O'er Yonder

Tomorrow is kind of the official beginning of a summer of some kind of adventure.  It is an adventure.  I know that, I feel that.  But it also feels like the step into a summer I know I won't emerge from the same person.  I don't know how much will change, in me, for me, but I know I don't stay too similar to myself for very long (usually in a good way, but I suppose that's not a guarantee and depends how you measure it) these days, and there are a lot of things happening so I don't imagine this summer will be anything like a getting back to or attaining any sort of status quo.  I stopped believing in status quo long ago anyway, so I don't mind that.

But let's lay down a littany of what's going on and deduce some things if we can.

I leave tomorrow for Wooster, which will probably always be a surreal feeling as long as I live.  Wooster is always going to feel like home in some way, and my personal sentimentality probably means that feeling will only increase as memories of anything less than pleasant fade daily and good memories become the focus of my recollections.

But I'm not going back to Wooster to wander around campus.  There is purpose and it is exciting.  I can't completely disagree with Parks and Recreation tonight though...."whenever a marriage takes place, two single people die" and with another summer of marriages and engagements already afoot, my social landscape will, once more, be rocked a bit.  It happens and it's good, but it's always a bit altering.

Speaking of single people dying, a sort of non-event will probably be taking place this summer (and if it doesn't, then that's an event in and of itself).  On June 16th, I'll have been single for the longest period of time since I started dating the summer before my junior year of high school.  That's not a huge deal, but if we put our amateur statistician hats on for a minute, you could say my time of singleness could very much be on the other side of the bell curve.  I could very much be wrong, but just based on the numbers, I can't be single much longer right?  That's never happened before, and while I could complexify my analysis and get specific about why I became unsingle in all my past seasons of singleness, and that would probably destroy my numerical analysis, science simply says I shouldn't be single for much longer.  So, this summer is a showdown between scientific meta-narrative and literal, post-modern facticity.  You know where I fall, and if I could write worth anything, you'd realize that I'm siding with the indeterminate length of single-living side of the argument.  That's probably right.  But it's been a long long long time.  I don't know what God has out there for me though, and it could very well be the case that I'll be single for much longer than the 20 months and 13 days that will have passed on June 16th.  But hey, even post-modern me is kind of rooting for science on this one.

Chapter Focus Week is soon and I'm legitimately staffing a track.  I feel unprepared because the more I prepare the more unprepared I feel.  Likewise, the more I don't prepare, the more arrogant I get and the worse things actually turn out.  So, in my feeling of unpreparedness, I'm probably going to be fine.  But pray for me over the next week, please.  Then, the second week, I'll be in the Hillsdale Leadership track.  Pray for that..mostly so no one draws any weapons and nothing turns to fisticuffs as leadership tracks can be wont to do from time to time.  That's mostly a joke, but pray for the cohesion of our group and the vision God will grant us.

June will be busy too....I'll be out of Ohio for 14 days en total and that's pretty busy by June standards

July isn't so busy after the first weekend. and August just means school is about to start again and I take the NSO plunge.  Ah.  Okay, life is joyous because I am excited just writing all of this.  But it also means I'll be on the other side of the beginning of classes this fall much quicker than it seems right now.  Maybe that's not true, maybe July will prove a long, relaxing month.  But I haven't even said anything about fund development yet, and that's going to be coursing through all of this and I'll have to do all I can *not* to neglect it between things.  God is faithful though, and I've never felt more called to this life, so I know he'll provide.  He always has, he always will, and when he stops that just means it's on to the next adventure...I don't see that happening any time soon though.  I know I had a post a few weeks ago about how I didn't know if I would stay on staff past next year, when I'll most likely be leaving Hillsdale.  That's still true, but I can't imagine stopping just after next year.  I'll be somewhere and I'll still be doing this, this thing I love which I have given up much to do but have gained so much more of such greater worth in doing.

I'm glad I can write that deeply, that joyfully, just about my professional life.  I don't know that many can do that.

But my life will change imperceptibly at the moment but majorly in the long run Saturday too, when my mom moves out and effectively ends what I guess was a facade of her life as a Christian mother and wife.  I probably shouldn't go into much detail here, and I don't have many details anyway, but I've got a brother and a father I've got to be there for this summer too, and right now, I'm just trying to do my best....pray for them and me too.

