It Was a Year

Today, the year, the decade, and my chances of winning the Landis college bowl picks competition are all drawing to a close. Because the decade is too broad for me to recap here, and because my bowl picks are too humiliating, it's time for review of 2009! This last semester, I was accused pretty frequently (meaning every day in my Strategies for Teaching class) of having become a dreary pessimist. So one my expect my reflections on the past year to be a catalogue of everything I didn't like about 2009. But the truth is that I have a good life, it was a good year, and there are a ton of great things for me to comment about from the last twelve months. Besides, I can just save the other list for my post next week.

I'm surprised sometimes that the U.S. hasn't made Super Bowl Sunday at national holiday by now. Practically everyone celebrates, because so many people in our country like football, and if they don't like football, they at least like lil' smokies and crackers and cheese. Last year's Super Bowl was my favorite one, because, as you may remember, the Pittsburgh Steelers won on a game-winning drive capped by an incredible catch. Being a Steelers fan, I don't remember ever having been so happy about a sporting event in my life. No year can be all that bad that starts like that.

Through high school and in my first couple years at Ozark, I heard everyone say how an overseas mission trip has the potential to be incredibly impacting. It's true, as I learned when I went to Honduras with a group of four other Ozark students last March. It's possible to have a pretty good understanding of the world while never leaving the U.S. due to the influence of globalization and the accessibility of information, pictures, and videos. But it really is another thing to actually see it. To see the sick people shoved in a hospital bed with next to no attention, to see the people hanging out on the sides of the broken streets winding up the mountains, to see the multitudes of kids at school chasing my teammates around in a Gulliver's Travels reenactment-style game of tag. There were also times of many laughs, such as I had the perfect outline of my watch marked on my skin due to a sunburn, or hearing the Hondurans try to differentiate between saying "beach" and cussing. Also, Honduras is maybe the most beautiful place I've ever been with it's combination of mountains, beach, and Domino's Pizza. I also had the best Chinese food I've ever tasted in my life, and for that reason, along with all the others, Honduras will remain a place very dear to me.

I'm a big kid now. Or at least that's what my driver's license says. Due to this, it's no longer acceptable for me to spend my summers at home sleeping till noon and watching reruns of King of Queens all day (but thankfully, that still flies for winter break). So instead, I spent last summer doing an internship at University Christian Church in Manhattan, KS, and it was definitely a blessing. I had actually always wanted to do my internship there, so I was very grateful that it worked out. I learned all kinds of things, like how to prime a floor, use a caulking gun, and how to address and stamp stacks and stacks of mailings. But hopefully I also learned something about God and ministry. It definitely helped my self-esteem being able to walk around with a giant roll of keys to all the parts of the church.

In other parts of the country, the Midwest can sometimes be characterized as one vast farmland. Because I'm from Topeka, KS, I'm supposed to wear overalls every day, get my water from the pump out back every morning, and smoke a corncob pipe. When I realized that I was so culturally deprived, I decided to take a vacation to Southern California. I had never been before, and I had a lot of fun eating sushi for the first time, attending an obscenity-strewn improv comedy show, being the happiest I've ever been at the Happiest Place on Earth (though Disneyland isn't as good as places like Six Flags (also, In-and-Out isn't as good as Spangle's)), and awkwardly noticing two bikini-clad women wrestle at the beach ("Well, there's something you don't see in Kansas"). So I returned to my little house on the prairie that much more street-wise and culturally educated.

So that's more or less been my year. As I look back on what I've written, I realize that this is maybe the most self-centered post I've ever posted. So now I have to think of a way to make all of this somehow redeeming. First, once again, I'm thankful for all of you out there that helped make this year a good one. I've gotten to know a lot of my friends even better, and I've made new friends that I am also thankful for.

New years are filled with all sorts of new possibilities, dreams, and goals. This is a good thing, I think. It gives us a chance to refocus on what's important. So let's use the next year to love God and love people to the best of our abilities. I know a lot of my peers are going to be graduating this year and going out to serve God all over the world, so it'll be a really big year of change for them and for me. So bring it on, 2010! Granted, it's looking like a distant possibility of the year starting with another Steelers Super Bowl victory, so how good of a year can it really be?

The biggest question on everyone's mind, though, is whether we will refer to the oncoming year as "two-thousand-ten" or "twenty-ten." I'm in favor for the latter, but I don't know what the worldwide consensus is. Nor do I know who decides such things. But as influential at this blog is, I'm confident that tomorrow morning, we'll all be wishing each other a Happy Twenty-Ten.

Before Garmin

When I was on camp teams, we traveled around in a big 15-passenger van with our school's logo on the side. You may or may not have been to many church camps, but as a general rule, they're out in the middle of nowhere. You don't drive down the interstate until you see a giant sign that says, "So-and-so Christian Camp: EXIT HERE ---->" No, you usually need to get off the highway and then traverse miles and miles of little dirt roads until you see the name of the camp etched into a log on the side of the road, and then you know you've reached your destination.

