musing

a resilient virus rendered me worthless at work. so i logged four and a half hours, clicked off my monitor and headed home. in the hours that have followed, filled with banal tasks like walking the dog, registering for a class, reading a book and taking a nap, i have been besieged with questions. i am going to share a few of these questions with you not because i expect answers or even a response, but because if you are anything like me - and i suspect you are - you probably hear similar voices in your head and i do not want either of us to feel alone.

while sitting in the registration office at S.H.I.T., i strung together a streak of profanity that even gave me pause. although i immediately told my friend, upon whose desk i had set (?) my feet, that simply walking the hallways of S.H.I.T. puts my mind and heart in a profane place, in all honesty i wonder if my assertion is true. in the end, i have to ask myself, why do i feel so alienated in that place? is it because i have changed or perhaps some long unforgiven offense? or is it because the long-term, unchanging, missional vision of the institution contrasts with my tendencies towards intellectual and spiritual transience? i wonder.

have i, somewhere along this winding road, submitted to the status quo? lately i've realized how insubstantial and ephemeral my conversation has been. can i carry on a conversation of more than fifteen minutes without quoting a movie? are my continuous attempts at humor little more than a mask? have i gotten so in-step with the mono-culture of television, film and music that i can no longer hear the different drum?

i have long distanced myself from fundamentalists because their passion for separation always seems to be laced with hatred. but surely there is another form of separation, which issues forth in service, sacrifice and prayer, that is fueled by love. have i become so immersed in culture that i fail to see the need for disciples of Jesus to have one foot in and one foot out of the stream? is there anyone who was better suited this one foot in, one foot out tactic than Jesus? He who was simultaneously full of glory and full of e.o.e.? how does one respond to the call of a God who calls us to both transform and stand as a testimony against the world?

how am i going to create culture if i spend all of my time consuming it?

will i ever learn to integrate my institutional training with the incarnational environment in which i serve? i fear that people with superstar pretensions find it difficult to be a role player. yet, i suspect, the latter is much closer to what God has in mind for my life.