Philip’s Tunnel to Nowhere 3

Oh, wait, I live by the Mississippi River.   Never mind.  It’s not a dry heat.

Most of those who know me in real life can attest that my body has a slightly embarrassing tendency to overreact to changes in temperature.   Just walking from a parking lot to an air-conditioned building is enough to start me sweating for half an hour!

So you can imagine I’m really enjoying the summer weather in Memphis right now.   Ooh, look: 96 today, 99, 97, 97, and 94 for the rest of the week.   So we’re in a bit of a cool spell compared to last week.

Really good sermon today at Redeemer by Jeremy.   The text was Exodus 3.10-15; 4.1-5, 10-14.   The applicability of that passage is sort of obvious, I think.  (Maybe I just mean obvious to me.) The verse that really grabbed my attention was 4.1, after God has called Moses and given him specific instructions:

Then Moses answered, “But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you.’”

It’s just so blatant, isn’t it?   Moses is talking to the creator of the universe who has just assigned him a mission, and instead of trusting the Lord to deal with the adverse circumstances, he just asserts a worst-case scenario that he’s dreamed up!

I do this a lot.   For example, lately I’ve been reevaluating my career plan that I had to put on hold for a few months while waiting to apply for grad school.   Reevaluation on a rational basis is fine, but I tend to get all panicky.   “I’m going to have to spend all my savings for a degree that won’t do me any good in the workforce anyway!”   Stuff like that.

It’s reassuring that God ends up somewhat meeting Moses “where he’s at” and continues to work through him despite his utter lack of faith.   After Moses presses on with the objections about his lack of eloquence, God eventually condescends to send Aaron as his spokesman.   But the point isn’t really that God was wrong to call Moses in the first place, or that Moses’s impediments to successful ministry were too much for the Lord to deal with so he had to fall back on Plan B.    The point is that God worked around Moses’s lack of faith without withdrawing the call to serve.   At least, that’s the point I take from it.

Other stuff

Last night, or really early this morning, in the Horseshoe Casino after all the sporting events had gone off I happened to catch a glimpse of the televised service from The Life Church of Memphis.  Actually, to be honest, I thought it was Mark Driscoll at first, until I figured out it didn’t say anything about Mars Hill and the phone number was a 901 area code.    In any event, that church looks alluringly hipster and all, and from their site they appear to be orthodox and not obviously a cult or anything.   (I’m edgy about unfamiliar church names ever since getting invited to “The Nashville Church” back in college, which turned out to be the operating name of the ICC.)   I was a little put off that both their “campuses” appear to be out in the suburbs — don’t they know that real hipsters live in Midtown? — but I might wander out there some week or other.   I’m not looking for a new church but I’m curious.

I turned 35 this week.   It’s a bit depressing that I’m now halfway through my thirties, and that 40 is closer than I want to admit.   I still don’t know who I am, still have no idea what to do vocationally, still feel like a bit of a deficient or at least highly deviant human being.

Yet even as I was thinking about that on the drive to this nice air-conditioned coffee house, I realized that this too is a lack of faith on my part.   God has a plan that encompasses the “waste” of my time from age 21 to 35.   I don’t know what the point of that time has been, but God does.   If only I could believe that on cue.

Tonight I went out clubbing for a while.   I thought I was going to a gothic/industrial club night, but it turns out that one’s not really operational at the moment.   Instead I was actually at some sort of more general alternative night that was in its second well.   Ah well, my musical taste is pretty diverse so that’s not a problem.   I talked a little with the organizer about career stuff.   However, it did appear to be a pretty tight-knit group, and my tolerance for sitting alone with my thoughts expires after a while, so I left after 2-3 hours.   But I’ll probably go back on future Wednesdays.

On the drive back down Madison Avenue, I caught a view of the main Methodist Hospital building over on Union.   Whenever I see it lit up at night, with a cross and a horizontal “METHODIST”, it reminds me of the night my grandmother died there in 1993.   I remember Mom waking me up in the early morning hours, telling me that it was time to go down there, and that sign looming ominously as we drove up.   I’ve always had a strong “sense of place”, in that certain places trigger certain thoughts or memories, and Memphis is really good for that given my family’s background here.

This Saturday I think I want to go to Blues on the Bluff, a fund-raiser for WEVL, the community radio station to which I’ve become very attached.   Events on Friday and Saturday nights now require a special impetus for me to attend, because my default plan is usually to take advantage of by far the most profitable nights for poker.   Indeed, if I were playing full-time, Friday and Saturday would usually be my, “Sorry, I can’t make it.  I have to work,” nights.   But I’m trying to not miss out on all Memphis has to offer.   I figure about 2 hours of blues will be enough, though, so I’ll probably head down to the casinos around 9.

I’m trying to figure out how to arrange my sleep so I can play in the late-night Saturday games but still make it to church on Sunday.   I think I’m going to retrain myself to sleep 3 am to 9 am, and then because six hours a day has never been close to enough for me, take naps in the afternoon as needed.   Call it the Spanish siesta plan.

