L37: Faith

I don't know that I have the faith to encounter God would have me encounter.  To believe all he would have me believe.  To trust in so many things it seems I've no practical hope of seeing.  

But his faithfulness, mercy, and grace run deeper than my own unbelief.  

I want to have the deeper faith, the faith required to do, to see, to be, to experience all he would have for me.  

I've learned much from a life that, if all set before me, looks much longer than it feels.  But perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that God calls us to bold and brilliant things but his grace is big enough that, for the present moment, he simply asks for the faith to take the next step.

And he builds on that.  

Faith is not natural, and it is not granted.

It is grown.

-Zack

"Peel back our ribs again and stand inside of our chest.  We just wanna love you"

-John Mark McMillan

-

L36: Reason

I hate poetry because of the rules, and I probably hate it for that reason because I'm jealous of those who can write it when I can't.  I do not, however, hate dance when that is still very much the case.  I also don't hate singing or painting or drawing or film or any other art form in which I can engage, even if poorly.

But poetry, I hate, even at its most beautiful, I wish it could be sprung from the confines of meter and the shackles of rhyme and just be beautiful on its own.  And maybe it can, and maybe it can't, and I'm doing all I can to actively rip beauty from the prison it inhabited so long ago.  I feel justified in doing this, because artistically, poetry is somehow older than prose.

If you study dance, which I've not, you'll encounter post-modern dance, wherein anything is a dance if the dancer decides this to be the case.  And I agree (and not just because I have an affinity for the post-modern).  That's probably my biggest issue with poetry.  Prose exists, and thus the least poetic poems are cast off as not-poems, or, as it's called so derisively "prose."

Perhaps more than I hate poetry, I lament it and my inability to create it.  I believe in the ultimate pliability of words, the fact that anyone can do anything they want with a language and the passion, the fury, the beauty, will seep out if it is poured in with enough care.  And sometimes that care takes the form of a poetic arrangement, and I don't have the skill to do that, so, perhaps, I lament that it works.  Like post-modern dance though, the tenant still remains that artistic creation is more the product of an expressing heart than the end product itself.  Sometimes that heart soars, it leaps, it flies, it screams, it cries, it aches, it dies, it beats and pulses with life, sorrow, death, and rage, and love.  Perhaps mostly love.  And hope.  I hate that that heart can effectively be boxed into iambs.  But it can.

-Zack

"these days, mercy cuts so deep"
-Jars of Clay

L35: Patience

Uncertainty is both natural and naturally uncomfortable.  We do long, I do long, to always know the next step, to know what happens next, to see what's coming, in order to plan or really just to know.


But that's just wanting something I ought not have yet.  It's just desiring something that is not mine to desire.  


Without uncertainty, there could not be faith, at least not a faith in the promise that the future is brighter, that the future is where we're supposed to be heading, and in the meantime, we're where we're supposed to be in the meantime.


Patience, though, is highly inconvenient when you live in the tunnel of time as we all do, some more than others.  I'll admit that I'm highly impatient when it comes to not knowing anything, especially about my future.  


That is probably its own form of an unholy lack of contentment, a lack of faith that what is now is what is supposed to be, even just for now.  


Sometimes I'm less a fan of the now and throw all of myself into the next because the next might be better than the now.

There's a right place, somewhere in the middle of it all, of positively seeking real change, patiently looking forward to what comes next and being ready for what it may be (not holding too tightly to what is now because it might just be for now), and having the faith God asks of us to simply be where he has placed us and to know he's placed us there for a reason.

I'm not sure how to straddle all of that right now, but I'm trying.

-Zack

"the answer's obvious, we switch the consonants, change the sword to words and lift continents"
-Flobots

L34: Bright

There are so many metaphors for God and for the life lived with him and to him.  But there's one particular metaphor that I question in its symbolic use:

"Walk in the light, for you are children of the light and in the light there can be no darkness"

Maybe it's just because I think in metaphor too often that I substitute it for reality, from time to time.  But I swear I've seen the light in people, not as something else, but really, as light.  Light and darkness are a necessary dichotomy, but it's unfortunate that modern dichotomistic thinking gets to think about this one, because it's only a dichotomy because it has to be.  Most of the time, it seems we think about the light as the absence of darkness, and I think it ought to be the other way around.  Darkness is the absence of light.  Suddenly, walking in the light isn't just a righteous life, but something more glorious, something more than just not sinning...something more than what it's not.

But maybe I just confuse what I want to see for what I actually see, but I know there are those in whom I've seen something, some sort of brightness, some sort of effluvial joy and it's a lot more than simply not doing bad things.  There is certainly merit to the pure life, or as pure a life as we can live, but the glory of the gospel isn't that it stops us from sinning, it's that we can live a life no longer bound by the chains of our ultimately flawed personal strivings, and feeling that freedom, breathing in the glory of truth and grace...that is the presence of light.

-Zack

"See the most important parts are the ones that are unseen; the wings don't make you fly and the crown don't make you king"
-Lupe Fiasco

L33: Shepherd

"The God of love, my shepherd is."
"What shall I want?"

It's not just that we're being led by the almighty maker and ruler of all.  It's not just that we're in the hands of he who holds all in his hands, by whose will and word all came into being and all continues to be.

It's that that God, that maker, that ruler of all, loves us deeply.

I know I'll only ever comprehend the smallest bits of that love.  If I could dive the depths of human experience and feel all the love all loving is ever rendered, I imagine I'd still have a very incomplete understanding of God's love.

But there's something reassuring about even knowing that we can't know how much he loves us.  It suffices to say that we're, even collectively, too small to understand it.

And to know that someone who loves us that deeply, that completely, that incomprehensibly, is the one directing our paths, if we will follow, is, perhaps the best hope I can muster.  Even when things are brilliant and hope seems less necessary, that's but an illusion; things are only brilliant when hope is at its highest.

Above all else, his love, his leading, his very being, compels us to hope.

-Zack

"I was born to shine"
-John Mark McMillan

L32: Again

They, whomever they may be, say history repeats itself.  I'm generally and principally skeptical of maxims, especially reductionist maxims, no matter how true they hold to be; that seems a process of dumb luck or conditioning.

But I do wonder how God uses experiences to prepare us for what's to come, if circumstances are to, at least on some level, repeat.

There are some things I never want to go through again and the Lord has graciously prevented them from repeating and I've gained lessons from those experiences that I don't think I'll need to relearn.  But as God is omniscient, as he knows our future, and as he grows us through life experience, there's a certain place where lesson in principal and training intersects with preparation.  Indeed, I sometimes wonder if God ever has us learn lessons we don't end up using.  I don't know, but I do know he knows a lot more about our future than math teachers who remind students daily that they never know where they might need math in the future.  God knows where we'll need what he teaches us in the future.

I don't know if that's exciting or scary.  I'm pretty sure it's both.  I'm not necessarily excited to need the knowledge I've learned from some life experiences, but I am utterly grateful he's prepared me for what is to come.

-Zack

"'Anyway' she says, 'I'll see you around'"
-Vienna Teng

Beneath the Starry Threshold

I was looking back through old entries just now, trying to pinpoint when I did my first blog redesign, about this time last year.  Last year I was entering my last full month of college as March unwound.  I could go on and on about how I was wrong and right in surprising ways about life now, and about what I know now and didn't then and all that's happened since, and all that.  A general catch up reminiscence post, and maybe I'll do one of those someday, but not today, not right now, because, though I resist it as much as I can, I'm realizing a theme to my writing, and I guess, if my writing has to have a theme, I'm honored to have this one: Betweenness.  Liminality.  Indefiniteness symbolized by spacial uncenteredness.  As college came to an end, I felt the betweenness of life's changing tide, the now and not yet of there and the rest of my life.  As it turns out, circumstances change but I still feel the sharp pangs of betweenness and I'm kind of a walking example, at least in my own mindset, of the livability of the post-modern ideal.  I don't know if there can be such a thing as the post-modern ideal, but if there is, it is the ability to live liminally.  That's not to say it is to be tried for- it is to say that we all live liminally and are at our best when we fully acknowledge that we're between centers at all times and can't really know anything about the centers till we step back and let ourselves exist between them.  And that's what I do.  That's what I've been doing for at least a year, subconsciously and most definitely super-consciously at times.  That's not to brag, well, maybe it is a little bit but I don't mean it to be...it's just that I've thought recently, quite a bit, that I've felt the most in-between things in life as I ever have, and reading through what I wrote last year, I wonder if that's true or if I'm simply more aware of it now than ever before (perhaps largely brought on by the forced introspection of forcing myself to average one post per day during lent save for Sundays).  I do know I'm living and feeling in between many things now, but I have been for awhile.

But that's life in this world, between many things.  Ultimately though, it's a direct analog to the now and not yet that is the Kingdom of God.  There are parts of it here, there are elements ongoing.  But they pale in comparison to what is to come, and we're constantly between those facts.

