Children get yelled at by their parents. Like when I used to blow bubbles in my soda through the straw. This usually took place at Shoney's, Big Boy, or some other restaurant that let kids eat for free on Wednesday's nights. I was relentless, I loved ruining that carbonated drink with a fury of breath sent down through the straw. I loved getting a reaction out of my parents when I would end up splashing the soda onto my chin. My parents would scold me for it. My dad would grab my shoulder and give me a harmless but forceful jolt, "Lance, cut it out." Yet, I blew bubbles into the soda. It was a furious storm of bubbles.
...
Some people think that God breathes life into the creation, human beings specifically. There is dirt, then God breathes out, and the dirt begins to dance because of the breathe of life that has been given. The dirt becomes a person. The person dances about for a while, meets other people, maybe even realizes that God breathed people into existence. The person continues to dance, but eventually God's breathe is no longer an exhale. The breathe that once made the dirt dance is now being sucked back by God.
God breathes out. And in.
God gives. And takes.
...
Sometimes I feel like soda. Like I am being blown around. Like a furious storm is happening to me. Like God is some little kid blowing into a straw.
This is absurd.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Faith Architect
A huge part of my childhood revolved around building. K'NEX and LEGOS rocked my world. And because my parents were suckers, they would buy me set after set of these little toys in hopes that it would make me develop into a lean, mean, designing machine. Well, not really. They probably just wanted a break from parenting and felt bad about setting me in front of the big purple dinosaur on the t.v. for the seventh day in a row.
I loved building this stuff. My dad even let me tinker around with his old school Lincoln Logs. This was the entirety of my existence as a child: to build shit.
Besides my obsession with sports trading cards, this little youngster hobby of mine is pretty much one of the only things I can remember spending literally all of my waking hours doing (video games don't count because it sucks brain out of your head). I was a committed LEGO and K'NEX builder. I would have been in a group on facebook, had it been available for 8 year old's in the early 90's. I was sold out to the cause of toy building. Had I not been raised in a neo-conservative Mennonite home (the "neo" part is for dramatic effect) I think I would have had tattoo's of my favorite building projects. One time I made a huge roller coaster with K'NEX and it actually worked. I also specifically remember covering my entire living room floor with LEGOs (and everyone knows how much of a joy it is to step on those). I loved getting LEGO's and opening the new box and reading the manual on how to assemble the toy (knowing full well I was flipping the pages entirely too fast to be learning anything). I loved laying all the pieces out on the ground, even if it meant losing some of the most necessary pieces. I would keep the finished project assembled for days, weeks, years if my mother would have allowed it.
I was the most incredible mixture of content, inspired, and challenged by these toys.
LEGO's and K'NEX were basically my baby sitter AND best friend. What an amazing combination!!
...
In the 9th grade I took one of those "vocation tests" that attempts to assess an adolescent's gifts and abilities, for the sake of offering career possibilities. Let's think about it: it seems that most children dream of being a movie star, firefighter, astronaut, lawyer, or something extraordinary. You know what I got: city planner. Yep, if you aren't impressed by the dullness of that right off the bat, then you probably, like I did, don't know that a city planner maps out roads, buildings, and various other city things to help with efficiency and organization. "Give it up for the boring kid!" As a young and willing young man, I was branded with the hope of one day organizing roads. And to make it even more unsettling, I was pretty much okay with this. I liked math and science, and with my history in Lego obsession, I would get the knack of things soon enough.
I was going to organize people's roads.
...
Somewhere along the line, religious people started talking to me about calling. Not calling my mom on the phone, or calling for help, or calling my brother a turd, nope, this is the type of word you put in quotes because it has the power to freak people out: "calling".
But because I have always been in a religious family, the unique nature of this language didn't really hit me until recently. As a teenager, I got more and more comfortable with "calling", maybe because it put some words to the deep longings I had, or because it meant that "some thing" was doing this "calling", or maybe thinking about my "calling" allowed me to wrestle with ideas that were foreign to me. Not foreign like illegal immigrants or Eskimos, but foreign like unfamiliar to my routine. The "calling" I was experiencing in high school was an awakening to something outside the material, quantifiable, and mechanistic stuff that I was used to. My future as a city planner was being shattered by "calling", not because dealings with the physical and seemingly mundane world around me would have been a bad pursuit, but instead, because my eyes were being opened to questions of the abstract.
