Category Archives: Just Random Stuff

What I Would Do In Another Lifetime

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I often spend time wondering or fantasizing about what I would do if I had another life to live. I waver between on the one hand really applying myself and being something great like a surgeon, or an artist, or some other brilliant and hardworking genius, and on the other hand I wouldn’t mind going a very different, non-traditional path like being a bike messenger, or a barista, or an intentional homeless wanderer. Any of these latter options sounds appealing because I wouldn’t be a part of the rat race. I wouldn’t be responsible for other people’s success. And I wouldn’t have had to go to college and try to make life-impacting choices at the age of 17. How the hell is a 17-year old supposed to know what she or he wants to for the rest of life? So before we are old enough and responsible enough to even join the military, let alone drink a beer, we are expected to decide who we will become and what our vocation will be. It makes zero sense. As for me, I love what I am doing, but I wish I could do a million other things.

I have also spent time considering a career as a long-haul trucker, but I am not sure that I could deal withe being away from Becs for that long at a time. I have a friend from high school who posted this as his status: “i’ve come to realize the only time i am truely happy when i’m not with my kids is when 18 wheels are singing their song as miles roll by.” I envy him for his freedom on the road. I want to hear the wheels sing on the road, and to feel the wind on my face as the miles tick by. This is probably why I prefer to ride my motorcycle or drive when I go on vacation. I love to watch the road pass by and know that I am headed somewhere. It doesn’t really matter if the road is leading me away from home or back. Either way, I know I am headed somewhere, instead of sitting still.

I don’t envy him the feeling of being sad when he’s away from his kids, as he’s posted in multiple other posts. But I do envy the fact that he has children. Multiple times in the past few weeks, I have found myself either dreaming or fantasizing about having children, or a child. I’d be a good mom, Bec has already been a good mom, and together we’d make excellent moms. Why can’t my health insurance pay for artificial insemination? Why can’t I just swallow my pride and use a turkey baster? I have multiple people who’d be willing donors if I could just pay for the service. I could adopt, but I can’t afford that either, which is way more criminal. There are so many kids who could use healthy and stable homes. Why does it have to cost so fucking much to get a child? Oh, well.

 

Sometimes a Body Needs Silence

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It was enough just to sit there without words. —Louise Erdrich

Today promises to be chock full of goodness, like that candy bar that’s chock-full-o-nuts, whatever candy bar that is. I am again at Starbucks, but today I am working on my fat studies presentation. In an attempt to get this finished before I leave for the conference, I have set aside today to work. I should be grading my students’ essays, planning for next week, and commenting on the many rough drafts that are in my bag. Instead, I am setting all of that aside in order to work on this paper. I am writing about the way middle school and high school students perceive their fat teachers and peers.Unfortunately, none of the research I have done really has anything to do with what I want to write about. Most research I am learning pretends that people don’t exist until they reach college. Middle schoolers and high schoolers and their teacher (by default I suppose) are non-entities. We simply don’t exist on the academic radar.

Even the data base known as ERIC contains no articles that I can find about the status of fat kids, their teachers, or their school environment. However, in my search I found countless articles about how schools are trying to contain the obesity epidemic. I have a few thoughts about that: (1) Stop making PE one of the first classes we cut. Just because of the nature of the subject, PE gives students time to exercise and unwind from the pressures of school. Statistics show that people eat more when they are stressed. (2) Make all students have PE everyday. Most schools only provide PE once a week. For example, the school my mom teaches at gives their students 20 minutes of PE once a week. (3) Stop cutting recess in order to provide more instructional time. We learn how to be people at recess. When we cut recess, we not only cut exercise time, we also cut the time in which children learn self-governance, discover problem solving, and figure out how to interact with their peers in a non-contrived environment. (4) Feed students healthy food. Vegetables are as inexpensive as meat. Beans and rice are less expensive than any other foodstuffs. If each student got some beans and rice, a green vegetable, and a pint of milk, they’d have a pretty decent meal. And it wouldn’t be “fat topped with cheese floating in grease,” as Bec’s kids used to describe school lunch. (5) Allow children to walk to school and to play outside, and give parents the training they need to provide excellent snacks and meals at home. Sometimes the very things we fight against come from ignorance, lack of time, and a weak support system. So, I suppose instead of penalizing people for things beyond their control, we should help them avoid those things.

I came here craving silence and found myself having a conversation with someone I generally can’t stand. This conversation, however, was pleasant and fulfilling. I still crave the silence of reading and writing, but I am glad I didn’t pass up this opportunity. This ends up being on of my biggest problems: I’d much rather have good, enriching conversation than do anything else. It’s probably something I should work on. Or I should have found an occupation where that is an admirable quality instead of a deterrent to success.

The outlook for silence looks bleak. Next weekend (October 1-3) I will be in MN with two of my closest friends. The next weekend (October 8-10) holds my father’s and Bec’s birthday celebrations, and a friend is coming in from Kentucky. October 15-17 is a potential silent retreat, but the next weekend is filled-up with fall break, a ghost tour, and a Halloween party, all of which I am super excited about. I am going to spend the day with my mom in her classroom on that Friday. The next weekend is empty for now, but November 6 (when I was supposed to run my marathon) is Amy’s big birthday bash. The weekend after that, November 12-16, means that Bec and I are going to MN to see the boys. I need about 75 fewer things to do. :)

As busy as I have been, I have still find to contemplate spirituality. I always find time for that. What I am finding is that I need to listen more (hence the need for silence) and talk or comment less (hence the need for silence).

Going Away. New Focus. And Changes.

