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Wow.  It’s the 31st.  Crazy.

It’s been another negligent blogging month.  But hey, I’ve been working hard.  Things are a little nuts up here in Alaska.  Teaching two classes from scratch has proved to be a good challenge.  I’m finally getting to the point where I have a little breathing room between my planning and my teaching.  But only a little.

In other news, it’s sunny!  I mean, there’s actually daylight!  Hours of it!  Yes, there is a drastic difference between mid-December in Alaska and end-of-January in Alaska.  I mean, it was getting light at 8:30 this morning.  And the other day, I was out skiing until almost 6pm…with no headlamp!

We could use some snow up here.  I have to say…I’m a little disappointed in Alaska.  I’m starting to believe that it doesn’t exist. I thought back in November that I was really in for it.  But things just haven’t panned out to be as intense as they initially seemed.  I mean, temperature usually sits around 20-25 during the day and then drops to around 5-10 at night.  But seriously, I thought Alaskans were supposed to be these Xtreme folks.  And the snow?  We’ve got about a foot and a half or so…Where’s the heaps and heaps and heaps of the stuff?  Fortunately it’s enough to ski on, although right now we really really need a fresh six inches or so because it’s basically like an ice rink out on the trails…and I’m only exaggerating a little bit.

But in exciting news, I signed up to do the Tour of Anchorage.  It’s a 50k ski marathon.  Should be fun.  It’s five weeks from today.  So I’m trying to get strong again.  The good news is that that’s more time than I gave myself back in September…and I have a better base now.

Well, that’s the exciting news.  Except that yesterday I came home and climbed out of my car and there was a mommy and baby moose standing in front of my door…blocking my entrance to my house.  But they moved.  So I don’t actually have an exciting story related to that occurrence.

Yes, as we have just rolled over not one but two numbers on the calendar, I thought maybe we should take a look back at the past ten years to see where we’ve gone.  I mean, a lot has happened.  Ten years ago at midnight, I was standing on the hill above Twisp waiting for the lights to go out…oh, Y2K, you really threw us for a loop.

So here’s a list of the top ten best things (or at least interesting things) that happened in the past decade:

10.  I graduated from high school!  And college!  And grad school!

9.  Ran the London Marathon and broke the 2:40 barrier (also ran three other marathons this decade…shooting for ten in the next decade!)

8.  Played with a crazy monkey while living in Ecuador for a year, working at Covenant Bible College.  Also went spelunking with a one-legged man.  Also climbed a 19k+ ft mountain: Cotopaxi.

7.  Travelled all around Europe…from Norway to Greece and everywhere in between!

6.  More and more running…running in high school, running in college, running aftercollege…lots of good times, good races, good people…in the Mountains in Winthrop, on the beach in Santa Barbara, on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, through the streets of London, through the hills of Thailand, getting chased by dogs in Ecuador, getting stress fractures in the summers…is it sad that I spend so much time at this activity?  I don’t think so.  It’s provided some pretty incredible moments.

5.  Went to Thailand for a four months and loved it…lived in a tribal village, ate great food, had crazy adventures.

4.  Spent a year in Scotland doing my masters degree.  Hung out with some great folks, explored higher theology, got started in professional coffee making.

3.  Worked on a llama ranch in Colorado for the summer after college.  Also fought forest fires for a couple of summers…hence my alter ego: Fuego.

2.  Spent a year with the Canby Community learning to live well.

1.  Learned a lot about life, about God, about people, about myself.

Goals for the next decade: 1.  Get a Ph.D., 2.  Run sub-2:30 in a marathon, 3. Spend another year living overseas, 4. Live well.

I was talking to a friend here at the Canby House (I’m still in Portland for my Christmas Break) the other day and he was commenting on how 2009 was an eventful year.  I proceeded to think to myself, “Wow.  2009 was a pretty boring year for me!”  I mean, it’s not that nothing happened, but it really was kind of just a normal year (whereas the last several have been quite eventful).  Moving to Alaska was kind of the only big momentous thing.  So here’s a list of the top ten small but meaningful things that happened to me this year.

10.  The Canby House community garden project was a success!  Though I wasn’t there to reap many of the fruits of my labor, it was a great experiment that taught me a lot and allowed for

some great time and conversations with great people and plus it felt good just to spend a lot of time outside and getting dirty.

9.  Spent a day with Cousin Shannon hiking around Multnomah Falls and having lunch at McMenamins Edgefield.

8.  I spent a lot of good time with Cousin Jesse and Now-Cousin-In-Law Jen…two people who are great and who I hadn’t seen a lot within the past decade/hadn’t really gotten to know well at all.

7.  I won a marathon.  Granted there were only about 25 people in the race.  Granted my time was twenty-seven minutes slower (that’s one minute per mile) than my previous slowest time…but I WON!

