On Jumping Up and Down

This is Seattle like I remember it, like I remember from the first days back in 1984.  Cool September mornings, maple leaves two hands wide, the fresh watered air waking me as I loped down Mercer St. toward the Rep.  New beginnings in a new school year, children dressed in uniforms (plaid skirts for the girls) crowding the coffee shop yesterday morning, the thick, coffeed air, absolutely electric with anticipation.  “The first day of school,” they shouted, jumping up and down.

Makes me think of the young couple I married Saturday night.  After the ceremony, held on an Argosy Cruise boat out in the middle of Lake Union–a perfect day–the groom, as he tried to explain his feelings, ended up jumping up and down just like the schoolchildren did saying, “I’m so excited, I’m so excited.”

What am I jumping up and down about these days?

Got up at 4:50 this morning, hit the gym, and about 15 minutes into it, tweaked a muscle in my back.  Not jumping up and down about that.  Spent the evening yesterday in rehearsal for a play, much of it waiting for my entrance, working lines in the darkened Taproot balcony, listening again to the rawkus cackle of laughter coming from the rehearsal room.  As I wrote under my new status picture on Facebook yesterday, I’m way too serious, but I finally squeaked a few laughs out myself.  Not jumping up and down about my acting, but I could at least imagine doing so.

Truth is, there’s lots to jump up and down about.  It’s called blessing-counting.  God’s goodness and faithfulness is not always apparent to folks, nor to me,  but just now it is.  I’m sort of stunned at how He does what He does–not that I understand much about it–but the truth is, the good far outweighs the bad in the world, evidenced by the fact that the bad is so starkly wrong.  The insinuation of experience is that “good” should reign, that “good” is the major theme, and as C. S. Lewis so famously argued (or something like this) that dark is not a substance in and of itself, but is rather an absence of a substance.   I can spend my day crap-counting if I want (I’m very experienced in this vein), but I’d just as soon celebrate what I can.

How about you?  Got anything to jump up and down about?  Love?  Possibility? Maybe a creative thought just begging you to pay attention to it?  It’s September, you know.  Newness, adventure, setting out to find what God has in mind.

Time for school…