breaks

Winter quarter ended significantly different than fall quarter ended. Fall quarter, I ended feeling pretty elated about life. This time, I had a discouraging end to top off a discouraging quarter. Things ended with me feeling disoriented and confused as I drove south to California. But all of this makes me think that the most important part of holidays and specific days is how remembering that same holiday in the past makes me reflect on change in my life. It's not just holidays, either, this happens to me on a weekly, daily, sometimes even hourly basis, where I realize what I was doing x amount of time before this point. I'm not sure why, but I often feel embarassed when I remember times that I was really feeling happy about life, like the end of fall quarter feels embarassing to me right now. Whatevz.

Here's one thing I was thinking about over break: most of life is learning how to reconcile different stories and then actually reconciling them. The way I live my life depends on how I choose to fuse together multiple storylines and which storylines I choose to fuse together.

Here's something that I'm excited about: the humility of God. I talked with a friend of mine at the end of the quarter, and he brought this up, specifically in regards to evolution. This is the idea that God using evolution to bring about the world de-emphasizes his power and emphasizes his humility. In a lot of ways, this fits with the God I know and the God that I want to know. I've thought a lot about the silence of God, and I wonder if his silence has to do with his humility. But it also has to do with the humility of Jesus, both in becoming human and in the way he lived out his life. He did perform miracles yes, but there was also humility to his actions. Incidentally, I'm coming to understand more how God's silence may sometimes be the most fitting answer to suffering, in the same way that my silence may be the best thing that I can give someone else who is suffering, instead of giving them concepts that "explain" the meaning of suffering but, in the end, do nothing towards healing the pain that they feel.

I never want to think that my most important function as a Christian is church. It's good to meet together, but my primary role as a Christian is not meeting together with other Christians.

I don't want to use an alarm this quarter. We'll see how that goes.