It's 10:30. I'm supposed to be in bed in 30 minutes haha. Tomorrow I'm going to Chautauqua (the ch sounds like a "sh") for 3 days to.. well I don't know what I'll be doing, Eric keeps me clueless to keep it interesting. Then a day and a half at home, and then WHOOSH up to New York for 2 months. Life goes too fast for this kid sometimes. But when it comes down to it, that's okay I guess, because you just gotta take things as they come. My brain has been processing some intense experiences, and they just keep coming. Sometimes I sort of disengage; my brain just soaks in details and stores it for long-term processing.
What does all this mean? I think it means my life is still in the seed stage. Given a little time and soil, all this stuff will grow into something meaningful, and my blog won't be quite as narcissistic. So if my life doesn't look as together as some of yours, well just go to the mustard seed you short-sighted pea-brained guano-munching self-satisfied pack of lemmings. (No hard feelings.)
slow down mister
Some News. Or Olds to be precise.
Well hey there fellers. And gellers. Life moves rapidly forward as usual. Summer goes so fast, I swear I saw a snowflake yesterday. Next Wednesday I'll be driving up to New Hartford, New York to meet Vin Upham, the senior pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church, and Clarks Summit will be history for a couple months. I'll be interning doing youth pastoral type stuff (actually just Christian stuff more or less, kinda what we're supposed to be doing, I'll just be doing it full time). Meanwhile, I am happy to just read and do all these chores I'm doing. And stay on top of my online class. (Fell behind for awhile.) Golly...
I'm getting smarter. Maybe.
Yesterday I wrote some big papers. I'm a slower writer than many, so I was pretty impressed that I managed to turn out 16 pages. That's lots for me. (It's for the John class I'm taking.) My brain feels like it has been shoved through a PVC tube. I actually recover from these events faster than usual. I guess practice makes perfect, and now I can get back into Augustine's "Confessions." Well, soon that is.
But when I'm tired out, gosh I just want to go and splurge on a freebord (think snowboarding on concrete) or hitchhike to Hawaii (not an easy thing to do... the whole Pacific thing...), play ukuleles and surf or something. Theoretically this intense studying is supposed to make me smarter, so someone is going to have to explain why I'm so-not-eager to do anything particularly worthwhile right now. (Besides listen to A Day In The Life for the fifth or sixth time today.)
Born Again
When Nicodemus first heard the words, "born again," they were new and profound. But when we hear those words today, we don't hear what he heard. In fact, we can't hear what he heard. The words "born again" mean more than just something symbolic. When I hear those words, the tune for "old time religion" starts running through my head. I can't help but think about small-town, ignorant old religious folk hopping on the right-wing bandwagon; "that there guvners born-again, yessir." I sometimes use the words, but I'm occasionally a little uncomfortable. (The words are overly associated with Christianists, and under-associated with Christ.) (Oh kind of like the church.)
So when I read the passage, I realize I've got my work cut out to get past all the stuff that skews my Scripto-Vision (?). I'm taking an online Moody class on John's gospel. It's challenging enough by itself, but these in-built misperceptions don't make it any easier to really get what Jesus is trying to say sometimes. It may have been obvious to the original readers, but generation after generation of fuzzy thinkers has done a lot to confuse things. The meanings are there, but sometimes it's just going to take some work and patience. Here's to life-long learning.
Waiting
Today I am wondering if I'll ever really get past where I am. I mean, I know I can serve and help people a little bit. But sometimes life just seems like a really long period of waiting. Waiting for something. Waiting for my internship in July. Waiting to meet someone. Waiting to get out of debt. Not that life isn't moving. Heck I'm busy, I'm always busy. There's always way too much to do. You finish one thing but there's always a million more things. And I always feel guilty because I haven't really succeeded at anything. I do art, photography, music, writing, all in a "sure you could do something with this" sort of way, but really end up being pretty bad. And life continues to pile in on itself.
And I'm trying to be happy with where I am, with where I am in my spiritual walk and in church and all these things, but I can't help but always feel like I'm waiting for something to change. Sometimes I think I'm just waiting for heaven (which a lot of people would accuse as the ultimate cop out.) And hey, maybe so. Maybe life will never get any clearer or simpler. Well in the words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young,
"Rejoice, Rejoice,
We have no choice
but to carry on."
(Woodstock recording, "Deja Vu.")(Favorite rock song ever?)
How to rate your day (optimists and pessimists both welcome)
It's so hard to rate how well my day went. Let's say you work with a scale going from 1 to 10, 1 being really bad, 10 being really good. The problem is, you can never really know just how bad a day can go. You may think you'll never hit a 1, or you may think you've hit it, but you might be proven wrong. And maybe one day you have a great day, and it scores a perfect 10. Well, what if it gets better? (Fortunately I'm a pessimist and don't worry too much about the high end of the scale.)