There is however, one center that is constant and our own disparateness with it is our own shortcoming.  Hope in that, hope in Him, is the fuel to fire the engines of a life stuck between many things thanks to the brokenness of our suffering world.  But it's not eternal, and if nothing else, that's where we can get our hope.  I'm not positing the value of inbetween living, just pointing out its existence, because we're all always in between and we're all always in process and we always will be til He returns.  But He loves us and will not withhold all blessings prior to that day.

Even so, right now, I'm between many things, and he wants me to be that way for the time being, and when that time is up, I'll be between other things.

Last night I went on a very impromptu stargazing trip with 4 students at the University of Findlay.  My love for that particular institution and city will have to wait for another hypothetical post that may never take place.  I don't know that it matters the context, but looking up at the stars, even in our attempts to objectify them as our own constellations, always makes me feel small and warm and filled with wonder, like a child in his or her mother's arms not long after birth; there's a rightness and a warmth to the smallness and the fulfillment from the experience.  Somehow, gazing up, I don't feel inconsequential despite the vastness of the universe.  I feel small compared to its largeness, but I feel close to it all the same, and somewhere in that lies the love that passes all understanding, because the God that made all of that still loved us enough to not just die for us, but to come here in the first place, from up there where, even if not literally heaven that is the heavens of outerspace, I'm sure the stars look more brilliant.

-Zack

"I want to know if you feel the same way, cause if you do I want to stay forever"
-Ween

Redesign

You might notice the new title and the new layout.  It's not that I like to redesign my blog every march or anything, but I have decided to make it look and feel more like the aim the posts actually tend to go.  Instead of a look inside and through my life (although that's certainly, in a different manner, inherent in everything I write), I've been going in a more "art inspired by hope" direction, so that's kind of the new MO around here.  I simply want to create, and as someone who strives to see the world through the hope of the cross, I want to examine the world and this walk we call life through that lens.  Sometimes hope is the inspiration for amazing things and sometimes hope is the only thing we can cling to as the world falls around us.  But in Christ there is hope, and while I might doubt many things many times (often, indeed), I know the hope and it is through and by that hope that I am all I am and could ever be.

L31: Sun

I know that rain is necessary, to quench the parched Earth and all life to continue. I know storms come and winter is never more than 9 months away, and when winter comes in the north, the skies go overcast for weeks on end.

I know it has to happen, I know the storms and snows and floods come on the Earth and in our lives. I know it's necessary and can't be helped.

But oh to feel the sun, to see it burst forth behind and in front and all around. To feel the warmth dispelling the fog...oh to live in that place where the sun always is.

That would be supreme. Perhaps even and only divine.

But still the storms persist here, in this life and through it.

But I persist despite the storms, because somewhere, on the other side, I will feel the sun.

-Zack

"In an unreliable world, you shine like a star"
-Mat Kearney

L30:Eternity

I wonder what it means, that we live in light of eternity. Do our lives become much more (so much more) than the finite specks they are, while we're still living them? And what does it even mean, that a life lived in light of its own eternity has some kind of eternal consequence past its own self? We must be born as something unique already, if what we do, here and now, in this relative speck of time, matters for the rest of it. It's a great divine mystery I'm sure we're not quire able to comprehend, and I'm sure that's how it's supposed to be. But it makes me wonder, it makes me dream, of what might be on the other side, really literally, what is there? What is there that we can impact it from here but that it could make all of this seem like but a bad dream? There's no logic to that, and perhaps, that's exactly the point.

-Zack

"Surely we can change something"

-David Crowder

L29:Community

If the process of redemption is the process of placing Christ more and more at the center, then something has got to move out of the way. We're born at our own center, and we can't stay there if Christ is to take his rightful place. If we don't make the effort to take ourselves out of the center and put Christ at the center, we run the risk of making life an attempt at being the best at putting Christ at the center. That might not be totally bad, but there's a reason unity is placed at so high a place of priority in the New Testament. There's a reason what we do to the least of these is what we do to Christ, and there's a reason true religion is feeding the hungry. It's not because works have anything to do with our salvation. It's because Christ is most at his right place when we're out of our own center, inside the same periphery we place others, and then we see and feel their needs as if we have them, and helping others, doing things for others, thinking of others ahead of ourselves is the natural outpouring of the worldview Christ calls us to. People often rationalize the James passage as saying that true faith will produce good fruit. But that's still a bit too self-centered because it's placing the emphasis on one's own faith.

-Zack

"And the problem it seems is with you and me not the love Who came to fix everything"

-David Crowder

L29: Exodus

There's something to be said about the call to be a foreigner in the Bible. Throughout Leviticus and Deuteronomy (and elsewhere), God reminds the Israelites to show hospitality to the non-Hebrews they will share space with because "they were once foreigners in Egypt." Further than that, we're called people just on a sojourn here on this Earth, citizens, more truly, of a heavenly Kingdom.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, God does not want us to get too comfortable here, to mistake anything here as anything but temporary.

But there are pieces of eternity all around us, and it matters how we treat them...it feels a bit kitsche to say, but the people around us have souls that will last forever and we collide with them everyday.

So there's always a necessry tension. Life as a child of God is by nature always already liminal...because we're living as eternal beings with heavenly citizenship in a world that is nothing but fleeting.

-Zack

"we're so comfortable now the pioneers have settled in, a perfect blend of progress and pale skin"

-John Reuben

L28: Difference

It's funny how it works sometimes, that we intentionally end up in places and with people that aren't quite like us. And it's good too, but its' so far from easy. I don't know how it works for everyone, but I know for me, or well, I'm finding out everyday, that there's something in the difference, something in the places where everything doesn't quite meld, something there that I'll learn from. Every context has it's own levels of dissonance, but for whatever reason I find myself in contexts all of the time that don't resonate with me. Places where difference exists. Right now I'm learning from a place that is different from me due to its samenness in itself. I don't know if that's ironic, but life is rarely if ever dull.

-Zack

"with our hopes and our hearts and our hands, we're the architects of our last stand"

-Flobots

L26: Power

Michel Foucault, more rightfully than most of us would like to admit, claimed that no real truth really exists and people simply believe what they choose to believe because they subconciously believe it gives them more cultural currency to do what they please with their lives. This, in turn, sets up systems where the social deviants are able to operate on the margins; giving up certain things in order to accomplish goals in a sort of short-circuited rendering of reality. Everyone, Foucault claimed, works under an idea of a discourse that they hold to be true.

For the most part, this makes Foucalt both one of the least popular and most important 20th century theorists. He was kind of like Nietzsche for the common man with less memorable statements (although still very potent). I think though, for the most part, Foucalt was probably right, and I think that because I've seen things work how he set them up to work. I believe in truth a little more than he did, but I can't blame him for looking at people and surmising that they are doing what they're doing for reasons of cultural power. Indeed, it's a thin line we all walk, at best, and it explains how two contradictory viewpoints could be as compelling as we often see them- because the truthfulness isn't as important as the cultural power one gains by adhering to a certain perspective. It's a trap I see people fall into all of the time. How many people, afterall, are strong Christians throughout High School because it makes them popular with the cute members of the opposite sex in youth group, but abandon their faith when those cute members of the opposite sex are suddenly members of the party crowd? In the mind of anyone below 25, sexuality is probably our strongest discourse, even though I hate to admit that. Here at Hillsdale, things are a bit different, but I see it, everyday, where people subscribe to a certain morality and a certain sort of ethos because it lends them a sort of cultural currency...and it happened at Wooster too, although it was usually amorality that drove them. In short, that means I run into a lot of cultural Christians who espouse some wonderful and correct things, but they do it for all of the wrong reasons, and I don't know that they realize it.

I'm not quite sure there's a real way out of the cultural conundrum Foucault points out, but he does leave the special room for the cultural margin, the people that work in the opposite direction of the system, but within it, and ultimately, that's what Christ did too. Call it a theology of sedition if you will. I do know Christ never called us to our faith in him out of what we gain from it within this world. Indeed, he calls us to give it all up for him, and that's the opposite of what Foucault says happens with cultural power and discourse theory. Just because something really is true, truer than Foucault says anything can be, doesn't mean our fallenness can't use it as just another discourse.

-Zack

"Bodies die, souls will rise"
-David Crowder

L25: Green

There aren't many words, especially adjectives, with as many meanings as "green". They all point to the color, of course, but the color means so much: young, inexperienced, alive, envious.

What if they all point to the same thing? I think, perhaps, they do, at least in my own youthful understanding of things. Well, young at least, if not youthful.

For me it just makes sense; to be young is to be quite alive, both in your distance from "natural" death and the energy that goes with it, but it's also to be inexperienced, and I think it is often to be envious because there are still so many things left in the world to experience, to do, to see, to feel, to be. Envy, I think, is the fallen state of adventurous. I suppose it's possible to be some of them but not all, or one of them and not the rest. But it is, at least, to be less "green." Right now, I'd say I'm pretty green, and not just because it's St. Patrick's Day.

