secrets

you may have noticed the link to postsecret on the right side of this blog. it's a link to a blog where people send postcards of their secrets--secrets they've never told anyone before. the guy who runs the blog picks 10-20 every week to post on his site.

so what is it that draws people to send their secrets in to a total stranger? why do they want their secrets to be known? what need is this site meeting in peoples' lives? because it is meeting a need. the man who manages the blog is inundated with postcards daily. people are reading them all the time, and many people make a connection with the cards that are posted.

i've got to believe that part of the draw is that there are very few places in our society where it is safe to be human--to be imperfect--to have issues. at work we are expected to produce with an eye only to monetary gain. our homes are so busy that there is little time to make deep enough connection to be concerned with enabling those around us to learn and grow. and there is little grace. in the christian world there is often an expectation of perfection... you don't bring your problems to church. in the secular world there is more of an acceptance of non-perfection, and yet there is little concern with reaching outside of onseself to meet the needs of others, especially those who are mere acquaintances.

so my question is this... is this a need that the church should be meeting? is there a way that the church could become a community of grace and connection in such a disconnected society?

i can tell you for sure that it will never happen in a program-oriented environment. and it will not happen if the only thing that happens at church is the normal singing/preaching worship service. not that these things are bad in themselves, and not that they are not necessary for some purposes.

but somehow the world has changed so much that people no longer have true community. gone are the days (in most places) where people walk next door to borrow a cup of sugar. people don't know each other. at all. you can go into a social setting and be whoever you want to be, and come home & be someone completely different. you can be whoever you want to on the internet and make lots of internet friends who see only a one-dimensional picture of who you are.

but there is still a deep longing for connection, a desire to be known and loved unconditionally. i firmly believe that if we can figure out how to make the church that community of grace and connection, the church will be able to reach this generation. how to do so while maintaining a commitment to discipleship and a grounded theology is the challenge we now face.

adversarial indeed

so i had my law review interview this weekend. law review is the legal journal published by each legal institution. it's the journal that has rigorous requirements so that only the top students make it in. it's also the student activity that the most prestigious institutions require before you will even be considered for a position with them.

the interview was not pleasant--at all. out of all the legal interviews i have had this year, this one was the worst. it was everything that people don't like about the legal world. it was a committee of egos attacking my character and ability and willingness to contribute to the law review. it was rude questions and interruptions. it was simply horrible. i left not wanting to join. i left thinking that some of the editors had a personal problem with me. i tried to discern whether it was my grades, my writing style, my commitments to church and faith... i couldn't figure it out.

and then i started talking with the other students who'd interviewed. they explained they had somewhat similar experiences, though i'm not sure anyone else thought it was as personally directed as it seemed to me. so then i thought maybe the board was just trying to weed people out--people who don't belong because they won't work hard or aren't tough enough.

but then i had my final draft conference for the paper i'm writing for sumission to the law review, and my professor asked how my interview went. she then told me that though all her other students had the same experience, it was not typical of our law review interview. she basically apologized for the board's behavior and told me that she had already complained to their advisor and requested that something be done about it.

even during the rude questions and disrepectful attitudes, the committee kept asking me questions about being willing to sacrifice for a team and whether i would be willing to go the extra mile to make sure things were done. it seems counterintuitive to me though, if you're going for teamwork, that you would start out by disparaging your team members. somehow that doesn't seem like the kind of teambuilding that i would want to do if i were heading up the team. for all the competitiveness and adversarial nature of the legal world, i still believe that you get the best out of a team if they actually believe they are valued and respected and have something to contribute.

so i'm taking a position on the law review, but i'm not excited about it. i think there's a real possibility that it could be a horrible experience. but i do it because it has to be on my resume.

for the most part i've had a really positive experience with my school. i've had great professors, the other students have been interesting, and i have learned a ton. for the most part, my school actually has a collaborative atmosphere, meaning that though there's competition for grades and such, people really do help one another out. this is the kind of experience i would have stereotyped law school to encourage, but had hoped to never have to encounter. i suppose if it is the worst that i have to endure, then i will have gotten off pretty easy. but i am very disappointed in our law review, and am now looking forward to the day it will be over for me.

it will be interesting to see if it's really as bad as the interview made it seem.

it's done!!!!!

well... the first draft at least. i've really only just begun. now comes the editing, tweaking, supplementing the supporting authority, and other such activities. but i can at least go to my other classes tomorrow with one less thing to think about.

40 pages. 223 footnotes. hundreds of hours expended. several hours today of complete doubt that i have anything to add to this discussion whatsoever. but, praise God, i was able to push through that, and hopefully have come to the other side & will be able to just concentrate on making it better.

the longest paper i ever wrote before this was 26 pages long, which i had to shrink the font quite a bit to get it down to 20 pages... do you know i've never had to enlarge the font to make something longer? i think i have a tendency to babble when i write, which i seem to be doing right now.

