"There were several mothers shopping up and down the aisles with young children in tow-- many of them snarling and snapping at the over-lively, curiosity-filled, wildly energetic kids. I wanted to grab the mothers, embrace them, tell them, 'Do you realize what you have done? You have given birth to a child, a child-- this miracle, this wonder, this glory. You're a Madonna! Why aren't you in awe and on your knees with the magi, with the shepherds?' Luckily, I restrained myself. 'Madonna' probably would not have had the same meaning for them as it had for me."

--Eugene Peterson, "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," p 58

Last week, I attended a house concert given by The Blackthorn Project, a fabulously inspiring couple from Woodland Park that travels around the country and the world playing beautiful music, which, they explain, serves as journal entry and remembrances to life as they continue to work it out. Laurie, the fiddle player, had been speaking for much of the day (they also graciously led our worship at Timberline Oldtown that morning) about her recent deep realization of the expanse of God's love and related a story about the manifestation of this love in this life of her nineteen-month-old daugter. When her child was born, she said, she remebered holding this tiny peice of creation in her hands and thanking the Father for such a gift and expressingher love for the baby, only for her prayer to be returned with the words, "I love her even more than you do," spoken clearly from the Spirit of God.

Although I am not a mother and do not plan on having children of my own for quite some time, this idea really resonated with me. Often, when I hear stories about mothers and children and the raising of these small lives, my mind goes directly to the kids I work with every day, the students I interact with through my involvement with the School of Education, and the students that will be under my care when they enter my classroom in just a little while. I can't help but think of these small people as my own children, lives that my career path is leading me to be a significant part of. As Laurie talked about this message from Abba about his love for the child that has been given to her for this short time on earth, I instantly wanted to hang onto that truth for my own student. As much as I love the children I find attached to my legs and arms at work and as much as I am looking forward to helping children realize thier own creativity in an art classroom, it opens my world wider to realize that God loves these children immensely more than I could ever imagine loving them myself.

There is something about this admission from God that makes me realize that I am only a small part of all that he does in our lives and in this world. I am reminded that I am only his hands and I am only invited through his grace into this work of life that he is continually recreating.

In his chapter on creation, Peterson talks at length about the wonder that comes from an awareness of the life infused into our beings as humans. In the passage quoted above, I am inspired again to be the sort of teacher that cultivates the image of God in my students. The more I work with young people, especially kids in the early elementary grades, the more I am in awe of their creativity, thier energy, the life that is yet to be subdued and diminished by "maturity." The more I work with these little people, the more I am challenged to harness all of this life towards good, to grow it, to stregthen it so as to aid its survival through the harsh world. It is as if the small bodies of children are just bursting with the Spirit of God.

Each day, I get a few steps closer to this profession, this way of life that I think far exceeds many paths in life. Just the thought of being in a classroom, cultivating young minds and influencing the future of our world for good makes me feel right at home. It is my hope and prayer that I would be continually reminded of my place in the larger scheme of things-- situated within the house of God's love that is beyond all I could ever dream or imagine.

Two weeks are behind us already. fourteen weeks to go. Just kidding. This semester has been markedly less chaotic and full than other semesters have been in the past-- which has been a great relief. Sometimes, I catch myself feeling a bit like I'm still in "break mode," and wonder who this relaxed person who is who has time to clean the kitchen occasionally. It seems strange to think that after tomorrow and the next day, it will be February and my 22nd year will be finished in just 14 more days.

I've been thinking some about the minute threads of existence that make up the entirety of our lives. I've been thinking about painting the pattern of life and history on canvas. I've started reading Eugene Peterson's "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," (thanks Robin!) with a friend and it's gotten us to thinking about all the little stuff that God is in and how important those little rituals are to our lives. I don't know if it would be honest to say that I've been enjoying those little things more these days, but I've been thinking about ways of capturing them, that's for sure.

I am in the last stretch of my education Practicum and I've been spending a lot of time about 20 minutes from home in a very large High School and I'm getting excited about building relationships and collaborating and dressing professionally again. I was late for painting today after forgetting my house keys and taking a 30 minute walk home from campus and I felt free from that nagging sense of failure that often accompanies this sort of irresponsibility-- lateness and all. I simply walked in, set up my paints and got to work. I don't feel the same pressure and am really enjoying the freedom to be creative and free and loose with myself and my art-- I feel like this sense of "enough-ness" is the thing that is going to keep be creating after I get out of school--- not the terror that be used to be the motivation.

