More Fiction!

New hagah post:

• The Janitor's Daughter (fiction)

IST: Ordinary Miracle, Sarah Mclachlan

I like to think that when God does miracles, He doesn't always do the supernatural type. I think He often works through the coincidental, the trivial, the mundane. We just don't always recognize them for the miracles they are.

I think it's a miracle when I look out my window and see for just a second a sky filled to the brim with different shades of cloud over trees ranging from green to red, a blue jay, and a rabbit.

I think it's a miracle when people build relationships on strong foundations and know that they can talk about anything and everything and know that there's no judgement, just love.

I think it's a miracle when I can curl up inside, watch the rain mist over the ground, stay warm and cozy and dry.

I think it's a miracle when we learn in chapel how to dance an Israeli dance and it doesn't matter if we mess up or what because we're just here to celebrate our great God.

I think it's a miracle when I can funnel my thoughts into words and my words into a device that will send them almost instantaneously to someone I care about, whether they are steps or miles or half the world away.

I think it's a miracle when people living in a community they didn't even arrange themselves can grow together and love one another and have good relationships with each other.

I think it's a miracle when I can take joy in something simple and laugh at silly things.

I think it's a miracle when my sister folds a piece of paper into a crane or a flower or a bear or any one of a hundred other things.

I think it's a miracle when we're invited to join in a story so much bigger than ourselves, when we can run and not grow weary, when we can rest, be still, and know that He is God.

What miracles are hiding around us today?

Doubts and Conversation Hearts

New hagah posts:

• God Even Uses Candy Conversation Hearts (prose)
• Nagging Doubts (poetry)

Inner Soundtrack: Sleepless Night, Fernando Ortega

This week at my floor's Bible study, we talked about how sometimes God works "behind the scenes," so to speak. We also talked about some times in our lives when we'd seen concrete answers to prayer.

I didn't think much of it during Bible study, but earlier that day, I'd gone to the registrar's office to fill out a form that would change my program of study from undecided to a Writing major with minors in Greek and Computer Science. I'm still not positive that this will be my exact program, but I needed something down before next week so my ducks would be in a row for academic advising. Since I think I'll most likely be doing something like this, I went and filled out the form so I could think about getting into the right classes next semester.

Filling out that form changed not only my course of study, but also my advisor. This had me a little worried. My current advisor was in the Classics department, which I needed for my minor, but I would also need an advisor in the English department for my major.

When you've only had two professors in the entire department and only liked one of them, getting an advisor in the department can be a little unnerving. I was a little bit afraid that I was going to be assigned to that prof whose personality clashed so badly with mine. More than a little bit, if I'm being completely honest. The only other profs in the department that I'd sort of met where about three who had given guest lectures in my English class. One of them stuck out to me as one I liked -- maybe she could be my advisor, I thought. But I didn't know, and since I wasn't sure at the time if I would keep my old advisor or not, I didn't fill out the advisor request line on the form.

As it turned out when I submitted the form, the registrar's office only specifically assigns advisors for majors. I could keep meeting with my current advisor on my own, but my primary advisor would change to a prof in the English department. So I handed over the form and spent a fair amount of time praying that night while I was trying to sleep that I would get an advisor who would understand me and who would be someone I could work well with.

I got an email the next morning that my program -- and my advisor -- had been updated. I went to the Calvin website and pulled up my program requirements. Lo and behold, I had a new advisor. And out of more than twenty professors in the English department, the registrar's office had assigned me to that one who had given the guest lecture in my class -- the one that I'd liked.

Some would call it a coincidence. But after all that, I would call it anything but.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?"

Matthew 6:25-27

Colons, Links, and (Guess What?) Greek

Every now and then I have this thought, and usually it goes something like this:

"Greek is so awesome! Class today was so interesting. I wish [name of friend] could have been there; I bet they would have found our discussion fascinating. Maybe I'll go write about Greek on my blog. Oh wait, just about every other post on this blog is about or somehow mentions Greek. I need to write less about Greek. I thought I was an English major. Maybe I should write about something English-y. Or something about life. Or... you know. Something that's not about Greek. [At this point, anywhere from one to several minutes pass as I watch my cursor blink on my screen.] ...Curses. I'm just gonna have to write about Greek."

Here's the thing, though: I am not a Greek major. And honestly, I don't really want to change my major to Greek. (Now watch me eat my words a few months from now. It'll probably happen, knowing my track record. Maybe I'll double major or something. And now I'm getting ahead of myself. Please excuse the rabbit trail.) Don't get me wrong, I think Greek is awesome -- just look at all those posts I linked back there for a small sample -- but my real love lies in Biblical Greek. (Sorry, Plato. I'll probably put up with you for a semester so I can get my minor, but that's about it.)

As long as I'm overusing colons, here's the point of all that rambling: this post is going to be about Greek. Surprise! I'm sure I've given my if-you're-sick-of-me-talking-about-Greek warning before, but if you are, go ahead and skip to the end and read the new hagah post (which, incidentally, is entirely unrelated to Greek and to the rest of this post) linked there. If not... cool. Let's talk about Greek. Actually, let's talk about my Greek class.

Usually in Greek 205, we work on slowly translating our way through the book of Mark. Sometimes, we take rabbit trails. Sometimes, we take a lot of rabbit trails. They're usually important or relevant rabbit trails, though, and they're almost always interesting.

Example: today was a day of extended rabbit trails that took us through how Scripture is translated, the relationships between translations and interpretation, the implications and possibilities of human agency, the dating and authorship of some New Testament books that scholarship says could be vastly different from our traditional beliefs, what these verses from Revelation 22 could mean for how we look at the canon of Scripture, how the canon became canonical, the place and purpose of the Apocrypha books, and generally a big bundle of interesting things. And near the end of class we even translated a little Greek. Basically, way too many fascinating and huge topics for one fifty-minute class period or one blog post.

In short, there are a lot of things we don't know. And "a lot" is an understatement. "Things are always more complicated than we make them out to be," as our prof said near the end of our discussion. I do know this, though: I am blessed beyond what I could tell you now to be in a place where we are, as our prof frequently reminds us, a "Greek family" -- a group of people who are willing to struggle through texts and interpretations and ask deep questions about things we value and are just beginning, in some small way, to understand.

-----------

New hagah post: Remember (poetry)