Today effectively ends my summer, for all practical purposes. Yes, there’s after 5 p.m. stuff, and weekend stuff to be done, and more adventures to be had, but the days of waking up at 9 a.m. and lounging in my chair til noon are done with. Tomorrow, I start my new job working for Baylor Press doing whatever they tell me to do. I imagine that the summer will be mostly getting me up to speed, learning their catalog, their way of doing things, how Carey Newman likes his coffee, and the like.
Thursday, I’ll be out at the farm. I’ve been anticipating this for two months, and still haven’t done hardly anything to get ready for it. I bought a pair of work boots and sunscreen today, but other than that, I’ll assume that it’s nothing more complicated than working a shovel.
So, we’ll see. As of tomorrow, multiple new things launch into my life. I should be more excited, I suppose, but more than anything, I’ll be glad to be freed from the endless rotation of days with only a different book title to demark the days. A little total bummery is good, but after about a week, I get too fidgety. Be careful about asking for change; it’ll come until you’re on your back begging for mercy.
It’s an understatement to say that it’s early.
It’s been about four years since I’ve been able to really sleep through the night. Blame it on too much school, an overactive mind, whatever. Regardless, about two hours after nodding off, I’ll wind up staring at the wall for a while before nodding off again. In those times, a lot comes to me that can only be described as the tangible presence of God. Maybe it’s that things get so quiet then that, all the distractions having subsided, God’s pervasive voice can come through loud and clear, but it seems that the middle of the night is prime time for the speaking of God. Eli, Joshua, Abraham, Nicodemus–I could be crazy, but there seems to be some precedent for this.
So what has God been saying at 3:15 on Sunday morning? Not quite sure. I feel like being awake is a sure sign that, despite whatever sins that I commit, I have not gone to sleep completely, as it were; being able to be awake precedes being able to know that one is awake and not dead yet. It could be the fish I had for dinner; I’m not much for seafood, and as great as it was–and it was pretty amazing–my body could be wide awake with wonder and awe at the marine dish in my belly.
I’m hoping that this is God speaking, and that the noisy A/C will not drown out the voice.
**
The gift of repentance is a paradox, because being able to repent, to turn and follow at all, is spoken of in Scripture as a gift in and of itself. We repent because God enables us to do so. Not repenting doesn’t mean that the Spirit is not speaking or that the person who doesn’t turn and follow has not been bushwacked by God–only that they haven’t responded, and thus, in some sense, they haven’t really heard. God’s movement in our life precedes our thinking about it, or responding to it, or being grateful for it.
And by that, I am comforted. I am comforted knowing that turning the ship around is not a matter of me knowing the way home so much as knowing that the currents home are already there, and that the boat has been made strong enough to take me. Repenting is believing that when I turn the wheel, the wheel in some mysterious way has been turning for me, and accepting that the new course is a much better one than the one I was steering.
If this sounds like giving up on human initiative, it’s only giving up on an initiative that doesn’t have God’s empowering and God’s design on it. To say that anything we do is a mustering up of some force that we created is a mistake, whether you call it “creative initiative” or “divine mandate”. Call it providence, call it mystery, but do not call it something that we are doomed to make up out of our own goods. This world–in all of its twists and breaks–is God’s, held together and preserved, and to live in it rightly, we have to acknowledge that living in any other way than as a beloved creature in God’s world is an illusion. The call of the Christian is to live in rebellion to evil, to live in accordance with the deep magic of the world, and to follow the one who is already making all things new.
It’s 3:30, and I’m awake. And awake, I can sleep.
Part of the early allure behind this decision to try out the clothes of the vegetarian was, before I moved to Waco, I’d never met a vegetarian. Now that I’ve been here for five years, I’m in double digits. Having dinner with them was always a matter of intrigue; there was always the question of what food there was on the menu aside from the salads that they could eat. Should we be eating in more cultural Meccas like Austin, this wouldn’t be so much of an issue, but in Waco, where the Whataburger just did away with their bocca burgers, it becomes more of an issue.
My third year in Waco, I went to Tennessee with a group of the guys and on the way back, we stopped over in Shreveport to eat with the folks. I had to inform the folks that one of my friends with us, Andrew, was a vegetarian, to which my mom replied, “You mean he doesn’t eat ANY meat? Not even shrimp?” So, the rest of us dined on hot bowls of shrimp creole, while Andrew took up the mantle of rice and creole and all the fixings.
I daresay I won’t give up the shrimp creole. I can’t see giving up Louisiana cuisine for the sake of a culinary experiment. It’s just too good, and I’m doing this not because of ethical reasons, but because….why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? Why did I wake up this morning with my body ready to castrate someone for bacon?
1) Health. I’ve never been a fat kid, but in the last year, I’ve noticed that I’m not 18 anymore, and that now is the time to cement a good lifestyle into place. Barring prosthetics, God gives us one body that’s to be cared for.
2) Intrigue. What’s the allure of doing this? Why would anyone willingly give up steak and chicken? What are the benefits? I’ll keep you posted.
3) Discipline. There’s a number of things that I hope to accomplish in the next few months, and this eating is, among other things, a means to an end–a way to learn discipline in my life. I’m a living example of the 3rd law of thermodynamics: things left to their own devices tend to decay.
4) Chicks dig vegetarians. So long as you’re not crazy.
5) Outsider. In Waco, in the South, being a Christian is the norm. There is no great cultural divide here on the surface, unless you inadvertently find yourself trapped in a conversation like I was the other day about how much porn is an acceptable amount for guys to be allowed to watch. Jesus is an assumption, and thus, Christianity finds its way to the center of the conversation. I have in this easy environment found myself no longer a minority or an outsider. I’m losing my way home. Thus, taking up something that pushes me to the edge is a constant reminder that as Christians, we are at our best on the fringes, hedging towards a puzzled look by observers.
I have to confess that I woke up this morning in a foul mood. Last night was terrible, and grocery shopping yesterday was the most frustrating experience of the last two months.
So, any takers?
***
And FYI, today is the birthday of John Ronald Ruel Tolkien. Light the candles.
I’m not much on resolutions, mostly because they don’t stick, and partly because I don’t have the willpower or the resolve to really do much about them even if they were really worthwhile. Changes in a life, if they are real, take place over a long period of time. Even the most radical turnarounds, over the span of a lifetime, look gradual when you account for troughs and valleys.
With that in mind, here’s what changes I’m attempting this year:
1) Scripture. I’ve fallen into a terrible pattern of not reading Scriptures daily. This needs to change. As much as I believe that Scriptures come out of tradition, and must be held in dialogue with the saints who have come before us, it doesn’t change that Scripture is Scripture. And I need it.
2) Running. Once upon a time, I was a marathon-worthy runner. Now, I have a nearly new pair of shoes and not nearly the endurance I once had. This too will change, because I know what it is to be in shape.
3) Writing. I may be blogging less frequently, albeit not much, in order to give this nascent book a chance to be born.
4) This is the biggie. Vegetables. I’m trying out being a vegetarian, for a few reasons, most of them health. I love cows. I love chicken. But I’ve always been intrigued by vegetarians, and so, I’m going to attempt to learn their ways. It’s not a hard and fast thing, so when I go to Kansas City in a few days, I’ll eat BBQ til I puke.
5) There are other innumerable ones I won’t list. But mostly they have to do with knowing where I am and where I want to be.
Thus, the year begins. Welcome to 2005.
