the past few weeks have been so indigestably full of innumerable activities, there’s no way i can relate most of what’s happened recently. but that’s ok, since neither you nor i would care to read about it anyway.
the short of it is i am back at stanford amidst the busiest quarter of my career (so far). i’ve got classes more or less settled on, and enough homework to make me procrastinate. but like i said, that’s not really interesting.
of some interest, maybe, is this: in roughly 3 hours i will be 21. the last coming-of-age experience of my life. here already…..and i don’t know what to think about that, this toeing the line between “young man” and “man”. there’s an incredible sense of loneliness, silly as it may seem, moving from a smaller, simpler, and maybe more innocent class of people into the class of people that most just consider “everyone”. i will be fully a citizen and an adult of this world, with all rights and privileges appertaining. it’s funny that in the states effectively the last privilege of adulthood is that of drinking alcohol. it seems so completely arbitrary, and it is. it is. but it’s a marker of freedom for me to drink; not just freedom from condemnation by uncle sam, but the spiritual freedom we have in christ. if that sounds odd or backwards to you, i am sorry.
it’s the coming-of-age that draws and excites me, though, not the thought of the liquor that i will no doubt be guzzling in shameful quantities in a few hours. that’s the external, the base and unrefined and uncouth symbol of a nobler internal reality–the rite of passage phenomenon that has been a part of man’s (and here i mean male) life for ages. and there is a contradiction here, you will say, a cheapening of that reality (which you maybe doubt exists) via the external actions used to signify it. but i say, the problem is not in the base and unrefined and uncouth, for all these things i assuredly am, but who am i to pretend to a nobler inner reality? and so if there is a contradiction it is because i am reaching for something higher than i am, not because i already have it.
i will agree, however, that were it not for the fact that i am listening to the deep and beautiful music of sigur ros, i might not have just made such outrageous claims. this does not lessen the strength of my belief in them, though you might catch me tomorrow laughing at myself for having said these things. haha! like that.
the point is, i am now grown up, whether i like it or not, and regardless of the fact that a number (21) is the most arbitrary of all forms of measuring maturity. with that growth comes responsibility, whether i like it or not, and whether its existence is a self-made phantasm.
these are heavy things for me to ponder on and to give to god, but i for one am just glad to have had 21 years of existence and to have been blessed in all ways undeservedly. still, i must not let myself look back and linger too long on my story just yet, because i might get caught up in its beauty (and it is beautiful, though i had no part in making it so) and forget that the story is not finished, but beginning. but i let slide a few tears of joy anyways, first because i believe that i have a story, that i am a story, and that i am part of the vectored story that is christ’s universe, and second because the shadow of grace has always hovered over the chaos of my soul.
the first thing i will do at 12 am on september 26, 2003, will be offer my entire being in prayer to the god of my heart. and the second will be to down a pint of the finest beer i can find in palo alto, drinking that god’s health. slainte!