your typical Monday night

I really quite like my toes.

Feet are interesting.

(I am completely sober.)

That is all.

making my way home

So in Arizona, they really like country music. Like, really. I guess that makes sense. Never much thought about it before.

I've bounced around friends just a little bit before flying out of the country - the only thing Nikki had to say was "Grand Canyon", and I was in. I just wished we'd had more time to explore everything; Arizona is an incredibly beautiful state. Already there are embryonic plans for a road trip down Route 66 for next summer break. Have I mentioned that I'm coming back to the states to keep studying?

Right now I'm sitting next to Carrie in her family's home in Porterville, CA. That's Central Valley to you, the largest something-or-other in the state. Geographical thingie. Yup, I'm S-M-R-T. It's all small-town agricultural land around here, and it's delightful - undulating golden hills, rows of citrus trees, hazy distant mountain ranges (that's from the smog, though), hot bright days. This is my wind-down time, no pressure, no schedule, just "so what are we gonna do today?" In the last couple of days we've volunteered in Carrie's mum's first grade class in the afternoon; yesterday we took them to "Australia". I wore my hat. Very exciting.

Okay, so I was about to launch into a hat-related anecdote, but I realized that there is absolutely no context for it, so: each semester at Moody they do a week-long conference thing of talks and whatnot. The opening night always has what's called the "Parade of Nations", in which various international students and missionary kids represent their countries by walking down the aisles of the auditorium carrying the flag, preferably dressed in their national costume. Now, I am the only Australian on campus, and although it feels unAustralian to go about waving our flag (without yelling "Aussie Aussie Aussie!"), I duly submitted both times to the flag ceremony.

Of course, lacking a Wallabies jersey, I had very little that would posit as "national costume", so I wore my Redbacks work boots and my black Drizabone hat. (Those boots have been set on fire, cracked all over, tramped in Congo dust and Grand Canyon dirt, and propped up on desks during bible college lectures, and remained sturdy and faithful; I'ma gonna be buried in them boots.)

So when I got the hat out to shelter my poor little white face from the southwest sun, Nikki said, "It's the parade of nations hat!" And I'm all, "Huh?"

Then she explained that in the last flag ceremony (only the second I'd ever participated in, remember), some kid sitting near her in the auditorium that she doesn't even know spotted me coming in and exclaimed exactly that: "It's the parade of nations hat!"

My hat is famous, y'all. (That's an Amerian term. Why they can't pronounce "g'day" right I'll never know.) I might have to be buried in that, too.

In related news, Carrie and I sat with her family and watched the season finale of American Idol, attempting to keep snark to a minimum in the commentary. An excellent exercise in self-control, by the way; I highly recommend it. It was the first time I'd ever seen more than five seconds of the show together, and it was a fascinating study in marketing cycnicsm. Not one I'd want to repeat any time soon, though.

I keep having an achy memory of Chicagoan winter, its snow and bite and brooding dormancy. Some people thrive in the adventure of the elements, and others wilt away from sunshine. I think I got a little of both. One of the sweetest moments I can recall from my whole year there was standing on the eleventh floor of my building, at around ten-thirty at night, watching about fifteen boys from the next-door dorm playing football in the dim golden-lit snow.

I'm looking forward to coming back.

the core of it all

So my favourite thing about doing the Personal Profile assignment was the last section, where we were asked to compile a list of scripture verses which inform our core convictions about ministry. Everyone will have different verses according to their calling and role in the body, and the lists aren't meant to be exhaustive or immutable; just a compilation of those passages that stand out the most, getting a feel for what we feel to be the basic principles.

I found I couldn't comfortably narrow it down past thirteen (highly indicative of character, no doubt), and they are arranged in three catagories: core, character and community. And yes, the alliteration was all my doing. It seems to be a popular mnemonic device around here, and apparently it's catching.

The core catagory has only one passage, but for me it's absolutely central. Without this understanding, there is no truth, no motive and no resource for ministry:

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Colossians 1:15-20

So... yeah. Anything done apart from this is ultimately meaningless. I love the phrase "that in everything he might have the supremacy." And "in him all things hold together." It hit me some years ago, thinking about this passage, something of the depth of its meaning: in all of this whole entire reality, every scrap of space and every tick of time, in every life lived and deed done, in all that there is from beginning to end ever, there is nothing that is not about Christ.

Now, of course, I can't comprehend all that that means, because I can't comprehend everything. It's a shockingly casual word, "everything". Anyhow, I can't get my head around it all, because my mind is not an earth-sized supercomputer with ten million years' run-time*. What I do know is that nothing anyone does, decides or thinks about is worth spending any time on in the long run (read: eternity) if Christ is not the dead-centre reason.

