Hello You See Kids Readers.
Today I began writing nonfiction again. You can find it at a new site.
I’ll be putting up at least one nonfiction piece a week. If you want to subscribe to the new site, scroll to the bottom and click “Follow”.
My short fiction will still be posted at shortfictionbreak.com. I usually post there on Sunday nights.
Much love,
Jeff
“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.” – Abraham Joshua Heschel
Many of my prayers are inspired by moments of need, or fear, or frustration, or worry. I come to God asking for something. For security, protection, peace, money, a solution.
Or I’ll be driven to prayer by the needs of others. I hear someone is sick, or sad, or in need and I will pray. In these moments prayer is an act of compassion. It is a confession that the problems others face are to big for me to handle. This maybe the closest I get to what Heschel is talking about.
While these are fine reasons to pray they aren’t awe inspired or humble.
I long to see the world as Heschel saw it. I long to be in wonder of life, in awe of things around me. Sadly though I typically am to consumed with what is in front of my own nose to see what God has made or is up to. When I was a child I used to love to look at the clouds and imagine them to be different things: a dragon, a dog, a tree, a monster eating ice cream. I don’t look at the clouds any more.
Heschel’s quote reminds me of what prayer should be – an act of worship. He calls me to discover what it means to be in awe of life and respond by speaking to the creator about it. When I think on Heschel’s statement I am ashamed at how much I take for granted and how much I act like I deserve.
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This post is the 4th in a series I’m calling 60in60 – 60 quotes that have inspired me in 60 days.
“If you screw it up, no one is going to die on the table.”
Dad did a lot of high risk OB/GYN surgery. The work gave him a unique perspective on life.
He used to love to tell this story: Once a friend of his who was a seminary professor was having lunch with Dad and some other high risk OB/GYN docs Dad worked with. After listening to the group of doctors talk for a few minutes the seminary professor made the comment, “You are all very earthy people.” Dad said the mood suddenly shifted from jovial to tense when one of Dad’s partners retorted sharply, “Earthy! Why don’t you spend two hours putting your head and hands where we put our head and hands, get yourself all covered in blood and crap (he didn’t say crap), only to have your patient die on the table, and we will see how sparkly shinny clean you come out dam it!” Dad said after a second of silence the whole table bust into laughter and everyone returned to their previous conversations.
My father was an amazing man. Not only did he pioneer several life saving surgical techniques and write countless articles/books (his CV was like a novel); he also helped established the medical system for the countries of Ghana and Nigeria, fought for the rights of people with Down’s syndrome in the U.S., and waged a war on injustice on multiple fronts (a battle which finally took his life).
Just before my freshman year of high school my family moved from Ann Arbor to New Orleans. On the first day of football practice, which started a few weeks before school, I was freaking out. Everything was new and different. I didn’t know any one. And I had never played football before. As we pulled into the school’s parking lot Dad put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and said, “Jeff, don’t sweat it. If you screw it up, no one is going to die on the table.”
The saying stuck. It became something he said to me anytime I was stressed. Now it hangs on my the wall in my office to help me keep things in perspective.
It reminds me to take risks, because its okay if they don’t work – no one is going to die.
It reminds me not to take myself to seriously. My daily decisions aren’t life an death ones.
It reminds me its okay when I fail. Almost everything is fixable.
I hope this thought from Dad encourages you today. Go take risks. Go try new things. Go screw it up. No one is going to die on the table.
That is unless you are a high risk surgeon. No risky behavior or failure aloud for you.
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This is #3 in a series of posts I’m writing about quotes which have defined and/or inspired me. I’m calling the series 60in60 – 60 quotes in 60 days.
Two things converged on me to create this idea.
