I finished with all my college classes today.

I finished with all my classes in college ever. It was a strange feeling. It was like being freed from lots of things, but realizing that many of them were things I actualy liked. In fact it was exactly that.

Oh well. Life moves on I suppose. My friend Lindsey and I talked for awhile last night and I needed her to tell me several times that “It was going to be okay.” It took me a bit for that to sink in. I don’t know that it has yet.

I guess with this all ending (college) so soon…I don’t know that I really know what to do with it. I have no functional context to put this moment in. I haven’t done this before. I guess there are only some things you can prepare yourself for by doing…Graduation just may be one of those things. Deep sigh. Haven’t cried yet. I’ll get there.

I am listening to a song from the Legend of Zelda. Yes. It’s video game music. You should give it a shot. http://www.skreemr.com/results.jsp?q=Legend+of+Zelda+gerudo Listen to the third one down. It’s cooler than you think.

I’m going to try and make the most out of these next few days. I was in my friend Bob’s office today and came to the conclusion that i didn’t regret this experience. I believe that I have made good use of my time (apart from the hours I wasted Freshman year) and like the things that I have been able to experience. At the very least I am leaving with the knowledge that I am proud of the things I chose to do and the experinces I had. High five to me? Yes. I think so.

These are the days that I might be missing soon.

Things I am thinking about with regards to the upcoming change in life:

Okay, so I won’t miss finals. I won’t miss tedious homework. I won’t even miss paying tuition or other such costs.

Yet…

I actually will miss sitting in classes that were a sporadically proper mix between dull and wonderful.

I will miss sunny days in which the value of free time is intensified by the fact that I have to go study for finals. 

I will miss lying idly in the grass in the sunshine for awhile until someone I know appears and decides to sit and chat for however long they please. 

I will miss the nights of heading out to seven eleven randomly at midnight because we are in college and get hungry.

I will miss the ease of availability of wisdom from and relationships with professors.

Among other important things, I suppose in general I will miss the context in which my relationships exist now. This context will soon change quite drastically for the first time in 16 years of education…

You might say I am getting somewhat nostalgic. I ought to be outlining for my ethics final, but I really couldn’t commit at the moment. I needed to think about a few things.

I was talking to friends today and I realized that I am feeling just about every emotion possible about graduation. I feel sad to be leaving, happy to be done, wistful that it has to end, pleased to be moving on, it keeps going. There is a sense of loss that I am experiencing. It hurts a bit, knowing that some things end and you don’t get them back. That life moves on and you don’t get to keep living in the wonderful context you have loved.

But there’s also good things. Life is good because the source of life is good (God). There are things that are worth doing that will bring personal satisfaction after college. In fact, those things might even be better than college. I wonder if in some ways we have created an artificial experience here. School is 16 years if you go to university. Life is about…80 years or so. That means that at this point I have 60 years of life to live left. That is more life than I have ever thought about living. There quite honestly must be more than college.

Honestly, I have loved college. It has been great. So many good memories, so many useful lessons, so much learned, so much experienced, so much development. Yet, every step that I have taken in life till this point has resulted in life that is fuller –at times more complicated perhaps–but fuller and more worthwhile nonetheless. Walking through each new door and leaving behind a great experience while taking relationships and what you’ve learned with you, inevitably finds something new. You are different, the world is different as a result, and somehow it is better.

My friend Johanna quoted John Mayer to me in high school saying that “the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve.” I think that ought to be what we graduates should be looking for. Not necessarily the recreation of the college experience, but perhaps more of the full-participation in God’s plan for us as a result of our college experience. The real us is negotiated every single day. Each day we grow, we learn, we hurt, we eat food, etc…But each day we are in a process of becoming. You weren’t the person you were yesterday, neither am I. Something is different. Maybe it’s just today, but somehow I think it has more to do with us. 

Maybe the point of what I’m trying to say is that somehow I’ve got to learn to put this lovely, wonderful, dear to my heart, and all-too-short experience in the context of a life that is 80 years long (God willing). It has been the culmination of my studies thus far to graduate college with a degree, but the culmination of my studies doesn’t necessarily translate into the culmination of life as it is meant to be. We can’t stay in college forever, and so as graduation looms it would seem that I have to learn to see value and life in terms of a new context. Rather than ask, what the post-college context looks like, I wonder if I have even been asking the right questions or thinking about the right things.

