Um! I’m a little late with this year’s yearly update. Last year, 2011, was a good year, marked by several notable opportunities, but marked even more by hard work. In the Spring semester, I finally got to teach a literature course during the regular school semester – the first time since I started teaching in the fall of 04 – but with a catch. The catch? I had to teach it in addition to my regular composition courses, with no extra pay. But, hey, I’m a team player – and it paid off; the class has been added to my regular yearly schedule, and this spring I’m teaching it instead of a composition class.

In addition, last summer I taught my first theology class. It was online, but it went well.

Last fall, I got a paper accepted at a conference (which is scheduled for this March). The title: “Pure Religion and Undefiled”: A Wesleyan Analysis of Ibn Tufail’s The Improvement of Human Reason. Basically, I’m writing a whole paper on a castaway comment an 18th-century preacher made about a work of 12th-century Islamic philosophy. This is a great opportunity, and the first conference paper I’ve given in a decade, but it demands a lot of work in research and writing in addition to my normal workload. We’ll see where it leads in 2012!

My odometer reads 212,620. That means I drove 1,715 miles in 2011, which is less than a third what I drove in 2010.

It's the annual update on my life. Last year, 2010, was a banner year, for a number of reasons:

* I got engaged.

* I graduated seminary with my M.Div.

* I went oversees (to Morocco) for the first time in my life.

* I got married (just short of two years after our first date).

* My wife and I moved into our first house, a rental, on campus at the college where I teach.

* I became an uncle for the first time. (My sister-in-law had a daughter.)

* I preached a sermon series for the first time. (Six consecutive sermons on the book of Titus - much more of a challenge than I thought it would be! My church was very receptive, though.)

In short, I experienced an overwhelming amount of (good) change - and I'm still adjusting to it all!

My odometer reads 210,905 miles. That means I drove 5,561 miles in 2010, which was about half what I drove in 2009.

So, yeah, I haven't really been blogging much lately. This is for two reasons:
1. Seminary has gotten really time-consuming; I took both Greek and Hebrew this past year, and I don't have much time for blogging. I'm on schedule to graduate in May, though.
2. Facebook enables me to do fast status updates, which fills the need (with most of my friends) to keep tabs on my life.

Few of my friends blog anymore. I enjoy blogging - it's a creative outlet and promotes good observation, reflection, and writing skills. I'd like to return to blogging sometime down the road, but for the time being, Facebook fills all my needs.

The Obligatory 2009 Retrospective:
It was a good year. I had lots of work, but accomplished a lot as well. Most of my non-school and non-work time and energy has been devoted to my girlfriend, but that relationship is going well and I'm very happy with her.

The economy went south, but (fortunately) we didn't have to cut any professors from the school. It was a close shave, though. We survived mainly because three professors volunteered to enter retirement early and shift to half-time employment.

I'm looking forward to graduating with my second Master's degree, an M.Div, in May. I imagine my life will be significantly less stressful when that happens.

My odometer reads 205,344 miles, which means I drove over 11,000 miles in 2009, which is more than in any of the previous three years. I hope to drive less in 2010.

This past weekend, several friends of mine - students - were the victims of an armed robbery. They were on their way to Macon and stopped to get gas. When they went in to pay, three men armed with guns came in, forced them to the floor, and took their money and keys.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to seeing the (mostly excellent) movie Crash. I'll spoil (a small part of) it for you: at the end, the lovable carjacker gets shot for no (apparent) reason by an off-duty cop with an itchy trigger finger. The expression on his face as he dies clearly says, You creep! What did you go and do that for?

I suppose I was expected to feel sorry for the senseless violence that took this man's life, and upset at the social circumstances that forced such a friendly guy into a life of crime, and to some extent I was, but mostly I wanted to shout at the character, "Oh, don't you even get self-righteous! What right do you have to go giving people dirty looks? You're a carjacker! You've been shoving your gun into people's faces since the movie began!"

All my friends are okay, and are now processing the trauma that they went through. For those exposed to the real thing, though, any depiction of violent crime as funny and lovable is utterly abhorrent.

