josh aldrich (words)

Dodgeball

2011-10-23T00:38:00.002-04:00

Let's just say it, I was a fat kid. With blonde highlights. I liked to hang out at home with my books and my Gamecube. It didn't help that I chose to hide in sweatshirts that would have looked oversized on Jonah Hill. And not new, skinny Jonah Hill. Moneyball Jonah Hill. My gym teacher also did not help my awkwardness by insisting that we play dodgeball with balls that were inflated for maximum pain, especially when strategically launched at you by that middle schooler who looked like Ryan Gosling on steroids. And not Half Nelson Ryan Gosling. Crazy Stupid Love Ryan Gosling. I liked him better as a (fictional) crackhead...but that may be the dodgeball memories talking. I still break out into cold sweats at the sight of a volleyball.

I mostly survived middle school with equal doses of sarcasm and Cheetos. Eventually my dad sat me down and told me I was living a sedentary lifestyle. It was difficult to hear him over the crunching of said Cheetos, but eventually I got the point. I then started running on the treadmill in my jeans, because that's just what you do when you're in eighth grade and are shorts-averse. I lost weight. I also almost killed myself when I decided to douse my face in water while running on that electrical gerbil wheel. For the uninitiated, electrical objects and water tend not to react well.

My luck with the ladies wasn't much better. I still have a very clear recollection of the last day of eighth grade. I had one good female friend named Jessy. She was small and slightly awkward, which complemented my hefty awkwardness well. In any case, my friend Tyler had just purchased a brand new film-loaded camera (we were still in the pre-Jobs era). I had a strong suspicion that he really just bought the camera to get some pictures with the most photogenic girls, a suspicion that was confirmed when he managed to line every 8th grade girl up against the wall for a group picture.

I happened to be walking through the hallway when I saw this yearbook moment occurring, which was clearly only missing some Josh charm. In an attempt to...well, I'm not really sure actually...I managed to swing my arm like an uncoordinated wookie, subsequently crashing my elbow into Tyler's camera. The camera plummeted faster than my level of Josh charm before breaking open. As the film rolled down the hallway, Tyler gave out a cry and the girls slowly came to the awareness that their, umm, Xangas (whatever we had in 2003) were going to be seriously lacking a new profile picture thanks to the kid with the XXXL And One sweatshirt. Everyone filed away, Tyler cradled his camera, and Jessy smirked. I felt sad.

My brother is in middle school now. He came home dejected the other day after his friends started calling him "corporal" because of his new haircut. I assured him that middle school is stupid and I have no qualms about taking off this peacoat and dishing out some well honed teacher glares. This made him feel slightly better, I think. Which is good, because to be honest, my mal ojo could use a bit more work.

I went to visit my mentor Brian the other day. After talking about lesson plans, neuroses, and the awesomeness of cardigans, he leaned back in his chair like he always does before he's going to say something really insightful. I gave up leaning back in chairs after the 5th grade gordita incident, but that's neither here nor there. Brian then said, "Josh, there's something very endearing about your self-deprecation. It's unique. But you may want to consider whether you are using self-deprecating humor to reinforce the negative views you hold about yourself."

Like most things Brian tells me, this statement was pretty much exactly accurate. As articulated in these essays before, I struggle with self-image, self-doubt, and an overall low view of my self worth. It's not an endearing quality, and I hate sharing it with people because I don't want to come across as needy. No one likes the guy who uses others' affirmation as a crutch. Yet, I've struggled with an image of God as a cosmic taskmaster, an eternally disappointed father. I've wrestled with the feeling that I am somehow unloveable or unworthy of others. I've long dealt with depression.

And I often use self-deprecation as a means of keeping people at a distance. If I can reject myself first, then I don't have to fear the rejection of others. And yet it still hurts when friends innocently jab me about the same stories I so casually share with them. I never have really known why either.

Ultimately, we want to be accepted. We want to be loved for who we are. I've come a long way since I was the fat middle schooler. I graduated from high school, I'm months away from student teaching, I've worked my way through college without debt, and I've managed to keep my GPA at a good level. I've done well. But I still have days where I feel like that fat middle schooler again. I want to hear that I'm okay, I want to be affirmed by my family, my friends, my boss, my mentor, my girlfriend. I want to know that I have progressed, that I'm not still stuck in a dodgeball match with Ryan Gosling. And it burns me out quickly. I can't focus at work, I can't enjoy dates or time with friends, I get so stuck in my own head until I eventually just turn my verbal jabs against myself.

It is in these times that I take great solace in the Psalms. David was a very complex individual. He always tends to be portrayed as more King Richard the Lionheart than King Bertie the stutterer. Yet, his Psalms are full of confessions, vulnerability, and melancholia. And it's really little wonder why. He was a deeply flawed man. As king, he sent a man to die on the front lines of war so that he could sleep with his wife. He was a terrible father whose son plotted to kill him. His best friend died young while his best friend's dad attempted to murder him. His wife scoffed at his religion and the best adjective the Scriptures can apply to him is "ruddy" and generally not exactly the type of guy that looks like he could use a crown.

Yet, David was "a man after God's own heart." In fact, most of the people held up as models of the faith were deeply flawed individuals. Noah was a drunk, Jeremiah was depressed, Paul was arrogant, Peter had anger issues, Isaiah was unqualified, Samson was a womanizer, Abraham was a coward, Aaron was rebellious, Jacob was a pathological liar, Moses was a murderer, Matthew was a fraud, and Rahab was a prostitute.

