The world is so full of humanness.

I press up against my students, 33 of them crammed into a little room with brick block walls and big metal window frames letting in the spare light of courtyard, not really bright enough to liluminate the thin yellow chalk on the greenboard.

They're all taking quizzes and making guesses about "right answers" and i know, secretly thinking through the next hour, their day, their lives. I try to engage them, to take on their lives and perspectives and burdens in order to make the words and ideas I have to give them deeper and richer and better, and I feel exhausted.

It feels like we can only bear so much of the loads of those around us.

President Johnson (prez of the college) today addressed the undergrads and told them that to hear God's purpose for their life, that they couldn't look to their own dreams and ambitions -- that they needed to surrender to God's ambition.

His source Rick Warren's _Purpose Driven Life_ -- I knew that the book was everywhere (when I saw a trucker at a greazy spoon in Nowhere, Indiana (on a road trip this summer with Erik) reading it over breakfast) despite my lifelong vows against Christian bookstores...but please tell me, somebody, that Rick isn't opposing our will (in any sort of natural or given way) to God's will? Because shouldn't our dreams and goals spring in some way from the riches of God's common grace? Shouldn't our longings be evidence / witness to the creative and sustaining powers of God.

And by the way, Daniel is an anti-calvinist. And I can't figure out in retrospect whether he thinks that God doesn't call the elect, that the elect do not perservere, or that God just isn't neccessarily omniscient. One of these I agree with.... Readers?

Yesterday Addison wouldn't go into the basement without me. He was convinced. CONVINCED that a Lion would be down there. He played out the whole scenario for me over and over. Go downstairs. ROAR! me: DAD! come. Stick. Poke. DIE!

Most of his syllogisms end in bloody deaths. The fastest one is no seatbelt. He shakes his head, says "on?" and that's the only link needed -- "DIE!"

ahhh my pacifist children. (note: not pacifistIC. IC on the end of words is increasingly my MOST hated misuse of the English language -- or at least of Suffixes.)

My brother David is writing some funny stuff about Pirates these days.

peace~

- the front burner heats up -

so now i'm just blogging about how my job is taking over my whole entire life.

i don't think that there could possibly be a more boring blog to read.

Dale Soden from Whitworth College came to campus last week to talk to the faculty and he talked about how central to the life of the faculty member it was to be helping our students think careful about meaningful vocation.

I couldn't agree with him more. I've felt deeply enmeshed in the struggle of MANY of my students (some of you are reading?) -- unsure of where and how they fit in the world.

Harry decided to preach a series on vocation though (so now is the time to come and visit if its applicable and you're interested). This morning he talked about how hearing God's call was often about forcing yourself to listen to the shape of who *you* are. What is it that you love? long for? enjoy? take pleasure in? *AND* forcing yourself NOT to listen to all the seductions and expectations that feel so natural (money, security, normalcy, parents' expectations).

It was very moving. This summer I think that I'm starting to think (and yes, that sentence needs to be just that circuitous) that maybe this teaching thing *does* / *could* fit my calling after all. Certainly, I'm increasingly convinced that the bueracracy of higher (and most other levels) ed. is *not* a good fit -- but that maybe the things that I love:

- telling stories
- casting vision
- intuiting truth
- building friends

can find a home in this profession. Not that they couldn't have found "home" in another profession -- and certainly I never set out in this direction...

I do become increasingly convinced that more often than not our CALLING (vocatio) does not *fit* well with the jobs and the institutions and the places and the flow of money that exist in the world. Isn't that part of what it means to be strangers and aliens.

I wrote in a card to Lynn about 6 months ago that i felt "set adrift in life". that felt scary and awful to me then. (I remembered the feeling when i saw the card on the counter today -- it fell out of her Bible maybe?) The truth is that I still feel that drift, but am maybe becoming more convinced that the sense of chartedness and destiny that i thought was driving me forward was purely rhetorical construct -- and that we're all trying to make our drifting meaningful by telling stories.

Of course I don't want to demean those stories. I live for them. (I'd like to MAKE A LIVING telling them.) But I also want to free myself to enjoy the drift. To acknowledge the possibility and the playfulness that exists in the limin and betweenness.

If you're my brother, you're "blah, blah, blah"ing the screen right now. If you're my grandma you're shaking your head, "that boy!" if you're my mom, you're hearing me depict my brothers and grandmother publicly and saying, "andy!"

so that's my cue to shut up. happy school start, teachers, parents & students everywhere.

peace!
~andrew

(p.s. if you're my sister Angela, you're nodding intensely, listening as I ramble, seeming *so* interested...but possibly you're just on screensaver mode...)