'Kicking It'

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When I was beginning to think about going to seminary, I met with one of the heads of the Educational Ministries department at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. He was awesome and told me to look up Social Entrepreneurship. At one of the websites, I found a bio of Mel Young, the founder of the Homeless World Cup. What an amazing idea. Now they made a documentary.

ANTHONY BRADLEY ON CNN/HEADLINE NEWS WITH GLENN BECK

Anthony Bradley is a professor at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis with my dad and works with the same youth group I do at Chesterfield Pres.  I think he's awesome.

Stop Loss

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I recently saw the trailer for Stop Loss. My friend Jason is a counseling student at Covenant Seminary and is interested in specializing in men with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in Iraq for around a year and a half. He accounts for many of the issues related to men as being a direct or indirect result of PTSD. I'm glad awareness is being raised, so that military people with it can get help.

Carrie and getting carried away with ridiculous travel plans

My friend Carrie is delightful and always eggs on the flights of fancy I have when thinking about trips or adventures I want to take. On the Myers-Briggs, we're both ENFPs and are totally more into the idea of things over the practical. Here's a list of trips that I want to take in the next year, along with the varying possibilities of me actually doing them:

- January: Mizzou has a ridiculous 5 weeks off for winter break. Awesome. There's a website my old co-worker showed me called lastminute.com Also, I want to check out cheapoair.com (I heard about it from a girl in one of my classes - I don't know how good it is). I want to go somewhere for a four days really bad. Maybe Montreal will finally work.
- May: My friend Dan is graduating from film school in Los Angeles a week after I graduate from Mizzou. I haven't seen the Grand Canyon since I was 15 months old. Carrie and I will take my car cross-country. Maybe.
June: various family trips and youth group trips (Illinois, Florida, North Carolina)
July: New York City for the first time ever. Sweet.
August: Beijing for the Olympics? If I go to Covenant Seminary, classes start the last Thursday of August, so that'll be cutting it tight. Three weeks in China. Is it enough?

...and after that is prolonging the wonderful student schedule where I get months off for travel. It's a good life.

Life, it is.

As I am working towards to goal of defining what my life passions are, different words, phrases, and ideas seem to fit together to create the larger vision. One of them comes from an email that wasn't written to me by a professor at Covenant Seminary. It is a broad question that shapes a lot of who Covenant Seminary is and their mission. This question makes me want to go to seminary there. "What do you see in terms of spiritual yearnings within contemporary (popular) culture (in the U.S.A. and globally)?"

I was sitting in my 'Cultural and Intellectual History of the US' class this morning and another image came to me. In contemporary church culture, so much is made of Acts 17, when Paul is preaching on Mars Hill. I think Christians enjoy the image of Paul citing the contemporary secular poets and thinkers to make his own case for the existence of one God and for salvation in Christ. It makes the case that the church shouldn't be a fortress on a hill, separated from society by huge walls of distrust and misunderstanding. It should be a city, with streets leading out, inviting trade and dialogue.

It just occurred to me that that is what inspires me too. My favorite part of being at Mizzou as a Christian is being in a sociology class and being able to see the image of God in the writers and other students as we all discuss culture and the nature of man in society. It's fantastic seeing that what the Bible says isn't all crap and that what it says about human nature and the way God created us in His image can be seen in everything we do. Even the ways we set up power elites and have class warfare speaks to our desire to have the God-like power that got us in this whole mess in the first place (Garden of Eden).

In my history class, my professor acts kind of like an Old Testament prophet, highlighting trends of thought that shifted the American culture. I want to learn how to do that. I want to look at a culture and say, "Here is the foundational issue. Here is where we do not believe God." That would be so cool.