Tonight was the first time in a while that I went out for a walk without an umbrella.  We had a beautiful sunset, which was a nice way to wrap things up before classes start.  The rest of the day was a balance of meetings, recording lectures and devotionals, and doing other last-minute things to get ready for tomorrow.  It was a good way to end break, though.  And it was fine to go for a long walk without an umbrella.

The last half of the walk I played some Switchfoot.  It’s odd to think that the band is not part of my students’ musical background.  Turns out that switched happened three or four years ago.  I still play one of their songs, “The Blues,” for class.  The other song, that I’ve loved since hearing it at a Donald Miller conference many years ago, is “Restless.”  At the time I didn’t know of its roots in the vocabulary of Augustine.  Now it’s a song that taps into a couple of different streams of thought and feeling.

Here’s Jon Foreman, the band’s lead singer, doing a live version of the song a few days ago as a kind of encouragement during Our Current Moment.