We all have "our stuff." I get depressed and I tend to think lowly of myself. It doesn't mean that I will always be that way, but I might. And that's okay. Because my stuff does not define me, my weaknesses do not give me name, and my identity does not derive from the approval of others.

So ultimately, it comes down to a choice. My overweight middle school self will always be a part of my past. Paul always had his early life as Saul. Nothing could change that. However, we are given the choice to accept resurrection and to accept that who we were holds no bearing over who we are now.

So may we accept our constant imperfection. May we stop fighting the shame of our past and the weaknesses of our present. And may we realize that God has defined us as His children and openly extends the invitation to experience acceptance, unlimited grace, and the fullness of joy that was always intended to be ours.

Remind Me Who I Am

2011-10-13T22:25:00.002-04:00

There's a fascinating podcast that I began downloading for my long commutes to campus every day. It's hosted by a comedian named Marc Maron. Maron came to popularity in the 80s and early 90s as a forerunner of the alternative comedy movement that produced comedians ranging in style from Louis C.K. to Zack Galifianakis to Lewis Black. Maron's comedy is deeply personal and frequently angry. I have often grappled with whether or not I should listen to Maron's work as his language is extremely harsh. The man could make Samuel L. Jackson blush, although toned-down, NPR versions are available.

However, I am continually drawn to Maron's show due to the host's unparalleled openness. Listening to him can be an uncomfortable experience, as he often seems to open a vein and bleed into the microphone. His monologues which open every show can range from a rant about the dead rat he couldn't bear to dig out from underneath his house (emblematic of his lack of "masculinity") to a diatribe about his ex-wife's infidelity and abandonment years ago. Like many of the comedians he interviews, Maron is an archetypal, tragic jester. His wife's infidelity and his parents' emotional distance only reinforced his longheld beliefs in his own inadequacies as he frequently states.

One of Maron's notable guests, Conan O'Brien recently had a documentary created about his "Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour" that transpired after his high-profile dismissal from The Tonight Show. In both the documentary and Maron's interview, Conan talks openly of his lifelong ambition to one day fill Johnny Carson's chair. He worked his whole life for one shot at the only job he ever wanted, and within 10 months it had come and gone. The documentary reveals an ugly, deeply human side of Conan as he grapples with serious depression and exhaustion while relentlessly touring the country for the better part of a year. An inability to say no leaves the comic looking quite unhealthy and ragged, all the while he opens every show by telling his audience how much he has missed hearing their nightly applause.

For my whole life, I have struggled with the deep need to feel affirmed. I often deny this fact about myself, but it's undeniably there. Because of my tendencies to be melancholy and somewhat isolated, I often crave the affections and affirmations of others much to my horror. I don't want to look for approval in others' words, but I do.

In and of itself, the desire for words of affirmation is not a bad thing. It's a love language, a natural desire that many of us possess. But it can easily become out of balance.

I met with my mentor last week. Midway through our conversation, he leaned back in his chair and said, "Josh, we're both sensitive people. And because of that sensitivity, when we walk into a situation or a room we can instantly detect when something is wrong, off, or imbalanced. The same is true in our relationships. And often, we assume that we are the issue. In relationships, we assume that we are the cause of whatever tension may exist. So we internalize that and we assume rejection. But we both need to realize that, just because we are sensitive to tension or know when people are bothered, it does not mean that we know their thoughts. And to assume so is incredibly harmful. You don't know what other people are thinking."

For years, my first tendency when confronted with tension or an ambiguous remark about my person was to assume the worst. I assume that I have the issue, I am the cause of imbalance. And I assume that this tension is about to result in my imminent rejection, whether in relationships, friendships, or work situations. And it has seriously screwed with my mind. Feeling that you have to perform for an audience, for a parent, for a significant other, or for a societal expectation is exhausting and it leads to a dark place. Because you're never going to be good enough, you're never going to cut it, and you're never going to reach the impossible standards you assume others hold for you. And if you look for rejection, you will find it.

The world is not an affirming place.

There's a short Psalm that is found in the midst of David's Songs of Ascent. In it the psalmist writes, "Lord, my heart is not haughty, Nor my eyes lofty, Neither do I concern myself with great matters, Nor with things too profound for me. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child with his mother, Like a weaned child is my soul within me."

It's an odd psalm, especially for those who don't want to ponder the weaning process. It's also an odd heart posture that David advocates. In theory, it's simple. Don't think about matters you can't control, be humble, rest, chill out, watch more Dr. Phil. But in reality, it's an incredibly difficult order. (And so is watching more Dr. Phil.)

I work at a neurofeedback clinic, I have the Breathing Zone app, I've read Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. And I have no idea how to quiet my soul. My mind wants to concern itself with "great" matters. Because then I feel that I have some semblance of control. If I can think through all the ways in which rejection could come, if I can sort out all the ways that I can fail, if I can consider all the ways in which God could "teach me a lesson" by robbing me of those relationships and friendships I cherish...then maybe I have control. Maybe they won't happen. Always better to start with the worst scenario, right?

But that's not what David advocates, nor is such thinking Biblical or healthy in any way. It's warped and it will absolutely rob you of your joy. Throughout the Psalms, David seeks to release the unknowable, the unpredictable, the unchangeable to God. He is in a constant state of admitting his lack of control. He does not struggle like an unweaned child, he does not fight, he merely rests. Content in the unknown, content in his lack of control, content in the knowledge that it just doesn't matter whether others accept or reject him. He is merely asked to rest.

Resting is not easy. It's much more natural to play the sad clown, exorcising your demons in tragicomic rants or running yourself ragged just for the applause. But life is not set up to offer affirmation or applause. And that's why we absolutely must learn to rest like a weaned child, humbled to God's total, unrequited acceptance and love.

