On my way home the other day, I was sitting at the last stoplight where the highway meets the car dealers when I was struck with an overwhelming sense of Nothing.

There was nothing around me. Thousands of dollars worth of automobiles and petrol and a Wal-Mart full of goods and banks and restaurants and - nothing. I looked at the people in the cars beside me (yes, I'm a people-watcher) and wondered: which of these finds himself surrounded by nothing, and which of these looks at the stores and cars and banks and gasoline and sees everything? I wanted to jump out of the car there and bang on everyone's window. "Hey! Do you see this? It's nothing! Listen to me!"

In my search for an article to analyse in an essay for Logic, I googled "end of the world" just to see what turned up and found the predictions about 2012. Yes, the world is going to end in 2012 - just ask ancient Mayan calendars and ancient Egyptian soothsayers and NASA scientists with their sunflare predictions (am I the only one finding it ironic that hokey predictions are being paired with Grand and Intellectual (that is, Modern) Scientific ones?). Well--that's not what I wanted to tell those people. (I also didn't want to sell them my fifteen books on why it will end and how to prepare, the latter of which coincidentally involves my End Of The World survival kits. Money-making scheme much?)

I don't really care if the world ends in 2012 (although I don't give it much value; there is that little matter of God promising not to destroy the whole earth again, which is something the leading predictors of the 2012 movement think will/should happen, or the matter of the Bible saying Christ will come as a "thief in the night," which doesn't exactly mean something predictable by soothsayers and modern scientists). The point is, it's ending sometime - and chances are it won't be dramatic. The world will end for everyone--not with the sun spitting fire onto the earth and obliterating life, but in the slow, torturous chipping away of time until blink! your life is over. You are dead. All the cars and possessions and money are Nothing. If the afterlife is your first introduction to the eternal worthlessness of the thousands of dollars surrounding the stoplight, where are you but with the man who built himself an idol, bowed down to it and said "you made me!", only meeting the true Maker after death when he could no longer suppress the truth?

A few weeks ago, I heard the pastor of our old church preach on Isaiah 31-32. He said something that struck me: what you hope for determines what you pray for. He pointed the listener to the Lord's prayer. When we hope for material things such as food and drink, we pray accordingly--Give us this day our daily bread. There is nothing wrong with such a prayer, but we are called to something beyond that. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

Decide to be discontent with the world, Pastor Shea said. Here's another way of putting it: I don't wanna gain the whole world and lose my soul (no, I couldn't resist...). Or as the apostle Paul says: consider everything as a loss compared to a treasure unsurpassed in worth: knowing Christ.

What you hope for determines what you pray for, so one might assume that what you pray for shows what you hope for. What are you praying for? What am I praying for? Honestly... I pray for (No-)things. I pray for my own comfort, my own ease of conscience and lifestyle. Kingdom prayers (thy Kingdom come! thy Will be done!) are in short supply. I do not have a Kingdom-hoping heart.

And so I say--preach--plead with myself: Heu (hey you)! Soul! Decide to be discontent with Nothing (the world). Pursue absolute contentment in Everything (God). Don't hope for the gain of Nothing (the world) and thus pray for Nothing at the loss of Something (your soul) and Everything (fellowship with God and His Kingdom).

What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ. (Phil. 3:8)

I got to handle a human brain today - in my freshman intro psychology class, of all things. Apparently the professor got his hands on one by one means or another (no, I don't mean anything criminal - please, people, the owner died years before my professor was even born!) - I think someone who was Something in the department let him have it. It was fifty or sixty years old and not in the best condition, but it was amazing nonetheless.

It was the first time my professor got to handle one, though he had seen the real thing before. He canceled our usual lecture and just brought the thing into the classroom in a bucket, made us all form a circle around a little podium, and set it up there. It was already divided into sections and stewing in some sort of alcohol/formaldehyde bath. He began fishing the pieces out one at a time and putting them on Styrofoam plates and showing us the various parts.

