Right now I'm reading through Leviticus preparing to write twenty pages about it. Yes, twenty pages on Leviticus. But don't discount this exercise - there's already life-changing application.

The first several chapters of Leviticus are specific instructions on how to do certain sacrifices. You bring this certain animal to the priest, he does specific things to it, it is burned in a certain way on the altar. But each section ends with the statement: "It is a pleasing aroma to the Lord." Over and over again, everything is described and done in such a way as to produce this nice smell for God.

So then we leave Leviticus and its ancient ways and old customs, casting it aside for a new system and a new way of approaching God. But do we? The ancients brought their cattle, their birds, and their grain to the altar for sacrifice. This was the atonement act before God of the Israelites. We progress through time from there, slowly building a crescendo of God's work into the mighty, triumphal climax of Jesus breathing his last on the cross. The world fell into darkness at that moment. The ground shook. And we suddenly cut back in time to a close up of the dark, burned flesh on the altar. What's left? Not much except the lingering aroma of what used to be there.

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? 2 Corinthians 2:14-16

Am I being the lingering aroma of Christ's sacrifice in this world?

Few things offend me more than the assertion that the world both makes sense and points to a God worth worshipping.

I read this line in a blog I was reading ealier tonight. This girl is an ACU student. One who regularly does weekend campaigns.

Lately I've been very much caught up in questions about the system I exist within. Right now I'm struggling mightily on how to approach this thing called seminary which exists within this institution of the Christian school which is a product of an organization called church. I have trouble accepting some tenets of all three of those structures. Frankly, I hate them at times.

However, I'm not struggling with my acceptance of the worshipfulness of God. My struggles with what I'm doing right now come primarily out of my desire to live a life of true mission - one that is serving God, worshipping him in a daily context, and joining with others in his kingdom without the baggage of these fattened, bloated, self-serving systems that seem to try to call themselves "community." I fight with doubt about God. But he seems to always overcome that in some subtle or overt way, showing me, often in a whisper, that he is mighty and active. Yes, I serve a God worth worshipping. In a world that makes sense? Maybe, maybe not.

Things lately that don't seem to make sense: why one of my best friends has to have stage 3 stomach cancer now after enduring emergency surgery on her ribs and lungs because of something evil that happened to her. After having her brother commit suicide. After her mom slowly dying. Also, two of my friends may have to leave China because the government may be onto the fact that they have been having people into their home to teach them about Christ. Also, graduate school doesn't really make a lot of sense. Not in the Christian context.

But I've decided that even for my 23 year old friend who may die from cancer, everything is still gain. Everything. Why? Because she found Christ. And because she had life, and life in Christ, everything is gain. What we deserve is nothing. Not even life. I may lose her. But what I have with her is nothing but gain. If God takes her, it will be horrifically painful, but it still will have been nothing but gain for me. That's the kind of thing that makes God worth worshipping: life itself doesn't really make sense, but every bit of it exists, and is gain, because God has decided to continue to allow us something that we don't deserve. To live is Christ. Literally.

What does this mean? I'm helping one of my LIFE group members load up her bike when my phone rings. My Greek professor wants to check in about our meeting but we end up deciding I need to withdraw from the class. My self-disappointment rages and my M.Div course sequence is now altered for the worse for the future.

I come into my room and sit on my computer for a bit, contemplating my failure, when my IM pops up with a message from a girl saying "I love lifegroup!!!! I love it I love it!!"

What is success? What is failure? I am in a huge conflict right now because I'm not really sure of that answer. Right now I'm failing in some ways in front of the religious elite of Abilene, Texas and the intellectual scholar community of the church. But then I get a small message like that and I wonder what things are really about.

Right now I'm wondering why I am in grad school. To be in grad school and succeed requires two things: 1) The will to spend three years doing academic things. 2) The will to give up the time necessary to do those academic things.

I just walked out of a Greek midterm that I probably failed. What makes me angry right now is the fact that I probably could have done reasonably well had I had the will to give the time to Greek every day that I should. But I don't, and right now I have very little desire to. So now I'm telling my professor that I need help with my Greek, when that's not really the case. What I need is some kind of motivation to study greek every day. Why do I not have that motivation? What is the stumbling block to knowing that this is what I need to do to succeed in grad school? I'm not an agressive person but right now I want to throw a chair across the room that I am sitting in. I told a lady in an interview a while back that I believe it is my obligation to Christ to give my best to everything that I do. Perhaps I don't believe that? Perhaps I'm just fooling myself? Right now I'm just not sure what the heck it is I'm supposed to be doing. Right now a blank page of first and second declension noun forms is telling me that I shouldn't seek to be a minister as a career. At least not a minister with an M.Div degree.

I need to find my problem and find it quick, or this grad school thing is going to sink me.

Sigh.

Tonight I came up for air out of my sea of Greek materials and called a friend in Alabama with whom I hadn't spoken in a while. He was hanging out in the campus ministry facilities there so I ended up being passed around to about seven different people which ended up being a marathon Alabama catch-up session.

On Wednesday of this week it will be exactly one year since I announced my resignation from University Christian Ministry. An entire year has passed since my experiences in Tuscaloosa but I can recall every story and every moment of those ten months as if they happened earlier today. Ten months - I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for ten months. Yet I seem to recall about five years worth of memories. From the moment I rolled in with a U-Haul and no place to live on January 1st to the moment the last item was packed out of the now-famous Reed Street house on October 29th, life was a non-stop adventure. Each day held something new and unexpected. I saw the work of God in ways I had not seen before. I saw the work of Satan in ways I had not seen before. Both grew me, stretched, me, pushed me to my limits in all kinds of wonderful and strange ways. I found whole new levels of looking at life and God. I experienced new levels of wonderment in God and people who showed me new ways of living by faith. I looked evil in the face and winced from the burns it gave me. I feel like I boarded a ten month long wild roller-coaster that gave me the biggest highs and wildest moments I've had so far. When I got off I was dizzy and needed to lay down for a while, which was the season in life God gave me in Tulsa.

Now things are different. Very different. My days are largely routine. My purpose is very different. I have professors who are telling me that God can do without me for three years. What? Where did that idea come from? Is that what seminary does? I guess that from day one in Alabama there was no choice but to place myself as a tool in the hands of God and embark on the adventure that creates. Every moment was by faith - it had to be. But now I exist largely within the ivory towers of theological academia, where ideas are forced to be complicated beyond belief and the Christian experience is distilled into the printed pages of books.But this is not an entry about the merits of grad school.

My vivid reflections about Alabama life will fade through time, and the analysis of my new adventures will become paramount and the lessons learned become clear, just as it has been for my Bama life. When I think about it honestly, I had moments in Alabama where I longed for the OU life. So, I figure that whenever the next round comes, I'll think back on Abilene in some of these same ways. One thing is for sure, though. I know now to expect more of the unexpected. And the unexpected is what usually reveals the glory of God.

Perhaps you have heard of the dramatic bomb-related suicide on the OU campus during the football game last night. Perhaps you haven't. Nobody knows yet who it was or what the motivations were.

I walked that sidewalk almost every day for four and a half years. How often did I look at someone who had fantasies of something like that? How often did I brush shoulders with someone who might be wondering right now why that person didn't get closer to the stadium holding 84,000 people? How often did I pass people who have no idea what peace is? Did I pass someone who is planning something worse? The only thing I know is that this person did not know peace.

Right now I am convicted to beg God's peace over our campuses. This prayer obviously needs to be prayed over everything, but I figure that praying for intercession on our campuses is God's little role for me.

People need to know God's peace. Please God, let them know your peace.