"If God did not will it, it wouldn't be so"

So let's not focus on that apparently unchangeable and unpleasant fact about the life of my family.  There are much worthier topics in the world, like how some people drift into your life by what looks like accident then 5 months later you realize that it wasn't a drifting at all but a divine appointment and there is no such thing as accident, much less coincidence.  And for that reason I hope.  And I hope because of love.  And I love because I have faith.  Because at the end of the day, at the end of all days "these three remain, faith, hope and love".

Just love.

-Zack

"The rhythm is so in sync and that isn't their only strength
They were humming a tune the sun and the moon, they didn't know what to think"
-Flobots

And can it be...

Christ lives, and so too shall I.

That's the opening line of one of my favorite hymns, but I like it best when I break my own rules about Christian writing and deconstruct the lines.  That line is at its best when it's not followed by the rest of the song, which is mostly about heaven and resurrection.  There is nothing wrong with heaven or resurrection, but right now, I'm not terribly close to either occurrence.  Christ's life most immediately allows me to live fully, to embrace all that life has to offer deeply and love completely.  Christ lives and so too shall I; right here, right now.

-Zack

"Gently lifting hands to heaven,
softened by the sweetest hush,
a Father sings over his children,
loving them so very much."

-Five Iron Frenzy

Stumbling

I want to write something right now, but I don't know what, and I don't know how.  I'm plunging through new depths of liminality these days, incapable of holding fast to more and more things I had relied upon, taken for granted.  We can build things of a sort, and maybe they're pretty stable, but as long as we can build them, they're not necessarily permanent, because we're far from perfect and the fallen world is tending toward fragmentation.

I wish I wasn't so right about all of this, I wish there were exceptions.  But there aren't.

God's it.  All of it.  The only one, the only thing, the only foundation we can stand on, the only thing we can cling to when life's winds pick up and threaten to blow all apart all we've built.

Inside his will though, upon the rock of his word on which we can stand, he gives peace, joy, hope, love.  It's not just a clinging in hard times.  It's a standing firm and high, higher than we ever could on our own.

This fallen world wants to fragment, and our fallen selves want to do that to, to follow our own lead, to fragment with it.  It's natural, but it isn't right.  He wants to give us so much more, but far too often we seek to build elsewhere, to stray from the foundation He is and create on our own.

I never thought these abstract forms would become so real in my own family.  But here we are, and until we get back on the rock, decenter all else and recenter on Christ, truly, there is no hope, because there was never supposed to be hope apart from Christ.

That sounds like bad news, until you reverse it; in Christ there is great, more than supernatural hope.  Hope placed elsewhere is little more than fanciful wishing, but hope placed in Christ is a promise that he will never let go.

-Zack

"Tell me why you lie, and what it is you do to keep your eyes so shiny"
-The Decembrists

Inward and Onward

As far as I'm concerned, next year is now.

That's not true, but this year isn't really hanging on by much anymore...just a dissipation into nothing as I turn my attention to what's on the way.

I used to write end of the year blogs in college, and I don't think I'll have it in me to do that as a staff.  Part of that is because I have prayer letters for that, and the other part is that years don't really end as much as new years arrive.  That sounds dramatic, harrowing perhaps, or at least confusing, but there's simply little to no time to transition between the two.  Prior to Chapter Focus Week, where the focus is on the chapter as it will be next year, we've got to make submit plans for the next year.  So right now, with an entire week left on campus (I say entire when I should say but one), I'm just thinking about next year and planning for CFW.  There's enough meditative space in my life (and enough is required to sufficiently plan for next year) that I don't feel too rushed, I don't feel like there's no due time to move from one to the next.  But there's a big difference between the months of summer that accompany even the most ambitious InterVarsity student as he or she moves between school years and the months of constantly-forward-looking work that accompany staff work.

I like it though, because I can't really function looking backward too much.  If anything, it's because I'm too sentimental and can get locked into thinking about what was (and won't be) and neglect to think about what will be.  That's why graduation weekend was so hard last year...I was completely diametrically split between the celebration and the saying of goodbyes.  There was no inbetween, ever.  After graduation, the last thought I had was how I had completed college... the only thought I had was how I was leaving.  They couldn't stay together for me, although they were both altogether true enough at that present moment.

