Echoes and Stars

1. For what you communicate in your vocation to be your only comfort in life and death is no small thing. I am not sure I realized this before. Far too often “success” is the comfort…was the comfort.

2. Mozart’s clarinet concerto.

3. Side goal with my students: Expose them to the magisterial thinking of Calvin.

4. My daughter starts high school in a few days. How is this even possible? She is only 7 and just yesterday she could fit in my lap and asked me  to carry her because she was tired.

5. This week I talked with a fellow new faculty member about Shawshank Redemption. We talked about being “institutionalized” and the fear. I am about to describe something many of you understand about the workplace even if you never had words for it. 

You are standing on the head of a pin and you are realizing there are an infinite number of ways to fall off. And daily you are shown new ways of falling off. The head of that pin is never expanded. That would cost money. It is always contracting. And fear is all around you. 

Even though I am no longer standing on the head of a pin, it is hard to not stand as if I am.

6. It is hard to watch the Cardinals right now. Easy to not.

7.  Yesterday I was cut off by someone getting off at the same exit I was. It was an unnecessarily dangerous piece of driving. And then I thought how funny it would be if we were going to the same place. And that got me thinking about how followers of Jesus talk about each other and deal with each other and we are all headed to the same place.

8. People say there is no magic but I disagree because of coffee.

9. That moment in the roadhouse when Jayber sees Troy Chatham with another woman.

10. Have you ever not feared?/To stand there in all that mercy,/if only for a split second, with/nothing to fear, is heaven itself.