Saturday! Finally! amidst all the mundanity

it's an archtypal saturday morning.

we woke up late. (i haven't woken up late since I decided to be a more serious writer -- as most of you know 5 am is my date with my muse.) I had echinacea tea, j & a joined Lynn for some chai tea. She picked up an obsession from Andrea G. & the kids have joined her in her devotion to the stuff...

J & I both have the coughing, sneezing, sniffling, sneezing croup so HONEY in my tea (since I read _secret life of bees_ this summer, I have the sneaking suspicion that honey *is* the cure for everything) was great. Been listening to coldplay parachutes loud.

The kids are playing in the new sandbox grandpa garry just built them yesterday (read: that's not a sandbox -- that's a SMALL BEACH.)

The whole family ate popcorn and watched the neverending story last night. We've been fielding questions from Jaelyn about "what *is* the -nothing- though?" all morning.

I'm imagining a psuedo sci fi story where the nothing (eg. anti matter, black hole) slowly approaches the earth, and there are religious wars in churches, which are, along with casinos and brothels and prisons -- packed out....but the whole story wouldn't be about the world coming down (and i'm thinking that the world-coming-down story would be gentle and inevitable like the short story _The Ceiling_ and the novel _Blindness_ - not like the movie _Armageddon_) it would be about a religious conflict over whether or not different END TIMES theological frameworks (the kingdom coming, the rapture, the millenia, the apocalypse) could be REALLY HAPPENING in the approach of the coming nothing or if the coming nothing signalled something else. Kind of like a theological debate in the style of the _Name of the Rose_ -- only not quite so death-and-destruction as that story....

Eh?

And we put an offer on a house closer to Malone and it was accepted and now our house is on the market and we have to paint our kitchen ceiling, fix our bathroom (downstairs) walls, put in a little flooring, make up for three years of bad gardening plus the onslaught of fall...and we're signing hundreds of papers. And the tenure process is taking forever along with a self study that i'm heading up in the department -- we're sorting data and developing coding processes...

(anyone *else* bored with that last paragraph? how'd you like to live such administrivia?! BUT YOU DO!?! that's the kicker -- if it isn't homework, its taxes or investments or gardening and 401Ks and church boards and the United Way...)

And so when Jaelyn says but what *is* the nothing? I want to tell her that its the colonization of institutions upon the freedom and happiness of our minds....

But I know that these very same institutions frame our lives and give us privilege (give *me* privilege) that we otherwise couldn't enjoy...

It's a beautiful saturday morning -- sunshine in the wake of the leftover hurricane storms we've been feeling. And the resting makes me *see* the frenzy and the routine in a way that's not so benevolent.

I hope your Saturday morning gives you rest and peace and HOPE for the rest of the week -- because ultimately, I affirm that its not the presence of the institutions and their suckage that =s The Nothing --- it's the seeping & creeping away of HOPE in the bustle of trying to keep up with the great Sucking....and i hope that rest & hope leaves you feeling God's

peace~

the end of the line

when i was in the ninth grade, Calvary Baptist Church decided to run a bus service / ministry from Muskegon Michigan to Fruitport Michigan so that good Baptists of Muskegon could send their children to Faith Christian School, a ministry of Bethel Baptist Church and would not have to worry about the:

1.) multiple evils lurking in the local degenerate public school systems (not the least of which included: feminism, evolution, secularism, and pluralism)

2.) far more insidious danger(s) lurking inside the local West Michigan Christian School owned and operated by the Christian Reformed Church (who, notably, consumed alcohol, did not believe in the imminent return of Jesus Christ and the ensuing seven year tribution, attended the movies, and even allowed Christians who believed in *evolution* to teach in their denominational colleges).

The teenagers riding this bus were so merciless and disorderly that each week a new bus driver was hired and then quit. Occasionally the minister of visitation from Calvary Baptist Academy would be employed as a transitional driver.

Finally a little old man who was in his seventies was contracted to run the bus. In the first few days he greeted each student with a smile and a kind hello. Within a week, he stared straight ahead, brow furrowed as his little enemies filed onto the bus.

The elementary students sat in the front of the bus as far from the dangerous high schoolers as they possibly could.

I, having just moved to the area, and (for the most part) hating the high school already, found it neccessary to sit amongst the high schoolers so as to not engender any more alienation than I was already experiencing.

One girl, I'll change her name a little, Carrie, sat in the back. Always. She was the baddest of the bad.

On days when (I'll call him --) Bud would sit in the backseat with her -- her head would disappear into the hotly rumored realm of sexual favors or (which we, of course, did not call "sexual favors") the glassy straight - ahead intensity of both of their gazes would clue us into the fact that a "hand job" (as Max and his cohorts were keen to call them) was probably in session. We knew we'd hear all the details the next day, anyway. If "Bud" wasn't on the bus -- "Carrie" was doing one of two things:

a.) talking about the trouble she'd gotten in or caused or --

b.) causing trouble for the bus driver.

Occasional paperwads, regular commentary and one or two mooned cars on the highway were enough to drive the bus driving old guy to the edge.

Had it happened now, I would have been much more freaked.

After about a month (maybe it was more, I don't really have a chronometer that's very dependable in my memory banks), Old Guy pulled the bus to the side of the road, closed and locked the doors, stood up, and started to scream.

"You're all ungrateful! I'm not doing it anymore! Who was it?! Who did it?!"

Only the wierd thing was that *this* time -- nobody had done anything. The persecution had left some kind of mark in his consciousness like a glance at the sun will give you if you close your eyes right away. He was feeling spitwads when there were none. He was hearing nasty commentary when no one had given any. He was seeing standing, moving students when none had.

He yelled for fifteen minutes then sat down and stared at the doors. A third grader started to cry.

He turned to start driving again.

"Crazy old man!" yelled Carrie.

The brakes squealed. He hadn't yet pulled all the way onto the road. A passing motorist honked. Swerved...

He looked with rage in the wide overhanging mirror. The bus was silent for the next hour as the bus was gradually emptied of its riders.

The next day -- the visitation minister was back and we never saw the old man again.

Two years before, I would have complained to my parents that an authority figure had so misused us. My sense of justice, injustice & the obligations of authority had always been very strong.

Several months at Faith Christian had destroyed my sense of justice in the world. I knew that the Old Guy probably had it worse than we did. I knew that I certainly felt like hijacking the high school several days a week.

This weekend I attended Fresno Bible Church's Father-Son Banquet with my father in law. Thursday night my mother in law called to let us know that the theme would be "Wear A Professional Sports Jersey to Prove What a Sports Fan You Are."

I don't think that the rest of the story even needs to be told -- does it? Since I'm the author / teller of the story...I don't think it gets any better than that...

I have the attention span of a post it note

& the

pipes of a baptist revivalist just back to the circuit with fresh inspiration...

so my occupation fits but the inequity in the equation doesn't fit the world well.

i'm going to try to do something about that...