/breathes sigh of relief.

i shall return another day.

nightly update so i feel like i'm making progress

30 pages

170 footnotes

3 more pages of outline to cover, plus the intro and the conclusion, so i'm guessing about 5-6 more pages.

will i be able to finish it tomorrow??? that's the goal...

nighty night.

chaos of the mind

my head is just absolutely swimming from writing all day.

i love it.

but it's amazing to me how long it takes to get things down on paper. after doing other things all week, to get back into the groove of what i'm saying and where i'm going with things took at least 2 hours. and then to just get into the rythm of, "write a sentence, do a footnote; write a sentence, do a footnote," took at least another hour. but by this time of the night, after working for about 9 hours, i don't want to stop. however, the mind-swimming is somewhat detrimental to the paper-writing process, so it's time for me to break for the night.

i'm at 20 pages, 121 footnotes, and i'm a little more than halfway through the outline. yipee!

(and i know that all you non-lawyers--and maybe even some lawyers--are out there thinking how wrong it is for someone to be happy about writing a paper for 9 hours on a saturday... but what can i say, it's a strange sort of sickness i have, i guess...)

a paradigm of growth

well, i'm about 15 pages and 100 footnotes into my big paper for the semester.

i'm really, really enjoying the process. i know it's just a little bit crazy, but the process of taking almost endless research and turning it into a legal argument is very enjoyable for me. i enjoy the big-pictureness of it, i think - the analysis and synthesis of many parts into a cohesive whole. i enjoy the possibility that it might impact actual lives or policy.

choosing the job that i did for the summer, the place where i'll be researching and writing the days away, is a little out of character for me. i had another great option that would have put me in the courtroom as a prosecutor for the summer. normally, when given a choice between something i would love and something that would challenge me, or between something i perceive as "easy" and something that i will be stretched in, i choose the harder path. i just always choose the hardest thing. i think somehow i have that tied to my spirituality, though i can't tell you how right now.

but somehow for the summer i found the freedom to actually go with my personality instead of against it. see... i live within a paradigm for growth. living overseas and being challenged all my life in many different ways has made me uncomfortable with being comfortable. i always want to grow and be out of my element just a little bit - with the hope that i will become a better person and more like Christ. i think i have a genuine fear of the complacency that normally accompanies being comfortable where i am. so somehow i always end up doing the hard things, or the neutral things the hard way.

i think in many ways this leads to being a more balanced person - i'm working on my weaknesses so they become less detrimental. but i think it also has caused me to not reach my full potential. in developing my weaknesses instead of my strengths i have not allowed myself to excel and strengthen my strengths.

maybe like so much of life, balance is needed. it's really good to develop and use the strengths that we have because that is who God has made us. but it's also good to seek growth and development in areas that we are weak so that as people we can be more balanced.

maybe the challenge for me this summer then, will be to put as much energy into developing my strengths as i normally would put into trying to overcome my weaknesses. there's no real reason why the growth paradigm has to be limited to just one kind of growth.

summer job

i got a job!

i'll be working this summer in a federal government agency right in my own town. i don't have to drive more than 5 minutes to work each day, i'll get some school credit so i'll have less to do during my last 2 semesters, i'll be in a position to make contacts with some great people, i'll be researching & writing the summer away, i'll have nights & weekends to do whatever i want, and i'll have time to visit my family for several weeks.

i can't think of a position that would have been better for me. i'm so thankful that this is what God provided for me.

how evidence taught me grace

my evidence class and a talk with a friend taught me a little bit about grace this week.

the federal rules of evidence don't really allow you to discuss a person's character during trial, with just a few exceptions. usually you can't bring up past actions (like a prior conviction for robbing a bank) to show that someone has a propensity to do something (like robbing in general), to show that they did something specific (like robbing the 7-11). we don't want someone convicted of a crime because he's a bad person - we want him convicted because there's enough evidence that he did it.

a friend and i did something to upset one of our best friends about a year ago. not a huge deal, only we live such a long distance from one another that it's been hard to reconnect. so she was visiting again for several weeks over Christmas, and i discovered that i wasn't really emotionally connecting with her. and so i tried to figure out why. eventually i discovered it was because i wasn't really sure what she thought of me anymore. she's a pretty emotional person. i'm a pretty sensitive person. she had responded in frustration in a way that made me wonder what she thought of me.

and that's where evidence comes in. i realized that i believed that she'd taken my negative action and made a negative inference about me. i believed that she no longer believed in me. and i don't know how to be real and vulnerable with someone who has known me deeply, yet stopped believing in me.

then i thought about grace - maybe that's what grace is. it's seeing the negative things that a person does, but not drawing a negative inference about them. it's allowing people to make mistakes, to be human, but to reserve judgment and keep thinking the best of them. and that really is how God sees us. he looks at us and does see the bad things that we do. but he doesn't infer bad things about us. in fact - he goes further and sees us through Christ's work on the cross. he is able to see the good in us, in spite of the bad things we do.

the reason the testimony about prior bad acts is kept out of court is because it's highly prejudicial. juries tend to give great weight to prior bad acts in determining current guilt. i think that's because that's the way we are in life too. we all to often see the bad acts and make the inference about bad character and then basically expect the person to keep doing bad things.

but i want to see the best in people. and i want people to believe the best about me, even when i do stupid things. is that what it means to always protect, always hope, always trust, and always persevere in love?

i kind of think it does.