Alma Mater. Latin for ‘nourishing milk.’ Though certainly a strange term to describe where one went to college, truly my college experience was an overwhelmingly rich one. I am here now, at Houghton College in rural western New York state. Houghton is a Christian liberal arts college where I studied, among other things, Intercultural studies and linguistics. There are many things I could say about this school, but I will focus on just one. Y’know – for focus. <<insert crook-eye here>>

On Sunday nights here at Houghton, there is a wonderful ministry called Koinonia. All this ministry does (for the most part) is lead worship services on the chapel stage. Nothing compulsory, no pressure – just a come if you want sort of a thing. We have a small college, only about 1200-1400 students, but more than a third of them come out to worship on Sundays.

Now we do have compulsory chapel services – It’s a Monday/Wednesday/Friday thing and you have to go to 2/3 of them. But Koinonia draws these huge numbers of people just to worship.

I suppose I grew up believing that worship was just one component of a Church service. I guessed that worship was just to ‘butter you up’ for the preaching. I had never imagined that worship in song was of intrinsic value in and of itself. Growing up, worship had always been like a means to an end, but Koinonia was one of my first introductions to participating in a faith community where I did authentically Christian things besides “going to church.” Gathering just to worship the Lord with no ulterior motives (like boring sermons, for instance) opened up a whole new world of spirituality for me. Ah the old days.

I reckon this is all I have to say for now.

The long circuitous route I am making in the weeks to come

Well my life is swiftly becoming worthwhile. After much heartache and a bout with hopelessness, I am indeed going on my last hurrah trip around the northeast. I could not be more excited. My itinerary is the following

Thursday 11th, Northampton MA to see Ben, Laura and family, then on to Bangor ME to see Justin, amy and family

Friday 12th, Newport VT to see Elsbeth and her husband Paul

Saturday 13th, Rochester NY to see Henry and Debbie

Sunday 14th, Buffalo NY to see Jer and Alicia (perhaps Shannon and other Buffaloans), then onto Houghton NY, to see Tineke and Susanna

Monday-Friday 15-19, stay in Houghton and visit all sorts of people

Saturday 20, Jer and Alicia’s wedding

Sunday-Wednesday 21-24, Hamilton ON, to see Ben and Crysty

Thursday 25, Back home to Torrington

I just found out this evening that I am able to leave tomorrow morning, so neither Ben and Laura nor Justin and Amy know that I am coming yet. Thank God for cell phones!

The Lord is so kind to me. He always comes through and I love him so much. Oh dear dear friends of mine, I am coming!

The Big Kahuna

Well, the day has finally arrived, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland has been switched on. I can’t imagine who might be reading this who might not know about CERN and the LHC, but it is the largest machine in the world and the greatest science experiment ever devised by humankind. It is truly a tribute to the achievements of the human race.

I am a lover of science and religion. Religion and science seem to have a hard time playing nice together, because they play by very different rules and have very different standards by which they judge the world around them. But science is truly a gift from the hand of God. We as human beings can come to know the depths of the mysteries of the universe he created. He laid it all out at the foundation of the universe, and we are discovering the whats and whys of his brilliant masterstrokes.

The LHC is designed to recreate conditions that occured in the next instant after the beginning of the universe, and then to take pictures of what happens next. The great explosion of light and power described so eloquently in Genesis chapter 1 as “Let there be light” is the focus of humanity’s gaze for the next months and years after today. The LHC is a kind of a cosmic ‘Wayback Machine’ to see how that most incredible of all displays of power was formed into what we see today.

One thing that I often muse on is the names of all our particles. There are Hadrons, Protons, Neutrons, Baryons, Mesons, Quarks, Leptons, Electrons, Neutrinos, Bosons, Photons, Gluons, and even theoretical particles like the Higgs Boson or even the Graviton! My muse is this: when God created the universe, he had a name for all these things. When he dreamed up creation, the planned beforehand how all of these would be woven together to make the universe make sense. I bet those names were very beautiful.

Well, that’s one solid profound thought from me today. Raise your glasses to this new triumph of humanity, seeking one more insight into the person of God and how he stitched this universe together.

