Alas! For those of you who have dismayed at the absense of your favorite purveyor of discounted bananas, I have returned with a vengeance and at least renewed intentions on keeping you afresh of mental developments via this electronic forum.

In other words, I've been slacking. You might have even noticed that I lost this site altogether due to a domain name expiration that I forgot was coming. But the ship is righted now and you can continue to read the latest ramblings, plus look at stuff like the newest photo galleries. I still have some more videos on the way if Lee will ever get off his duff and get them burned off the computer in Alabama that holds them.

I have a little mini-essay to share with you but will put that into a separate entry. I may write that tonight, we'll see.

But for now I'll let you in on this. This past week (two days of working at the Tulsa International Soul Winning Workshop, and then four days of hiking and camping in Arkansas with Alabama friends) has made me all the more aware of the separate worlds I live in. Right now I have at least three separate and distinct worlds that I am maintaining, with a fourth that is beginning to develop. The first, and perhaps the least active at this point in life, is my Norman world. This consists of all of my friends and experiences from college. For the most part, I have been moving away from this world for a year and a few months now, but it is still very important to me, and the friendships I have carried away from this place are extremely important to me. Physically going back to this world is very easy and natural for me, and is a place where I was very well established. It's where much of my lasting identity was formed.

Next is my Alabama world. I was only physically present in this world for ten months, but it was so intense, in both good and bad ways, that a huge part of my identity is left there. I consider some of my best friends to be people I encountered in Alabama. Walking into the little apartment filled with them this weekend was no different than what it was like seeing them every day.

And right now I have found a world that I never expected, nor even wanted, but God has blessed me with. I came back to Tulsa in November with a good bit of mental kicking and screaming. I did not want to be here, and psychologically rebelled against the idea of establishing any kind of identity here. For a long time, I convinced myself that I was a victim of a hostage crisis, being held in a foreign place against my will until I found a way to escape. But just like he usually does, God has blessed me with people from whom I am learning a lot of powerful spiritual lessons. Don't get me wrong - I am ready to go to Abilene right now - but leaving the people God has put into my life here is going to be yet another hard thing to do.

And, of course, there is my impending Abilene world. Already I've started getting to know several of the graduate students and some of those in a local campus ministry there. I'm sure God is preparing to blow me away with the kind of experiences he is waiting to share with me there.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this kind of experience. People go from one place to the next all the time. But what I am finding is that there really is a common thread to each of these worlds - and that is the encountering of people in each that are teaching me incredible lessons about God. I think that it is because of that commonality that I am able to transition from one to the next so easily. On Saturday morning at 1:30am I finished helping the Memorial Drive campus ministry minister to a hundred college students at a huge bonfire, and in a matter of five hours was in a totally different state with totally different people, but having essentially the same experience. So, what I know now is that it truly does not matter where you are or when you are there. Wherever you are, whenever you are there, God has created that world especially for you, to teach you incredible things. And the next world you are in, whenever you are there and for whatever reason, God is going to do the same thing. Awesome!

No posts in quite a long while. No good excuses for that. One of the odd problems that I face is that the busier I get, the more good ideas I have. But because I am busy, I am able to devote less time to each good idea. Why do my good ideas not come at times when I have down time? But, I also consider it a blessing that I feel busy.

One thing I have been working on since the summers of 1999 and 2000 is the idea and attitude that there is something awesome to be found in every mundane happening and idea. Jim Elliot described it like this: "To the Christian, nothing is commonplace; everything is somehow miraculous." Would it not be awesome to find these stories and tell them? My brain is working on a way to do that.

As I knew would be tempting to happen, I have come upon so many things to say in this blog that I have pretty much totally neglected it for the past couple of weeks, because I don't know how to say all of it. So, I'll just forget it and start with where I am today.

Right now I work an incredibly inane job where I call companies all day long and basically repeat the same line over and over. Sometimes I literally repeat the same two sentences six times in a single call. So, naturally, I seek for the little ways of escaping, whether that be standing up where I am working and looking across the sea of cubicles out the windows on the other side of the office while I speak into my headset, or, more commonly, sitting during my lunch hour and checking up on the websites of missionary friends. Today I perused the website of my friend Ashley Sides, who is currently working in Prague, Czech Republic. Then I scanned through some of the more recent photo galleries of Jessica's Japanese adventures. Then I went over to see some of the new stuff on the Ukrainian Education Center site. Needless to say, I was unbelievably restless all afternoon with nothing but the vision of adventure burned into my brain. I devised quite a number of reasons to quit on the spot and hop a plane to China. And, it just so happens that a few minutes ago I received the latest update from some missionary friends in that very place.

So what am I to do? Keep sitting there in that dusty office chair, dialing one phone number after another and repeating the same line, just so I can see a lousy $300 check at the end of the week? Is patience all that I am lacking here? Is my time that cheap and worthless, that this is what I'm spending it on?

This past weekend I went down to Abilene and got more of a glimpse of my future. I'm excited about graduate school, but apprehensive of the subtle demands it makes at the same time. I realize that I am 24 years old and still spiritually immature, but I see a huge conflict looming that I am going to need a lot of maturity to deal with: I disdain academic theology, yet I know that I want to do what it takes to get the M. Div. degree. This is seminary. The foundational purpose of seminary is to train a Christian for the demands of ministry. Yet, when I asked about that in front of the most prestigious professors in my Christian world, they openly said that I should consider backing off of what I consider to be the active Christian life so that I can focus on the academic demands of the M. Div. I should not participate in ministry so that I can do better ministry??? Gary Green might want me to serve on the part time campus ministry staff at Southern Hills in Abilene. Would it actually in my best interest to turn that down so that I can, in the eyes of these professors, break into the "professional" ministry world more prepared? I hope the disparity I am seeing here is not unreasonable. I have a lot to learn, and I know that working on the M. Div. at ACU is going to spiritually challenge me in big ways. But writing a comp on the hermeneutical nature of a specific historical ecclesiology ultimately is only going to be good for impressing a professor, not touching the soul of someone who needs to experience the power of a late night prayer at a picnic table in a park at 2:00am.

Our brightest, most talented Christian servants are encouraged to pursue graduate school (seminary) for preparation to take on those responisibilities at a whole new level. Yet, what I see is a lot of graduate theology students who are now some of the least involved people in real ministry. I pray to God that this is not my lot. Should I escape off to China or Ukraine where real ministry can take place right now? No. Because until I come back into the realization that real ministry can take place right now, right here, even sitting in a dusty office chair making repetitive phone calls all day, then hopping a plane to somewhere else will only be a cover. So, I'll get up again in the morning and do it again, so that when I head to Abilene I won't fall into any traps. I don't need wild adventure to know that God is working in big ways. Now if I could only really feel that way.