A New Endeavor

This past week I did something I have never done before. Two things, really. First, I went snorkeling with whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico / Caribbean Sea. There may be another blog dedicated to that later. The other was reading the New Testament (Matthew - Jude) in this very short time. I took a couple of novels with me on vacation, but I had finished both of those by the end of the 4th day under the palms, so I needed something else to read. I decided to read the New Testament, not as an academic study, but just to get a broader sense of the things I've been reading and taught from my whole life. I must say it was quite a difficult, eye-opening experience. By reading the whole thing at once, I found myself engrossed in just a few themes that kept recurring throughout. I was disappointed (even a little angry at times) that my biblical education has been mostly about proving one thing or another about Christian life, spiritual behavior, church rules, what one can or cannot do, etc., but very little about living life as a creation of God.
I will share, ever so briefly, the overwhelming theme I felt during my reading. I know this will be overly simplistic, but that, too, is something that I came out of this with - that God didn't intend for spirituality to be rocket science.

I think God intended for humans to get along. More than that, I think He wants us to love each other, treat each other with respect and dignity and genuine concern for each others' well-being. It wasn't long after he created us, though, that that got pretty screwed up. Almost immediately, humans got selfish and started doing what we wanted and killing each other to get our way. He tried wiping out all the bad guys with a flood, but the evil still crept back in, and people just weren't doing for each other what He intended. In fact, it went so far for so long, that people didn't even remember what things they were supposed to do. That's where the law came in. God gave his law to the Israelites so they could have a check list (more or less) of the things they needed to do to keep themselves pure, with God and with each other. This law existed only because of the ignorance of human beings to understand what God had intended in the first place, so it was there to get them back on track. Nothing about the law was bad, except maybe for the fact that it was impossible! Good grief, very few of us are perfect (that's sarcasm, OK?), so no way will humans do very well at following a list like "the law." (Side note: read Leviticus in your best Monty Python Holy Hand Grenade voice. It works, it's hilarious, and it's pretty much the only way to get through that book with your sanity.) Any way, the law was good in that it got people back on the track of living as the humans God had intended, but it was never going to be good enough. It was just a bunch of rules to be read and followed. The academically inclined liked to talk about the meanings of all the words and what they meant we have to do (which sounds a lot like the church I grew up in and have experienced for lots of my life), but no one was good enough to show someone how to live it. So God came down to earth to show us how to do it. When Jesus was here, he didn't tell us the way to live is to spend our time in church or with our noses in scriptures, he SHOWED us how to love each other. Everything Jesus did and taught was about relationships - human to human relationships. I really believe that Jesus' message was, "if you want to get reconciled to God and live the life your creator intended, you need to take care of each other." When he was asked his stance on the law, he clearly said he wasn't here to do away with it. The law was not the problem. There's good stuff for daily living in there. When he was asked to sum up the law, though, he told us to love God and love each other. See what I mean? All that stuff in the law can be taken care of by loving, and God himself came down here to show us how to do it. Sending down a manual on how to do it wasn't enough. We needed to see it, so he sacrificed himself so we could have an example to look at. Then, as if that wasn't enough, he left part of himself with us to guide us from the inside. That's what I think spiritual living is all about - love. Jesus disciples and the apostles seemed to think the same thing. Everything I read about in Paul's letters and the writings of others in the Bible points me to the same thing.

Like I said, this has been more than a little overwhelming. This kind of thinking is not what I grew up with. I have prayed that God will keep pushing me to find out more if this is really what he intended and to squelch this if it's not. I don't know where this will lead. I'm going to start over in the gospels and try to document (maybe in this blog) the instances that I read that make me feel these things. We'll see.

Someday soon, I'll post pictures of the whale sharks too. They were pretty overwhelming themselves!

Spring Broke

It probably sounds a little cliche', but I think I'm ready to go back to work to get some rest. Physical rest, anyway. This week, Spring Break, has been a very productive week for us. There are so many things in the yard that have been neglected since last fall. It was time to knock out some of those tasks or face them at the beginning of summer by when they would have been even bigger jobs. So, this post is an attempt to log, in no particular order, the things accomplished this week.

Prepped the garden (turned the soil, pulled the grass, added compost).
Planted tomatoes and peppers.
Mulched the new garden plants.
Pulled weeds and grass from flower beds and pruned out dead plants.
Dug out two huge pampas grass stumps, divided them into 25 smaller plants and replanted all the new ones.
Cut down other pampas grass with chain saw.
Spread 18 bags of mulch in flower beds.
Dug post holes and built a new 16-foot split-rail fence.
Dug out rose bush and transplanted to grow on split-rail fence.
Pruned all other rose bushes.
Loaded pickup with cut limbs, lumber, etc. and hauled to landfill...twice.
Cut down 4 shrubs in front flower beds.
(Side story: The biggest shrubs in the front flower bed have never been our favorites, but they're what we have, so we've lived with them. The two biggest, by the front doorway, had grown big enough to cover the house number, and pruning them back was not going to be a very attractive option. So, we just decided to take them out completely. They, and others, suffered some leaf damage during all the ice and snow this winter, and some of the more attractive shrubs were beginning to fill in better, so we decided to take out more than just the two largest. So, I got my chainsaw, put on the work gloves and got down on my knees and started cutting. I cut the lower limbs out of the first one, then immediately made a cross cut at the base of the trunk and took that sucker out all at once. I stood up, pulled the whole shrub out and stood back to admire my work only to realize I'd just cut down the wrong bush! We had planned to take out 3, not 4. Oh well. It was ugly, too!)
Cleaned out leaves and dead grass from front flower beds.
Mowed and collected grass clippings.

