Craziness of life

Hey y'all,

I haven't looked at the blog in a while...so it was like a treat getting to read this great big cache of posts that I hadn't read yet. I miss all of you, and I'm getting more and more excited for October. Like Kirsten said, she's the only one who I've actually seen in the whole time since MESP...and I'm really jealous of all of you who get to keep hanging out with each other. The wedding is going to be awesome, and I'm super-psyched for the hookah reunion at Alissa's place that we've all been promised.

Umm, update from my end of things...things are really super busy for me now. This summer was really chill, with a fairly undemanding job and lots of reading and contemplating. I'm excited to hear that a lot of y'all are also reading about and thinking through pacifism. That was one of the big things I was thinking a lot about over the summer. I read a lot of essays by John Howard Yoder. I'm still...I don't know. When people ask me about it, I say that I'm "hovering around the edges" of pacifism. I would consider myself a pacifist for most intents and purposes, but I think that a commitment to nonviolence is something that you have to take really seriously, and I'm not willing to say that until I know that it's something I can remain totally committed to. There's lots of examples in history of people and organizations who made grand pacifistic statements but when the going got tough they gave it up for security (The Socialists of Europe before WWI for example). And I look at it in a similar way to what Becka was saying about Orthodoxy. Pacifism is something which really appeals to me, but violence-nonviolence isn't a game, and I don't want to jump into it now only to jump out again later.

Anyway, so that's where I am on that. Like I said, I'm super-busy right now...I've got kind of a supervisory position at my job, which means a little more money but a lot more time commitment...and I'm leading a student ministry, playing flag football, writing articles for the student newspaper, (hopefully) getting a part in the fall theater department show, and researching and writing an honors thesis...oh, I don't know if I've told all of you about this before. I'm writing on the history of the Christian Zionist lobby in the US and their effect on US foreign policy towards Israel. It's been really interesting so far, there's a lot of literature out there, but it is a LOT of work. There's a lot of different components to it, all of which I could write an entire honors thesis on, from the introduction of dispensationalism to the States, to the rise of the religious right, to the interplay between CZs and Likud, to Reagan and his semi-obsession with end-times stuff, there's just so much there...anyway, I'm having fun with it. Oh, and of course I still have classes, too. Yeah, those are also time-consuming. But fun...I'm taking Intermediate Arabic and I really like the new professor.

I don't know, I have a weird fluctuating combination of extreme senioritis, getting so stir-crazy and sick of this place that I want nothing more than to just pack up my car and drive...anywhere, really...and, at the same time, feeling so far from ready to be done here that graduating terrifies me. You know what I mean? I guess I just thought I would know a lot more by the time I was a senior, thought I would have a lot more life experience, be a lot more ready to go out and live life in the real world. Thought I would probably be engaged by this time too...but that's a whole other can of worms.

Anyway, I can't wait to hang out with all of y'all who'll be there in Seattle.
Peace,
Jon