Reflectito

Hey friends, you awesome group of people. Seriously everywhere I go where a photo of us pops up on my computer or something, people just wonder aloud about how cool this group seems. I must agree.

So I'm in DC, and I've been entertaining (aka freaking out over) the temptations of reuniting with those of you guys still in the Ham. Sometime last fall at a faculty workday we were reflecting, in writing, a bit from My Utmost for His Highest (1/26), and I just found it today under stacks of stacks of paper. What struck me about it is the remarkable extent to which it still reflects the way that I'm thinking through this situation. It's not particularly wise, thought out, or informed. I just had a feeling that I ought to share it with you guys, if for no other reason than to say something on here every now and then, a little reminding northern whisper. So:

"Many of us refuse to grow where we are put; consequently we take root nowhere."

This can't have been written in a day before options and from a man unacquainted with transition. And am I to feel "put" here, in NoVA/DC, to take root and grow? Or is this a nursery on the way to some better, more suitable spot, a planter in a living room, a forest in the South, a park in the city, a meadow near a brook.

But what right does a tree have to question where the seed that grew it was scattered? Well I don't know but that this "planting" here is a product of options, of consumerism applied to circumstance, of plotting my own course. So then where is Birmingham? Where is that communal root of such beauty, joy, and service (though not devoid of the plain, the dull, the selfish, and the complacent)?

Maybe at the end of it all, simplicity looks like working without worrying. It isn't the opposite of options, maybe; but it could be opposed to letting the worry over options take control, that tightness in the countenance, the burden of freedom.



So I love yall, and hope you're doing well. I'm sure we'll find some other random excuse to get together for awesomeness before too long. Until then, I miss you.