If I were a betting woman...

...well, actually, I am. I play a lot of Texas Hold'em. So I have some idea of what constitutes a good wager, and what doesn't.

A bad wager puts at risk more than you can afford to lose. (What does it profit a woman to gain the whole world and lose her soul?) A bad wager risks a large sum against a proportionally small gain. Don't go all-in with your inheritance, for example, for a mess of pottage. That's a bad bet, right there.

A good wager risks a little for a similar or larger gain. A good wager only risks it all when the reward is commensurately great. Along those lines, I'm told that those who lose their lives will save them.

Many might consider it foolish to make a wager with incalculable odds. When one of the terms may either be ~ metaphorically speaking ~ either zero or infinity, there can be no rational solution to the equation. This is a strange kind of gambling.

But I chose to live, for now, "as if." I trust and hope that, whether or not my faith is rewarded in any clear-cut or concrete way, I will live a better life because of that choice. I may be wrong; if so, one day I'll remove my chips from the table and concede defeat. Until then I will be at play in the fields of the Lord, gamboling with the rest of God's fools.

On Monday I'm starting as a "special student" at Wesley Theological Seminary. I'm only taking two courses, "Orientation to Christian Theology" and "Art as Worship/Worship as Art." Because of chronic procrastination, most of the meat & potato courses were full up. That's okay, this is just a toe in the pond. I'm testing my temperature as much as the water's. We'll see how it goes.

So those of you coming here from both2and: beyond binary should know that this is going to be mostly about my academic and personal exploration of Christian life and community. No doubt the occasional cat picture or other off-topic item will pop up, but I expect it to be relatively tightly focused.

Thanks for visiting.