the end of this age and the beginning of the one to come.

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of thinking.

Part of the point of this semester was to try to figure out what "my purpose in life" is. or whatever that means. I think I might have just found something more important. something bigger than me, something bigger than any of us.

My eyes have been opened to something bigger, something that has been keeping me awake and unable to think for too long about anything else, unable to look at anything else without it being altered by this. In our culture (especially in the american church) we look at a lot of the practices that our society practices that we know are unjust, unwise, and unethical, and we use a word called "unsustainable" to describe the ethical dilemma. when we say that, we don't so much mean the official meaning of that word - if we did, it would result in a changing of our actions to a better way of doing things. We do that to excuse ourselves of the inherent guilt that lies in our collective actions; we would much rather be guilty of "unsustainable practices" than "indescribable and unforgivable evil against our world, our neighbor, and God".

But this is what we are guilty of. It was through my studies as a sociology minor that this has come especially to light. Even in the subtle things that we do not pay such mind, we have together created an evil and despicable culture that is a parasite of our world. The consequences of this are already written in the species that have gone extinct and in the land that has been laid barren and in the humans that have been reduced to poverty and effective slavery - both in our society and in foreign lands that we can barely even pronounce the name of. People are suffering because of our insistence on convenience, and an affordable, comfortable lifestyle. It's not that these things are bad, but we have been blinded to the fact that others have had to suffer and die because of our insistence. And this would all be fine, we could follow the ways of our most recent generations, who have stood in the face of these problems and pleaded ignorance, and continued along the way of self-indulgence and ignorance. We have turned our world into a place that is not good.

This would all not mean very much to us if it could continue this way. But my thoughts and the thoughts that others have interjected have brought me to a somber conclusion that is born out of prophecy but also out of what seems to be unwavering economic theory. We are headed irrevocably towards the end of the age. It's a sobering and yet unifying thought. The age of consumerism is about to burn. The ways of the world in which we grew up are about to become entirely dismantled. The word "unsustainable" seems to be searingly accurate - the way we live now cannot and will not continue. Unfathomable changes in our society and economy are coming, and they are coming in our lifetimes. Our generation is going to be forced to deal with the problems that the western lifestyle has wreaked on the world. We are going to run out of cheap oil, the lifeblood of american capitalism. The wheels will fall off of the "green revolution" models of agricultural society that make cities possible.

It makes me really uncomfortable and sad and worried but it also fills me with hope. so much hope. In our lifetimes, we will see the horrors of famine and war and human suffering, and we will see glimpses of the kingdom of heaven. Where do we fit into this? It's our job to make change, to love our neighbor, to begin to heal the world and turn this world into the world that it should be. I have many more thoughts on this, and many of my thoughts on this need to be expanded. I also want to cover on the blog what I'll be speaking about at CCF sunday school on sunday. We'll get to that. but here's a song.

a return to the vice of old

When I was a boy, foraging for love and prepackaged lunchables among the barrens of eastern Independence, Missouri, we had a society of young people that was built upon two core principles:

• everything that happens to you is the most important thing in the world.
• everyone must know about everything that happens.

We, the generation that was lucky enough to grow up with computers (in that computers grew up as we grew up), had means of implementing these juvenile beliefs that were unrivaled by any before us. We had this delightful website called Xanga where every day, sometimes twice a day, we would use the internet to give a collective whine about our boring day. And the thing is, the technology was pretty incredible. Every day we were able to communicate to an audience of up to thousands of people. The problem in that was that we didn't have anything to say. We were young and naive and stupid and in a world that made less sense the more we thought about it. we didn't have anything constructive to contribute to the online world of ideas, so the whole thing folded as soon as the next big thing (Myspace) happened.
(Just for kicks - http://preschooler-at-heart.xanga.com/ . my past life was flooming pathetic. knock yourself out, quit when you get bored.)

So anyways, we're all in our twenties now. We've developed facebook and twitter to take care of our incessant need to whine to the world about our lives, but one thing that I've lost in doing that is having a place to express my more tangible ideas. Even on that old xanga, I read the 4 or so posts from 2007 and 2008 and can't help but notice firstly that in the past 4 years everything about my mind and the way I interact with the world has changed. I'm actually at a point now where I have things to say that have more substance.

So in many ways the things that are posted here are a spiritual successor to that. and in many ways it's not. I'm starting this blog because big things are about to happen, not just in my life but in the world. I don't want this to be meaningless expression of immediate feelings, I want it to fight through what is going on in my mind. I think the title can explain some of this. "The life of the world to come." I chose it for a few reasons:

• It's a mountain goats reference. It's an album title, and it's also referenced in the song "Slow west vultures" from the album "We Shall All Be Healed". The song ends with the line: "ready for the future. ready for the world about to come."
• I like it because it expresses this spiritual idea that while we have heaven to look forward to, we are supposed to be working towards an "earth as it is in heaven". part of our job as christians is to be continually striving towards life as it should be.
• It's also sort of ominous. for reasons I'll be exploring, in our lifetimes our world has to change a lot. we will be raising our children in a world that isn't merely a progression from our world, it's going to be something completely different. in thousands of facets, things about our world have to change either in beautiful ways or in chaotic, even catastrophic ways.

That might seem like I'm going to be really focused in my writing. I'm not. I'mma be all over the place, but I'm going to do my best to not delve into self-promotion, that's what my facebook and twitter are for. But what I am going to be trying to express in the writings here are compositions based upon my own experiences as a christian and a person, trying to answer the questions I wrestle with about God, our identity as people, and our role as christians in a mad world. How shall we then live? I'm going to try to keep a balance between the absolutely theoretical and the completely temporal, mainly because this gives me a lot to talk about. I figure it gives me a lot of freedom in these writings, letting me be able to talk about abstract spiritual matters in one post and how important it is that we support local businesses in another.

I'm going to try to self-moderate myself as much as possible, but if you see me posting a bunch of "funny stuff I found on the internet" on a daily basis, I want you to come to my house and slap me. That's not what I want this to be about. Cool. Let's do it.

I think the most important thing is that I'm as much doing this for myself as any potential readers out there. While I'm excited at the prospect of readers, that keeps my motives right. I don't want to make a stupid blog just trying to draw attention to myself because I think there's enough of that in the world.

I'll leave you with this:
one of the things I did like a lot about xanga is that at the end of each post they let you add a "currently listening/currently watching/currently reading" button where you chose something you were consuming and let the world know. It was kind of a way for cheap promotion, (and profit for xanga, it gave a link to an amazon page for whatever it was that you were promoting) but I liked it. I like the idea of not just sharing my ideas but also sharing where they are coming from and also sharing all the music swirling in my head at a given moment. I think it's appropriate in this instance to choose a song from the album for which this blog is named. I'm choosing "Genesis 30:3", because I think it paints a beautiful picture that I'd like to replicate through my words. Also, it haunts me. it keeps me up at night. it's beautiful. It's a world of new life and old life and people working together and making decisions based upon mutual love.