Recently I had to move my office. Even though the trip was only down the hall and around the corner it was still emotional. Which was weird because the move is actually a good thing. A Korean church is going to begin sharing our building and their head pastor needs office space near the reception area, so I gave up my room. I’m excited about the church coming in and gave up my office with total joy in knowing it was the right thing to do. But still it was rough. I think because as I moved my office I remembered all the other times I’ve had to move – some of those weren’t so great. I did okay until I started moving the quotes. All the emotions of those moments came rushing up on me. In my office I have a wall of quotes and pictures. The quotes came from things I’ve read or heard while working in churches. Each one has shaped how I see the world. As I pealed them off the wall and thought back on all the times I’ve had to move them before a deep urge to spend time reflecting on each one was birthed in me.
At the same time, I’ve been looking for a challenge. Last year I did a blogging challenge with the Domino Project called “Trust 30.” For 30 days every morning there was a blogging prompt that went out based on Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” I loved the challenge of writing every morning. Recently I’ve been longing for that opportunity again but I haven’t been able to find a blogging challenge that really excited me.
Last week these two things came together in my head. I want to reflect on the quotes on my wall and I want a blogging challenge. So for the next 60 days I’m going to write about one quote a day. I’ll do my best to keep it short. Hope you enjoy this journey through my twisted logic.
I’ve been listening to a brilliant podcast called 99% Invisible. It’s about design, and architecture, and all the things around us that we don’t usually pay attention to. Each episode is about 10 minutes long. I highly recommend it.
The most recent episode was called “The Arsenal of Exclusion“. It discussed design elements in urban landscapes that city planners use to increase or restrict people’s access to different spaces. In the episode the host and a city planner take a tour through a neighborhood in Baltimore to examine the different weapons of exclusion used to keep neighborhood’s segregated. They cover things like street design and permitted parking. It is fascinating. I feel like after listening to it I had a whole new understanding of why my city is so segregated.
It brought to mind something I noticed in Baltimore when we were living down town. We lived in Federal Hill. It was a nice neighborhood. Most of the people living in it (not us) made well over three figures. This was before the bubble burst so housing renovation was crazy. Everyone was buying old row homes, gutting them, and bringing them into a new glory. It seemed there weren’t enough row homes to go around so the bubble was slowly expanding west.
Immediately west of Federal Hill, across Hanover Street, is a neighborhood called Sharp Leadenhall. It is predominately African American and most of the people in the neighborhood lived below the poverty line (I know this because I worked with feeding ministries that there who provided free groceries, ran an after school program at the PAL center there, and I attended many of the neighborhood association meetings). It was a sharp contrast to Federal Hill, but the developers were working hard to change that. I walked the streets of Sharp Leadenhall routinely and it felt like every day another row home had sold and some developer was gutting it to rehab.
The fast pace at which Sharp Leadenhall was being gentrified made people look to the next neighborhood west, a neighborhood known as Pig Town, as a place for potential investment. Pig Town resembled Sharp Leadenhall in a lot of ways. Many of my Federal Hill friends who were in the development game were buying houses there hoping after Sharp Leadenhall flipped, Pig Town would become like Federal Hill. (No one thought the bubble would burst. It seemed like a golden age of renovation that would never slow.)
I know people who had success in Sharp Leadenhall. The neighborhood definitely changed. If the bubble hadn’t burst I imagine Sharp Leadenhall would have been completely consumed by the Federal Hill crowd. I never met anyone who had success in Pig Town and the neighborhood stayed the same. In fact I don’t think it would have changed, not like Sharp Leadenhall anyway.
After listening to 99% Invisible’s Arsenal of Exclusion I think I understand why. There are two weapons of exclusion I observed in my time there.
First there were the stadiums and the Inner Harbor. Federal Hill (along with Locust Point, Otterbien, and the Riverside Park area) are an island. On there west flank are the O’s and Raven’s stadiums along with the vast parking lots the facilities require. North is the Inner Harbor area. East and south are blocked separated from the rest of the city by a river and by I-95. The South Baltimore peninsula is isolated. Sharp Leadenhall fell within that perimeter. Pig Town was outside of it.
