We spent our 5th year anniversary in Yellow Springs Ohio. We hiked for about 3 or so hours in the Glen Helen Nature preserve, alone, in the woods with the silence and the leaves under our feet and the pine forest that is deep into the preserve where we lied down and watched the wind bend the tops of the trees feeling the mystery of a place that seemed so thin. We ate at The Winds Cafe and enjoyed an uninterrupted meal of locally grown and organic food that was prepared with such care and goodness. It’s a rare meal that it is just Jaime and I and it felt as much like an anniversary as our wedding day felt like a wedding. We stayed at The Arthur Morgan House bed and breakfast and enjoyed a king size bed with a private bath and a home-cooked organic meal for breakfast. Leading up to our anniversary, I had been unemployed for about 3 weeks and short on cash I wondered whether or not I ought to be extravagant and frustrated that I felt like I couldn’t be even though I wanted to and felt as though we needed to. Celebration is good…and five years of good marriage is something to celebrate. I went ahead and made all the arrangements in the days leading up to our little get-a-way. Jaime’s mom took the kids, we had a 5pm reservation at the restaurant, and a night booked at the bed and breakfast. I threw up a heart-felt, though very quick prayer that God would bless our anniversary and provide for us, even if my choice to be extravagant during a time of need lacked some discretion. The next day someone showed up to our house with an envelope full of twenty dollar bills that added up to $200. It added up, as well, to God’s way of answering that prayer and blessing not just the anniversary, but also the next season of life and the next 5 years.

I love my wife and the two children we have and the little house and the life we are choosing to live. Our marriage is good…and I am saying that in the midst of a week where it seems everything we say to one another is at the wrong time, or with the wrong tone, or shouldn’t be said at all. Thank you, Jaime, for giving, forgiving, and helping me to receive when I have nothing to give and for teaching me to give in ways I thought I couldn’t.

“It maybe when we no longer know what to do, We have come to our real work, And that when we no longer know which way to go, We have begun our real journey.”
—Wendall Berry

Last week I began my new job as a Managing Partner at The Northstar Cafe. There are only a few things in this world in which I am really interested, and organic food and sustainable living are part of the mix. Wendell Berry is famous for saying that “eating is an agricultural act.” Part of the vision of The Northstar Cafe is to give people the idea and experience that what they’re putting into their bodies is part of a larger system that can be a really good one. Enjoying good food is part of a life that God has given for us to enjoy. I have come to Northstar because I fundamentally believe that what we eat and how we eat are as important as what vote we cast in the ballot box.

Losing a job I loved and starting to look for another has been as challenging as almost anything I have done. I only have a few interests in the world and that can make it difficult to find something to put one’s hands to. I received an invitation to interview for an insurance job and the thought never crossed my mind to attend the interview…not that I’m against insurance….I just couldn’t sell it.
I really think I got to the point, somewhere within the past few weeks, that I flat out didn’t know what to do or where to go. I’m hoping that Wendell Berry is as right about the journey as he is about food.

Thank you all for your prayers. More later.

“Be not affeard…” says Shakespeare, and yet, sometimes what we fear most shows up to take away the sounds and sweetness that both give delight and make us wonder if we will ever hurt again. The past 15 or so months of my life have been as much a dream from which I feared to awake as anything else. I am speaking vocationally. A year or so ago I took a job with a non-profit organization that gave me the freedom to live in a vocational way much of what I have hoped to live for the past 10 years. It was a job that inhabited my life in ways in which we all long for…our passions and gifts and desires being lived out, not just on the side, peripherally, but centrally as part of our everyday life. For those of you who know these people, imagine Matt Beckler making a full living off his music, which is both his passion and giftedness, or Andy Whitman paying the mortgage and sending both his children to college doing what he loves to do most…which is writing. That is the life I have been living the past year or so, and last week, that life came to an abrupt close when I lost that job and have since been wondering where and how and why it all came crashing down. The wondering has come while shoveling mulch for a nice old eccentric man in Worthington, bending and lifting and dumping, wondering how those verbs are words to me from God about how to bend in ways he wants me to bend and lift up the things I am to lift up and dump the things I need to set aside. The first day, I got through a whole pile of mulch and a bunch of prayers and tears and I thought the mulching was finished. I arrived the next morning only to find another pile of mulch, which to me said there are more prayers to pray and more tears to shed and more bending to be done.
If you’ve missed it up until now…what I have been trying to say is that I am unemployed and am trying to find the voice and hand of God in all of it. The unemployed part of the story is long and difficult to explain, and for those who want to know, I’ll do the explaining sometime, though not yet. As far as the voice of God and finding it in the midst of it all, for those of you who pray, please pray. The voice of God is the hum about my ears and a thousand twangling instruments that will of course make me sleep again. The sleep that comes, it seems to me, at least for me right now, is a sleep that says I’m calm and trusting—-the dreaming comes too, but sleeping and dreaming are not the same. Right now I am restless and sleepless, both spiritually and physically and the lullaby of God, as he calls me to pray, is his faithfulness to his promise of opening up the clouds and shewing his riches, as Shakespeare says, that are of course ready to drop. That’s the dream to embrace and to pray for, but first comes the sleeping. The resting. The quietness before the creator and the kind of peace that surpasses all the understanding of the whys and how comes that wake us up from our sleep, and interrupt our dreams. Right now, I’m crying to dream again.

