I am a lie
A self loving, self hating
Little bout of consciousness
Declaratively relating

I am a desert
Vastly constituted by shifting sands
Mighty and empty
Soulessly existing so grand

I am a desperate mime
Grasping for words to scream
No thoughts to think, no message to speak,
No visions to tell or dream

I am an ocean
Mistaken for depth and wealth
Inspiring to a colony of fools
While drowning at the bottom of myself

What is this treacherous treason?
My actions betray my selfish reason.

Topography

I am a nominal shade, fading like a cooling fire, dying even with the memory of itself. I am forgotten at the core, while weakly present at the surface. My body is fine, my words adequate, my work thorough. I am a void. I am wasted and cold. I walk. I work. I eat and sleep. I pay rent. I buy organic food and fairly traded Christmas gifts. I listen in church. I change the oil in my car regularly. I read books about the world. I watch foreign films. I house hunt. I interview well. I call my mom and tell my wife I love her. I listen to the melody of coffee-shop prophets. But their words only go in my ears. I think that I think.
What am I doing? I have turned this mountain into a flat map.

My God, then,
Why have I given up the fight?
Warring and whoring
As if salvation were a right!

My previous posting has elicited much more response than I expected. I have been asked by at least two people for explanations that I have not had time to give in person, so I would like to offer comments here. Forgive me if they do not fully answer any questions you may have. The poem is actually one that I myself despise at times, and I am not exactly sure why I chose to post it. I dislike it not because of its provocative imagery, but because it is a weak poem. Its imagery is mixed, its rhyme schemes are sporadic, and its intent is obviously less than clear. Moreover, the poem represents unresolved emotions and complex issues that still leave me unsure.

I wrote it at a time when I worked for the church and felt poorly equipped as a vassal for that institution. My representation of the church seemed hypocritical because the church was my shallow tool and method for faking faith. The God that I had so zealously sought had already proved much less tangible than I expected, and my energetic rally became undirected despair similar to that of a passionate young lover, rejected for someone else's romance.

My wounds ran so terribly deep that my only possible hope for coping was to hide my folly and the personal and heinous rejection I felt from everyone - myself most paramount. I played the same roles I always had; the student, the leader, the ready missionary. But play acting was cheap and I knew how surface deep my facade truly was. The book of James tells us that faith without works is dead. Imagine the complexity and torment of works without faith! It was more than I could bare.

As I have said before, I never really stopped believing in the existence of God. The question that has become the unresolved issue of my life is of the character of God and goodness. The poem acknowledges the God that I do not know and the sense of prostituting my soul to an institution that helped me pretend that God was who I wanted God to be, rather than the source of pain torment of my secret life. It also acknowledges the useless masquerade the church would become as people discovered that God was not to be found in a pulpit.

The line that reads: "I will live like there is a heaven, I will live like there is no hell, for damnation is upon me, but Grace is as well," is the meat of what I was trying to say. It expresses the terrible fear that heaven, and heavens expectations, are real. It also expresses the futility of living in a way that tries to avoid hell. For hell is real and we are all in its grasp and under its dominion. Living as if there is no hell means knowing there is nothing I can do about it. Damnation is constantly and justly upon us all. And if we are to have any hope of any other fate it is completely exterior of ourselves and our actions. Free Grace means that God saves by His own desire and ability, no matter how noble or mired we may seem to be. Grace comes by Gods whims. The poem is an acknowledgement that there is nothing, good or bad, that I can do to influence Gods application of Grace.

So, I'm the whore
You're the pimp
And who's our John?
All the buyers are gone
anyway

The pews are empty in the church
They can only take so much hurt
Before they leave
For any other thing
but lies

I will live like there is a heaven
I will live like there is no hell
For damnation is upon me
But grace is as well

God and I have an understanding
He won't ask me to do what I can't
I will ask only what He offers
And what he does not, I will accept

I want to live like there is a heaven
I want to live like there is no hell
I want to live like I were an angel
before the angels fell

"Don't say my name like that,"
Said the plebian to the slow and subtle thief.
I used to be your lover, now I am your child
And I fear there is no relief.

I imagined Dido and Anius,
I imagine you did too.
Neither of us are quit so strong,
Drinking this endless, nihilist brew.

I am deaf to frozen words
No matter how gently you speak.
You search in me for something to hate
But I am not that which you seek.