Second (now I must be honest, this is a little over my head) were property taxes. I remember sitting in a Sharp Leadenhall neighborhood association meeting which featured a city tax agent. They called him “the tax man.” He explained to the neighborhood that if they owned their own homes they should sell because their property taxes would increase slowly as the value of homes around them increased.
I’m still looking for more weapons in the arsenal. It’s a morbid curiosity for me after hearing that podcast. If you are in Baltimore and you see any let me know. If I find any new ones I’ll put them up. I’ve started reading this blog and I’m looking forward to their book in the fall of 2012.
Yesterday I finished the rough draft of a paper I’ve been working on. It is one in a series. Not sure what will become of them yet. This one came out to be 12,000+ words. I’ll share it once I’m done editing. Here is an excerpt from it.
Only in the environment of loving others can we cast off the chains of sin. Discipleship is not an act of isolation. Rather freedom from sin grows in the soil of mission. Only once we have joined God on His mission to reunite the world to Himself can we live as priests. If we want to pursue holiness we must throw ourselves fully into serving others. We must make sacrificial, die-on-the-cross-for-others love the motivation behind all our actions. Paul affirmed this in his letter to the Galatians. Writing to Christians struggling with whether or not they should pacify the ritual and rule following religious folk by being circumcised, Paul said:
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope.
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love…You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law. The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. (Excerpts from Galatians 5)
It is worth taking a moment to break down Paul’s argument a piece at a time:
I’ve spent years sitting in classrooms learning the rituals and rules, listening to sermons explaining how various aspects of the manual work, and journaling about what a horrible sinner I am hoping the force of my inner strength will crush the idols around me – all in the name of discipleship. The ironic truth is all those things served to focus me more on myself and in the end re-enslave me making the Law my master. If I had just gotten up from the pew, walked out of the classroom, focused less on myself and taken the hungry homeless man on the corner to lunch I would have given the Spirit much more furtile soil to work in.
We are going to take a break from the sermon debate today while Brady prepares his response. He’s getting married soon so he is appropriately distracted. We’ll get back at it soon. Now its time for something completely different..
I’ve met a lot of Christians over the last three years that are like me. We are disenfranchised with the institution of church. We don’t like the social and political positions the title “Christian” is assumed to carry. We live missionally/incarnationally. Although we might attend worship services, we struggle to find life in them. More often than not we are seeking community outside the institution. We are uncomfortable with ambition for church growth. We are wary of systems of authority. We have a passion to see things change. And we don’t like labels (which makes what is about to follow highly ironic).
I don’t know enough about church history to know if people like us are new on the scene or if we are always hanging around. But I feel like we are growing in number…in Baltimore anyway.
A few weeks ago I was trying to describe this group to someone and I was at lost for a label. So I sent an email to a bunch of people I know that fit this description and asked them what a good name was for believers like us. Here are some of the names they came up with:
I don’t plan to ever use any of these. I don’t know that labels are helpful. But I think the exercise was interesting because it reveals how we think about ourselves.
What would you call us?
The apartment had been hot for a week. It didn’t seem to matter how low we set the air conditioner, the poor thing was unable to keep up.
Well, that’s not completely true. My and Zach’s room was fine…cold actually. It seemed only the central common room, kitchen, and Peter and Phil’s room that were suffering.
Every time I came into the apartment I pondered the problem, “Maybe the air conditioner is going out? One of us should go check the filter, or call the apartment complex, or something.” But none of us had time for that. We were all extremely active juniors in college. Between classes, studying, social activities, and church stuff none of us had time to address minor problems like half the apartment being 90+ degrees.
It’s amazing what problems you can put off until tomorrow when your busy.
It was a Thursday afternoon when everything blew up. Phil and I were sitting on the couch sweating. At first we were both sitting in silence roasting together. Then Phil let go a loud, “AHHHHH! It is freak’in hot bro!” We were both erupted in hysterical laughter. The humidity had driven us to delirium.
