BitterSweetLife

Yesterday became the stage for a revealing chain of events. At church, having just wrapped up a dynamic series on Revelation, we had a "response Sunday." People (the brave ones, anyway) seized the opportunity to communicate something they had learned during the previous weeks of teaching. As usual, the comments were heartening, suggesting, more than anything else, that God is in a constant mode of speaking to his people.

I felt compelled to say something about the revelatory nature of creation - immediately glorious, yet a mere shadow of the divine character. Interestingly, I'd blogged about this very topic in recent days. Who says blogging isn't good for the soul?

After the service, I learned belatedly that the "Second Annual Harvest Bowl" was taking place in a field across the street, and saw that opportunity was knocking: a chance to scrabble around in the dirt with a bunch of guys in freezing weather. Normally I'm a hoops player, but the right thing to do was obvious. I dug through our car trunk and suited up in my dingy "paint clothes" from last summer. It was time to become a multiple-sport athlete.

As I was succumbing to the gravitational pull of the football game, my wife informed me that we'd just been given tickets to a classical music concert - Beethoven's Spring Sonata, with Rob Kapilow. Obviously, this opportunity was equally compelling. Beethoven or the Harvest Bowl? Sports or Arts? Which would it be? The choice was clear.

And so it was, a touchdown catch and a dramatic victory* later, I found myself in the men's room, ditching my sweatshirt, pulling my slacks and corduroy shirt back on. Ugh. The Harvest Bowl participants were dispersing as I raced to the waiting car and Lindsay peeled out of the church parking lot, hunched over the wheel. We were late.

Fortunately, there are ways to make up drive-time. Fifteen minutes later, I marched into the downtown Folly Theatre, a picture of cultured machismo. My valet-wife followed momentarily, having completed her car-parking duties several blocks away.** As we slipped into the concert hall, the refined murmurings of the sophisticate masked our entrance. Their ranks had been infiltrated, and they were unsuspecting. We sat down, exchanged a few meaningful glances, and the music began. Ah.

Later, in a surreal moment, I realized that the day's events in some ways epitomized my life. Tossed on adversarial waves of arts (academics) and athletics, thrown here and there by unplanned opportunities, anchored, fortunately, by the steady revelation of the divine Coordinator.

I'm not sure if pleasantly eclectic is the phrase I'm looking for. But regardless, I'm thankful.


*Well, sort of. We won by two touchdowns. But very act of winning an outdoor football game with no pads in freezing, drizzly weather is inherently dramatic...right?

**Heh he...ahem. I know it sounds awful. But as a three-year veteran of marriage, I've discovered there are a limited number of sure-fire ways of ways to get a rise out of my wife. This paragraph is one of them. ;)