Incredible opportunity

When I was finishing university and looking around for what to do next, my internet searching brought up a professor doing work that I thought was interesting. So I applied to his department, and they flew me out to visit. It was a fun visit and I enjoyed sitting in on his class and office hours, but I decided not to go to graduate school straight out of college.

In the end, I wanted to learn from him so much, I re-applied to the program, moved to a big city I didn't like, and took his crazy 4-8PM courses for years. At one point, I was sick of that city and sick of the lack of funding in the department and looked to transfer to another program in another city. But I couldn't find a researcher I'd rather work under. And so I stayed in that expensive, crowded city, in that poor department, but with that professor. For all his faults and the surrounding difficulties, being his student was an incredible opportunity.

 [Jesus] must be clearly seen as the most important thing in human life, and being his apprentice as the greatest opportunity any human being ever has. ~Dallas Willard, "How does the disciple live?"

Being a student of Jesus is the most incredible opportunity. It is inconceivable yet true that the one who is right about everything invites us to learn from him. This learning doesn't consist of long-distance, over-the-internet lectures. This learning is an in-the-flesh, moment-by-moment, intimately-near and out-of-love experience. And from it, we can learn what is good, true, and beautiful.

This is really good news. It is a damaging half-truth to focus on our eternal souls when what we really mean is that we want Jesus to get us into heaven after we die. Indeed, it's a logical fallacy because eternity includes now. The good news of the Bible is not about later. The good news is about now and forever.

What Jesus actually says in "Great Commission" is this (which I've broken up for emphasis):

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
~The good news according to Matthew, chapter 28, vs 17-20

There are many points to make here, but what I want to push back against is our Christian cultural emphasis on just going. "Go means Go" I've heard pastors preach. And that's great. I agree. But what's to happen when we arrive? Making disciples. Introducing people to the incredible opportunity of learning all that is good, true, and beautiful with and from the loving Creator God.

What are we to be about? What does being a disciple look like? We'll keep digging into that next week.



  

Broken but not hopeless

In reviewing a lot of children's books over the past year, I've been saddened by the messiness, grossness, the evil that my children need to be exposed to.

Today, I was coloring with my daughter and introduced her to coloring skin. We used a peachy pencil, and a dusty tan pencil, and a brown pencil and we talked about how people had different color skin. And we compared our arm colors, and we talked about other children she knew who were darker than she was. And it was just a fact. To her, it's like daddy has blue eyes and she has brown eyes. 

But we've read a number of books that share about the American history with skin color and how it wasn't so factual. One thing I've been impressed about a number of these books is how exuberant they can be in the face of evil. I'm thinking about books like Hallelujah Flight which tells about an early trans-continental flight by 2 African-American men or Willie and the All-Stars about a boy growing up during WWII who wants to play professional baseball only to be told he won't ever because he's the wrong color.

We've read a couple books about children with limited access to books and the librarians who trek miles to help them. That Book Woman tells the story from the 1930s of an illiterate boy in Appalachia who learns to read over the course of  the visits from "that book woman". The book made me cry. Waiting for the Biblioburro also talks about an itinerant librarian but is set in contemporary Colombia. The burros are charmingly named Alpha and Beto. Our house is filled with books, and our children are unlikely to experience the privation these books refer to. Yet they need to know. They need to know that it's not so easy in most of the world and hasn't been for most of history.

But I also want them to know that their circumstances do not define them. That's something I so value in the children's book genre; they are by and large hopeful. Though these none of these books are grounded in a theology of hope, I think the hope is there because in Jesus there is the truth of hope. In the Easter story, where Jesus dies and defeats death, the darkest hopelessness, hope gets teeth. It's not just wishful thinking. Evil doesn't win the war even if it wins a few battles. 

Our nighttime routine with our daughter is to read a devotional with her, pray some set prayers, and then we ask her, "What can we thank Jesus for today?" Lately, she's wised up and tells us "Everything!" so that we can get it over with and get on to reading a library book. While we do help her unpack what her everything is, I hope she can also see the truth of it, that we can be thankful for everything and in being thankful we are hanging on to hope regardless of the circumstances. 

When you can't see anymore

I did not grow up with a lot of baking. My mom did bake some, but mostly I remember the comforting clang of the wok and the bubbling of our rice cooker.

But then I married my Anglo husband and shortly thereafter discovered I was gluten sensitive. And when we moved away from California to Austin, my husband's beloved sourdough bread became harder to find. All of this gave me a lot of motivation to learn to bake.

I started with gluten-free baking to satisfy my occassional cravings for bready type foods--pancakes and muffins and such. Then a few years later, when we moved to Austin, I started learning how to make sourdough bread for N.  As I become more comfortable with the oven, I also started to learn to roast meats and vegetables in the oven. 

