And I began to weep.

On the first day of Christmas break, which has presently just ended, I spent the entire day in bed.  I read a short book cover to cover; it was C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.  I purchased this book from the used bookstore in the mostly neglected basement of an old small-town library in Elk Rapids, Michigan sometime this past summer, before or after St. Louis and all that came with it, though, I’m not sure.  In hindsight, I wish I knew and I’m not entirely sure why.

Though far from my favorite novel, it was a decent read and served its purpose.  In the end, the story found between its covers is not what will remain with me; instead it is the incidentals and existential bit of treasure found within that I continue to think about.  It is an old edition of an even older book.  Whoever owned it prior has no doubt seen many more years than I; the book — the object itself — with it’s distinctive smell of peace and age, is the unwavering proof that someone else has turned the pages before me.  An old book can remind you of many things, but chief among them is your perpetual youth.  No matter how road-weary and weathered you might become, someone has passed this way before you.  Long, long before you.

All of these things were instantly crystalized and set to incubation in my mind for the past three weeks the moment I turned the page somewhere in the first third of the book and, out from the crease of the elderly spine, fell the stiff receipt of a money order made in the 1960′s.  The sense of time long past and things faded and lost was immediately too much to bear.  And I began to weep.

We are constantly seeking out something that can weather the storm, stand the tests perpetual of time, and remain as day gives way into night.  We are looking for something to find ourselves in, know ourselves by, and call our own.  We are always seeking new things, that they might in turn become old things; that they might remain near and alive when other organs and relations begin to fail and fall away.

In a world full of variables, all we want is a constant.  All we want is to not grow old alone, like the long-forgotten receipt in the broken spine of a long-forgotten book.  All we want is the familiar, the foundational, the safe and secure; all we want is to be loved.  To be loved, and loved, and loved — and never, ever forgotten.

Moving.

I realized today that I hate moving, but not simply for its labor, sweat, and headaches: I hate it because it is representative of a process of change in which a person trades in a long list of familiarities and taken-for-granteds for a structure of open-endedness and variable disguised as a rental house.  I am thankful for the new place and for my close friends who I get to now call “roommates” and I am excited for what twelve months on the east side of Lansing will do, but I hate being in transition.

It seems my entire life is one transitory experience strung up to and followed by another.  It’s true, my living experience is constantly bettering itself on an upward slope, but the summit seems elusive from wherever it is exactly I am right now.  It’s also true that I would not trade what I’ve got now for anything ever I’ve thus far had; I wouldn’t turn back the clock, not for one damn minute.

I was crouching down in the lake yesterday — water up to my chin — trying to take in the beauty and internalize the experience that I might draw from it when winter’s chill comes to rob me of my warmth and sun when I realized that I’m no longer a child.  It will be almost a year before I find myself up at the cottage again.  I wonder what will have happened between now and then.

Probably many things.  Probably many, many things.

Why I Love Living in the Hood.

Every morning I start my day with some exercises in my room and then a run through the neighborhood. The run in the neighborhood is usually a quiet, if not silent, experience; the most conversation I generally have with people at the early hour of 8:20am usually consists of mutual “Good morning’s”. Today, though, was different.

I recently ramped up my efforts to do more push-ups, more crunches, and to run further so, instead of just one lap around the block, today I started doing two. On the first time around, I passed a thirty-something year-old black guy, sitting on his stoop, listening to a portable CD player and smoking. He was nice enough; we said, “Hey, good morning!” and I was on my way.

I made my second lap and, as is my standard practice for the awkward “second hello”, I just waved, smiled, and made a congenial, neighborly noise in his general direction. This, to him, must have sounded something like, “Sir, I would love to hear your health advice. Please, with cigarette in-hand, anoint me with your knowledge and let me know how I could better myself,” because he responded with a real gem:

“Alright, man! Hey — you know, you should just take a laxative or somethin’, you know, to get rid of all that bad food you got in yo’ stomach. That’s why yo’ stomach so fat!”

Since my “fat stomach” is precisely the reason why I get up a half hour early every day and go through this religious ritual of exercise, I could hardly be offended and, besides — it was really, really funny. I don’t believe for even a moment he meant any sort of offense by his remark so I just took it in stride.

Really, though, I’d like you to take a moment to ponder this: can you imagine hearing something like that while running on the level and unbroken pavement of an upscale suburb? No, you won’t find that kind of human interaction anywhere else — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Peace be with you, our neighbors, and my fat stomach.
Danny

Missionary Tourism.

