Viking Restaurant

New Superman Returns Footage

I am unable to blog much right now because I am so busy with my first week of school. Also, Phil Harvey is here to visit me for a few days, so things are just crazy!

I do feel compelled however to just quickly draw your attention to what is sure to be the most amazing film of next summer.

Earlier this summer, Brian Singer traveled from Sydney, Australia where he is filming "Superman Returns" to appear at the Mecca of comic book conventions, Comic-Con in San Diego. He gave drooling fans a taste of what to expect. I myself am wiping the drool off my shirt as I write this.

Go to www.bluetights.net and watch "20 Hours in San Diego" for the footage!

Also, I kind of liked this fan trailer if you can play it.

What God Has Been Doing in My Life Lately, Part III

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I left off talking about the fall semester of Fall 2003, the semester where I was not a full-time student, but I was writing my SIP on "Thomas Reid and the Epistemology of Testimony," raising support money to go to Trnava, Slovakia and work at "The Building," acting in "Sabrina Fair", and working for Chartwells Food Service.

A few things stick out to me about this time in my life.

First off, I wasnt incredibly successful at raising money for my trip to Slovakia. I just dont click real well with the traditional style of support raising that exists in the church today for short term missions. You have to write letters to friends and relatives that you havent communicated with in years, and pretend that you are really writing them so that they will pray for you and be informed about your desire for ministry, but you just cant get around the fact that you surely would not have sent them a letter unless you needed money from them. It was a very uncomfortable process for me, and I allowed myself to be talked into sending support letters to people on my dad's side of the family that I never talk to anymore just to get money out of them. I still kind of regret that.

I'm also not very well connected to a support-raising base, like some people my age who have spent years getting donors from various mission trips they have gone on. So I was getting kind of frustrated as I watched my considerably minimal support needs come in even more considerably slow.

I did receive some blessing from this process though. The biggest blessing for me was that certain members at Rock Creek, who really didn't know me that well, stepped forward to support me. Their support for me and for my family really tied me closer to the church at that time. I think particularly of Allen and Sharon Duble who showed a lot of interest in my trip when I hadnt even really reached out to them that much to seek out their interest.

In the end though, I wouldnt raise enough money to go to Slovakia. But the Lord sent another source of income, which at the time I saw as a strange but sure miraculous provision of God. One night, while turning left onto Ochs Highway, the highway that leads up Lookout Mountain, a driver who was speeding down the mountain slammed into my left side as I was making the turn (I was pulling out and he came suddenly aroung a curve; my instant reaction was to break and hope that he could break as well but he was going too fast and couldn't stop in time). I was miraculously protected and also miraculously provided with insurance money to pay for my totaled car. The other driver was completely faulted for the accident. I decided to use some of the insurance money to finance my trip to Slovakia. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Another thing that sticks out to me about that time was the development of a relationship with my pastor Eric Youngblood. He would make frequent visits to see me, meeting me often up at Covenant College after I would finish my shift at Chartwells. We would sometimes meet on the Overlook while I was still in my work uniform. We talked about a lot of things during that time, and I told him a lot about myself. I had gone to a lot of counselors when I was younger and I had grown kind of sick of dumping my problems on people. But Eric had a natural way of listening and advising that made me trust him immediately. I began to work on things in my life and heart that I had avoided for a long time. I began to pray about things that I had not even dared to pray about before. We talked about Slovakia and my hopes for what I would do after I returned. I told him I would like to come back to Chattanooga for a while and that I wanted to be more involved in the church and to do some more meaningful things with my gifts and talents than work at Chartwells. He vowed that when I got back from Slovakia, we could continue to meet and that he would pay special attention to helping me find a way to use my gifts and to prepare myself more for my future calling, whatever that may be. He kept that vow in big ways this past year, which Id like to write more about later.

My SIP really sticks out to me too. I really liked writing my SIP. I really liked studying Thomas Reid and his way of thought and I liked thinking about the importance of testimony to our knowledge. So much of what we know comes from the word of others. We shouldnt treat the word of others too skeptically. We build our knowledge upon the foundation of testimony from the day we are born. And it is ultimately the testimony of Christ, presented to us through the testimony of His apostles and prophets, and confirmed to us by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, that we must trust to be saved.

"Sabrina Fair" sticks out to me. What a fun play to be a part of. You could write a book about it. Tyler Grisham, my partner in crime at Chartwells, played my brother in the play so we saw a lot of each other that semester. A girl named Laura Bannister was supposed to play Sabrina but she fell and broke her ankle after trying to jump down into a pit of mattressess that Catacombs had set up outside their hall window. So Catacombs almost singlehandedly destroyed the play that semester. But Emily Shaw, the director, stepped in at the last minute and learned all the lines, and thus starred in and directed her own play under some pretty excruciating pressure. But we pulled it off OK, and I got to become better friends with Courtney Withington, who played "Girl #2" in the play. Courtney has been one of my best friends in the past two years and she recently helped me drive out to Cono and helped me move into my apartment. She was the last Covenant friend I spent time with before starting my job here.

