beautiful destruction

so... for those of you who dont know... i am living in the middle of a disaster zone. earlier this week a sheet of ice planted itself all over the city. tuesday i went out to the car and there was about an inch separating me from my windshield. there was also icicles making it very very hard to get into the car. i had to break this wall of ice just to get in and turn on the defroster... like that was actually gonna help. well... after about 40 minutes... i got it uncovered enough that i felt it ok to drive... well... that was the least awful day of the week...

tuesday afternoon i sat and watched trees topple over as i was taking the new slate of ice off of my car. i feared as i drove and heard small twigs hit my car. when i got home... i walked inside and there i sat for the next 2 days. JBU for the first time in history cancelled classes on wednesday. we were encouraged to stay inside. power was lost all throughout the state. the place was really a disaster...

but this morning as i went outside... because jbu can never cancel 2 days of class... that would be crazy... i go out to my car... get into it after a couple of knocks to remove some ice... and try to start it up... its dead... oh joy... well... i had to get up to school for a voice lesson... so i take off walking.

as i walked i saw amazing things. things were destroyed. trees fallen on powerlines. people unable to leave their house because of powerlines draped across their driveway. but you look up and see the light shining through the ice. it was beautiful. throughout the destruction... there was still beauty.



it is kind of like fire... a forest fire kills off so much... but it leaves the land so fertile and ready for life. it is a beautiful thing. God may have times that things dont always look the greatest... outlook on our end may seem bleak... but it always leads to something more beautiful than we could have ever planned...

What was the dream?

so... we had a speaker come into chapel... of course he was black. it seems funny to me... i think back to all that i have learned every year on this day about martin luther king jr. what did he teach... he didnt teach equality of the races at all... he taught that race wouldnt matter. it would be the content of the character that mattered. and that is basically what the guy said. he made a lot of comments about how he gets asked to speak on MLK day because he is a black preacher and all that. but how he always changes his topic to something more universal.

well.. something i thought was funny that happened yesterday that is very relavent to what the guy talked about tonight was something i saw on tv yesterday. i was watching lean on me on BET. a commercial came on that was for obama... it wasnt all that surprising that i saw it... but then it was talking about inaguration and had this figure that looked a lot like MLK out in the crowd. the guy was watching obama swearing into office. and then at the end it said a dream come true... or a dream realized or something like that. i almost turned off the tv... now i am not a racist... yeah... i have some strong feelings sometimes... but not about the people but some of the crap that has come out of reconciliation. i dont agree with affirmative action or anything that says one person should be held above another just because people of their "kind" had it rough in the past. well i got to thinking during chapel today as to why that made me not very happy seeing that on the tv. and now i know.

that was not the dream at all. the dream was that one race wouldnt be held over another... but it seems that there is something special about a black person being elected president. you know i will give you that yes. it is historic. but it is nothing that should be really treated like a dream has been realized... saying that in itself tells me that it has not been realized. on the contrary we are still very far from it. we are still looking at the color of the skin. we have just switched it around. we have a race picking a president just because he is black.

im sorry mr. martin luther king... your dream is just as far from being realized as ever.