Just taking this opportunity to brag on my homeland. St. Lawrence County, New York, voted number six in Best Rural Places to Live 2007. Pictured here is Potsdam, New York (and more specifically, Sergi's Pizza, sure to be number one on the Best Pizza to Eat 2007).

Like any good revolutionaries we sat around the table and discussed the means to bettering the world at large, beginning with the world here. Each of us getting relatively loud-mouthed and passionate about the things which mean the most and eventually closing in a rousing redition of joining hands and praying.

I hope it sticks. I hope that we can not just tout the glory of well intentions and Biblical mandates, preach serving one another and God's glory, but I hope it sticks to our hearts like peanut-butter on a pair of jeans. I hope that we start revival and I hope that it starts with me.

We talked about loving God today. Sitting on a stone bench in a garden, the sun drawing short shadows in front of us. We talked about how even those things that are part of our personal make-up, the DNA that pulses personalities, blue-eyes, stature, are subject to our intentions to love God first. Sometimes our gifts, things for which we are known in the Spiritual places, have to take a backseat to just loving God fully. In I Corinthians 14 Paul says that the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets; that seems to mean that even those things which are spiritual gifts have to be taken in accordance with order and to love God is the first and greatest order.

It is Spring here. I drove slowly past a row of yellow daffodils the other morning. And today, while walking to school, the sunrise was at my back and a row of white tree blossoms were orange in its morning glow. I smelled Spring today. And I was glad.

I was thinking about love the other night. How my ideas about loving the Lord are evident most in the ways I love other people. And about how the greatest barometer for my love for the Lord are the relationships in which I invest. I've been thinking about how easy it is to make love into a method, to figure out which things make me feel loving and which don't, and to list them in outline form. In the morning I wrote this:

The Science Project

We cut the canvas into small and perfect squares
laying them beside one another in a formulated mosaic
(looking nothing like the original).
Changing the art of love into the science of love
with principles, periodics and a gross amount of pride.
I know now
what is wrong with us, isn't us at all,
but our insistence on scientific facts and percentages,
the need to be right;
an inebriated desire to prove a theory,
instead of making art for love's sake.

This is really just an apology, a brief peace-offering, for being so quiet around here recently. Mostly I haven't felt like writing, but partly I haven't felt like I have anything worth saying. Even the small things are tastless when there is nothing pretty to say about them.

It's called the Capstone Class. Different for every major and required for every graduating senior, it's the first usher into the real world of education meets career meets Christianity. It's the most fun, really, because we sit around with two of our favorite department professors, beside the classmates with whom we've suffered Kafka, Shakespeare and Voltaire, and discuss how literature shapes our worldview and what the heck to do with all these verbs, terms, and bookworms.

Next to The Complete Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor Collection, Graham Greene, and The Christian Perspective, there is nestled a fifth required book for this class: Girl Meets God, by Lauren F. Winner. I've read it before; see, she's come to our writer's series a few times, each time sporting jeweled cat-eyes and long velour skirts and a throaty voice, more accustomed to reading than speaking. Each time I've read through this book, though, it's been in a hurried pace, desperate to know enough about Lauren F. Winner that I wouldn't be completely speechless when comparing notes with other bibliophiles attending the series.

For this class though, beside my senior counterparts--self-identified smarty pants and literature fiends, a quick read-though will not be sufficient. For that I'm glad.

I finished the book the other night, curled in a thrift store armchair in a friend's room. As the inches in my left hand began accumulating and the pages in my right decreasing, I felt the tears begin to smart in my eyes. I didn't want to finish it. Here, in this book, I was finding a friend finally. Madeleine L'engle is the only other writer with whom I identify so strongly, and she hasn't turned out a new book in quite a long time. Here, Lauren F. Winner, with her talk of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments and the Book of Ruth and her propensity to sin and the stacks of books she has piled in every room of her Manhattan apartment, here is a person I can like and admire.

And so when the last pages were turned, I refused to close the book, but went back and reread favorite parts; small pieces of the whole, enough to convince me that good writing still happens to people who love God. And so this is how I usher in this next season of my life, finishing school and stepping out into the big, bad, corporate world, by stepping back and continuing to learn.

I have been sitting here staring at an empty page for about ten minutes. It’s not an essay assignment I’m lax to begin, nor is it yet another page from my employers book. It’s a letter. To you. A post really, is what we call them, but really that’s what a weblog is. A long continuous letter filled with what is happening and what I wish were happening and what has happened and sometimes I throw in a little extra at no charge—what might have happened.

But today, feeling the pressure to update because I haven’t in so long, I feel quiet.

I said to a friend the other day that the seasons where my writing is nonexistent are the seasons when my observations are few. The monotonies of the days run into one another like gravy and peas and everything else on Thanksgiving Day. It’s not that life is boring; it’s just that the same exciting things happen with such regularity that I forget to mention them in my prayers at night. God Blesses are a thing of the past. My eyes are shut the moment I sink into bed.

And so nothing gets written, nothing gets said. This letter is lame. Send it back at my expense.