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I am going on a week-long road trip to Nebraska and Minnesota, with a little swing through South Dakota to liven things up. I am not taking my computer, and I plan to only sporadically use my cell phone. This means two things: no blog entry this week and hopefully a lot to write about next week.I am actually looking forward to being detached for a bit, or as Bec’s sister Susan says, “It is ok to be inaccessible.” In my heart, I know it is okay, but in my head I keep thinking I will miss something important. I know this isn’t true. And, if I do miss something, will it be the end of the world? No.

When I return from my trip, there will be approximately three weeks until school starts. Hopefully what you will begin to read here will be a more academic look at things related to teaching, theology, social justice, etc. I started this blog to discuss ideas, and it has morphed into a weird combination of journal and goal setting, which I will still do as well. However, I want a better portion of it to be more focused, direct readings of current events, books I am reading, and life circumstances that will cause us all to think more critically, myself foremost.

Finally, I also wanted to thank everyone for making a relatively rough birthday better. Your kind words and happy thoughts were just what I needed. I am working on becoming the person you think I am! :) I am starting to do that by changing the focus of my running form pure pleasure to raising money for a cause that is important to me. You can support my efforts in fundraising for Riley Hospital for children by going to this website to donate money. I want to raise $1000.00 for them, and right now I have $25.00 raised, which I donated myself. :( Pitch in.

The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley

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The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church by Andrew Farley begins with an epigraph by Arthur Bury from 1691, making the claim that the naked gospel “was the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached,” which is what I expected this book to do. I expected to read a new take on Jesus theology, in which I would learn a bit more about what Jesus said and did and the ways in which those actions were revolutionary. I would have loved this book if that had been what it really did. What I got instead was a whole different story involving Paul, a Jew who supposedly grew to have no use for his traditional religious upbringing, and those people who came after Paul who also saw no need for relationship with the Jewish Scriptures. How, can I ask, does this present “the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached”? Instead, possibly the epigraph should have been a quote from Origen who thought that Paul “taught the Church which he had gathered from among the Gentiles how to understand the books of the Law” and then ignore them. It seems as if Farley spends quite a bit of time discussing Paul and Paul’s aversion to his own tradition, which doesn’t seem like a Naked Gospel, but more of an interrogation of Paul. That being said, this book isn’t all bad; it just wasn’t what I expected.

Farley provides an excellent critique of our desire to remain staid in our own complacent following of hollow rules that we perceive make us good Christians. However, I am not sure that early Christians would agree with his reading of the meaning of old and new and the ways that he argues Christians are called to live a new life without considering the laws or the Jewish Scriptures. It makes no sense to advocate the very heavy disregard for the early Christians’ previous religious experience, especially because there is substantial evidence to the contrary. In fact, the very people Farley discusses—Peter, Paul, and the other apostles—did not leave the Jewish faith. They merely reconfigured their previous beliefs to fit with their newly acquired faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Particularly, Matthew adheres to his Jewish roots as he tried to convince both Gentiles and Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. Making such an adamant break from discussing Jewish traditions and religion is a major weakness of Farley’s text. I do agree with his assessment that Christians need to learn to avoid “the painful symptoms of un-necessary religion” (31), but does this need to be done by completely breaking away from tradition or previous manifestations of religious worship? I think not. Even Paul, who Farley quotes sometimes very out of context, references his own religious and secular traditions as well as the religious and secular leaders of his time.

The main tenet that Farley proposes with which I agree is the idea that we are free from sin. We are always already forgiven, and too many Christians don’t realize it. They are crippled by the perceived necessity to keep accounts of their sins and to compulsively ask forgiveness for those sins, sometimes to the point of unhealthy self-reflectivity and analysis. I love the song “Everything Glorious” by David Crowder Band, because it makes this claim so well. I think Farley is getting at the same question as Crowder: “You make everything glorious and I am Yours, so what does that make me?” According to Farley, “It’s important to understand that we’re joined to the risen Christ, not to a dead religious teacher” (180). I would even take this a step further and say that we are the risen Christ. Whatever is to be done on this earth now, is to be done through us as we are the manifestation of the work that Jesus did on the cross. We are required to be Christ to people: “Genuine growth occurs as we absorb truth about who we already are and what we already possess in Christ” (187). I concur.

In short, I liked this book because it challenges several commonly held beliefs in contemporary Christianity, such as the idea that we have to change who we are to be perfect Christians. As Farly writes, “Having Christ live through you is really about knowing who you are and being yourself. Since Christ is your life, your source of true fulfillment, you’ll only be content when you are expressing him” (194). I agree but my main complaints about this book can speak directly to this idea: what if the way you experience Christ living through you includes a love for and an adherence to those “Old Testament” ideas that he claims are null and void? Can we really claim that the naked gospel is a gospel void of any sense of tradition or Jewish scripture, relying solely on tradition and reason to inform our actions as Christians? I don’t think so. I don’t think this is really “Jesus plus nothing.” It’s more like Jesus nothing with a heaping helping of misread Paul. I would recommend this book, simply so people could wrestle through all of these ideas as Farley adeptly challenges the reader to think critically about a variety of ideas.

You can read this and other reviews of the same book at Viral Bloggers.

Thanks, Pittsburgh Pirates.

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Dear Pittsburgh Pirates,

Thanks for being in last place in the National League. I feel very good about myself for choosing to be a fan of your team this year. My self-esteem needed this boost, and I am sure yours did too. Could you try hard not to completely suck for the rest of this year? If Baltimore ends up with a better record than you do, we’re through.

Sincerely,

A Newly Devoted Fan