"The Lord heard my cry for help and had mercy on me."

"Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished."

It feels like a new day today. Although it is mid-January, the sun is shining and I took off my shoes. It feels like summer is on its way, despite the reality of Colorado's tendency for weather trickery.

This morning, the head of the School of Education greeted every senior teacher candidate with these tidings: "Welcome to the first day of your career." There have been times over the last month that I wished I could just skip over this term, hoping that I could wake up and find myself finished. But today, things felt new. I find a new hope under the soles of my shoes.

Today I joined my education collegues, fellow students, and faculty in the RamSkeller to take part in a ritual taking place in Washington D.C. Marking an event overwhelmingly significant to many. Since the election, I've been at peace with the contol I believe our Father holds over our lives and life of our country, but today, sitting in that room, surrounded by people that have become my home, I felt the weight of the day for me personally and for the world. Things are exciting. Dreams are happening and the world is changing.

I was reflecting back four years ago when I first walked this now-familiar campus, wondering if it would ever feel like my own. Today, the first day of my last semester here, I felt the joy fill my heart of knowing that indeed today this place is home, it is a place of hope, and will always be an important place of remembrance for this journey.

I'm not sure if I really have anything really profound to say about all of this, but it feels like a day a stone needs to mark. I've been thinking a lot about ritual and about traditions. I've been looking for those important momvents, those rituals used to mark the important, spiritual things in our lives. Ceremony. Taking more than a coffee break to acknowledge the life that is taking shape around our souls.

So today, new things are happening. It is the first day of my career-- a career that this person also said should never feel like work. I am rejoicing today in a God who has mercy on me. Saying a little prayer of thanks for a painting instructor that defined her role as "cheerleader"-- a sort of person I desperately need in my life these days.

"Our capacity to take risks and learn from then depends heavily on whether we understand action as instrumental or expressive. The instrumental image, which dominates Western culture, portrays action as a means to predetermined ends, as an instrument or tool of our intentions. The only possible measure of such action is whether it achieves the ends at which it is aimed. Instrumental action is governed by the logic of success and failure; it discourages us from risk-taking because it values success over learning, and it abhors failure whether we learn from it or not.

Instrumental action always wants to win,but win or lose, it inhibits our learning. If we win we think we know it all and have nothing more to learn. If we lose we feel so defeated that learning is a hollow consolation. Instrumenal action traps us in a system or praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge and diminishes our capacity to take the risks that may yeild growth.

I find it facinating that the most 'successful' of all modern activites-- science-- is one that rejects success and failure as the primary norms for its acts. For the pure scientist, a failed experiement is no failure at all, but a vital step towared learning the truth. Such 'failure' narroes the range or relevant hypotheses to be tested and may contriubut some posiive findings as well. Science, seen by many as our most powerful instrumentality, has achieved its eminence in part by freeing itself from the stangelhold of instrumentalism.

Of course, scientific knowledge is often used by technology in action of the most instrumental sorts. Such action, action that links means to ends, will always be a part of our lives, will always play a central role in a world with finite resources and infinte needs. Aslong as we live embodied lives, the demands of instrumental action will always be with us.

But when the standards of instrumentalism dominate, our action is impoverished and our lives are dminished. Only when we act expressively do we move toward full aliveness and authentic power. An expressive act is one that I take not to acheive a goal outside myself but to express a conviction, a leading, a truth that is within me. An expressie act is one taken because if I did not take it I would be denying my own insight, gift, nature. By taking an expressive act, and act not obsessed with outcomes, I become closer to making the contribution that is mine to make in the scheme of things.

The doing of pure science is an expressive act, an act that simply manifests the scientis's own desire to know the truth. Paradoxically, as science demonstrates, and expressie act is more likely to achieve real ends than is an instrumental act calculated to reach such ends but not rooted in the actor's own reality. When an act is true to one's nature it is more likely to have outcomes that are true to the field of action. I do not mean that we will always find the outcomes of expressive action to be acceptable, pleasing, or 'good.' I mean simply that whatever the outcomes may be, they will be convergent with a larger sustaining truth. They will not be temporary illusions imposed on reality by our false and frail images of how things ought to be."