I have been asking “what will change? and how do I adjust to that?” I think that maybe I should be thinking in terms of “God never changes. I do. How do I walk with Him through this?” Honestly, the scariest thing may be the uncertainty of the rest of life that comes at this point. Still, I don’t know that the rest of life is necessarily where my focus needs to be. Nor on the size of the change that I face. Just maybe the focus that I need to have is on the immediacy of the eternal God in this moment, and in all future moments like this one. In every step that I take, I move towards something that God has prepared for me. “The LORD Himself goes before you and He will be with you, He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged.” Deuteronomy 31:8 could be that verse that we could all hear. Especially me and the other graduate sorts.

Real life in T-minus 11 days and counting. For those of you who I say goodbye to and never see again in a week from Sunday, goodbye in the Kingdom of God is a bit of a silly thing to begin with. There’s this thing that they say in the movie He-Man. They say “Good journey.” It’s interesting how accurate that is to our experience as Christians. We are on a journey with the sovereign God to an unknown land that He will show us. God invited and guided us onto the path, is with us on the way, and He will meet us all at the end. If I don’t see you again in life after graduation, it is there that I hope to see you. It is there that all will be as it was meant to be. It is there that we will see that goodbye was always a shortsighted phrase and that perhaps we were never as far from each other as we thought. On that day, you save me a high five. They never get old.

A letter to the racoons that live in my ceiling.

Dear Racoons,

I have lived underneath you for some time now and desire to make a formal complaint against you in the public domain, so that others may know of your gross breaches in the unspoken accord between man and beast.

Long ago, humans were given dominion over creation by God. All the animals are included in that statement. That means you. You better shape up.

Lately I have noticed that your noises have gotten louder and more careless as though you have no regard for those of us with two legs who do not regularly spread rabies. I have hit the ceiling several times to no avail. This does not please me.

You have crossed too many lines. You don’t respect my time while I sleep, you don’t respect my time while I study, and you’ve even gotten into my dreams. I am going to file a restraining order in hopes that someday you can learn what it means to really care about your neighbors. 

In general, I am called to be a steward of God’s creation, and you are not being helpful in encouraging this divine calling. I often think about ways of making you be quiet. Rat poison is one of the ways that most often comes to mind. I strongly suggest that you reconsider your actions. 

If you desire to make amends you have the choice of a formal apology letter or a duel (pistols at 50 paces). The choice is yours.

Your neighbor 3 feet below the floor you scurry about on,

Chauncey

The sun is out.

Hey everyone. The sun is out and I am pumped about it. I thought I would tell you about what I did in the sun yesterday.

I went to Pike Place market and got free cheese. It was the cheese festival that happens every year. Fun stuff. Plenty of calcium.

I played baseball! It was super fun! Guys from my house and I played out in the sun and hit baseballs at a park in Queen Anne. This kid walked by me while I was going for my waterbottle and told me “nice hit.” He had a popsicle. That popsicle and his existence as a kid served to be the encouragement I never really got when I played ball as a kid. It was as though the past merged with the present and the embodiment of those kids on my team when I was little told me that I can actually play decently. Baseball was redeemed a bit in that moment.

I have been having dreams about racoons lately. Mostly in the dreams they make the same noises they make in the attic right now. 

I had this great moment yesterday with my friend Andrew. We were talking about the beatitude in Matthew where Jesus says “Blessed are the poor in Spirit.” It occured to me that so many times I am totally jonesing for this state of being with the Lord that is more or less having it all together. I want to be good to go. I want to be on top of the world. I want to have successfully built the spiritual equivalent of a sugarpacket village at Denny’s (an impossible feat). Yet, when you read some of this guy named Tozer’s book he points out something along the lines of the fact that our preferred spiritual state is to be like the beggar on the streets of Jerusalem. 

In other words, going off of this poor in spirit idea, the place where we ought to be is continually in a place of realizing the reality of our own lack of “having it togetherness”. Going from the beattitude it seems that this is really what Jesus wants from us. The One who said “I can do nothing by myself” (John 5:30) wants us to share that perspective. The state of blessedness here is for those who get that they don’t have it all together and that they never will.

