two years

I like to think I'm allowed one heavily emo post every couple of months, so here's mine for the spring semester.

going home to houston, I had a wonderful talk with an close old friend, during which he made the comment that I haven't been the same person he knew in college ever since the end of my first relationship, that all the joy that defined my first 3 years at Rice had somehow vanished, replaced by an unacknowledged cynicism and skepticism masked as "careful reasoning".

After that one relationship, from February to March, two years ago now. How does one month change someone so much? I'll try to answer that...by starting with a seemingly tangential non-sequitur.

After reading the most recent post on Matt Dunn's blog about "initiative evangelism" and a non-Christian's view of Christians, I have to admit that over these last two years, I think I've been looking at my own faith through that sort of perspective.

And I think that all started with the line "I think God is leading me to break up with you".

The way it had happened was that she had a few doubts about the relationship, so we took 3 days apart to pray and ask for guidance to see if we should continue. I thought yes; apparently God told her differently. For the first week, I took it seriously. A week later, not so much. After talking to several sympathetic Christians, I started to think there might have been more hidden in that line than just the prophetic hand of God intervening in a relationship. Eventually, I think I started to wonder if God was even present in that line at all.

Maybe this is what started the downward spiral. For the first time, I could look at the Christian life and see contradictions and issues, fallacies, things that didn't make sense. Talking with non-Christian friends about the breakup made me feel better, since they all basically shared the exact same reaction - shock and incredulity at the way she ended the relationship. It felt so good to be able to feel like I'd been wronged somehow, that somehow she had taken God's name in vain. Eventually, this evolved into the thought that she had just done something irrational and dishonest, using God as a cover.

And so it started. I began to remove the hand of God from my interpretation of events. The breakup was because she didn't feel confident, and therefore invoking God was an excuse to cover up her real reasons. Someone's "led by the Spirit"? Just a combination of their emotions and their own thoughts. Even better, this easily explained stupid, hurtful, or violent actions done by the leading of (and in the name of) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without having to directly attribute them to God. And so I started to distrust the way Christians take things as the action of God, without mystery or uncertainty, applied to their personal lives.

Admittedly, the breakup hurt like nothing had ever hurt before, so negative feelings associated with that probably exacerbated my growing skepticism. Don't get me wrong, though - my battle with doubt is something completely different. Doubting God, creation, Jesus, etc originated elsewhere and was resolved apart from this issue (though the condition of my heart probably had something to do with both).

I do believe Jesus was the Son of God, physically resurrected from the dead to redeem us from our sins. I believe that God has called us to live morally upright lives, serving each other in love, being his hands and feet into the world, sharing our faith with others, and being salt and light to a veiled and decomposing world. I have more trouble believing God continues to work in blatantly supernatural ways: not that he can't; but that he chooses instead involved in the natural processes that guide our paths, our actions, our thoughts - that he (usually) interacts with us in a quiet, nuanced, mysterious way, and not just crudely, directly breaks into our lives and picks us up, forcefully turning us to go a certain direction.

Therefore, I still believe God is at work in the world. I just don't know if he works in the way I naively imagined him to do early in my Christian life. A good artist doesn't just force the theme of his art upon you brusquely; they guide you in a nuanced way to a given interpretation. Most of the time, good art may look like nothing at first glance, but upon a closer inspection, the genius behind the piece comes out. In terms of engineering and mathematics, I wonder if God's taking action in the world is a little like creating a function (the action) that satisfies certain conditions (purposes). There is often an easy, straightforward way to construct a valid function, but that function usually ends up being either trivial or useless for any application purposes without continual tinkering with the function and its processes. The construction of a useful function (action) is usually much less straightforward, and may seem to take several paths that seem completely unrelated to the problem, but ends up giving you a function that has a distinct purpose, yet isn't something that's completely alien to (and thus useless in) the natural settings.

(Theologically, if God works in this way, I believe it has very interesting applications to the way we as Christians should interact/approach the world, consider science, etc...but that's another blog post)

...

