So it's really going to happen, after all: I am going to Iraq, and I am going to teach at the Christian K-8 school I talked about in this post.

I know, this whole ordeal has been an on-again, off-again sorta thing. I'm sorry about that. This time, though, there's a real sense of certainty: flights have been booked, and in less than a month from now, I'll actually be in Iraq. More on that in just a sec.

First, how did all of this come about, you ask? Hadn't this whole thing fallen through? Well, yes...up until two weeks ago, that is. During another dreary Wednesday at work, I'd gotten a call from the mission agency. They'd been praying/thinking/struggling through their staffing issues, and to make a long story short, they didn't feel that they should be throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. They had someone all gung-ho about going to teach at the school in Northern Iraq (i.e. me), and they'd realized that they still wanted expatriate staff to teach some of the classes and help expose the students to the Christian worldview. So the new opportunity to teach at the school was presented, and I was happy and excited to take it.

I'll be teaching humanities. (When they told me that, I got really excited, even though I'm not very well-versed in humanities...yet.) I'll teach for the spring semester, starting in January, and come back to the States for a relaxing summer, during which I'll determine if I'm up for teaching another semester. If so, then I'll go and teach during the fall, making it a whole year at the school.

Now, as for the next couple of months: as originally anticipated, I'm leaving New York at the end of this month (which is coming upon us faster than I can believe) and relocating to Nashville. The big new change now is that very soon after I get to Nashville, I'll be leaving for a brief training trip to Northern Iraq. I'll come back from that trip in time to spend Thanksgiving with family, then continue my training in Nashville for the next month. BUT, before I embark on any of this...I'm doin' like LL and goin' back to Cali. It'll be a very short trip--October 24th through the morning of the 27th--but I'm hoping to see as many of you as I can in that short period of time.

So...yeah. Again, I want to thank everyone who's been so supportive and encouraging. It means the world to me, it really does. I'm excited and nervous and scared and anxious and about 100 other things. And I know many of you will be experiencing some of those emotions as well--know that I don't mean to put you through all the emotional stress. I know not everyone agrees with what I'm doing, nor do I expect everyone to (in fact, I'd be a little worried if everyone agreed with me), but I trust that this is what I'm being called to do for the next year of my life.

Please e-mail me if you'd like to be put on the "support team" mailing list.

Thank you all so much for allowing me to share this big step with you.

I've been waiting for the "perfect moment" to make this huge announcement for a long while now, but I've come to the conclusion that such a thing doesn't exist. So no more delays. Here's what's about to happen with me:

I'm leaving New York.

Yeah, I know. If you've read even a fraction of what I've written here in the last two years, you'd think I was crazy for leaving a city that I love so dearly. Well, it gets better...or, as some might suggest, crazier:

I'm going to Iraq.

No, you read that right. I'm going to Iraq. If it's hard for you to believe that I just said that, you can imagine how hard it is for me to believe that I just said that, but that's exactly what I plan to do. I'm going to the northern (and relatively secure) part of Iraq to teach at a Christian K-8 school for the next year and a half.

What on earth made me come to this decision, you ask? Well, as you may know from reading certain lists that I've posted, I've long had a strong desire to either teach, do humanitarian work, or serve as a missionary in a third world country. I believe it's not just a strong desire, but moreover, a calling from the Lord to serve in this capacity for a period of my life. And I believe that period is now. Personally, I'm at the point where I can make this kind of short-term commitment. And I believe it's an important time to invest in the country of Iraq. The country has suffered through so much over the past three decades, and as violence screams from out of our television sets and newspapers on a near-daily basis, it's hard not to be moved with compassion for the Iraqi people. The people of the country are now rebuilding their society and regaining a sense of their identity and purpose that was taken from them during Saddam's regime, and one of the areas that will be vital to the reconstruction efforts is education.

So I intend to assist in the rebuilding of Iraq by teaching at this Christian school. I will work alongside fellow brothers and sisters in Christ--both American and Iraqi--to offer children a solid education in the Classical model in which they learn to think critically and express freely, and beyond that, to offer them an opportunity to learn of God's unending love for them.