So may we learn to adjust our posture. May we orient ourselves toward God. May we submit the "great matters" to Him. And may we learn to quiet our souls with the knowledge that the God who bore all things is the God whose love and affirmation will never run out.

I Spoke Once

2011-03-20T00:34:00.009-04:00

I passed the Kleenex down the couch. It was early January in Michigan and the wind outside was working itself up into a typical, lake effective huff. Next to me was my friend, the makeup rubbed from her puffy eyes. In the background, Ryan Seacrest was excited about...something. My friend had just had one of those breakups. The kind that come out of nowhere. One day, things are fine. The next day, it's over. And she was not taking it well.

We've all seen those relationships and we all know what comes next. The search for a reason, for an answer, for some explanation as to why things aren't the same anymore.

It's like that movie 500 Days of Summer. After the breakup, Tom Hansen (Oh hi, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) goes back montage-style to all the times he was with the "girl of his dreams." He is able to identify all the warning signs that he didn't want to see all along. But his character still ends up in bed with a fifth of vodka, orange juice, and Twinkies while Morrissey wails about, well, whatever it is that Morrissey is wailing about these days. Most likely misery, veganism, and homicidal buses.

But really, we can all relate to that character. Even if we haven't spent a weekend sloshing through Smirnoff in old pajamas, we know the character's motivations. It's not really about how any Ringo Starr-loving, Zooey Deschanel character is worth at least one carton of Tropicana. It's that we were blindsided right with Tom. There was no reason to do what she did. And then she gets married? To some dumb schmuck reading Oscar Wilde at a Starbucks? Well that is just too hipster by half. And so we get mad at every Tumblr-using, Pitchfork-reading, American-Spirit smoking jerk that would dare steal away Zooey from that guy who wasn't Leonardo in Inception.

But really, the anger is at the fickleness of the whole thing. And it's not just about love either. Yeah, "man is a giddy thing" and all that...but that's not a great explanation for those events that just...don't...make...sense. That goes against our rational nature.

When I was a kid, we had a close family friend named Paul. Paul was a teenager who was very involved at the church where my dad was a pastor. When he was about 16, Paul was first diagnosed with cancer. He fought like hell for two years, but the disease just wouldn't quit. He was wheeled to Benny Hinn concerts and entire churches prayed for him. He charmed doctors and nurses and asked that they refer to him as "Cancer Boy." He was bed stricken for weeks at a time and one day, when he couldn't even lift his arms anymore, he asked my dad to raise them so that he could worship God.

And then he died.

There have been instances within the church, and the greater Christian community, when people like Paul were told by fellow believers that they were being punished by God. That if they could just confess one more sin, then the sickness would go away.

As offensive as that is, it's completely understandable. Because we want reasons, we want rationale, we want closure. If we could just pinpoint that one unresolved sin, if we could just find that magic bullet, if we could just change that one bad habit, well then...

Then that friend will apologize for what he said. Then she will come back and give you one more shot. Then the job will change, the finances will improve, the prodigal child will return, the sick friend will recover, the world will rewind and be all right again just the way it was before...

The Bible tells a story about a man who had everything. Land, riches, children, a beautiful wife, a brand new, straight off the lot...camel? Job had it made. Until he didn't. Until his children were killed, his land was taken, his money lost, his livestock ravished, and his body covered in boils. Job goes from the BC version of Bill Gates to a man whose lone possession is a broken piece of pottery which he uses to scrape the oozing wounds that cover his sagging flesh. Pretty picture, huh? Luckily his wife is still there to...tell him to curse God and die.

Slightly less helpful still are the guy's friends who give a master-class in really bad theology. In essence, these guys come off like a cable news panel: loud, uninformed, and really opinionated. And they go on and on and on and on, all the while Job scratches. And just when you think it possibly couldn't get any worse, just when you're starting to wonder if Job's wife was onto something, God speaks up.

And his first words are, "Brace yourself like a man." God tells Job to man up. One can only presume he stops scratching at this point. The rest of Job 40 goes something like this:

¹⁹ “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? ²⁰ Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? ²¹ Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!

And after couplet upon couplet and verse upon verse about the One who stores the snow and tells the waves where to halt and summons the dawn and leads the wild animal to its manger...God says, "Let him who accuses God answer him!"

Job is left with one possible response.

⁴ “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. ⁵ I spoke once, but I have no answer— twice, but I will say no more.”

Because sometimes things just don't make sense. Friends betray, money vanishes, relationships end, test results come back, depression hits, bodies wither, disasters devastate whole countries and it feels like all we have left is an ash heap and a shard of clay. And in this moment, in the moment where hell's flames seem to be flickering under the earth's feet, in the moment where there is no explanation...that's when we are confronted with our essential frailty and brokenness.

And we are given the option to trust in a God who is always in this place despite our unawareness, a God who knows the abode of light and has seen darkness' dwelling. A God who is making all things new in spite of our weaknesses, in spite of our doubts, in spite of our broken spirits, and in spite of our ash heaps.

And sometimes, after all the questioning, after all the despair and philosophizing and anxiety and advice...the only response left is to say, "I spoke once, but I have no answer - twice, but I will say no more."

Boys and Girls in America

2011-03-13T15:34:00.001-04:00

"I...need to run to the bathroom quick."

