Blogging off

Folks, after two years at Luther Seminary, I start my internship tomorrow. And with that challenging change of pace before me, I conclude my two years as a Life at Luther blogger.

I'm told that a great big crew of Luther Seminary students will be taking the reins of this site very shortly, and this gives me a chance to fade out just a little further and officially retire to a blog-free life. But it's likely that one year from now, when my internship is over and I return for my final year of classes at Luther, I'll come out of retirement and seek to rejoin the team.

Like Brett Favre. Ugh. I'm sorry. But I wanted to offer a few final updates, and you know I had to mention FavreGate. As you have surely heard, my football hero has joined up with the New York Jets. So have I. The photo above probably gave you a clue (or maybe you didn't notice—the jersey is still green). The truth is that the whole thing stinks. But as I have mentioned before, it has become clear to my dad and me over the past few years that the Green Bay Packers management just didn't want to keep Favre on the team, apparently so that the management could establish its own regime and receive the credit that Favre has earned for the past 16 years. My dad got so fed up with this two years ago that he became a Houston Texans fan and only followed his hometown Packers for Favre's sake.

Given the ridiculous events of the past month (with Favre admittedly to blame for some of the ridiculousness), I've finally decided that my dad was on the right track, and I, too, have turned my back on the Pack. I'm not happy about it (look at the picture). But I've got a lot more love for Favre than for anyone else on the Packers (save good old Donald Driver), especially when the team's leaders have disregarded so badly what's best for the team. And so I'll be spending at least one year as a Jets fan (luckily, my jersey collection has already equipped me for this).

Among other revelations, I have successfully completed Clinical Pastoral Education. And I continued to enjoy it, right through to the end. It helped me better understand my role in God's work, and it has helped me to be a much less nervous person (Tracy is admittedly the more nervous person in our family now, which is crazy). In fact, I'd be way more nervous about being fewer than 24 hours away from internship if it weren't for CPE. So the bottom line is, for those of you prospective or current seminarians who fear CPE as much as I did, there is hope.

Aside from CPE itself, this has continued to be a very, very good summer. First of all, Tracy and I saw a lot of good movies. We were pleasantly surprised by "Iron Man," although "The Dark Knight," which we saw at the drive-in with my uncle and aunt from Texas and their church's youth group, really set a new standard among comic book movies. (Seriously, though, why does Batman now talk through grunts like he's giving Bat-birth to a Bat-baby?) "WALL-E" was hands down our favorite movie of the summer ... if not of all time. I'd have to put the little lovesick robot right up there with Babe the pig at the top of my list of favorite film characters. And although so many people hated it, we really liked "The X-Files: I Want to Believe." Not only did we find it to be worth our years of waiting, but I also found it to be everything the new "Indiana Jones" movie failed to be—a solid love story about heroes who have moved on with their lives (also, it's not about aliens).

As for real-world highlights of this summer, we managed to make a couple weekend trips to Wisconsin. On one, we took nearly all 30 members of Tracy's maternal family, the Barelmanns, to the Milwaukee Brewers' Barrel Man bobble-head giveaway game on July 6 (later that day, the Brewers picked up rock-star pitcher CC Sabathia in a trade that has kept the Brew Crew in the hunt for the playoffs). Then, a couple weeks ago, we visited Green Bay and saw my grandparents—my Grandpa Don's memory still isn't what it used to be, but his sense of humor is still pretty extraordinary. And there's one more big family gathering coming up this weekend in the Twin Cities. My wonderful Grandma Alice is celebrating her 90th birthday at the country church she has attended her entire life.

Now, Tracy and I are waiting for her final marathon day at the Dakota County Fair to end. Each day of my tragically timed week off, she has put in 13 hours or more at her historic village and museum, which adjoin the fairgrounds. Today she only has to put in nine hours, so we'll get three or four solid hours of vacation before my internship starts. As I talked about last year, though, a county fair isn't a bad place to hang around, so it was a fairly nice break.

That's about all you could possibly want to know about where things stand for me at this phase in my seminary life. (I haven't been on the Luther Seminary campus for three months, so any attempt to describe actual "life at Luther" right now is pointless.) Thanks a ton to all you folks who have read this blog over the past two years, and thanks especially to those of you who have posted some feedback along the way. I'm really sorry that I peaked so early and was never able to eclipse the splendor of my alphabetical entry from last October. If any of you are so inclined, you can follow me (or at least my sermon-writing) at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church (Minneapolis) Web site, www.bethlehem-church.org.

God's peace to you all. I pray that the Lord in the next year will bless each of you with strength and focus to continually minister to others, in whatever capacity or career that might come. I leave you with an image from the county fair: a pair of monkeys on border collies after successfully corralling a group of rams. I think it's an image that carries a proper, Lutheran message about law and gospel, vocation and service to the neighbor. Also, it involves monkeys riding dogs.