Calling

You live on the shore of a country where the wind is rare. To pass the time, you build a boat. The project is preposterous, and your friends are quick to tell you so. There is no wind.

You make yourself busy with the work of the day, and from time to time you return to the shore. Sometimes you work on the boat. Sometimes you sit in it and wonder where it would take you. Some days you can't look at the boat because your desire for the wind is unbearable.

Then one day, as you like to think you knew it would, the wind comes.

Do you ask the wind if it will continue to blow until you reach safe harbor? Do you request that the wind return when your affairs are more ordered?

Or, having the boat and the wind and suspecting you were born for it, do you set sail?

The Road Not Taken

I was telling a story today about some time I spent with the Navy SEALs. It's a fun story, and I've told it at least a dozen times since the summer of 1990 when it happened. A month after the story took place, one of my co-workers - one of our lead engineers - went off to kindergarten.

Life is fleeting, and if the statistics are right I'm about half way through.

Life is also absurd. Case in point: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just sold pictures of their newborn twins for $14,000,000. Of course this is California money, so that's only about nine 2,000 square foot homes. It only gets worse when you realize that the reason someone paid that much is because they firmly believe that they can make a profit from them - that $14,000,000 is less than the pictures are really worth.

Make sure you know what you're striving for, and make sure it's worth it. Or be pretty and make babies.

Thoughts from the Walk

You will never love anyone or anything more deeply than you love God. If you do, you're mistaken about who your God is.

Waiting

I had a dream the other night about a thick, green-covered book called Christian Theology. I'd purchased the book a dozen years ago for a seminary course and hadn't looked at it since.

I found it on my bookshelf and put it on a table, and there it sat until I came home from work for lunch one day this week and cracked it open. Tucked inside the front cover was a photocopy of an article titled "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language" by Langdon B. Gilkey. While I sat there eating my peanut butter sandwich and reading the article, I found myself uncontrollably weeping.

I weep when I read systematic theology. I thought I was done surprising myself.

Supernatural Aid

On Sunday, while waiting to go to the rehearsal for my best friend's wedding, my daughter and I goofed around outside. It's October in Massachusetts (just like most other places right now) and there was clover everywhere. So I explained to my daughter about the four-leaf variety and she wanted to look for one.

Aha, I thought to myself, the true purpose of the superstition -- it gave people something do while waiting before they'd invented the Nintendo DS.

After a few seconds of searching the hillside, I'd had about enough, and I told my daughter what we needed was a shamrock sensor. "You could sweep it around like this," I said, making beeping noises. She thought that was a great idea and began sweeping and beeping right along with me.

We laughed for a bit. Then I sighed and stopped and wondered how much more time we had to kill. She was still sweeping and beeping when I looked down and saw, looking right back up at me, a clover with four leaves.

I counted them again. Then I knelt down for a closer look and counted a third time. We picked it and rushed inside to find something to store it in. My daughter said, "Can we go look for another?"

I said, "Um, I think it's time to go."

In other news, I finished the first draft of my book today. It's a story about a young man growing up and learning what it means to be a hero in a world that doesn't always make sense. I need to take at least one more pass at it to clean it up, but it sure was fun writing it.

Here's hoping Sunday's event and today's event are somehow related.