a 47-minute post

It's exactly 8:00 PM as I write this.

It's strangely warm out, so the space heater's quiet.

Mumford & Sons is playing. "Babel."

Cause I know my weakness, know my voice, and I'll believe in grace and choice.

And I know perhaps my heart is farce, but I'll be born without a mask.

My right tire went flat outside the Loth House some few days ago. I pulled it up into the driveway, which is really nothing but a patch of grass. The rain came down in torrents, and I fought against the mud and rain and managed to get halfway through the agonizing process of switching out the flat with the spare when the muddied earth gave way and sent the car on a jolting rock back, nearly crushing my foot. I cursed myself, went around to the driver's door, pulled up on the emergency brake for the second time around. Ams discovered me, brought Brandy and John to behold the spectacle. Much to everyone's surprise, I successfully fixed my car. Though I must say, these back-and-forth expeditions to coffee and reading at The Anchor probably aren't best for my poor Celica.

"The Anchor's going to kill me," I told Ams yesterday as we were stuck in traffic on our way to eat dinner with Mom & Dad.

"What's that?" she said. "How's it going to kill you?"

"Not me. My car."

But the trips are worthwhile. The Anchor really is a highlight of my day: work's over, the evening's settling in, the skies are growing dark, and I'm warm in the low light surrounded by nautical imagery, sweeping (and wonderfully tacky) murals, and models of 18th century warships. The coffee's hot on cold fingers (note: I must buy one of their mugs off of them when I leave this place; and if they won't sell, believe me, I'll steal. The Anchor is that sentimental). 

Over the last several weeks, I've been studying the American Revolution. It's a fascinating story, it really is, and most people don't have the faintest idea about it. Some people think they do, but recent scholarship has shown some up as false some of those very things we've oft been taught in our high school history classes. The war's so far removed, and so overshadowed by the Civil War that has left such an engraving on our culture, that what most of us know about it is contained in quips, aphorisms, and scattered facts void of substance and context. That the events of 1775-1783 have all but faded from public consciousness is the fact that a vast majority of the battle sites haven't been preserved: memorials may commemorate the events, but the memory is forgotten: apartment complexes cover the field the British marched up on their assault on Breed's Hill in Boston, and a pizza restaurant sits where British soldiers fell mangled and bloodied in heaps. 

Studying what led up to the Revolution is fascinating in its own right. Take, for example, the French & Indian War, where the ignition of the world's first true "world war" came from the brash recklessness of a young George Washington, who "accidentally" attacked what looks to be a French diplomatic party. The world war that ensued, The Seven Years World, involved all the major world imperial powers, and many of the characters prominent in the American Revolution tasted war for the first time on the North American frontier. Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, and George Washington all participated in the 1755 Battle of Monongahela (another participant was the British officer Thomas Gage, who would become Washington's mortal enemy during the Siege of Boston). Britain won the laurels of the war, but not without incurring a vast amount of debt. Because Parliament was already taxing the shit out of the English people to try and pay for it, they decided to add taxes for extra revenue to their British colonies, whom they had "protected" from the French & Indian during the War; never-minding, of course, that the vast bulk of the fighting force in North America had been colonials. These taxes lay behind the whole "No Taxation Without Representation" bit that would blossom into a fervor for independence.

Day-by-day I'm studying the French & Indian War, and I'm plowing through it and finding myself enthralled by the great stories and events that really happened but have been all but forgotten about. Take, for instance, Washington's defense of Fort Necessity in 1754:

Psyche. The French's allied Indians charged the British forces, and the militia broke and fled back to the fort (something, sadly, militia tend to do). The British regulars remaining with Washington were vastly outnumbered and under fire from the Indians hidden in the thick trees, so they had no choice but to flee back to the fort where they made a defense in a rain that poured so hard it flooded the trenches up to the men's waist who fired into the rain while their dead comrades floated beside them. Washington surrendered the fort and was allowed to leave with honors. It was the only time he surrendered, despite countless defeats. It seems the shame of surrender, and the great loss it did to the British stronghold in the area, remained engraved in his psyche when he took over the Continental Army 21 years later.

All during the drive to Red Robin where my family and I would dine on burgers and salads, I couldn't stop thinking about the Native Americans, their brutality and tactics in war. It's definitely an interesting read, and sheds a different color on such things as Pocahontas and the settling of Jamestown. 

Dad asked me, "Have you decided what you're going to go back to school for?"

"Not yet," I said.

"Well. What do you like to do? What're your interests?"

"I tried going to school for what interested me. I don't want to make the same mistake again."

But the rut I find myself in now isn't because I went to school for something that interests me. It's because I went to school for something I don't want to do, at least not now. I went to school to become a minister, and to put it in my own words from back then, I was going to get married, have a family, and work at a small town church in Colorado. People sometimes ask what changed. I'd like to think I've grown up a little more. And what I mean by that is, "How in the hell do we expect someone to know what they want to do when they're eighteen years old?" It's so young! We're still growing, still developing, our personalities are still forming, so much is going to change over the next four years by the time we're to graduate, and our personalities, desires and such continue evolving and taking shape well into the latter years of our twenties. Maybe a reason so many people aren't working in their fields (including, might I add, my own parents) is that at 18 we think we know what we want to do, but we've still got so much evolving to do that it turns out, some years later, we don't want now what we wanted then. And I can say, with a guiltless conscience, that ministry isn't something I want to do. I don't want the pressures, the fire-fighting, the squabbles, the territoritial pissings, all that drama. I like to read, to study, I like to teach, but I don't want to be that guy who has the entire needs, burdens, and gossips of an entire community thrust onto his shoulders. I can barely deal with my own shit, why should I presume to be able to help anyone else get their ducks in a row?

All this to say, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do, the course my life will take. I've realized that with a bachelor's degree I'm more than halfway to a career. I can get my Master's in just about anything. The future's open. My own distaste for vocational ministry coupled with the guilt-sodden conviction that it was the only thing I could do to please God, has kept only so many doors open. But now it's like the door's been opened wider, and I can take a step out in whichever direction I please. It's a liberating feeling, really.