HOWDY

i can feel myself desperately grasping for control.  any amount of it over any manner of thing holds out the promise of quelling this turmoil.  but it won’t.  it won’t.

brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.  for many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.  their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.  but our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself.

philippians 3:17-21

the call of worldliness resonates so deeply with our own sinfulness that, though we never hear a sound to alarm us, we find ourselves dancing to its rhythms, marching to its beat, away from the so often strange and alien tones of the truth and of the Cross.  the siren call of comfort, conformity, and casual disregard will lead us to shipwreck - of this there is no doubt.  beware of excusing your sin by disclaiming it as merely the way of the world, as though that was ever, in all the history of creation, a good thing.

oh alumni, i fear for you and for me.

after these things the word of the LORD came to abram in a vision: “fear not, abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

genesis 15:1

college ministry is an exquisite impossibility.  every year, you discover that you have fallen in love with a group of people - people who only four years prior were strangers or even enemies.  and almost as soon as you realize the depth of your heartbeat for them, for their safety, for their future, for all they will become, you are confronted with the reality that you must let them go.  and that you must make room in your bursting heart for a new group of strangers.  how can this be possible? is the heart truly so elastic?

the answer is No, it is not.  it is an impossibility.  it is impossible to love and then love again, and then love again, and then again.  that is, until you realize that what you thought was your heart beating for these people was never your heart alone, but was from the beginning always God’s heart for these people revealed to yours.  it is impossible to love in this way until you realize that your growing love for a group of people is not so much your love growing as it is God’s love rising in crescendo on the strings of your finite heart.  it is God playing His own love song on your heart.

and then you realize that God will never stop loving His people.  that it was always His love that mattered, that will carry them, that leads them on into futures distant and unknown.  and that’s when it feels alright to make another room in your heart - a room that you will soon find is already full of others, too.

college ministry is impossible.  i can’t imagine life without it.

what is it about fires that makes us want to keep them going?

wow.  there’s a website that “measures your influence on your social networks”.  it’s called klout.com.  they score your signficance.  wikipedia’s rundown:

“Klout scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a higher assessment by Klout of the breadth and strength of one’s online influence. Klout scores are supplemented with three nominally more specific measures, which Klout calls ‘True Reach’, ‘Amplification’, and ‘Network Impact’.

“True Reach is based on the size of a person’s ‘engaged audience’ of followers and friends who actively listen and react to her or his online messages. Amplification Score relates to the likelihood that one’s messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes, and comments). Network Score reflects the computed influence value of a person’s engaged audience.”

klout.com.  would you believe that?  i do.  it’s existence pretty much confirms what some have been suggesting all along:  for all its capacity to empower the marginalized and equalize the inhabitants of our global neighborhood, in the end, the internet is just another (virtual) world for our narcissism to conquer.

if it wasn’t for the Resurrection, i’d probably be a nihilist.

deuteronomy 32:35