Fate is not truth;
A lie we too long believed.
We died to ourselves without putting on new selves
And we have nothing left to grieve.

I am again feeling the urge to do something. 'Doing something' to me inevitably means moving to some place like Dheisheh, or Sarajevo, and destroying any lingering sense of normalcy or complacency in my life; thrusting all my dust into the wind and trusting in life's subtle pattern for making things alright in the end. Only, making a decision like that now involves bringing Loren along for my adventures and experiments. She tends to need that normalcy more than I, and we have to consider each other's essential characteristics when deciding how to live. Only, can it really be fair to weigh my back-drop whim's against her chance at having the story book life she has always wanted - and that we have just barely begun to build? Should I feel guilty for desperately wanting to be on the go?

She tells me she will go anywhere with me. Of course she would say that. She loves me. But does that really give me license to jet set? I love her too, and want to give her that story book life. God knows we are indelible soul mates, but in so many ways we seem incompatible, and the trend toward stability is just one of those ways. When she needs structure, I need adventure. When I need variety, she needs routine.

Before we married I promised her every bit of my life, and she knew that meant settling down would be a long way off. But likewise, I knew that settling down would have to happen someday. So the question is where are we now.

We moved to Boone so that I could start graduate school, and we have been here for three months now. I feel more than anything I need to be on a train crossing the Indian steppes, or working in an AIDS clinic in a village in Lesotho. Yet I know she is still struggling to feel like she has a routine here in Boone. And I am struggling not to. I get so bored with business as usual and begin to feel like my life doesn't amount to much. And I never want to feel that way. Yet can I justify uprooting everything again?

Yes. But not now. Moving Loren to Boone may have constituted a commitment to that Master's degree. If I am going to put her through resettlement, she has to know it is worth it. And moving here just to decide where to move to next is simply not worth it. We are here and that degree is valuable for a plethora of reasons. So I will get it. Period.

But the taunting question lingers: Where to next?

I simultaneously desire and fear total illumination more than anything else.

In the desert the devil came and went, Zion rose and fell.
In the valley night descended and morning broke;
all passed away, even heaven and hell
and what was left was Jesus.

For anyone that might be interested, I decided to post the statement I was recently required to write for my job application. It is as follows:

Statement of Personal Christian Testimony

John tells us at the start of his gospel, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things that were made were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made." John goes on to tell us, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory…" In the authority of scripture it is clear that Jesus is the divine made manifest in human form. God, in all his majesty and authority, humbled himself to walk among his creation, as servant and savior.

Salvation came to the world through a righteous man, the King of Kings to those who knew the truth, punished as a convicted criminal. It was His divine assumption of a brutal capital punishment that freed us, the unrighteous, from our sin. He is both the impossible standard demanding righteousness of a fallen world, and the ultimate sacrifice redeeming the damned.

I first came to know Christ personally when I was 15 years old. I look back now at the person I was before knowing Jesus and see a wretched child steeped in rebellion, depression, and hopelessness. The sheer weight of God's undeniable call on my life pulled me out of that darkness into a vibrant world of grace and redemption. God's salvation came to me as a free gift through His son, by His grace, not my merit. I was no longer trapped in a bitter existence, but I personally felt the love of Christ through His Holy Spirit and I knew the intimate hope that seems to evade the hopeless. In one moment, my life changed.

Since then, I have experienced what C.S. Lewis calls 'peaks and troughs,' spiritual highs and lows that are natural for every Christian living in the world. Some peaks have been mighty and indelible, while some troughs have seemed heartbreaking and overwhelming. What remains constant is the knowledge that the triune God knew, loved, and preserved me even before the beginning of time.

By His grace and the empowerment of His Spirit, we believers have been made the vassals of His will on earth. Like the proverbial Good Samaritan, we are sinner saints, redeemed, justified, and crowned as children of God. The victory of Christ over sin and death is victory for us over apathy and isolation. Christ’s resurrection enables us to respond to His work in our lives by going to the widows, prisoners, and sinners, the hurting, marginalized, and otherwise hopeless with truth and light. It is because of His indwelling Spirit that we can take His love to every nation and fulfill His commandment.

Christ has changed my life by giving me clarity of purpose and a passion for those whom He loves. It is my prayer that everyday I may be that vassal of God to whomever He would ordain that I meet, wherever He would have me serve, doing whatever role He would have me do for His glorious kingdom.

