Hurricane Katrina
August 31st, 2005 | My thoughts and prayers are with all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. If you haven’t heard yet, Katrina is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since 1969. The earlier link has lots of information.
The American Red Cross is organizing their biggest relief effort ever. For information on how you can get involved, visit their website.
Update:
I am very much interested in the theology of Hurricane Katrina. That is, where is God in all of this, and what (if any) is His role? I have begun to compile a list of commentaries that seek to answer these and other questions below. I will continue to update these as they become available.
Vision
Tom and I have been talking about this trip nonstop. So much so that many people who know us have heard about it, and we’ve been getting mixed reactions. Some believe in us and our vision and believe that we can make it happen. Others, however, think that it is just a dream that will never be realized.
Here’s the thing – vision in and of itself is not contageous. It is vision fueled by passion that is truly contageous; it cannot be ignored. Because Tom and I believe in this vision, I think that whatever faculty we talk with will become infected with our passion. Tom also mentioned the other day the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a “prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to come true.” In other words, if we believe in this vision enough, if we pour our hearts, souls, and unbridled imagination into it, it will inevitably come true.
Since the original post, we have thrown around several ideas. The first deals with the theme and organization of the journey. The idea of community and (1) where one finds indivudual vocation within community and (2) how community affects vocation has become, more or less, the central theme. Because of the community aspect, we have thought about beginning our journey by attending Passion ‘06 in Nashville, Tenessee from January 2-5. Passion is a national conference for Christian college students that has speakers, worship, and community group time. We think it would be an awesome way to begin the trip, and also a great way to begin to analyze vocation in community. We would then, maybe (and this is all a big “maybe”), head up through Pennsylvania, where we would stop at one or more Amish communities. Following this, we would then drive to Maine and the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. Beyond that, we don’t really have much planned.
Although it may seem like an overtly religious trip – there are undoubtedly religious themes and questions – we are not limiting our search of self and vocation to religion alone. We’d like to vist with non-religious communities as well and investigate vocation with them. The tentative title, then, has been changed. Instead of Traveling the American Frontier: In Search of Self and Vocation, it would be [insert creative title]: An Exploration of Self and Vocation in America’s Communal Heritage.
In questioning how to make the journey more presentable as an academic endeavour and not a month-long vacation, we have come up with several ideas. We would, as I have already mentioned, journal our experiences and insights from the trip daily and compile them into a thesis-length paper after the completion of the journey. We would also put together a presentation that we would present for faculty members and students, and anyone to whom the Sense of Vocation Program would have us speak. This would be good for us because it organizes what we learned from the trip, and it is also good promotion for Luther and its programs. As with nearly any other academic class, we have a required reading list. We’ve been researching the topic and the two texts we have decided to read thus far are:
The first is written by a man who spent 10 years in a Quaker community in Pennsylvania (we could go there…), and the second is a more theological piece. Having required reading, which we plan to have already read before the journey, again, makes our vision more presentable as an academic endeavour.
We also hope to play disc golf in every state through which we pass.
It’s A Start
This is Tom, Jake’s compatriot who will stick by his side during this mind blowing odyssey.
As Jake said, we’ve set a lofty goal of embarking on a month long road trip into the great wide open. Funding for the trip is unlikely. However, faculty sponsorship could be a possibility. A journey whose road is a search for meaning and vocation presents many great expansive educational oppurtunities. In a society where grades, numbers, and profits have become the reason for work, opportunities for jobs with purpose are falling to the wayside. Once the substance is gone from a task one enjoys, the sense of calling goes with it. Though a month’s time isn’t nearly enough, we could use this oppurtunity to engage in conversation with the few remaining American faiths based on simplicity and the honest sense of dedication that dictates their everyday actions.
A hope of mine is that through this process of understanding, we can uncover what qualities are necessary in one’s life to bring out and create the inherent quality we call vocation. As we work and think about this journey, I’m sure more aspects will be added, but this could be a start.
In Search of Self and Vocation
A few quick things:
Anyway, on to the actual post…
My friend Tom and I have been talking a lot during the last two days. At one point, half jokingly, I said that we should spend J-term[2] traveling. Slightly inspired by Donald Miller’s new book, Through Painted Deserts (which is a reworked version of his first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance[3]), in which Donald and a friend pick up and leave their home state of Texas with no plans except to go to the Grand Canyon and eventually end up in Oregon, I thought it might be cool if Tom and I just dropped everything for a month and travel around the country.
The more we talked about it, the more serious we got.
We would spend as much time in January as we could – 4 full weeks – on a journey through the eastern U.S. We talked about trying to get tuition credit at Luther for this proposed “course” and making it actually mean something. Titles for the course were tossed around, such as Traveling the American Frontier: In Search of Self and Vocation and An Odyssey through America: Sojourners in Search of Self and Vocation – something that sounds very academic[4]. You see, we actually want to learn from this experience. The hardest part, though, will be getting it approved for credit and finding an academic advisor. Part of the journey will involve Tom and I writing all of our experiences with the intention of compiling them into a book or thesis-length paper at the end.