I got to touch it. With my fingers. A brain. A human brain.

I know the italics are excessive, but it was truly exciting. Most people don't even get to see a real human brain, much less touch them - certainly not usually as undergrads - because they're very hard to come by. So when my professor asked if anyone wanted to come up and help him fish them out of their bucket -

Well, what do you think I did?

It was glorious. The smell brought back memories of biology dissections - yes, I do look back on those with some measure of fondness, although that certainly has something to do with my illustrious labmates as well... and it was just all so - if you'll pardon the phraseology - freakin' cool!

It was amazing to see what I never expected to see for a good many years - perhaps never. To be able to stick my hand in a bucket of brown water and come out with the fragile, tender reality from which we get all those dry pictures in the textbooks and all those plastic models in science labs - it's beautiful. That's really the best word in my mind right now: beautiful. Fragile. Not lilies-of-the-valley beautiful, but a something clothed by our Heavenly Father in broken, human beauty nonetheless. And to think - that's in my head! It works! It lives - it bleeds - there are so many ways it could all go wrong and be ruined, but still - !

I was exhilarated, but a bit saddened as well. "This is the essence of who we are as humans," says my professor, going on to describe the evolutionary development of the frontal lobe as what distinguishes us from animals. If that's all we are, sixty years ago Mrs. Donor donated her Humanity. Humanity sits in my fingers. And lo - a person's value as a Human therefore rests in my hands, since mangling the frontal lobe turns us into vegetables,and the brain is easily damaged.

Yet - we are so much more and so much less.

So much more wonderfully formed than the ever-amazing human brain.

So much more hideously shattered than a sharpened scalpel could contrive.

Something that can't be chopped apart and put on the table for examination by someone with my untrained fingers and silly brain. Something that was ruined long ago.

Luke 12:4 says, I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. Or, after today, my own proposed version: do not fear those who chop up the brain and use it for their own godless studies, and after that become dead and their own brains chopped up or rotted according to God's almighty purposes.

When I die, I may donate my body to some scientific lab - I doubt it; I have little respect for the purposes of most research that takes place nowadays. But if so, and if it's my brain some student or professor is poking apart on an expensive lab table or a shaky desk in the middle of a classroom, I won't be on the table. My Humanity - which is a stupid word to describe my essence, and isn't something so splendid or glorious as they want me to think - is not bound up in greyish-brown pieces which can be soaked in nasty chemicals and scattered about.

Verse 5 of the same passage goes on: But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!

The moral of my Encounter with a Brain is not the mighty awesomeness of humankind in our adaptive blah over millions and billions of blah blah for the same of blahbahhy blah. Nor is it: Be Ye Mightily Grossed Out, Perhaps Vomiting Muchly, For When Thou Diest Thy Brains Shall Rot And Make A Fearsome Stench - And Lo! I Have Seen A Brain, And Not Vomited, Though 'Tis A Nasty Sight, And A Fearsome Stench.

I propose something much more simple:

Fear God.

Why? He made you beautiful and fragile, and your beauty and hideousness are incalculable and incurable by measure of the human eye or any of its instruments and none but All-Knowing knows the depth of your rottenness and frailness. He holds, or does not hold, your souls - and that is where you (your "essence") lies. It will not remain chopped up on the table after death. When death comes, your essence finds itself for God - or against Him.

Therefore, fear God.

(Thorn among lilies. *snerksnerk*)



...But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

-Luke 12:27-28

Teetering on the brink of sickness and health does amazing things for your sleep.

That is, if amazing is equivalent to bizarre.

On Tuesday night, I dreamt that I was among a group of people running about a large, white-corridored, many-storied building. We were running because an enormous gecko was leaping about from one wall to the next, and while the nature of this gecko (poisonous or nonpoisonous, clawed or declawed, sharp-toothed or soft, friendly or hostile) was generally unknown, no one wants to be walking down the hall and suddenly slapped in the face with an enormous, wriggling gecko.