I don't know that there is much real importance to a simple accounting and conflation of all the possible meanings of green, but I do like how so much of it comes straight from creation. Green literally means both alive and unripe in the same organisms and, at least in English, often in the same people.

I'm definitely far from "ripe," and even if that means inexperienced to a fault, at least it still means I'm very alive.

-Zack

"Our love was on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing"
-The Fields of Athenry

L24: Terminology

My life has been pretty submersed in C.S. Lewis since late 2009 and joy is a constant theme, especially when you read the highly formalist Christian literature about Narnia I've been reading lately. It's not really terrible, well, I guess most of you don't assume formalist is a pejorative like I do. The biggest issue is really the assumption that formalism is Christian and the Christian approach to a text is formalist. That's modernist arrogance though, and it's rampant in the American church, has been for some time, and continues to cripple us. Literature is probably the least of most of our worries. But it's pretty central to mine, and I couldn't help it if it wasn't.

Most ironically, Lewis' work is steeped in the "ahead of its time" post-modern. All the references to the "numinous," the very nature of unattainable joy in the Earthly realm that drives all of his work (most of all, his own autobiography), and the importance of story over dogma all point to post-modernity. I don't know if it's because he didn't have to mindset to do it or not, but if he could have reduced the centrality of ideas in his thinking, he'd have been the first Christian post-modernist. Indeed, most of his work was a critique on modernist approaches to the faith.

Of course, I opened this talking about literary criticism, and that's where things fall apart. Lewis himself was an almost perfectly formalist critic, and it's unfortunate. It allows for all of those who write about him to fall into his school of thought and, in doing so, to get trapped in it when approaching his writings on faith. I don't think he would have liked it that way. I can't agree with his approach to literature, but he would be the first to tell you that he wrote his criticism about stories and poems, not faith, so approaching his work on faith the same way he approached The Faerie Queen is an unfortunate reversal of what he would have ever wanted. Ironic enough as that is, doing what the author wouldn't have wanted points to non-formalist approaches, and taking the formalist approach would be what he wouldn't want.

It's all a circle, and I'm probably the only one who will ever read this that would ever care about it.

But I miss college sometimes.

-Zack

"We can be redeemed, oh, all of us"
-David Crowder

L23: Theme

I stopped believing in over-arching grand narrative a long time ago. For some people (C.S. Lewis), that's a very unchristian (but not the book) thing to do. Well, I guess I should restate that. I stopped believing in the necessity of Grand Narrative a long time ago. I do know God has a purpose and goal and work everything out for the good and all of history is tending toward his ultimate end reality and all of that. But I don't think we can break that down, at least not on this side of eternity, as much as we would like to. I think it's God's narrative, necessarily, and we can, at best, work within our role and hope to realize what it all means on the other side of here.

So maybe I do believe in grand narrative. But I don't believe in pursuing it, I don't believe in a priori fitting it all together and coming up with what meant what, before we reach the end. That's basically like mapping out a plot (an exercise I don't really believe in either, but it's done "successfully" in many lower-tier English classes all of the time, and probably in even the higher ones at Hillsdale...) before you've finished the book. At best, it's conjecture, and I'd argue it's mostly immoral.

God calls us to abide in him, and part of that is not knowing what's next. "you will hear, to your right and to your left, this is the way, walk in it." To me, that doesn't sound like we can fit it all together on our own before we see where we end up. I've tried that a lot in my life, and I can construct quite the interesting sequence of events, none of them accidental, that get me to where I am today, and it would be, well, interesting to see...but to draw conclusions about the future from it not only often fails, but it is an exercise in small faith. The honest truth is, I can't tell where I'm headed, just by where I've been. But I can tell by where I am, from where I've been, God's got it under control, no matter what.

-Zack

"The low moon helps me sing"
-Feist

L22: Silence

It is common literary practice, especially among the theorists, to consider a voice a form of agency and thereby personhood. To be able to speak, to have the ability and the presence within a given space to vocalize internal thoughts is the pathway to existence.

This makes sense, because it is in giving up that ability, at least temporarily, that we come closest to our creator. God meets us in the silence, when we stop talking, when we escape the places where everyone and everything is doing all they can to assert their agency by voice and come to a place where there is nothing to be heard but the voice of God.

It is a call to silence and a call to refreshment, but it is largely a call to give up self as well, or at least any claims we might think we have to our own selves, to our own personhood, in contrast to the glory that is the maker and ruler of all. God does not forcibly take our own selves from ourselves, but he will willing receive and renew those who willingly take a step back, and even for a moment, allow for silence to hear his call. Dying to self has always been the key, and he has always been in the resurrection business.

-Zack

"the nearness of there feels more near to here"
-David Crowder

Inside the Sound

I don't know why God invites us into a life of suffering. It's much easier to picture a world where everything becomes brighter, everything becomes good, everything becomes whole, the moment Christ takes over. I guess I can relate to the Pharisees sometimes, because no matter what I know and believe about Jesus (or at least, by putting that aside for just a second), I kind of wish he was the ultimate conquering messiah who would just come and set things right. Of course I know that's not right, that's now what he was doing, that's not the total, long-view purpose of God's Kingdom, but I do sometimes wish it were that easy.

But it's not, and the reality we have is better, at least in the long run, for it. But it doesn't change how my humanity doesn't enjoy the sort of suffering endemic to the human condition...and it's not even like I suffer in the same ways so many around the world do on a daily basis...but it's not like I enjoy what I do go through either. There's a big difference between en-joy and to "count it all joy." I'm learning that. Because I can count it as eventual joy, and I can do what I can to view everything as a learning experience and as a step further toward the "prize." But suffering wouldn't be suffering without suffering, and without suffering, there isn't the long-view learning to be had.

I'm sorry for how all of my posts might seem like endless pontificating these days. I'm just trying to make sense of a life I just don't understand right now, and I do that by writing. If it weren't for the blog-format and the publishability though, I'd get too self-concious and never get these thoughts out...or I'd never have to process them to the point of being able to share them with others, as this kind of is. It's a sad substitute, I'll admit, to a real person to talk through things (and, honestly, be more honest), but it's what I've got right now, and it's what I'll use. I've enjoyed the lent posts, but I do apologize how they seem to get shorter and far more parochial as I go. I don't mean it that way, and I don't have a plan for them at all. Sometimes I get stuck around issues and thoughts and have to write around them like digging a hole around a post or something...you can't do much to the post itself, but by digging around it, eventually you'll get to the point that you can remove it.

I wish I could say more and I wish I could say different things. But right now, I mostly just need to be as clear in my thoughts as I can be, so I can get to sleep and face a new day and all the excitement that may be on the way.

Goodnight world.

-Zack

"You never stop until my final breath is gone"
-Hawthorne Heights

L21: Promises

If only we could learn to cling to the promises. First and only. If only we could realize that too good to be true might often be the case in this world, but too good to be true is the currency of truth in which our Lord most often deals.

If only we could love as he loves. To not love in spite of flaws, but to love wholly, flaws and all. And even at that space, where he loves unconditionally, even the lowest, most flawed of us all, to still provide the rescue out; to love us in our sin and have and keep us as his while we come out of it and stumble back in. To want to save us even when we don't realize we need the saving.

We can't do that. We cannot be what we are not, and we can't have that counted against us. And he never will. He only counts the response, and his patience is unending.

Knowing God is knowing one's own imperfection, but knowing God is realizing that He'll never stop loving, healing, chasing, rescuing, despite the level of imperfection. He just loves us, and who am I to understand that, and to know anything of it at all? I can't explain it, I can't fathom it. And sometimes, the most I can do is depend on it even when I don't feel it.

But even then, it's never let me down.

-Zack

"You are not the only one who feels like the only one"
-David Crowder

L20: Waves

We never quite know where we're going, and somehow, that's part of the beauty of all of it. To stare into the great unknown and say "this will all one day be my home." Because all we don't really know are the details. Just details of who, what, when, and where. But we know the why, and we know it is beautiful: because God has willed it, and He perfectly loves us all as individuals, as His children. And somehow, that has to be enough. But staring into the great unknown, sometimes greater than other times, and right now quite great indeed, I know that it is enough. It is enough to know that I might not know anything else, but I know my life is in the hands of someone far greater than myself. All He asks is that we have faith in that fact. A simple action, far from easy.

But the waves come with the evening, a divine rhythm that reverberates within us all. In and out and up and down and good and bad and joyous and tragic. All at once. Creation is a series of endless ands, because He wants us to see this is all more than me, more than you, more than us until us is eternal.

-Zack

"We will run so far from here"
-Newsboys

L19: Last

I've always believed that it was never about the destination as much as the journey, and I'm still quite sure of that truth. But in light of that I've been undercutting patience for years. When the adventure wasn't ripe, I've been too quick to discount the steps the journey was taking. But there is real merit in the end result, or at least that's what I think I've been realizing lately and I hope it's true.