I suppose that it is in that place you trust God above all because you know yourself to be spiritually poor. You need God to pull you through. Poverty back in the day was hard (if not impossible) to get out of…I don’t think that being poor in spirit is something that you get to stop being. It may be that it’s one of those things that you probably have to find out to be true and deal with the reality that though you have nothing spiritually to offer God, He still wants to be with you. It would seem that  it was never really about what you could give Him to begin with…

Here’s a paper I wrote on the Lord’s Supper. Maybe you like it…maybe you don’t.

Is Eucharist no More than a Reminder?

            On campus over the past week or so there has been a variety of conversations regarding the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist). The context of these discussions is a topic for a different paper. Nonetheless, in the space created by many dialogues regarding in what circumstances communion is and is not appropriate something became clear for me. It would seem for many that the concept involved in the Eucharist is simply a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for us. This apparently is the sum total for regarding the purpose of the Lord’s Supper: that in taking the bread/wafer and the wine/juice we are involved in a process of remembering the Lord’s death for us that carries no greater meaning than the remembering in and of itself. In this view the necessity of ordained clergy administering this sacrament to the congregants is often written off as unnecessary or belittled by the derogatory use of the word “traditional.” This perspective while very freeing for the American individualist, is hardly befitting the seriousness and (dare I say) eternal significance of the task at hand when the Eucharist is served for the body of Christ. It is for this reason that I must protest in essay form. The biblical record regarding the Eucharist shows that it is and will continue to be far more than a simple reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for the body of believers.

            The first mention of the Eucharist in the NT comes in the book of Matthew, and it is here that the crux of the issue lies. While giving the wine to his disciples (Mt 26:24) Jesus states that “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many.” The phrase blood of the covenant is what carries significant meaning to this discussion beyond the idea of a simple reminder. In the context of ancient Israel the blood of the covenant implies the blood of the mosaic covenant. The mosaic covenant in Exodus 24 features prominently the use of the blood of sacrificial animals as the binding agent of God’s agreement with Israel; the signature on the document so to speak. Exodus 24:6-8 describes the process (emphasis added):

 

“Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar.  Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey.” Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

 

            Moses sprinkles half the blood against the altar, and the rest on the people of Israel after they have agreed to obey the LORD. Moses’ statement at the end is in my perspective an affirmation of the Israelites statement of obedience. God and the Israelites are in agreement. The covenant is then sealed with the blood of bulls marking this as fact. The theme of the covenant and the renewal of said covenant plays out through the rest of the Scripture. The Israelites fail to keep the covenant, they repent, and they fail to keep the covenant again. They (and we) fail to obey in a repetitive manner. Nonetheless, their failure does not negate God’s part of the covenant. God’s faithfulness is not lessened by the unfaithfulness of his people.

            The ultimate sense of God’s faithfulness to the covenant He made with His people is in becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ and therein renewing and fulfilling the entirety of the covenant for all time. Christ fulfills all the necessary roles of the covenant. Jesus takes on the role of the sacrifice required; the blood of the covenant becomes His blood of the covenant. Jesus takes on the role of the priest in mediating the connection between God and man through the blood of the sacrifice (His blood). Jesus takes on the role of Israel by living a sinless life in perfect obedience to God. Finally, Jesus being at the same time the fullness of man and the fullness of the Living God affirms the henceforward eternally renewed holy covenant in the name of His Father in heaven by initiating in the Spirit the very act of renewal itself.

            If this is the meaning carried by the implications of Lord’s Supper, then why is the Eucharist still not just a reminder of this immensely theologically complex and holy action of the Lord in His death and resurrection? It is not because of the nature of faith itself. We as Christians do not presume to live in separation from God, in fact a main point of the resurrection was to achieve exactly the opposite. We participate through Christ in the Spirit in the eternal community of the Triune God. As Christ’s death is our death, so is His life our life (Colossians 2:12). The same point can be made regarding the Eucharist.

            In 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 the apostle Paul writes, “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.” According to Paul, we are truly the body of Christ. Our participation as such includes us is His death, His life, His resurrection and His renewal of the covenant that is initiated in the Eucharist.