Fortunately for my camp team, Sy had one of those GPS navigation systems attached to a suction cup that we stuck to our windshield. I had never really been around one of those before, and it amazed me. We would be driving through the desolation of Wyoming, and if we got hungry, we would just tell the GPS that our stomachs were grumbling, and it would tell us where the nearest Wendy's was, all in a courteous British accent. I also couldn't believe that the GPS knew about some of the roads it took us on. When we were in Oregon, it sent us down a nearly invisible gravel strip that basically went off of a cliff. I even had to get out of the van and walk ahead a ways to determine if our van could handle the incline or if it would tip over and fall into the ocean. No one in the world knew this little gravel road existed, yet our electronic guide was in on the secret.

Most people do not like to be unsure what the road ahead of them will be like. Some people do, and they have no problem just picking up and going, without being sure where they're going. If they drive a VW van, we call them hippies. If they carry their possessions in a handkerchief at the end of a stick, we call them hobos. But for the rest of us, we like to have a clear idea of where we're going and what lies along the road, both in travel and in life. High school counselors tell kids to create their own 5-year and 10-year plans. People are expected to know where they're going to go to college, where they're going to live, what job they'll have, what they'll name their pet dog, and where they'll retire, and they are supposed to figure all this out when they're 16 years old.

Whenever I tell my testimony, I tell how I thought I had my life figured out when I was in 8th grade. I wanted to be a journalist, so I was going to write for the high school newspaper, then go to college for journalism, and eventually find myself writing for TIME Magazine with a row of Pulitzers on my mantle. Then when I was at CIY before my freshman year, I felt like God wanted me to go into ministry, so I scratched my previous plan. And since that time, I've usually felt pretty good about myself, forsaking my own dreams in order to follow God and all that. It's a very heroic, courageous lifestyle, you know?

At times, however, I wonder if I still try to maintain too much control over my own life. I try to plan everything out, saying "This summer I'll do an internship here, and next summer I'll do an internship there, and then I'll get my own ministry and do these activities and take these trips, and then I'll go back to school, and then...." And while some planning isn't altogether a bad thing, we need to remember that God may not lead us according to those plans. He may have something totally different for us, and more often than not, he doesn't explain to us everything that lies in store before we set out. He just tells us to follow. It's like when God tells Abram to go to Canaan. He doesn't really tell him where he's going, and he doesn't lay out everything that lies along the road. He just tells Abram to go, and Abram faithfully does it.

I watched a Mark Driscoll sermon last night about the angel Gabriel telling Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. Mary is a teenager from a tiny village who's engaged to Joseph, and Gabriel shows up and tells her that she's going to have a baby, even though she's a virgin. I imagine that wasn't in her 5-year plan. It meant that Joseph could divorce her, which would leave her both ostracized and financially insecure. It meant that for the rest of her life, people would whisper about her and her perceived promiscuity. It meant her son would be laughed at and gossiped about. But in spite of all that, Mary answers, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said" (Lk. 1:38).

Mary didn't know exactly where God's call on her life would lead. She knew it would be difficult, but details were scant. But she's okay with that. She follows God, trusting that he'll work everything out. I've been reading The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first book of The Lord of the Rings. If you've read it or seen the movie, you know that Frodo and his companions begin a quest to destroy a ring, but they have to travel a great distance to do it. Before they start out, Elrond the Elf says, "I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know." Later, Gandalf is describing the way that the group needs to travel at first, and Merry asks, "Yes, and where then?" Gandalf replies, "To the end of the journey--in the end. We cannot look too far ahead."

That's kind of what it's like with God. He doesn't show us the whole map at once. He guides us in little parts. He gives us a picture of the end, but everything between here and there is often veiled. Because of that, our own plans often prove meaningless. Our plans are like paintings that we create, but then God takes the painting, cuts it up, rearranges the pieces, and puts it all back together, and somehow it looks better when he's done with it than it was before.

So in the meantime, we can't let ourselves freak out over the fact that the future seems unclear. Now that I'm an upperclassman at college, my future looms large over my head. But the truth is that I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing in ten years. I don't really even know what I'll be doing in one year, necessarily. I think the best thing for us to do is to wake up every morning asking how we can obey and serve God with our day, and to ask the same thing in every situation, decision, and interaction we face throughout the day. Because God will guide, and we just need to follow. He may not show us the whole path, but he promises to get us to the end.

While I've been writing this post, I've been watching basketball in my basement. Every once in a while, a commercial will come on for Kay Jewelers. It shows a man and woman looking out the window during a thunderstorm. There is a loud crash of thunder, and the woman turns around into the man's arms, and he says comfortingly, "I'm right here..." and then he pulls out a jewelry box with a necklace inside and concludes, "...and I always will be." At the end of the commercial, the woman wraps her arms around his neck and says, "Don't let go....ever." And then the guy gets a kiss. Lesson learned: If I start carrying jewelry around in my pocket, then I'll have more opportunities to pull it out and say some cheesy line, and then girls will have more opportunities to fall in love with me.

