last-minute break contemplations

My break is over, and it has been good. I wrote sixty pages in Dwellers of the Night, got to spend time with my extended family, and even got to see my old friends Dylan and Tyler. “Old Friends.” It’s a strange phrase. If taken literally, it means a friend who is old in years, or someone whom you used to be friends with but with whom you’ve grown apart. Yet in our language, it means a friend who has been a friend so long that even after months and even years or even decades of not seeing one another, the friendship is just as solid and open and care-free as it was since the beginning. That’s how my friendship with Dylan and Tyler has been, and I am confident that even if we don’t see each other for a decade, and we end up meeting up at a bar or something, we’ll still be able to reminisce on the old times and be able to make new, laugh-filled memories. In Proverbs it says, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Dylan and Tyler are this type of friend.

As mentioned, my break is over. I am taking two week-long intensive classes preceding the actual beginning of the spring semester on January 20th. These classes are “Job and Lamentations” and “Prayer and Spirituality.” I don’t know what the second class will be like, but I know that the first is really a study in theodicy: “How do we reconcile suffering with a righteous God?” I was reading Eugene Peterson the other day, and something he wrote stuck out to me:

The biblical revelation neither explains nor eliminates suffering. It shows, rather, God entering into the life of suffering humanity, accepting and sharing the suffering. Scripture is not a lecture from God, pointing the finger at unfortunate sufferers and saying, ‘I told you so: here and here and here is where you went wrong; now you are paying for it.” Nor is it a program from God providing, step by step, for the gradual elimination of suffering in a series of five-year plans (or, on a grander scale, dispensations). There is no progress from more or less suffering from Egyptian bondage to wilderness wandering, to kingless anarchy, to Assyrian siege, to Babylonian captivity, to Roman crucifixion, to Neronian/Domitian holocaust. The suffering is there, and where the sufferer is, God is.

(Living the Message, pages 134-135)

In my journal a few days ago, I wrote: “I miss ----- a lot today. Well, I missed what we had: the joy, the happiness, the hope, the future. It’s slowly sinking in that I will never be with her. Her dreams were handed to her on a silver platter, right off the grill; and mine were seemingly stomped underfoot by the Chef. Oh, I know it’s not true. God isn’t mean like that. He isn’t finding joy in my suffering. He wants me to be happy, and He genuinely cares for me. It’s just… the suffering I’ve endured since May 2006 till now—nearly three years of constant, unending, unbroken suffering—has been suffocating, and it’s turned me into a miserable, burnt-out creature, cold and calloused and bitter and empty, desiring change and hope. I’m working on it. I’m working on it physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m trying to surmount the bases. My ‘Fall from Joy’ didn’t happen in a day, and just like Rome’s construction, my restoration won’t take place in a day. Brick by brick, stone by stone, I am rebuilding my life. With God’s help, what was a mere cottage before will become a towering palace with porticoes, courtyards, rotundas, and parapets. Maybe even some hanging gardens!”