Monday, August 13, 2012

Fading and Shining

By the end of the day, I'll be entrenched.  I'm writing, right now, mostly so I'll have something to look back on in months and years, to know that this version of me existed, and to have something to  reflect upon, as close to the threshold as I can get.

After 3 years and 3 months, (appropriately, I turned my I.S. in on March 3rd) I'm heading back to school this evening.  It's just a sort of welcome ceremony or something, but classes start tomorrow and then it's all a waterfall.

I know how much I changed through Wooster.  It was astronomical.  I don't know if I should expect that out of law school, but I'm prepared to be an astoundingly different (and hopefully better) person  by the end of the three years I'm giving to further my education.  I've already even done some homework and that's actually got me more excited than I thought I'd be.  At this point, I like that law school comes with assignments before the first day of class.  It assuages the worry about content and  expels the uselessness generally inherent to the first day of classes.

With the beginning of school comes, of course, the end of summer.  Summer has never been my favorite season, and I don't imagine it will be.  It's just too hot and uneventful for the most part.  But it was a great summer this time around.

For the first time in 6 years, my summer didn't start in northern Michigan.  Coming to terms with what that's meant has been part of the summer's journey, as I cut ties with an organization that had, at least more than any other single entity, til this past April, nurtured me into the person I turned into via Wooster and beyond.  In the words of Oswald Chambers, we can't "sympathize with what we must leave behind to walk with God.  It's been stabbing Him the whole time."

In many ways, this summer was a sort of dynamo, through which I had to be wrung, in order to come out prepared for the future.  It involved leaving.  It had to.  It involved arduous, somewhat degrading work at the Cleveland Clinic Starbucks (it's not that "barista-ing" is itself degrading, but our particular store has its own way of grinding all of us into something of a dusty paste).  Through it all though, I recaptured the fire and love for Cleveland, for the path God's placed me on, for the sake of my love for Him and all those He loves.

In 2009, when I joined staff, I think I did it largely because everyone was telling me that I was called to it.  I believed them and I probably should have, in all honesty.  I didn't know what else to do and it made sense back then.  But somewhere in the journey, I went from serving God to serving InterVarsity, and it started breaking my entire soul to bits.  I think the break was actually much earlier than I've yet admitted- during fundraising my first year (which I always hated), it was at the InterVarsity-free Curry Night that I truly felt the sort of love for people I'd been hired to exhibit.  Apart from it, it felt like a job- not even a career- just a job I'd been hired to do.  So for three years I kept it up, as much I could, but honestly, there was little inside me to keep me going because, ultimately, I wasn't in it for any of the right reasons.  My work suffered, my life suffered.

This summer has been about regaining that.  And I think I have, to some degree.  Even though my job sucked a lot of the time, I've still felt more full of life than I have for years this summer.

I also discovered another city to love.  The first week of August, Alexandra and I visited Savannah, Georgia.  I'd never been that far south, but I fell in love with the city.  I can't quite put my finger on the reason- there's just something in the air there, something in the vibe, with which I felt myself become enthralled.  It's a beautiful city, to be certain, but it's also got a strange darkness to it; a sort of melancholy you can't quite escape.  To that, it's not unlike Cleveland, where even the most exciting occasions are tinged with a memory of loss and strife.  But it isn't like Cleveland.  It's a subtropical pre-revolutionary war era city about the size of Toledo.  I might retire there sometime, but not after pouring out whatever inside of me now or grows up inside of me yet, for Cleveland.

So it has been an amazing summer.  I've not read as much or watched all the movies I'd have liked.  But I can't complain.  Whatever happened this summer was supposed to happen, in ways little, since Wooster, was.  And now I'm on a precipice once more, of a new adventure.  I'm running headlong into it, and I couldn't be more excited for the future, from this point onward.

-Zack
"I have stoked the fire on the big steel wheels"
-Rush