The Warner Theatre

I’m back in my hometown of Torrington, Connecticut. I love Connecticut, truly it is on of the most beautiful places I have ever been. It’s so great.

The name of this post come from a (very) limited edition board game, a monopoly clone that our town was selling as part of some downtown revitalization. Somewhat historic, one of the main attractions of Torrington is our huge art deco movie theatre, the Warner Theatre. It has since been converted to regular stage venue, with plays, shows, concerts, etc. The Warner was the ‘Boardwalk’ of Torringtonopoly. This is unrelated to the rest of the blog post.

Aside from the clear and obvious first-priority of seeing and greeting friends and family, am have come to Torrington in search of riches. Well, for money. I am actually considering (gasp Kyle Nagy!) taking out a personal loan at my local bank to “tie up” a few financial loose ends (to the relief of Brent Chamberlain and others). I’ll let y’all know how that goes.

There are two people in particular whom I wish to see while I am in Torrington. The first is Zachariah Patterson. Zach and I were best friends in high school, and is now almost engaged to my sister (the extent of that almost is unclear, but it’s coming along somewhere). He is a brilliant guy, a delight to talk with, and very reformed. He is what Clark Pinnock would call a paleo-Calvinist, holding fast to the Westminster confession, etc. He may even be Dutch reformed! (which I realize is different from Netherlands reformed, as the great Cornelius Hegeman taught me)

The other happens to be his uncle, Norm Patterson (Jr). Norm Patterson has been one of the people who has poured into me spiritually for many years, even going back to middle school when I first went to the church where he preached. He is a bold man of conviction and passion. He is a family man with four home-schooled children and a remarkable wife Debbie. Norm has taught me much about zealously pursuing God with all my heart and mind – probably my great love of theology today came from him in those pre-college days. Visiting with him is truly one of the highlights of my time before going to Korea.

As far as going to Korea goes, all I have left is the visa, which should be taken care of in the next week or so. I have to go down to fabulous New York City to get it, and you’ll be sure to know how that goes.

Well, this is officially my second foray into the wild world of bloging – ah, the blessed Blogosphere. There are a number of preliminary comments that I will now set out to explain. Perhaps you might like to grab a snack as we go through these formalities.

I think it is only honest to begin by telling you, dear readers, that I do not, as yet, have by own computer. This is fine while I am mooching off friends in the various cities I hope to be visiting, but I cannot promise anything like regular postings until I own a computer of my very own. Given my first failed blogging experiment, I’m not sure I can promise writing more after I get a computer, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

So Why am I starting a blog, and whom is its audience? Well, as most of you may know, I am about to make one of the greatest transitions of my life. I am moving to Seoul, South Korea to teach English at an elementary school there. This blog is intended for my friends and any who would like to keep up with my travels, feelings, experiences, adventures, misadventures, debacles, and, of course, hair-brained schemes.

Where did this blog get it’s name? The name is a reference to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the Joss Whedon musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, which I watched with some good friends at my going away party some weeks ago. It is also a tribute to Charleen and Jesse Wells, who gave me one of my most beloved monikers, Doctor Fiorello, owing to my Sudd-sized store of random information that seems to come in handy in all sorts of situations.

When am I going to Korea?Well here’s the deal: Though I have already signed a contract with a school in Seoul, I have not yet gotten my Visa. I hope to do this in the weeks to come. The general USA limit is my attendance at the wedding of Alicia Walmus and Jeremy Clifton, two of the finest people I know, in the great city of Buffalo, New York on September 20th.

What will be the content of this blog? Well, though I initially wanted it to be an exclusively video blog, it didn’t seem right to postpone its creation until I obtained my own computer. I imagine there will be video posts at some point. I think this blog can be appropriately described as a collection of posts on a continuum between deeply theological/philosophical thoughts and extended facebook status updates. It may include travel plans and itineraries also. The long and short of it is, there are many who want their regular dose of Christopher Fiorello. And by crackie, they are going to get it!