A Jimmy John's employee lazily glanced up from his sandwich as my red, partially perspiring face tripped to the back of his store. The guy with matching Craig Finn glasses took a look at me and waved me ahead in the line for the restroom. Fumbling for the switch, the harsh fluorescent light wheezed into service. Staring back at me in the mirror was a flushed face emerging from a dark scarf and a black pea coat soaked in coffee.

The date was not going particularly well. It turns out that Grand Rapids adheres to a very strict view of the Sabbath, meaning that there are about two businesses open for service on Sundays in November. The first is an art museum, consisting mainly of an Andy Warhol wall and 586 recreations of the city's one Calder statue. I guess orange and curvy is the highest form of artistic inspiration. I preferred Andy's zebra, even though it began to give me a headache after a few minutes.

Following the art museum, my date and I cut through the needling Michigan air to the artsy coffee shop that was either closed or was making a statement about post modernism by turning all their chairs upside down on the tables. Noting that hot dogs were probably an insensitive suggestion when going out with a vegetarian, we managed to wander toward another coffee shop next to the museum. It was warm. And full of homeless people.

Now, I am certainly not against sheltering the homeless or providing them with caffeine. I imagine this is the place where Jesus would have taken his morning coffee. I'm not so sure that He would have recommended that Peter bring a date there though. Something about getting stared down by a man who bears a striking resemblance to Mad Eye Moody can prove a bit disconcerting when trying to put on your best romantic moves.

Between Mad Eye, fluorescent zebras, and coffee baths (it turns out that it is very possible to miss the lid's opening when attempting to drink a latte like a shot of whiskey) it was clear that there was no love connection. My vegetarian date went to go be pretty and eat healthy things while I began to re-budget for dry cleaning and Yesterdog.

The weird thing was, for a long time I couldn't let this date go. I wasn't exactly wandering my college campus in sackcloth, but I was far too down for a date in which the highlight was asking a homeless man if he could apparate (He totally could).

It wasn't about my date either. She was a nice girl and all, but we never even had the time to figure out what we had in common other than being thoroughly grossed out by Food Inc. She didn't want to go out again, but it wasn't like we were obvious soul mates. The reason I was so down afterwards was because, well, I think that I wanted a relationship to cure me.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a book last year called Freedom. Barack and Oprah both read it, so I felt that as an English major and someone who was verbally berated by old Republicans in 2008, I should probably pick up a copy. On one hand, it's one of those books that feels like it was written for middle class people with middle class problems, but the characters are somehow richer than their surface, Twin City issues.

Walter Berglund is a geek that falls for a girl in college. And he falls hard. Her name is Patty, she is the star of the basketball team, and she is a whole lot of crazy. Both come from homes with dismissive, psychologically abusive parents and they quickly become consumed with each other. Lost in their newfound "freedom," which means a lot of emotional entanglement and sex, Patty and Walter's relationship charges toward the altar while never addressing the issues just beneath the surface.

Suffice it to say, Patty cheats on Walter with his rock star roommate from college (just go with it) and Walter falls for that girl in your political science class who dresses like a promiscuous librarian and listens to a whole lot of NPR. Both Patty and Walter spend pages and pages pining for new lovers, chasing their forbidden passions across the country and away from each other.

Because that's what we do, isn't it? We celebrate our freedom, all the while ignoring the consequences of it. We chase our desires, hoping that they will offer the security that we so desperately want in a world that can seem just a little too free some times. Freedom is great, but it also means a lack of a safety net. So we look for that in others and our insecurities are played out in high stakes emotional drama.

These searches for safety, for reassurance, for a cure to our loneliness are not inherently wrong, sinful, or unnatural. They're a fact of the human condition. Obviously, if it results in cheating on your husband with his drugged out best friend, you may have some underlying issues. But it is quite natural to seek out love, hope, and safety in others. There is something deeply unsettling and beautiful about giving yourself over to another, knowing that they now have the power to hold you or let you fall. The risk of love, relationships, dating, and friendships lend them power.

Yet, too often this search for safety becomes imbalanced. Rather than searching for a girl to share in life's journey, dating becomes a search for "your better half." Rather than taking the time to get to know someone as a companion and a friend, insecurities are unfairly grafted onto another person. There can be so much pressure inherent in dating that a spilled coffee becomes a devastating event. The idea that the other person is not totally put together, not completely perfected or the second coming of Jesus, can quickly become an intolerable idea.

It gets to the point where dating and relationships are no longer about being together through the ups and downs, the mountains and the valleys, the scars and ugly warts and imperfections, but instead become a search for a personal savior. When others are viewed as Christ figures, there is a tendency to run at the first sign of discontent, a result that is deeply unfair to everyone involved. That's why couples like Patty and Walter split up. Not content to work through the unease of a long term relationship, they run for the idealized arms of another at the first hint of trouble.

We've all seen those couples. The kind that go up like a rocket of entanglement and subsequently blow up when they find out that their favorite colors aren't the same. The only one that can truly complete you, the only being that can truly romance your soul, is the one who "makes everything beautiful in its time." The one who "has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

So, may you take the pressure off of yourself and others. Is he perfect? Nope. Is she the answer to your insecurities? Nah. Do you have to have everything figured out from the beginning, every commonality addressed and every Freudian issue solved? No. Because in the end, he's just a guy and she's just a girl. Leave the search for safety in the hands of your soul's Creator. Just find someone else who is willing to eat junk food and look at art with you, in spite of your neuroses and occasional coffee spills.

I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor (Part 3)

2011-01-05T15:49:00.005-05:00

You should probably read Part One and Part Two first. Just saying.