I hope you all have the most wonderful Christmas ever. I hope you get all of the things you want, that you have a great time spent with family and friends, and that you remember that Jesus loves you more than you can ever understand. If I know you, then I'm very thankful for your friendship, and you mean a lot to me and I look forward to the next time we see each other. If I don't know you, then that's a shame, because I'm sure we'd be chums.

Epic

The Bloggolution has been shaken to life in the past few days. It seems like everyone has been writing something new except for me. I've been wanting to do so, but I've been spending so much time playing Halo and Nertz that I just haven't gotten around to it. Or gotten around to working on my big Doctrine of the Church paper, which is due this week and is worth basically my whole grade in that class. But we all need to set priorities, you know?

This week is finals week. Which I am very glad for. Finals week is always my favorite week of the semester. That sounds weird to a lot of people, but I really don't mind taking tests (I actually prefer that to having regular class, usually), and I only have one or two a day, and then I get to just hang out the rest of the time! Also, our dining hall opens up late at night during finals week and gives us free food, and nothing helps me study (or play cards) than being there with everyone drinking glass after glass of soda. Sometimes my kidneys just need to take one for the team.

As I said in my last post, I was recently reading Donald Miller's new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and I just finished it a couple days ago. It's good. Really good. It's all about viewing life as a story and how to live a more meaningful story than one spent eating cookies and writing blogs. I really like that idea of life as a story, and it's something I had thought of some before this book came out, so I'm glad that he wrote it and explained it all in a way better than I ever could.

I really love "epic" books and movies. The ones that cover big periods of time and have all kinds of characters that have some bearing on the story. Some stories just cover a little period of time and present some crisis that is solved pretty quickly. But epics are more drawn-out. The plot rises and falls, characters change and change again, relationships are strained and reconciled.

In elementary school, they did this program called Accelerated Reader, where different books were worth a different number of points, and you had to read and take quizzes on the books and get however many points a quarter. In sixth grade, I read David Copperfield because it was worth more points than any other book in the library. For good reason too, because that thing is thick. It was my Everest. After slogging through it for weeks, I finished it and took the quiz. And I thought it was great. The novel basically covers a guy's entire life, all the way from his birth. Because of this, a number of characters enter into the story and then exit, and some die. (It's actually pretty depressing in parts. If I remember, David's wife and dog die the same day.) Although the book is at times slow and perhaps wouldn't be a bestseller if written in today's action-saturated culture, I thought it was fantastic because it was epic. It told a big story about one man's life.

And in that sense, everyone has an epic story of their own. Lives are stories. I'm only 21 years old, and when I first think about it, I feel like my life story is pretty uninteresting, and nobody would really care to hear it. I've grown up in the suburbs, have always had life pretty easy, and I haven't taken too many risks. But when I think about it more, a lot has happened in those 21 years. I've gotten to go to a lot of cool places, I've seen some crazy things, and I've met a ton of awesome people. My life is full of a sorts of different scenes: funny ones, sad ones, unfortunate ones, happy ones--and they're all woven together into a tapestry of story that is my own.

We all spend so much time throwing ourselves into various stories. We read books and watch movies and TV shows because we want to enter into the story. Maybe what we don't realize is that all the time, we're walking in and out among those who are living stories. The world is like a giant library. But often, we don't crack the covers to these stories. We don't ask people about their lives. We're masters of small talk, and we'll sit and chat about the weather or movies or sports. And we leave it at that. There are people we may even consider close friends, but we know almost nothing about their stories, about their lives.

I think that, to a point, pretty much everyone wants to be known. Really known. They want someone to take interest in their story. In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about a time when he lived with a group of hippies in the woods, and he says that we loved the hippies because they showed real, genuine interest in people. He writes:

They asked me what I loved, what I hated, how I felt about this and that, what sort of music made me angry, what sort of music made me sad. They asked me what I daydreamed about, what I wrote about, where my favorite places in the world were. They asked me about high school and college and my travels around America. They loved me like a good novel, like an art film.

Do we see other people like that? Do we see them as a beautiful story to be enjoyed, or do we just see them as someone to be passed over? Do we ask each other about our dreams, fears, memories, interests, yearnings, goals, and hurts? Or do we remain content to just talk about the latest episode of The Office? Often, we don't do this intentionally. Instead we think that others probably don't want us to ask much about their lives. In our modern individualistic culture, after all, that seems awfully nosy. But I think that, to a point, pretty much everyone wants to be known. Really known. They want someone to take interest in their story. But no one can just go out and tell everyone about their own life, unless they want to look like a jerk, or if they write a book. So we all walk around, wanting to let others into our stories but feeling too awkward to ask about anyone else's. So I guess my encouragement is this: read each other's stories. I'm awful at this. I'm all about staying the surface. But good relationships require something more than that. They need a sharing of story. Sometimes we just need to put forth a little more effort to get past the title page.

I really like winter. Winter makes me feel reflective. Not that I really reflect on anything in particular. But I just feel like I should be sitting by a window reading some insightful book and, if I were into such things, drinking some sort of pumpkin-spice coffee thing. With luck, this reflective mood will result in more frequent blogging. It all depends on how caught up in watching TV I get when I'm home, I suppose.