Separating

Earlier this week I undertook a project I had too long neglected: the simple task of organizing the papers I spent five years of college writing.
Why didn't I just throw them in a box, I kept asking myself. Or better yet, chuck 'em?
I hoped these papers would serve as a chronicle of my journey of the written word, and also a comfort in knowing that not everything I have written has ended up in the trash bin before reaching completion.
But why did it take so long?
I discovered that the delay stemmed from an issue of control. That and a little disease we call procrastination.

If you're like me, you like things to appear neat and orderly. Sometims I spend half my days off organizing the house so I can get twenty minutes of writing done. A pathetic ratio of productivity, but how can I expect to have a clear mind when everything around me is cluttered with "life"?

The simple truth is that life is seldom neatly separated, which makes it difficult to come across life altruisms. No subject is simply "black" or "white." There will always be a darker black and a brighter white, you know?

So I have come to accept that if I just pick up the pen and run with what's in my head, I might not say precisely what I mean to say, at least not at first. Someone else is bound to have a more definitive, educated opinion. They might even--gasp!--disagree with me.

Even so, one of my fondest memories when writing for the Digest one semester at Trinity College was when a female student told me she had read my latest article, an opinion piece on Michael Jackson.
"Oh good!" I said, beaming that someone had given my writing the time of day.
"Yeah," she responded, as a thoughtful expression came accross her face. "I don't think I liked it."
It's natural to become defensive when someone challenges our opinions, the paradigms we have constructed which rule our world.
But the reward for someone's response after having thought about what you said is well worth it.

So here's to not holding on so tightly to categories. Different opinions are what make life a many-colored experience.

First Church of Chris

I listen as my coworker makes avocados into thin slices for sushi roles. He slices and talks as if both actions were rudimentary to life.
As I stand idly behind my espresso machine where I work, I let him field a question that is a follow-up to a discussion we had earlier that week.

 “So, Chris. Other than curiosity, or devout faith, why read the Holy Books?”
Admittedly, asking him this makes me a little nervous. Chris subscribes to no organized religion as I do, yet he told me recently he was rereading the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. I don't think I've read through the entire Bible even one time.

"First, to understand human motivation," Chris answers, going on to explain that there are many themes that tie into each other in these books, and the truth of them that connects with its readers is why the books have survived for so long.

Second, he explains, to touch the divine in all of us. Whether it comes from within or above, humans are gifted with a spiritual capacity. By reading the holy books we enrich that crucial aspect of our nature.

Finally, to show we don’t vilify a particular belief.
Chris is very conscience how his children perceive his life path, and this includes where he turns his attention to learn about the world.

“So it’s about respect,” I say concerning the last reason.
Although we may not share the same philosophical passion, by educating ourselves about what our brothers and sisters around the world profess, we not only better understand them but show that we respect where their faith comes from enough to know about its source.

Having no avocados of my own to slice, I idly handle the groupheads.
Chris’s honest thoughts make me think about how often people spend so much energy bashing the beliefs and actions of others that they come away having no idea where the other person is coming from.

This energy would be better spent furthuring one’s knowledge about his own beliefs.
Or even better, to live them out.

“You’re in my church now,” Chris says as he begins pruining a bunch of green onions. Smiling, I exit the First Church of Chris.

Then Chris lifts an eyebrow at me one last time.
“You know, reading the Book of the Dead once was enough for me,” he said.
"You can pretty much sum it up in one phrase: 'you are dead, you are dead, you are dead, go and be free, because you are dead.'

I am dead? Well, that takes a load off.
Guess I no longer have to spend time judging people.

playing the god card

Steve came into my dorm room with a cloudy look on his face. He had just asked a girl out on a date, and judging by his muffled cursing, I had a feeling I knew how it went.

"Tina said no," he said, striking the desk with his fist.
"I hate it when they play the God card!"

Playing the God card, though frustrating for Steve's romantic life, was an understandable ploy for girls on campus to use. As students we were encouraged to make career decisions based on our faith. Why not our dating paths as well?

It is an easy frame of mind to fall into. With so many young Christians on campus, we all challenged each other not to be impacted by culture, but to influence it for the glory of God. To accomplish this our thinking had to be faith-centered, influencing our actions. Often our word choice reflected this thinking as well.

There are two main reasons why being rejected by "the God card" is such a tough blow.
First, how do you plead your case when the other person is deferring to the highest authority? "Actually, uh, Tina, God told me we are supposed to be dating..."
Second, we all knew that using such God-coded language was a roundabout way of saying, "I don't like you." At that point it's just a slap in the face.

But why the temptation to use the God card at all? Why not just straight-shoot?
As a religious person I can relate to the desire to be inside God's head. The Bible speaks strongly against those who act against God's will, making it easy for the believer to try too hard to know what God's will is in every category of their lives, even every moment.
Whereas it can be helpful to remind ourselves of our core values, can someone really expect to know what God wants them to be doing every second of the day?

I don't think so. Vaguely speaking, I think God's ways are higher than ours, above our understanding, and that's ok.

The Bible is a large and extensive book. In it people are given teaching how to live well, and many of these are general principles that we have to take and use our brains to figure out application for our lives.

I think that any time we claim to know what God wants in a specific situation we have to be wary in how we carry ourselves. Because the truth is that other people are praying and reading their Bible just as carefully as we are!

This goes back to a general principle of how people live out their faith. What if we claim to do something because God told us, and in fact God didn't?

In my opinion it's a little presumptious, and even worse, lazy rhetoric.

when success becomes expected

If you want to read a good biography and you enjoy sports history, read When Pride Still Mattered, Lombardi, the Classic that Inspired the Broadway Play by David Maraniss.

