Of Action

Please excuse the woeful inactivity on this blog of late. I determined at the New Year that 2009 would be a year of action, and so it has become. In 9 days I depart for a year living abroad in Western China. I am going to a region in which I have traveled before, but much uncertainty lies on the other side of the dwindling hours.

I've never been a man of action. As this blog illustrates, I have some amount of comfort with words and the illusions they can spin, and admittedly have often used them to shield me from the reality of my inertia. Lack of follow through. Apathy.

I'd like to say I've turned a new leaf, but for today I will just say I've taken a step that I have not taken before. Some of you know this is my fourth attempt to move overseas. As usual in times of change, I have reflected on those earlier attempts and subjected them to the torments of my overly analytical mind. They have held up admirably, but I still wonder how much heart I put into those earlier attempts. I always question my heart.

But, constant analysis is another form of paralysis. I've used it as a shield too, masking my inability to decide with the veneer of a desire for deliberate wisdom. But this time, I just have to go. I don't know what it's going to be like, but I have to get there. So I'm going.

I don't know what this commitment to action will do to my blogging. I hope enhance it, but it certainly can't get much slower than it is right now. Stay tuned, and we'll see what happens. You see, things are happening in 2009.

Reflections on a love poem

The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God's new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus calls us to begin living it with him and for him right now. Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope; people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way. Conversely, people who are living by this rule of love will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.

--N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church