-- Parker Palmer, "The Active Life," 23-24

After these three days end, school will once again consume my entire person-hood for one more term. As those of you who actually still read this no doubt have observed, I haven't been writing as much lately. I myself have wondered why this is, whether it be the lack of adequate things to say, a loss of my reflective self, an increased loss of literate appetite thanks to the overtake of college senior status and an ever-growing desire to sleep more than anything else. I've also wondered if maybe I'm growing out of this blog. Over the last semester, I've experienced, thanks to the wonder of pharmaceutical technology, a freedom from the depression that drove me to write here in hope of refuge from the storm. I've wondered if the thing I set out to do by writing this blog has been accomplished and I've reached many of the ends each of these posts was a prayer for.

It has been four and one-half years since I started covering this black space with these white words. A journey through the conclusion of high school through what is now the conclusion of my undergraduate life. This has been round four as far as the winter break cycle is concerned, and I am tempted to speculate that this has been the most-anticipated one so far, but I'm not sure if that is true. Regardless of its status among previous breaks, I will say it has been one of a great deal of recombination and reflection-- I've felt the importance of taking some extended time to step back and look at my spiritual life and prepare my heart for the year that lies ahead.

For the last few terms, I've had the painful sense of a spiritual shift in my life-- in terms of how my personal growth has been assessed in my younger days, these more recent seasons of this transition they call "college age" are marked with less measurable focus on who I am becoming and more adherence to an increasing need to "get by." The time I used to spend filling journals and reading is now spent writing lesson plans and painting to a deadline. My prayer life occurs occasionally in the shower or on my bike between classes and lunch and usually consists of the words, "help me make it through another day." God isn't the same God I thought he was when I was eighteen and I am not the same person either. Earlier this fall, I wondered if I was still the deep, wise person people told me I was back then when I was a person beyond most my age. I wondered if my life had become shallow and small.

Over the break, the completion of an application for a summer camp counseling job forced me into some serious reflection on the state of my spirit and the disciplines that keep me growing. A few months back, the presentation of the question: "How is your spiritual life," sent me into a panic as I realized that for the sake of appearances, my spiritual life was found at the altar of school-- the all-consuming fire in my life felt like the need to meet deadlines and expectations. But as I sat down to work through the question presented on the application, "What is your relationship with Christ?" I began to realize that it isn't that my soul has shrunken to meeting the expectations of my superiors, but my way of approaching the Spirit of God and his work in my life had simply changed to something less measurable, but far more authentic.

As I wrote my response, I came to the realization that in the last four years, my spiritual growth has shifted from isolated disciplines of solitude and reflection to a communal way of life. As I've prayed for a freedom from guilt and a sense of obligation for the aquisition of acceptance and validation, I've found a life in the arms of a loving and faithful God who is not limited to ink on paper. Not that solitude and the disciplines are not essential means of connecting with the Father, but when we leave behind the need to do these things for our own spiritual satisfaction and seek God where he wants to be found, we crack open a world far beyond our own imaginations.

Sitting down and thinking through the true state of my relationship with the Trininity leaves me only with the pervading reality that God is faithful, that his promise never to foresake perseveres in the midst of the violent shifts that modern life inevitably presents. I began to write the section of my application on "disciplines that keep you growting" with some trepidation-- no longer do I have time for regular journaling, it has been months since I read a good book on theology or "inspiration" on my own, and truth be told-- my bible rarely sees the light of day outside of Sunday. As I mentioned before, my serious times of solitude are the 8-10 minutes in the shower on days I get ahold of my worries for the day or am awake enough to think beyond the selection of clean clothes in my closet. But as I stopped thinking in terms of how I would have proudly presented my spiritual stature in previous years, I realized that osmething far more prevading and powerful now marks my spiritual growth-- community.

