Passing-Thought

college, time, and accountability

It was good to see Linda and Victor DeBrunner at Prairie Kitchen (Norman, OK) this morning. They were two of my Electrical Engineering professors at the University of Oklahoma (1994-1999), and still teach there. It is Oklahoma Sooner vs. Texas Longhorn weekend, which is an official holiday for the campus, so Linda and her husband were celebrating their day off by having breakfast together. I had just finished a men's Bible study there over the opening chapters of Isaiah. (The Bible study meets there every Friday morning at--YAWN--6:30am, under the teaching of the local PCA Pastor, Mike Biggs.) It just dawned on me, after I departed the DeBrunners, that Linda had introduced me to their five or six year old child with whom (I believe) she was pregnant (and gave birth to) while I was taking EE classes at OU. It appeared also that she was blessed with another one on the way. I think guys are generally slow about recognizing such things, especially early in the morning, but once in a while we come to our senses (with the help of some coffee). :) Above all instruments that were made to tell of time or to measure it, children, by their growth, demonstrate to the previous generation that time is actually ticking. :)

College seems like a blur to me now. Perhaps graduation did not give me a full sense of closure for it. Maybe because I commuted and never fully felt the solidarity of the college community. Or maybe because a month later I started taking seminary classes part time and still have yet to finish a degree from it. In any case, I still have dreams where I am back in college and realize that I have somehow forgotten to attend one of my classes for most of the semester for which I now have a final exam. Phew! I am always so thankful to awaken (and escape) from those dreams! But I wonder about the significance of such dreams. Perhaps I have negletted responsibilities in the present that need to be dealt with for which I am accountable? There are so many ways we can "escape" from the difficult things in life that need attending to. And I suspect those things are often deeply rooted in our past. For that reason, college remains in my mind an unescapable metaphor for life and eschatology.