Two days after

I played golf today. 18 rounds. I needed it. Jeffrey Travis, Mike Akel and I stopped after nine and grabbed a burger and fries in the dodgy snack shop off the driving range. It was 70 degrees and sunny today in Austin, Texas. I stood on the ambrosial green grass in the middle of the fairway on hole 16, birds cooing, a breeze skating in between an oblong pond on one side and a skirt of woods on the other, a 7 iron in hand, Helly Hansen baseball cap low on the eyes, sweating, hands beginning to blister, reminding myself for the fiftieth time to keep my head down--and then I stopped. I stopped and looked up from the pock-faced white ball. I relaxed my body. I took in a deep breath. I exhaled it out. I took note of life quietly happening around me. For a fleetingest moment I experienced a holy zen, the restful peace of Christ, the pleasure of God over the work of his hands. All was well. It was going to be ok. I'm going to make it.

And then I wacked that ball and followed it with my eyes till it landed in the woods.

This entry is harder to write than I imagined. As an organizer I see everything that went right about the symposium and everything that went wrong. How do I write about it without sounding triumphalist or self-pitying?

My brain is still in a partial state of cream-of-wheat. I can't remember half the things that were said—from the stage, in casual conversation, even from my own mouth. My emotions are fickle. Symposia are hazardous to your health.

Phaedra and I are OCBs. OCBs are different from OCDs, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. OCBs are the kind of people who like their homes Orderly, Clean and Beautiful, not in any OCD way, mind you, just in a pleasant enjoyment of things being in their place, dust dusted away, fresh-cut flowers, Mexican-tiled mirrors, bookshelves with books whose bindings are all the color blue, a wooden-carved statue of Don Quixote, textiles from Indonesia and Guatemala draped this way and that around the house--everything in its place helping us to find our center. At home. This past week our home was crap!

Mostly, we just laughed at the mess. Sometimes we'd come home late at night, knowing that dawn was only a few hours around the corner, and we’d make the bed before getting into it just so we'd feel like sanity had not completely escaped the premises.

I'm truly sorry I didn't meet everybody who showed up for the symposium. I really am.

But we laughed a lot. I love laughing. Barbara Nicolosi was hilarious, and very, very spicy. I would meet people and think, "I know you. Where do I know you from?" I knew them from their registration. And they had a face! I loved meeting, for example, Tamara Murphy who didn't look anything like I imagined her from her emails and blog comments.

I walked around all three days like a pregnant woman. When the modern dancers, Annette and Ceci, took the stage for the opening of the symposium I almost started crying. It was all too beautiful. I've carried this thing inside me for eight years. Here finally it was happening--with real, live people who had paid mountains of money to come and I thought to myself "I can't do this. I don't think I can carry this thing. I'm not big enough, old enough, experienced enough, resourced enough, strong enough. Just don't blow it, David, just don't blow it."

Eerie and weird and astonishing and happy and sad (that now that it had started it would come to an end before I was ready for it to end) and cranky and surprised and overwhelmed and thoroughly spent and marveling at the goodness of God and frightened for all the things that might go wrong and happy, happy, happy and anxious, anxious, anxious for all the things I knew we hadn't prepared or anticipated or that people would miss--and I would want to say, "I know, I know, trust me, I know and we tried, I promise," but to say those things on day one would be lame and disingenuous, so I kept my mouth shut and let the "art" speak for itself and let pleasure and disappointment happen of their own will and under Jesus' sovereign shepherding.

I also wore a polyester shirt my first day and stank like a pig by 2 o'clock.

Many speakings. I was thrilled with the way Andy Crouch and Jeremy Begbie began and ended the plenary talks. They so surpassed my hopes for the kind of framing I wanted to take place. Eugene Peterson was quintessentially Eugene, elliptically narrating his way to the truth. John Witvliet is one of the kindest and most broadly seeing scholars I know. The stuff they do at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship is fabulous. I felt bad for Barbara who had her talked eaten up by her Mac computer. But I was so glad she was there with all her spicyness and burlesque sense of humor. She's a Catholic Christian woman who feels the sting of artistic want and ache every day.

I was also glad to see people meeting each other, yucking it up in the hallways and the courtyard and the bathroom. I wanted so badly to be the Holy Spirit. Then I could be everywhere at once and eavesdrop on everyone's conversation--without being creepy.

I'm tired. I've got several hundred evaluations to read. The budget needs to be reconciled. I oversee communion tomorrow morning at church. Ed Tschoepe's having his goodbye picnic after church. Phaedra's weeding the garden right now. It's 7:52 pm in Austin, Texas. The house is darkening around me. And the symposium feels like a strange dream, a very strange dream.

I'm not sure what it means--what it means--but I'm glad I did it, with an incalculably blessed army of helpers.