It was just a short time before I began writing here that for the first time in my life I heard the message from Genesis 1-- "It is not good for man to be alone." Four and a half-years ago, I entered into this mind-blowing reality that this longing I have to be connected to other human beings is not a right denied to certain people like myself-- we are made for it. And it has been since then that I've been on this quest towards seeing that play out in my life.

Over the past month, I've been keenly aware of how close my life is to becomming one of a full-time teacher. As I go to work every day and see the faces of so many kids that need to be lovingly cared for and brought up in truth, my role of such a mentor in the classroom draws closer and closer in my awareness. Underneath, I've been aware of my calling to teach for my entire life. I have distinct memories of sitting at the small desk in my dad's office, surrounded by rows of music tapes and my aunt's artwork, sticking barbie stickers on green paper thinking to myself, "I will sit at a desk like this as a teacher some day." As a sophomore in high school, at a youth retreat on legacy, I prayed that God would speak to me about the path he would call me to through college. Almost instantly, everything burrying this life-old voice moved to the side and I knew teaching art was the place created for me. It was as though all I had to do was remember.

And so I followed the voice, despite the trepidation at the thought of connecting with children and my overall fear of relationship. I don't know how to do relationship, I wispered to God often. How will this ever work? How can I ever teach if I don't know how to connect to people? But then there was this whole group of people repeating this word over and over again-- community. Community. It was an alluring word, a concept full of mystery and romance. Something I wondered about for myself.

My first year of college, I felt like I messed up a lot of relationships. This community I was looking for in the Body seemed impossible and I was still hard, full of walls to be surmounted. My dreams weren't coming true and I wondered how I could be so full of the quest for community and yet be falling so hard. And then I recieved an invitation. "Come do life with us for a while." Community.

For a long time, I saw the embodiment of community as a group of friends that did things together on Friday night and never left each other out of things and gave each other rides and ate dinner together a lot. A life-long circle of friends that never wavered or shifted. Undying loyalty. So I went, thinking I would find such a circle of friends. And I found myself alone a lot. I did make new friends and we did things together and I spent a lot of days in a row with people. We ate dinner together. But I also got hurt and it was usually messy. And then certain words woke me up to a new reality of what community meant.

My definition of community changed. I realized community isn't a formula fond in certain ancient accounts. It doesn't look like a high school clique and it doesn't solve all of your problems in an instant. And maybe the most important lesson of all is the reality that community is never static and it isn't an unchanging wall of security. Community, I am learning, is an ever-shifting openness to change. Community is bravery and community is the realization that everybody matters. When I make an image out of community, I end up putting walls around things and miss out on the wind that blows through life.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons I've learned over the past four years is the inevitable tendency for people to walk in and out of your life and the unquestionable need to hold people with an open hand. Best friends forever isn't actually the way community breathes. I like that image-- community is breath. When I read that humanity is created in the image of God and my exeperience tells me no two people are the same, I have to conclude that as a Body, every person moving in and out of the mouth of God as his breath is some manifestation of the life God gives. So, allowing the natural rythm of relational tide to wash over my life is recieving the sustenence God himself gives. We all know that people move in and out of our lives at certain times for perticular reasons.

Along the course of this journey towards life found in community, I've wondered at the paradox between the idea that God is enough and this life supposedly made for community. Growing up as a lonely child, petrified of the damage relationships with other broken shards of people can bring, I maintained a self-sufficient life, relying on my own ability to perform and learn without actual human interaction. I was taught "God is enough," and that my daily routine of discipline must exhibit a spiritual fortitude of epic porportions to by loved by God and accepted in relgious communities. God is enough meant never trust other people to provide for your needs. I lived a black and white life of isolated theology.

However, this idea of God being found in the ebb and flow of faces around me, reconciles this idea afterall. God is enough as he shows himself in the community he has built into our hearts. Our horizontal and vertical lives are not separated. Maybe the verticle isn't quite as high as we thought. My definition of the life God made for our spirits has changed.