Sometimes, with the worst having happened, there is no longer the worst to fear. That is what Saint Frederick Buechner says at least, who is a saint to me in ways in which no other author has been. Sounds a lot like another Saint who said something about perfect love casting out all the fear and maybe there is more of that love that I am to see through all this; some of which has come already, and more, I am sure, is on it’s way. I’m sure because I have been this restless and sad and confused before. Eventually, Christ has his way of holding us close and waiting until we can rest again, and sleep again. And then, as quickly as the tears are gone, a new dream begins.

CITY OF GOD

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
-Gerald Manley Hopkins

Telling an honest story of a place just outside Rio Dejanero, where limbs are not lovely, and eyes are not lovely, Director Fernando Meirelles’ displays a genre-bending epic of a city of slums, and drugs, gang violence, and ten thousand places of rape and features of faces oppressed. Part documentary and story, and part social commentary, this film takes the viewer into the heart of the gun-ridden seemingly god-forsaken world of children who aspire to be a “hood,” and an entry-level position of drug-running and message delivery for the gang, can land you a corner office in munitions distribution and “territory” management. “Rocket,” is the narrator and hero of this film, navigating his way through the haze of crime and drugs in the 60’s and 70’s, and into the street war of the 80’s, saving himself, and ironically precipitating the end of the ongoing crisis, with nothing more than a 35mm camera, and an accidental misprint of the pictures he takes from the “inside” that lands him into a photojournalist role almost by accident. Characters develop as the landscape jumps back and forth between the generations, where the back-story on the leader of a senseless war with senseless killing, includes a murdered cousin, a raped wife, and a former life as a calm and quotidian bus-driver. We never get the perspective on the situation from outside the slum, and the limited perspective puts the viewer in first-hand accounts, with all the bleakness and hopelessness that is to be expected. The violence seems senseless, but to the little boys who live in the City of God, the violence is supposed vindication for a world that has pushed them aside, the sex and rape and inferred orgies followed by blood-spill and terror as well as laughter—all in the same cinematographic sentence—- is not Hollywood sensuality or sentimentalism, it’s little boys becoming men:

“Listen man, I smoke, I snort… I’ve been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I’ve cleaned windshields at stop lights. I’ve polished shoes, I’ve robbed, I’ve killed… I ain’t no kid, no way. I’m a real man.”

In the City of God, justice is never served, the bodies of children, never vindicated, and the gang violence is perpetuated to the next generation—a far cry from our hope of a new earth, a renewed ‘city’ of God:

“Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
—Revelation 21:3,4

I’m on a trial membership with Netflix, and yesterday was my first arrival. Last night I watched City of God. I’ll post my thoughts later today. But I hope that this will be the first of more to follow.

Any Central Vineyardites interested in joining John McCollum in Cambodia October 1-22 for our first ever CV missions trip?

John’s hosting an informational meeting at Element (directions at elementville.com > contact us) at 7pm next Monday, July 17. If you think there’s even a remote chance you might be able to go, you should really attend this meeting.

If you can’t make the meeting, but still want to go on the trip, contact John (john [at] elementville [dot] com) this week.

Also, if you know you can’t go on the trip, but want to help fund someone else’s trip, please contact John at the same email address.

Like school children bickering over the spot where the ball has landed, inside or outside the box, in a game of four-square, the church for the past 60 years or so has wondered about the role of scripture in the life of the believer and how any text could have authority on this side of modernity. The difficult road for the postmodern church is the road through the path of textual deconstruction, authorial question, and the type of “naive realism” that Wright exposes. The enlightenment myth of history as fully knowable and discoverable has overshadowed a deeper problem of the church: fear of scholarship. Since Galileo, the church has been skeptical of where history and science often lead us. Wright has pointed out that though our method of exegesis is still very basic, it is nonetheless still subject to potential errors. While our goal should always be to know, “what the text said” and therefore “what might it say to me,” we must come to terms with the reality that well-meaning people have gotten it wrong on both accounts at several moments in history.

