Category Archives: Grace

School. Dissertating. Running. Church. Vegan Food Failure #1.

Posted on 12 July 2010 | 2 comments

I went to school today to help rearrange the middle school office, which is a wreck, and I am not sure we improved it a great deal. We have those weird curved (around the corner) style desks where there are two desks attached to each other with a corner piece. Six of them do not fit well in one office. In fact, five of them would probably not fit comfortably. We will mostly be on top of each other, which is fine with me since I only have bodily personal space issues and don’t mind one bit sharing communal living space. I don’t mind if people are climbing all over my desk, as long as they don’t touch me in the process.

Going to school today really excited me for the fall. I want to start planning. I fantasize about what my room will look like, about the lessons I will teach, and about the ways I will interact with the students. If I didn’t have so much left to do this summer, I’d want school to start tomorrow. I walked around and just took in my classroom, looking in every cabinet and touching every filthy, kid-handled surface. I dreamed of burning sage and anointing the doorway, but I don’t want the campus police to be called because of the smell of the sage. (True story: One of my friends had the campus police called on him because he was doing an American Indian prayer/smudging in his office, and one of our colleagues thought he was smoking marijuana. They really came to our hallway and investigated his office until they were satisfied the smell came from sage. In their defense, they smell similar, and you can get high on salvia (sage) just as well as marijuana.) I may have to settle for just the anointing. No one will know what that smell is anyway, and the oil certainly doesn’t smell like pot-smoke like the sage does. I plan to spend much more time in my classroom than I spend in my office anyway. And when I am in the office, I will be working on my dissertation. I would love to get this thing finished as soon as possible. I am hoping to finish by May of 2012, which has been pushed back by a whole year because I will be teaching full time in the fall.

I just started reading a couple of theoretical/theological books to work on framing the chapter about biblical authority. Sometimes it seems like the more I read, the more questions I have instead of feeling like I am actually learning anything and moving toward having answers. Will I ever feel like I actually have some authority over my project? Will I ever be able to say to myself that I have read enough, digested it, and formulated my own opinions/theories about these texts? It feels like a long time coming, and like it may never happen.

Another thing that seems like it may never happen is this marathon. Although my six-mile run went really well on Saturday, my ankle still hurts unless I wear my minimalist footwear. When I wear my running shoes, and I have three different pairs I’ve been rotating, my ankle hurts ridiculously the next day. If I wear my Vibrams, I am fine, but the most I have run in them is three miles. Next Saturday, I am supposed to run 7 miles. Three of those miles will be done in the morning in Pendleton at a 5K that Bec and I are doing together. She’ll walk. I’ll run. We’ll finish together. 🙂 I think I will wear my running shoes for the 5K and my Vibrams for the other 4 miles and see how that works out. At any rate, I need to figure this whole thing out before I am up to running 10-15 miles at a stretch.

My Saturday run was one of the most beautiful I have been on in a long time. I started at about 630 with a nice slow walk down to Elm Street to sort of warm up my legs and work out the sleeping kinks, then I ran along the river from our house to the mile marker by Marsh on Tillotson and White River Boulevard and home. I finished by taking off my shoes and walking barefoot down to Elm Street and back. When I started out, the air was cool and there was a slight breeze. The dun had just poked out from above the horizon and the earth was just waking up. Slowly. As I ran, the sun moved up over the trees and the breeze slowed, giving me a humid, yet tolerable, workout. On mornings like that one, it’s not difficult to worship as I run, remembering the Creator and my place in the creation.

I think my view of my place in this world is complicated by the fact that I restrict myself to thinking worship somehow involves a human church, so on Sunday we went to church at Commonway because we had both been thinking this past week about missing church. Typically, we go to the Sunday evening Commonway service, but during the summer there aren’t as many college students so they meet in the morning with the regular service. The morning service has a whole different feel than the evening one. I enjoyed it, but when school starts back up, I plan to switch back to Sunday nights for a couple reasons.

For one thing, had it not been for my friend Molly and one of my students, we would have made it into the church, through the service, and back out without ever talking to another living person besides the surly greeter who didn’t understand why we wanted to share a bulletin. The speaker even made his way down the other end of our aisle, hugging people as he went, then almost tripped over my foot as he was exiting our aisle, but he didn’t even say good morning. Excellent interpersonal skills.

