A Glimpse Into Daily Life
Since my goal is to move all of my content creation from Facebook to Substack, I’m going to experiment with “glimpses of daily life” posts. This is the first. [side note: four days after I quit using Facebook, they started sending me e-mail alerts with updates about what friends had posted, even though I have ALL e-mail alerts turned off. It’s insidious.]
Last weekend we brought our daughter home from band camp at the university. Then Sunday we took her to Camp Mitchell, located on Mt. Petit Jean, an Arkansas classic and natural treasure in the middle of the state. Petit Jean isn’t the highest mountain in the state, that honor goes to Mt. Magazine, the highest point in the U.S. between the Appalachians and the climb to the Rockies, but it’s beautifully developed, including a lot of rustic-style, native log and stone facilities constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) beginning in 1933.
After we got her dropped off, I started an adventure camp for my sixth grader and his friends. The actual “adventure camp” at Lake Fayetteville was already full for the summer, so I had this crazy idea: I could host an adventure camp!
So that's what we did. Monday we went kayaking and swimming. Tuesday we shot arrows on the 3-D archery range at the new Hunt Family Highland Ozarks Nature Center. Locals I highly recommend the nature center. It's great for the little kids because there's an air conditioned indoor interactive exhibit and then it has an outdoor 3d archery range (hot in this heat and sun but accessible and well-designed). It’s open dusk to dawn, bring your own equipment and plan to lose some arrows.
There's also an indoor range that you can visit, it's also free and from two to 4pm every day you can shoot BB guns, air guns or archery, and they supply the equipment.
Wednesday we started our Jurassic Park viewing marathon, in between which we went to bounce at the trampoline park and then a sleepover which lasted into Friday, when we went bowling. Today concludes Adventure Camp, we're playing outdoor laser tag and getting smoothies.
This is also the week when I started a mini sabbatical. We talked as a leadership team at church and they graciously facilitated a one month break. I didn't think I could pull off a full three month sabbatical this year. According to my call as a pastor I can take a three month sabbatical every six years. I’ve never successfully scheduled one of these in my 20 years of ministry.
I know this time will be good for me, and hope it will be good for the congregation as well. So I'm out of the office, wonderful people have taken over for many different tasks and responsibilities and I just have this time sabbaticalizing.
If you are married and have a family a sabbatical is not quite like the kind of sabbatical you might have imagined a single middle aged professor taking in previous eras. I'm not by myself, and I really wouldn't want to be. But it is allowing my brain to wander into some new spaces and inhabit those spaces for a bit.
As some examples, I came across and read an essay I wrote 15 years ago about JWC Dietrichson, the founding pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran church in America. He was the first pastor at the church I served in Wisconsin.
And because I've taken a complete break from social media I've only been getting the news when I intentionally go looking for it. So I'm reading the Reuters news feed and New York Times and I get a couple of daily emails that I appreciate as much or more than the actual newspaper. I'll link to both of them here because I love them so much.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American
Gabe Fleischer, Wake Up To Politics
Other daily things of note. I am trying to do one home improvement every day. Today I replaced the our porch and driveway lights.
Yesterday I repaired some broken drywall and repainted the area.
Of course I'm reading. This week I read Barbara Holmes's Unspeakable Joy: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church which everyone should read because it is about “crisis contemplation,” or how to think about contemplation in daily life and struggle rather than contemplation as privilege or escape.
I’m digging back into books three and four of Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, which if you are a fantasy or science fiction reader is right up there with the Lord of the Rings.
I also finished the excellent Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back To Life, a co-written work by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, co-directors of the scholarly project www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk that makes a case for analytic philosophy’s first all-female philosophical school, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch.
Then maybe the funniest thing I did this week. I wrote an essay for the Christian Citizen on playing Pokemon Go, something I started back in March and have been playing as a kind of escape ever since.
I should mention last week was our 2nd annual Queer Camp (with 85 campers including youth from as far away as Puerto Rico, Oregon and Louisiana), which means I went straight from a very, very busy and engaged work week to almost nothing at all, just a few follow ups and then now, family life and fun.
That itself is interesting: I’ve realized I kind of have to come down off of work, it takes some days to transition. So I can see the wisdom of taking longer sabbaticals because it takes you a while (at least it takes me a while) to transition to a different frame of mind.
Next week our oldest son starts SAT camp (he took the ACT last Saturday) and our daughter starts marching band rehearsals and our youngest will probably go to the pool a lot. So I'll still have quite a joyous family time and honestly commuting (so some recommendations, the new Viagra Boys album is fantastic as is the new Arcade Fire).
But I trust that the space I have been given will be fruitful and that this time for contemplation, rest and reframing that I've been gifted with can be a different kind of engaging the struggle that allows me to draw closer to God and closer to my neighbors in love.
What’s going on with your summer?