The major report of the past two weeks is that I have been writing and revising application materials to submit for review at several relief agencies. One in particular is a Christian organization that holds evangelism at the core of its mission to those in need. The notion that an NGO would seek to meet not only the physical security needs of the disposed, but also the spiritual, appealed to me very much. However, this agency specifically requests that applicants submit a written statement of Christian testimony that describes what it is exactly that the applicant believes and how Christ is a part of the applicants’ daily life.

When I sat down to chronicle my faith I had no idea where to begin. I immediately found the task to be unsettling and spent the first hour of my attempt starring at the few lines I managed to write, discard, and rewrite. The daunting task hung over my head like an impenetrable storm cloud darkening my consciousness. I felt too inarticulate to even begin to capture in words the rocky path I have traveled thus far. How could I explain the thrill I experienced as a young, new Christian? How could I describe the responsibility and eventual inadequacy, I felt as an outspoken leader of a small Christian community in an otherwise hostile school environment? How could I even begin to comprehend the depression and loneliness I delved into in college, much less convey such dreadfulness to strangers? And what’s more, would I even want to? The history of my relationship to God has rarely been a pleasant one, and such a history is not likely to be just the type of story the human resources officer at an openly evangelical relief agency wants to see from an applicant. I could hardly be the poster child for Christian devotion.

What unnerved me further about my application was the request to describe the daily effect of Christ in my life. In spite of all the wandering and dark places I have journeyed, I returned to a place of faith. It would now be best described as a much less emotional, much more skeptical faith, but a sincere and questioning faith non-the-less. But daily practice seems to have slipped behind the heavy door of opening opportunities and quickly filling schedules.

How easily I forget that it is God that opens those doors for me, God that allows all my distractions to even enter my life in the first place, and the spirit of God that gives me the meager faith that I have to begin with. I know I give next to nothing to the Christ that sacrificed so much for me. I know that I owe Him every bit of every day in return. But I am still tending old wounds and find too many questions of the nature of my God to distract me from action.

I have given up doubting the existence of God, but simply can not resolve my wondering as to how He could create pain and suffering, of where those things could have come from, if not from Him. Or, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and exists outside time, then when He created the world He did so knowing exactly how every person throughout time would end up. If He is the majestic God I profess, He would have to have known that Hitler would eventually have rejected Him and chosen the path that he did. God would have to know that my mother and father would choose to separate. God would have had to have known that so many of the lost would die never knowing the hope of the redeemed. God created all these people the way He did with full knowledge of what they would become. Are we puppets? Do we really have a free will? How could God create us and deliver us into a world full of painful deaths from starvation, testicular cancer, AIDS, or dementia?

It would be easy to say that God gives us trials and tribulations to strengthen us. Indeed, we do owe Him everything. Every good and perfect thing comes from the Lord, right? Even if life is an odd sort of testing ground for our character development, and we are greatly rewarded for faithfulness and righteousness, the test is not fair. If God created us and promises to reward us for being good, but punishes us for being bad, then God would seem unjust; for in that depiction God would be sending us into a painful and dangerous world full of the wily darts of the devil where most of us will perish – all without our consent! The injustice would be that God never asked. Life can be difficult to endure and many people never make it without cursing the creator. Would they not be better off never having been created at all? I wonder.

Though sometimes I begin to believe that creation was either a mistake or an expression of the injustice of God, I do not really accept that. I believe the depiction of God as a loving and fatherly deity. I believe in the salvation of sols from self destruction. Like Calvin, I am cursed knowing that I cannot know where I fall until my earthly demise. And like Kierkegaard I believe that the improbability of religion is precisely what separates faith from knowledge. My dilemma is that I am not clear about what depiction of God to put my faith in.

All my questions and confusions leave me with no answers. However, this is what I know: I feel a touch of the divine when I consider the love of my wife, and the love I have for her. I sense affirmation when I make decisions that I believe place me closer to God’s plan and my part in it. I feel loneliness when I mull over my sinfulness and intimacy when I consider His grace. I feel conviction about being here in North Carolina now, conviction about seeking the hurting, and conviction about placing the pursuit of, and communion with, God as a priority in my life.

