the bad and the good

It's only noon on Saturday and it's already been a busy weekend! A lot of things have been on my mind lately, which means they're likely to show up in my blog.

Kent and I planned a Friday hymnsing chapel for yesterday, and he's blogged about it here and here. Yesterday morning I got to Calvin and found out that a Calvin student had passed away suddenly in what may have been suicide. I know of no more tragic death than suicide, and we didn't hesitate before changing our plans for the service. The original theme had been Christ's fulfillment of the OT sacrificial system through his role as the sacrificial lamb of God slain for our sins - lots of substitutionary atonement. A lot of the songs we had picked fit with a service of lament, but one of the things we had to change was the intercessory prayer. The dominant emotions as I sat down to re-write were confusion and anger. I didn't feel like leading worship, I didn't feel like worshipping, I didn't feel like doing anything. About then I remembered, it's not about me. I had the opportunity to lead my community in worship at a time when many of them didn't have anywhere else to turn but worship. I got to voice their cries to God when some of them didn't have the words to speak. What an awesome privilege and responsibility! Of course it brought me back to the chapel Kent and I had to lead on the morning we found out about Daryl's accident. Please pray for Rachelle Goedhart's family and friends as we are here at Calvin.

Then yesterday afternoon I was fortunate to meet with one of my favorite groups of people: the Lilly Vocation Grant Committee. This is the third year in a row I've had the chance to share with them about my experiences with Lilly grant programs. I know several of them from other contexts, so it's been a joy to have them follow my vocational journey, encouraging and supporting me along the way. It also provided me with a chance to reflect on how far I've come in these three years. When I think back to who I was when I started the Worship Apprentice program, he doesn't look too much like the person I am now as an alum of WA and Jubilee Fellows (For more insight into that young impressionable version of me you can read my first attempt at a blog of sorts - the 02-03 WA Journal I wrote). The best part was getting to have lunch with Sandy Vander Ploeg, a committee member who's my Mom's best friend from high school and college days. Mom will be so jealous.

For some unrelated reasons I was a bit grumpy when I got home last night, and it turned out my roommate Nathan was too. We decided the best course of action was to go out and stuff ourselves with excellent Mexican food, which we did. We've been spending more time together lately - it's good to live with a solid brother in Christ like Nate. We had project neighborhood class on urban socialization this morning. We were just getting into a good discussion of how to find a balance between a personally-focused evangelism-based Christianity and a societally-focused inclusive but doctrinally watered down Christianity when we ran out of time. Next time we get to talk about white flight and gentrification! In other news, the Calvin men's basketball team beat Wheaton in the first round of the NCAA D-III tournament. Take that you Evangelicals! And the Dodgers lost a spring training game to the Braves on a botched double-play attempt in the bottom of the ninth that would have won the game. Again, those dumb Dodgers...