Do you ever stuggle through a certain season in life only to step back after the smoke clears and feel the suffen gravity of a shift? In expounding on my practices of personal growth on this application, it occured to me that through the refining fire of time management and submission to the demands of Colorado State University, I've been freed from my isolated sense of religious accomplishment as a mark of spiritual worth into the realization of God in the faces that meet my gaze every day. I don't have time to sit down and read for hours and the pages upon pages I write these days often entail lesson objectives and assessment strategies, but the spiritual encounters that permeate my life are the women I life with, my classmates, and the kids I build relationships with at work. I learn about the person God is making me into as I struggle through how to love my parents, and I do the dishes for the sake of a roommate who enjoys a far-neater house that I am compelled to maintain. My exeperiences of God are no longer limited to the weekly hour I spend with my nose in a book, but permiate moments of despiration when I wonder if I'll ever find the strenght to paint another 15 minutes.

As I near the end of this journey and perpare to enter a new season in life, I can't help but marvel at God's faithfulness. As I look back at the times I grieved my own percieved lack of spiritual accomplishment, I see only an image of the Father holding me close. I've been thikning a lot about Rob Bell's Nooma video entitled "Rain," in which he tells the story of a time he took his son for a walk in the forest when it began to pour a torrential rain. Near the conclusion of the video, Bell contemplates what it would be like for his son to later ask him how he could put him through such abuse. As a father, he says, such a question would be pure heartbreak as this experience was one of the closest moments with his son in his lifetime. "I got to hold you close," Bell says.

Throughout the Christmas season, the concept of story has been on my mind. I've been thinking about the story God had prepared for John the Baptist and the journey many prophesied about Jesus' life. I often think about a talk Francis Chan gave at Mar's Hill sometime ago about this idea of the story God is inviting us into; the portion of his talk that continually comes back to me is his retelling of his own life from God's perspective. I'm going to have this child born to a family who doesn't want him. I'm going to have this child be adopted, only to witness the death of his mother at age 12. And then... I often think about this manner of narrative in light of my own life and imagine God telling my story in much the same way-- he knows it all, and he knows the pain, but it is a beautiful novel in his library of lives.

I began to think back on the last four years and how I find myself in a community now that I felt I've been searching for since the start of my college life, a community I was so close to being a part of but somehow ended up taking a detour to find. A detour that led me to perhaps the greatest pain of my life. The first realization of this thought instatntly brought me to ask why. Why, Abba, would you take me through that road that you knew would end in an experience of such greif? But as I thought about the path my life took there, no cell in my body asks to go back or avoid it. It is a part of me. A gift.

So here I am. In three short days, I will venture once again to rooms full of chairs and tables, I will embark on journeys through books and do a lot of typing on this same keyboard. I will be covered in paint and I will dress professionally. I will be making last preparations before stepping into a classroom all my own, on my own.

But I will go with an awareness of a God who is faithful and a God who only longs to hold me close. I will go armed with the pages of a story that tell of a Father who answered prayer, who healed this broken heart and taught me how to love people, a God who soothed my fears and taught me how to love children. A God who gives me dreams at night about building relationships with children I've yet to meet. A God who has already made this child into someone she only dreamed to ask for. So off I go!

Brian Kershinisnik

I opened my iGoogle page this morning and was greeted with this painting in the "Art of the Day" spot and was instantly in love with it. You should check out this artist and fall in love with it too. Because it is fabulous.

Stories

"Blessed is she who has believed what the Lord has said will be done to her." --Luke 1

Since a few weeks before Christmas came, we've been meditating on the first few chapters of Luke on Sunday mornings. For the last three or four Christmases, I've been spending the time leading up to the holidays asking God what he would have to say to me about the coming of his son, to give me some sort of new word about what this ritual means to the connection of my spirit and his. This year, however, having virtually given up on any intentional spiritual effort, I forgot about this tradition. I suppose it may have entered my mind a time or two, but I never took the time to really sit down and seek it out.

In God's infinite grace and merciful remembrance of me, it seems that he has brought a word to me, regardless of my contributed effort. The idea that is continually running through my mind is the concept of story. Since we began thinking through Advent and these early words of Luke, I can't get that word, story, out of my mind. There seems to be little accompanying the word by way of interpretation or specifics, but I get this sense that God is speaking to me about the story he is writing on my life, the story he had in mind for his son on this earth, and how those two things are intersecting.

