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Month: August 2017

Beauty

It has officially been two weeks since I arrived in Slovenia. This country is astounding: mountains, rivers, countrysides, castles, European aesthetic everywhere. Constantly students and citizens tell… Read more “Beauty”

August 21, 2017July 6, 2018 by samhodge22

Post-Slovenia Update

Hey everyone! This month has been a whirl-wind of growth, growing pains, spiritual battles, and spiritual life and I’m excited to tell you all about it. As… Read more “Post-Slovenia Update”

August 3, 2017 by samhodge22

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e: hodge.209@osu.edu
ig: _SamHodge_

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happy six months. you are my favorite.

“Change began to unravel in my life like something hand-knit. Slowly, the woven pieces frayed and, with increasing speed and another winter passed, the pace of wear picked up for different strands until I found my fingers and toes poking through the ends of wool mittens and wool socks.” • Trying out writing a memoir about change. I’d love to share pieces as I go. Above is a snippet.

By chance I picked up Frederick Buechner’s The Alphabet of Grace yesterday at Half Price Books. It is brilliant. It is refreshing. It is inspiring. Buechner often has a way of communicating that I connect with deeply. Here are some excerpts. Enjoy. • “The name of Jesus. Incarnation. All those years of waiting until finally the holy dream became a holy face. Like Sunday’s face, perhaps, too frank to be understood, too obvious to be detected, his jokes so big and simple that no one had thought of them. The power beyond all powers which is the power to make Christs and Bodhisattvas, to make heroes out of pigs, to spin gold out of straw, that room at the heart of reality where life is born of death, it has a face, a name. Who would have guessed it?” • “‘I hear you are entering the ministry,’ the woman said down the long table, meaning no real harm. ‘Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?’ And the answer was that she could not have heard even if I had given was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own nor anyone else’s. It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring of blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all he who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.”

Sunday Night, you are so good.

So here’s the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about: Adulthood. I’ve shared these thoughts with a few people and been met with resonance and understanding. I hope you’ll find them helpful, insightful, resonant, and hopeful too. • Adulthood just kinda feels a lot more vague than the rest of your early years. Everything becomes indistinct. There aren’t benchmarks. There aren’t grade years. There aren’t report card checkpoints. You don’t say you had a “good semester” or a “bad semester” and then move to the next “mystery-of-emotion-and-circumstances semester.” It’s all one big blurry Time. So it makes sense that the feelings and circumstances become blurrier too sometimes. It makes sense that days are both full of happiness and sadness, freedom and stress, and sometimes they are happening simultaneously. It makes sense one has to discern in each moment which things they want to feel, need to feel, and have the capacity to feel. It makes sense that I can be intensely joyful about happy circumstances in the midst of other intensely awful circumstances because joy and gratitude are even more of a choice now. In some sense, boundaries become more necessary because Time isn’t bounded for you anymore, nor will Time continue to be your rescuer nor your refuge. Yet, boundaries also become simpler because it’s only a matter of choosing joy, grace, and more joy. There’s even less rationale to fiddle around in things we don’t care about and that hurt us, those things we only did because we thought we ought to, because Time won’t come to deliver us from our boredom and agony anymore. Those meaningless, lifeless things actually begin to take on an eternal nature in adulthood. The good news is, so do the meaningful, living things we love most dearly and passionately. So simply put: Choose life. Choose life. Choose life. Every single indistinct, blurry moment. Choose life.

Fall Getaway 2019. Hard to put into words how incredible this weekend truly was. • 📸: @m_skarsten

Caleb got BAPTIZED. It’s been so encouraging to talk with this dude about what obedience to Christ looks like in the highs and lows. This is another important, outward example of the transformed, servant heart Caleb has from and for God. Congrats, brother, excited to see what steps toward God you continue to make from here on out!

hey y’all. enjoy this painting inspired by the song Circles by @towrsmusic. if you haven’t listened to them, go do that now before you keep reading. it’s a good song, but also applicable. • • • recently it may have seemed like I either fell off the face of the earth, or stopped communicating with you, or lost interest in hanging out. truth is, none of those things are what are going on. I am, in fact, on the face of the earth (thanks gravity), willing to communicate (but tbh I’m the worst at texting so pls be direct and gracious with me), and I am definitely interested in hanging out with you (coffee?). Recently I have become slightly recluse to give myself some room to breathe and think. I’ve been reading and creating and writing and reflecting and letting myself be where I am. I’ve relearned things about God, love, life, and Harry’s fourth year at Hogwarts. I’m always learning that it is aye-oh-kay to admit life hits hard sometimes and to embrace that. So this is me saying hey, I’m here and I’m thankful for your patience and friendship along the way ✌🏼

This stained glass window in Budapest will forever haunt me with how intentionally it was architected. The designer must have deeply connected with Christ being the light to a darkened, broken world. They must have known there is beauty and complexity in the darkness where even the smallest ray of light from the lamb touches it. That, or they just liked the way it looked and I’m ascribing my own experiences to some random window some person I’ll never know put in place generations ago. Either way, I love it and how it inspires me to think.

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