            When Christ renews and fulfills the holy covenant, we as the body of Christ are fully participatory in this action. There can be no separation. The church is the body of Christ. In this sense when we break bread and take of the cup in the Lord’s Supper we are participating actively in Christ’s continual and eternal renewal of the covenant and remembering therein the role played by our One Holy sacrifice, priest, faithful Israel, and eternal God in making all things new. However, as a result, the Eucharist will always be far more than a reminder.

Time to take time to blog.

I hit the silly tired wall a few minutes ago. I assume that many of you know this wall. It happens when you’re really tired and things become really funny. In my case I started talking about how great of a film D3: The Mighty Ducks was…that was a tad off base to say the least. 

I have been thinking about the Holy Spirit lately. He’s really confusing. I think that for a long time I have tried to imagine what I assume God is doing. It works only so well. Recently, I discovered something obvious: I don’t see the Holy Spirit. I notice it, but I don’t see it like I see a tree or a bicycle or another human being. The Spirit of God moves and no one knows where He goes or where He came from. This may seem a bit convoluted and yes I know that we see God in other people and other places, but that to me resembles catching a glimpse of someone right before they walk around a corner. They’re there, but you can’t quite get a feel for in what capacity or how. 

I think God is like that a lot. He’s always working, He’s always around, but He isn’t seen (at least not in an overt way). I don’t really understand why that’s so strange to me. I guess it never really quite occured to me in this way before, that I believe in and worship a God that I have never seen. This doesn’t really affect my faith in Him, but it did surprise me when I realized the depths to which that may confuse other people. I believe the testimony of witnesses (the apostles) who saw the Risen Christ and through whom God built the church…but the way some people talk about Jesus, you feel like they’ve shook hands with him. Although…can I really say that I haven’t?

If people bear the image of God (and I believe they do), then each and every person is someone in whom a bit of God dwells. The image of God is in all of us, whether we be Christian or not. Jesus died for all of us, Christian and not. In that line of thinking, how do we learn to see others as that? How do we make steps towards being able to see with the eyes of the mysterious and unseen Spirit of God? 

Sometimes I really want God to tell me lots of things. I would love His opinion on lots of little things, but I am realizing that maybe God doesn’t necessarily care if I have yogurt in my oatmeal or not…maybe He just wants me to share the time I am eating oatmeal with Him. There’s another thing. 

Lots of people are graduating soon. Some of them plan on striking out for bigger and better things. Some of them (I assume) to prestigious roles in groundbreaking communities and businesses. I don’t think this is what God has for me for the next while after graduation. I do get to work at camp, which is great. However, I also plan on coming back to Seattle and getting a job for a bit after the summer ends. I think that however, the task for all of us is very similar. We are to live in relationship with the LORD. Every single day. All the time. If you think about it, that is a huge task. Learning to live in relationship with God is scary and challenging, I think moreso in a lifestyle that people would label “small.”

When asked if a janitor bring glory to God by being a janitor, people would answer yes. Yet, if they were asked if they wanted to be a janitor, most would say no. Unless someone happens to have an unusual penchant for cleaning stuff. There’s the problem though. I think that we all have bought into this idea that following Jesus will be entail the sort of life that movie stars live in film, only in real life. I guess that we read the bible and see stories of pillars of fire, battles, water changing to wine, people raising from the dead, people being lowered out of windows, etc… and we think that our lives should be that way all the time. Well, they’re not…and I don’t think they need to be.

When I read the bible I notice things like “Abraham traveled through the land as far as the site of the Great tree of Moreh…” This was after God called him. Abraham traveled with all his stuff for awhile. It didn’t seem like the Lord was constantly dropping memos to him in the process. When He stopped, the Lord spoke. Interesting. The point I am trying to make is this: Abraham walked a long way, so did Jesus. You cannot tell me that the disciples or Abraham had the best and most “super keen” time on the road everyday. I think that sometimes it must have been boring. It’s hot in the middle east. Some days I bet they were just out walking. All day. Have you been out in the sun all day? You don’t say much sometimes. It’s rather dull.

I suppose it would be nice if people would take the time to tell you that following Christ costs everything you are, even your expectations for how fun it will be. At the end of the day I didn’t start following Jesus because it was fun. I hope you didn’t either. Just wanted to throw it out there that it’s necessary for a relationship with God to factor in the little things, because eventually…that’s what life is made out of.