We don’t want a strict itinerary. We do, however, need to have some idea of what we want to do and where we want to go. One of the early decisions was which direction to go, so we picked East. Other ideas that were tossed around were: living for 3-5 days in an Amish community – eating, sleeping, and working with them, going to an Indian reservation, living in an inner city, hiking in the Appalacians, and visiting the last remaining Shakers, among other things.
As Donald Miller says in Through Painted Deserts,
It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.
More on the journey as it unfolds…
[1] My photoblog is a place to dump all of my pictures and is hosted on Luther’s servers, while my Flickr account has select pictures and is more permanent in nature.
[2] J-term is a mini-semester during the month of January, inbetween fall and spring semesters.
[3] PAVM is no longer in print, and now sells for no less than $30 on places such as Half.com.
[4] See Luther’s Sense of Vocation program.
Sounds of Summer
The following is a list of albums that have thus far defined my summer:
Coldplay, X&Y
Black Eyed Peas, Monkey Business
John Mayer, As/Is
Jason Mraz, Mr. A-Z
Michael Bublé, It’s Time
Michael Bublé, Michael Bublé
Honorable mention:
This Day & Age, Always Leave The Ground
Mae, The Everglow
Anberlin, Never Take Friendship Personal
Various Artists, Laina’s Mix #1
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Recently
The summer is coming to a close.
Tomorrow is my last official day of the greatest summer internship ever, as well as my last day in West Des Moines. I head back up to Luther on Friday after and quick morning stop in Ames to visit Laina. I’ve probably said, “I can’t believe how fast this summer went!” at the end of every summer since I was thirteen, but this summer seriously went by extra quick. I still vividly remember a very akward phone conversation I had with Molly, one of the other interns, in mid-May. She was telling me when I needed to be in the office, but we didn’t know one another, so it was quite akward.
It’s been a while since I really wrote anything that had to do with my life. I spent the first week of August at the Lake of the Ozarks with a ton of Jr. High students for a camp called Surge that Valley Church does. It was a blast, and it was great to get to know the younger kids in the ministry that I hadn’t even met because I have been doing Sr. High stuff all summer. Two days after we got back from Surge, we headed back to Parmelee, South Dakota. We had gift baskets for every house in the town (between 80-100) and we got to see most of the kids again. In the 36 hours that we were gone for the trip, 16 was spend driving and only 4 was spent in the town… but it was awesome. The instant William saw me, he started sprinting toward me. I love that boy.
The day after Return to Rosebud, I took a group of students to the Iowa State Fair to see Switchfoot perform, with Sleeping at Last as the opening act. Not many people there even knew of Sleeping at Last, but I have been a pretty big fan for about a year. I got to meet the guys, and they signed a poster for me. Switchfoot was good, too. I think their new album will be sweet.
Speaking of new albums, Matt Wertz has a new EP coming out on September 7. It’s called Today & Tomorrow, and it will have five songs, three of which are new and two reworked old ones. You can hear the new version of “I’m Sorry, Mary” on Matt’s myspace.
This has been a very A.D.D. post. My bad.
Writing A Song with John Mayer
Ironic that I just posted about the new John Mayer Stratocaster® from Fender.
Ironic because John has decided to ask singer/songwriters1 to write a song using lyrics that he wrote. Lyrics that didn’t make it onto his upcoming album, Continuum. He will hand-pick his favorites to be downloadable on esquire.com,2 and the grand prize is, naturally, the aforementioned Mayer Stratocaster.3
Here are the lyrics:
I keep a note that I wrote on a taxi receipt
It says, “Don’t listen to anybody other than me”
I hit the big time for a nominal fee
You lose a friend in the end for every dream that you see come trueI got scars upon scrapes, I’ve got bruises on breaks
Masochistically committed to see how much of this I’ll take
Three years under water, and I ain’t even got the shakes
I’m going deeper and deeper and deeperI’ve got dreams to remember, I’ve got days to forget
I’ve got some phone calls in to God but he ain’t called me back just yet
Submissions aren’t due until September 30, so I’ve got a while to work on it. I’m actually kind of nervous. Anyway, I’ll let you know when I have something put together.
- I am not sure at what point I would be considered a singer/songwriter. There are really only two qualifications: (1) writing songs, and (2) singing. I’m pretty sure I do both. It’s just such a broad category to which lots of talented people belong, i.e. John Mayer. ↩
- John writes a monthly article for Esquire Magazine. I believe the following article will be in the September issue. That’s what I read, but I would think it would be in the August issue. Whatev. ↩
- Holy crap I just found out that this guitar costs $1400. This needs to be the best song I ever write. ↩
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