It's that time again: the annual New Year's review and preview.

To begin with, 2008 was almost a complete flip-flop of 2007. I started 2007 off well, and had a really great first half of the year, then about halfway through it went completely, overwhelmingly rotten. This year, on the other hand, started off completely rotten, and then (at almost the exact same point in August) suddenly became awesome, and it's been getting steadily more awesome ever since. This past week was the most amazingly incredible week I've had in years.

Highs and Lows: My best friend had his first child, a beautiful daughter, last January. The next month, a close friend of mine died unexpectedly in an auto accident. "The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." (Job 1:21)

Last spring, I helped my school organize a week of 24/7 prayer on campus as part of a larger initiative to cover 52 days with continuous 24/7 prayer on college campuses across the state. It was great, and it looks like we'll participate in an even larger program this spring.

Milestones: At the end of the spring semester, I watched my first students graduate - the ones who were freshmen in my class my first year of teaching (2004-2005) walked across the stage to get their diplomas. It was a strange feeling - those four years passed much more quickly than I remember them passing when I was a student. Now, in just a few months, I'll watch the ones that came in my second year graduate. I would be inclined to feel a little depressed at the speed life is passing me by, when I realize that it's not passing me by, and that I'll be graduating with my second Masters degree in a year and a half.

Today also marks the 5th anniversary of this blog. Hooray! On the other hand, I've noticed that blogs aren't nearly as popular as they were a few years ago - casual bloggers use Facebook and Twitter to give shorter updates about themselves. I am relying on Facebook more and more, but it's not as conducive to longer, more introspective posts. We'll see where this goes.

Mileage: My odometer stands at 194,127 miles. Despite the staggering $4-a-gallon gas this year, I drove 50% further than the year before. Way to buck the trends!

This next year is shaping up to be a good year. Unlike last year, I'm looking forward to seeing what it will bring.

This Christmas, I got a Blu-Ray player. Since I don't consider myself any sort of cinematic gourmet, I think DVD has all the resolution I need for a movie - that is, if I'm watching it on regular-sized TV screen. Last month, though, I bought a high-definition projector, and I thought blowing a DVD image up to 6' x 6' might show some graininess that Blu-Ray would ameliorate. We watched Iron Man on Blu-Ray, and it was awesome!

I remember when I got a DVD player. It was back in 2000. I had The Matrix on VHS, and my best friend Dann called me up and said he had something he just HAD to show me. I went over, and he had a new DVD drive for his computer. I watched the first 5 minutes of The Matrix on it and was immediately sold. The colors and resolution so obviously outshone VHS that I got a DVD drive for my own computer ($200!) and started building my DVD library. Lately, that drive has been going on the fritz, but that's understandable - I got much more than $200 worth of entertainment out of it over the last 8 years.

Before DVD, we all watched VHS. I vaguely remember the Betamax/VHS wars of the eighties, but my family didn't have one until nearly the end of that decade. I remember the Christmas we got it, a silver Zenith VCR. I was more ecstatic over that gift than pretty much any gift before or since. After Christmas, we went to my grandparents', and the whole trip I just wandered around in a happy fog, muttering, "I can't believe we got a VCR!" over and over again.

It's sort of a fitting time, then, to note that the last producer of VHS tapes has decided to shut down manufacturing. Ain't It Cool News is also reflecting on it. I don't really have much to add - my family didn't amass a library of VHS tapes, but we did frequently rent them from the video store, and my childhood slumber parties would be radically different without it. Being able to record shows off the TV was an added convenience that really made cable worthwhile. In the days of TiVo and digital download, it's good to reflect on how revolutionary it all was at the beginning.

I teach in a pretty old building, one of the oldest buildings on campus. Recently, as the students were leaving class, one of them pointed to an odd metal contraption next to the door and asked me, "What is this thing?"

Can YOU identify it?



Some days, I can't figure out whether my students are breathtakingly ignorant, or I'm a dinosaur.