“there is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes.” —pg. 95

All in all, we need to stop trying to support the theological categories as they have come to us from prior generations, and be open to a new and fresh reading of the scripture ourselves, allowing it to tell us things we might not have known were there all along, and some things that we hoped we wouldn’t find. To think that all the historical work has been done in the modern period and therefore to resolve ourselves to embracing “modern” categories, is to make a category mistake. If we find pieces of history that help us understand better the historical document that we have before us, say, a letter of Paul’s to the Romans, we should look to understand the letter as it is written, in light of our historical finding, irregardless of what our present or past reading of the letter might be.

The authority of scripture rests on the way in which we agree to come underneath the story that it tells and live in light of and part of the story. God has not given scripture for the sole purpose of saving human beings, “but to renew the whole world” (pg. 29). Authority, for Wright, is not defined by us as we stand on the outside and say of the text, “this has authority because it is from God.” Authority is recognizing that God has given us a story that communicates the ways in which he has acted, and, if we are attentive and have the kind of ears for hearing, we will live as faithful characters of the same play, being the arms and hands of a sovereign God who aims to heal the world of sin and death. The authority comes from acting alongside and remaining faithful to the story.

Wright’s gives a most helpful analogy to unpack the very difficult term of “authority”. He calls it the “five-act” hermeneutic.

“The bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers….Within this scheme I am proposing, we are currently living in the fifth act, the time of the church…..Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story….We must act in the appropriate manner for THIS moment in the story; this will be in direct continuity with the previous acts (we are not free to jump suddenly to another narrative, a different play altogether), but such continuity also implies discontinuity, a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen. We must be ferociously loyal to what has gone before and cheerfully open about what must come next.” (pp. 121,122, 123)

Living in the fifth act means living faithfully to the story-line, immersing ourselves enough in the story to become familiar with the play so as to live a life of faithful “impromptu” in particular contexts and settings. The story “stiffens our resolve, as we work to implement the resurrection of Jesus, and so anticipate the day when God will make all things new…” (pg. 115)

We’re venturing our way forward with a chem-free lawn. I know… Birkenstock wearin’ hippie…but it’s true…nothing but a combo of chicken crap, corn gluten, hard work, and a few years of all of that before we get a lawn that looks half as good as our neighbors. Click the chem free lawn link to find out why.

The past 2 years or so, Jaime and I have been moving more in the direction of tree-hugging environmentalist than I ever thought I would…I won’t speak for Jaime, but my eyes have definately been opened a bit to the consequences of one’s perspective on the world. Are we “just passin’ through?” Or have we taken the comand to cultivate the earth as seriously as other things? Along our journery has been the switch to Organic Milk…then to Organic fruits and veggies…now it’s grain fed free-range Amish chicken from an Ohio farm…and a lawn that the neighbors, I am sure, scoff at. Our grocery budget is about 30% more than what it used to be, and the neighbors yards are green, and ready for the golf swing.
I have a friend who spent most of his life in Denmark. We were talking about the lifestyle that is required to uphold the purchase of Organic foods. It’s expensive, however, his remark was that food in Denmark and most of Europe takes as large, if not more, of a chunk of one’s paycheck as does Organic food here. “You Americans are just used to cheap food,” he said. I think he is right.

I spent the time digging up dandelions, with my daughter, Rayli. She was out there with, rake in hand, dirty knees, and a phrase that held our time together like you hope for as a father that went something like, “daddy, I helping you…” …and she was. She was helping me live and love and pray. She was helping me enjoy. She was helping me understand why God has given us this earth…to till and cultivate and the dirt to get under our fingers. We did it together. I’ve got fresh grass seed down…which she trampled. And yes, using her plastic rake from time to time slowed the process…but it was nontheless the cultivation of many things, in me, in her, not least somewhere inside both of us. It’s why I buy organic food…not just because it’s good for me, but because somewhere in this country, or some other country, somebody is getting dirty, and the water, the rivers, the land—it’s staying clean. Somebody is working hard…working with the land and not against it…praying for rain, perhaps.

Half-way through tonights project, Rayli brought me a “white dandelion.” The kind you blow. That’s how dandelions spread, by the way. That’s the seed for multiplicaiton. I spent an hour or so digging up the roots of a hundred (probably more) dandelion plants and my daughter wanted me to blow the fuzzy kind and spread the seed. I blew hard, and she laughed. She brought another one, and I blew again…and laughed with her.