http://www.nateberends.com/blog An understanding that my life is a means for more ends than my own. Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:26:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Continued From Chapter VI: On The Rooftop I already mentioned that Emily was the first person to have ever told me that she loved me.  Of course my family had been telling me that they loved me my whole life, but when Emily said it, it was different.  I already mentioned, too, ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/341 Continued From Chapter V: Of Kansas & Sunrises I don't know why I was expecting anything else, but the process of saying goodbye was entirely underwhelming.  I had gone through the whole process when I left Boston eight years earlier and I recalled that even back then the process felt no different. Of ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/332 Continued From Chapter IV: Of Yachts & Suspicions I left for Leawood on a Tuesday.  My roommate woke me up that morning. "Hey.  You awake," he asked. "You've gotta see this sunrise." By some stroke of luck, Zachary and I had worked our way into the East-facing room of the house.  The most noticeable ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/327 Continued From Chapter III: I Didn't Understand Haylie and I met again a few days later.  Both she and I had left our conversation under the bridge feeling particularly unsettled about the possibility that a future could be lost. What I didn't know at the time was that the questions raised on that ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/319 Continued From CHAPTER II: Two Stories & A Myth Over the course of the next few years I would have a lot of relationships that relied quite deeply on the lovers' myth. It wasn't until the week before I left Seattle that I even came to realize this. I was sitting beneath the ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/307 Continued from CHAPTER I: Welcome To Leawood, Kansas No matter what anybody tells me, I am convinced that it doesn't take very long in a relationship to determine whether or not marriage is a possibility.  Maybe a few weeks.  Maybe. I already mentioned that Emily and I had been together for six years.  ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/295 I've now been in Leawood for four days.  It's hot.  It's humid. It's unfamiliar. And now it's home. There are a lot of reasons somebody might move to the middle of nowhere.  For me, it was simply a matter of changing up the game.  I had gone to high school with ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/292   [caption id="attachment_272" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="When I walk down memory lane, this is sometimes where I end up."][/caption] http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/271 A dear friend warned me of this. She told me that as soon as I was done with college, I would find myself with a surplus of time and a degree of freedom that was before unthinkable. With this time, she shared, I might find myself reading more books, finding ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/249 What follows is an excerpt from a course integration paper I wrote for my History & Theology of Christian Worship class this past quarter.  It is valuable if only because it recounts in a very cursory way the larger themes of the course.   We began the quarter considering Rudolf Otto’s Das ... http://www.nateberends.com/blog/archives/267