(Here, I realize that I've started to ramble and need to connect it back to what I started the blog post about)

I'd be willing to bet that these ideas about God's action in the world aren't impossible to swallow for most Christians - I've heard these metaphors and ideas before, and I don't think that they're out of line with the Bible (at least, I think if there are verses against it, there are also verses supporting it). However, it looks like somehow these ideas got twisted by my feelings about the breakup. Pride in me makes it easy enough to see someone who doesn't hold this similar (intellectual) view as being overly conservative, sheltered, and slightly backwards. However, throw a breakup and one misspoken line about God's guidance into the picture, and pride combines with fear into distrust, and I think that if I've changed for the worse these past two years, it's because of this.

Truth be told, two years later, I'm still reliving parts of the breakup, and unfortunately, I'm also still having trouble trusting other Christians "led by the Spirit". I think I'm slowly coming to the point where I can say things like "God taught me" or "God worked in my life" again, but after experiencing the consequences of taking God's name in vain, I find that I still hesitate in taking God's name at all anymore.

on a controversial topic

An incredibly poignant, thought provoking article on homosexuality, written by an openly gay Christian.

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I've been visiting churches for the past few months, and I've promised to do a thorough sweep of them all. I haven't forgotten, but I do have one more church I'd like to visit before I do a broad sweep of the Austin area congregations. A brief trailer for each church I've seen - large/mainstream Evangelical, Episcopalean, emergent-but-not-really, Korean...so stay tuned.

In addition to this, I've been reading one of the best books I've read in a while - C.S. Lewis' "Miracles". I hope to write on this one in a bit too - I wish I had read this sooner, like at Rice when I was questioning the validity of Christianity (instead of the random slew of poor-quality literature that I read instead). In particular, I took a humbling message from one of its chapters that talked about the validity of ideas despite misinterpretation (I confess I've probably been a bit of in intellectual snob in my treatment of other Christians =\ not something I'm proud of). Anyhow, in a future post, I'd like to do my best to convince any readers of this blog to read this book as well, because I found it very stimulating, with just the right balance of intellectual rigor and accessibility.

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Thus, this post acts as sort of a placeholder, awaiting more important and thoughtful posts. Ironically, my time in Austin (cue sermon-like tie-in to actual content!) seems to feel much the same - for now, my years here at UT feel like they're just being used to wait it out until I get a job, or (God willing) get married, or move back home, or experience a more important event in my life than just work and grad school.

As the novelty of being somewhere new wears off, I'm finding myself spending more and more time alone. It feels hard to go out and meet people - there hasn't been a Friday night large group for post-grads, and investing a chunk of time into hanging out with one person can be awkward if they're not someone you know well/feel comfortable with. I don't feel like I should try to invest in a college group on campus either, otherwise I could see myself just trying to relive college instead of moving on and growing. Whatever the reasons (and I'm still sorting thru these), I find myself alone at home a lot, doing a social thing maybe once a month at best. Currently, I'm blogging because I feel fairly lonely, which is a pretty terrible reason to blog (still, perhaps something constructive may come out of this - especially if anyone has any comments/advice, they'd be much appreciated).

In trying to reason why I feel so lonely here, I came up with the following chain of logic: I don't feel very connected to Austin (tied in to investing in Austin is the church search as well...), so I'm not too motivated to connect myself to Austin either, and therefore have not built a stable group of friends to be around here either.

I got an email from a friend commenting on how hard it was to invest in a solid church community given that he would only be around the area for a few months. Somehow, though I will probably be here a good few years at least, I seem to have motivations similar to someone who's just passing through a town. Since I have friends in Houston, family in California, it's difficult to see myself giving either of those up to stay here long-term. The whole feel of Austin seems much too "cool" as well, and I don't really feel like I fit in well with "cool" kids (hence I loved Rice).
In the end though, I still believe I should make the most of my time here. While I don't THINK I'll have the college experience all over again, forming deep friendships everywhere I go, I KNOW I won't get anything done isolating myself either.

Any thoughts/experiences/advice on adapting to a new place?

old (therefore young) version of billy graham

http://theologica.blogspot.com/2009/03/billy-graham-at-harvard-47-years-ago.html

Here's a set of audio clips I found interesting for the following reasons - one, they're Billy Graham at Harvard, speaking to a much different and more academically oriented audience than he typically does. Secondly, it's interesting to hear what kind of talks evangelicals gave 47 years ago compared to today. Graham's style has definitely carried over to most churches, and you can hear that in the talk as well. You can see the way he approached and interpreted issues of his time as well (Communism, moral flippancy, etc).