I am about a quarter of the way finished with doing all of the things I need to do before I leave on Friday.  I did roughly a metric ton of laundry (it’s almost unfathomable how many white undershirts I own), started sorting the clothes I need vs. the clothes I don’t, and went to Meijer where I spent about $50 more than I had expected to on a mini-cartful of odds and ends for the upcoming trip.

As I was walking around with my cart full of plain gray and white t-shirts, shampoo, razors, a pair of shoes, notebooks, and vitamins, I realized that it doesn’t even feel like I’m leaving for any extended period of time; even the reasons behind this trip don’t quite carry with them the burden of reality just yet.  In my head, I know I’m leaving on Friday for the field for two months and some change; from where I’m standing right now, however, it feels like I’m merely prepping for a summer vacation.  I’m packing, I’m shopping, I’m making sure all my little ducks are in rows, and I’m feeling mostly like a tourist just before he leaves.

As I walked out to the van in the parking lot, however, I had a moment of reflection: a realization that I’m no tourist - I’m a missionary.  This equal and opposite revelation bothered me because with it comes an almost involuntary feeling of self-importance.  I don’t like that there’s a certain sense of novelty to all this.  I hope that it wears off – and quick.  I don’t like feeling like I have it in me to save the world  – or even a little slice of it - because, at the very end of the day, I can’t do a thing.

Yours (with fear, excitement, and an inflamed sense of ego),
Danny

Why.

Ever since I started telling people that I’m moving to St. Louis, MO for the summer, I’ve heard almost nothing but responses along the lines of “Oh, really?  That’s cool!  Why?”  I then, in my own fumbling way, explain that it’s for an internship with an organization called The Urban Mission.  This line tends to separate the believers from the non, as the non-believing folks tend to grin and ask me if I’m ”gonna go be a missionary and save everyone?” while those who readily identify themselves as Christians always, always, always ask, “So…what are you going to be doing there?” 

As if I’ve got a clue.  I’m irresponsible, lackadaisical, and I have the uncanny knack to relegate things of relative import to the backburner.  I’m leaving in ten days and I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing there; I haven’t gotten the job description yet.  If I could get away with an answer that merely skims the surface, I suppose I’m moving to St. Louis, Missouri because I was accepted as an intern, in partial completion of the internship program at Great Lakes Christian College and, while I’m there, I’ll be doing all manner of intern-like jobs, just live every other college student who’s ever done this sort of thing.  It’s a step along my journey to collegiate success.  An internship is the natural precipitate to a successful career, is it not?  This is, basically, the black-and-white, two-dimensional version of why I’m going to St. Louis.  I’m going because I have to.

There is, however, another reason why, in just ten days, I’m leaving to spend a summer in that city alongside everyone who works at The Urban Mission.  As I stated earlier, I don’t know what my job description is for this internship.  The more I think about it, the more excited I get, and the more sure I become of the fact that, when it comes to explaining job descriptions and the like, I just don’t care.  It is so much more simple than that.  What follows is the ‘what’ of my summer internship, as well as the ‘why’.  It is simple, it could even be called foolish by some, but it makes me feel a certain way when I think about it and that way is simply good.

There is, somewhere within me, a Love that I cannot claim, cannot own, cannot hold onto – though God knows I’ve tried.  For years and years – my entire Christian life, in fact – I’ve squandered this Love, I’ve wasted it.  Like any other element, one would believe that this Love within me would, like all matter, give way to the atrophy of age and disrepair.  It hasn’t.  It’s still there.  And I still try to hold it for myself, for my family, for my friends, for all other manners of selfish, would-be ‘love.’ 

But this is not the reason for which this Love was born.  In the book, No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton says that “…it is in loving others that we best love ourselves.”  He goes on: “Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved.”  And on: “Love can be kept only by being given away.”

You see, this Love inside of me, this thing that I can equate with the knowledge of and only understand through a belief in God, was born to be given away and, for twenty-two years, I’ve masqueraded Christianity and only held this God-breathed concept of Love hostage as a means to meet my own selfish ends.  I’m going to St. Louis to love people the way Jesus did.  I don’t know who they’ll be, what they’ll look like, or even what sort of background and circumstances they’ll come from.  But it is for them that I believe I’m being sent.  I’m going because I want to give this awesome, magnificent, holy, life-shaking, world-changing Love away – because it was never mine to begin with.  I’m going because I believe it’s something Jesus might do.  I’m going because it feels right.

I’m going because, with everything inside of me, I know that I have to.

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Friends and family, I hope you will read this blog while I’m gone.  I’ve never been so good at keeping in touch with those I love, but I hope this offers a two-way connection and keeps us in each other’s lives.  I don’t know what things I’ll be experiencing in the times to come, but I hope you will experience them with me through this silly blog.

Love & Faith; Grace & Peace,
Danny