The plan for me is this: I'm leaving New York in the beginning of November to relocate to Nashville, where I will undergo training at the organization's home office. Then, in January, I'll be deployed to Iraq. I'll work the spring semester, and get a teacher's vacation over the summer (I intend to come back to the States and just chill; maybe make another epic roadtrip, hopefully spend lots of time chillin' in NYC...Lord knows how much I'll miss this place!). Then, in September, I'll head back to Iraq, where I'll spend the entire school year on staff at CSM. I'll return from this short-term mission right around June 2007 (though I'm also envisioning a nice, lengthy excursion through Europe once I'm done with my duties at the school).

So, I know that that's a TON of information and you may still be in disbelief that I've decided to do this in the first place. One last thing I need to share with you for now: as is the case with most missionaries, I will need to raise my own financial support. All told, it'll be nearly $2,000 a month to cover my salary and various expenses--yeah, if you do the math you realize it's a LOT of money to raise, but I trust that God will provide. Here's what I'd like for you, my readers, to consider: if you, someone you know, or a church you attend might be willing to support me financially and be a part of the work I'll be doing in Iraq, please e-mail me at dave@usctrojans.com and let me know. If you can't support financially but can do so through prayer and emotional/spiritual support, please e-mail me as well. Either way, I would be so very blessed and honored to have your support.

This is easily the biggest (and yes, the craziest) decision I've made in my life--you'll surely be hearing about it more as time goes along. Excited? You bet I am. Scared? More than you can imagine (though not for the reasons that you might suspect). Needless to say, this will be quite the exercise in faith.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

John McCandlish Phillips writes a wonderful article in today's WaPo that says out loud what I've been thinking for quite a while now: what's up with the spiteful Evangelical bashing as of late? What have I and other Evangelicals like me done to be deserving of adjectives such as 'dangerous' and 'frightening'...to be deserving of accusations of starting a 'full-scale jihad' here in the States? Phillips--an Evangelical himself, and a former writer at the New York Times--expresses my sentiments exactly when he writes:

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

It's a good read, and I encourage you to check it out. I'd write more now, but I gotta run. Needless to say, this recent trend has been deeply disturbing to me. And though I'm clearly in one camp in this emerging culture war, I hate the fact that it's coming to this; I hate that it's being called a "culture war" in the first place, and that it looks like it's just going to get uglier and more divisive as time goes on.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again--I wish I was half as good a writer as James Lileks is (yes, I know he's a professional and has been doing it for years, but still). Whereas I yammered on and on earlier about my own recollections of Pope John Paul II, Lileks makes a short yet brilliant observation (you have to scroll down to his "4/4 Update" halfway down the page). I urge you to check it out yourself, but in the meantime, here's a sample of what he writes:

The Pope has shoes? Of course; shoes of the fisherman, metaphorical shoes. But real ones? You never think of the Pope putting on his shoes, tying the laces, buffing out a blemish.

There are definitely times when I feel like my writing is going to be relegated to this silly LJ for the rest of my life. Reading Lileks--as much as I love reading him--is one of those times.

As news of Pope John Paul II's death has flooded the mediasphere these past few days, I've been learning quite a bit about a man whom I knew very little about up until now.

If I'm not mistaken, I first learned about the pope--meaning the papacy in general, but also John Paul II in particular--back in '92 or '93 when I'd read that Sinead O'Conner had ripped up a picture of him on Saturday Night Live. That would make sense, since I was a good little Protestant Christian, and therefore knew nothing about the head of the Catholic church (though somehow I DID know a good deal about SNL at such an early age).

So my only recollections of the Pope over the past 13 years or so are, as you can imagine, that of an old, frail man with a weak, gravely voice, either giving the sign of the cross or reciting the Mass in Latin. It's been very surprising--and very telling of my ignorance--to hear that this guy used to be quite charming and charismatic when he first started out. Revolutionary, even. That he traveled the world--unheard of for the "prisoner of the Vatican"--and that he drew enormous, euphoric crowds as though he were a rock star. That he was a poet, a playwright, and a Ph.D in Philosophy in his pre-papacy days. And that he's given a great deal of credit for helping to bring about the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. (I blame my ignorance in this area partially on the fact that our history books in school came out just a few years after the events of the late '80s, and so they didn't offer much in the way of historical analysis, just a mere stating of the major facts.)

So it's been good to learn more about a man whose life has been an inspiration for countless others around the world. Like Tracy, though I can't say that I agreed with him on some of the issues of the Christian faith (church as an institution vs. church as the people, or the whole pope = vicar of Christ thing), I certainly admire and respect him for all that he's done in the name of the Gospel.

My heart goes out to all those who lost their church father this weekend.