Because right now it seems I'm tied to an excruciating process of patience and the adventure is far from ripe. The patience is part of the journey and I don't like to admit that. I don't like to be in a place where I've got to "wait and see." But so often that's exactly what God calls us to do. Perhaps I've been inordinately blessed with a processes of progress in my life to this point. Up til now, so much of my time has been spent feeling like and seemingly learning that if i'm not moving forward then I'm not doing something right.

But right now, and probably times before when I've ignored it, the major lesson is just waiting. Because the end result is coming, and it will be worth it, despite the journey, at least this time and probably more times later.

I do still hope and think I know though, that end results of patience are just new steps along the journey.

-Zack

"it's like a book elegantly bound in a language that you can't read just yet"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L18: Lifted

We once stood atop the mountain, stretched our arms wide and thought for a moment we could fly. I remember closing my eyes then and wondering how things could be so wonderful. But now I just wonder where it all went.

It's the silence that disturbs me most. The deafening inactivity, the raging calm and the maddening expanse of placidly portrayed miles.

We used to dive in head first, we used to jump without fear because we knew we'd be caught. But we now distrust even ourselves.

There's a broken mirror in which we see ourselves. If it wasn't whole in the past, we at least understood its brokenness. Now we believe more in the brokenness than we do our own existence.

But even so, His love lifts us. Slowly, steadily, we'll learn to fly again.

-Zack

"If the silence takes you then I hope it takes me too"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L17: Mist

I want to get closer, closer to the heart of it all, closer to the center of all reality that we all hang from and so rarely acknowledge. I want to get close enough to feel the rays, to bask in the heat that might only be a metaphor, because the lightness might only be a metaphor, and light might not even mean heat, when you're that close to the Father.

I want to be so close that, were it as much a waterfall as it sometimes feels, I would be drenched in the spray. But if it were a waterfall, then I wouldn't want to be drenched in the spray, because I would want to drown in whatever the source would be.

But I also want to strip it down, to get down to the core and cut through all of this endless metaphor we use because we just can't understand, we just can't get that close to know it at all. So we build things around it.

And there's nothing wrong with that, because we're limited, we're powerless, we're absolutely nothing without what is probably little more than a subatomic amount of all of that glory that gives us life and keeps us alive and lets us love and lets us know and say and hear and be.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with the desire either, to get closer.

-Zack

"I can't lie on my bed without thinking I was wrong"
-Phoenix

L16: Spring

There's a kind of rhythm to the world, a kind of persistent beat that drums itself, slowly or quickly, regularly or with syncopation. But it's a beat that goes on.

Winter leads to spring and spring would be a nuisance without it.

But as it is, spring is beautiful, even if just a transition to warmer days.

It stretches beyond all of that. We need winter. Not just the cold winter that, in the northern United States seems to stretch from November to April, but the winters we go through proverbially, from time to time and with regard to everything in our lives.

I don't love winter. I don't know how to love winter. But I love that it exists, because as soon as the first snow falls, spring is on the way.

-Zack

"You are my everything and I will adore you"
-Jennie Lee Riddle

L15: Home

For five years, I've been grappling with the idea, the theory, the essence of "home" and "home-ness." I've been all across the board as I've worked to come up with some sort of definition, with my ultimate decision being that the idea of home is at best a feeling and some kind of constructed necessity more than a naturally existing phenomena.

I don't quite retract all of those thoughts littered across many blog posts in many places, but I've been realizing more and more lately that the idea of home, whatever it is exactly, is something we're all going to at least long for, and I think that's ultimately tied into our deeper longing for belonging. "Home" itself isn't really anything. It doesn't have to be and really, it's just a name we've attached to all sorts of things over the years. "Home" itself is no sort of necessity at all, but there's an idea of belonging that goes with it to some degree that points toward a feeling of belonging, a feeling of comfort, a feeling ultimately, of love, and that is home, as we tend to define it. But you don't need a home to feel that. I've never felt that my part of Ohio is more home than I do now, but I live there as little as I ever have in my life too.

There is a linguistic use of "home" too, pointing to the place your parents are or the place you grew up, though that is quite literal, and quite boring, and ultimately, quite meaningless (quite ironically).

-Zack

"Claim the stars as ours, I know just where they'll be and what they'll say; they will sing"
-Mae

L14: Dreams

If my dreams came true, the dreams I actually have while I sleep, not my hopes and wishes, people would turn into other people a lot.

I had a dream during a nap this afternoon where I received a card from someone that had a few blank pages built in...sort of a letter-card. I don't know if those exist or not, but they should, it seems a good idea.

I've also had dreams in which I'm not present, like I'm watching a movie or reading or something.

I had a dream the other day that I was sitting with someone who also carries around a copy of Hymns II.

I'm glad I can mostly remember my dreams, but they often really are realities I wish were true, or I'm someone in them, better than I am now. Strange things do happen, from time to time, and I often wonder if they mean anything.

But if they do or if they don't, I don't know that it would change anything.

-Zack

"There's a tough word, on your crossword, there's a bedbug nipping your finger, there's a swallow, there's a calm, here's a hand to lay on your open palm today"
-The Decembrists

L13: Stay

"Abide in me"

One year ago today, exactly, I turned in a 100 page dissertation on what it means to abide without actually talking about it for more than a sentence or two. It is simply to be, to strip away all we know, all we see, all we think, and most importantly, all we assume, and to simply be.

Today, I went to a Bible study in which we discussed what it means to "abide." I gave it my best shot, but the leader was looking for an answer, and thus "we" decided it meant doing something more than simply being..."bible study, prayer, practicing love."

Nothing against those, but I don't think that's what abiding is. It is to simply be, to exist. To abide in something is to exist in a state within that particular thing's frame of reference.

What I did discuss, at length, in those 100 pages, is the necessity to decenter, and that, truly, is what abiding is.

"the dude abides" because the dude found a way to be the perfect hero without any actual action, to exist in a truly decentered state.

We abide in Christ because we have decentered all else and put him at our center...our only center. Everything else, yes, even all we do for him, is and, if we are abiding must be, periphery.

One year may pass, but I could still write about this stuff forever.

-Zack

"I need more now than philosophy; some god in outer-space doesn't mean anything to me"
-John Mark McMillan

L12: Hopeful

There's a constance to the concept of hope that keeps us looking forward. To know that here isn't forever, to know that now is not eternal. But to know that what we have now, what we do what we say what we think can point us toward that ever-coming, nearly but never present hope.

Because this is just a way-station, just a stopping point between many gaps before we reach whatever it is that is coming. There is something here, but the gravest mistake we can make is to confuse it for but the shadow of what is to come.

The best we can hope for, whatever it means, is to see a dim reflection. Even though that is the case, I would rather stare into that dark reflection than look toward or forward to anything else. Because at least, as a reflection, it offers hope of something greater. Outside it could be very real, very tangible, even more than a reflection (though I doubt it), and even if that is the case, I would rather see eternity reflected darkly than the things of this world that offer no hope with all clarity. Perhaps even, it is our ability to see them for what they are and as they are that makes that dim reflection all the more appealing.

-Zack

"When the skyline looks this way, I never want to sleep tonight"
-Mae

L11: Beneath

I wish we could get beneath it all, the skin and bones, the words, the facades, to the place where there's nothing but truth and to find whatever it is that we might find there, just for the sake of finding it, just for the sake of knowing it, just for the sake of seeing and holding it.

But we dance and we dance, around and around, we never find the place where, beneath it all is hearts beating and voices singing. We never come to the place where all that is is love and community and there is no such thing as loneliness because deep down we all just want to be loved and to love, and deep down, beneath it all, no one is unlovable.

But we're stuck out here, we're stuck in this game and we don't know how to get out, or at least I don't, so I just collide, over and over again, into the places I wish I could sink past but can't. It doesn't stop me from trying, but it is the outcome, over and over and over again, as I try to get beneath it all, but just can't.

I wish we could transcend it all, all we see and all we think we know, and come to a place where we realize it's not what we know but who, and who knows us in turn. There's a lushness there, onward and inward, something warm, something vibrant, and it resonates on every string and every rhythm of every heart.

If only we could go deeper, then maybe we could go there, but we can only go together.

-Zack

"you move the earth but now the sky is falling"
-Anberlin

L10: Slide

I just wish we could see through it all, into something else, something deeper, something farther along than all of this. To fore-go this process and end up and the end without traversing all the way through from the beginning.

But that's not what we've got, not here, not now, presumably not ever. And it can be maddening.

And we pray and we ask and we implore, just to see a little bit of the future or even a future, but even as those prayers are answered we want more and more and more....and I say we when really, I just mean I, I just mean me but I don't want to admit and don't really think I'm all that alone in the quarry for what's next.

What happened to faith?

Nothing. It's just that sometimes I have to grasp it much tighter than I please, I have to work to grow it...and I just don't want to.

