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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!

1. Sunrise was at 10am this morning.  Certainly, dawn arrived much earlier, but I still tend to get this feeling that I’m in some sort of ethereal time-warp.
2. Yesterday was the winter’s first ski.  It felt good.  I’m about to head out for the winter’s second ski.
3. Healing takes time.  One of the advantages of being up here at ACC is that I get to take advantage of professional counseling from the counseling center.  So I’ve been going.  And I’ve been realizing that some scars still run pretty deep.  But I’m also starting to see that maybe the point isn’t to get rid of them but to be shaped by them.  After I got a stress fracture in college from overtraining, I had to learn how to run again, how to train again…I couldn’t go about things in the same way and expect to not get hurt again…and even now, when I start training hard, that same spot, the left tibia, sometimes acts up and I have to be careful.  Maybe emotional injuries work the same way.  Be careful, learn from it, be shaped by it, but never forget it, never act as though it isn’t still a deep part of me.
4. My application to Duke’s Ph.D. program is all submitted.  Now I get to wait around for a couple of months to see if I’m even in the running.
5. N.T. Wright is a phenomenal thinker.  I’m getting close to finishing Justification and though it’s a pretty heady book, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to believe that maybe the message of Jesus is better than even we imagined.  I never used to like Paul much…but Wright is convincing me that I need to give him a new, better, more informed reading.
6. Somehow I’ve found myself “in charge” of organizing worship at the new The River Covenant Church plant here in Soldotna.  Challenging.
7. The semester is coming to an end.  Ethics was discussing food last week.  I ended on this topic because it ties together a lot of the other issues and shows how they are connected.  We are going to watch a documentary tomorrow, Food, Inc. I recommend that you all see it.  It will change the way that you think about what you eat and it demonstrates those connections to many other ethical issues.  Final exams next week.
8. I’m headed home in less than two weeks.  And by home I mean Portland and then Winthrop for a little while and then back to Portland to fly back here to Alaska.  Hope to see many of you then.

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.

I just finished reading East of Eden (John Steinbeck).  Wow.  I don’t know what to say.  It’s simply beautiful.

If you haven’t read this one, get on it.  Seriously…I think we’ve got a new nominee for my top five books.