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Picture unrelated. Or rather, it’s semi-related. The Astros have been stinking it up, so I’ve been somewhat ashamed lately. Releasing Kaz Matsui was a good move, though. I digress.
If an update is a reprisal one one’s activities prior to posting, would an account of events yet-to-come be a downdate? I don’t know.
The next two weeks are going to be somewhat busy. This Sunday, Cherith and I are running our first 5K. This is one of the reasons I like the metric system; it makes everything sound a bit more impressive. When you tell someone “Hey, I’m going out to run 3.1 miles”, the usual reaction is: “So?” The annual Lilac Festival has been happening this week in Rochester, and Sunday marks the conclusion - with a 5K and a 10K. Since beginning the Couch-to-5K program, Cherith and I have made very visible progress, and are now hoping to display that progress publicly. Hopefully we don’t look like idiots.
For the majority of next week, I will be in Chicago to attend the North American Patristics Society annual meeting (as well as attend a Cubs game so I can mark Wrigley off the list of baseball parks I need to visit, and otherwise to hang out with a few great college/seminary friends I’ve not seen in a while). I’m not sure what possessed me to do so, but during the “call for papers” period a couple months ago I proposed a paper…and they apparently liked it, since I was asked to be a presenter. This paper is based on a paper I originally wrote for an Augustine class in seminary, though it’s a bit broader in scope (hopefully). Procrastination is catching up with me, though, and I have a bit of work to do with it before I’ll feel comfortable presenting it.
Finally, the Saturday after that I’ll be speaking at a conference focusing on discipleship for the Central New York district of the Wesleyan Church. If you know me, you should find this curious, since I am no longer Wesleyan. It seems my stock has risen now that I’m somewhat of an oddity in these parts, being Anglican and all. This should also sound odd because, as you might imagine, I’ll be speaking to a bunch of pastors for the most part, and I am what you might call a “failed” pastor. Nevertheless, I was still grateful for the invitation, and I hope I will not squander the opportunity. I will be talking about using the “spiritual disciplines” (especially as outlined by Richard Foster) to foster organic (I’m sorry, I hate this word, especially since it makes me sound like a hipster-doofus sort of Christian, but it’s used in the sense of being the opposite of traditionally-conceived “programming”) discipleship in congregations. So we’ll see how that goes. I feel completely unqualified for the task. Maybe that’s a good thing.
And, in the not-so-distant future, Cherith and I will be making decisions about how to proceed with my PhD “stuff”. We would both be pleased to move to Toronto, but this would require some sort of employment for Cherith, most likely before we could hope to move. Otherwise we will be trying to figure out the most efficient way for me to commute.
And now, I leave you with a picture best summarizing how I feel about the loss of Detroit in the NHL playoffs (acted out by none other than Capt. Jean-Luc Picard):
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Cicero, the prince of Roman orators says of someone that “He never uttered a word which he would wish to recall.” High praise indeed! - but more applicable to a complete ass than to a genuinely wise man…. If God permit me, I shall gather together and point out, in a work specially devoted to this purpose, all the things which justly displease me in my books: then men will see that I am far from being a biased judge in my own case…. For I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress - by writing.
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Our enlightenment is to participate in the Word, that is, in that life which is the light of men. Yet we were absolutely incapable of such participation and quite unfit for it, so unclean were we through sin, so we had to be cleansed…. So he applied to us the similarity of his humanity to take away the dissimilarity of our iniquity, and becoming a partaker of our mortality he made us partakers of his divinity.
