If you’re not familiar with my “Casserole” posts, each of them is a collection of hopefully deep thoughts (not the SNL kind). It’s been almost five years since my last such post.
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I usually blog after I end a fast so that I can share what I learned during the fast. I haven’t blogged immediately after ending fasts this year partly due to time constraints and partly due to my not having learned anything that would take up an entire blog post. In January, I fasted for twenty-one days from meats and sweets; the biggest thing I learned is that it is possible to live without meats and sweets. It’s something that was actually profound and metaphorical that God needed to etch on my heart. (In the top half of the photo above, I’ve shared pics of nice meatless meals that I enjoyed at restaurants.) On the Sunday before Memorial Day, I did a salad fast—I ate only a salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with no snacks, like I used to do for fourteen straight days—and remembered that, well, salad fasts are hard because I can get pretty dang hungry. (In the bottom half of the photo, I’ve shared pics of the pre-packaged salads that I ate.) I was reminded that what I was praying for needed to happen more than I needed to eat a burger.
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After several years as a freelance editor, with mostly students as clients, I have now closed my editing business primarily so that I can focus on my schoolwork and other opportunities.* I’m not an editor anymore. When I went on social media last night to make it official there, I kind of felt naked not seeing “editor” on my list of current jobs anymore—as if a part of me is now missing as I interact with the world.
How long will that feeling last? Well, when I think of how I’ll no longer have to answer a ton of emails from potential clients whose questions I’ll never get paid to answer, or get a text from a client about a project on my day off, or not receive any projects when I really need some income, or receive a deluge of more projects than I can handle when I have my own schoolwork coming up, or deal with a client who says that they won’t pay me because they supposedly didn’t receive my edited file and supposedly turned in their school paper without my edits and I want to reach through my computer and strangle them... You know what? That feeling is kinda gone. Maniacal laugh!
(But in the future, if a full-time editing job ever presents itself in a very cool environment, and the door is open, and God is beckoning me to walk through it, and I’m broke, I wouldn’t say no.)
I like the idea of having only one job for a change. I’d like to relish that for a little while.
*opportunities = being available for ministry jobs or just having enough time to lead worship, which is not a hobby—it’s a heartbeat
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So, what am I doing now? Still working at my school, still being a grad student, still working on one of my multiple dreams. I have learned that it is OK for life to move slowly. Right now, my life is kinda like a list of downloads that are in progress: one dream has been prepared and is ready for God to click on the “OPEN” button, the preparation for another dream is a download in progress, and the preparation for yet another dream isn’t quite ready to download yet.
My job is to wait until the downloads finish, stick with the process, and cling to the One who initiates the downloads (and the One who can cancel the downloads at any time).
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I probably don’t have to tell you, reader, but theology has a very bad reputation in many Christian circles. You mention the word “theology” or “theologian,” and you instantly think of a stuffy, snooty, suited jerk who tries to dissect God as if He were a lab rat. In these Christian circles, theologians aren’t known for loving God or being passionate about Him.
However, the opposite should be true. Theology is the study of God, and God is the lover of our soul, and He has commanded us to love Him with every fiber of our being, and He is love. Therefore, theology should have a bit of romance associated with it, spiritually speaking, even as an academic discipline.
I think what ruins this potential for this kind of romance is theologians’ writing styles. OH MY GOSH WHY ARE THEOLOGIANS SO BORING??? Put Wikipedia or social media in front of me, and I can read for hours. Put a textbook that compiles various theological perspectives about soteriology, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and any other ology that you can think of—especially if it’s poorly organized or written—and I’ll fall asleep after a few minutes. I’m still working on reading through a small pile of textbooks that I didn’t finish reading during the past year (although I think most of this year’s editing projects did put me behind on my reading assignments).
Good grief, man! Would it kill you to be more concise when you write about theological or historical concepts? I keep feeling like I’m reading the same thing over and over and over and over and over again (although your wordiness has motivated me to learn how to speed-read). I mean, gosh. Where did you learn how to write? Did they not teach you about how to organize your ideas? Who edited your work? Were they not brave enough to tell you that your ideas need to flow in a certain direction? Or did you just not listen to them, and a publisher published you anyway because you have more degrees than a thermometer? Frustrated sigh!
So, if I ever write a theology book, please remind me to not put my readers to sleep.
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God told me recently that my mind is like a toddler. He didn’t mean it as an insult; He just showed me that it’s OK to let my mind do some controlled exploration whenever it needs to. Otherwise it’ll throw a tantrum.
About a decade ago, I baby-sat my cousin’s little boy and followed him around his house as he did his toddler-exploration thing. When our time together was nearly over, he instructed me to sit on the living-room couch. Then he threw a toy at my face and laughed. “You are definitely related to me,” I said.
As I’m sure you know, toddlers put things in their mouths, they knock things over, and they get into things that they don’t need to be getting into, so you need to keep an eye on them. They’re not trying to be bad people; they’ve just learned how to use their legs, they’ve discovered how powerful they are, they want to learn about the world around them, and they have no idea how to do so properly or safely until you show them how. (And if they refuse to follow your leadership or accept your authority, they’ll scream bloody murder.)
My mind is like a toddler, and it’s good for me to know that I need to let God follow my mind around as it explores things. I’ll give you an example. Recently, after I finished a long day’s work and my mind was tired from working and I think also from trying to read for school, I got ready to attend a special church service that evening. I ate dinner at a deli, and while I was enjoying my meal, a song played on the radio that I wanted to identify.
So, I downloaded the Shazam app on my phone and learned that the song was “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship. Of course. I should have recognized their sound, because lately I’ve been listening to Starship and other 80s tunes while I’ve been working on a clerical project at my job. (Not to mention, I’m pretty sure I heard “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” a million times on 97.9FM in Odessa.) This made me think of the song “We Built This City” (which I heard for the first time when I was hanging out with friends in Odessa in the 90s), which many people on the internet consider to be one of the worst songs of the 80s.
So, I read online about how the song is actually a lament of the closing-down of clubs where music used to be performed in California. Knowing this helps some of the lyrics make more sense (some of the lyrics still seem nonsensical to me, but so what? the song is otherwise mindless and very danceable—perfect for playing in the background). Then I got curious about how one of the lead singers was around my age when the song was recorded, so I read online about how she has actually gotten into trouble with the law several times, and about how she had been a lead singer in the band basically since the 60s. (In a nutshell, Starship used to be Jefferson Starship, which used to be Jefferson Airplane, and I believe the group went through even more changes after the 80s.)
So, I finished my deli meal and drove to church. While I was hanging out in the parking lot, I decided to listen to Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” for the first time on YouTube. (I couldn’t help but think of Neo’s instruction to “follow the white rabbit” in The Matrix.) I could tell from the first few lyrics that the song is about drugs, and then I read online about how the song was about drugs (duh), and that tied a nice little bow around my mind’s toddler-exploration thing. Having thoroughly enjoyed some introvert recharging, I walked to the church building happy and a little lighter on my feet—ready to greet people and enjoy the evening.
So, that’s how my mind is like a toddler. (It has explored things not-so-safely in the past with very horrible results as my mind has dabbled in some very bad things.) I’ve learned that if I don’t let my mind toddle around and explore, and if I don’t let God be part of this process, my mind could throw a screaming-bloody-murder tantrum. By that, I mean that I could fantasize about punching somebody out, telling somebody off, or basically doing something that could get me arrested if I were to actually do it in real life. A toddler needs to be toddler, but within safe, healthy boundaries.
Hopefully this random life skill will come in handy when it’s time to write a thesis or dissertation later.
