Learning to Hope

Happy Thanksgiving. This is the first time I've ever sat down at our home computer to write a blog. It's weird. The screen is so much bigger than my laptop. Being home has been great, but being on break has just been oppressive. I'm working on my fourth paper for the weekend and I still have one more due at the end of exam week that's 12 pages that I haven't even really started yet. I had this vision in my head of getting everything that I had to do for the rest of the semester done over break. I did pretty well, but I've still got that huge paper looming over my next two weeks.
Break was blah, but being at home was nice. This was the first time our entire family has been together in a long time (mostly because of me). I got to see all of my neices and nephew and two of them spent most of break at our house. After a while I started to realize why the game Hide and Seek was invented. I got so sick of hearing the words "come pway wif me" that I ended up hiding rather than have to sit and play cars for another hour. Added onto the constant need to play with him, being around my nephew was like playing a non-stop game of MadGab where I had to decode everything he said. I don't know how many times I just looked at him and said "I have no idea what you're talking about". Dont' get me wrong, I love my nephew and nieces, but it did make me realize that I'm glad having kids is nowhere in my immediate future.
Tonight I volunteered to go with my home church to a men's shelter in Toledo to help serve a meal. They also asked me if I would be willing to give a message beforehand. I made myself say yes even though I knew it would be hard and would force me to really think about what to say. I had a hard time trying to figure out what a person like me had to say to people like them when I have everything I could ever need and more and they are scraping to get by. I think I initially had a hard time with this because so much of what I've been conditioned to expect from the church is a set of morals. We go to church to hear about how God wants us to live, right?
While I think that God does make demands on our lives if we truly decide to follow Him, I think that our churches could do a better job of simply proclaiming the Good News. Yes, I can become a better person but that is only because of the work that Christ already accomplished. Now that I think about it more, I can't believe I had a hard time finding something to say to those people tonight. Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the captives free, and to let the oppressed go. So that's what I tried to convey tonight. The message was titled "The Bravest Thing We Have is Hope" and I tried to show what it truly meant to place hope in Jesus more than just on the surface. I thought it went well and afterwards one of the men there made the comment that it really sounded like I meant what I said from the heart. I told him that if it didn't, then I had failed. Part of me wanted to put up a transcript of the message, but that would be entirely too long. I will leave you with a nugget that I really feel like God used to speak through me to myself about how sometimes we we misuse our faith in Christ selfishly.

"Your hope means nothing until it means something for everyone."

Is your hope too small?

Committed...

So, if you were wondering, I fulfilled my committment. Last Saturday combined two things that I really don't like at all: football and snow, but my dedication to my friend superceded all that. The only thing that got me through was thinking about how great it would feel to get back inside, take a nice hot shower, and sleep for the rest of the day. Which I did and which was everything I thought it could be and more. (We lost the football game if you were wondering.)





We had SNW again yesterday. I always get exhausted afterwards and just want to go to bed, but I realized this week was going to be really busy. But now that I'm through my Monday, the rest of the week doesn't look so bad. I just have to get through my Greek test on Wednesday. It's just a lot of memorizing that I'm so tired of doing. I feel like I'm to the point in the semester where everytime I put something in my brain another thing falls out the other side.





I'm excited to go home for Thanksgiving. I haven't been home in a long time and I haven't seen a lot of my extended family in even longer. It really surprises me when I find out that there are other people who don't have really good relationships with their cousins and their aunts and uncles and such. My cousins were my first real friends and we still remain close. In the spirit of Thanksgiving I guess you could say that I am thankful for such a strong support system of family that I know cares about me.

Here's a picture of me and some of the fam'...ok, so I'm only actually related to about half of them, but they all feel like family.

What did I get myself into?

So the guy that lives across the hall from me kept trying to tell me that he didn't feel like I supported him enough in his football endeavors because I hardly ever go to the games. He said that I was being a bad Hall Chaplain by not being there for him in something that he loved. I of course refuted this fact, but conceded that I would go to the last game of the season since it is against our big rivals, Defiance. He told me I have to wear his jersey (which in itself is a little weird to me...but I'm being supportive) and that I had to stay for the whole game even if they were losing big time. So I committed. Now I wake up Saturday morning before the big game and it's cold, raining and windy outside with no signs of letting up. Add this to the fact that I can barely stand football anyway.

But I'm committed.

He even said that he should play quite a bit today so that should be exciting...maybe.

Now I know how parents feel.

Go #29.

The first of many lasts...

This week is scheduling week for next semester. And I just realized that this morning was the last time I will ever schedule for college classes. It was sort of anti-climactic. I always loved scheduling as an underclassmen because there were so many options and it was always a race to see if you could get into all the classes you wanted to at 7 in the morning. This next semester I'm just taking the bare minimum of what I have to to graduate. I thought about taking an elective, but I want to give myself enough time to really prepare for my senior recital. I was all excited to be able to take Biblical Greek this year, but after one semester I've decided that it's not really worth all the effort. Don't get me wrong, I'm doing really well in the class. I just don't see myself wanting to do all that memorizing next semester. Plus, 13 credit hours doesn't sound so bad for the last semester of college, especially when three of those credit hours will end after 5 weeks, and 2 more will be done after 10 weeks.

I won't know what to do with myself. I'm seriously considering trying out for the musical this year. I haven't the past two years because I either didn't like the musical or didn't have time, but now I pretty much have all the time in the world. It's not a musical I know much about, but it sounds decent. Who knows, maybe this will be my last chance to do any sort of musical and I should grab on to this last chance while I can.

Here's to the first of many coming lasts and making the most of all of them.

Fall or Spring?

Today was a great day simply because it was more like spring than fall. Who would have thought I'd be wearing shorts and a t-shirt in the beginning of November.

We had our first band concert for the year last Saturday. We always seem to get to the rehearsal before and I walk away thinking that the concert will either completely fall apart or be really good. We usually seem to pull it off somehow, and we did again this time. The theme for the concert was world music so we played some really cool foreign pieces.

We had Sunday Night Worship again yesterday. I feel like I'm really starting to find my place as a worship leader. We're doing more and more difficult songs and they seem to be going well. And I really like that SNW doesn't have a whole committee planning it so we get a bit more freedom. One thing I tried to do this past week was something I had been thinking with a book I just finished. The book was called "The Prophetic Imagination" by Walter Brueggemann and part of it talked about the language of grief. Brueggemann tried to point out how the prophets, especially Jeremiah, used the language of grief to get the people of Israel to realize that things are not the way they ought to be. Oftentimes we get into these ruts of contentment where we know that our world is not what God wants for us but we just feel like that's what is. The job of the prophet, then, is to bring people out of that by showing them what it means to grieve. We cannot experience true joy until we have done the hard work of grieving. With this in mind, we started out the service with a hymn based around Psalm 137. Usually I try to pick the first song to be an upbeat one that brings people together around the joy of worship, but this hymn was anything but joyful. When I actually typed out the words for the powerpoint I almost thought that I just couldn't use it because it was too hard and too real. (read the end of Psalm 137 if you don't believe me) But we went ahead and did it anyway and I tried to invite everyone to try to come to the hymn with an understanding of where the writers were coming from: exile in an oppressive foreign land. I think a lot of people appreciated using the song of lament because it helped them focus on the idea that things do not have to be the way they are. God wants so much better for us if we'd only do the hard work of grieving what is and accepting who God is calling us to be.

I realize I only ever seem to talk about SNW, but honestly that is what seems to be really challenging me this year. Maybe I'll talk about some of the cool things we're talking about in Philosophy.

Until then, I've got some scotcheroo's from my mom to snack on.