And Now, The Hard Part

I have done a lot of thinking this summer.

Summer is a time for thinking, for there is time. Alarm clocks do not exist for those of us in the teaching class. The best of days are the unscheduled ones. In those hours unclaimed, the mind speaks - in the quiet of the hike; in the shadows of an evening bike ride on a seldom used blacktop; or in the silent perfection I find in my recliner, book in hand, fresh cup of coffee next to me, and my lab's chin resting gently on my lap before anyone in the house stirs.

I've done a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of speaking the past couple of months. I gave two sermons. I offered advice and challenges. I jabbered through a thousand ideas and wine-inspired goals around a table, around a fire, through letters. But I haven't done a lot of doing.

I haven't had to. It's been vacation, after all. But the summer is over now, and now is the time for doing. It is time for action.

Many people claim to not want to think too hard or too deeply about things; but trust me, thinking is the easy part. Thinking is inspiring. Thinking assumes the best about you and your future. Thinking is full of idealism, and that idealism becomes real in the thinking. Oh, the brilliant teaching ideas I've had! The writing prompts! The acts of friendship! The goals for living and parenting! They all boldly spoke of a wise man living a wise life.

But at some point, then, I've got to get out of the chair. I've got to get off the bike, or put the mower away, or put the cup of coffee down. I've got to clean up the dishes, put the fire out, and get up the next morning. Turning thinking into reality, then, seems possible for another day. Any day but today. And then it is gone.

I do some of my best thinking on Sunday mornings. I typically have time to read the paper. I get great conversation from Sunday School and church relationships. I sit quietly, challenged from the pulpit, inspired by the Good Book during the service. When I walk out of that church door at noon, I'm ready to set the day on fire and then save my little corner of the world all week long. The thinking has been sweet. By some Wednesdays, it's hard to even recognize some of those 4-day-old thoughts as my own.

Stephen Mansfield writes in his book, Mansfield's Book of Manly Men, this quote form Frederick W. Robertson:

Christian life is action: not a speculating, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feelings pass; resolves and thoughts pass; opinions change. What you have done lasts - lasts in you. Through the ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ - that, and only that, your are.

So what good has my thinking been this summer? What action will I live?

I thought and wrote and preached on submitting to one's earthly master in the form of our bosses. How will I now behave in meetings I don't like, following directives I don't agree with, on the days I feel mired in fatigue and complaints? Will my thinking prevail? Will I continue to pray for my bosses, as I so confidently challenged my audience to do? Will I be different in my daily work, noticeably and distinctly different, humble and servant-hearted and Christ-like?

I preached on standing firm to the truth of Scriptures, despite cultural trends. On loving those with whom I disagree, praying for them and serving them, while not apologizing for the Bible. How will I handle those conversations? In what ways will I serve those with whom I vehemently disagree?

I taught on injecting constant truth into life so that we can overcome deceitful feeling. I taught on not allowing a busy schedule to keep us from speaking and reading truth to each other in our households. So what will I do, now that I've written down into my calendar the soccer practices and games, the AWANA meetings, the basketball season, the piano lessons? Will I write my daughter notes for her lunchbox? Will I read and speak Scripture with them?

And the myriad teaching ideas, scribbled in this book, in that margin, on that notebook, in this file? What of those? What of my attempts to be better, to broaden my knowledge, to know more so that I can teach more? Optimism and high-mindedness drips from my plans. Will my actions?

One may think a number of things. But the thinking is nothing. The thinking flees and changes, darting from one wind-blown intention to another, mangled, mangled, mangled until its ashes return, unrecognizable. One is known by their actions. My actions will reach far greater audiences than this blog or my sermons.

The freedom to think remains. But the demand to act is real, offering safe passage for those thoughts here, to the land of the living.

The Best Part of Every Book

After our family got back from our ten day vacation through Nebraska and Colorado, we did what most families do: we looked back at our pictures. This was the first vacation for Elise, our seven year old, to have a fully functioning digital camera. Therefore we had two cameras worth of pictures to go back through, along with a full CD of pictures from our whitewater rafting experience. Going back through the pictures allowed us to relive the vacation, one day at a time. We obviously couldn't see whole days, but we felt them. We remembered the places and smells and joy and trepidation associated with each. They told our story to us one more time, one highlight at time, in a way that only we who had experience the whole trip could really understand.

Despite the hard time I give my wife about the sheer volume of pictures our family takes, she knows I appreciate having the story. And in many ways, this is the same way I like to read books.

The best part of every book is walking back through, after reading the book in it's entirety, and copying down every passage that I've highlighted or every note that I've jotted in the margin. I gave myself the liberty to read my books with a pen in hand several years ago, and it's one of the best things I've ever done as a reader. The freedom to take my pen and make the text my own, circling and underlining and connecting and commenting, dirtying the clean page with my mess, allows me to breathe a second life into the book - my own. These books were the authors'; now they are ours together.

When I deface the page with pen, I don't spend a lot of time there. I hover, I ponder, I appreciate, and then I move on. I don't want to disrupt the rhythm. The author has established a cadence so that this sentence, the one that has grabbed me in some way, has both a sentence before and a sentence after, and they inform each other and demand that I feel and think a certain way, one clause at a time, as I come across the content.

But there is a time to spend with those pieces. I used to be depressed when I came to the end of a great book. It was not a sense of accomplishment; it was a loss. No longer. After the final period, I wait a day. Or a week. I go back to page one and flip one page at a time, looking for ink. And then I get to relive the text all over again. But it's not only an experience of reading my favorite passages all over; it's also a reliving of each day of reading the book again, of the feelings associated with those days, of the events, of the settings.

I recently went back through and typed out my notes for Shauna Niequist's Bread and Wine, a book I read both at home and on vacation. As I jogged through the last half of the book, I smelled the mountain air of Colorado all over again. I felt the comfortable satisfaction of reading on the porch of our bunkhouse at Garden of the Gods Campground. I remembered the hikes, the swimming, the boundless energy of children on vacation, and whatever else was going on the day I read those pages. Before that, there was the passage that caused me to relive sitting in my recliner at home on a quiet morning before anyone else was up, breathless, as her writing conjured up the emotions and fears of miscarriage, ones that I had long ago attempted to bury. Or the one I read right after a run, in which she describes her marathon experience, and I could see and hear and feel mile 15 with her with the half-baked idea to do it all over again. The best of the best, the most intense, the most thought-provoking, the most condemning sentences - my personal highlight reel of reading Bread and Wine, all played before my eyes.

I'm finding the same experience in my Bible reading as well. Reading back through a chapter, or an entire book of the Bible, reviewing my notes and highlights, ties all of the reading back into a threaded web. What is most interesting is when I'm using my old NIV, the one I got back in the 4th grade, and I can see all that I've ever highlighted or written in the margins. I can tell the season of life by pen color, sometimes even the other books I had been reading at the time based on my scribbled notes. I can see my growth. Unfortunately, I can see my intended growth as well. In the margins is the history of a man, at least the history of when that man was humble enough to read his Bible.

You can't get than in an app. You can't get that in a verse of the day, or quote of the day. Those tools are fine. They have a purpose, and anything that gets us more Bible and more literature and more sentences into our head are tools to be used. And I use them. But they do not communicate experience. They do not tell time.

Tonight I begin a new book. I just got Roy Peter Clark's most recent text on writing. I love Clark's work. I can't wait to start. But I know the best is a long way off, not until after the final page. I look forward to the journey.