-Zack

"I really see you upside down"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L9: Direction

"This is the way, walk in it"

Often, there is little we know. Often, there is little we see. We're but one entry point on literally billions into perceiving and working and moving through the world. Try as we might to approach similarity, at the end of the day, we fall apart on some level, we fail to connect at some key moment. If this weren't the case then marriage wouldn't so often be defined as both the deepest form of human connection on the most levels and the process of learning to compromise for the sake of love (or loving to the point of compromise. Were I married, I might care how I term that, but I'm not so I don't).

So how are we anything more than many islands floating about, crashing into each other from time to time, for good or bad?

I wish I could answer that, I wish I could find the connection point that goes deeper than all of this, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist, or at least not across the board, not on every level.

And somewhere deep inside all of that, it's right that that is the case, it's right that we're all so different and we're so prone to disagree or at least think differently even if we're not outwardly disagreeing.

But we're called to community, we're called to reconciliation. And maybe we're fractured so we can approach that, so we can work toward it. Maybe sin didn't just separate individuals from God but individuals from individuals so that we would know our winnowing of dross that keeps us apart is an act ordained by God.

Even though we still fail here, here in this world, we can at least work in the right direction.

"This is the way, walk in it"

-Zack

"We will learn to be a piece is to be truly whole"
-Vienna Teng

L8: Tidal

You could sink in it, you could drown in it, you could be overcome by it, it can seep through every crack, it can go all places it is not blocked. It is love, it is justice, it is righteousness.

And we can know everything, we can do everything, because with God all things are possible. We can say anything, we can say it sweetly, we can say it wonderfully, we can say it powerfully. But without love it will all be nothing, it will all be noise.

And love can get in every crack because it is poured out and flows like a river, because it is released and crashes like a glorious tide. And all we have to do is be the open lock; to let it flow through us.

It's an idea that sounds so sweet and it sounds so easy. But it can be hard and it can be bitter, to love and even to be loved. But it is always right; to love and to be loved at all costs.

-Zack

"There's a low moon caught in your tangles"
-The Decembrists

150

I started this just over 13 months ago, and it's taken me that long to reach 150 posts. I don't feel like I post so much, but I guess that means I average around 2.5 posts/week. That's more than I would expect, but perhaps not completely surprising.

Hillsdale's spring break is still four weeks away as of tomorrow. That's quite the haul from the beginning of the semester in mid-January, and I always thought it was long when we had to get to the second week of March at Wooster. But, at least, at Hillsdale, once you get to break, you're really close to the end of the school year. I don't know that that's necessarily good, but coming off of break and seeing 6 more weeks of class isn't much fun either.

It's all just pointing to the fact that balance doesn't get enough credit in our lives or our structures. Of course, balance and Hillsdale are often complete opposites so that's no surprise.

I don't completely know how long I'll be on staff in general, but I do know I'll almost definitely still be at Hillsdale next year. I'm mostly fine with that and excited to continue on in the work God has started this semester, but if I stay on staff much past next year, I can't fathom staying out of Ohio for a singular reason: the Cleveland Urban Plunge. I've gone three years in a row, so I don't really mind missing it for this year and next, and obviously, there's no gurantee I'd get to staff it if I was on staff in Ohio, but at least there would be a chance. More than anything else, even more than MAC or China, I often think "if I could just get these guys to go to the Urban plunge" this or that would be different. It's a truly transformative time, each and every year, and I went three times. I remember a student, during the fall of my junior year at Wooster, claiming to "not need a full week of an Urban Plunge" and thinking that she couldn't be more incorrect. She did go though, eventually, and I would imagine she now realizes the error of her earliest statement.

And it's not like each year I went was particularly good....my second time around, I kind of wished I hadn't decided to go. But looking back, I know it was the right decision (and for the record, it had nothing to do with the program itself, but rather an unfortunate concatenation of participants).

I should probably back up and explain what all this fuss is about. It's really quite simple: God loves people, all people, and his heart breaks in the face of injustice. When you get many people together (as is the case in an urban center) and they are subject and exposed to much injustice (as is the case in Cleveland and many of our nation's cities), the result is a nearness and fullness to God's love and passions that you're not going to encounter on your own and you're not even going to encounter on an urban service project, because far too often, people like me, or at least people like who I was, feel like they're making a lasting difference and saving the world on service projects. But at the Urban Plunge, we, quite simply, encounter God and see what we can learn of his love for the city. What happens though, is realizing that that love is the same for all people everywhere and, no matter how downcast any group of people or any inhabitants of a particular place might be, there is always real hope for the present and future in God.

And I can explain it all further, but that's it in a nutshell, and no matter how much you think you grasp it, I say whole-heartedly that understanding what I've written is nothing like actually experiencing it.

I went three times after all.

My life is so strangely gyroscopic right now. I kind of look forward to weekends for rest and renewal, but on the other hand, I kind of loathe weekends for their blankness.

-Zack

"Everything changes when you come around"
-John Mark McMillan

L7: Circles

If only it could all make sense, to fall in at once to an epiphanized state, where it all just makes sense and it all just is. To find a stasis worth living in, to be placed in a stasis worth inhabiting.

But ultimately, disassembling that becomes the process the defines how life actually goes, how wheels actually turn, how progress actually happens.

We hear so often that we ought to avoid change for the sake of change or progress in the name of progress, but where do we get off assuming everything is already so perfect?

Doesn't life constantly prove itself to be a series of important falls from which we are to recover? A change for the worse at least proves that we're not stuck somewhere, which, no matter what, would be far worse.

I would rather make fruitless progress than no progress at all. Because at least I have a chance at positive change that way.

-Zack

"And no one knows where the shore is
We're divided by the ocean
And the only thing I know is
That the answer isn't for us"
-Feist

L6: Mountains

We've got to get to the bottom of this, to the answer to the fleeting question, what is joy and how do we find it? Do we find it at all?

C.S. Lewis had his own definition, that joy was something we couldn't fully have in the here and now. That now and then, we caught glimpses of it and that was a picture of heaven. But it was not something we could truly know or make known deeply here on Earth. The joy that is from the Lord, that is, unspeakable and transcendent joy.

But there's something in the here and now, there's something we can have, something I know we have and have had. The question is where does it come from and how does it make itself manifest?

It is promised to us afterall, for we are always already raised up with Christ, or something like that, when Lacan and Paul meet in a hallway and start agreeing on more things than you'd ever believe.

But how can we know? Is it a sin to suffer and feel like God might not be as close as He is? I won't rush to claim it, because I've felt it.

And I've felt the reverse.

Somewhere we've got to allow for the acknowledgment that we don't really know how God works. What might be an unending unspeakable joy and faith in Christ for years on end could stem from the same theology that leads to years of struggles with faith.

I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that I can't claim surety either, because God draws and teaches us all differently. He made us differently. He made us care about different things, he made us love and experience love differently. And he did it because it is how he expresses himself through us, his children.

Sometimes faith is what you've got to cling to when the world is falling down, and sometimes it's the start of everything beautiful, and either way, we've got to get to a point where we can say neither is incorrect. Just different and all at once the same.

It might never make sense, until you leave the center.

-Zack

"The boundaries of language I quietly cursed
And all the different names for the same thing."
-Death Cab for Cutie

L5: Lazarus

Revived. Renewed. Remade.

Resurrected.

There's no room for comprehension; I was blind now I see, I was dead, now I live.

I was old, I am new.

What I was then, I am not now. I have been transformed.

Then or now or soon or not yet, it's always going on, always already and always forever.

Call it sanctification if you must, but that word just feels so old, so outdated, so much like it says something about us.

But the process is becoming less and less ourselves and more and more someone else more us than we could ever be.

Sanctified, for what? after all, is the far better question.

No matter how far you've gone, no matter how high or how low, there's still hope for the future as long as you're still here.

Just look at Lazarus. He was dead. It's easy to think of that in so spoon-fed terms...but let's be honest; there's something to Lazarus we always miss: what did it mean for him to die and come back to life? It had to mean something. It had to mean that even in death God wasn't finished with Lazarus on Earth.

We're never useless to the Earth till God's finished using us.

-Zack

"The laughs will dance from up and down the pews"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L4: Unseen

"Faith is having hope for things unseen"

It's more than trust. It's more than experienced calculations that things will probably turn out as they have in the past. It's the unseen, the unknown, the hope for the future based on what you can't know anything about.

Faith is so much bigger than the impetus that brings us back in relationship with God, a God who has always already "blessed us with every blessing from the heavenly realm." And we've got to believe that even though it seems so strange that that could be the case and things could often be so unsatisfying, so empty, so cold, so disappointing.

But it's because it's unseen, it's because it's about hope.

It's not about taking one step and into a larger world and realizing everything for the first time all at once. That would be convenient, but it would turn the faith switch off the moment it all began, and I do not believe that is the will of the Father.

He wants us to take hold of his hand and journey on into the great unknown, the ever unseen for all eternity.

God is asking me to have faith right now and I want to know why and how I can do it without having any sort of guarantee that anything will come from it.