My future as an architect was shifting away from the building and designing of roads and buildings, to the mapping and exploration of faith and meaning. My interests were, and continue to be, grounded in a desire to organize the stuff that surrounds us; however, I think that the stuff of faith and meaning resists this organizing, but instead requires that we thoughtfully "name" this stuff. My childhood obsession with Lego's ought to teach me a thing or two about the time I spend with religious and spiritual ideas, that I can appropriately love this process of exploring faith and meaning.
May my faith journey of the present remind me of my time spent with Lego's as a child - the most incredible mixture of content, inspired, and challenged.
I loved building this stuff. My dad even let me tinker around with his old school Lincoln Logs. This was the entirety of my existence as a child: to build shit.
Besides my obsession with sports trading cards, this little youngster hobby of mine is pretty much one of the only things I can remember spending literally all of my waking hours doing (video games don't count because it sucks brain out of your head). I was a committed LEGO and K'NEX builder. I would have been in a group on facebook, had it been available for 8 year old's in the early 90's. I was sold out to the cause of toy building. Had I not been raised in a neo-conservative Mennonite home (the "neo" part is for dramatic effect) I think I would have had tattoo's of my favorite building projects. One time I made a huge roller coaster with K'NEX and it actually worked. I also specifically remember covering my entire living room floor with LEGOs (and everyone knows how much of a joy it is to step on those). I loved getting LEGO's and opening the new box and reading the manual on how to assemble the toy (knowing full well I was flipping the pages entirely too fast to be learning anything). I loved laying all the pieces out on the ground, even if it meant losing some of the most necessary pieces. I would keep the finished project assembled for days, weeks, years if my mother would have allowed it.
I was the most incredible mixture of content, inspired, and challenged by these toys.
LEGO's and K'NEX were basically my baby sitter AND best friend. What an amazing combination!!
...
In the 9th grade I took one of those "vocation tests" that attempts to assess an adolescent's gifts and abilities, for the sake of offering career possibilities. Let's think about it: it seems that most children dream of being a movie star, firefighter, astronaut, lawyer, or something extraordinary. You know what I got: city planner. Yep, if you aren't impressed by the dullness of that right off the bat, then you probably, like I did, don't know that a city planner maps out roads, buildings, and various other city things to help with efficiency and organization. "Give it up for the boring kid!" As a young and willing young man, I was branded with the hope of one day organizing roads. And to make it even more unsettling, I was pretty much okay with this. I liked math and science, and with my history in Lego obsession, I would get the knack of things soon enough.
I was going to organize people's roads.
...
Somewhere along the line, religious people started talking to me about calling. Not calling my mom on the phone, or calling for help, or calling my brother a turd, nope, this is the type of word you put in quotes because it has the power to freak people out: "calling".
But because I have always been in a religious family, the unique nature of this language didn't really hit me until recently. As a teenager, I got more and more comfortable with "calling", maybe because it put some words to the deep longings I had, or because it meant that "some thing" was doing this "calling", or maybe thinking about my "calling" allowed me to wrestle with ideas that were foreign to me. Not foreign like illegal immigrants or Eskimos, but foreign like unfamiliar to my routine. The "calling" I was experiencing in high school was an awakening to something outside the material, quantifiable, and mechanistic stuff that I was used to. My future as a city planner was being shattered by "calling", not because dealings with the physical and seemingly mundane world around me would have been a bad pursuit, but instead, because my eyes were being opened to questions of the abstract.
My future as an architect was shifting away from the building and designing of roads and buildings, to the mapping and exploration of faith and meaning. My interests were, and continue to be, grounded in a desire to organize the stuff that surrounds us; however, I think that the stuff of faith and meaning resists this organizing, but instead requires that we thoughtfully "name" this stuff. My childhood obsession with Lego's ought to teach me a thing or two about the time I spend with religious and spiritual ideas, that I can appropriately love this process of exploring faith and meaning.
May my faith journey of the present remind me of my time spent with Lego's as a child - the most incredible mixture of content, inspired, and challenged.
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