And it's even harder right now.  Not the looking back thing, but the looking forward, because a big part of next year is figuring out next-next year.  Actually, that's often more on my mind than the coming year.  Indeed, it's a bit hard to believe in the 370 or so days that sit between me and then at the moment, and that is a problem.  It's often not that I don't want to be here (indeed, it's very much that I very much do), but there is a strong temptation to think that the next year here is an important bit of putting my life on hold.  I shouldn't but I do feel like whatever comes next will be a step toward forever, but until then, I have a mandatory year at Hillsdale with no legitimate bearing on what comes next...and the irony of that is that I don't even know that I won't be at Hillsdale for a third year (but if I am, I'll have to figure out something of a social life between now and then, because every weekend spent here feels like a hostage situation with little to no stockholm syndrome).  In the end, it doesn't really matter.  Well, it's hard to ever say that and really mean it or for it to be completely true (but then again, what is ever completely true?).  I mean to say though, that all the thinking, all the debating in my mind over what is happening, all the uneasiness or at least un-surety will fade, (and ought to out of faith already) and what is right will be apparent.

I have my dreams, I have my desires, I have my own ideas about what I would like to see happen.  I don't know that those are all completely invalid because I don't know that they're all completely born of my own desires without God's input.  More than anything though, I've just got to have faith, I've just got to pray, I've just got, often, to wait and see.  Because it's not hard for me to get impassioned about something and run toward it just to find out that my passion wasn't invalid but my running was.  Indeed, I've had and lost girlfriends and almost girlfriends that way....  I do trust though, that I'll know, when the moment hits and the time is right, that the passion is correct and I won't even be able to run fast enough to take in all God has for me, so He'll have to carry me there.

That's one large glob of a prayer request for next year, and I can't wait to take the steps and plumb the depths of the adventure God's got ahead of me to find out.  There is no waiting in this holding pattern here at Hillsdale.  There is no waiting at all in the shadow of the almighty.  No matter where we are, no matter what we are doing, this is an adventure and waiting is nothing more than his way of letting us experience where we are and what we're doing deeper.  We miss that.  We miss that a lot.

-Zack

"You can't memorize words you've always known"
-Flobots

Thursday Again

It's been awhile since I posted weekly, since I had been posting daily.  But, to be certain, my lent posts were very different from my standard Thursday-or-so posts.

I had a great spring break.  I felt like I spent it everywhere I could in Ohio, and I don't think I could have made it any better without adding a day in Cleveland.  It's been far too long since I've been in Cleveland.  I think I'll organize a day in Cleveland sometime this summer.  West Side Market, maybe an Indians game, wander around downtown for awhile.  Could  be fun, very fun.

I also kind of broke my keyboard en route from my parents house back to Hillsdale... the spacebar only works about 60 percent of the time now.  I'll probably have to get a new keyboard, but I definitely prefer this one thanks to it's special controls.

I don't exactly know why I shared all of that, because my life simply isn't that dull.

In two days I'm going to Michigan State to engage in a day of evangelism training and evangelism on campus in the afternoon. I'm looking forward to that for everything it is, but, one step back, I'm looking forward to seeing students seriously  share their faith and engage in learning how to live a life of evangelism amongst their peers.

God is doing great things on campuses all around us.  Next week is the largest evangelistic project InterVarsity has ever undertaken, at Ohio State.  Already though, the chapters there have seen 100 people give their lives to Christ this school year.  We had around 30 people come to Christ when we did the same thing at Wooster.  Mathematically, that could mean 650 people come to Christ next week at Ohio State.  That sounds insane.  But God is huge and wants to see life transformation, he wants to see healing, he wants to love and for his children to know love.  Pray for even more, perhaps.

Spring Break was great, but it went a long way to accentuating the blankness of my life in Hillsdale.  There are many things I don't have here; non-work-related friends, a church that actually feels like home, true community.  But in the words of Paul, even having those, as I do at home, I count them all loss for the sake of the Gospel.  And that's why I'm here.  It's true, life, on its own, might be "objectively better" in Ohio.  Why wouldn't it be?  It's where I'm from, it's where "my people" are, so to speak.  But it's not where God has called me right now, and I know that...that was accentuated over break as well.  There are many holes to my life in Hillsdale, but there's a bigger, more important hole in my life everywhere else.  The ministry I'm doing here, the ministry to which I am completely committed is important, is huge, is well worth all sacrifice to the point that it's not sacrifice at all, but light and temporary inconvenience.  Because God loves Hillsdale, and he wants me here to learn and demonstrate that.