Secondly, I simply can’t stand selling things in church. I have this strong aversion to churches maintaining bookstores and pay cafĂ©s in their facilities. I have more of an aversion when the said money-making institutions are open for sales on Sunday morning as you are walking into the church. I have more of an aversion when there are inserts in the bulletin that advertise the sales going on in said marketplaces, and I just pretty much wait for the roof to cave in when the speaker announces the Bible sales from the dais after he makes a point about the importance of reading the Bible.

As churches today go, Commonway is a good one. They work hard to maintain social outreach. In fact, they have people in Kazakhstan doing some social outreach, they are collecting school supplies for students in Muncie, and they are collecting new kids shoes for those kids whose famlies can’t  afford them. I can get behind all of those things. The message had a good balance of material for new Christians and challenges for those people have been Christians for longer. And, I love the pastor. Matt pretty much rocks.

Vegan Food Failure #1: Taco pizza. Never try to make a vegan taco pizza without taco seasoning. It doesn’t work. At all. You will end up with beans, corn, tomatoes, and salsa on crust instead of taco pizza. Ew, but I hate to waste food, so I ate it, trying my best not to think of it as taco pizza so it would taste better. Okay, I imagined it was simply pizza, so it wouldn’t taste repulsive. I kept trying to get Bec to eat some of it, but she refused. Smart woman.

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Posted in Dissertation, Food, Grace, Religion, Running, School, Teaching, Vegetarian or Vegan

Christianity. Games. Conversations. Food and Running.

Posted on 9 July 2010 | 2 comments

Sometimes I think I’m not a very good Christian. I think this because I don’t give enough grace, I don’t read my Bible enough, and I don’t really pray at all anymore. I justify this by believing that the amount of grace I give is way more than most the people around me. I look around, and I see the way people treat each other without even thinking about each other at all and without considering how they are making other people feel. Of course, comparing yourself to other people always gets you just short of nowhere. Just ask any of the Psalmists about comparing yourself to others. I don’t think you’d find one of them, or any other biblical writer for that matter, who advocates measuring yourself on a worldly standard.

That being said, in comparing myself to a biblical standard of grace-giving instead of comparing myself to each other, I fail miserably. In fact, comparing myself to any religious systems standards of person-to-person interactions, I fail miserably. Buddhists might say I am too attached to myself and too concerned about my worldly pleasure. There is a quote that says, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” I think compassion for Buddhists is a lot like grace for Christians. They’re both difficult, because you have to look at people with other-worldly eyes. You have to see past the history you have with them, and look into who they are. It’s like the Christian concept of seeing Jesus in people or the Jewish concept of loving your neighbor. And in Islam, “in one Hadith the Prophet -peace be upon him- said that Allah has commanded him about nine things. One of them he mentioned was ‘that I forgive those who do wrong to me.’” It’s so difficult to forgive, to give grace, to show compassion when we feel we’ve been wrong. In this way, I think I need to practice my Christianity in a more direct and conscious way.

My poor attempt at Christianity lately could stem from the fact that we haven’t been to church in … well, I am unsure how long it’s been. I can’t speak for Bec, but I am starting to miss it. Finding a church is a difficult thing, though. I suppose this problem is then compounded by the fact that I haven’t been reading my Bible consistently, and the fact that very rarely pray. I mean, really pray, or really read the Bible. I do the thing that I despise in other people. I break out the Bible when I get in a theological argument with someone who hurls scripture at me, hurling scripture back at them with equal (sometimes more) ferocious velocity, and I pray when it’s convenient or when I need or want something.

By really praying I mean uttering words from my mouth or in my head to a God who I think is listening. I do, however, pray a lot, if by pray you mean worshiping God for the amazing things [They] have made, praising God for the ability to move my body, as sluggishly as it may be, on my morning run, or thanking God for my amazing life, friends, and family. I think this type of prayer is valid, but it isn’t focused. I haven’t consciously thought about who I am praying to, what or whom I am praying for. I simply let whatever thoughts or ideas I have float up (out, down, around) to God, not really expecting a response or acknowledgment. Does it make prayers invalid if you just worship? Do you have to ask for things?

The same goes for scripture reading. I exaggerated a little when I said above that I only use scripture to refute other people. That’s not entirely true. In fact, recently I have done a few little exegetical projects for friends that have really been challenging and fun, but I don’t do it consistently. I don’t have a set aside time period each day when I devote myself to God alone, reading [Their] words and talking with [Them]. It’s difficult for me to figure out how to develop this discipline while teaching, dissertating (which isn’t a word, but really should be), running, cooking, and whatever else the day holds.