That was when an incredibly sweaty Peter erupted from his room clutching something tightly in his fist. Lines of anger ran across his forehead. “Where is Zach?” he said with an eerie calm.
“What’cha got there?” Phil said with a grin.
Peter released his death grip to reveal a crumpled piece of notebook paper with holes poked in it. I stared at his hand in confusion until Peter pointed to the vent in the living room and said, “Look!” There behind the vent was another piece of paper. Peter darted into his room and re-emerged with a screw driver. Grabbing a chair from the kitchen to stand on, he went to work on the vent.
Like clock work the front door opened and in came Zach. “Oh man. You found them.” he said to a glaring Peter.
“Why would you do this?” Peter said with rage.
“When I said my room was hot you said it was tough luck. I don’t believe in luck so I decided to fix it.” Zach said with a grin.
My mind flashed back to a conversation I had witnessed two weeks ago in the kitchen. Zach was complaining that our room was always hot while Peter and Phil’s room seemed cool. Peter had made some smart comment about it and then Zach had left the room in silence. At the time I didn’t think anything of the silence. We were tight friends. Poking fun at each other was no big deal. Looking up at Peter on a chair and then looking over at Zach’s grin, I realized that Zach’s silence had not been acceptance and defeat but rather the birth of a plan. Zach had a twisted genius we all loved, laughed at, and feared.
All Peter’s rage was gone. Now only shock remained. He said, “Bro, you can’t just do stuff like this.”
Zach smiled and said, “I won’t do that again.” Then he went to his room leaving us to wonder at the emphasis he had placed on the word “that”.
Peter looked at Phil and I confused. Phil started laughing. I laughed too and said, “I’m going to bed. It’s cooler in there. See you guys in the morning.”
I’ve been processing what it means to have a lifestyle centric definition of church a lot lately. If you want to jump to the beginning of the conversation click here.
Many will claim that one of the biggest problem with the American church is the consumer mentality of attendees; and I agree. We come. We sit. We listen. We leave. We choose our church by whether or not we have been “fed” by the preacher, or moved by the music, or made comfortable by the security and appearance of the children’s programs.
Some of you right now, who don’t believe you have a consumer mentality, are wondering what is wrong with picking a church by their children’s program.
Am I saying that we should accept crappy unsafe programs for our kids and nobly attend a church that is broken and doesn’t inspire us simply because it is around the corner? Am I saying that the solution to consumerism is that we all dutifully attend worship services we find irrelevant? Am I saying that to avoid consumerism we should practice rituals simply because they are provided and not judge their quality?
No. That is not what I’m saying.
What I am saying is that we shouldn’t define ourselves as “attendees” to begin with. Defining ourselves as attendees of a church assumes an activities centric definition of church – that being part of a church means participating in a set of activities. There is no where for this definition of church to lead accept to consumerism.
The first wave focused on combating this consumerism mentality I observed (keep in mind that I am only in my early 30’s) was the push for “service.” The theory went something like, “We need to combat consumerism by getting attendees serving in the church.” So we, the church leadership, provided tons of places to serve – the worship team, sound team, ushers, Sunday School, ministries in the community, etc… The concept was that if you could move people from sitting in the worship gathering to serving in a ministry you would encourage spiritual health and shift people away from consumerism.
But for many of us this only created a funnel effect where most showed up to watch a few serve like crazy. And in my experience it didn’t heal the consumerism. Many of those serving like crazy still wanted to be consumers. They had simply stepped up like martyrs to take on the responsibilities no one else wanted.
Now we are in the middle of this “missional” conversation. The theory seems to be that to combat consumerism we need to teach and encourage people to see themselves as missionaries. We need to call them to “be Jesus” in their communities.
Sadly, unless there is a direct assault on our definition of “church”, I fear consumerism will continue to plague us. We must address this broken understanding that the church is a set of activities we participate in. As long as church is defined by our activities we will operate as consumerism.