Staring at the papers that now covered his kitchen floor, Luke softly cursed under his breath and ran pale fingers through his thick red hair. The floor was covered with a sea of black and white, flecked with waves of red. Luke began to feel dizzy. Stepping over the mass of Holden Caulfield essays, Luke collapsed onto his torn leather couch. Staring at the ceiling, he heard Rachel shuffle back down the hallway, probably going to do laundry. She was always doing laundry; Luke figured it was some sort of OCD coping mechanism. Of course, this was coming from someone who received Christmas cards from his therapist. Rachel wasn’t all that bad; she was cute in that sweatpants sort of way. She was chipper too, Luke could use some chipperness in his life. Emma always told him that red wine, the XX, and Steinbeck do not make for a good weekend. She was always trying to get him to lighten up, to stick around, to dwell on fantasies about moonlight or tuberous plants. She burned him Noah and the Whale albums and left copies of Paulo Coelho books on his desk. Luke would thank her before tucking the happy art into his satchel never to be seen again. Emma would tell him to go out and have a latte, meet a girl, volunteer at his church. That’s how he met Rachel in the first place, some volunteer dinner at Mars Hill Community. Afterwards, they went to the Starbucks on the corner. Emma was there too, she teased Luke about it later that week. Then she told him something about carpe-ing diems, or the universe conspiring to help Luke get a girlfriend. Something from Coelho, no doubt. Rachel didn’t read Coelho, she preferred Steinbeck too. Or at least that’s what she told Luke. Luke suspected that Rachel would support the water boarding of kittens if he told her that’s what he was into.

Sitting up on the couch, Luke picked up the nearest essay, propelled across the floor by the wheezing vent. Instinctively, he grabbed for a nearby pen and began to read, words passing his eyes like traffic on I-75, something about Holden’s relationships with women. “On page 142, Holden writes about a friend named Jane, ‘Jane was different. We’d get into a movie or something, and right away we started holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were,’ (103).”

Luke let the essay drop out of his sweaty hands, as a peculiar rush coursed through his blood. Practically jumping off the couch, Luke ignored the dizziness and grabbed for his satchel, now only holding a laptop and The First Days of Spring. With a determined thrust, he yanked open his apartment door and quickly headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. Not bothering to re-button his coat, Luke cut through the November air and jumped back into his leather driver’s seat. He threw the car into drive and the Arctic Monkeys came back with a bookish vengeance.

Pulling into the Starbucks parking lot, Luke flipped down his visor, pulling at his hair. He fumbled in his glove compartment until he found a small bottle of cologne which he conservatively sprayed onto his wool coat. With a shaking sigh, the teacher swung open his silver door and charged toward the coffee shop, forgetting to lock his car or turn off his headlights in the process. Upon entering the shop, he was instantly hit with the scent of corporate coffee accompanied by latter day Paul McCartney pop music and a calming laugh that wafted throughout the store like a late April breeze. Flipping the collar of his pea coat up, Luke quickly retreated to an armless yellow chair in the corner.

With shaky hands, he flipped open the cover of his laptop and began sorting through emails from professors and administration. Toggling his arrow to the side of the screen he clicked on the folder marked “Dad” which was typically full with pictures of Florida beaches and forwarded emails accusing the President of communism. Luke flipped from message to message, barely looking at the pictures of the leathered man with the taut smile and close cropped white hair. He was always standing on some impossibly white beach with his petite wife. Luke nervously looked over the top of his laptop, sneaking glances at the tall, thin barista with the long, curly brown hair cascading from under her green hat. Listening as customers placed twenty-adjective orders for lattes and espressos, Luke’s chest ached with every polite giggle from behind the counter. Once the line had cleared and the businessmen had their evening caffeine fixes satiated, Luke stumbled to his feet, nearly knocking his laptop off of the imitation-IKEA table which was still showing pictures of the old man’s demanding face.

With a loud gulp, Luke walked up to the counter and waited for the barista’s swollen blue eyes to meet his. Shriveled flowers sat below the counter as the young, tired teacher turned to greet Luke with a surprised grin.

The following Monday, the University of Michigan’s graduate English program lost one of their top students when he suddenly dropped all his classes a semester away from graduation. That same morning, the BP clerk in Royal Oak missed her ginger haired customer who had frequented the Marlboros every Monday since late September. At 8:00, the sophomore American Literature class at Royal Oak High School received twenty analysis papers on The Catcher in the Rye back. The lowest grade was a B. At 9:00, the junior British Lit class received a spirited lecture on diems, potatoes, and moonbeams. And at 10:00, a stringy haired teenager was pulled aside in the hallway and thanked by a pale English teacher.

I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor (Part 2)

2011-01-02T21:28:00.000-05:00

Part One located here.

That all changed in late September. Emma Kasmirski started dating a tanned doctor with strong arms and a booming voice. Apparently she met him at a bar. Or maybe it was church. Luke didn’t much care to find out the details. He definitely agreed with Ian’s assessment of Emma’s doctor friend but chose to dive deeper into his work, chastising himself for ever dwelling on such childish fantasies in the first place. It was stupid anyway. Stupid to think that Emma would ever go for a pasty, awkward, skinny geek like himself. Stupid to get distracted. Stupid to think about potatoes, Emma, or moonlight. After all, this job was just a stepping stone. Next came the master’s degree, then the doctorate, and then the Ivy League professorship. He couldn’t afford to let himself get off task. He just needed to hold onto this job until he finished his master’s work at U of M. It shouldn’t be so hard anyway, he graduated from Madison in three years. Three years and a 4.0. And his father didn’t pay that tuition so his son could whittle away his time flirting with math teachers and trying to teach deadbeats like Ian the finer points of beat poetry or Elizabethan masterpieces. Luke was destined for great things, for Harvard, Yale, maybe even Oxford. At least that’s what he told the man with the sharp jaw and even sharper mouth. The retired Marine made it perfectly clear that if his son was not only going to avoid serving his country, but do so to study books by dead guys, he better make something of himself. No son of his was going to spend his days as a limp-wristed, sweater-vested, fifth-class “academic,” telling acne-faced teenagers to carpe their diems and write about how moonlight reminds them of potatoes. If Luke was going to be one of the liberal elite, then he better be damn elite.