I am in the closing chapters of my "College Story." This fact I know all too well. I'm sure you all are tired of hearing about it, but somehow this idea of story that keeps repeating itself seems connected to the twilight of this small part of my story. It is significant, yes, but it is part. Although I have a shady outlined idea of what even the entire next year might look like, I know little details of the coming story. I find myself wondering what this message about "story" means because I feel like I have less questions about "what comes next" than most college graduates. I am not seeking a gigantic revelation about what to seek next-- I'm lucky (or maybe unlucky, depending) to be studying something in school that pretty clearly defines my career path: teaching and art.

Our study of Luke seems to continually weave threads of consecration and dedication through each of the characters. Beginning with the birth of John the Baptist, God calls the child out for his purposes before his parents are even able to hold him with their own hands. This child is mine. Throughout these passages, angels and prophets keep saying things about John and Jesus like, "You have no idea what story will be written for these children."

We watch as each person dedicates their lives to the Lord, things change. Simeon gives Mary the good news that her child will "pierce her heart like a sword," and John will never be able to bury his own father. Often we remind each other on Sundays that following Christ will cost us everything, but it will be worth it.

This morning, in continued attempt to decipher this idea of story in my life and the sense of calling that surrounds my spirit these days, I wonder if these words have something to do with all the culminations I find myself in the midst of these days. I feel like I'm so close to teaching-- I can almost taste it in the air, like the salt of the ocean. This is something that I feel has been written on my heart for my entire life. For as long as I can remember, I've been waiting for the chance to have a classroom all my won. I'm on the cusp of diving in, full-bodied. The thing that my story has been about for approximately 17 years is about to be real. The thing I've been preparing for, anticipating is within reach.

I am often hesitant to speak with such certainty. I do not like nailing lists of things on doors and, as Rob Bell has suggested, I do not live with brick walls. And I think for this reason it seems strang for me to want to say that this is the thing I was made to do, that this-- teaching-- is the thing-- yet, I can't help but repeat it like a poem. And maybe there will come a day when I am led somewhere else, when the winds change and I move to a new current. But these days, the thing I think about is teaching. This is the story that's being written for me for now and I can't wait to step into it fully.

It is the third day of 2009 and people are talking about goals and resolutions and retrospectives and newness and change and hope. I've been away from school for nearly three weeks now and most of my days have consisted of sleeping, eating, biking, net surfing, an occasional read, some celebrating, some gift giving, too much TV watching. I've been thinking it is about time I sat down and wrote something here about how 2008 went by and goals I have for the coming year. I keep thinking I should sit down and write something along the lines of: Who I Want to be Before 2010 Rolls Around.

I've been thinking about it and I think every answer to that sort of inquiry can be summed up in the title College Graduate. I contemplated just working through what I am about to write here in the privacy of my journal out of embarrassment for my lack of aspiration and self-motivation, but something talked me out of it. Truth be told, after I think through it all, my goal for the coming semester (the first half of the year or so) is to get through it. I used to be so eager to learn all my instructors had to pour into my head, but as I look forward to this semester, I see myself going through the motions, but I don't see myself putting in the 132% that I'm used to putting in. And, undoubtedly, I'll learn loads of great stuff in the next term, but i don't see myself putting any sort of goals down on yellow paper stating that I will be striving towards any self-inflicted learning.

As I look towards the coming year, I feel like it is broken up fairly simply: one more semester of familiar classes, a summer (hopefully) spent on staff at a camp somewhere, fall student teaching. I feel as though I'm being quite the cynic, but the truth is, I feel much too tired to be making goals. I'm one semester away from the conclusion of my undergraduate life as I know it, a summer and one more semester away from a new lifestyle, a new set of choices.

My public conscience tells me I ought to be thinking more inspirationally about learning new hobbies or learning how to be a nicer person or eat more spinach or something, but the truth is, those aren't things I'm interested in adding to my repertoire in 2009. Maybe my goal should be an improvement in attitude or the completion of CSU's list of 100 things to do before you graduate. Maybe I should pray that God would make me be more in the moment, that he would make me present to all that he has to do in my last semester of school. But the thought of any of those things imposes a bit more pressure than I'd like to afford. So, I suppose obtaining a BFA in painting and K-12 Teaching license will be enough to attribute to the year.