New Blog

I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions. I like to joke that I enjoy making resolutions like, "Eat more chocolate." (Actually, I do make resolutions, but I make them the night before my birthday.) Anyhow, I did make a New Year's resolution. I want to spend this year saturated in the gospels. To do this, I'm trying to write a blog a day about a text or several texts from the gospels. I've started in and here's the link: http://athisfeet2012.blogspot.com/. Check it out when you get a chance.

A Difficult Week for a Cat

It has been a difficult week for my sis-in-law's cat, Lily. I keep accidentally passing through her 5 feet bubble of personal space, not noticing her sitting underneath the fern plant, walking by her too quickly, and wearing white socks in her presence (she really hates those white socks). All of my horrible actions have elicited hisses, swats, and groans from her. She's even chased me once. (It's a little unnerving to be on the receiving end of a cat playing offense--ah!)

I'm not Lily's only archnemesis. She also hates a neighborhood cat named Milly (if you grew up in the 80s saying those two names close together might make you think of a certain band, now disgraced).

Lily's feud with Milly wakes everyone up most mornings around 6 am. The cats have settled into a happy routine of positive mutual disdain. Lily's hisses, growls, and high-pitched squeals usually give us notice that Milly has come to the glass door again to make faces at her.

The noise is so loud and the fight sounds so vicious that we might be tempted to think the glass door came down. But it hasn't. No Lily's fight is all "sound and fury, signifying nothing".

Miami Trip

I have a running relationship with bad luck, so when a friend suggested I meet up with him in Miami for his two hour layover in the airport--I should have said no right off the bat. It's a four hour drive from Orlando to Miami, and I had a to-do list that was hovering over me something wicked. But I'm a people person. And heck what was four hours in comparison to the three years I hadn't seen him? Plus, I had my handy new GPS, and I felt invincible. My days of getting lost were forever behind me!

Things started out bad. I struggled to get out of bed, I had to fill the gas tank up, but then I got in a good rhythm and kind of enjoyed seeing parts of Orlando I'd never encountered. "So this is what south Orlando looks like?" I eventually got on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike and was zipping (well, as much as I can zip along) until an overwhelming sleepiness came over me. I tried to fight it. But after I had one of those troublesome fantasies of just closing my eyes taking a long nice nap in the car, and after I found my car wandering into another lane, I decided a break was in order. I pulled off at a gas station and lost 20 minutes off my ETA.

Then I drove on and on and on and on. At one point my friend called and asked, "Where are you?" "I'm only 20 minutes away," I said. After talking with him, I discovered that he would be be boarding his flight in 40 minutes. "Oh no," I grumbled and willed myself to go faster...but it was around this time that things went bad. First traffic...the empty road became a bastion of slow moving cars (I watched my GPS ETA extend longer and longer). Then my GPS was very faithful in telling me--"in five hundred yards exit on the left". Unfortunately, those five hundred yards involved three lanes of traffic and people dead set on letting anyone in front of them.
(My estimated ETA got even later.)

After several loops and explorations of various Miami freeways, my friend called again. We determined that I had about 10 minutes to see him. I told him, "Run out to the drop off and pick up, and I'll meet you there." I had ten minutes left on my ETA. I could make it in time for a quick hug.

Come to find out the drop off/pick up section of the Miami Airport has one little entrance if you are wanting to be right next to the doors. I missed the entrance, and from where I was driving on an outer left lane, I couldn't see my friend. (He had been calling me from a pay phone.) I tried to exit to pull through the airport again, but I ended up pulling into a "service vehicle only" area entrance. Argh!! Eventually, I managed to swing around and go through the airport again. I got in on the inside lane. I stopped my car, got out, and looked for my friend. He was gone. I drove a little more, stopped my car and looked again--nope, he wasn't there. I realized I had missed him and pulled ahead over the curb (smack wack crunch thunk) in front of me with a heavy (and slightly embarrassed) heart.

I went immediately to Denny's for comfort. (Breakfast is the best comfort food.) I was tired and just needed some food. I sat in the booth pondering the absurdity of it all--I was in Miami with nothing to show for it. I drank a glass of cold ice water, and it slipped from my hands...ice landed on my lap and on the floor and several customers turned to see the commotion. Sigh.

I somehow hoped there was a bigger reason for me to be in Miami. I wanted to (at that point) save someone's life or run into a lost soul who needed a listening ear. Then I could say that the whole trip had been worth something. I had been sent to Miami on a mission!

No such opportunities showed up--though I did end up doing the bulk of my finals grading on a beach under a palm tree--that sure beat my office!!