Addressing this I’m learning is no simple task. Forget addressing it with others…I’m simply talking about combating the consumerism within me. You see, shifting to a lifestyle centric definition of church – in which being part of a church means living a common lifestyle in the world – is rough. It demands a massive amount of personal responsibility on my part. Showing up to stuff is so much easier.
When we first started the Thingy (the church Wendy and I are a part of that gathers on Monday nights) this was a major struggle for all of us. Shifting from the centralized leadership providing activities focused on spiritual growth to taking responsibility for our own spirituality was rough. A year and a half into this journey some of us still talk about it. I constantly catch myself planning big events or asking myself, “So when will a time come when I can just show up to something?” There was even a period of detox for all of us – a time of intense frustration and pain where we longed to just be consumers.
At the same time. While the transition away from consumerism has been hard, I’ve never felt more alive in my faith. I’ve never been closer to Christ. I’ve never felt so in tune with the New Testament. For so long I would read scripture and feel my spiritual life was completely disconnected from it. There were so many things Jesus said that made no sense to me. Moving to a lifestyle centric definition of church was like removing a veil. All of a sudden passages that never made sense started connecting. All of a sudden I felt like a part of the story, not just a reader.
The shift is hard…but it is worth it.
I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a lot of change during this past year. I’ve watched individuals and institutions struggled with massive shifts in thinking and behavior. Seeing all of this go on around me has helped me reflect on my own transformation and how I operate as a change agent…and I think I’m learning some stuff…maybe.
Recently I was listening to the Radio Lab pod-cast and picked up a phrase that has brought more depth to my understanding of how change works – “adjacent possible.”
By the by, Radio Lab is fantastic. If you have and inquisitive mind and currently aren’t listening to it, I would recommend you go try it out. Not only is it entertaining, its brilliantly informative and creative.
The episode that brought about my current enlightenment is called “What Does Technology Want?” It is a conversation between Robert Krulwich (one of the Radio Lab hosts), Steven Johnson (author of Where Ideas Come From), and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants?). One of the things they talk about in the episode is how ideas develop. They make the point that people in medieval times could not have conceived of the internet because the necessary steps to the idea of the internet hadn’t been made yet. Ideas, they explained, develop through the “adjacent possible.” Change is evolutionary. To achieve something the proper steps of development have to happen first.
One of the deacons at Valley, a brilliant leader who I admire, pointed this out to me earlier in the year. We were talking about large system change in the organization and he made the statement, “You have to take people there in steps. Before they can do it themselves they need to see someone else doing. They need transitional moves. They can’t just take a huge leap from A to B.”
I’ve observed that this is true about personal change as well, not just organizational change.
I will put myself up as my own example. Why were Wendy and I able to embrace the ideas of guys like Alan Hirsch and Neil Cole so quickly? How were we able to turn on a dime, move away from institutional church, and start thinking about being the church differently? There were two steps that made the evolution in our thinking possible.
1) My parents were missionaries. We heard and saw the missionary lifestyle through them. Missional theology therefore wasn’t such a hard leap.
2) We experience a form of the Cell church model while we were in college. It made the shift from institutional thinking to more organic thinking easier.
So now I’m really struggling with this statement – “before a leap from A to B can be made by an individual or an organization the adjacent possible has to be present.”
If this is true, should I be approaching change differently? The vision-centric approach I’ve been taught says put the new picture out their and have people conform to it. Give them the big end vision and start working to it. The adjacent possible model (I think) would argue, don’t flood people with the whole all at once. Work them in a series of steps putting the next necessary step of evolution before them, helping them move toward the goal a little at a time.
The problem is, this concept assumes we can figure out what the steps are toward the goal. Is that even possible.?
Welcome to the chaos of my mind. Pull up a chair and join in. I would love to hear the thoughts of others.
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