We are all connected

Snowflake magnified by electron microscope.
Wikipedia Commons

This week I finished reading A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Donald Miller. If you are a writer, you might especially like this book since it's based on principles of story. In fact it's subtitled "How I learned to live a better story." In the book, Mr. Miller tells about the process of making an earlier book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. The analogy throughout the book is that our life is full of stories, and like stories our lives have characters who have ambitions, and inciting incidents, high points, and low points. The author of our stories is God, but like any good author will tell you, characters have a mind of their own, and as characters, we often steal the stories from God and try to write them ourselves. And then the stories become lame. The book was so boring at the beginning, I had to put it down and come back later several times because the stories were pointless. It wasn't until about half way through the book that I realized that pointlessness was intentional. Then I was amazed at the brilliance of it! It's good to be amazed.

Toward the end of the book, Miller brings up the fact that we are all connected, that my house is connected to yours. Today was yet another day of horrific news, with more police officers being shot, this time in Baton Rouge. I could get in the car, go out of the alley behind my house, drive for several hours, and end up at the driveway of one of those officer's homes. I could probably leave there and drive over to the house where the mom of the shooter lives. I could drive reasonably close to where powerful people live, like President Obama, and Bill and Melinda Gates. We are so closely connected.

Miller also reminds the reader that no two snowflakes are alike. They all start out as water vapor, and one thing that makes them unique is their journey. "The atmosphere is a turbulent place, and crystals tend to oscillate as they are blown around, so even different corners see slightly different environments." (See PBS NewsHour article for more.) We, too, are all unique due to our journeys. We have unique sets of experiences which give us perspectives that are different from one another. We have varying gifts and abilities. We have different preferences... and the list goes on.

May we work hard, because it will take hard work, to embody our connectedness while appreciating our variety. Let's quit trying to steal the story and instead cooperate with the great Author of us all.

Classes have begun!

Yesterday my first seminary classes began. This summer, between July 11 and Aug 26, I'll be taking two classes from the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. The classes are Theological & Biblical Research (1 credit) and God's Redemptive Mission (4 credits). Online orientation is now winding down, and I've received the first assignments for God's Redemptive Mission. So, yesterday afternoon I read the first book, "A Walk Through the Bible," by Lesslie Newbigin. It was a great, and short, book that reminded me of "The Story" a little bit. Of course "The Story" is the text of the Bible, in chronological order and without repeats, and Newbigin's book wasn't. Instead, it's a brief chronological account of the story of the Bible allowing the reader to see a big picture of what the Bible is about, and thus, what God is like, and how we are called to be. It would be worth your time to read it (it's about $6 on Amazon).

Then we were asked to write a brief statement about what character or book of the Bible we found significant and post it to our class forum. Here's my submission:
Among many books and characters in the Bible that hold significance to me, I choose Moses today. Even from a place of power, Moses identified with his people, the Israelites, and then grew to know and love their God, even more than they did. His love for his people, and his strong relationship with God helped hold things together out in the desert. For a period of many weeks, while I was struggling to discern my call, I had Moses’ statement to God from Exodus 32:32 as wallpaper on my phone: “But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.” It is that type of love for people, and relationship with God, that I seek to emulate.