It's a pretty helpful plumb line. Without what Christ has done, there is no power to achieve anything of eternal value. Without who Christ is, there is no reason to do anything of eternal value, or even understanding of what it is. As far as I'm concerned, this is the touchstone for ministry, no matter what you're doing. And it's amazingly easy to lose sight of it, so I'm thinking the phrase "constant vigilance" is appropriate here.

"Character" and "community" verses to be posted soonish (I may or may not be trying to make up for not posting for months). I have a position paper to write on eschatology, so that will be fun. Hope y'all have a meaningful Easter.

*Being facetious. The nerds to whom this was a shout-out won't need to click on this, but just so everyone is included... *links*

so personally me!

I'm procrastinating again - I'm supposed to be doing a "Personal Profile Paper" where we take a whole lot of personality assessment thingies and summarize. Then we set goals and strategize. Can I get a woot? Amen.

If I've learned anything, it's that I put little stock in these things. The criteria seem too narrow and the strokes too broad, even scattershot, like reading horoscope personality traits. Just ignore anything that isn't applicable, you say? Way to inspire confidence.

Mind you, I'm not complaining because I don't like what my results say. My results are fine, if little paradoxical at times. And I'm sure they are somewhat accurate, as any broad stroke will be. It seems the greatest benefit of it is to require greater self-examination, figuring out why the heck I scored what I did rather than something else, and exactly how that applies (and how it doesn't). All in all, a rather tedious exercise. For example, being advised that my personality type(s) need to try new things and sometimes go against the crowd, be more determined and dominant and can be too concerned with winning seems a touch incongruous. Ah, but just delete what isn't applicable? Right.

The worst one (for me) was the character self-assessment, which was just entirely subjective, requiring you to rate yourself against what you perceive to be "average", while noting that by that they mean the average seminary student. It "assumes that you possess enough maturity to give an accurate picture of your present character development." I think I'm okay at evalutating my strengths and weaknesses, but I have always been completely crap at evaluating what constitutes "average". I don't know that I even believe that such a thing exists. Not to mention that asking an Australian to objectively declare that we are, in our own opinion, significantly above average at something achieves conflicted results, given our tall poppy syndrome. As a result, I busted out of the average range only twice in a list of twenty-nine traits. Not particularly helpful.

The best one, for my money, was the one that measured "basic values", probably because each pair was plotted on an independent scale, allowing for flexibility, range and overlap. Oh, and the spiritual gifts one was interesting, too, mostly because I've never done one before rather than because it put labels on what I already knew.

Sigh.

/procrastination

Edit: I just spotted this one too: I size up situations and comply with the rules in order to look good. Also, apparently I am sensitive to what others think about [me] and [my] work.

make some noise for Jesus yo

Just attended the first ever rap music recital at Moody Bible Institute.

Awesome.

and in other news

I don't like posting because I feel like I ought to.

It's cold. Currently -16°C, if my desktop widgets are to be believed. And I am ensconced in one of the quirky, paraphernalia-crammed coffee shops which Chicago seems feverishly to produce. The ones whose musical playlist is precisely calibrated to let you know just how indie-hip they are. There's some good stuff in there, but a lot of it is kind of annoying. Rather like Tom Waits. It weeds out the casual listener from the true aficionado in-crowd. Don't get me wrong, I like Tom Waits, but you have to be in the mood, you know?

My skin is dry. My fingernails are abnormally long, because my rule of thumb is simply to cut them all whenever one chips enough to be annoying - working in the foundry, that happened predictably frequently; now, they just keep... growing.

Also, it's time I wrote my next newsletter and sent it out. Ding it.

"Damn" is a real four-letter word here. I keep shocking people with it. They say "ding" or "dang" or "darn" instead. "Hell" likewise; they say "heck". I kind of wonder, sometimes, exactly what the difference is. Why sanitize swearwords? You mean the exact same thing, surely? And the idea of trying to make "damn" and "hell" more genteel is agreeably absurd, which is one of the reasons I acquiesce. Then again, using them as swearwords the way Aussies do equally downplays their inherent seriousness. So we're all stuck. That's not really the point of swearing, though, is it? The point is to say something shocking, unacceptable, to make a point. Therefore sanitized swearing is oxymoronic... Or just to say something, a conversational place-holder. Or an intensifier. This is making my head hurt.

Time to get more inventive. I'll have to hunt up some Strine and confuse people. I feel I've been letting the side down. One of the things I like about being Australian is that we can borrow or steal anything cultural from anyone and this is perfectly in keeping with our national heritage. We can be Australian and anything else that appeals to us. Rather like the English language.

The sun has set, because it's 4.30 in the afternoon. Enough said.

I like the word bumblebee. Also pickle. There were others I was thinking about the other day, but I've forgotten what they were. But I still like them.

Today's stream of consciousness was brought to you by the letter D, the number 17, and too much loafing about.

homework-induced garble

The words Ephesus, Artemis and silver have formed their own little ideophonic word group association in my head.

Fun.

Two days until the semester is Done.