There was one good thing that came out of the experience: besides lessons in better planning and more pessimism about my ability to get anywhere in the "estimated time"...the trip broke up a little wave of discontentment that had started to come over me the night before. In fact, I was so involved in my mini-pity party that Sunday night that my Miami airport friend had called me twice before I got back with him. I was trying to drown my sorrows in the Internet (reading obscure news articles and watching cat videos) that I hadn't noticed he had called me a second time.

His phone call/invitation to make a spontaneous trip to Miami changed the whole direction of my thought. I had to plan a trip! Then I had to execute it, and the execution was so poorly done that I had no time to think about the small thing making me discontent. I came back tired, amused, chagrined, and well content again.

So maybe that's what I'm walking away with. Sometimes God has to send me to Miami to get over myself.

Reaping and Sowing

"Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he reap" (Galatians 6:7-8, ESV).


I laid in my bed mulling over that text last night. Just the other day, I had spent some time reading over journals from about ten years ago. I was thinking about how the life I live now is a small reaping of the life I lived ten years ago. I wondered, "Did I sow well? Am I reaping now a good harvest?"

The second thing I considered was what am I sowing now? What is it that I'm bringing into my life that I will harvest later? What am I nourishing now that will grow up later?

I usually think of this text in the context of my spiritual life. (I want to sow generously in matters of God!) But the text can also be applied to every area of my life (my health, relationships, work etc). I read a book recently that emphasized this idea. It was called the Principle of the Path. The book's basic premise was simply--what we do now has a direct affect on our future. It seems like a no-duh principle, but I so easily forget it.

I want to blindly sow and blindly reap. I don't want to make a connection between what I do today and who I am tomorrow. Sometimes I'd rather blame chance than to blame myself.

The Principle of the Path was a call for me to sit down and heartily think about where I am, so that I won't be surprised when I get to my destination.

Downtown

I stood in downtown Orlando last night watching fireworks. The fireworks were gorgeous--bright whites, purples, and reds all breaking up over the buildings of downtown Orlando. I stood in front of a Baptist church with with a long front porch and white colonnades--a very southern architectural scheme. On the porch of the Baptist church were thirty plus homeless people. They had all set up camp for the night. They had marked their places with the blankets that the church provides every night.

The contrast was surreal. Above me the sky was breathtaking--behind me was one of the painful realities of life in the US: homelessness. (It has its various causes--mental illness, drug abuse, terrifically bad luck.)

My students have started a homeless ministry, and I was just along for the ride. We came down to pass out clothes (jackets, shirts, pants, underwear and socks). We also came to just hang out. I ended up kneeling and chatting with a woman who I guessed was in her early twenties if not teens. She sat next to her husband in his early thirties. We talked about their life. She had grown up on a farm and loved horses--"a real country girl" she said. He also had spent sometime in middle-of-no-where cities.

I don't know how much I can do to actually help the homeless (so many of their needs goes beyond handouts). I asked a friend about it on the way home. He told me the story of the pool Bethesda. He noted that there were dozens of sick people there, but Jesus only healed one. He said, you help prayerfully with wisdom, you establish relationships with the homeless, you let them know that this isn't about getting your good works done, and you let them know you care.

The 21st Century

At least once a semester I send my students outside to write about what they see, smell, hear, touch, and taste (if they eat!).

I just sent my students out and I'm waiting to hear back from them. One of the students left with his laptop. The other students were teasing him about dragging his computer out to write, and I joked with him a little too. He responded to the teasing with, "It IS the 21st century." He was turning as he spoke and didn't hear my response. I replied, "Tragically so."

There's a part of me that longs for life before the ubiquitous presence of phones, laptops, and handheld devices. You really could be with a person and just be with that person alone.

I sometimes feel sad that the generation just ten years younger than me does not know what life was like without the Internet. But for all my nostalgia I would not go back. I like what I read once about people who long for the past. The author suggested that nostalgic people go home on a hot August day and turn off their air conditioner.

Feet and Other Things

I was so grateful for the man sitting next to me in Sabbath School last week who asked, "Does the fact that I'm pointing my foot at you bother you?" He's spent a great deal of his life in Asia so he gets that small detail. It just made me happy.

I miss all the things that no one here really gets. For example, it doesn't make sense to go around complaining about my shoe that is falling apart and compare it to a loi-gao-gao shoe.

Before I moved to Thailand, I had only vague impressions of it. My knowledge of Thailand could be summed up in a sentence: it was the country with lots of prostitutes, a very successful AIDs campaign, and the place where they made pad thai.

So I guess I can't expect more from people. But it there's a certain sadness in having a world tucked away in the corner of my heart. I can only mutter Thai words to myself and move on.

Last week I was interviewed for a class on world religions about my experience in Thailand. After the professor thanked me for the interview, I struggled to stop talking. You mean its over? I can't share anymore?