Cedarville University

Last Monday, I started a student teaching experience at a high school in Washington Court House, and so far it has been a total blast. I teach two English classes a day, one tenth grade and one ninth, and my kids are completely awesome. On the first day, I did a little icebreaker with my students, asking them to respond to a few get-to-know-you questions. Two of said questions included, “What is your favorite smell?” and “What is your worst ever self-imposed injury?”

Here are a few of my favorite responses from the class:

Favorite Smell:
5. “Gasoline in the morning”
4. “Puppy breath”
3. “Strawberry lotion…and gas”  (this combination fascinates me)
2. “Burnt Copper”
1. “Ninjas”  (upon reading this, I asked this kid if I could adopt him) 

Worst Self-Imposed Injury:
5. “Ran into a tree. My face bled.”  (I admire the poignant simplicity)
4. “Stabbed myself in the leg with scissors”
3. “Fell out of my chair”  (so profoundly average, it had to make the list)
2. “[Same as # 4] in the foot with a toothpick”
1. “Had a handlebar lodged in my chin”  (for the vivid verb choice, I awarded him a bonus point)

The last week has really affirmed this, but I am head-over-heals in love with the prospect of being a teacher. However, the prospect of discovering the specific quirks and qualities of about 40 other human beings every day is perhaps what really infects me about this profession.

And the same applies to you, beloved reader. It’s also fascinating to know how unique and particular you are. So tell me, how you would respond to the two questions I asked my students? Leave a comment, show me and the World Wide Web just how remarkably specific you are!

The other day, my buddy Pete asked me a question that, to put it subtly, forever reordered my expectations for existence. The question was, “If you could marry any movie character, who would it be and why?”

Now, I am a person who takes these kinds of “what if” questions quite seriously. More seriously, in fact, than questions like, “What are you doing with your life after college?” Typically, I will respond to hypothetical surveys like Pete’s with a long train of scarcely relevant questions about conditions and stipulations (i.e. After I marry her, do we then live in her movie world or the real world? Are there any jilted lovers I’ll have to vanquish first? Is it assumed that she will prescribe to a biblical model of mutual submission? etc.).

The other day, however, proved to be the single swiftest response I’ve ever elicited to a “what if” scenario. All Pete had to day was, “She does not have to be a real person” and the answer shot out like a bottle rocket from my inner being:

Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

Why, you might ask? Let’s take a look at what makes Belle so irrefutably awesome.
She is…

1) Intellectually-Balanced:
I mean, this is a dame C.S. Lewis could fall for. Reads mountains of books, (literally), but she’s not too stuck up to sing to the peasants in the gutters of her village. And in the words of Mr. Lewis, “Knowledge, with humility, is hot.”

2) Radically Altruistic:
If you remember the film, Belle convinces a frothing seven foot monster to en-dungeon her in place of her father. Now there’s a compassion that’s difficult to find in anyone, much less in your average adolescent French girl.

3) Discerning:
She sees the Beast for more than his foul breath, his temper tantrums, his razor claws, and supernaturally-induced death sentence. And she sees Geston for the shallow toolshed he is, dismantling his ego again and again.

4) Self-Respecting:
One word, folks: modesty. Jasmine and Arial can show all the midriff they want, but they’ll never touch the radiance of a girl with this much self-respect.

So there you have it. Four reasons why Belle from Beauty and the Beast would make an indisputably fantastic (hypothetical) spouse. Now allow me to turn the question on you, dear reader: What movie character would you marry? Proclaim your choice! Leave a comment and tell the world why.

Recently, I’ve been chewing on the idea of leisure. Now I’ll be honest: this chewing has had much to do with an assignment for a Bible class. The project is now “done,” but some of the issues it raised continue to flop around in my head. So, on the topic of free time and Christ-following, this post is something like a half-torn net catching what has flopped out in the last week. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you…

So thanks to Christ, we have a very real freedom to engage God personally, even in the ordinary fabric of our day-to-day situations. However, somewhere along the line, our Christian thinking has been content to designate “spiritual” and “unspiritual” aspects of life that subtly determine the places where we can and cannot experience God. Author/pastor Rob Bell notably observed that since the Hebrew language has no word for “spiritual,” perhaps we should reorder our thinking to acknowledge a spiritual dimension to every aspect and situation of our lives. The psalmist seems to support this idea when he proclaims that “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (24:1). If the fullness of our human experience belongs to God, there seems no arena of our life that should go untwined by his presence.

But why is it that we (I) seem so reluctant to invite God into the “non-spiritual” aspects of our daily context? When we categorize like this, I feel that we overlook huge chunks of Christ’s presence available to us throughout the day. Way too often, we (I) restrict our interactions with Christ to a narrowly-defined rubric of religiously-approved activities. While a premeditated practice prayer and Scripture (“Quiet Time”) is an inseparable foundation of what it means to know God, I think we miss out when we make it the exclusive way we interact with him. When we rigidly confine our fellowship with Christ to two or three religious activities, we miss out severely on his presence. We don’t celebrate with him. We don’t date with him. We don’t learn with him. We don’t listen to music with him. We don’t laugh our heads off with him. And we don’t leisure with him.

So how should the presence of God affect the kinds of things we do in our free time? Should we take mandatory, ten minute breaks from basketball and euchre to sing worship songs or memorize Scripture? On this issue, I think it’s helpful to consider the curious, often fluid ways that human relationships are forged and developed. For example, ask just about any married couple what they did to fall in love. Chances are, their answer won’t take long to mention, “spending time together.” Ask that couple how they spent that time, and you’ll get a list of memories and mutual experiences that will be unique and remarkably specific to their relationship. In short, the growth of our relationships seems intrinsically weaved into any kind of activity, so long as we are doing it together. I remember one of the first bonding moments I shared with my neighbor, Stephen, who would become one of my closet childhood friends: we threw rocks at each other in the crawl space of his basement. This isn’t the kind of activity you would include in an “Irrefutable Principles of Friendship” book, but chucking those stones brought us together in an unpredictable but powerful way.

I feel that this phenomenon in human relationships reflects how God might have intended us to interact with him on a day-to-day basis (maybe not the rocks…you get the idea). When we invite God into our leisure time, I don’t think we need not contrive ways to “spiritualize” whatever we happen to be doing. Rather, we approach what we do in our leisure with a conscious acknowledgement that God is now, a living, active, and knowable presence in the fabric of every situation. Maybe it’s not unlike the way we constantly include ‘friendship’ in just about anything we do with people close to us. For example, think of a favorite movie or show you might share with a close friend. Watching that movie with your friend can easily become an experience of one another in the very act of sharing something you both enjoy. Even if we do not explicitly sit down and “know” our friend with rehearsed conversation, we still entwine them in our situation and, in the process, end up knowing and experiencing them. Inviting God into our leisure, in turn, may take on a similar form as we consciously orient ourselves to engage and enjoy his presence and his children, claiming fellowship with every breath.