Courtney and I, along with Laura Kaufmann, Hope Davis, Jeff and Faith Orr, Brae and Lowen Howard, Phil Harvey, and Adam Belz, had a neat Fall Break that semester. We went to Nat Belz's house in North Carolina. I got to meet a good many Belz relations that week including Nat, Mindy, and Steve Lutz. I also got to see Gillian Welch live in Asheville. Good memories. Little did I know at the time that I would be surrounded by members of the Belz family for more years to come.

Next chapter: I'll talk about getting out to Slovakia and working at The Building. Those were some interesting days.

A Sober Week at Cono

It has been a sober week around Cono. Teachers have been working hard at preparing for classes. I have been putting in long days, trying to get each of my four classes prepped and get other things done as well like cleaning my classroom. I have pulled out of this week ahead of the game however. I've got my classes prepped with very "Bill Davis-esque" syllabi printed out and ready to hand out to the students. My classroom is in order and I finished seating charts this afternoon. Now I just have to wait for the students to get here so we can start orientation.

But all of our hard work has been overshadowed of course by the news of the Duble tragedy. That is affecting every staff member at Cono due to the fact that Eric Duble is our pastor. He is here today and he gave us all an official report on how Noah died. Eric and his son Matt were actually the last to be with Noah, as they were playing football with him by the lake where they were vacationing. The cause of death continues to be mysterious. Noah did not fall in the water or suffer any kind of physical injury. He merely collapsed as he ran to pick up a football. Eric's last memory of Noah was of holding a football and smiling.

Eric will leave for Chattanooga tomorrow with his family for Noah's funeral service to be held at Rock Creek Fellowship. My thoughts are heavily with my home church right now and I very much wish I could be in Chattanooga. I feel that the Lord must be working very powerfully at Rock Creek to be sending so many dramatic trials into the lives of its leadership. Eric Youngblood's sickness was very traumatic last fall and led the congregation to pray in ways that it never had before. We were all very scared and shocked. And now Troy, one of Rock Creek's elders, is suffering one of the worst tragedies imaginable. I remember that Eric Yougblood prayed very specifically and very often that Rock Creek would become a praying church. He taught on it intentionally and frequently, and in many of our personal conversations Eric would talk about the importance of prayer as if it were truly "the" work of the church and of a pastor. Well I think God is answering Eric's prayer in a powerful way because Rock Creek is becoming a praying church through these trials, and I feel that Rock Creek will continue to be a praying church for a long time.

Cono had another scare just yesterday when Becky Brown and Jenny Brown, Eric Brown's mother and sister, got into a serious car accident, flipping their car twice and then into a ditch. They were miraculously unharmed. So that incident turned into a major praise to the Lord.

So Cono itself is a praying place these days. We have been given a lot of reasons to pray which is something to be thankul for I think, even when the things we are praying about give us sadness.

On a lighter note, I am getting my CDL so that I can become a school bus driver. I had to go to a three hour course where I watched a number of videos, one of which was called "Dont Veer for Deer." Yes, you are required in the state of Iowa to hit a deer if it comes across your path. Did anyone else know that the deer population in the US is on a major uprise? Bambis of the world, watch out!

I do appreciate every one's comments and every one's prayers!

The Dubles

I wanted to direct the readers of this blog to pray for Troy Duble and his family as his young son Noah Duble died yesterday in a tragic accident while vacationing at a lake. Troy is an elder at my home church in Chattanooga, which is called Rock Creek Fellowship. But also, Troy's brother Eric, who was at a family reunion with Troy at the time of Noah's death, is my pastor here in Walker, Iowa. Therefore, Noah's death affects a lot of people in both communities. If you dont know Troy or any of the Dubles, please still pray for them.

Rules, Policies, and Procedures

So this is it. I am Mr. Willison now. And here is my RPP (Rules, Policies, Procedures)

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What God Has Been Doing in My Life Lately, Part II

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Fall 2003

I am appreciating everybody's comments. I left off talking about my decision to go to Slovakia, something that kind of cemented itself at the Howard family crab feast in Silver Spring, MD. I mentioned meeting Kathy Miner. She is a friend of mine that excited me about the prospect of moving to Slovakia.