6.  I traveled into the Alaskan Bush to the village of Shaktoolik…a very eye opening experience.

5.  I took on a job that I actually enjoy!  Let’s hear it for jobs with intellectual stimulation!

4.  I got to spend several days with my whole family in the Methow back in April.  I hadn’t seen my brother Ben’s family in almost two years and it had been three years since we had all been together.

3.  East of Eden entered my list of the best books ever written.

2.  When I was driving up to Alaska with my cousin Jesse, somewhere near the Alaska/Canada border at about 3am, we pulled over to the side of the road to look at the northern lights.  It was pretty cool.  But then it got even better when meteors were shooting across them.  Spectacular.

1.  Lots of good time spent with great people doing nothing particularly special but just enjoying wonderful fellowship.  Thanks everybody!

I’m back.  The big trip to Shaktoolik actually happened (!!!) and though it was a short weekend experience, it was very valuable and enlightening as I try to learn to better serve this group of students with whom I have the privilege to work.

The weekend was much like any other high school retreat.  Kids from all over Norton Sound (that’s the part below the old man’s nose if you look at a map of Alaska) came to Shaktoolik—from Nome, Unalakleet, Elim, and others—to take part.  We had the usual games, chapel services, small group time, and late nights (which took their toll on me as I’m now fighting off sickness…boo).  I saw some pretty interesting sights: flying over the frozen Yukon River, the beginnings of the ocean freezing over (there was slush and ice washing up on the frozen shore), the store where prices were anywhere from two to three times “normal” or more (the kids dropped $3.50 for energy drinks like Rockstar, which are pretty popular up here).

The most “enlightening” part of the weekend, though, had to do with the theological landscape.  Being in the village was interesting and seeing the way they lived, but it’s not extreme poverty…I’ve seen far worse in Thailand and Ecuador.  The Alaska Natives in these villages generally live a subsistence lifestyle, and they seem to do alright.  But the theology and worldview was very different and at times even disturbing.  I have seen student papers and heard students speak with what appeared to be a very strong dualistic sense of the world—a very stark good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell, God vs. Satan viewpoint—but now I understand a little bit better how they have come to that point.  It’s what is in the villages.

As one of the other ACC staff told me the other day (a guy who is himself native), there is a great fascination with end-times stuff (eschatology) and often a very escapist mentality (the idea that this life is just a way-point that we have to suffer through before we can get to heaven).  Frankly, I was deeply disturbed and distressed by this.  I saw and heard some examples of pretty poor biblical interpretation to support theological ideas that I believe are flat out wrong.  It seemed that all weekend long the message was about sin, death, judgment, Hell, Satan.  It was about us getting out of here, about how we can hardly wait for Jesus to come back and save us from whatever it is that we are stuck in.  But, if this is merely a testing ground to see if we are good enough to make it to heaven (even if being “good enough” only means that we have to believe in Jesus), then we are all just in purgatory…we’re paying our dues, putting in our time suffering.  But this is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It seems that I keep coming back to this point in everything that I talk about, but the Gospel is about Life (yes, with a capital “L”).  It is about us living up to everything that God created us to be…about us realizing our true humanity…humanity as we’ve never experienced it before.  It’s not just sin management.  It’s not just good news for the elect few.  We don’t seek forgiveness and salvation simply for the remission of sins.  We do so because in repentance and forgiveness God offers to us and we embrace that true Life…life as it was meant to be lived, as we were created to live it, our true humanity!  I fear that the church has for too long framed the Gospel in the negative, by saying “do this/believe or else.”  Might we return to viewing the Gospel as a positive, as saying “do this/believe because it is inherently better than life in that other way.”  Might we do better, might we better serve Christ if we offered something to people instead of threatening them?

I am certain that the Gospel is better than simply a get out of Hell free card…I know that it is, that is has to be truly good news.

After a false start two weeks ago, we are back online to head to Shaktoolik.  The youth conference was rescheduled for this weekend and so (barring any more unforeseen complications with weather, moose, or other acts of God) I will be heading out on Friday morning.  Sadly, this time I won’t be taking along any students.  They have obligations this weekend.  But I’ve been set free to go experience life in the bush.  Hopefully the polar bears won’t get me…but on the upside, I’d be able to take that one off the of the Alaska Wildlife Checklist.

Whelp.  The trip to Shaktoolik was cancelled.  Rough weather is making it difficult for everyone (including the people who are running the retreat) to get there.  So in the end, I get to stay in Soldotna for the weekend…(hooray…)

Oh well.  There is talk of rescheduling for later on.  We can hope so.  I still have to see a walrus.

Exciting times!  I’m off to the bush this next weekend to a little village called Shaktoolik.  I’m going to be leading a small group of students to do a service trip at a Alaska Native youth conference.  It’ll be a pretty cool opportunity to experience a bit of village life and culture.  Shaktoolik supposedly is a “one road village.”  Just one street down the middle of the town which sits on a little spit on the west coast southeast of Nome.  Cool stuff.  More to come after the weekend.