I don't know though, that I'll be at Hillsdale past next year.  I don't know that I'll even be on staff.  All I really know though, is that God wants me here now, and he wants me here one year from now.  Beyond that, I don't know anything, but I don't know that I have to.

"Give me one more year.  I will dig around it and cultivate the tree.  If then there is no fruit, you may cut it down and use it for firewood"  That's a quote from a parable somewhere in Luke as well as I remember it, and it's how I feel about Hillsdale right now, kind of.  It's not that I'm not seeing any fruit.  It's not that, even, I require any amount of fruit to stay here for longer than next year.  But I do require God letting me know it's right for me to be here past next year.  That's the sort of fruit I'll be looking for next year.  Right now, I feel like I'll be moving on, using my experiences here as the firewood to drive me wherever I'm headed next, after one more year.  I don't know how right it is to pull apart scripture like that, but scripture or not, it's a story I can apply like that in my life right now...even if not, as such, as the word of God.

I'm also feeling a push, from somewhere deep inside and all around, to stop neglecting the intellectual and artistic gifts God has given me.  I don't know what that means.  I don't know that they're completely wasted by being on staff (indeed, I don't think they are).  But I do know I'm going to spend a lot more time writing this summer.  Over the next year, while I'm praying, thinking, journaling, pursuing the next step for me, grad school won't be completely out of play, and that's kind of scary to say, because I've always said seminary is my next academic step if there is one.  But I don't think that's true anymore.  Actually, I don't think it's ever been true.  You could say I've been coming to terms with the potential intermingling of faith and art a lot lately.    I've never not believed it, but I never thought it true for me; I always separated out my academic life from my faith to a degree...it was just necessary when I had to make honest decisions about time in college and ministry found itself opposed to academics.  But when I think about the story of that, the changing of my major and the all-nighters during "It Could Be U" because I literally had no time to do homework before midnight that week, I realize that God has always blessed me with a special relationship to literature, which let me get through college with more an InterVarsity major than an English when you count the time I actually spent.  But that blessing, I don't believe, stopped then, and I don't believe it was just so I could get through college as such.  I know this because I read 7-10 books at a time because I deeply miss the intellectual stimulation I had during college.  I know this because I cannot express myself but through writing.  I know this because even still, little gets me more excited than talking about post-modernity.  It's just a part of who I am, and I confess that I thought I would grow out of it, I thought it would fade as I got farther from college.  But it hasn't.  And it won't.  Despite all I am, I am "a person of letters" so to speak, perhaps even more than anything else save for a child of God, saved by grace and called to love.

So I don't know what all of that means right now.  But it could someday mean my life looks much different from how I imagine it now, how I have imagined it for so long.

As of yesterday, I haven't seen Meg for an entire year.  I don't know that that matters to any of you, but I remember days when I would count the days since I've seen her and if that number was bigger than 0, it made me sorrowful.  I would count the days til I saw her again, and no matter how many there were, I would say "only" and be hopeful.  But yesterday passed with no pomp, no reflection.  It's just been a year, and it probably should have been a year a lot longer ago, save for good friends made at the Urban Plunge inviting us to an event at Marietta, with me accepting despite knowing Meg would be there.  Actually, since breaking up, Meg has performed a dance every time I've seen her...at Fall Conference and then at the hunger meal in Marietta. I couldn't watch either time.

It doesn't really matter how right it was that a once strong couple ends their romantic relationship....there are just some things it's hard to see someone you once loved do, times when they're at their most beautiful, times you remember why your relationship ever began in the first place...times when they seem closer to God than you could ever hope to be.  Audrey sings, Meg dances.

It has been a long year. Sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible, but in the end, marked by love.

If you read this before tonight, pray for an important leadership meeting taking place at 6:30.

Pray for the price of life at Ohio State too.

-Zack

"There's a whistle in your will"
-Jason Morant

L40: Wait

Why the middle day? If he had the power to resurrect, why stay dead one whole day?  There's retroactive poetry in the rising on a Sunday, or something like that depending on calendars and day calculation...but I only know how to work on that level, so I've always already flouted technicality.

I won't begin to know or try to figure out why there's a day between Good Friday and Easter, but I know it serves us well to observe today as something constant in our lives, in both the spiritual and practical sense.