Luke was shocked from his thoughts by the sharp November air slapping against his lightly freckled face as he walked out of the high school’s arched entryway. Fumbling around in his pea coat pockets for his keys, he dropped a small Bic lighter. Chastising himself for the nasty habit, Luke quickly shoved the blue plastic wick into his pocket and recovered his keys, starting his paternally purchased 2006 BMW from ten feet away. The only other car in the lot was Jack Dunham’s red, chipped minivan. Glancing over his shoulder, Luke saw the balding principal, sitting behind a constantly lit window in shirtsleeves, brow furrowed and furiously typing away, his hands deeply lined but ring-less. A diploma from Columbia hung behind the principal’s silhouette, next to a bookshelf lined with pedagogical tomes and modules for the “21^st century classroom,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Luke ducked out of the cold and landed in his leather driver’s seat with a groan as he guiltily fumbled for a cigarette. Rolling the window down, he cranked his idle heater and twisted the volume violently on his CD player. Taking a deep drag of his cigarette, he pointed his BMW toward his apartment, mentally cycling through the list of grad school assignments for the weekend. Then there were those awful Catcher in the Rye papers to grade. “If Salinger wasn’t dead already, those papers probably would’ve done him in,” thought Luke ruefully as he flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the Michigan dusk. With a rattling cough, Luke put up his window and turned the volume to ear splitting levels as Alex Turner and his Arctic Monkeys snottily poured out of the factory Bose speakers, “I said I bet that you look good on the dancefloor, I don’t know if you looking for romance or what; I said I bet you look good on the dancefloor dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984!”

Within minutes, Luke arrived at his apartment complex and began the trudge to the fourth floor, his chest aching and his left hand possibly tingling. Rubbing his chest, he muttered something about Web MD and imagined he would spend his night drinking red wine and convincing himself that he was dying. Dragging his satchel behind him and fumbling with his phone, Luke almost trampled Rachel, his impossibly enthusiastic neighbor from across the hall.

“Luke, how are you??” Rachel exclaimed, “I haven’t seen you in days, where have you been?”

Luke paused, barely making contact with Rachel’s wide green eyes framed by light eyeliner and bordered by long, light brown bangs. After trying to obscure a particularly harsh cough he replied, “Umm, yeah, you know, busy with school and everything. Haven’t been able to do much…stuff lately.” He smiled weakly and hoped for a quick end to the conversation.

“Oh…well, okay. It’s just that I thought you were going to help me out on Wednesdays. You never returned my Facebook message though…” Rachel said, studying Luke’s drooping eyes.

“Wednesdays? Oh yeah, that church thing. I’m sorry, Rachel, I just don’t have the time anymore. Besides, I see enough of teenagers, right?” he weakly laughed and shoved the Blackberry into his pocket.

“Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s no big deal or anything, I know you’re really busy, I probably shouldn’t have even asked,” said Rachel with a forced chuckle. “But hey, I’m not really doing anything tonight if you wanted to…”

She was interrupted by another of Luke’s ugly coughs.

“Oh my gosh, Luke! Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine…really, I’m…great. Listen, it was really good seeing you Rachel, good luck with that youth group thing of yours. I’ve got a lot of papers so I should probably go…” Luke’s words trailed off as he opened the door to his apartment.

Looking on with a reddened face, Rachel self-consciously smiled goodbye as Luke tripped into his apartment, dropping the papers all over his floor in the process. He quickly closed the door, leaving the cute graduate student standing alone in the hallway. She quietly headed back into her apartment, as the lock on her door turned with a resigned click.

I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor (Part 1)

2010-12-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

“Ian, will you please stop bouncing that ball. The sooner you finish your essay, the sooner you can leave,” sighed the young, pale teacher peering up from a stack of freshman essays on The Catcher in the Rye, riddled with split infinitives and incorrect preposition usage.

“Sorry, Mr. A.”

“That’s Mr. Allen, Ian. Mr. Allen,” said Luke Allen, taking off his half-rimmed silver glasses and slowly rubbing his prematurely sagging eyes.

“Right. So Mr. A, you gay or somethin’?” inquired Ian lazily, while continuing to bounce a bright yellow ball on the graying classroom carpet. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but Mike says you are and I say you’re not.”

“What? No…no Ian, I’m not gay. Why would…you know what, forget it, just write your paper.”

“Yeah, Mike just said he never seen you with nobody. You don’t got any pictures of a wife or anything…Kasmirski got flowers today, you know. Her boyfriend looks like a douche though, he was probably trying to make up for something.”

“Ms. Kasmirski, Ian. Ms. Kasmirski. And last time I checked, my job was not to give you or Mike Rogen the play-by-play on my private life.”

“Hey, take it easy, I’m just playin’ with you Mr. A. Why are you still here anyway?” asked Ian as he sprawled in his blue plastic seat, brushing stringy brown hair away from his cloudy eyes.

