I learned today that renowned author and all around good guy John M. Ford has passed away. I never met Mr. Ford, but he was good friends with my literary hero Neil Gaiman. For the Treksters among us, you may remember his novels The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet? Each star that falls dims the night sky that much more. Like the rest of you, I a-wait the dawn.
A few minutes ago I learned that a colleague at another school has left his position. I've only met him a couple of times at workshops that he has presented. He's a nationally recognized guru in a certain area of librarianship. He's also a kind and generous person who recently has lost his wife to cancer. I hope that wherever he ends up he will find peace and happiness.
Tonight marks the midpoint of this year's Strauss lectureship (an annual lectureship that brings well-known scholars to campus to lecture on various aspects of Christian worldview thinking). Dr. Paul Copan has been speaking about "Evil and the Cross of Christ." It's been interesting, but I don't envy anyone who has to speak about the problem of evil. I don't think I'll ever be able to answer the why questions that cry out from the broken human heart. I can sympathize and weep with you, but I'm as clueless as the next as to why things go the way they go. Might be why I'm in the library and not lecturing in the classroom (of course, as an homage to futility, I continue to beat my head against the brick wall of the questions; I really like psychological concussions!)
Death, life changes, the mysteries of suffering and hell. Is this what the human mind was created for? I hope not, and I have the laughter of my children, the jokes of friends, the beauty of nature to smile with. But my children also cry, and someday will cry and I will not be able to console them. My friends jokes will either turn cruel, or turn to tears, or just fade away. All of nature is double-edged: wind, water, earth, sun... they all are destroyers when they are not being agents of delight. I sit on the edge and am overwhelmed by the ravages of time, the inevitability of the abyss. All I can do is have faith, a faith I do not deserve, but one that was given to me nevertheless. God is funny, in exactly the kind of way an all-holy, transcendent being might be funny. But I am grateful, I may not even understand what I am grateful for, but I am grateful for it anyway (yeah, I may not be making much sense right now, but I suspect there's something true here.) My hopes are with each of you, as you make your way through the happy days and dark nights, that you will become increasingly aware of the gifts you have to be grateful for, even the ones you're only vaguely aware of...
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How truly sad. I remember both of those books. How Much for Just the Planet was very amusing and I found myself laughing through much of it.
I hope that the human mind was not created for thought as those as well. It seems that I always find myself thinking of those things more than I want. I don't know the answer either. The older I get the less I feel I know. I thought wisdom was supposed to come with age not more confusion!
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