Or no one in the dream, anyway.

On Wednesday, we were supposed to have a quiz in Greek. I had dutifully prepared, but in class the majority of the students wished to have it on Friday instead so it was postponed accordingly. Apparently this caused some anxiety on my part concerning my ability to recall all the information through Friday, for I woke up several times, repeated the paradigm of the active indicative participle for the verb "to be" to myself, and promptly fell asleep again.

Last night (that being a Thursday) I dreamt that I awoke to the sound of someone creeping down the hallways of where I work. Flashlight in hand - how it got there I know not; I am not so paranoid as to sleep with one or even really know where one is - I crept down the hallway. Details of what followed are sketchy. The thugs weren't your average ugly mugs; some nondescript females in T-shirts and jeans, I think. I recall shining a lot of flashlight into their eyes and at one point bashing someone over the head but usually attempts at self-defense are rather rubbery in dreams. I do remember the following conversation:

Thug Lacking Ugly Mug: D'ohh, like, where are da shiny 'spensive stuff?
(Okay, she didn't say that exactly... but I needed a brief intro line.)
Me: Well, it's actually in the realm of Nonexistence.
Thug Lacking Ugly Mug: You got a computer?
Me: Uh, yeah. But not here.
TLUM: *looking a little ticked* Why didn't you bring your computer to work?
Me: Well... I usually don't. And anyway, it's not a very expensive computer.
(Somehow I show her a picture of my computer.)
TLUM: Why don't you have a more expensive computer?! *rummaging about on nightstand* What kinduvva phone is this?!

...So I while couldn't beat the thugs without ugly mugs off with my flashlight, they eventually left in a huff, quite offended that I hadn't brought anything worth stealing to work.

Courtesy of my extremely eloquent brother, Ben. But it's sort of profoundly descriptive of my life right now, which just...is. Kind of like my face is me. It's obvious. And, like my face, I definitely can't say I love it, but I can't say I hate it either.

Yes, studying for exams makes me pensive and strange.

Ha.

Blah.

Ta.

I am tangled up in contradiction
I am strangled by my own two hands
I am hunted by the hounds of addiction
Hosanna

I have lied to everyone who trusts me
I have tried to fall when I could stand
I have only loved the ones who love me
Hosanna

Oh, Hosanna
See the long awaited king
Come to set his people free
Oh, Hosanna
Come and tear the temple down
Raise it up on holy ground
Hosanna

I have struggled to remove this raiment
Tried to hide every shimmering strand
I contend with these ghosts and these hosts of bright angels
Hosanna

I have cursed the man that you have made me
I have nursed the beast that bays for my blood
I have run from the one who would save me
Hosanna

Oh, Hosanna
See the long awaited king
Come to set his people free
Oh, Hosanna
Come and tear the temple down
Raise it up on holy ground
Hosanna

We cry for blood
We take your life
Hosanna

We cry for blood
We take your life
It is blood and it is life that you have given

You have crushed beneath your heel the vile serpent
You have carried to the grave the black stain
You have torn apart the temple's holy curtain
You have beaten death at death's own game -
Hosanna!

Hail the long awaited king
Come to set his people free
(We cry) Oh, Hosanna
Come and tear this temple down
Raise it up on holy ground
Oh, Hosanna
I will lift my voice and sing
You have come and washed me clean

Hosanna!

-Andrew Peterson

I'd like to lay my head down
Upon yon comfy bed.
I s'pose this ruddy textbook
Will have to do instead.

The denseness of its subject
Makes a pathetic cushion.
But, on the bright side, there's a chance
I'll learn it by os...mu...shion...