I talked a bit about my transition to Memphis, but here’s a thought that’s been going through my mind lately.

I’m acutely aware that my brain requires a certain amount of novelty to function, and that rearranging my work life so that I could move came at just the right time when I was about to flip out over being confined to Huntsville.   But making this move has helped remind me just how much fun it novelty is to me.

I like getting lost and finding my way around streets I don’t know.   I’ve been doing that a lot.

To some extent I like having to make new friends.   I don’t mean that I tire of my old friends, exactly, or that I like feeling alone.   But there’s something stimulating about the blank social slate.

I like being new places and having new opportunities to explore.   I need to explore more of these coffee shops and not just stick to Otherlands and High Point.   I definitely need to go through this list of Memphis BBQ joints!

Anyway, my point about novelty is that even though I’m just soaking it up, I’m acutely aware than in 3 or 6 months, everything novel about Memphis won’t seem novel any more.   And although Memphis is the kind of place I could settle for good, much more than Huntsville, I also know that it won’t always be this new and exciting.   So I can move around a lot, or I can learn new ways to create novelty in familiar settings.  (For the record, grad school may move me away from Memphis in 2009 anyway.)

I’m not sure how “settled” I’ll be in the future, but I do know that I can’t live without some sort of novelty.

Often I get in conversations with other people about churches and sermons.   I guess this is because of my obsession with macro-level thinking, with always considering how to improve institutions that matter to me.

In any case, I find this conversations often going down well-worn paths, to the question of whether a church ought to be “aiming low” in its spiritual content, trying to clarify the basics so that any non-Christian coming in feels at ease; or “aiming high” so that the staunch believers making up most of the congregation will feel that the spiritual content continues to challenge them.   (It should hopefully be obvious from the scare quotes that when I call this “aiming high”, I’m only talking about level of theological knowledge, not implying that the theologically knowledgeable are better or even more moral people.)

My position is typically that treating the question this way forces a false dichotomy.   I think it’s plausible that a talented pastor can “aim low” by teaching the same fundamental truths of the Gospel again and again, but do it in such a way as to also “aim high” by illustrating those truths in ways that cause that jaded portion of the flock to think, “Wow, I’d never quite thought of that truth in those terms.”   To be sure it takes talent, and it’s not like it happens every day.   But there is a supernatural aspect to the Bible that renews it with every reading, so it’s not like the preacher is left to his own devices.   Hopefully he’s calling on the Holy Spirit for help!

In any case, this came to mind last week at the church where I’m getting settled in, Redeemer Memphis.   Jeffrey Lancaster gave a sermon on the beginning of Isaiah 6, and in my notes I transcribed his overview as:
“God is convicting, overwhelming, and the one who calls us.”

Now, none of these characteristics of God is exactly novel to me.   I know God convicts; I know God is overwhelmingly holy; and I know God is the one who calls us.   I’d probably even thought of each of the three in isolation in reference to that passage!   But I’d not really thought of the three together, and certainly not with the particular illustrations that Jeffrey chose from his own experience.

I just wanted to get my position out there on the Internets: You can ask for preaching that does it all, both reiterating the fundamental truths and illuminating them for those who’ve already heard it all.   How many preachers do that, though, or how the Holy Spirit interacts with the individual talents of the preacher, I wouldn’t venture to guess.

From day to day, week to week, I have a lot of thoughts spilling out of my brain that I think are interesting enough to write down here for future reference. But I rarely remember what they are by the time I have the volition to actually type up blog entries.

In any event, the transition to mostly living and working in Memphis is going really well. After some early drama around the question of whether my landlord’s previous roommate was really going to clear out or not (some months after he stopped paying rent!), everything finally worked out. I love Mud Island — very upper-middle class, true, but also great for walking with beautiful views of the DeSoto (I-40) Bridge. I live somewhat off the left side of this view, on the Memphis side

I have some other thoughts that I’d like to write about today, but in the interest of blog readability I think they’d best be displaced to their own posts. And for even more fun I can set them to auto-post
sometime in the future, oh my!

My mom is undergoing surgery tomorrow.   It’s pretty routine, but she’s understandably nervous.   If you happen to see this and care to pray, it’s much appreciated.

I know I’m beating a dead horse here, and of course the author is biased and pro-Democrat.   And of course he selects informants who play into the worst stereotypes about the South.    But the part about how this is a very calculated strategy to focus everyone off of issues and onto demonization still rings true.

This basically is everything the GOP has been serving up for all of my generation.   As much as I dislike the policies of the Democrats, as much as they’re opposed to small government in theory, I’ll be pulling for them to beat the crap out of the GOP this November.   Electoral humiliation is the only morality these turkeys know.   Everything else validates their trash as a means to an end.

Last night I ventured out to the Hi-Tone for the first time to see Unwed Sailor, an impressive instrumental band that I was only vaguely familiar with. I’m glad I did, because being more active in the music scene locally is one of my priorities for this move to Memphis.

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I’m restarting this blog again. Here’s why. And the latest on my career/living status.

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