Faith Venture

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I took a year between undergraduate and graduate school to earn some money to pay off debts and prepare for the next step. During that year I met a young woman who became my wife.

We moved from Ohio to Louisiana where I had an assistantship to work on a Masters degree. Halfway through that year, the faculty voted to disband the program. I had a job offer back in Ohio, so we moved back to my home area of western Ohio. The temporary job turned into a permanent (well, as permanent as anything really is) position. We stayed in the area.

One day, my wife asked, “How much do you think we could get if we tried selling our house again?” Two weeks later we had sold the house. Now, where to move. Well, our family resided in the Chicago suburbs.

Five years ago today I met the moving van at what was no longer our house. They loaded up everything. I pushed (with my neighbor’s help) the last of perhaps 2,000 pounds of excess stuff we’d accumulated to the street for the rubbish pickup.  And, poof, we were gone.

That entire process was six weeks. On March 23, I met the moving van at our new house along with the cable guy bring me an internet connection.

That was also the first day of the Covid lockdown. Covid plus a new environment and loss of our fitness center and church did have an impact. 

I guess all that should have been traumatic. I think we survived quite well.

Sorry for the autobiography, but five years is a milestone.

Oliver Burkeman writes The Imperfectionist newsletter. “Imperfectionist” alluding to his writing about how trying to execute everything in your life perfectly is detrimental to one’s mental and physical health.

His latest effort discussed how our psychological centre of gravity must be in our real and immediate world. We must live in the world of family and friends and neighborhood, our work and creative projects. Trying to live in the far-off world of presidents and governments and social forces and global emergencies leads to distress.

This reminds me of the early days of the Internet in the early to mid 1990s. I joined several Usegroups. These were online forums organized around a single topic. I remember being on comp.realtime and comp.C+ and a few others. These were civil discussions with tips and tricks and news. I first joined Facebook to keep up with family and a  few close friends and acquaintances. Then it went downhill rapidly.

The first two years of Twitter gave me a great communication tool with like-minded people discussing industrial automation. Then it slid into news, then algorithms, then just trash.

You might intentionally visit the outer world at times. You need to remain grounded locally.

Jesus gives us many pre-internet clues. He was aware of political and religious structures of the time. He knew about political power and religious/political power. He spoke directly at times about the Jewish religious/political power structure. 

His actions were unmistakably local. When he was somewhere, he was present there. He dealt with real people in the present moment.

Interestingly, while never really addressing the Roman power structure, his message of love as the opposite of Roman crude power wound up upending Rome by the early 300s.

Just being present where you are with whom are around you is the most powerful thing you can do to change worlds.

I close my eyes for meditation. In the gray mist of sight behind closed lids, I see outlines of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting together.

I close my eyes preparing for sleep. Yes, I see arrays of jigsaw puzzle pieces.

My wife and I have had a project for the past couple of weeks assembling a jigsaw puzzle. The exercise requires focus, observation, patience, mental clarity. This puzzle did not come with a photo showing the completed puzzle. It came with a short murder mystery story describing a scene. You are to figure out the scene and then conclude where the body is hidden, who did it, and how.

We finished it last night. I took a commemorative photo. It will rest on our table for a while until we take it apart and put it away.

There are many puzzles I’ve experienced.

Two colleagues and I joined to form a new magazine. We hashed out ideas, sometimes with considerable passion. The pieces came together. We built a top-rated magazine for the market we served.

Like many people, I puzzled over Paul’s letter to the Roman followers. Some theologians wrote huge works trying to tease out subtle meanings from each Greek word. Luther, Calvin, Wesley all saw pieces of the letter and built theologies. 

I added some other study and thinking and the pieces fell into place. Don’t try to build grandiose theories. This letter is the ultimate spiritual development tract in the New Testament. Paul leads the reader from a state of being lost to a state of being in the state of God’s grace. Not stopping there, he continues with ideas on how we live in the state of grace.

I have been part of a team led by my wife for the better part of a year. Called Rise Above, the ministry hopes to reach out to people suffering from emotional hurt and support them on the return journey to wholeness. At our last meeting, the pieces came together. Just like after the pieces came together forming the magazine, I realized that now I had to get an actual magazine produced and into the mail. Now, we have to actually meet with those people.

When the jigsaw puzzle is done, it’s done. When we assemble the pieces of our project, that’s just the beginning.

The jigsaw puzzle contains 1,000 pieces. The photo on the box cover does not portray the actual completed puzzle. The box contains a story of a murder. The story describes the scene and action.

You dump the contents on your table, turn the pieces picture up, and proceed to find the border pieces.

So far, so good.

But now you begin assembling the pieces with no clear idea of the big picture.

Life imitates art someone said years ago.

You try to imagine the type of person you strive to be. You may imagine and list goals to achieve.

But you assemble your life without seeing the big picture. You can’t foresee the surprises lying in wait. You don’t understand at first how all the pieces fit.

Then slowly piece-by-piece the picture becomes clearer. This part fits with that part. Relationships form. Direction becomes clearer simply by living a day at a time and putting it together.