Maybe the conduit for grace I crave to become would come to fruition if I disciplined myself in reading the Bible and praying more. I know in my favorite book of the Bible, James says, “The effective and fervent prayer of a righteous person avails much.”

I am not good at playing games. I never have been.

I had a great conversation over coffee with a very conservative friend of mine this morning. It was the type of conversation I like to have. We do not agree about anything except books and their magic, and yet, when we part company, we can hug each other and know that the next time will be just as good.

I turned right around and had another excellent conversation with two other friends about polar opposite topics. We talked about the road trip we are about to embark upon, and decided that we are all SO ready to see our other friends and spend some time going cross-country. The trip is going to take us to Nebraska and Minnesota, but we are working in North and South Dakota and possibly Kansas, just so we can say we did. Unfortunately, the Badlands are on the other side of South Dakota, so we won’t be able to check those out like we had hoped. Sad day. Either way, we are excited.

It always amazes me how such different people can bring out facets of us that we wouldn’t know we had except for their persistence in bringing those things out in us.

Today has been an excellent food day. I started off with granola in soy milk and a decaf Americano while I did my work and waited to meet with Reta. Once she got there, I got a soy chai latte in a ceramic mug. I have to say that soy chai was possibly the most perfect hot drink I have had in a long time. Chai tea is so comforting, almost like the crying squares on the quilt I’ve had since childhood. The quilt, made by my Aunt Aglaia, has two squares of incredibly soft material. I used to use those two squares to dry my eyes when I cried, and I did lots of crying. I think it is my weird artistic sensibilities. I need to do some art, because it might help me get back to who I was before graduate school before working in a church, and before I became so jaded. I was softer when I was an artist, but I suppose we all change as we age and grow. But I digress.

For lunch, my two other friends and I went to Sketchy Thai, and I had tofu Mee Krop and spring rolls. I followed it up with an iced soy chai. The first one was so good, I couldn’t resist the second. Finally, for dinner tonight after Bec and I went on a nice (our first this summer, and blissful as usual) bike ride, we had garden green beans and sweet potato gnocchi with sage “butter” sauce. I finished it all off with a scoop (or maybe two) of Ben and Jerry’s Berried Treasure Sorbet and a couple (or four) of my mom’s delicious vegan sugar cookies. I would say it was a perfect food day to fuel my six-miler in the morning.

I am hoping to run a fairly even tempo tomorrow, so I am going to get up early to run while it’s fairly cool. I ran three miles yesterday in my Vibram Five Fingers, and my feet felt fantastic when I was finished. But, I am going to run the six miles in my regular running shoes, so I don’t injure myself by transitioning to “barefoot” running too quickly. I’d much rather go it slow than hurt myself.

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Posted in Dissertation, Food, Grace, Relationships, Running, Vegetarian or Vegan

Muncie Mission. Organization. Marathon Training. And Compassion.

Posted on 6 July 2010 | Leave a comment

I was shocked to hear on the radio this morning that the Muncie Mission had a horrible fire. I was even more shocked to hear that the dormitory side of the mission was pretty much a loss and that a good portion of the men lost their belongings in the fire. How messed up is it to have such horrible circumstances that you end up living in a mission, and then have the mission along with your belongings burn down around you. Here are some links to articles about it:

WISH TV

Muncie StarPress

WTHR

According to all of the articles, everyone got out of the mission safely, but there is about a million dollars worth of damage to the brand new building.

*

I am trying hard to face the things I need to face in the upcoming weeks, and I realize that I waste quite a bit of time procrastinating the things I need to do, sometimes to the point of not being able to enjoy leisurely activities because I know I have so much work weighing on me. So, one more time I am going to try to work on this horrible habit of procrastination and learn how to get what needs to get finished, finished in a timely fashion. I had to edit my plan to tackle all of the things I need to tackle by August 18. I only switched a couple of things, but here is the revised schedule of how I plan to accomplish all of it:

  • House painting—WEEKENDS
  • Dissertation—MORNINGS
  • IEI—AFTERNOONS
  • Running—EARLY MORNING before dog walking, must get up by 6
  • Write On! and Planning for School—EVENINGS
  • Disc Golf, etc.—IN BETWEENS

With the exception of these activities, I am on an activity blackout. Unless it’s already on the calendar, it’s not going on the calendar. I’ve spent too much time playing during the first part of the summer to keep up that level of playing for the rest of the summer and still accomplish what I need to. Sorry.