It's the blankest day on the church calendar, and yet one of the most important.  Waiting, after all, is one of the keys to the Christian life.  The Kingdom of God is here but not yet, just as redemption is here but not yet when Christ has died but not yet resurrected.  Maybe today, as a remembrance of the day he actually did spend in the grave, is an analog for the space between ascension and return.

It doesn't matter, or at least matters very little, because metaphor is what you make it and it always has been.

I do know though, that of all I've felt called to by God, waiting, specifically and simply in general, has been the bulk of it.  We wait.  We wait in expectancy of what he will do, and he's promised us it will be glorious.  But yet, we must wait.  God places true value on the act of waiting, on the cultivation of patience.  "whys" don't apply, or at least I'm not the one to address them.  I just know it's the way things are, and I'll walk in it til he calls me to action, when he has called me to wait.

-Zack

"All I had was just a vision, all I had was my ambition.  Your love without condition kept me swinging when I'm missing"
-Mat Kearney

L39: Redemption

We live in a world that loves to break itself.  I feel it in me, from time to time, the urge to do something somehow self destructive without a second thought.  And the great lie, the greatest lie of all, is that it always starts as something good, at least for me.  I always think it's best for me, even at someone else's expense, but at least best for me.  But that's never true.  Acting on my own accord, to try, on my own, to find happiness, perhaps ironically, always ends in my own depravity.

But there is a hope, and today we celebrate it.  Heaven came down at Christmas but love is shown perfect and sacrifice supreme in Christ's death on the cross.  His ultimate selflessness lets us set right our constantly self-destructive selfishness.  It's counter intuitive, perhaps, but that itself is a mirage; his Kingdom his perfect and it's our broken world that's counter intuitive.  For now, it seems backwards, but I know it's right, that what's best for me is what's best for you, what's best for us, for me to give myself up, for me to become second.  Because that's what Christ did, that's what love is.  And in love, there is redemption.  In redemption, there is love.

We live in a world that loves the break itself, but God loves this world and loves to make it whole again.

-Zack

"No cars go where we know, between the click of the light and the start of the dream"
-The Arcade Fire

L38: Together

"No one claimed any of their possessions as their own"
"They had all things in common"
"What you do to the least of these, you do to me"

Thanks to a Wooster education and a set of key experiences, I'm more opposed to most forms of individualism than most these days.  That definitely isn't where I was when I got to college, but to say those are 4 formative years is an understatement.  Even, I think, if you come through college thinking most of the same things you come to college thinking, there's growth that happens by being around others and engaging thoughts, new or not, on a deeper level.

But I'm not trying to write about college right here.

There is real value in community and most especially community that is knit together in understanding and love, able to be transformative and transform the members of the community.  But it starts in love and it grows people together.

I don't understand exactly how all of Jesus works into the atonement framework of most theologians.  I know we're saved by grace through his sacrifice and it's the greatest form of love. But if that were 100% of the story, Jesus wouldn't have been here for so long.  He wouldn't have come and walked among us.  The rough and ready gospel just says he lived a perfect life, died, and rose from the dead.  I don't see any stipulation on that life except that it was sinless.  Maybe though, it was more than sinless, or, that is to say, that sinlessness is but part, and maybe but a small part of perfection.  Jesus came and calls people, me, you, us, to a life in which we give up things that are our own in response to God's love for us.  But he doesn't just say to hand them over and let them be abandoned.  Giving up self, in Jesus' terms, involves doing so for the good of others...other people.  Something about his perfect life knits people together on a truer, deeper, more sincere level.  That's the life I want.  I do not want to sin, but given the choice, I would rather struggle in a loving community than purify myself of all sin and be utterly alone.  If Jesus' life is any indicator, perhaps that would be a sin itself.



-Zack

"It's a sad situation when we have to resort to keyboards as a means of making relations"
-Gym Class Heroes

Counting with scarecrow fingers

I just realized that the "post count" from the place I post counts stored drafts.  I never bother deleting things I don't choose to finish or publish, but that means my few "landmark" posts, where I acknowledge that I've reached a certain number has been a bit inflated.  You can add up the counters on the side by month or year and see that this is but my 157th post, not my 191st, as it will say in the blogger dashboard.  That means I don't post around 5 percent of everything I start writing.

95% is still passing right?

-Zack

"We'll claim the stars as ours"
-Mae

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