Author Archives: Dave

Wow, I can’t believe that Christmas is in like four days. Karen and I are bustling about trying to take care of Christmas cards we still haven’t gotten out, packages we still haven’t shipped, and buying odds and ends, including travel-sized stuff so that we can get through the insane security for our Saturday morning flight and appease the TSA gods.

I had to think last night that I am so thankful for her this Christmas, and that there are gifts under our tree, and that we have family with which to spend Christmas. But I’m disillusioned, nonetheless. Not about us, but about what I see around us.

Now, I suppose I should confess that I actually enjoy Christmas shopping. I like the electricity in the air at the malls as people rush around, attempting to find the perfect gift. I had that look on my own face as I attempted to find the perfect gift for Karen this year. I enjoy the Christmas music I’ve recenty been loading onto my iPod, and I enjoy gingerbread lattes from Starbucks (I certainly don’t miss the snow, although we’ll probably see that when we fly north this weekend…groan!).

Every year, though, it’s bittersweet because I see people obsessed with the materialistic drive to give and receive the coolest gifts. I’m confronted with the media blitz of a country driven by a “whoever dies with the most toys wins” mindset. I’m all too easily caught up in this if I’m not careful. My goal for myself over the next couple of days is to focus on the purpose of the celebration. The gift-giving, while a wonderful thing, isn’t the ultimate reality here. The violent sport called last-minute shopping certainly is not. There’s a much deeper reason for all of this, a turning point in history, a moment when God intruded into our space-time flow and physically moved in with us, for just a few years. A few years that altered everything. A few years that began at an unlikely time, with the unexpected fulfillment of a prophecy, and has altered the course of every life at this time of year ever since.

Pondering that, if only for a little while, will change your perspective about all of this.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Okay, so two weeks without a post, but I’m happy to report that the last thing standing between me and my master’s degree is a term paper in my Greek class. I’m looking forward to taking some well-deserved time off from school.

Of course, this means moving back into the “real world.” Unlike most grad students, I left the professional realm and have only worked here and there for the last three years or so (Seminary degrees tend to be really long…). So, this means returning to reality and worrying about making an decent salary, paying off debt, and the sudden responsibility to be the provider now that I have a wife and all.

No more papers, no more exams…but, no pleasure of researching and learning and discovering and solving problems and creating and…

…no more school…back to reality….

…okay, wait…this kinda sucks!

Actually, it’s a temporary respite, because Karen and I are both planning another degree. While I don’t think I’m going to do the next one full time as I did this one, I’m anxious to go back in a way, because I love to learn and to expand my horizons. Not to mention that you just meet the coolest people while in school…the atomsphere is just different. It’s one of exploration and discovery, and a freedom to create.

I think its important to touch base with the “real world” occasionally in order to avoid being in a bubble. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere worse about putting you in a bubble than Seminary. So, a year or two in the real world, and then I get to focus on learning and discovering again.

Not such a bad deal.

I’ve often wondered, “why?”

Not necessarily big “why”‘s, although certainly I have my moments with those. But even little “why”‘s.

Examples: “Why did this happen to me this way, when I didn’t deserve it?” (after getting married to my lovely wife).

“Why did the car in front of me get stopped when I didn’t?” (when you drive like me, these things come up frequently).

“Why did God set things up to run this way?”

I’ve encountered a lot of the last question (or forms of it) from other people in the last few years. Why did God design things to run a certain way? Why did He allow things like hurricanes to happen? Why does the world operate the way it does? Why? For many people, it’s a barrier to full belief.

Unfortunatley, I’ve also met a lot of theologians who had the audacity to formulate answers to these questions.

To me, if I am an unbeleiver who asks this question, and someone formulates a neat and tidy answer to it, then it sounds to me like they’ve designed the mythology in which they believe. It’s fake. It’s too neat. Life, experientially, just isn’t that neat.

