All Is Quiet on New Year's Day

Well, truth be told, it's the day after New Year's Day. In other words, it's time to get back to work. Students are back in school, no more sleeping in, and I'm back at work. It's the time of year when everyone makes their NY resolutions and everyone online who thinks they know better spends their time making fun of people making resolutions or quoting studies that show that resolutions don't actually work. Despite that, I'm going to admit that I do have some resolutions to make, but as I've proved before the only thing I do consistently is act inconsistently.

So, before I get to resolutions, let's recap 2007. 2007, for those of you who weren't aware, was a year where God was working. Now there really isn't enough room here (or knowledge of all that in my head) so I'm going to cover some of the more specific events and lessons learned in my life in the past year.

Going way back to last January there were a couple of big events that happened there. Let's see, there was my first Princeton Forum in Nashville. A lot of that went towards how I would shape the mission trip for this summer, mainly along the lines of requiring a lot of my students in terms of preparation which went very well, but only as far as I was willing to go along with it. Then there was the DEEP Ski Retreat where the theme was about creating our identity in God. Which was a great message but I realized soon after that it fell short of getting to a good stopping point in terms of a lesson. How'd I figure that out? Because at Princeton they were giving away the audio journals and one of the previous ones I hadn't listened to yet was entitled "Belonging to God." And in it they quote from "Belonging to God: A First Catechism," from which I shall quote:

Question 1. Who are you?
I am a child of God.

Question 2. What does it mean to be a child of God?
That I belong to God, who loves me.

Question 3. What makes you a child of God?
Grace -- God's free gift of love that I do not deserve and cannot earn.

Man, I tear up just retyping that. It's such a powerful, needed message. Our worth isn't from anything we've done or even could do. It's not from who loves us or who we love. It comes from the simple fact that we come from God and he is our father and we bear his image and his love. Identity in God is great, but knowing that we are God's sons and daughters is the message that our world doesn't know and needs to hear.

Oh yeah, a funny thing happened in January, I became engaged. And then embroiled in that necessary evil called wedding planning. But I'll wrap that up when I get to October. :)

Then you get February through June, a relatively quiet time that was professionally wrapped up in preparing for Jamaica and personally wrapped up in wedding planning and a sudden new hobby: WWII reenacting. Reenacting is just another one of my obsessive hobbies that I switch around every few years. It's sad to say but it may not last more than a couple years. Can't really say for sure. Comic book reading is coming up on its 3rd year though. Anyways, reenacting has taught me more than a little bit about life with God by trying to be someone from 60 years ago but someone who is still thoroughly a modern person living in a modern world among modern people.

Pretty early into my reenacting career I came onto the subject of chaplains. I was aware of chaplains and what they do and how they do it but this made me look specifically at WWII chaplains and open myself up to some of their stories. I learned that Chaplains are made of extraordinary stuff and have a very fine line to walk in relating to the men they shepherd in the worst of all human-created scenarios that can create all sorts of internal conflict for a man of God. But I also learned about how Christians need to be chaplains in every group they are in. They need to be of extraordinary strength and courage to living in their circles in the world and be willing to be light and salt. I came to find that in my own reenacting unit there are lots of great guys but I was living a very different life than most of them. I haven't held confession or handed out communion and I'm technically not even our unit's chaplain, but I feel the need to be living my life as God's son among those men and women.

I also had the boots lesson where I learned about the necessity of protecting and beautifying my life with exposure to God. That's a lesson I still need some learning on. But, truth be told, my boots aren't as good as they could be either :P

Then there's July, a month I was simultaneously dreading and looking forward to. Jamaica and Montreat at breakneck pace. I survived both but secretly enjoyed Jamaica way more than Montreat. Jamaica definitely had its lessons though. I remember great conversations with the youth group there about living in Christian community and seeing that start to happen as the lessons God showed me began to sink in as I tried to teach them. But coming out of Jamaica I realized the power and freedom to be found in being happy with less. Even now as I think about the article I wrote for Relevant and all the talking I did, the lessons seemed to have dimmed as Lisa and I bowed to the Christmas monster and I now have a text messaging plan and I start to shrug off all the things I was doing without mainly in the name of saving for the wedding. Or the contradiction of wanting to be content with less but my two main hobbies, reenacting and comics, are about hoarding. So obviously I have a ways to go there and this reminder helped!

August met September and then September met October in a rush of expectations as the wedding finally arrived! It was seriously one of the best weekends of my young life, and for many reasons. Mostly because it went off without a hitch and that's thanks to so many people. I was seriously worried with my voice gone, a pastor gone, and the ridiculous rains that preceded everything but it all came together. I'm pretty sure I didn't lift a finger that weekend thanks to all the help from everyone involved. It was ridiculous! But in a good way. That was some serious community, as Ben put it in his dLog entry. But it was also great because, hey, I have a great wife. And she is still putting up with me two months later!

And then that's been the big lessons the rest of the year: learning to love. Let's face it, no matter how good you think you are at loving someone it's in your nature to love yourself first and exclusively. The feelings of love come easy at first but the act of loving takes laser-like focus and effort to maintain on a regular basis. Thankfully I'm blessed with a patient wife who sees potential in me that I'm not even aware of. And that's how you know that God is present in our marriage because that's more patience and vision than I think any one human could ever possess ;)

So, all in all, 2007 was a very good year.