Reason Breeds Insanity

Yesterday at church Dave preached about initiative. He charged us to dream big, to know that God loves us, and to put our trust in that love as we plan our new year. He used this quote by Annie Dillard as a challenge to us for the new year:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

In thinking about her words, I recognize that U spend many of my days worrying about what the next day will bring. The difficulty in living is worrying about what may come next. How can I expect to live a fulfilling life if my days are spent invested not in the day I am living, but in the next day, the next month, or the next year.

Along with a variety of other rebirths, I am going to try to live more in the moment. I have tried so many times to change my ways, and I think I have failed for many reasons. One reason is that I try to derive my strength from people rather than from God. I realize that I need human support in my endeavors, but I also realize that I need to pull my strength from the love of the Creator not the created. I am going to focus on how I spend my days, so that my life will proceed from the way my days are spent. I want my life to matter.

My friend Sarah and I went to see the movie Atonement and it was a good movie. It was beautiful, well filmed, and moderately well acted. The music was fantastic: the composer used a type writer as a percussion instrument, which gave an interesting twist to the sound of it. I am going to attempt to read the book this summer or squeeze it in this school year. I’ll let you know how it compares.

I moved into my office today, and it was kind of a reality check. I will be teaching in two days. I will be responsible for the development of freshman composition students. Their future success is in my hands. I know. I don’t take too much of this onto myself, because their actual future success, as well as their success in my class, depends on their own ability to learn, to create, and to manage their own destinies as one might say. At any rate the task is daunting. Take fifty students whose writing levels vary from poor to okay and mold them into passing writers. I hope the assignments that I have come up encourage the students to be creative as well as encouraging them be risky and grow. I look at this as a sort of extension of pastoring. I’m teaching them about writing, not God. You would think writing would be much more manageable as a subject. But are writing and spirituality different? They both are so personal, so formulative, and so bound up in our own intimacy that it seems hard to distinguish where our spirit ends and our writing begins. I look at writing as pouring out my spirit in words. Weird? Maybe.

You can check out my newest project that I hope to stick with for the rest of the year at here.

I love Christmas. I love it because everyone comes together in a way that is different from the way we come together throughout the rest of the year. There is something about that deep, deep connection that exists around the holidays. And it isn’t just Christmas, that is too Christian to assume, but I think it has something to do with the winter season. Whether we want to admit it or not, death is lurking around us in the winter. At least the appearance of death sits firmly about us. The trees are brown, the grass is brown, the land is covered with snow, and ice encrusts what little is alive and alert in the cold. I am amazed at the way the pine tree in our front yard comforts me. I hate winter. What I hate about it is that it reminds of death and I want to think about life. As I move through advent I want to look forward to life, not to the barrenness that surrounds me. I am not sure what Christians were thinking by moving a celebration of life into the middle of winter other than the fact that they were trying to get one up on those dastardly pagans! Yo Saturnalia! Anyway, the pine tree reminds me that life and greenery are coming. There is a rebirth on the way. The world, despite our best anti-environmental efforts, will reawaken in a few months.

I think I am getting older, too, because things make me cry. I was at the airport, which usually makes me cry, but I saw this woman get off the plane and walk into the arms of her parents (they looked just like her) and they all started crying. And so did I. I was so moved by their presence that I just wept. Becky looked at me and said, you’re crying, aren’t you. Of course I’m not, I replied. There’s no crying in baseball. I never knew how much other people’s happiness effected me. I cry at movies and books. I mean who wouldn’t cry at the final scenes of Moulin Rouge or Tess of the D’Urbervilles? I do. Every time. I even cry at the sappy stories in Guideposts. It borders on ridiculous.

Speaking of bordering on the ridiculous. All three of Becky’s kids are here for the holidays. Andy and Tim brought their respective girlfriends, Claire and Whitney, and David’s girlfriend, Heather, is coming down after he gets back from California. When everyone is here, life borders on ridiculous… until we add beer, and then there is no border. Things become all out hilarity. Tonight the boys are taking us out to Vera Mae’s for dinner, and then we are going to the Heorot for beers. It should be a spectacularly absurd time! My only regret is that we haven’t played one round of drunken Trivial Pursuit.

I am reading The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. The writer is agnostic, but he grapples more realistically with tough spiritual questions than most Christians I know. I am learning quite a bit, and you have to respect a man who read the bible from cover to cover in five weeks! I recommend this read.

I am one semester closer to being called doctor. 🙂 Scary isn’t it.

It is hard to believe that one more semester has come and gone. I wasn’t sure that I was going to make it through, but then I never am quite sure. This semester seemed really hard for lots of people, and I am not sure why that was. It seemed more fraught with drama, more filled with angst, and definitely more constipated with congestion. I am glad it is over, honestly, and I am actually ready for the next semester to start. I have quite a few things to finish before it does, but I am trying to take some kind of break for this week and next. I will squeeze what I need to get done into the last week before classes start. The most important part of what I need to do is to finish my syllabus, schedule, and assignment sheets for my 104 classes, and I need to read at least two books for each class, so I can get a little ahead.

I am looking forward to Christmas. I am looking forward to being with friends and family and I am pretty excited that Becky’s boys will be here along with girlfriends. Thy leave by Christmas Eve, but it has been fun to decorate this year. I am sure that we will have a great time drinking beers and playing trivial pursuit. There is nothing better than drunken trivial pursuit. I hope Adam comes to join us.

Now on to anticipating the Messiah and making Christmas gifts. But first, I have to say this has been the most stress free Christmas ever, because my family decided to make gifts and not buy gifts. I haven’t had one panic attack over a gift this year!