But the point is that if I had any sort of guarantee, then it wouldn't be faith at all. That's the hardest realization I've ever had. And I can look back on life and know that he's been working. But that doesn't mean I can see how exactly he'll do it now...and I know that's exactly how he wants it.

Journey onward, journey deeper, adventure upward. That is the life to which we are truly called and the faith we must have.

-Zack

"Did you know what you were doing, did you know? Did you know how you would move me well, I don't even think so"
-Mae

The Light starts to Burn

If you've visited this over the past few days, you've noticed a series of 3 short posts. They're the first three of 40 5 minute thought explorations I'll be undertaking til Easter. There's no set theme, there's no real connection between them. Mostly I'm doing it to keep my mind running throughout the day or to process things from the day before going to bed. There's not time really, to go too in depth or get all that narrative or meta-prosish in 5 minutes, so I honestly just sit down and start writing as I think. I hope they're at least slightly interesting, but I completely understand if they're incomprehensible too.

This week, I've been learning how far from a Calvinist I am...and it's happened by encountering many of them. Ancestrally, I can't really win with Hillsdale...students are taught to celebrate the American heritage that includes stealing the land upon which this country was founded from one side of my ancestry, while religiously, a vast majority of the Christians here align quite sharply with the group that persecuted the other side of my ancestry to the point of fleeing Europe for the United States.

But thankfully, just as there is no Greek, Roman, Slave, Free, Male, or Female in Christ, there is no Calvinist, Anabaptist, Native American or White Immigrant American either. That means I either keep my personal details to myself or do my best to look past the uninterrogated views that are seemingly held by so many and lay aside any objections I might have for the sake of the Gospel. There's no need to rehash distant past conflicts now. Someone did say, at Bible Study Wednesday night, that "people don't seem to like the Anabaptists much around here" and that doesn't really make sense to me. I mean, I guess pacifism can be contentious, especially at the neo-con capital of the world, but disliking pacifists is kind of the funniest thing I've heard or had the chance to think about for a long time..... I didn't stretch that conversation too far, so I don't know what the actual grief was, but I'm also not sure what it could be once you get past incorrect preconceptions. But, chances are, that's the real issue anyway, as it so often is.

I'm caught somewhere between believing my life is some grand adventure and some slow roll toward chaos. I kind of like it like that, but I do wish I had more than just a group of people that aren't too sure I'm at all necessary to turn to for all social interaction. It will come though, I'm sure...I'm also incredibly impatient.

I kind of can't wait for Chapter Focus Week. Semester go a lot faster when you don't have class. February is almost over and I can barely remember any time passing between now and its beginning. Really, since moving to Hillsdale, time has been completely unclear for me. It seems like both forever ago and a recent event. Sometimes I feel like I've been here forever, but I don't know that I've really ever felt like I actually live here. I kind of live an episodic yet repetitive life...sort of like the "The Monkees" wherein every episode is different, but similar enough that you can hardly tell them apart. That happened in college too I think, but my life was people-centric enough that variety seeped in and I can think back and piece together whole time-space referenced memories. I don't know that I can really do that at Hillsdale, at least not yet.


Mostly I just know I need patience. My life is ridiculously contrasting, going back and forth from really amazing to really dull without warning.

Mostly, weekends are the dull part.

-Zack

"Listen to the girl as she takes on half the world, moving up and so alive"
-The Jesus and Mary Chain

L3: Integration

"To live is Christ and to die is gain."
So what do we have to lose?

If only it were that easy. It's true, ultimately, what is the most we can lose but life, and what comes with death but eternal communion with our heavenly father, savior, and friend.

It's a great battle cry, a great call to boldness.

But "do you not know that your body is a temple. Glorify God with your body."

We've got to find the middle ground, where what we do acknowledges that we've got nothing to lose and yet everything that does exist here matters to some degree.

God loves us greatly and part of that was granting us the ability to love here and now. We aren't the love the here and now and yet, we are to do all we can to be here and now and live purposefully here. In doing so, you're going to love things here and now and not be able to help it.

Contradiction. Sometimes that's what it all feels like.

But it's now and not yet and it's both and, and it's always already and it's what we've got to do no matter how much we understand it.

C.S. Lewis calls humanity a great experiment, attaching an immortal soul to a mortal "animal" body. Actually, that's from the Screwtape Letters so it's more (and purposefully, ironically) harsh in explaining it.

But it's God's experiment, not ours, and he doesn't make mistakes.

-Zack

"Like Ludwig Van, how I loved that man, well the guy went deaf and didn't give a f***, no.."
-The Hours

L2: Calling

I wish we could all broaden. Our horizons, our minds, our expectations for the truth. I wish we could accept that under all of this there could just be something more, there could be something deeper than what we want to cling to, what we want to hold on to, what we want to use to say we know we're right.

But we're not so right so easily, the moment we're convinced of it.

It's not about pursuing truth. That is a bland, neutered dream. What is truth but a set of ideas, and what happens to my life when I've captured them?

Nothing.

Let us pursue something deeper. Something bigger, something more wonderful and something stronger.

Something bold.

We are called to adventure, not to interrogation; to "go and make" not to "read and interpret."

We should know the truth. We should want to know the truth. But the truth sets us free, and when we're free, we have a choice. We can continue to pound out boring old dogmas and chase down some ever-nearing-ancient ideal from a dead swiss-man about santification...or we can do that to which we are actually called.

The mission of God is saving souls and the body works together to accomplish it. You're either working in the body to that end, or you're not really working in the body at all.

So run, fly, dream. Chase something bigger.

Because it is that to which the power and redemption of Christ compels us.

-Zack

"I'm learning to trust that it's not you who hurt me"
-Jason Upton

L1: Crash

At some point in time, it all just has to make sense right? And what if it doesn't? What if it's all just about rolling through life with millions of unanswered questions and unlinked events? Does that change anything?

They say He's the great storyteller, that really, in the end, this is all just a huge narrative being pulled together by strings set long before any of this all began. I don't doubt that, but I don't know how necessary it is either.

"He works all things out for the good" True. Can't be refuted. But does it mean all things end up having good results? Can it really be that simple, that strictly correlative?

I don't doubt that eventually we're sliding to "the good." But does that have to mean every single event is leading up to something redemptive? Can't something just be bad without a good result? I don't see why not. Indeed, I mostly see times when that is the case.

There's got to be something deeper to it all, to this working out to the good. There's got to be more than all's well that ends well, no matter how well it ends.

-Zack

"At the end of the age, it will land you and me"
-Anberlin

Safe from the Guards

I've been trying to come up with something to say with a Valentine's day theme since Friday and it just isn't coming this year. This is the least valentine's-feeling valentine's day I've probably ever had, or at least for quite some time. There are a lot of reasons for that I'm sure, but most of them are probably summed up with how it's a Sunday and short of the obligatory sermon on God's love in Church this morning, I've been completely sheltered from all things Valentine's save for Zales commercials.

Tomorrow will probably feel exactly like President's day though...and that will probably be exactly like today...I don't know if that's ironic or just a fun fact.

On the whole, it's hard to top the summer olympics, but at least I enjoy watching basically everything in the winter olympics, even if it's out of novelty. Nothing could be further from the truth in the summer olympics, where at least 90% of them are quite boring to watch.

I once dated a girl who's birthday was Valentine's Day. We dated for about 32 days, all of them in the fall. From a cost perspective, she might have been one of the least expensive girls I've ever dated....there's only so much you can give someone on a single day after all. Other than that, I can't see any benefit from that relationship.....indeed, we dated for 32 too many days.

Ah well. The NBA All-Star game is tonight, and I haven't been able to watch it since my senior year of High School, so I guess I've got a date with that. Or some other stupid-emo-sounding-wordplay.

-Zack

"No words to say, No words to convey"
-Tracy Chapman

Waiting for the World to Fall

Google buzz might make for an interesting new dynamic to my "blog's" readership. I hope that doesn't change how I write, but it would be a lie to say that I don't think about who reads this when I write it. I wish that weren't the case, I wish I could just create without thinking about the audience, but I'm not capable of such a feat. Indeed, it is a truly remarkable artistic achievement, no matter the content or result, if one can do so. I don't know that I believe anyone can, but there are those that claim it to be possible. Darren Arronfsky claims that...he directed Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and The Wrestler. If you've seen any of those, do you think he's creating without deference to his audience? I think it varies. To call Requiem for a Dream anything but a play to an audience though, is a lie to oneself.

I like google buzz though, even if it's kind of useless before it began thanks to facebook and twitter. It's just a social network aspect to google contacts, but most people don't have google contacts that aren't at least contacts on facebook and twitter as well.

Starting next Wednesday (can anyone guess why?) I'm going to engage in 40 days of 5 minute thought experiments on here. My lent will be interesting this year, because I'm focusing on hw I use my time...which is completely different from giving up food or drink. I've never gone through lent without coming out better with regard to the things upon which I focused (I eat a lot less meat now, for instance), so we'll see what happens....it could be a pretty radical life-altering lent...or not, we'll see. So these five minute things... I'm going to spend exactly five minutes every day (either early in the morning or right before bed) writing about whatever comes to mind, to see what happens and to see, after it all, where my thoughts tended to go.

