A long time coming...

Man, it has been a long month and a half. For my reader, I apologize to you for your absence. Your homework and other worthwhile activities have probably gotten way too much attention since March 23.

Finishing up finals, I've been thinking some about the meaning and place of stress in our lives. It is really easy, I think, to try to make stress into this thing that gets in the way of our fulfillment and therefore blow it up or minimize it from what it really is. We have such a strange relationship with stress, much like our relationship with sleep. Is it good? Stress: no. Sleep: yes. But not better than work and activity and busyness. It is good to rest, to shabbat we might say in Christian circles, but we're not going to actually do it if it costs us work. We need to be active, to be working, to be productive. even our Christian lives are this way. if we're not growing continually over the course of our lives, then there is something wrong, right? i think we've let our notions of economics work into our notions of ontology a little too much. In other words, we think about living the way we think about the economy. If our spirituality or our economy is not growing, that's bad. There is little to no room for plateau, for falling off a little bit, for crisis even. Our whole focus is on that upward move that points ever upwards into some supposedly limitless sky. But I am going to say this is false.

first off, the fact that our notions of "personal growth" and "spiritual health" are so determined by our conception of the economy troubles me. it seems that, if anything, there should be a much greater focus on sustainability, on faithfulness, on doing what needs to be done and finding joy in it. We should be looking deeper into how to redeem the various aspects of our lives with whatever currency we have, be that economic, social, cultural, or whatever. Instead, we try to amass some store of personal worth and capital without trying to reach out in that, without recognizing that the purpose of any capital that we have is to spend it in redeeming. And the greatest capital that we can ever amass comes from a long, long time spent faithfully responding to the call to love God and others. But this sort of capital is indifferent to the variables of how we are doing, of how stressed we are, of how successful we are. Indifferent may be too strong a word. Um, it is other than those things. our faithfulness, though often impacted by the other circumstances of our lives, is different from those circumstances. In many ways, our faithfulness is in our adherence to a standard outside of those circumstances in the midst of them. This standard of loving others--of living a cruciform life, of maintaining the core commitment to Christ in the midst of the "rest" of life--is the thing to keep in mind at each moment, in each day. It is why we meet on Sundays, why we continue to take the Eucharist, why we continue to gather for baptisms and remember our own in them. These serve as reminders to us. But not for our own sake. They serve as reminders that we might live for another. And yet they are also the real substance that pulls us up into the reality of God's salvation and redemption of the world.

So...finals. stress. sometimes it feels like i am going to break under all of it and i just want to give up, to lay down my education go get a job in southeast or, better yet, as a pool boy in Cabo. but I know that there is something to the breaking. it reminds me of what life is about, that life is not about me and my wishes or my comfort. it is about how i remain faithful to the call to love in the midst of heavy circumstances. because despite Jeff Carr's institution of "success week" at loma, garbage still happens. i still have to wrestle with difficult things and hard things and ugly things. i still have to be a youth pastor and a stand-in dad and a friend and a host of other things. So I am reminded that no matter how tired i am, i need to pray. I don't necessarily need to have a full day of lounging around, but i do need to pray. And beyond that, I am not my work. My research paper for Kevin probably sucked bad. I'm okay with that. I am more than the sum of my accomplishments and it is good yet hard to remember that in the midst of an ouput/production-oriented culture. So what if i do fail out. it would suck, but i can faithfully respond to that situation just as i can faithfully respond to success. neither is necessarily easier. So whatever situation comes, we can say with Paul that we are "content whatever the circumstances." (Phil. 4)

That said, I'm glad to have a break. I'm tired but I'm going to sleep tonight and that is a good thing. So peace, friend(s). the summer is upon us.