nothing like a train to take you far away

just this side of the horizon a combine is storing soybeans in the bin and fouling the air with dust and husks. God how i hated this place. up in the choir room that has long served as a lecture hall, Brian Johnson is speaking to freshmen about God's fidelity and Israel's infidelity. i half-expect him to recount his take on the judges cycle that he taught me so long ago. God how i love him.

i feel like an alien, an unwanted stranger sitting in front of the raucous, cinder block hell of a dorm that i once called home. i wish i could describing my time at soybean bible more accurately. at one moment it feels like a wilderness in which i am being tested and at another moment it seems to be a spiritually gedi, where my wounds are being salved and i am once again finding strength for the journey.

the dirty gold cornstalks in front of me are reverberating with old prayers, some of which were answered and others which apparently ricocheted off the cinderblock ceiling of titus 217. occasionally, as the cornstalks sway, i am reminded of ambitions that have been fulfilled and others which were unrealized.

God how i hated this place. but fortunately this place, this mis-shaped square of uninspired utilitarian architecture, gracious yet unsettling professors and post-pubescent students who are filled with libido, a love of God and ambitions not unlike my own, has never hated me.

God, thank you for this black, fertile soil in which i died and have been born again. thank you for the hands which cultivated and occasionally pruned my heart. although this is the time of harvest, i hope my fallow field is once again suitable for sowing.