Calling lent a favorite religious observance is probably a misnomer among misnomers, but it has always been a call to spiritual discipline in my practical life that God always honors in power, grace, and mercy.

Speaking of lent, we've got a remarkable weekend coming up...it's literally 4 holidays in a row and they're not all inter-related.... Sunday is Valentine's day, Monday is President's day, then Mardi Gras (fat tuesday for the German catholics that don't acknowledge other bits of European tradition in the church.) and Ash Wednesday. I'm sure that's probably happened before, the little Holiday marathon we're running into. Of course, Mardi Gras is only kind of a holiday and Ash Wednesday is less holiday and more holyday, but they're still 4 recognizable days. Of course, everyday is some kind of holiday if you get down to it (everything is commemorated in some culture on some day it seems), but as Americans (which I am one of), most of us can at least claim a bit of working knowledge about each day, especially Christians or post-Christians.

I have come close to a full post about this a lot lately, but I'm just going to say a few words right now...... If we, as a church trying to reach out to the culture in which we exist, keep thinking about post-modernity as a culture to which we must reach out, we're always going to miss the point. It's not a culture. It's an ideology that informs the young culture of westerners. If post-modern is a culture, so is modernity and the theory of gravity is just a cultural value. That sounds insane, but it's no less insane than calling a lack of grand narrative and an emphasis on personal story a "cultural value" among the post-modern, and we (actually, I say we because I associate with people who do it, but I never will so I don't actually include myself in that we) say that all of the time. A lack of grand narrative and emphasis on personal story is the outcome of a held assumption that we have made far too many assumptions in the past and are striving to get beyond them by giving agency to people who have not had it, but not just doing that...also allowing and acknowledging that everyone gets agency. That is not a cultural value that shifts person to person and culture to culture; it is a deeply held belief that informs and constructs cultural values which may or may not be rooted in post-modern theory and ideology.

It's not just a gripe on my part...it's an important distinction that, if we don't start making it, will ultimately neuter our witness in the post-modern world which is both coming and already here. The now and not yet. Sounds familiar....

-Zack

"All of my dreams and my passions are in your hands'
-Falling Up

Retraced

I'll admit, last night's was something of a cop-out post as I knew I should post something to stay "on schedule," but instead of really "updating" I just thought and wrote for a few minutes. I guess that's what this is all of the time, but there are different voices, different perspectives, and different tones toward the reader I take, depending on the sort of post, and I've kind of got a "weekly update" voice that I forsook to this point this past week.

But I'm making up for it, or at least trying to, right now.

My life is a perfect dichotomy in Hillsdale. When I'm on campus doing things, I feel perfectly alive, very much in touch with a world, (although, as it is on any college campus and especially Hillsdale, calling it the world is a bit too generou), and like a functioning member of an integrated (not racially but at least anthropologically) society. It's still a world I'm trying to figure out and that's a lot of what I do (quite directly these days, as I meet with students and try to get perspective on all of this, to figure out what exactly and where exactly I'll be best deployed (so to speak) in ministry on campus), but I do feel like I do something, and actual "doing-things" roles are emerging. Staffwork at Hillsdale has a lot of intricacies, not the least of which being that the primary staff has been and will continue to operate with a very old model of staffwork, wherein the role is basically coming to campus periodically to meet with students and hear about what's going on, influencing as the opportunities arise...it's a fine style, but there are a lot more possibilities when the staff lives in the community, like I do....so sometimes I feel like I'm creating my own role in a roguish fashion. Things are going pretty well and just keep getting better with time....

Then there's the other side of my life....the side that is when I'm not on campus....the side that has little to no social interaction, and it's a side that is slowly driving me insane. I've been back to Ohio twice since moving to Hillsdale, and both times I have realized the non-campus social life I'm missing here....but I'll make it work til something develops, and if it doesn't, so be it...Ohio isn't that far away and perhaps that's how God wants it. Indeed, I'm sure how it is right now is how God wants it; it's just a matter of figuring out what that means in the long run.

We talk a lot about how our goal on campus is to bring glory to God. You couldn't come up with a more complete statement, but I'm finding different students have different ideas about that, and few of them realize the call that actually places on their lives to do things....often times, they're pretty convinced it's more about what they don't do.

I'm by all means a fish out of water here, but that's good for all of us.... I see things on campus others don't because their perspective is different...and I'm learning things I wouldn't encounter elsewhere.

I know God wants me here right now......but I also know he doesn't want me here forever.

So where am I headed? Well, I said I'd be out of the country for at least 3-5 years on my Urbana commitment card, and since that's also where the first seeds of staffwork started being cultivated, I don't doubt that it's still true....but I just don't know where or when.

I've said it so much that you've probably heard it, but I've got a feeling I'll be married or have a seminary degree before I go abroad. Part of me doesn't wonder if both won't be true....I'm pretty sure at least one will be because I've done what I can to escape that little "technicality" about calling, and it just hasn't worked.

I'm also learning a lot about patience these days, but I'm going to have to leave it at that.

-Zack

"You're aiming to please way off target"
-Death Cab for Cutie

Breathing In

It takes so long for things to epiphanize. I don't know where I'm going, but I know it's all intake.

Where are you from?
Tell me about your relationship with God.
What do you see God doing on campus?
How is God working in your life right now?


Good questions. Rote questions.
Rote-for-a-reason questions.

But it's all intake. It's all inhalation. It's all good. But it's all consumption.

At some point we have to burst. We have to exhale. We have to give after we've taken. Call it balance, I just call it survival. At some point it all just ends; the fragmentation sets in and there's a way to finally see beyond the give and take, the push and pull, the polarization of all meaning and the stark nakedness of thought that is inhale/exhale or this/that oriented. God never meant this/that, he always mean both and and. And is more than a conjunction; it is the key to all meaning, once you realize it's meaning. And perhaps that's what it is all along- the link to phrases, thoughts, clauses, and, on the outside of all of that, the link between us all that actually lets us get past what we think we know and realize that all we need to know is that He is at the center and all else is not just up for debate but necessarily subjective.

But even so, how we live is how we live and how we see is how we see; it might be built on false castles and ungrounded foundations, but they are still our castles, they are still our foundation, and that gives them a legitimacy to us, even if they aren't necessary, even if they aren't right, even if they don't even exist. Because God loves us enough to put himself within this hackneyed world of false binaries so that we might see beyond it. But we can't see beyond it without its existence, and that, if nothing else, is worth exploring.

So even if my feeling of inhalation is ultimately false, that doesn't change the fact that I'm longing to breath out.

-Zack

"The more I live I see this life's not about me"
-Anberlin

The Stars Lean Down

It's impossible to be two places at once, without being truly nowhere.

But that's what I want to do. Because the dual-nature of our lives, the private and the public, the professional and the social, the wished for and the real, the now and the not yet, is pressing me on all sides. And the two sides, all of them, are as far from each other as they've ever been in my life.

Physically.

But we don't really live a dual existence. I can't go to campus and become a different person than I am when I'm not there....I can act differently, I can think of myself differently, I can "have my InterVarsity hat upon my head" but no matter what, there is something, even concealed, of the rest of me, the rest of my life, of the other side, beneath or even running through it all.

But I'm living a dichotomy right now, a very real dichotomy, and it is hard to really "be" anywhere.

There's a spiritual discipline I know very little about, called "practicing the presence of God." Basically, it's spending time in acute awareness of God's presence. God's always around, of course, but so often we live, pray, act, and speak as if that's not the case. I mostly attribute that to the smallness of our minds and the parochial nature of our ability to focus. No matter what, the fact that we actually need to focus on something omnipresent shows us how small we really are, and it reminds me that I've got to focus to even be present in corporeal unity at any given time.

It's hard to separate my "work" from the rest of my life, but conversely, it's also hard to separate the rest of my life from work. It's practically impossible. That's not bad, but I often feel like I'm floating about without any clear lines as to what is what. I know time will peal away the layers as I develop a life in Hillsdale that isn't on campus, but I don't know what that looks like, when I kind of just want to be back in Ohio whenever I'm not on campus or doing InterVarsity work. I went "home" over the weekend (although I've not got anywhere there that I've ever actually lived now that my parents have moved out of Ottawa) and was reminded of how balanced our lives ought to be and mine has not been since moving to Hillsdale. But it will take time. I know that. I do fear, however, that I'll illegitimately undertake a full binarization of my life and live fully here at Zack, HCF staff, and fully in Zack, the everything else Zack is. But that just isn't true, and I hope it doesn't happen.

But I know I will continuously, increasingly, and joyously be drawn back to Ohio more than I had thought when I moved.

-Zack

"There is a light in your eyes that never goes out"
-The Lucksmiths

Purpose

My favorite song will be, until the day I die, There is a Light that Never Goes Out by the Smiths.