Now, 5 years in, I've got my own rhythms down. With meat, I am big on using a probe thermometer. No more guessing about done-ness, just look at the temp. With gluten free baking, I use almond meal with various cheaper flours I can get at Asian stores (rice flour, sticky rice flour, tapioca starch). I weigh my ingredients on a kitchen scale allowing me to scale proportions easily. 
The result of this internalizing is that someone asked for my cobbler recipe and I wrote:

The 'biscuit' topping was 2 parts almond meal, 1 part corn flour, 2 parts milk, 1 part cold butter, baking powder, salt, sugar

Now, that actually works GREAT for me. But it's a pretty horrible recipe for most people and especially this friend.

For my everyday life, it's good and appropriate to develop rhythms and habits so that I'm not having to think about every. single. thing. But the trade off is that it becomes harder to not think in those ways, but it's vitally important to do so for other people.

I am realizing that when I quickly dismiss something as "dumb"--another political view, another way of  parenting, another way of organizing life--I'm using my built in heuristics. My habitual way of thinking and making decisions is preventing me from seeing the other considerations people have. What I fear is that some of my habits of thought are so ingrained that I'm truly blind, unable to even realize I have a blind spot, and thus unable to back up and try again.

My cobbler recipe take II:

Peach cobbler--
FRUIT INNARDS
6 cups peaches, sliced & peeled
1/2 c sugar
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 tbsp lemon
1/4 tsp cinnamon
--Over med-low heat, stirring frequently, bring to a boil, after 1 min pour into 9" pie pan or 8" square pan
--pre-heat oven to 400 dgr

BISCUIT TOPPING
6 oz almond meal
3 oz corn flour (the kind used to make tortillas)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
 3 oz (6 tbsp) cold butter 
6 oz milk

--whisk together dry ingredients
--cut or pinch in butter
--add milk and stir together til everything is wet, will be pretty goopy and wet
--scoop lumps over the peach mix (I had about 8-9 lumps)
--for a decorative touch sprinkle with sugar crystals

--bake at 400 dgr for 20 minutes or until brown on top
--serve warm with vanilla ice cream

Knowledge and living

Yesterday I came across this interview with NT Wright who's book Surprised by Hope I'm reading through rather slowly. What struck me about this interview is how much I don't think about the matters being debated between Wright and Piper. And that got me to thinking why I have resisted the encouragements to go to seminary.

You don't earn a doctorate without some scholarly bent; and being someone who likes to think about the life of faith, a number of people have thus suggested that seminary might be a good thing. I'm not here to suggest that seminary can't be a good thing. However, I'd like to use some of my experiences in the language classroom to explain my resistance.

As I've spent time on both sides of the language classroom as both a learner and an instructor, it is obvious that rule knowledge is not the same as being able to converse with people. I have a love hate relationship with learning grammar. It's neat in a "hmm. They chose to express things using that way. Interesting." kinda of a sense. It's maddening in a "ARG! I need to squeeze my thoughts into those rules and its just.not.fitting.right!" My learning style has typically been to learn a massive amount of rules, try to speak but be overwhelmed by all the rules I'm trying to keep track of and apply, get frustrated, and then actively try to forget most of the rules, selectively apply a few of them and sting words together.

As an instructor, I've seen that sometimes my grammar nuts are my best language users, but frequently that's not the case. Peter MacIntyre a language researcher has proposed that "Willingness to Communicate" is a trait that varies from person to person, can be fostered or discouraged, affects language learning outcome. So my students with ok grammar knowledge but enthusiastic willingness to communicate tend to improve a lot faster (and are more fun to work with). My grammar freaks with low willingness to communicate can surprise me with bursts of fluency, but frequently do better in writing tasks where they can be methodical but scared stiff in speaking activities.

When I say that I am resistant to the idea of seminary, I am resistant to the idea that more knowledge necessarily helps me live a life of faith more coherently. As I read 10-20 pages a week of Surprised by Hope, I do think that Wright's explanation of resurrection will ultimately change my outlook on life and how I make decisions. But I don't think that resolving the debate between Wright and Piper will. To me going to seminary would be like my experience of studying Latin grammar intensively for 3 years and then attending a 45 min class on speaking Latin and only being able to produce "The soup is hot. The soup is cold." (True story.) It's far, far too much information at once to integrate into practice.

When I tell people I'm a linguist they frequently think that I know many languages. As a personal preference, in the past I have studied quite a few. However, on a day to day level, I don't study a particular language at all. I am not learning a new language. I look at language use with little reflection about my own experience. I don't want this to happen to my spiritual life. I don't want to dissect, examine, and write about other people's thoughts and experiences on the matter. I actually want to live a faith-filled life. So I'm taking it slow. I appreciate the hard work of others, but I only digest a bit at a time.

We'll never get March back

--Has it hit you that you're a MOM?
--No. Keep asking me and I'll let you know when it happens.

