escapingbabylon.com

Family Night picnic

Church sign, ironically enough seen on my way to church.

Geese outside the Guthrie Theater this morning.

Tried sending a picture from my mobile phone here. It was horrible, I hope you didn’t see it.

Somehow over the past year I’ve become a full-fledged adult, or at least I’ve become a lot closer to a full fledged adult than I have ever been. I’ve actually been able to grow a decent beard (even though I’m doing the perma-stubble thing, it’s better perma-stubble than I’ve ever been able to do). And I’ve had two conversations with people who are definitely older than me (one actually has a kid that is in my age group) where they’ve said something to the effect that they respect my advice (actually one of them said that their mother respects my advice). This wierds me out.

I guess in some respects it is cool, but it still wierds me out that somehow while I was not looking I crossed to line from a good and slightly overacheiving kid/youth to an actual adult. It’s not only in how people react to me, but my internal life is very different from two years ago when I was 23. In the past my struggle has been in figuring out what to do with my life. Now I’m pretty positive about what I want to do with my life, and the struggle now is acheiving it. The places/institutions in my life that were places that shape me are now becoming the places that I now shape. It’s a wierd feeling.

It’s also a wierd feeling realizing that your age now rounds up to 30. I don’t know about you, but for me 30 is an age that symbolises settled in my mind. I hear 30 in my mind and I picture myself in the career that is probably going to last through the rest of my life, in a house or other such long term residence, married with 1-2 children. In some ways I can see how I could get there from here, but a lot of that path is murky, and there are some pretty significant gaps in my perception. I can’t shake the feeling that from here on I’m heading for and building a much more permanent life, and taking some significant life-making steps within the next couple of years. And that’s a wierd feeling to live with sometimes.

I still have a large post talking about the InterVarsity summer conference that I went to, but I just ran into a former student from Family Night and his dad. He was in my 3rd – 4th grade class, was some trouble at first, but an awesome kid. He sort of dropped off the face of the earth for a long time, and I had no idea what had happened to him. Anyway, today as I am waiting for my second bus to head to the day job out of nowhere he shows up. He’s taking the bus with his dad (who he’s now living with) and looks really happy and wants to start coming back to church!

If you’ve worked in youth ministry, you’ve probably had the experience where there are certain kids who just capture your heart and change your life. This kid was one of them. So right now my heart is simply rejoicing and praising and all of that. As a matter of fact, I’m going to stop writing before I start weeping at my desk.

So in a 15 minute conversation at Pursuit (I’ll explain later) I have found an artist to design my tattoo and someone who knows of a Christian tattoo artist who would do it for me. I am very, very happy with the artist who I asked to design it for me. She’s a Macalester Grad whom I’ve known for years, and have loved everything that she did. She is a person who can worship with a pencil and paper, and worship is exactly what I’m going for. I can’t believe I didn’t think about having her design it before. Basically if she does design the tattoo, I can easily see myself getting the tattoo within a week.

So on the good side this past weekend was one of the best weekends I’ve had in at least a month. I can probably nail down two to three reasons for that (and one of those reasons is cause for thought, but possibly more on that later). However, it’s been part of a pretty dramatic turnaround in how I’ve been feeling over the past 2 or so weeks.

I’m worried that the turnaround has been a little too dramatic. But then I realize that it’s the fact that I’m happy that is making me worried and then I worry about the fact that I’m worrying because I’m happy. Can anyone see the futility here?

But I didn’t really post this to whine. I’m a little bit confused, a lot happy, and have a couple of decisions to make. If you guys can pray for me, and for a couple of InterVarsity things that are coming up (which would include arranging a pre-semester prayer gathering to intercede for the campus, as well as some networking gatherings that I’m trying to get going) and just for clarity in my decision-making process I would really appreciate it.

I’m building databases on a Saturday. Part of my current life reorganization is to re-think/reorganize the way that I’m handling some of my InterVarsity duties. Part of that was getting the copy of Microsoft Access and designing a supporter database. I’m thinking I did a pretty decent job on it too. I’m going to call a more experienced staff member to see what other queries/capabilities I’d need, but all in all this is a pretty fun (and useful) geekout process

Untitled-71, originally uploaded by toad1981.

In a lot of ways I think I’m better with a brushpen than I am with a pencil. I like the boldness of it, and the way that it requires you to be representational (for want of a better word) about the image.

Here’s what I mean by that. A drawing isn’t an accurate representation of how an object looks in real life. A drawing comes about when the artist observes real life, analyzes it, and usess lines to represent what he or she sees there. The brush and ink forces you to do two things, firstly it forces you to give up the conceit of being able to reproduce a 3 dimensional object in two dimensional space, secondly because of the nature of the medium, it forces you to be efficient in your communication. In most cases it isn’t practical to keep adding details in the hope that the nature of the object you are drawing will become apparent, but instead you are forced to choose the most telling details, and illustrate them with your brush.