Shire

I have made a discovery, one that makes me happy and that keeps me humble. I am simple! I love the simple and straightforward, like a good book on a rainy day it fills me with joy and hope. I love to sit quietly in the evening with a cup of tea and listen the silence of a sleeping house. For all that I enjoy of the great towers of Gondor with their deep learning and their elegant beauty they are cold as stone. I am more at home in the Shire, with it cheerful pubs and the smoking of pipes in the twilight with old friends. The green and domestic call to a deep level of my heart in a way that the exalted and ancient cannot.

I think this is why I am being led away from academics and away from the life I thought I would lead as a professor of history; and toward the ministry. The ministry is human, it is interested in people and their lives, it seeks to comfort and help those who are hurting. It's business is with the domestic, with the everyday lives of the people it seeks to serve. The extraordinary comes and is dealt with, but most of life is about the mundane and simple, the things we take for granted until they disappear. One of my favorite parts of "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson, is when Rev. Ames goes to fix the faucet of one of his congregants. It is simple, a small help to an elderly woman, yet it is as much a ministry as comforting the family of a child who has died.

Academics must concern itself with the profound and the expansive. It is always seeking the New World, the idea or thought that has not been expressed. At their best the academic is seeking to help people, but doing so through the book and the pen, through the great learning of ivory towers. History, by and far, deals with the extraordinary. It is interested in the great events. There is little room for a cup of tea in an old farm house or a visit to a neighbor to talk of the rain. History is the study of us as a group, the milestones we have faced and the changes we have experienced, and it is important. History illuminates the world in which we live, it opens the door for us to see each other in a context greater than our own, but by and far people live outside of recorded history. The great deeds of the century pale beside the petty fights and simple pleasures that God has given us, the ones that fill our lives.