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.