This is one reason I respect Aggie fans.

Once upon a time, C.S. Lewis sparked a revolution in my mind. I sat late at night in a small, sixteenth story communist-era apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, and poured through the pages of The Screwtape Letters by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. I had to go across the world to read this work that has sat near me for who knows how long. But in its pages I gained a whole new insight on my nature and the nature of the spiritual world around me. Every now and then I pull my old copy of the shelf and read a couple of the letters, always finding new things underneath the notes and highlights I have already scribbled over every page. Sometimes I am reminded of life-changing ideas that have become faded over the years.

"As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on those feeling of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals. In his anguish, the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes. But it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats. He has never met these figures in real life--they are lay figures modelled on what he gets from newspapers...
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will."

I used to read voraciously. Grad school seems to have cured me of that, even though I technically read more now than ever before. As is fairly obvious, reading for school is much different than reading on one's own. I used to read a lot of spiritually-based books, and loved them. I still dGod's Big Messy Scrapbooko read some of these kinds of things, but now it is much different. Before, much of what I was reading was this:

1. Organic. I read stuff that I discovered, or was recommended to me by people I respected. Some things I am required to read now are things that I have read or would have read before, but them being on a required list seems to take all the sense of discovery out of it. Before, I would love to explore the shelves of my student center's library, which very well may have found me reading something heavily academic for a while, but because I wanted to. I have yet to take Restoration History in grad school, but became fascinated with this topic as an undergrad state school business student when I pulled some old Pepperdine Lectureship tapes off the shelf one day and started listening to Richard Hughes. As a result I read much of his Reviving the Ancient Faith long before I ever thought about becoming a ministry student and saw that this was required upper level grad school reading.
2. Contained some sense of wonder. I loved to read things that were spiritually transformative, and approached life and faith with a sense of mission mixed with deep thought. Now my reading is heavy in academic analytical-critical, and is dominated by those who seem to stand above their subject material as if they are masters of ideas. I don't mean to disparage this kind of reading, but I have lost interest in buying most of my books and now get them from the library every semester.
3. Reading for its own sake. There is a subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) atmosphere in a place like theological academia that makes the individual vie for power by being able to reference authors. The more you can throw into a conversation or a class comment (from both students and professors), the more respect you can garner. What is amusing and depressing at the same time is seeing people compete to see who can prove the most thoroughly that they have no original ideas.

I hope to regain my love for reading. Old used bookstores are some of my most favorite places on earth. And, every now and then, when I am digging through the library shelves to locate the obscure festschriften that has a paper on some far out exegetical concept that I need, I will find myself sitting on the stool in the aisle, reading through some book on a nearby shelf that caught my eye and interest. Some book that I will never quote from and will probably never find again. But, in the moment, some kind of curious brain itch was simultaneously activated and satisfied by a previously unknown chunk of writing. This is the kind of reading that really enriches the life.

I was reading in Genesis tonight when I noticed a little note at the bottom of my Study Bible that said about 40% of the Old Testament is poetry. For some reason, this really struck me and it put into perspective why we may have been, as a highly rationalistic people, somewhat mystified by the OT and found it pretty lacking when it comes to understanding God in a systematic, scientific way. Thus, we have pretty much written it off, except for some interesting stories that make for good Veggie Tales movies. I'll admit that I am relatively ignorant when it comes to the nitty gritty of the Old Testament. But I do know enough to realize that we have in our hands not a nicely lined out, consistent explanation of God and theology, but a huge messy collective scrapbook put together over a span of centuries by a small, ridiculously weird band of people. And it is a masterpiece. A big, mysterious masterpiece glued together by some messed up people -- but with the fingerprints of God all over it. The picture I see is a stern, yet kindly old man sitting amongst a group of small children and letting them draw pictures of him. A lot of the works are simplistic, some don't match, some are torn up and put back together, some are drawn by one with the ideas of another... but, end the end, the old man gathers them all up, binds them together, and proudly presents it to the next group of children as his biography. Why would he do this? Because he loves what his little children do for him. And besides, he is still sitting in the middle of the next group, and not going to leave any time soon.