The title comes from the quote: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." said by Hugh Latimer before being burned at the stake for heresy. Heresy in the form of an evangelical revolution on college campuses in England.

I don't think there's even the slightest coincidence that InterVarsity has nothing to do with the Smiths but wouldn't exist were it not for the people that were responsible for the song's title...and I am sure there is absolutely no other job in the world I should have right now.

I just spent 3 days in Ann Arbor talking about the heart of what we do...seeing people decide to make Jesus Christ the Lord of their lives.

It was a long and exhausting few days....we basically put in 12 hours of time, stayed up til 2 a.m. or later (that part was optional, but the direct consequence of putting the three Wooster-tied staff in the same place for sleeping arrangements), and did it all again the next day. Thankfully, it was only three days....As it was, I slept til noon today trying to catch up. Thankfully, indeed, I could do that...I'm sure many of my colleagues couldn't.

It was a remarkable time though.

Spending time thinking about why we do what we do, I've given thought to why I do much of what I do. Some of the reasons are more opaque than others.

As far as this is concerned though, I'm not quite sure why I write this...each post seems to have its own purpose. Sometimes, I just need to write and sometimes I feel like feeling like I'm telling people things, so a word document on my hard drive wouldn't "scratch that itch." Other times I really do have something I want people to know. Sometimes, I think I write because I often wish many of my friends had blogs so I could see what's on their mind from time to time. I acknowledge though, that my relationship with the English language and writing is pretty unique....

J.D. Salinger died today and I don't know what to say. I'm not glad he's dead; I'm never glad someone is dead. But he's basically famous for the death of John Lennon and making a ton of emotional teenagers think they know anything about anything. It's a shame too, because what there is to like about the Catcher in the Rye is never what gets attention. As far as I can tell, Salinger was incapable of creating characters or plot, but he could build a compelling narrative out of literally nothing....but it's the nothing that gets all the attention. Ironic, probably....

I heard bagpipes on campus last night. You can take bagpipe lessons, and that's what was going on. I've been aware of the lessons, so I always thought I would feel at home when and if I heard the pipes....but the opposite happened...I just missed Wooster.

I met a guy on Tuesday that could play basically any song he'd heard on the piano. He was wasting that talent on a degree in engineering....sometimes, communism looks good.


-Zack

"Oh call my name, you know my name, and in that sound everything will change"
-Vienna Teng

Shifting

There's a very good chance my traditionally (mostly) reliable Thursday posts are going to become traditional and mostly reliable Friday posts. Thursdays are a lot busier these days and if you remember, the Thursday thing started when I was in college and there was a nice break for writing between two things in the middle of the day. There's still time on Thursdays, if I tried, but generally, Fridays are pretty calm (so far) and don't, at least, have anything regular going on. Then again, I can basically guarantee that I won't post next Friday, but we'll see.

I'm greatly looking forward to the next week...all of it.

I find myself looking forward to tomorrows a lot more often than perhaps ever before, and it's a different sort of looking forward and being excited about what is to come than I've ever experienced. It's not that I'm really longing for what is to come (although I am). More than anything, it's a calm, assured, peaceful, expectant excitement about the coming day, week, month, and so on. This life is such an adventure.

I've joined (I paid dues) the Hillsdale film society. It's strange because I don't know that anyone involved is active in HCF (Hillsdale Christian Fellowship...our chapter), but sometimes, I feel more at home among those students than with the Christian students.....they just...well, the film society students seem like Wooster students more than any of the other Hillsdale students I've met. It will probably go slowly, but I'm hoping to cultivate friendships out of the film society.

But there is a danger in reading that incorrectly; I absolutely love spending time with HCF students...it's one of my life's greatest joys.

I recently told someone that it feels like I live in a different world now, and not just because I'm in Michigan. I feel like the world is just different for me now. There's a different sort of purpose that pervades all I do, and I love it.

I still feel weird thinking about how I don't live in Ohio, but it's been less than 2 weeks.

Sometimes, it kind of feels like I'm in college again, with more responsibilities and without class. Like, for instance, how I'm "going home for the weekend" next weekend. That just sounds like such a "college" thing to say. But it's true. I even do a lot of the same things I did while I was in college, so it's not too far removed.

But the purpose or at least the time devoted to the purpose is quite different, and really, that's the best part.

Much is wonderful, but not everything....and nearly nothing is easy.

I'm still trying to find a church, and that's a harder thing to do than it has ever been. So much of me doesn't feel like it fits into much of Hillsdale (town and college) and that's definitely reflected in the churches in the area. I'm sure there's somewhere though, where God has intended me to plant my roots while I am here. It's a lot harder to not have a church home than I have ever realized. It was never an issue in college, save for a few weeks at the beginning of my first year...and my church in Wooster ended up being the bridge to my church back home (both of which I miss dearly). Not so in Hillsdale, and my typical roadsigns for finding a church have already been exhausted. But there has to be somewhere...

I live alone right now too. My roommate had his colon removed on Monday and he'll be away recovering for awhile. It's strange, because I've never lived this alone for this long for my entire life. But I'm doing alright. It's the realization of that (the living alone...I try not to think about it too much) that makes me think about how much I don't have around here...no church, no real "non-student" friends, and no real outlet for any sort of social life. But praise the Lord for facebook. Seriously.

So that's why I can't wait for the coming week....three days with other new staff at our regional training session and a weekend at home, seeing people I've barely known for 3 months but have grown to love and miss dearly.

Time is such a strange thing....

-Zack

"yours is the face that launched 10000 ships"
-Death Cab for Cutie

Like a Hurricane

We can't fathom it.
How wide
How long
How deep.

But we know it is. We know it is because we are feeling something, we are knowing something. We are being and we are being and we are doing something.

I woke up today. Maybe it wasn't then. But at some point this morning, it became one of those crisis days. One of those days when you start to question the meaning of it all, one of those days when you just spend too long thinking about the bigness of it all and realize that you're not really much against it. One of those days when clarity is all you long for, but you realize that we're still staring straight into that glass...the immortal glass. Darkly.

But there is a place of peace. There is a place of serenity. There is calm assurance, and it's not assurance of all you wish you knew. It's assurance that it's alright to not know. Because He loves us.

And it's a love that flows freely all of the time. It's a love that sustains, it is a love the enlivens.

The greatest of these is love because it is a love in which we can have faith, it is a love that gives us hope. It is a love that never lets us go.

-Zack

"Night into day
We have been captured again
A new time and place to make a million new memories"
-Mae

no room at all

I've tried to write something here, 3 or 5 times in the past couple of days.

I know what it's supposed to feel like.

I know how I want to say it.

But I have no idea what I want to say.

So for now I have nothing.

Sorry.

-Zack

"I'm afraid to move"
-Vienna Teng

Love is a word so small

Sometimes, and right now might be one of those times, I just kind of sit at my computer and try to come up with things to do, to delay one thing or another (now, and probably most often, sleep), hoping an e-mail or something will come through so I've got something I can at least tell myself is important to do before doing the next thing.

And sometimes it happens, but often it doesn't.

Right now I just don't want to go upstairs and read til I feel tired enough to sleep. I love to read, don't get me wrong. I have to read multiple books at a time to feel like I'm getting the most out of my time reading. But I've been reading a lot lately, and at least for me, reading is only one half of the give and take experience that makes up much of my life. If I read too much, I have to write to get to a place where I can read enjoyably again. It could be many things...the necessity to balance consumption with creation, the natural response to reading I developed as an English major in college, or just a natural equilibrium I've got to have in my life. If I write a lot for awhile, I can't for awhile, and in that time, I always read more.

But it's all inexact. I just know I've been reading a lot lately. I've finished three books since I moved to Hillsdale...and as always, they weren't the only things I've been reading...and it's not like I've done nothing but read. Not only is that logistically impossible, but it's psychologically impossible too. I've written a lot more too. I think I, at least for the week, struck a good balance between the two.

But right now, all of this, feels more like an attempt to dull a mental edge totally unrelated to writing and reading and to let me come to a place of mental peace and serenity so I can get to sleep.

But it's not that easy really...not really at all.

Things are really just kind of lonely here. Not even really in a bad way. Well, I guess I would usually differentiate loneliness, solitude, and alone-ness, and I did choose to say "lonely" but I don't feel like I'm just dying for human contact or anything like that. I've got a good roommate and it's my job to work with some of the most remarkable students on the planet. But it just feels like there's a sort of connection I'm missing in life. I don't know what it is. I think it has something to do with knowing or seeing. But that's both vague and as much as I can come up with to say about it right now.

Things are good here. Very good. But I do miss things from home and from Wooster, but that's always natural. I feel like I don't understand or just don't get something about something, but that's all I can say about that too because it's all I know of it...and it's strange.

I think I'm going to give up and go read.

-Zack

"He's unresponsive cause you're irresponsible"
-Death Cab for Cutie