Another Tuesday without a call to go sub - and even though not subbing = not earning money, I'm enjoying the break again. I just spent an hour or so practicing Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring on guitar. I've never taken classical guitar lessons, and until a couple months ago had only played rock, folk, blues, etc. - I've studied and sung classical music, but guitar was for everything else. But a couple months ago I found a book with some intermediate level transcriptions of classical pieces (yes, I know, Bach is Baroque), and started messing around with some of them. I've always loved Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, so I was focusing on that one.

Then my job as music director for a church that does pretty much all rock music took an unexpected twist when I tried to start planning music for a wedding in the church and realized that wedding processionals and electric guitars aren't a normal combination. So I mustered up my courage (stupidity?) and told the couple "Hey, I'll play Bach on guitar for the processional."

So in the last two weeks I've been using a good chunk of my free time to plunk away... it's coming, and I'm sure I'll be ready to do it, but the subtlety involved in doing a piece like this well takes some concentration. This morning I worked on some trouble spots, then remembered that I have a recording of Phil Keaggy playing this piece with an orchestra in London, so I decided to see how far along I was by playing along. I turned it on, and my first realization was that he was taking a tempo that was, shall we say, a bit faster than I was planning. But I went ahead and tried it, and after fumbling through the first few measures, something cool happened - something about being forced to follow that quicker tempo made my mind turn off in a good way, and my fingers just started to remember where to go, and for a long while I was able to just play - I know I made some mistakes, but the majestic and peacefully rolling rhythm of the piece just seemed to carry me along, and the strings played soaring countermelodies to my (and Phil's) steady dance through the chord progressions. I ended up getting lost somewhere after a page turn, but by then I had already had those crucial several moments of forgetting about jobs, responsiblities, relationships, etc., and just being caught up in a piece of art that's a lot more eternal than my daily worries.

This might be, by necessity, fairly vague and abstract, but I'm thinking tonight about the concept of putting your heart out on the line, and how, too often, I don't. We're good at protecting ourselves, aren't we? If the object of life was to feel pain as infrequently as possible, I think most Americans would be considered pretty successful. Look at all the toys we have to distract us from hurt. Money can't buy happiness, but I suppose it can buy Prozac. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with anti-depressants at all, but if more people were well-equipped to handle their issues and find joy in life, we might find a much smaller number of people who actually need them.

Anyway, I point the finger at myself here, because I find it so easy to run anywhere that seems somehow safe rather than to risk pain. This is a basic truth I've known for a long time, but I'm realizing recently that maybe I'm at a point where I need to put myself on the line a little more, risk a little more hurt, be a little more naked - and just possibly put myself in a place to experience more joy. Andrew Osenga has a song called "When Will I Run to the Arms of God" - I think even the times I try to run to the arms of God, I don't expect enough from those Arms... I expect them to be safe, and at times (when I need them to be) they are. But I need to run to those arms when they're not safe - when they gently redirect me towards a path that looks dark and ripe with pain and uncertainty. Because sometimes safe isn't good. And God is good, so good that S/he can't always be safe. God loves us too much to keep us comfortable.

I went to bed last night exhausted - I was at church yesterday from 8:45 in the morning to 8:45 at night. It was all good stuff - planning worship, discussing postmodernism and the church, brainstorming ways to go outside of the church walls and relate to people. Then a couple from the church who are getting married at the end of the month came and we planned music for their wedding, which will be really neat. So it was all fulfilling, and I felt like I was really doing the things that I was made to do. But I got home and was spent - I needed to grade some papers for my class tonight, but I just couldn't do it. I went to bed and, if it's possible, I felt almost too tired to fall asleep! I finally did, all the while trying to figure out when I was going to have time today to finish grading and take care of a few details from church...

My alarm went off this morning, and I turned it off. My second alarm went off this morning (yeah, I need two!), and I turned it off, figuring that I'd wake up when the substitute coordinator called to tell me where I would work today. Maybe an hour later, I half emerged from behind the curtain of sleep and realized my phone hadn't rung. Duly noted, I fell back asleep. It wasn't the most restful sleep, because it seemed like everything that's been on my mind in the last couple weeks (church, teaching, summer work?, relationships, family) was making a lot of noise inside my sleeping head, but when I finally woke up for good at 9:30 and realized that, for the first time in a few weeks, the lady hadn't called with a job for me... well, I felt pretty awesome.

Now, this could be considered a bad thing - money-wise, I should be working every possible day. But... I needed a day off, and I immediately went outside with my new devotional book that draws on the tradition of Celtic prayer. The sun was out, and the sky was clear, and the Celtic Christian tradition focuses a lot on seeing God's goodness in the beauty of creation, so I spent some time soaking in the sun and the love of the One who created me. And now I have the opportunity to get some things done today and to rest, maybe go for a run, and be ready to really focus on building into the students in my class tonight... we live in a twisted world in some ways, and like Derek Webb says, "everyone is crooked deep down," so I may very well not use the day for all the great things I'm envisioning, but this little reminder of a God who gives grace in little ways along with the big ones has got me feeling a little bit lighter on my feet today.