“I’m waiting for you to finish your essay. And if you don’t, I’m sure Mr. Dunham would be more than happy to have a chat with your mother about why you’re flunking English 11 for the second year in a row.”

“Ah, Mr. A…Dunham’s got his head so far up his -”

“Ian, good Lord, write your paper and go home. I’ll tell you what, just give me two paragraphs on Jack Kerouac. The class has already moved on to Shakespeare and you still haven’t written the Kerouac essay from the first quarter! I would have thought that you of all people would enjoy a book about a drug riddled orgy through America,” muttered Luke, his pale face beginning to turn pink.

“That’s not cool, Mr. A. Why you always got to be like that, anyway? You don’t have to be such a jerk to everybody just ‘cause they don’t read your stupid books,” said Ian, bouncing his ball higher until it hit a ceiling tile, showering his desk in white dust.

“Maybe if you guys actually applied yourselves and knew what good writing was instead of getting high in the…” Luke’s voice trailed off as Ian’s bloodshot eyes met his.

“You’re just like all of ‘em, aren’t you Mr. Allen,” growled Ian. “You don’t care about any of us, none of you do. You just come here to get paid and shove books by dead guys at us and talk about meaning and symbolism and the ‘ideas of March’ and pretend that that stuff actually means something…”

“Ides of March,” whispered Luke softly, feeling a sudden wave of exhaustion washing over his thin frame.

“What?” asked Ian, turning his head sharply toward the teacher while stuffing the yellow ball into the pocket of his skinny black jeans.

“It’s the ides of March, Ian. Not the ideas,” replied Luke quietly.

“Yeah, whatever. You can keep your ides, here’s your essay,” said Ian, crumpling the paper and tossing it on Luke’s rusting desk. “I’m going to go get stoned now because that’s what I do allll weekend, right? Have fun with your books.”

Luke watched the painfully skinny teenager stomp out of his English classroom. He hadn’t bothered to take his books with him, leaving his crumpled copy of Julius Caesar next to a detailed drawing of a small Roman with a knife in his back, crown of olives intact. Luke leaned back in his chair and let out a shaky sigh. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. It’s not like he was in the city, he was in Royal Oak! These were the good kids, the overachievers. This was the town with a beauty salon every twenty feet, filled with made up women who didn’t even blink at the $500 being spent on their hair.

Luke slowly rose from his creaking maroon chair, closing his boxy Dell laptop and slipping it into a glossy satchel. The dying autumn sunlight shone on the clock, slowly ticking toward the five. Luke glanced at Ian’s notebook and flipped off the light switch, pulling the door shut with his gloved hand. It was unseasonably cold, even for Michigan. The news people were busy working themselves up into a lather about the first snow fall, as if Detroit had never seen winter before.

Luke walked down the barren hallway, replaying the scene with Ian in his mind. As a distant vacuum hummed, he absentmindedly glanced into the darkened rooms. All the teachers were supposed to stay until 5:00 on Fridays, which most everyone took to mean 3:01. It used to be just Luke and Emma Kasmirski on Friday afternoons. Sometimes Luke would wander into the cheerful math teacher’s classroom across the hall from his. They would talk about normal teacher stuff, the latest frustrations with Ian and his friends, disputes with the administration, rumors of a union strike. Once in a while they would talk about Emma’s part-time job. She worked all hours of the weekend and evenings, trying to pay off heavy undergraduate loans. Luke never said much, instead choosing to sip his coffee, listening for Emma’s twinkling laugh that had a way of warming up her class even in the dead of February. Sometimes their conversations would turn to the latest couple gossip within Royal Oak High School. Who was asking whom to the latest dance, the suspected relationship between Coach Williams and Miss Jansen, or the latest teenage tragedy in the junior class. Often, Luke would find himself staring at Emma as she talked, her pale skin and curly brown hair complemented by wide blue eyes. She was strikingly skinny, Luke figured it must have to do with her being a vegan. Emma was always talking about the latest tofu turkey recipe or the wonders of celery. Luke would smile and nod dreamily, imagining eating potatoes with Emma in the moonlight. Once he reached the vegan fantasies, it was only a matter of time before Emma would catch him staring, his reverie broken by her gentle laugh. Luke never could figure out how to recover from his zone-out moments, and usually excused himself with a reddened face. Emma’s sparkling blue eyes would follow him out her door, as she giggled with amusement. Luke would make the walk back across the hall, kicking himself for having the same dumb vegan daydream again. Who eats potatoes in the moonlight?

October in Northern Michigan

2010-12-21T13:36:00.001-05:00

Autumn arrives like a slow moving train,
waves to me as it approaches while
the light slowly dims beyond the valley's green wall.

As sticky air begins to loosen its grip on my skin,
the buzz of August fades into a gentle
crunch.
We taste fresh nostalgia
and drink in its bitter warmth.

Holland beckons to us and
Emma answers it call.
Leaving me alone,
she stays by my side.

The theaters are full of sweaters and glasses.
Music overflows and spills into the night,
but the kids are still standing with their arms folded tight.

That night I cannot walk along the shore
because Emma walks alone.
The sharp color of grace floods our home
washing away the leaves.

Our future is as clear as a London morning,
as we take flight above our sparking valley.
I scrape the floor and Emma soars,
but soon our directions will reverse.

Sharp clouds charge toward the valley with a lazy gait,
I know we must fly alone to be together.
I strain to hear her whisper.

And the train's whistle calls for my descent
even as the frigid wheels burn against the slicked track.

Based on 20 Little Poetry Projects (slightly edited).

Twitter Poetry

2010-12-20T18:17:00.002-05:00

You wanna know what we’re doing today?
I’m sick of following my dreams.

