I could resolve to make this blog more than it really is, to give it a sense of what it used to be; I could swear up and down that once again, I’ll post witty paragraphs comparing coffee to the workings of divine grace, but that’d be a lie. These days, I do well to get the writing done that I have to do, much less do the writing I’d like to be doing.
Let me back up: I do writing that I enjoy. But there’s a lot of writing that is done, in part, to pad a little thing called the “ciriculum vitae”. Mine’s looking better than it used to, and not as good as it will, but at the moment, it’s littered with a number of things that I’m doing just to have something on these sheets of paper. In February 2010, this changes, with the publication of a book that alter the landscape of how people read John Howard Yoder. At least that’s the hope.For the last two weeks, I’ve been sitting with two other guys in a very small room, for several hours a day, lightly editing a series of lectures Yoder did in the 1980s in Warsaw, which we’re titling simply Nonviolence–A Brief History. Watch for it via Baylor University Press.
But enough about the writing life, as it’s one thing, but hardly the most important. More significant is that this bachelor is, against all odds, becoming a married man in June. Sarah Marie Martin, Michigander, social worker extrordinaire, lover of Cheez-its, wearer of pink, hoper for the hopeless–I’m way out of my league. She loves Jesus and Elvis and high school football and yours truly. So, right now is wedding plans and moving out of my curent locale into a temporary–and free–living arrangement to prepare for the impending seismic shift.
Two things are true here: 1) I love this woman more than I know how to, and 2) I’m in way over my head.
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Other than that, dissertation is coming along slowly, pastor search is still ongoing, and friends are gracious and good. There’s the run of the mill garbage that comes with people being toolbags and institutions being foolish, but what else can I say? Teaching’s a blast; my students either love me or think I’m the anti-Christ; I had four students shake my hand and thank me on the way out of their final. I’m grateful all the way around.
Busy, exhausted, stressed, but at the bottom, utterly thankful and amazed.
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What’s to become of this blog in the future? We’ll see. For the time being, I suggest you check this out, or see which of the blogs on the left-hand side are still live ones: it’s been a bad year for the blogs that I used to frequent with a high number of casualties. My sense is that this cluster of ones and zeroes on the Internet will become an outpost for musings more personal than professional, more episodic than sustained.
See you soon.