I seem to find myself in a repeating pattern of the same problem. This is frustrating for me, because the issue in and of itself is not a problem, it's timing and placement is. If the circumstances that I find myself in would happen at the time and place (and something else) of my choosing, then it would actually be very good. Furthermore, this problem keeps happening because of my misguided attempts to be the best kind of person I can be. How's that for a downer? So, the right thing keeps happening in the wrong circumstance. At least, I feel like they are the wrong circumstances. Wouldn't I know if it was right? Or am I vain?

There was a time when I thought everything was right. But I was wrong.

The other day I was working with a friend of mine to tape off one of our church college classrooms for painting, and as she handed me strips of tape she began to talk about something that had come to annoy her -- for the past several days she had begun to cry while she prayed. She then related a story about how God had shown her it was alright to cry while talking with him.

I didn't know what to say. A large part of my mind told me that I was supposedly a spiritual leader for her: I lead her LIFE Group, I carry a lot of responsibility for her campus ministry, I teach classes, I pray for her... but in that moment I simply had to shed all self-important masks and realize that I simply did not know that kind of intimate prayer. I've had moments of life-changing prayer, but that day I hadn't even bothered to try, no less have trouble being overcome while doing so.

We talk a lot about prayer. I'm even adding to the pile of words right now with this blog. But how does it compare to our practice? How does the amount of words we say about prayer stack up to the amount of words of prayer? The reality is that my ratio is way off. I think God is well aware of this, and used my friend, with just a few words, to tell me what I was missing.

Finally, FINALLY, after being able to look at rats in the road in Turkmenestan for years, Google Maps has added high-res satellite imagery of one of the major college towns in AMERICA -- Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Although, it covers only about half of the town, but it at least gets the university.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

I know this means very little to most of you, but it actually is significant to me to be able to look at maps to remember a place. I've even started a live lifemap, but it is not finished yet so you may want to wait to see it. In any case, it is good to zoom around a lot of the places that have had a lot of significance in my life, especially a place like Tuscaloosa. There was a lot of pain and heartache there for me, but about hundredfold as many incredible experiences that shaped me in big ways. It was in a place like this that I could sit around the dining table at a friend's house and see a light-hearted game turn into a deep discussion of the spiritual longings of each others' lives. (Rather than sit in my living room and listen to Christians see how vulgar they can get and laugh about it.) A place where a simple gathering at a student's apartment would end up being a two-hour prayer session. A place with a lot of darkness, and in many ways a pervasive darkness, but an equally strong spiritual warfare that took place in the same place. Something as simple as looking upon the roofs of these places, upon the open green of the Quad, the sidewalks down 15th Street, reminds me of a kind of sharpness to life that is hard to find in the weird fuzziness of my current locale.

Here's to the wonders of modern technological cartography.

A lot of reflection has taken place regarding Gerald Ford. He is generally praised for being a man of conviction and integrity, having done much in his relatively short tenure as president to restore a national dignity to the United States. I experienced neither his presidency nor much of anything else about him. But many people close to me did. Some of these people had some personal experiences with him, some of which have lead me to admire Ford.

I have spoken before in this blog of the nationally-recognized Boy Scout troop that shaped part of my teen years. Gerald Ford, an Eagle Scout himself, paid a surprise visit to this troop one time and presented 13 boys with their Eagle Scout award. He would later write the forward to a book by my Scoutmaster and write a letter to my troop commenting on "Honor" portion of the Scout Law. This experience has become an anchor point in the history of my troop and helped lead to an additional visit with Ronald Reagan several years later. The Tulsa World newspaper, in their coverage of the life of Gerald Ford, has written several accounts of his visit to Troop 26, one written by a current World reporter who was one of those 13 Eagle Scouts that day. Gerald Ford said that achieving Eagle Scout was his finest accomplishment, despite becoming the world's most powerful leader.

These are a few photos of that visit, taken from the book "In the Words of..." by Bill Shaffer, my Scoutmaster.