I do not blame God for my lack of understanding. God is the measure of all things, and what He wills to be righteous is righteousness. Who are lowly we to argue? But there is a solid conviction in my gut that requires me to stand with the victims of injustice and that often causes me to feel at odds with my fellow believers. I do not believe this is due to some perversion of my sense of justice; nor do I believe it is because I have an inferior concept of God. I do believe that the mystery of God is as evasive to my fellow believers as it is to me, and that my faith is not weaker because I refuse to stop asking these questions. So I will continue to ask, and I implore your patience as I challenge you to do the same.

It's official. I have become Yuppified. Case in point: I am about to write a rambling, unimportant complaint about technology and the modern world on a blog. Please forgive me while I indulge myself.

I have somehow amassed a collection of electronic devices that I should not need and can not afford. While my cell phone was the leading gadget to march me down that slippery slope, it remains necessary but annoying; only somehow I can not remember the moment it became necessary. Following the cell came a digital camera, laptop, jump drive, ipod, and HP Printer/Scanner/Copier All-in-One. Admittedly the ipod is a lot of fun, but the point stands. The manifest of my technological evolution is a routine of podcasting, chatting through facebook (IM isn't hip anymore, on no) and blogging. I used to read Harpers Magazine and listen to Morning Edition on NPR. Now I get the five minute news update from itunes while reading briefs from the UN and Human Rights Watch web pages. I feel informed, but not connected.

I teach environmental education for crying out loud! What's the matter with me? I work outdoors with real people, teaching real kids about Eastern Tent Caterpillars and Tulip Poplars. I praise the virtues of community building and give groups the chance to overcome adversity together. Why do I spend my time off on a computer?

My problem, I believe, isn't unique. Though this is new to me, I think I am in many ways a decade behind the rest of America. Probably more. While many working families sent their kids to band and soccer practice after school, we had mandatory outside playtime at home. We never substituted quick drive through lunches for raw peanut butter and whole grain bread. We had television yes, but I was 15 before I really discovered its captivation. Growing up at my house, we talked politics and religion, we feared and respected my grandmother, and we kept our elbows off the table. Even when I got married, my wife and I rejected TV's and microwaves. All our friends think we are hippies and a little off our rockers, and I have always liked that image. What am I doing here?

Maybe, the truth is I am bored. I leave my work at work when I go home at night; we make dinner, read a little, and get ready for bed. Lately, however, I haven't actually been going to bed. I get online, check my email, post pictures on facebook, and avoid going to sleep because, let's face it, sleep is boring. I think the internet offers a way to acknowledge every persons need to be social, communicative creatures without actually doing anything about it.

I need to get out more. As depressing as this may be, my answer might be a club, sport, or discussion group. Maybe to avoid being a yuppie of the 21st century I need to revert to the social norms of the 1950s. At least some of them anyway.

As you may know, Loren and I moved to the Boone area after I finished my undergraduate work at ETSU. I hope to begin the grad program in International Relations and Comparative Government at Appalachian State University, but am currently taking a break. I look forward to the labor of love in PSCI, but like St. Augustine said, "Lord, give me purity and give me continence, but oh no, not yet." I have too many things I want to do before beginning a faithful decent into graduate studies.

For now, I am working at the new Camp Harrison of the YMCA. Planet Herring Ridge is the Environmental Education program of Camp Harrison, and I am fortunate to be a new instructor there.

Herring Ridge is a lot of fun. It is quit similar to River Ridge, the E.E. center I formerly worked with in Tennessee, but there are many differences. I am learning a new Choice model for high ropes facilitation which creates a very different motivation and goal set than the Challenge-By-Choice model I am familiar with. I have new requirements for the method of tying old knots, which I am having a surprisingly difficult time adjusting to. I am learning new emergency procedures, new challenge elements, new wetlands ecology curriculum, and a new management structure. All in all, I am having a lot of fun.

The YMCA camp is also, of course, a conference center. Though I enjoy the E.E. function far and away more, my responsibilities reach across the board and have had only one week of E.E. thus far. The kids from Countryside Montessori were wonderful and made our first week a breeze and a standard to reach for with each subsequent group.

The E.E. season will be over in mid November and I am searching for a full time job elsewhere. I am thrilled at the possibility of working for an international relief agency, and am working hard not to let my head remain in the clouds. Maybe in the spirit of the good saint I could be granted just a meager portion of purity - at least purity of single mindedness for the moment.