Endings and Beginnings, or, Time to Get Away

Tomorrow I graduate from college, but today feels no different than the other nine first-days-after-the-semester-ends that have come before it.  I think, especially after a long, difficult teaching internship and after five years in post-secondary academia, I expected to somehow feel like a changed man, like a professional or, I suppose, like an adult.  The fact of the matter is that very little has actually changed except that there are now two letters after my name.  I'm not even weepy about leaving the place that I've called home for five years, though of course I will miss the people, some of whom are my best friends.  Maybe I've been enough of a nomad for the last several years that one more move doesn't really phase me.  I'm simply moving on to one more place, one more occupation, one more season of life, and I suppose that's a healthy view to have.  Still, my lack of sentimentality surprises even me.

In a couple of days, I'll be leaving with a good friend for Kentucky.  It's about a seven-hour drive from Kalamazoo, enough to be somewhere warm and away from the craziness of home and school.  I feel that I've been so busy and preoccupied with my obligations to my degree that I haven't had the time to concentrate on life and people, on the things that make it all worth it, and this retreat of sorts will be a breath of fresh air.  To have the time to simply be, to rejoice in the beauty of God's creation, to pray and fast and seek and enjoy and experience the One who made it all will be so welcome.  It will be light for my soul.

I think that in these times of transition, there may be nothing more important than to stop every once in a while.  It is tempting, for some more than it is for me, to grab the diploma and go -- knowing where is less important than moving itself.  But I think that is selling ourselves short.  Action is necessary, but will come in its time.  Knowing where we are going and why we are going there makes all the difference in the way we do life, and doing the best thing is probably a lot less important than doing it in the right way.

My hope is that in the next several days we will be able to experience God in a way that changes our lives.  I hope that by spending time with him we will be prepared to see the direction of our lives, and to be proactive about making them lives that are worth living.

"Equality for All?" Or, A Defense for Indecision

This gay marriage debate has taught me a few things.  The first is that I can never spell marriage correctly on the first try.  The second is that it's awfully easy to draw lines in the sand when, really, lines don't always have much of a place.  I just clicked on a link, and the website it brought me to put a pop-up in front of me before I could watch the video I clicked for.  The pop-up read like this:

I Support Equality for All 

I believe everyone should be treated equally, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. 

Underneath the statement were two buttons: "I Agree" and "I Disagree."

Now, these pop-ups are usually annoying, and my first reaction was to ignore it and click the "Close" button in the top right corner.  But before I did, I thought about it, and decided I should weigh in.  I went to click the "I Agree" button, if you wanted to know.

But then I stopped myself a second time.  Do I really believe that?, I wondered.  Should someone that is African-American be treated exactly the same as a Caucasian?  Should a man be treated the same as a woman?  Should a lesbian woman be treated the same as a woman in a heterosexual marriage?  Is there an simple answer to these questions?

I have severely divided opinions on the matter of gay marriage, which I'm sure this pop-up was really about. Politically, I would tend to say that the government should stay out of people's business and shouldn't attempt to legislate morality.  Religiously, I would say that we should love all people, but that gay marriage is not a thing approved of by God.  (I would love to dialogue with anyone on either of these points if you have beef.  There's not enough room to write out every little nuance here, and you probably don't want to hear it after this last month, anyway.)  But even if I have more or less made my stance firm on these two issues, I know that I don't understand the bigger questions much at all.

Much less am I ready or willing to say that, for certain, all people ought to be treated equally.  Now, I think I know what the pop-up was really asking.  I think the real question was "Should all people have equal protection under the law?" and my answer to that would be an uninhibited "Yes."  But that wasn't the question that the written words asked, and as I reflected on that, I realized afresh that there are so many more nuances to the question than many of us want to admit.  In fact, most questions that are worth asking are highly nuanced, and a simple "yes" or "no" answer will rarely do.

If I were to make a "Yes" answer on that question public, I'd be bombarded by much of my family and friends with questions like, "But don't you believe what the Bible teaches!?"  If I were to answer "No," many of my friends would call me an insensitive, ignorant Cretan and would shun me for weeks.  We have discussed and debated this issue--and so many others--so badly that we think that there are two and only two clear sides, and that there is no room for dissent on either.  That is a wrong and naive way of thinking, in my opinion.

There is no real line in the sand here, in my mind.  Perhaps there are many lines, but there are enough that they all get jumbled together and make it awfully hard to talk about it all, anyway.  The point is, we live in such a divided society that it's hard to meet in the middle, even though, it seems to me, that's where the answer normally lies.  If there even is an answer, that is.

So, if you wanted to know, I didn't answer the question.