*

Today was the first day of marathon training, and I ran my three miles. It felt good, even better since I’ve been trying to go easy to let my ankle heel from whatever is making it ache. I am trying to maintain this vegan diet to cleanse my body and to lose some weight, so I can run the marathon. I know I am going to have to stick to my run/walk pattern to finish 26.2 miles, but it might be easier to finish if I could lose a few extra pounds between now and then. Yesterday was a good eating day. I started with sweet potato waffles with berry syrup, sausages, and fresh fruit. I ended with garbage pizza that had mushrooms, squash, and tofu on it. With just a week of not eating animal products, I feel quite a bit better. I can’t really describe how it feels, but my body feels lighter and I feel more in touch with myself and with the world. Running only helps with this connection. As I was running this morning, I kept listening to my breath, feeling my feet touching down on the ground, and thinking that this is what it feels like to be alive. I wonder if that is what I will think at mile 26.2?

*

I’ve been reading a website called Tiny Buddha. I have been introduced to all sorts of ideas about compassion, happiness, and positive thinking. What I like about this particular website is that it’s written from multiple perspectives, and people can send in their own thoughts about various topics. It’s helpful to me to read about how to think positively, but it’s also affirming to know that some people just need to be left to their own devices. In other words, I am learning to be compassionate, but that there will be people in your life that are simply disagreeable and that no amount of trying will make them like you, respect, you, or treat you well. You have to know you have tried to be compassionate, but you also need to be compassionate to yourself. It’s difficult for me to recognize when to stop being compassionate or when to stop giving grace. I tend to err on the side of giving it too much, and I let people walk all over me. Tiny Buddha and some other Buddhist readings I have been doing have helped me to see that you can show compassion to others only when you have compassion for yourself. I am working on this.

The difficult part of this is that Buddhism also advocates forgetting yourself. How do you forget yourself and have compassion for yourself as well? Here in lies the rub.

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Posted in Disc golf, Dissertation, Goals, Grace, IEI, Reading, Relationships, Running, School, Teaching, Vegetarian or Vegan, Writing

Sunday, June 13

Posted on 8 June 2010 | 3 comments

Sunday, June 13 will mark one year of taking life seriously. It will be one year ago on Saturday, June 13 that I weighed myself when I got home from family vacation and decided it was time to do something about my lifestyle. I think the weight, a magical 256.4 pounds on my brother’s bathroom scale, was just the quantitative evidence of the feelings I had been having for quite some time. I have never been one to gauge my health or my happiness by a number on a scale, but I had been feeling particularly unhappy with myself for quite some time. This feeling of unrest had more to do with my inability to find clothes that fit, my disappointment with my level of physical fitness, and my general feeling of blah. I knew I needed to make some changes, so I said to myself that my changes were not going to be about losing weight, but about getting to a place in which I felt good both physically and emotionally. On Sunday June 14, 2009, I started running. Actually, what I started doing was walking. Slowly. I started by running 30 seconds to a minute and walking a minute in between each “run.” I built up to “running” 13.1 miles on May 8, 2010. I didn’t get the time I wanted, but I finished, and as a side perk my blood pressure is lower than normal, I’ve lost 40 pounds, and I feel a million times better.

I suppose since it’s been a year, it’s time to set some new goals. One goal I had already set for this year was to run a marathon the fall after my 36th birthday. I am maintaining it as a goal by signing up for one on November 6. Here is my list of goals for this year from June 13, 2010 to June 12, 2011 (they are in no particular order):

  1. Finish the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon on November 6. Running, walking, or crawling.
  2. Shave my head on June 13 and on the 13th of every month all year long.
  3. Contemplate things outside of myself. Cultivate spiritual wholeness.
  4. Have 75% or more of my students grow one academic year’s worth of growth during the school year.
  5. Finish two chapters of my dissertation.
  6. Run 1000 miles (3 miles per day). Run and walk a combination of 3000 miles (10 miles per day).
  7. Go vegan. Stay at least lacto-vegetarian.
  8. Learn to say only what is necessary. Listen more than talk.
  9. Read one new book and one magazine from cover to cover each week. Follow the news, in print.
  10. Finish painting the outside of the house.

