My grades came back and I passed all of my classes this semester, so it really does look like I'll be graduating from MCAD in December. Thank you for all of your prayers about our future; Marilyn and I have conferred and we've both concluded that we think God is leading us back to Los Angeles. I've lived there before, we have many friends there, my family and the San Bernardino Mountains are two hours away (and the Campaign mountain is even closer!), and ideally there will be the most job opportunities available for both of us there. Neither of us are crazy about continuing to live in a city, but with friends and the possibility of retreating to the mountains on any given weekend, it should be livable. Marilyn is looking into trying to get some kind of transfer to the L.A. branch of Deloitte. As for me, it's really impossible to tell what opportunities will arise (if any!) at this point. I may be showing my portfolio around again this summer (hopefully for a lot less money than last time), and I don't know what will come up during my final semester. Having said that, we're both really hoping that we can move out in December and not have to endure one more Minnesota winter. God willing, we'll be celebrating Christmas in Crestline this year.

I've been reading a couple of books on loan from the church library - God in the Dock, a collection of C. S. Lewis essays, and The Mark of Cain by Stuart Barton Babbage. The latter has been very interesting; it's an examination of the themes of anxiety, guilt, alienation and death in modern literature (in everything from Sartre and Kafka to Steinbeck and Golding), claiming that while the picture they paint is an accurate picture of humanity, it's also an incomplete one - redemption of the self, when it is at all achieved in such literature, is shown as being done by the self. The Christian knows that this is indeed a fiction (and can often testify to the fact from their own experience).

It's been a great read so far. One of the first things the author pointed out which caught my attention was in regards to the mark of Cain. In Genesis 4, God curses Cain for murdering Abel, making him into a vagabond. Cain cries out that the punishment is too much for him to bear, and that he will be killed when others know that he's been cursed by God. God responds by putting His mark on Cain as a warning to others not to kill him, lest they earn God's vengeance seven-fold. Babbage points out that even as God condemns Cain, He extends His protection over him:

God answers Cain's despairing cry with graciousness. He places a mark upon Cain to protect him from the further consequences of his own misdeeds. In His sovereign mercy God proclaims that He is not only the avenger and protector of the innocent victim but also the defender of the guilty murderer. He promises that He will restrain and set limits to the unbridled wickedness of men, thereby enabling Cain to live. In spite of his heinous crime, God places on him the mark of His ownership and possession. "The sign of Cain," says Wilhelm Vischer, "is at once a stigma and a sign of protection: anyone bearing it is publicly branded by God as a murderer of his brother; at the same time he is, by the same sign, protected as God's inviolable possession."