Well, the idea was actually first planted in my head by my brother Ty who had studied abroad in Slovakia for a semester and had become close friends with the Lesondak family, the missionary family who pioneered an MTW (Mission to the World) mission in Trnava, Slovakia called "The Building." John Lesondak modeled his idea for The Building somewhat on Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri institute in Switzerland. A week at The Building has a lot in common with L'Abri. There are community dinners, film viewings and discussions, academic lectures, and casual opportunties for coffee, tea, and fellowship. The Building is oriented mostly toward university students in its approach but it has in fact drawn a unique blend of many ages due to a variety of circumstances. The idea behind The Building is that there would be a "safe" atmosphere in Trnava for the unbeliever to discuss and question the truths of Christianity and the many common grace truths about God that can be seen all throughout creation and culture.

As mentioned, my brother had often recommended the Lesondak's ministry at The Building to me and I had often considered it as a viable option for something to do after college. And it just so happened that I had not actually finished college yet. I still had to finish my SIP (Senior Integration Paper) and my Cross-Cultural credit, which is given for having and writing about a significant cross-cultural experience. So the idea of taking the fall to finish my SIP and raise support to intern in Slovakia, an internship I could gain my cross-cultural credit for, seemed like a really good idea. The idea cemented itself in my mind when I learned that Kathy Miner would be spending the year there as well. Kathy and I had become friends at the Howard family crab feast and I was encouraged by the idea of having somebody else my age to go through the experience with. It also helped that John Lesondak had been in Chattanooga that summer and I was able to seal the deal with him fairly fast. I was quickly approved by MTW and began raising my support.

Unfortunately, I had quit my job at Tortilla Factory due to the high stress of waiting on drunks till 3 in the morning sometimes, and so I needed to find another job that I could work for just a few months before it was time to go to Slovakia. Some of you may appreciate just how hard it is to find a good job in Chattanooga, and it is even more difficult when you cant commit for more than a few months. And so I settled for a pretty mediocre job for even more mediocre pay. I was to work the beverage bar and later on the deli line for the Covenant College food service, Chartwells.

The idea of working for Chartwells did have its perks. I liked it mostly because I would be able to see the Covenant community every day twice a day, breakfeast and lunch. I was able to stay involved in the lives of my friends who were still at Covenant and continue to build important friendships every day as they walked through the lunch line. It had its perks.

But it was also tough on my self-esteem. It wasn't a very difficult job and certainly didnt require a college education. But I did have Tyler Grisham who worked alongside me everyday at the make-to-order bar, and we were able to make the most of our lot in life with a lot of humor and top five lists.

But I still needed more than my job to make my life meaningful in those days. So I filled up my time outside of work primarily with three things: acting in the school play, Sabrina Fair (my first school play, I played the part of Linus Larrabee), writing my SIP on the Epistemology of Testimony, and corresponding with Kathy Miner, who was already in Slovakia and who would continue to give me exciting news of what was going on over there.

I think I'll talk about those things more in another segment.

A Prophetic Image (What God Has Been Doing in My Life Lately, Part 1)

I wanted to share this picture with the general public. It has come to be a fairly prophetic image concerning where God has placed me at this juncture in my life. The picture was taken this past May on my graduation day, and oddly enough it happens to be one of the only pictures I took at my graduation. Just a random moment where the Belz brothers, Adam and Max, grabbed me and hoisted me up between them for a quick kodachrome moment during a major epoch of my academic career.

At that time, I had no idea that a month later Andrew Belz (their father) would grab me in a very similar way out of the exhibition hall at the Chattanooga Convention Center during the PCA General Assembly and recruit me for a teaching position at a Christian boarding school in the middle of corn and soybean fields in Iowa. This photo captures the expression of a young man who had no idea how providentially and miraculously the Lord would work in his life in the near future and how the Lord had in fact been working in his life for a very long time.

It has been a remarkable thing to meditate on how the Lord has worked in my life particularly in the past two years, and how well ordered and purposeful His plan seems to me now that I see it in hindsight. I doubted it greatly in the midst of last year's events for sure. So for the interested reader, I would like to share my story in segments over the next few weeks. I'd like to convey what the past two years have looked like, how I walked through a valley of fear and doubt, how I made some very regretful mistakes that stemmed from great unbelief, and how the Lord providentially protected me, guided me, and taught me invaluable lessons with more ordered, purposed wisdom than I had ever dared give him credit for previously. I think its a good idea to take advantage of the times when the Lord gives me a little bit of clarity about my life to share it with my friends and glorify God for it, so that I will have something to look back upon when I reach the periods of cloudiness that are sure to come up pretty quickly here while teaching at the school. And I happen to have a lot of thoughts going through my head right now to share, and i havent had that in a long time, so I plan to start spitting them out while I still can. So if you desire, let me start off with my first segment, starting the story a bit beyond two years ago, when I finished up my last semester of classes at Covenant College.