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Posted in Dissertation, Fat, Food, Goals, Grace, New Year, Running, School, Teaching, Vegetarian or Vegan

The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley

Posted on 1 June 2010 | 4 comments

The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church by Andrew Farley begins with an epigraph by Arthur Bury from 1691, making the claim that the naked gospel “was the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached,” which is what I expected this book to do. I expected to read a new take on Jesus theology, in which I would learn a bit more about what Jesus said and did and the ways in which those actions were revolutionary. I would have loved this book if that had been what it really did. What I got instead was a whole different story involving Paul, a Jew who supposedly grew to have no use for his traditional religious upbringing, and those people who came after Paul who also saw no need for relationship with the Jewish Scriptures. How, can I ask, does this present “the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached”? Instead, possibly the epigraph should have been a quote from Origen who thought that Paul “taught the Church which he had gathered from among the Gentiles how to understand the books of the Law” and then ignore them. It seems as if Farley spends quite a bit of time discussing Paul and Paul’s aversion to his own tradition, which doesn’t seem like a Naked Gospel, but more of an interrogation of Paul. That being said, this book isn’t all bad; it just wasn’t what I expected.

Farley provides an excellent critique of our desire to remain staid in our own complacent following of hollow rules that we perceive make us good Christians. However, I am not sure that early Christians would agree with his reading of the meaning of old and new and the ways that he argues Christians are called to live a new life without considering the laws or the Jewish Scriptures. It makes no sense to advocate the very heavy disregard for the early Christians’ previous religious experience, especially because there is substantial evidence to the contrary. In fact, the very people Farley discusses—Peter, Paul, and the other apostles—did not leave the Jewish faith. They merely reconfigured their previous beliefs to fit with their newly acquired faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Particularly, Matthew adheres to his Jewish roots as he tried to convince both Gentiles and Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. Making such an adamant break from discussing Jewish traditions and religion is a major weakness of Farley’s text. I do agree with his assessment that Christians need to learn to avoid “the painful symptoms of un-necessary religion” (31), but does this need to be done by completely breaking away from tradition or previous manifestations of religious worship? I think not. Even Paul, who Farley quotes sometimes very out of context, references his own religious and secular traditions as well as the religious and secular leaders of his time.

The main tenet that Farley proposes with which I agree is the idea that we are free from sin. We are always already forgiven, and too many Christians don’t realize it. They are crippled by the perceived necessity to keep accounts of their sins and to compulsively ask forgiveness for those sins, sometimes to the point of unhealthy self-reflectivity and analysis. I love the song “Everything Glorious” by David Crowder Band, because it makes this claim so well. I think Farley is getting at the same question as Crowder: “You make everything glorious and I am Yours, so what does that make me?” According to Farley, “It’s important to understand that we’re joined to the risen Christ, not to a dead religious teacher” (180). I would even take this a step further and say that we are the risen Christ. Whatever is to be done on this earth now, is to be done through us as we are the manifestation of the work that Jesus did on the cross. We are required to be Christ to people: “Genuine growth occurs as we absorb truth about who we already are and what we already possess in Christ” (187). I concur.

In short, I liked this book because it challenges several commonly held beliefs in contemporary Christianity, such as the idea that we have to change who we are to be perfect Christians. As Farly writes, “Having Christ live through you is really about knowing who you are and being yourself. Since Christ is your life, your source of true fulfillment, you’ll only be content when you are expressing him” (194). I agree but my main complaints about this book can speak directly to this idea: what if the way you experience Christ living through you includes a love for and an adherence to those “Old Testament” ideas that he claims are null and void? Can we really claim that the naked gospel is a gospel void of any sense of tradition or Jewish scripture, relying solely on tradition and reason to inform our actions as Christians? I don’t think so. I don’t think this is really “Jesus plus nothing.” It’s more like Jesus nothing with a heaping helping of misread Paul. I would recommend this book, simply so people could wrestle through all of these ideas as Farley adeptly challenges the reader to think critically about a variety of ideas.

You can read this and other reviews of the same book at Viral Bloggers.

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Posted in Grace, Just for Fun, Just Random Stuff, Literature, Politics, Reading, Religion, Writing