New motherhood is weird. Newly married was weird and actually also disrupted my sleep patterns because it took some getting used to sharing a bed, but new motherhood takes that to a whole new level. My life in the day is punctuated by feedings after which my mother takes the little one and I get back to my dissertation. At night, I'm on my own for three feedings: midnight, 3AM, and 5AM (more or less). Pee and poo are whatever, breastmilk everywhere? Ugh. Inconsolable crying? [tears hair out]

My newborn turns 1 month today, and it's supposed to take 30 days to start a new habit or so I heard. But normal still feels like March, just me and my husband, our morning routines, our evening routines, our outlook on life and planning. Starting today I have finished the Chinese month of postpartum recuperation and can leave the house. I've left the house to go to the pediatrician's, but have otherwise been house-bound. Frankly, I haven't minded it one bit partly because it furthers the illusion that life is as it was. (Having Mom prepare my meals and others go grocery shopping for me is pretty nice too.) I don't have to think about how to run my errands with a newborn in tow. I don't have to schedule everything around her feedings. I don't have to worry about her and the vagaries of "out there". It's May, but I keep thinking it is March.

This reminds me of that verse about being "new creations"

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
~Paul's 2nd letter to the folk in Corinth

I've been a follower of Jesus for most of my life, way, way longer than I've been a mother, yet I find that I can also have the mindset that "normal" is my old life. This new life is strange and not real. What does it take to embrace a new identity and to own it?

About 2 years ago, 5 years into my PhD program, I realized that I wasn't an entering student anymore. I was willing to be called a scholar or researcher and could self-identify as that. Some time in the past 3 years, I've grown accustomed to being married. I don't identify with my maiden name; I don't find myself trying to assert my independence and "singlehood". How did these happen? Well, they certainly didn't happen in a month. For the PhD, I worked with some new students and the contrast in their thinking and my thinking was so different even though I could remember being in their shoes. That helped me to see that I had changed. In marriage, I'm finding that I'm doing "being married" more reflexively. I don't have to tell myself to consider my husband too. Not that I'm a wonderfully considerate person all the time, but I'm not reminding myself that I'm not single all the time. I've probably also finished grieving over the things I did as a single person that I've basically given up, like dragonboating and going out late. These have been replaced with other things I enjoy like Saturday morning pancakes and hosting tacos & SciFi night.

So what will it take to embrace new motherhood and being a new creation in Christ?

For new motherhood, I think it will first take time because in that time I will collect experiences. For new creation-ness, the time has been there. I think what it will take is perspective. What makes me feel like not a new creation are my stellar moments of NOT Christ-likeness. Yelling at a 2 wk old for stuff she can't control will make you feel pretty crappy. But just as I am not a perfect wife but still a wife, I am not a perfect "new creation" but still a "new creation" nevertheless. "New creation-ness" makes me feel like I should have it all together, to have left all the old stuff behind. I wonder if I need to consider new creation-ness as a process of growing into a new identity rather than the perfect, immediate adoption of Christ-like living.

Identity is a weird thing and something I thought 20 year olds dealt with. But here I am staring down 30, going through the another topsy turvy identity change.

Guess it doesn't matter cuz any way you slice it we'll never get March back.

Choosing failure

As a language learner, I actually have a sick love of learning grammar and vocabulary. The first language I studied from scratch was Latin which was partly awesome because I didn't have to speak it...until I did. You see I went to a Latin summer camp, and we had a class in spoken Latin. Oh my. Here I was, a super Latin dork, and I couldn't string sentences together for the life of me. I learned a few stock phrases and stuck with them. No matter, it's not like I was ever going to run into a native Latin speaker.

But then I studied Russian. Same thing--learned boat loads of grammar--but this time I went to Russia and worked at a children's hospital where everyone was a Russian speaking monolingual. My speaking abilities were dreadful. Pretty much the only people I could chat up were the kids who all had psychiatric or developmental problems. For all the grammar and linguistics I knew, I could not hold a coherent conversation with adults. Agh.

To get over my grammar hangup, I developed this strategy: each day I would pick one grammatical feature and try to use that correctly. For example, everything else could fall by the wayside, but I would form the past tense correctly. I'm pretty sure that the first weeks of this I was still pretty unintelligible to the other hospital workers, but as time passed I increased my vocabulary and I got more and more comfortable with different grammatical features. 18 months later when I moved to Kazakhstan, I was pretty comfortable working in Russian and even studied Kazakh with a tutor that only spoke Russian and Kazakh. (Learning to recite math equations in Kazakh through Russian explanations was exhausting.)

I don't know if it's a Western thing or a life thing, but I find myself often inundated with "how things should be done"; 10 steps to a being a better Christian, 7 highly effective habits of a healthy marriage, how to write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day. And the thing is I actually think a lot of the advice given has merit, but there is no way for me to implement all of it now. So I choose failure in almost everything so that I can practice one thing. My "one things"right now are:

1) Pray scripture. I haven't done this in a while and I'm finding it refreshing.
2) Tell N when he pisses me off instead of stuffing it inside.
3) Touch the dissertation everyday Monday through Saturday.

So forgive me if my life looks a little herky-jerky from your end, but I just don't have it together and I can only focus on so much at any one point in time.

If you're looking for a "one thing" for yourself, I offer you this verse from my childhood:

Psalm 100

1Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

3Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

5For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.