There is scuffling noise on the rooftop

So, I think that raccoons life either in the tree next to my window, on the roof above me, or in the attic. They make scuffling noises and scamper about. I wish I had the motivation to poison them. Only when I’m tired though. Mostly I guess I think about them as obnoxious housemates. They make a racket, they run around, they stare creepily at me from the tree outside my window….Okay, so not as much as I would like to assume.

I have been running on not enough sleep for several days at this point and it is starting to catch up to me. Today was the first time that I told the animals on the roof/attic/tree to “shut the hell up.” I think that when you start assuming even in part that animals can really hear and understand you…it’s time for bed. Also, if they were really housemates I would have been much more polite. Really though. I hope they’re not offended.

Some inspiration.

There’s this wonderful website that I have visited since high school when my friend John showed it to me. I have showed it to some of you and you hated it, others of you have loved it, and still there are those of you who just don’t know…it is for you that I decided to put this up. I think it is quite funny.

http://www.explodingdog.com/title/whatwillhappennext.html

Behold the boldness of my silly mistakes.

2 things you should know. 

1) I got lost on the Seattle Metro Bus system today. I planned on riding the number 17 to James Street Downtown, but missed it when the bus lady mumbled james street and then wound up waiting very patiently for the bus to turn around. So patiently and unsuspectingly I might add, that when the bus finally stopped and I realized the extent of the fool I had been…I was in White Center. I then got off the bus chatted with a man from Honduras, took a different bus back to downtown. I was inwardly fuming for a large part of the afternoon. I spent about 2 hours in a bus and it was a hellish and irritating experience. I was late for my appointment (it actually didn’t even happen), I was frustrated, and what’s more …it was completely my fault. Damn.

Incidentally, I did a few things that may have redeemed my time. I called my sister. That was cool. I also talked to the man there in White Center. He was nice. It’s fun to speak spanish with strangers. On my way back to town I got a text message from my friend Curran remarking on the course of my day that it was “full of Jesus”. I suppose that’s true. Even when I was on a bus hating life Jesus was there. Sometimes you get these little memos at the end of a long day and you don’t know quite how to apply it. Nonetheless, it was a day full of Jesus. Aren’t they all?

2) I accidentally poked myself in the eye the other day while I was drying off with a towel. It hurt. 

I hope that the profundity of the dumbness that I experienced within the past 4 days taught you something about humanity. It might not have. What it says to me though is that Jesus is at work even in the midst of stupid decisions, misplaced patience, and pointless bus rides. 

In fact those little things are just the things that are stupid and negative. We often tend to characterize our days (at least I do) by the bad things. What about the good things? I had dinner with great friends. I had a great conversation with my friend Lindsey. I talked to my sister. I got exercise. I wrote a clever essay (mostly there was this one paragraph that I was way into). I went to class and had fun dialogue about the philosophical weakness of the argument behind classical liberalism (i.e. Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations) as well as the role of corporate responsibility. These were fun things.

I even took a power nap. Kudos goes out to Ed smyth.

When does the car slow down? Graduation? Wait…

So lately I have been feeling like I am in a whirlwind of doing stuff. I get up I go to class and then I do other things. Some of them are very good things. However, I am beat at the end of the day. Maybe today was not the best representation of how tired I will be every day. Especially considering that I went running with Ben Troop today. Whatever the case may be, I am getting worn out.

I would write more, but I am in a grumpy mood. Tired I guess. I doubt y’all want to read grumpy Chauncey ramblings and I don’t really want to write them. I just wanted to make sure that I keep the habit of doing this blog. I realized lately that the things I want in life involve me making little choices everyday. If I want to have a better relationship with Jesus the things I do to move towards that happen in the moments of each day I have. If I want to be better at Spanish I need to make sure I have time each day to practice keeping my ear up by listening to news. You get the idea. 

Thus the blog. I want to be able to keep writing. It may not always be fun to read, but I really enjoy it. So, that coupled with this idea of little choices being the foundation of bigger things means that I am telling you all this despite the fact that I want to go to bed. I guess I’ll go to bed now.