Working on a new project...

Xaris and Shalom

Because what I need is a new blog, right?  :)

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When Evening is Overwhelming

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I was angry the other night. Enraged.  Furious.  Indignant.  Infuriated. I felt that there were not synonyms enough in the English language to express the depths of my emotion.  The world is sometimes so desperately broken and evil blows itself up so large, casting such large and far-reaching shadows that words fall short. There are no curses I know strong enough for such evil , I thought. Except one. Resurrection . In the face of the most ravaging evil that tightens around the world, that creates fissures in cultures, that breaks the hearts of my students, there is hope. He's risen. That truth is what kicks evil in the teeth, the earthquake that will destroy the whole kingdom of darkness.  For now, we wait and work, living in age of aftershocks, knowing that light is coming, that full morning will dawn and push out the darkness forever. ~~~ ["When Evening is Overwhelming" taken from a song by Zach Winters .]
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Plans Can't Keep Up With Changes (especially during a pandemic)

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It's still humbling to recall how, when news of the covid-19 pandemic first broke, I didn't think it was going to be a problem here.  Months and thousands of deaths later, with friends who have suffered from sickness and loss, it's obvious that I was incredibly wrong in my assessment of the situation.  I couldn't have guessed at how the spring and summer would unfold, at the changes that were written in the next few pages and chapters of my life that I never would have seen coming. hiking at the end of March with housemates April went by in a blur of confusion and exhaustion and grief as the US scrambled and reeled and states staggered with making decisions about how to cope with an incoming wave of devastation.  Pennsylvania's governor instituted a stay-at-home order that was prolonged a couple of times for the county I live in, which brought a twist I had never imagined to Jason's and my season of engagement -- in the same country, even the same county, yet no
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Habits

[As a slight disclaimer... I've been meaning to post this for about a month, and just haven't gotten around to it. Not that it makes much difference, but here it is.] I was reading The Divine Conspiracy (still; it didn't make my packing list for China so it kind of got put on hold) and hit a section on how much sin comes from habits. I've thought more about habits in the past three months than I probably ever had before, because as soon as we got to China we started realizing that we had all kind of habits that were so deeply engrained we didn't even realize that they were habits, we just thought they were how life was. And we longed to rebuild a similar set of routine habits, so that we could do things like eat and buy groceries and shower on autopilot. It takes a lot of energy to consciously think about everything that we do in the course of a day. Anyway, I think there is a lot to be said for what was being said in Divine Conspiracy : our habits are so un
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