For Mom

Here's an email I sent to my mom recently.
I've decided to make it a more public thank you.

"Hey Mom.

I'm writing to let you know about something I've been thinking about lately - trust. I've always been astounded, even as a teenager, by your ability to trust. First it was your ability to trust God that I saw. You were my model, obviously, in trusting God in the face of the difficulties of Dad's accident. That trust in God then blossommed out into all areas of my life. I was also amazed at how you trusted God with our well-being - allowing us to experience life in wonderful ways, on motorcycles, skateboards and the like. I later discovered, especially in college, that you had an unusual ability to trust me, whether in dealings with money or encouraging me to go to Israel for a semester. I have always coveted that trust, holding it close to my heart, not wanting to break it.

I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking a lot about trust the last week, and I've been grateful (toward you) as I've found myself to be a rather trusting person. Our world is full of fearfulness, whether it be of what someone will think of us or concerns about money, and trust seems to be a rare commodity. We are encouraged to be so careful with everyone and to get everything in writing. I think it's a horrible way to live, though - constantly in worry about everything. I find it debilitating.

So I'm writing to thank you for teaching me how to trust, for letting me experience trust. In a world of very unstable marriages, I have no difficulty trusting Robin. Concerning difficult life choices about raising children and prusuing a PhD and finding a job (or two), I have little difficulty trusting God. I see people in the parking lot at the grocery store whose glances flutter about themselves hoping to catch some danger in the act of destroying their lives. Yet I find myself able to close my eyes for the last few steps to the car, and take a deep breath, and pause, and imagine the flight of the birds that I hear in the distance, and know that God knows their actual flight. Then I open my eyes and begin to put the kids in the car and the groceries away as an even deeper breath comes with the realization of how much more . . .

Thank you for modelling trust to me."

O'Connor quotes for the day -

"It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time you struggle to endure it."

"It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead."

 

Our new Home. 

 

 

 

 

 

Job

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

:)

I got the job.

Hope, Faith and Love

I thought of a parallel in church a couple weeks ago. A teenager loves recklessly because she is inexperienced in not having love returned. As she grows older, she becomes more cautious with her love. A young Christian hopes recklessly in the promises of God because she is inexperienced in non-fulfillment. But as she grows older, she learns God's plans are bigger than her hopes and thereby don't always include her hopes. The same pattern is true for faith. The new Christian can have reckless faith, yet as she matures she may begin to question her interpretation of some things and what she is putting her faith in.

Our culture has a simple way of addressing the first, i.e. love. We say, "It is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all." We don't, however, have that view of hope and faith. Perhaps we understand this about love because we know that humans are flawed and that finding love is really a bit of a crap shoot. We know we must take big chances in order to have any possibility of true love. Perhaps we figure that God, on the other hand, is perfect and should fulfill all our hopes and all our faith, so we think that hope and faith are somehow more eternal than love. But what we don't take into account often enough is that we are flawed - our hopes, our love, and our faith are all flawed. Hope and faith are therefore also a bit of a crap shoot, particualarly when we place our hope in other flawed humans. But why do we not hold the same positive view of them? Is it that love has more physical forms? Should we amend the statement to “It is better to have loved physically and lost than not to have loved at all?” But that doesn’t sound right, so why can’t we say it is better to have hoped and lost than not to have hoped at all?

Job Interview

Please pray for me this week. I have an all-day job interview on Monday for a one-year faculty position at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. They're feeding me all three meals that day, so it must be pretty serious.