In the past, when I've journaled, I've always had the dilemna of what to do when I don't write for a while... spend time catching up, or just write what's on my mind? Well, tonight it's too late and I'm too tired to catch up, but I did want to write. I will say that the last week has found me continuing to think hard about various and sundry things, almost to the point where I'm tired of thinking. I've been thinking about most of them so hard that I haven't been able to write about them. But here's something I can write about.

I subbed today in an English class, which always makes me look around at books and get interested in one or several of them. Today I skimmed a book called Socrates Café, in which the author describes his pursuit of bringing philosophy back to the people. He tries to follow Socrates' example and methods of philosophical thought. In Socratic thought, the question is the all-important element. The point isn't as much to find the right answer as it is to learn from the process of questioning. So this author travels around to different places facilitating what he calls Socrates Café, in which people simply discuss basic questions about the meaning of life and how to live a good life, and they follow Socrates' model of exploring all lines of questioning that surround the basic question. Anyone is welcome, and all viewpoints are treated with respect.

Skimming this book did a couple things for me. One, it made me go after school to get a library card (I must really live here now - I have a library card!) and check out the book Sophie's World, which I hear does an amazing job of outlining the history of philosophy in the form of a novel. (Oh, and I also checked out Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days, because it reminds me of growing up listening to A Prairie Home Companion with my family.) Secondly, it made me think about how groups that function like these Socrates Cafés seem to be successful because they allow for dialogue and tolerance of other ideas and acceptance of anyone's viewpoints. And how many people would see churches as the opposite of this kind of place. At church, it seems to some, you don't dialogue - people tell you what to think. If you don't think like the rest of the church, you better leave.

So let's move church to the smoking section of a coffeeshop or bar and let whoever sits in on the conversation contribute to the sermon, right? Christians could go a long way towards reconciliation with people we've harmed by our legalism and judgement by showing that kind of respect for others' opinions. And it would seem to better demonstrate that grace is about Christ loving people while they are "yet sinners" and not about following a prescription list of rules.

But there is a difference between a Socrates Café and a church. A church - while I think it needs to be much more comfortable dwelling in questions than shelling out "certainties" which often have more basis in culture and tradition than in the Bible - a church must also be able to point people to a Truth that doesn't change, no matter how much you question it. I haven't figured out yet how that balance works, but I think it has something to do with concentrating less on man-made arguments as truth, but more on the one who said "I am the Truth." Does this make any sense? I don't know, I'll have to think about it tomorrow when I'm more awake.

Ever have a couple days where there's just a lot on your mind? Stupid question... everyone has those days, but it always amuses me how some stretches of time seem to just pass without much note, and watching Sportscenter seems like an important part of the day, and then little things happen that make me feel like I need to take a day off just to sit and smoke my pipe by a lake somewhere and try to make sense out of the world.

Without going into too much detail, I'm pondering...

- work... I've known that eventually I'm going to go to seminary, probably do ministry in a church full-time, if I'm not touring the country playing music. I've also known that I didn't want to do that right away, so since my graduation I've been a bank teller, a guitar salesman, a substitute teacher, an instructor at a business college, a studio musician, a guitar teacher, and of course, music director for a church. My substitute teaching gig will necessarily end come summer, so I'm pondering my next move. Patching together jobs to support myself, rather than having one full-time, more permanent job, has contributed to my feeling of life here being somewhat temporary, and that's how I perceived it when I moved here. But at this point I have no reason to leave anytime in the near future, unless I decide to go to seminary soon somewhere else. I love my church and wouldn't want to leave that anytime soon. So I'm pondering the possibility of teaching at the business college full-time... I need to figure out if I'm being called to really invest in trying to teach/love/minster to the very unique people there. If I were to decide to do that, I think I would want to commit to that for a while. But would that be somehow too limiting, or not the right focus for my energies? These are the things I think about... ok, I went into detail...

- relationships - the ones I've left behind, the ones I've begun to form, the ones that are being healed and renewed, the ones that build me up, the ones that make me hurt... in particular I'm feeling deeply for friends who are making decisions that they know aren't best, but who don't care at this point. I can't judge that - I've been there far too often, and will be again. But some decisions have harder consequences than others. It hurts to see it happen and not be able to do anything about it. But over the last few years I've been learning that letting God channel His love through me will not necessarily mean most times that I'll be able to influence people's behavior, but will more often mean that I get to walk with someone and show love and grace to them. That's a lot harder than telling them what to do, and I'm not always great at it, but I'm hoping that someday I'll see the fruit of it...