Article in Lariat

Check it out! The Lariat ran a whole story about my composting program!

See this seed here? In six months it’s going to be corn!

I was sitting in a meeting at work today, bored, tired, and thinking about how I don’t want to get stuck doing this for the rest of my life. And then I got to thinking about just how intangible my life is sometimes.

It’s like I live my life in boxes. I mean, what do I actually do during a given day? I wake up in one box (my room), get in a moving box (the bus), arrive at another box (my office), and sit in front a magic box (computer) that connects me to other people who are also living their lives in similar boxes. And at the end of the day, what do I have to show for my work? Nothing I can touch, or smell, or hold, or taste, or even really see. I have information, stored in small electronic pulses somewhere in the ether. It’s like this strange dissociated reality, because nothing is really “real,” it’s all just ideas.

And I look around, out the window, at all this “real” stuff like buildings and cars and sidewalks and restaurants, and it’s mostly populated by people who are just living in boxes too! I feel like modern living makes us so dissociated from the real, favoring this second, intangible reality of ideas and information and electrons. What’s all this living about anyways, all this eating and breathing, smelling, touching? I love those moments with I feel the realness of life just wash over and consume me, like I am a part of it, and it is a part of me.

It makes me want to be a farmer, because the work they do is actually real. They take a seed, place it in the ground, and through the miracle (yes, it is a miracle in my book) of photosynthesis it becomes food. A farmer makes something real, something tangible, something I can hold and smell. It’s almost magical.

who is the jesus fellow anyways?

i am amazed by the feedback i have gotten from my article. on the side of the page, there is a section for comments that people can leave, and it is interesting how split they are. it seems that people either absolutely HATE it or are appreciative, but nothing in between. many people simply dismiss it as “socialist lib” crap, and others seemed to find something in it that resonated. and i am okay that some people thought it was all wrong, because those are not the people i am trying to reach. i want those people who are unsure where they stand to read it, and then maybe see something they resonate with, and possibly see that they can make a difference too.

i believe that there are a lot of christians out there who are confused by environmentalism but feel that maybe we have a responsibility to protect Creation. i feel that the church is caught up in a culture that views environmental responsibility as something evil. i can’t figure out why there are so many negative attitudes towards environmentalism in the church, outside of its relationship to ‘liberal’ political views in general. which is sad.

when did jesus become a republican? when did he become a democrat? rob bell (one of my favorite authors) spends a lot of time challenging us to pursue the real jesus, instead of this fictitious one we create to fit into our worldview. man was made in god’s image, but i feel that we keep remaking god into our image. jesus was a real man, living in a real time period, with its own very real context that was completely removed from the political culture of our twenty-first century america. i want to understand who this man was, but how can i when only see Him being wrapped in the american flag, ushered onto the stage by whichever political leader of the day claims to know him the best?

relevant

so the other day i decided to send my editorial to relevant.com, an online christian magazine i read occasionally. i never heard back from them, but then lo-and-behold, i check today and see that my article got published! it is SO cool! check it out here!