on witnessing a team that remains from my childhood comeback from 18 points to defeat my fears

Let's imagine I'm a leather ball, laced together but on all accounts bursting apart. I was thrown from endzone to endzone on Sunday, and I won. I won. I finally won.

And, I repeat to myself, "one more game," because hopes are wound up in a leather ball. I admit, I believe I could conquer the lot of my problems if and only if the Colts could win a Super Bowl. What a silly thought to have, to wrap one's hopes into a game--were it so easy. That one team could score more points than another and my disposition could be improved. Wouldn't that be a feat? Sport transcending sport and becoming a raison d'être.

No. --So foolish, I say.

--Matters of one's disposition are best rooted in the things one can control, the appropriate response would be.

--Right, right, I agree. --Best to restrain my own well-being. Reign it in and grow it so that I can harvest it on command. Best not to let it compete with something else. Best to hide it away from the vicious world of shoulder pads and cleats.

--I see where you're taking this, the appropriate responder anticipates.

--Best to hide my spirits away, I ignore the caveat and continue. --Best to bury it instead of running it up the middle on third down and two on the four-yard line, on the off-chance that the offensive line will read the defensive scheme exactly, perfectly even, and the hole will expand and I will enter the endzone unscathed, untouched, blameless.

Best to control things myself.

on beginning a new semester

There is a freshness in the beginning of a new thing. It raises up in me--this newness--and fills my lungs like the sharp sting of the quick inhalation in midwinter. It is a good burn, I attest, because it means the body is being worked into submission.

It is breaking into a thousand pieces--the body that is--but my resurrector, He glues me together like a mosaic. Perhaps faith is a portrait splintered and re-constructed, and we spend the good majority of our effort as a community on the agreement of what our faith should look like: nice and packaged and well-rehearsed and presentable. Once, we were not this way; we had dirt beneath our fingernails and the blind in our arms.

Let's return to it.

I may be going to Uganda for my HNGR internship; that would be a beautiful thing and it will challenge me. Oh, it will challenge me.

on having a girl in the war

So, so, so, I've been reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it is exactly that. A remarkable blend of fiction and non that is encouraging in its ability to inspire a writer to write. So, so, so, I've set out to write a simple post, that may or may not be read by the people I like. [Chances are, if you're reading this, I like you.]

But, I've nothing remarkable to say, so I won't say a thing: