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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.

Why is there a line going across the banner at the top of this site?  I don’t know.  I can’t figure out how to get rid of it.  Does anybody read .php?  Please help me.  It’s driving me nuts.

I’m in the middle of N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope.  It’s a good book.  I recommend it.  It’s a good rethinking of some of Christianity’s most deeply-held and perhaps most misunderstood doctrines…namely Heaven, Hell, resurrection, and salvation.  But I stumbled across a quote the other day…a statement on the idea of the trinity in the middle of a chapter on the ascension (this wasn’t even the point of his argument here, but it was great so I wanted to share it):

The Trinity is precisely a way of recognizing and celebrating the fact of the human being Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from while still identified with God the Father, on the one hand (he didn’t just “go back to being God again” after his earthly life), and the Spirit on the other hand (the Jesus who is near us and with us by the Spirit remains the Jesus who is other than us). (p. 114)

I love the language of “distinct from while still identified with” and “the Jesus who is near us and with us…remains the Jesus who is other than us.”  I think it’s that he starts with Jesus where in my experience we tend to start with God the Father.  There’s just something about that language that affirms that Jesus came, that he is God and yet somehow fully a limited human being, and that he is still present and dwelling with us…but is not us.

I’ve been dealing lately with trying to get my students to think more abstractly.  This has come out in my ethics class as I try and get them to let go of black and white notions of right and wrong and think in the broader terms and categories that Jesus was always moving us to.  But I’ve also been trying to get them to see the idea of the trinity as an image, a metaphor, an analogy that helps us to learn about and understand a bigger, broader, more abstract truth that our finite minds cannot truly comprehend.

I was subbing for the OT professor last week and some students kept substituting “Jesus” for “God” and I was left trying to get them to see that, yes, Jesus is God then and now and forever, but that he also remains distinct then and now and forever.  And while the whole of the OT story brings us to Jesus, while it finds its fulfillment in Jesus, to place Jesus, as Jesus the incarnate human son, into the Old Testament is to insert a foreign element into the text.  Jesus is the incarnation of God and to take away his humanity, either by saying “well he was present there in the Old Testament” or by believing that Jesus “knew” everything or in any other way making him out to be omni-present, omnipotent, or omniscient destroys the amazing and incomprehensible beauty of the incarnation.