It’s much more believable to me to hear someone say that they don’t know. If someone tells me they don’t know, then obviously they are truly saying that there is something, Someone, outside of themselves that they cannot comprehend. That makes it easier for me to believe that they believe. Because to believe in God is to, at some level, hold a fearful respect for Him. Not to try to explain everything about Him.

There are many things about Himself that God has communicated to us, and I love digging into those facts and understanding all that I can about them. But those facts, I think, are a minimum of what we need to know. We are, by definition, less than God, and we will never be able to get our brains around Him. There are many aspects of Him that will always remain a mystery to us.

And God’s mystery has come to be one of His most fascinating qualities to me. There’s something wonderful about mystery.

Karen and I returned from our Thanksgiving trip late Sunday night. Monday morning, I struggled out of bed, and turned on MTV’s Video Wake-Up. Christina Aguilera’s “Hurt” was the video that caught my eye. It’s actually an incredibly well-produced video, and, as much as I would like to say that I’m not a fan (her image distresses me), her bluesy crooning at the beginning of the song always hooks me. The video leaves you with the distinct feeling that you have a broken heart. It makes you think about your family.

Considering that I was already thinking about family, it was particularly thought-provoking for me that morning. Thanksgiving was spent with my end of the family this year. It was a little strange for my wife and I to ride around with my parents and for all of us to have the same last name…strange in a good way.

The fact that we slept in my old high-school bedroom was just straight odd, but we won’t go there…

I guess what strikes me is that the importance of family is so much more important now than it was in the past. Don’t get me wrong, it was always important…my family has always been a huge and important part of my life. Of the things that God gives us, I think family is the among the most important. But now it’s more apparent in my life. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I prefer to think that it’s the new chapter that has began in my life.

Before leaving town, we spent time with Karen’s aunt and uncle, and a friend that has no family to speak of, who jokingly calls our aunt and uncle her “pseudo-family.” She is unbelievably thankful for that.

Which leaves me even more thankful for my own (newly extended) family. It also leaves me more aware that showing Christ’s love to those without family is so critical.

Funny how basic truth has a way of coming back into focus.

Karen and I were having a conversation a couple of days ago about the role of technique in art. It was kind of interesting. Karen is a dancer. She loves to dance, but knew early on that she couldn’t handle doing it professionally because she had seen so much emphasis on technical perfection, and so little emphasis placed on cretivity.

I direct a good deal of drama for my church, and when she slipped in the back while I was rehearsing one night, she expressed how amazed she was at how techinical a drama rehearsal could be (move here on this word, etc.).

So this sparked the debate: when are artists just vehicles for someone else’s creativity, and when are they really creative within themselves?

During my days a musician, I did a lot of classical music (I know, I know…out of character for me, but hey…I was in high school). I couldn’t express any creativity while playing in an orchestra. I was one of an army of people who were serving as vehicles for the creativity of the composer as interpreted by the conductor. Likewise, many dancers are expected to serve as vehicles for the creativity of the choreographer, and actors for the playwright, etc. Certainly, I think the most creative expression in a piece of music, or a play, or a dance, comes from the mind and heart which originate it. But I think we’re doing a severe dis-service in expecting musicians and actors and dancers to focus exlusively on techinique and to function as mindless drones in reproducing someone else’s vision.

When I direct someone else’s script, I refuse to give an actor a line reading. I give them the general parameters I think the character lies within, and the rest is up to their creativity. They should know their character better than I by the time the curtain rises, and so they know how their character would say a given line. That’s the actor’s creativity in this whole process.

Certainly, technique is essential to producing good art. I suppose the only time we really run into this type of debate is in the performing arts…certainly the writer or painter doesn’t seem to struggle with this, because they’re producing what is exlcusively their own. As a writer, though, when I write a play, I must allow for the actor’s creativity to come into play (no pun intended). I’ve never been disappointed in doing so when I’ve seen the finished product take life under the stage lights.

Could this be an indicator of other ways in which we inhibit the essence of creativity in art?