This blog will (hopefully) have no overarching theme. I have had the opportunity to read a good many blogs in my day and I appreciate (and celebrate) the many approaches. No preference will be given to the profound or the inane. It’s a blog about what I’m up to, what i’m thinking about, and generally what’s going on. This blog is a conversation with me.

How emergent of me.

Why am I going to Korea? I have answered this question to many people so far and I’m sure I will again. I always say that there are many reasons why I am going, so it seems like it would be good to list them out. Let’s see how far I get.

1. I want the money. The most necessary (though not sufficient) reason for my going to Korea is money. For my undergraduate degree, I attended fabulous Houghton College. Though wonderful in so many ways, it cost a pretty penny. And pretty penny – modest financial aid = still a pretty penny. I’m doing this for the money, to pay off my small mountain of college debt, to be free for whatever I might need to be free for in the future. Though 18 year-old Chris made the decision for 28 and 38 year-old Chris to go into such enormous debt, 24 year-old Chris is going to try to help them out.

2. I want to do what I have been trained to do. At Houghton, my major was ‘Intercultural Studies with a Concentration in Linguistics.” The climax of this major was a semester of studying abroad in the great nation of Tanzania, the spring of my junior year. I have a great love for other cultures, other languages, and new experiences in new worlds. Tanzania opened my eyes to what is absolutely a whole new world for this insular American. Since graduating I have been on staff at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. It was great there, but it did not have the cultural or linguistic immersion I needed.

3. I want to develop skill in teaching. I know that I have both a calling and a gifting to become a teacher. I love to do it and I have real talent and potential, but we all know that talent and potential don’t go very far. I need to develop real skill by experience. I need classroom hours and lesson plans and frustration and joys of teaching. I spent last school year at The Daniel Academy, which experience clued me into just how far I need to go. Moreover, my good friend Dr. Benjamin Hegeman, a missionary to Benin (among many other things), told me on a number of occasions that the way to get good a teaching is to teach very young children. He said that if he could do missions in Benin all over again, he would have every one of his pastors be elementary school teachers first. This is now my current aspiration.

4. I want to do something hard. There are many jobs and lifestyles that a body could pursue. Any one of these has the potential to become a career and/or provide for a family and be productive. But the wildness in me wants to do something hard. I don’t want to just coast through life I don’t want to live from paycheck to paycheck without saving. I don’t want my life to be looking forward to weekends and pizza and movies. I want to live! I want to achieve. I want to turn all the potential that has been invested in me by God, by my family, by my friends and by my own hard-spent-yet-to-have-earned money – I want to turn it into something great. I want to live a great life and that only comes by doing hard things.

5. I want to become a mature person. I can feel it. At 24 years of age, I can feel my life slipping away from me. The culture of chilaxin’ and video games, of paycheck to paycheck and spending money I don’t have cannot sustain even my own life. I know that I need to… I really can bring myself to say it… I need to grow up. I have grown up a lot – during college, during the two year since, but I really need to grow up. I need to build my life into something I’m proud of. I want to spend my hours, my days, my weeks and my years doing what it takes to turn my life into what I want it to be. If I can just barely support my self right now, how can I support a family? How can I spend my money wisely? It’s in the decisions I make today. And this is a big one.

6. Some of my best friends are there now. I mostly met Ryan and Carolyn at Houghton in Tanzania. Through a tumble of relational whatnot and many twists and turns they have become some of my closest friends. You may notice that I call many people some of my closest friends. In fact, you who are reading this may think ‘I am one of Chris’ closest friends’. Well, yes. I have been blessed with many wonderful people in my life and you all know who you are and how much you mean to me. But I think the moment that I decided to go was when I was on the phone with Ryan back in March or so. Long story short, I am going to Korea to journey with this couple for a while. It’s going to be great.

7. Learning Korean will be very useful. Being at IHOP-KC, I met a myriad of Koreans. There are Korean missionaries all over the world. Koreans are just good people. If I ever get a translator job for the US government, Korean is a language they pay for. Learning Korean is a stepping stone to learning Chinese, since 40 percent of the roots of Korean words come from Mandarin.

I think I’ll stop at seven. Seems like a good complete number.