courage and inevitability

more spring!

This coming week is a big one. 

• On Tuesday, kid 1 is taking her driving test for the second time and might get her license. She isn't optimistic because she failed last time, but she's legit a decent driver, so fingers crossed!! 
• On Thursday, kid 2 finds out whether he passed the test that determines whether he'll be able to go to [the equivalent of] high school one day a week alongside his apprenticeship next year. The practice tests...did not go so well...but maybe?? 
• On Friday, I have the appointment in Chur to find out whether I passed the psychological assessment and am now *allowed* to apply for the program I [thought I] was interested in. Eye roll. Stomach turn.

Who knows where we'll be next Saturday?

Meanwhile, in this week's gospel reading, Jesus heals a man born blind and the Pharisees are rather concerned that God might be working outside of the approved channels and so they interview the man, and then his parents, and then the man again, and the reading goes on and on and if I were a Pharisee I would surely be avoiding just going and talking to Jesus too - because at some level I know that to face the thing directly would mean something would have to give, and cognitive dissonance sucks. But the formerly-blind man himself eventually gets frustrated and lays it all out for them:

"This is what is so amazing, that you 'do not know where he is from,' yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does His will, He listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.” (John 9:30-33)

"...Then they threw him out," of course.

Have I ever told you about my novel? I sincerely doubt that I will ever write it, but if I did (or maybe someone else has already?), it would be about a mild-mannered academic in the future who, although religion is quite dead at this point, has studied cultural anthropology and randomly gets mixed up with some scientists who think they've cracked time travel, and meanwhile Earth is barreling toward certain environmental collapse and it slowly dawns on everyone that the only hope for the future is for this dude to travel back in time and play Jesus, armed with miracle-performing antibiotics and the certainty that if humanity does not find nonviolent ways forward it will be doomed. Does he do it? Knowing that this might have been tried already, and obviously didn't work, and also that he will likely die a violent and painful death three thousand years before his own birth? My novel would end with our hero sitting in the time travel pod, ready to launch; it wouldn't say whether he presses the Start button.

I'm not sure what my point is here. I guess this moment feels a bit like that: I'm heading towards certain doom and I have to do it anyway. Maybe because the only way out is through. On the plus side, apparently I have a backup plan if this church thing doesn't work out: I'll become a famous author. Ha.