My wife gave it to me for Valentines Day, even though she hates football. She's such a sweetheart.

Vince Lombardi is immortalized for the incredible success his teams had in Green Bay in the 60s. But like many successful figures, it was a long way to the top.

After years of coaching high school and college football teams, Lombardi came on as an assistant coach for the New York Football Giants, though it was the head coaching job he coveted. Maraniss describes the beginning of the 1956 season as a moment of confidence in the organization, one of those special tiems when success becomes expected (p. 175).

Growing up in a small town in the midwest, there were sports opportunities aplenty for me and my friends. Although I played on my share of poor teams, in junior high my soccer team went an entire season without loosing a game. We were undefeated! We all signed a soccer ball, and I like to think that ball still has a place in the trophy case among other accolades of that small private school.

Then there was the experience of the early Brett Favre years in Packer Country, when the entire state endured losing to the Cowboys in the playoffs for three straight years (!), only to make it to the big game the next two.

Success can be enjoyable, but it rarely comes without sacrafice.
What is it that we sacrafice on our way to achieving material success?

I often think about this tension in the context of family, career, and personal goals.
Which should come first? Our society values each of these.

I think that for most "family" is the obvious answer, but strangely the way we attempt to put family first is often by advancing our career.
And we can't ignore personal goals, because if we don't develop our own gifts and hobbies, we limit the ways others can enjoy our skills and experiences.

I think the key is to be conscious of how we view success, and to realize it is often a passing moment.
Enjoy it while it lasts, but realize that prestige isn't everything.

sustainability

When people in the South are reading something, they will often instead say that they are "reading on" said item of interest.

Well, I have been reading on Barbara Kingsolver, whom I will endearingly refer to as "Barbara" from here on.

Now Barbara has some great ideas. In Small Wonder (2002), she wrote essays encouraging Americans to rethink their response to the tragedy of 9/11. Instead of arrogantly assuming terrorists "hate us becuase we're free," she suggested there are ways in which our way of life as Americans are a cramp in the rest of the world's style.

We use a lot of resources, she said.

We think we don't have to make excuses for living comfortably, she also said.

I'm with Barbara on this one. I work at a natural foods grocery store, where all day long we are pushing products that are made without preservatives, food that was grown without genetically modified organisms (GMOs). I ride my bike there every day.
Every week I order coffee for our cafe that comes from our own city, to support local economies and save on shipping costs.

In other words, we are all about sustainability, at least in a commercial sense.

But Barbara pushes me even further by suggesting I get involved in my community and invest in my local economy with my decisions as a consumer.
And I wonder, is this really what it takes to live sustainably?
Ride my bike to work I can do, but the rest begins to sound rather inconvenient.

And I think that might be the point! As challenging as it is for parents to work overtime so they can provide for the future of their children, it is even more difficult to take Barbara's advice. Instead of making sure those we leave behind are provided for financially, perhaps we should focus on providing them with a knowledge of how to enjoy what we have. Remind them that everything we have, even if we have worked for it, is a gift.
Even the capacity for hard work is a gift!

I believe that good change can happen only when people have a sense of community. My wife and I are thinking about moving in with a couple we are close with and some of their friends, so I have been thinking about community a lot.

A community only thrives, some say, when it exists for a reason outside of itself.

Jean Vanier knew a thing or two about community:
http://www.larche.org/jean-vanier-founder-of-l-arche.en-gb.23.13.content.htm

In the face of Barbara's words, and figures such as Vanier, I accept the difficult task of loving on an leaning on other people I can trust.
I know I can't do it by myself.
If I want to have a positive impact on the world, I need to do it with other people.

dichotomy jesus

I was talking with a coworker about raising open-minded children.
"I don't want them to believe what I believe," Chris said. "I want them to believe what they believe."

I don't have children yet, but I'm sure that when I do it will be an interesting dilemma:
how much do I intentionally color their view of the world? How much do I leave to their own wisdom and experience?

The example Chris gave concerned what his kids were taught in school about Jesus. He thinks their teachers, while trying to appear objective, are instructing them based on a particular slant of Jesus. They only cast him in a certain light.

"There are two very distinct sides of Jesus presented in the New Testament," Chris persisted. He outlined them like this:

1) "I'm the Son of God, but don't tell anyone." (Matthew 8:4, 17:9)
2) Then (tossing his hands to the side in dramatic fashion), "I am the door!  I am the way!  You get to God through ME!"  (John 10:9, 14:6, 15:5)

Wow! I thought. We have on our hands a dichotomy Jesus!

What my friend was leaving out was that Jesus was a complicated person. Would you expect someone claiming to be the Son of God to be simple?

You also have to take into consideration that in Jesus' short time as a teacher before his death, he accomplished a lot. He was saying some radical stuff, which meant he had to be careful about what he said and who he was saying it to. He was very aware of his environment.

Matthew and John were different people, with different audiences they were writing to, probably in different decades of the first century. Is it possible that one author focused more on the times when Jesus spoke quietly to his followers, and the other author on the times when Jesus asserted himself more forcefully as a deity?

Jesus was a complex fellow, and he had much more to teach than the golden rule, "do unto others what you would have them do to you."

An article on slate.com from a few years ago has some interesting thoughts on different Jesuses.
http://www.slate.com/id/2150645/

The article makes a good point that our culture's view of Jesus, though based loosely on how the New Testament views this person, has more to do with what is relevant to us at the time.
For instance, if there is a concensus that our culture is lacking in strong male figures (thank you Homer Simpson), then the Macho Christ view of Jesus becomes popular.

I could certainly use help becoming an influential southern writer, so maybe I should believe in a Southern Muse Christ!

I think what my coworker asks his children is a good question for all of us in the South who are conscientous:
which Jesus are you talking about?