No, I think a better way to do this is to copy Mercalli's Damage scale for earthquakes. In the mercalli scale, you rate earthquakes not according to energy released, but according to damage and impact. So if your china falls off the wall, that's maybe a two, if you're uncle's house falls into a big crack, that's at least a 3 or 4 (okay actually like an 8), and then if absolutely everything falls apart, burns up, and then is covered in lava from multiple eruptions that's a ten. (And you never know, it could happen.)
But here is where we will have to make our big decisions: will we rate our day scale for how good it was or how bad it was? Some of you people are walking on sunshine and wearing rose-tinted glasses and all that, and I know you'll want to rate your day on just how good it was and how wonderfully you impacted the world or were impacted by it. So a 0 means you're in a coma and did nothing positive or negative, 1 means you brushed your teeth, 2 means you sent out a nice email, 3 means you had something great happen in your life (say a free new carpet), and let's skip to 7 in which the world is flooded with light and optimism from your incredible sunshiney life. Good for you, have a cookie.
But for the hardened cynic, you can rate your day on how much damage was inflicted or received. And it all depends on how you want to think about things. If you want to get depressed and forlorn just focus on damage you inflicted on the world. 10 is reserved for the antichrist (just any day of his I guess), 7 is murdering someone (and maybe murdering a LOT of people in one day puts that at like an 8), 4 is cutting someone off in traffic, and 1 is if you sent one of those stupid forwards into my email inbox. Oh, and if you cut someone off 10 times in one day, that's probably a 7 - you're a very bad person.
If you prefer feeling anger and spite, rate your day on how much damage you received. Ie, just how much did your day really suck? And probably we can turn this into some sort of competition to see who really had the worst day. (I'd love to see some emotional ventilational in the comments!) And you can really pick any scale just depending on how your feeling about your day. If your day was great, how great? If it sucked, how much?
This was anything but the serious entry I thought I was going to write (I never know what's going to come out), but hey we can't all be serious all the time.
PS - If you tell me about your day, I'll pick a scale and rate it! (So include good and bad.)
Post-College Vertigo + Photo Blog
My ideas for writing and the photos I post rarely have anything to do with each other, so I have started a separate photo blogs for the sole purpose of posting a new picture every day. To visit click HERE. FYI the address is joshuapowers.shutterchance.com.
I am out of the BBC environment, and suddenly a lot of things are becoming clear. The unique circumstances surrounding this particular college's environment tend to have a crucible effect on students. On graduation day, there are three types of seniors. First, the sort who have been faithfully eating whatever was spoon-fed into their vacuous minds their whole lives. These will be both the faithful followers and many of the spiritually significant leaders on the campus. They aren't all bad (some of them are but let's not stereotype too much), but they are characterized by blind acceptance of status quo. Some of them are honest people who just never had to struggle with hard questions. And they scare me just a little.
The other two types of seniors come out of the same background. They are probably from fundamental churches, but they've seen enough crap in church, enough insincerity, manipulation, politics, bigotry, and unkindness that they're asking some serious questions at different points in their college years. And trust me, if there are buttons to be pushed, BBC will push them. And come graduation day, a few students will be pushed right over the edge. I don't mean, "Let's not be fundamentalists" so much as "let's not have anything to do with Christianity, it's a hoax." (This usually isn't the result of great thinking as much as personal reaction to someone else's poor thinking. Ie, "I'm right because all of you are wrong.")
Fortunately, this isn't always the case. Just as often, students experience just enough love from faculty to overlook the mild insanity inherent in such an institution. Nothing muddies clear thinking so much as a grudge. If you want to think clear and face the real issues, you have to forgive the shortcomings of the institutions. (And I've had a lot of fuzzy thinking because of anger.) In my time here, I've had to do some personal crash courses on the canon, the trinity, epistemology, worldviews, and a good deal of soul-searching just to make it through. And I'm not going to lie, it's been tough. But I got through and what do you know, like some others, I'm still a Christian. And while I probably don't see myself as a strict fundamentalist, I'm not scared away from conservatives - they need forgiveness and grace as much as anybody. And they have their strengths.
Well I have only one goal today, which is to not take a nap. Not eazzzzzzzz(!)y. Chow out dogs ~
Wheeeeee I'm back! ("And there was much rejoicing.")
And you MIGHT have been reading this a day earlier (for all those folks who check this site every day), but hey guess what I got: "Down for Maintenance: Blogger is temporarily unavailable due to an unexpected technical problem. Our engineers are working hard to fix Blogger. We will be back up as soon as possible." Stymied again! For once I was FORCED to procrastinate... (Not that it's ever really my fault.)
It's summer, and things are still crazy, but not quite as crazy. I'm taking an online class with Moody (on John's gospel), doing piano stuff with Eric the Piano Guy, wrapping up loose ends at BBC (yes, still), and all the other things I normally do. I may do an internship later this summer, and that's the main thing I'm thinking about these days. More on that later.