This summer my work schedule has fluctuated between an average 90 hours (for three weeks straight) to a lowly 30 hours per week as I have sought to balance saving money for the wedding and spending time with my amazing fiance. My friend Strength pointed out that the 90 hour idea was not very good and I listened to his advice. Ever since, I have been going to parks (like this one that has the oldest beech trees in America), eating great food (like ham sandwiches with pepper jack cheese or chicken tetrazini or Chinese food downtown), and watching movies at an independent theater (like "Man on Wire"). Above all, I have tried to focus my inner life away from the steady erosion that nonstop labor performs on a man's soul and towards contemplation of two things: how we can prepare for our marriage and how to bless the people I meet. As a result, Allison and I have been reading the Bible together and asking ourselves what each passage tells about what marriage is. For example, we found a sentence in the book of Amos that says something like "oh, that justice would roll like a river." I have found that relationships often proceed like a court trial where one person is a prosecutor and one a defender and both try to play judge (maybe that's just because one of my flaws is being an accusatory person). So it is encouraging to think that we can seek and find justice in our marriage, that we can both pledge to submit ourselves to God as the judge and Jesus as the lawyer because we know that they will perform those functions way better than either of us. We also, of course, read the First Corinthians section on love and tried to find which descriptions we need to develop in ourselves. I need to stop keeping a record of wrongs. As far as blessing the people I meet, God has blessed me incredibly. Of course, my favorite thing about having painting as a job is that I get to go to people's homes and start to get to know them. I have met some great characters this summer already, including a Buddhist! Can you believe it? But the most amazing blessing opportunity I've had so far is my fellow worker, Maxwell. He comes from the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, has a great accent, and tests my patience every day. When I met his wife, she said that I should come study the Bible with them. Maxwell laughed and said, "No, that's ok." But his wife insisted. God answered a deep prayer of mine with that. Since then getting to make an impact in his life while God impacts mine through his has been . . . AMAZING.
It was a difficult week of goodbyes, mainly because they were never final. I ate dinner with the owner of the company on Monday and said goodbye then, but saw him two more times after that. I said goodbye to Maxwell on Thursday but saw him two more times too. I couldn't feel the visceral impact of the prospect of never seeing these people again for the rest of my life. Not the way I did leaving China. Even apart from the dulling effect of running into them again and again, I wasn't much moved anyway. When I left Chicago to move to Boston two years ago, by contrast, I sobbed when I said goodbye. Too many goodbyes have left me desensitized since. I wish I knew better how to feel. I wish I knew what to say. I wish I knew what this meant. Why should I bond so much with a random, great person like Maxwell and then never get to see him again? It doesn't seem fair. What was the purpose? Am I wrong to value experience so much that I'm willing to leave a beloved place and people to seek it somewhere new? Was it right to leave China? Was it right to go to China in the first place? What I want to experience now is community and establishment. I want to pass quickly and happily through this next week of visiting my brother, the week following marrying Allison, and the week after finding a place in Portland and a job, and then become settled firmly. I want to stay in Portland long enough that it nearly kills me to leave. For now all I can do is report that Boston is behind me.