It was good to get outside and get some fresh air and use muscles that have been dormant for a while, but now I'm ready to get back to the mental labor of teaching calculus. I thinking doing these major jobs this week will make coming home in the afternoons and doing a few minor jobs much more manageable and enjoyable.

My blog title "Spring Broke" is not meant to imply anything's broken, it's just a past tense thing, as in "Spring Break has come to an end."

That's Right, Wii Fit

I really do have to overcome my pride to say that I get my exercise on a Wii, but using the Wii Fit is about all I've got right now, so I'm taking what I can get. In the last two weeks, I've only missed working out 3 days, and the days I have worked out, I've done so anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. I have a few exercises I always do - a step warmup, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, a 10-minute jog (1.5 miles today) and a 12-minute boxing routine. After these, I vary what I do. I try to do some that help with muscle tone and a little flexibility / agility. I have only recently discovered two new items - the snowball fight, which consists of bending left or right at the waist and hurling and dodging snowballs, and the obstacle course, which involves running and jumping at varying paces, all the while avoiding swinging objects and infinte chasms. I know it's not much, but I have managed to lose 8 pounds in these two weeks, so I do believe I'll continue the "regimen."

Upswing

It is just amazing how feeling bad can make feeling good so much better. Really, when people ask "How ya doin'," and you say "good" or "fine" or whatever it is you say, it's all relative. I've had a scratchy throat and dry cough for so long it was easy to say I didn't feel good. But now that I've had a cold for the last week and it is subsiding, I can say "good" and mean it, even though I still have the throat and cough thing going on. Having finally seen the movie Crash over the weekend, it all makes me wonder how many aspects of our lives are relative. Right now I think probably most are. Truly, how I react to any given situation is tempered so much by whether I've had my coffee, somebody cut me off in traffic, how I saw my dad react, I'm protecting my wife or child, my shirt fits comfortably, the seat warmer is on low or high, Johnny showed up to take a test like he said he would, I got enough sleep last night, my TV show got recorded, I remembered to get milk at the grocery store, I had a glass of my favorite wine, and the list just goes on and on. And who bears the brunt of things going less than perfectly? I don't know. I'd like to think these things only effect me minimally, but I can remember my own poor reactions after having just a single, minute instance of things not being perfect. Maybe my reactions are changed and I don't even recognize it. Where did this start? Oh yes, I'm feeling much better, thank you. Now your day can be better too.

Weary

I am just so tired of all the physical aches and discomforts of the last 2 years. After starting out seeing an orthopedist about what we thought was a problem with my elbow, it seems that the difficulties have only escalated. I have been seeing Dr. Martin, the neurologist, for over 2 years now, and the inflammation in my spinal cord and subsequent discomfort in my hands remains unchanged. It takes such a mental toll on me to have this tingling / stinging / burning always in the background, no matter what I do. I think the stress of this has made my general health much worse. It's not that I worry about it, but I find that no matter how I sit, lie, walk, run, ride, lift, mow, bathe, etc. I cannot escape the discomforts, and this inability to escape beats me down. Every cold or allergy sniffle, cough, bruise, cut and ache is just piled on top of that which does not go away, and so the accumulation of symptoms to overcome feels insurmountable. I want to work in the yard, exercise, play basketball, go for walks and ENJOY them, but that seems like a distant dream for now. I keep praying that God will take this away, but He has other plans, I guess. I've heard that sometimes things have to be broken down before they can be made stronger. I'm ready for the stronger part!

Snow Days

Yesterday, God sent a beautiful blanket of snow to cover McKinney. Deneen, Curt and I had such a good time out in snow in our back yard. It was just barely below freezing, so being outside wasn't terribly uncomfortable. First we built a snow man, which Curt has named Geoffrey.

After a few pictures with Geoffrey, Curt had me take lots of pictures of him running and jumping in the snow. It reminded me of how our dogs react to changes in the weather. When the temperatures drop, they get a lot more energetic and run and play with each other. I think something similar happens with Curt. He took one of the sequences of photos and merged them in PhotoShop with great affect. I love how he can do this.

After the fun in our yard, Deneen and I went for a walk through the park and enjoyed seeing kids out sliding on the snow. It was fun to hear their laughter, see their snowball fights and just be out in the brisk air. It was a short walk, though, as the breeze and our cold toes forced us home.

Good news came later in the evening when we got a call from school letting us know schools were closed for Monday. So, today, we have enjoyed drinking coffee and getting caught up on some school work that probably would've been done tonight after work. It'll mean making up the day later this semester, but snow days are always special. The unexpected day off always provides relaxation and relief of some tension.

Thank you, Lord, for the beauty you provided and the other benefits that have come with it.