...zzZz....zzzz....Zzzz

Two nights in a row of interrupted sleep at work + getting up early to take brothers to school + coming down with some sort of head/throat sickness + general emotional exhaustion from various complications = above poem. My parents did fund a trip to Aspen this morning in return for driving the boys (I got tea! The drinkable kind, not the stuff Evelyn chews - and that makes "tea" sound like a dreadful euphemism in Ev's world but it's too funny to omit... thou mayest dub me a punk if you like, dearie) and then my belovded pater bought me a cup of coffee during chemistry drudgery. My chemistry textbook is the one reference above; it's by far the densest of the lot, and if osmushion--er, osmosis worked I'd sleep on it any day. But then, the wrong parts would probably seep into my cranium anyway...

She leaves the house that morning in the grey of day, the eastern sky just beginning to bleed dawn's light. The light grows and the music rolls out of her car's speakers, bubbling over with the love of God: My Jesus makes all things new... It's truth, glorious truth, yet never hers. A yearning for some semblance, some feeling (yes, she's a silly human with a craving to feel) of that newness fills her with heedless impulse. She rolls down the one window she can reach without taking the car off the road. Cold air washes water-like over her. The long grass from a nearby field waves as she passes by, seized by the joy of the moment.

The air isn't cold anymore--it's freezing--and she shivers a little and thinks her hair is a mess and she's on her way to classes and the guy in the truck she just passed definitely looked at her like an escapee from a white padded cell. But the small, finiteness of shivering with cold and the uncontrolled nature of her hair and expression seems to perfect the moment somehow.

She grips the wheel with slightly-numbed fingers and turns her eyes to the road, her mind running wildly through a field of swaying grass.

She's shaking with cold. She's never been warmer.

From a very tired Inky. Not likely to contain Much of General Interest - or General Sense, for that matter.

The Week Of Great Chemistry Upheaval has come and gone. It was really only one day, not the whole week - I only almost cried once and actually cried once, and then it was over. As Papa said: Get through it and then shrug it off. It won't happen again - not exactly this way - and that's a comfort. There's something about being undone that makes God a whole lot closer. I found that coming out of Spring Break - even driving somewhere, I had to think about the goodness and sovereignty of God to keep myself from sulking or sobbing.

One nice result of the Great Chemistry Upheaval is I have sort of given up setting any sort of stock in my abilities. I'm still trying and doing all the work I can, but there's not the sense of 'I can still do this!' that really makes it nasty. And it was funny - the root of the soreness here is that I am working hard, and I've only been working harder and harder as time gets on with no results for my work. Crying over chemistry turned out to be convicting because similar to my fruitless work for good chemistry scores is my fruitless work for good Holiness scores. It seems rather pathetic to cry over something so insignificant in comparison when the big, horrible falling-shorts so rarely give me pain.

Apart from the Great Chemistry Upheaval, things are going rather well. Chemistry is actually chugging along rather nicely. I left out a theta by sheer stupidity on a Greek quiz this last week and cost myself several marks. I'm still tempted to self-flagellate over that. (I knew it was right...) We got to read the cheerful story of Xerxes and the Helmsman from Herodotus today: basically, they get caught in a storm on the ship and the helmsman says that if Xerxes wants to save himself, all the Persian soldiers traveling with Xerxes have to jump overboard to lighten the ship. So Xerxes gives a grandiose "now is your chance to prove your love for me!" speech and all the marines go in the drink. Upon reaching land Xerxes puts a crown of gold on the helmsman's head for saving his king's life and then chops the newly-crowned head off for the loss of his soldiers.

Pssh. Persians are such persnickety things. But I suppose at least his head got to wear a crown when it was on the platter...

Dance - I've hurt my silly right foot. It's been a little lame ever since spring break - hard to put all my weight on it by itself - and then today during the plethora of rocks in Garden of Daisies it sort of crumbled and I sat down (more of a sitting than a fall) and felt very pathetic indeed. It doesn't hurt like a sprain or a break; it's just bad. Mehh.

Tomorrow: calling around for summer stuff, finishing up taxes, and homework homework homework.

I'm preparing a Bible Study on John 11 for Sunday. It's been lovely, especially this week when I've needed Perspective. What's one pathetic exam score to Christ, the Resurrection and the Life?

Now: work. I'm off.