A Little Farther Down the Path: The Road to Someplace Beautiful

Everybody faces tough times and difficult circumstances in life. For some, the pain seems deeper and more severe than for others, the episodes more frequent. But discouragement, disappointment, and pain—whether physical, financial, or emotional—visit us all at one time or another. Bad things happen to good people as well as to bad, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust, and the only constant in all of this is that nobody is immune.

After a lifetime relatively free of trauma, apart from periodic bouts of near-debilitating depression, things changed for me in 2007-08. The bottom fell out, and it was my turn to walk through some dark valleys. They were horrible, awful, painful years filled with one bit of bad news after another.

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The Road to Someplace Beautiful

The Road to Someplace Beautiful
Chapel Address by Eric Kouns
Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia
November 10, 2015

[Note: If you’d like to hear this address as it was delivered at EMS, click here.]

Whenever a man of mediocre intellect is invited to address an audience in an academic setting—a pseudo-scholar who wants to foster the pretense of erudition—he will often begin his talk by referencing an obscure quote by a nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher.

I think it was Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish existentialist, who once observed that…

We  live our lives looking forward, but we understand our lives only by looking back.

I would call that either profoundly self-evident or self-evidently profound. But it’s true, in any event.

“Mr. Lough, Are You a Liberal?”

Dear Mr. Lough:

So, let me see if I follow the line of thought you introduced in yesterday’s letter. One point in particular intrigues me. You say that “evangelicalism is the product of modernism.” I had always thought the two were diametrically opposed schools of thought. If I understand what you were saying, however, it seems that, while evangelicalism operates with a different set of presuppositions from modernism, it uses some of the same methodology to make a case for the version of Christianity it represents. Right?

Letting Off Some Steam: An Unexpected and Very Personal Post

Well, it didn’t take long for me to break my self-imposed fast from Facebook and this blog, but I need to say something in response to some personal messages I have received lately (based on the assumption that if some people are voicing thoughts like this, at least a few more are probably thinking them without saying anything).

My daughter is a single mother with an active, healthy eight-year-old son who is in the third grade and doing very well in a challenging academic and social environment. She is employed full-time in a helping profession that requires her to travel extensively in the local area and to be on-call and available for emergencies even when she is off-duty.

Resolving My Lenten Discipline Dilemma

I love dilemmas that resolve with a win-win outcome. For example, I decided that my Lenten discipline this year would have to do with my online presence and productivity. That, however, posed a dilemma for me. On the one hand, I sensed the need to take some time away from Facebook and my blog, as a way to de-tox from all the verbal clutter that has accumulated in my thought processes. So I considered just disappearing from social media for the duration of Lent. On the other hand, I could see how the discipline of publishing a blog post on each of the forty days of Lent could be beneficial, at least to me and maybe a few others.

Advent and the Church’s Mission

If the story of Jesus teaches us anything it is that God is on a mission. The gospel record of Jesus’ coming is simply a continuation of the Old Testament story of God at work, through his chosen instruments—Abraham and the nation that arose out of his descendants—to bring redemption to the world and to set right the creation which has been damaged and corrupted by human sin.

After his baptism and temptation, which took place in the southern part of the Jewish homeland, the area known as Judea, Jesus chose to begin his formal and public ministry in the north, where he had grown up, in the region known as Galilee.

Here is the way Mark describes it in chapter one of his Gospel.

Now… Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mark 1:14)

It’s interesting that Mark, who records very little of the teaching of Jesus, preferring to concentrate on his actions—his miracles and works of power—nevertheless begins his account of Jesus’ ministry, after briefly mentioning the baptism and temptation, with a reference to something Jesus said.

A Note to Former Students and Other Courageous People

This is my first blog post in more than six weeks. After I published a post every day during the month of October, I hit the wall, so to speak, and have found it difficult to generate the energy and enthusiasm required to sustain this endeavor.

I’ve been here before. Call it writer’s block or just apathy spawned by a sense of the futility that comes from trying to do something that so many others are doing, with most of them doing it better than me. In the past, one pervasive thought has provoked me to throw off my self-pity and get back to writing. I’m happy to say it has worked again, and that is what I’m sharing in this post.

It Would Have Been Nice to Know That Somebody Cared

Standing in line at his favorite downtown coffee shop, Arthur waited to order and pay for his overpriced beverage with the fancy name. At times he thought the use of foreign terms and phrases to describe the sizes and contents of the variations on the theme of coffee to be pretentious. Today, he was feeling a bit more mellow, however, and he had to admit that caffè latte, caffè mocha, and macchiato sounded a lot classier than simply coffee with different additives.

As he stood at the condiments bar, stirring milk into his caffè Americano (espresso with hot water added), his peripheral vision caught sight of a familiar figure. Ralph Gruben lived not far from Stauf’s Coffee House. Even though Arthur lived more than thirty miles away, for three years he had worked out of an office in a building just around the corner from Stauf’s. He spent a lot of time in that quirky coffee shop during those years, and as often as not, he would see Ralph at his favorite table in the corner, often reading but sometimes simply lost in his own thoughts.

My Soul Is At Peace

My soul is at peace. I haven’t written those words very many times in my life, because for most of my life, it simply was not true. But it is today, and I’ve experienced a growing awareness of that deep, inner peace for the past several weeks. (Oddly enough, the keenest awareness has developed and intensified since early March, just about the time we started the Gathering for Worship in the Liturgical Tradition.)

A Little Shameless Self-Promotion

As more and more people read my new book, The Long Road from Highland Springs: A Faith Odyssey, I am beginning to receive letters and notes expressing appreciation for the book. I am grateful.

Some will think I am brazenly opportunistic, as well, when they read this post. I know it may look that way, and it probably is, at its basest level, but it is also at least somewhat necessary.

As many of you know, I published the book myself. That is, rather than submit the manuscript to countless publishers only to be told, if they bothered to respond at all, that they do not read unsolicited manuscripts, I decided to bear the cost of publishing the book myself. That means, among other things, that I have no agent or publisher to promote and market the book on my behalf.