on the changing weather and my disposition

I don't take much pride in the fact that the weather, especially days like today, the unexpected snow during the first week of April, directly influence my state of mind. What a shitty day. The clouds have conspired against the sun and the ground is freezing cold. It is as though April never showed at all ... save Monday when it was 60 degrees and quite nice.

I have never longed for Monday before. Not once, and this entry will be the first time I long for a day such as Monday. Mondays are reminders that we repeat instead of progress. I spend so much energy longing that I can't adequately make myself present. I sense that acute longing when I look at this campus or when I walk in between the aisles of a supermarket or when I wait in line behind someone at an ATM or when I hear someone's music from two cars over at a stoplight. We are all groping against it, and we can't quite articulate what to call it.

And, when we can't name it, we can't claim it. To name is to call into existence, because language–it will save us. The Word become flesh, and a bevy of phrases come to mind: the Incarnation! The Incarnation? To call it a name, to believe, to long, to look with expectation, these are things we call the human impulse. Language doesn't suffice. So, why would we pull the Word into the world of language and make language to suit the Word?

When I can't find the language, the words, the phrases to match my disappointment in a world that requires war–where men kill men and women, I doubt it–all of it–so profoundly that I let it disappear into concretions and only concretions: a woman riding a bike, a table holding a plate full of spaghetti, a book made from the widdling away of trees, a fingernail clipping that can be divided into molecules and particles then quarks until we are all comprised of energy, a space in which we exchange symbols–crude representations of what we mean.

But, the Word! What does He do? What does the Incarnation mean to peace? to meaning? to equillibrium? All things moving toward some good? Those who love him?

There: community. All things moving toward community; being known and being loved, it must be where we are going.

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.