I finished my last semester of classes at Covenant College in the spring of 2003. It had been a rough senior year at Covenant. My mom and younger brother Tim had moved to the Chattanooga area in the fall and I was a bit stressed out about being a part of a family unit again after having put off that responsibility for about six years. Plus things were just emotionally turbulent for me. I was confused about my future (I wanted to go to seminary but didnt know how I could make it happen), girls (I was having a rather pathetic case of 'senioritis' in which the senior freaks out and thinks he needs a girlfriend before he graduates in order to fulfill his life), classes (it was going to take an incredibly extensive schedule to be the academic superstar I felt compelled to be and finish both my majors, Philosophy and History, on time), church (I was leaving the church I had been a member at for two years to embark on a journey of finding a church my whole family could agree on going to together), and my own spiritual life (why was I still so slow in learning how to love people, love my family and friends, and live an obedient life before God).

So naturally, because I was stressed out about all of these things, so much so that I wasn't sleeping at nights (just ask the Alton Park boys if they remember), all of these areas of my life simply fell apart. I avoided my family a lot, gave up on the idea of going to seminary the next year, I embarrassed myself in the girl department, I started underperforming in my classes to the noted disappointment of my professors, I dropped my history major, I started avoiding church, and I let my spiritual life go the way of the buffalo.

And yet God managed to do some amazing stuff in my life during that time. He started to draw me closer to a circle of friends that would surround me and support me for the next two years of my life, friends like Vincent Howard, Phil Harvey, Courtney Withington, the Kaufmanns, and Hope Davis. But God also continued to strengthen me in my older friendships with guys like Matt Allison, Kieth Riley, and Jason Bintz, and many others from my Catacombian days, including new Catacombians on the scene like Eric Brown. Dont feel excluded if I didnt just mention your name and you are reading this. If I knew you as a friend at all in the past two years, then you are immensely important. My friendships are what have kept me going for the past two years. I have been so strengthened and uplifted and sharpened by the community God has allowed me to be a part of for five years in Chattanooga, that I cannot hope to express my thankfulness on this blog.

God also led me to a most wonderful church during this time, Rock Creek Fellowship. He planted seeds for a relationship between me and my pastor, Eric Youngblood, from whom I would later receive the most intimate pastoral care and friendship that I had ever experienced.

And so, though the 2002-2003 school year would be one of the most difficult years of my college career, and one of the most costly to my grades, I ended it on a surprisingly high note. I was blessed with an inordinate amount of rich friendships, and I was beginning new relationships which would become crucial for the next two years of my life. And I had a lot of fun that spring semester, perhaps more fun than I had ever had in college up to that point.

But then the summer hit, and I had a lot of choices to make. I had given up on the idea of going to seminary, so what was I to do. Well I decided to live in a big yellow house on 41st avenue in St. Elmo (one which would have a long legacy of Covenant students) with Jason Bintz, Jason Luther, Steve Strawbridge, David Page, and Paul Nedelisky. I decided to get a job waiting tables at the Tortilla Factory. And by the end of the summer, after nearly avoiding a decision to move to East Texas and become a house parent for troubled teens (a position that I actually went to East Texas to intervew for and one that I actually accepted before I rejected), and after attending the Howard family crab feast in Silver Spring, Maryland where I met a girl named Kathy Miner, I had finally decided to raise money so that I could begin a short term missionary internship in Trnava, Slovakia by the next spring.

More on that in the next chapter.

Smallville, Iowa

I know that I mentioned this yesterday, but I have to reiterate just how much Walker, Iowa reminds me of Smallville, Kansas. This is probably most due to the fact that I am having my first experience in a small midwestern town and I have nothing else this close to my senses to compare Smallville to. It is also probably due to the fact that I am surrounded by an excessive amount of corn. Either way, my desire to be like Superman (a long, unfulfilled wish) has never been stronger.

While on the subject of Superman, let me draw the reader's attention to an exciting website which includes 20 online video blogs by Bryan Singer taking the viewer on some impressive tours behind the making of the highly aniticipated Superman Returns. I really think Superman is on the road to a major comeback in the cultural consciousness after this movie, if he isnt already with the success of Smallville and a resurgence in the success of his comics.

But on the subject of wishing I was like Superman, I just wanted to say that I would settle for not being able to fly, see through walls, or heat up my coffee with heat vision if I could somehow miraculously learn how to prepare lesson plans, design curriculum, and mold accurate and effective methods of assessment within the next two weeks without any formal training in education whatsoever.

I was saying to someone last night that if my life were an eighties movie (oh, if it were only so) then all I would need at this point was some kind of eighties montage right before classes start in which I am seen reading books, typing on my computer, and running through the Iowa cornfields while some song like "The Final Countdown" was playing in the background. If only.

Well Cono's inservice is giving me a lot of ideas but I am also overwhelmed with inadequacy. My lack of preparation is my kryptonite.

Appreciate the prayers.

Todd Willison