Vox Lucens

My first - and currently only - experience driving a car with a manual transmission came a few years ago, when the crazy used car salesman was desperate to sell me a little Focus. He was in a unique position; he was forced to butter me up in an attempt to sell me the vehicle, while finding it necessary to be critical enough to save his own life. On the latter he succeeded; on the former, not so much.

[And I still chuckle when I think of the salesman, desperately gripping the handle above the door, telling me "You're doing great!" as I stalled out at a busy red light, and envisioning my poor dad stuck in the tiny backseat desperately praying for survival.]

And now my life is changing gears. My perspective is changing. I don’t need a job to get through law school - I need a career. I can’t choose a job on the basis of inherent coolness - I have to look to the future.  My perspective is changing from years to decades.

I’m discovering that my life is not an automatic.  And I’m very bad at driving stick.  This little perspective shift has left my brain feeling stalled out from time to time, and has certainly caused a great variety of grinding noises as I try to get things moving again.

But this comfort I do have - even in a stick shift, once you get out on the highway, cruising is easy.  It’s just the merging that’s hard.  Once the course has been set, and the highway achieved, things get easier.

As someone much wittier than I once said–

Soon we’ll be out, amidst the cold world’s strife,
Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life…

It seems strange to be posting about yet another milestone - they have been coming fast and furious this year. It also seems strange that law school graduation - when I finished studies 10 months ago, passed the bar exam, and became a lawyer in the meantime - should mean so much to me, but it did. Commencement was wonderful, superbly done, and the commissioning prayers will stay with me for a long time.

Receiving the purple hood.

Newly behooded.

So many friends…

I was humbled to present the student response.

Receiving my diploma.

Thanks to everyone who prayed for me throughout this long journey.

…that Delta is now too cheap to provide you with a paper folder to put your boarding passes in?

Or, as the ticket agent told me today, “We discontinued folders a number of months ago.”

Guess what frequent flyer doesn’t regret not flying Delta in the past few months?

But this I will say - they had excellent video on demand on my little Charleston to Atlanta hop. I wonder how many folders you have to scrimp on to buy a new tricked-out jet to fly your passengers around.

Hopefully some of the foregoing will explain why there has been a serious lack of bloggish infotainment on this venue of late. The last week (even the part I didn’t spend overnighting in O’Hare) has been crazy, but praise the Lord, I think everything got done! I finished my first freelance legal project (a brief in a securities case), did the slideshow for graduation, spoke at a homeschool conference Saturday, preached on Sunday, oh, and yeah, I worked my normal job. Now, ten months after finishing my studies, I am off to officially graduate from law school.

I just returned from a truly terrific weekend in CA. Sunsets, beautiful scenery, celebration, and the best company in the world gave me what was basically just a perfect time.

I am learning to love my camera’s manual settings. Getting the right shot takes me forever, with lots of practice shots, but when it works, the pictures are just…better.

But not all the trip was sunsets and seagulls…one morning, Katie and I were out picking oranges, when she almost stepped on a rattler. Such a cute little deadly snake…

I think it scared me worse than it scared her, but we couldn’t just let it sit there.

So we killed it. And kept the rattle as a trophy.