I’m doing the camel Prada suit right now,
but I’m sick of following my dreams.

We are the president.

I’m sick of following my dreams.

I’m on the edge of glory!

I’m sick of following my dreams.

The Hof was kicked off “Dancing with the Stars”
and I’m sick of following my dreams.

Would someone come fix my spell check?

I’m sick of following my dreams.

It says I don’t know how to spell bananananana.

I’m sick of following my dreams.

I do notice u. Keep up the good work!

I’m sick of following my dreams.

I’m just gonna ask them where they’re goin’

and hook up with them later.

Taken from the tweets/tweeted quotes of Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Hillary Clinton, Lady Gaga, Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, LeBron James, and Mitch Hedberg.

The Prom Queen

2010-12-19T13:39:00.001-05:00

The Prom Queen smiles under ginger hair

washed in the sharp November air

freckles stuck in place.

Lovers’ moans, a father’s absent glare

it’s different this time, she will swear.

She prays just in case.

Straight from Illinois, left on a dare.

Her mother weaves a web and combs her lonely lair.

Scotch and faded lace.

To God she prays, her cares to bear.

To the city, she will readily bare

only to hide her face.

Resurrection

2010-12-18T15:16:00.003-05:00

Pale skin, dark circles under chestnut eyes,

twenty years and she’s thrown to a new life.

Dad has serpent’s tongue, razor apple lies;

banished from Eden by an angel’s scythe.

Scarlet blood marks our Gethsemane.

Winter’s hush masks our autumnal regret.

Our love runs dry as Ezekiel’s valley.

I am left alone with her tearful debt.

Still she wanders Cain’s world with Abel’s heart,

a frigid house obscuring her summer soul.

Wine pours from skin, torn by an icy dart,

still she waits for Isaiah’s hot coal.

I wait for her return, pray her soul to keep.

Marked by flames, she sinks in God’s blissful deep.

It's Been a While

2010-12-18T15:12:00.002-05:00

Hello people of the Interwebs,

It has been some time since this blog has been updated. I fear that life has gotten in the way of meandering spiritual musings. Being an English major, while a thoroughly enjoyable academic experience, does not lend itself to copious amounts of free time. More often than not, the words run out sometime around the 32nd page of the Catcher in the Rye unit plan.

In any case, I do have a bit of a backlog of poems, short stories, and a couple essays which I would be pleased to share with you fine people. While I do not promise that any of the following poems (or essays) are "good," hopefully they at least give you a brief distraction from whatever it is that you need distracting from.

Thanks for reading and have a very happy, and even merry, Christmas.

- Josh

Great Expectations

2010-06-23T02:16:00.007-04:00

There are certain moments in life that burn themselves into one's memory. Some of them are inconsequential and random. For example, my first memory involves sitting on my mom's lap watching Oprah in my family's small Missouri duplex. I don't know why this brief episode has stuck with me twenty years later, but I do know that I will have a great story to tell Oprah if I ever make it on her show. Or I may just have a statement, but regardless Ms. Winfrey will be happy to know that she is the second woman I remember seeing during my existence. Maybe she'll give me a humpback whale. Or at least an iPad.

Other memories are happy and nostalgic. Reveries of high school plays and first dates all bring with them a sense of wistfulness and even melancholy. I remember the first time I held hands with a girl. It was a warm May evening in Michigan and we decided to take a walk after prom, while other couples went to dance. We walked for an hour, all the while her soft hand gently rested in mine. I prayed that my palm would not become strangely sweaty like those of the fat men that always seems to find me during prayer at Pentecostal churches.

Other memories are more painful. I remember going to a friend's house in high school whose mother was in the last stages of cancer. A frozen rain pelted a group of us as we left school early to be with our friend. Once the nicest, warmest, and liveliest people I knew, she was now reduced to a thin, anxious pallor. As we laid hands on her and prayed, an uneasy sense of hopelessness fell upon the previously warm living room. We lifted our hands but nothing happened and she passed away later that week.

I have a good friend that was forced to grow up far too fast. A few years younger than me, she has seen more than many people twice her age. She is a very talented poet and often uses her poems as a means of expressing her evolutions from pain to a new life. She once told me, in a much more lyrical way I'm sure, that she still holds onto her past by way of memory, but she no longer allows it to affect her.

There is a natural tendency to cling to memories, thoughts, and people long after they have left us. Sometimes these are positive events: a first kiss, a lead role in a play, a well aimed fadeaway as the seconds expired on the clock.

Other memories are much harsher. A broken relationship, a neglectful father, words spoken by loved ones in anger and spite. The rejections of a past can be just as impacting as the victories of yesteryear.

Whether tinted with the idyllic colors of happy nostalgia or the harsh grays of an unchosen past, it is easy to dwell in a moment that has long since left.

How many times have you heard it said, "Remember when..." Remember when we were together, remember when we were happy, remember when we were young? Remember how things used to be?

Nostalgia is not bad, memories are not wrong. I love to reminisce on happy times from years past. Likewise, ugly memories can lead to empathy and motivation for a better future.

Yet we have all met the person that has never left their past. The angry father that never achieved his dreams, the old woman that sternly talks about better times. There is an easy temptation to become a society of Miss Havishams, waiting in bridal gowns next to molding cakes, anticipating the arrival of a groom that has long since moved on.

The harsh and blessed reality about life is that things aren't how they used to be. As much as we try to preserve the past, as much as we speak about "glory days" in wistful tones, those days are gone and they're not returning. The victories of our past have faded. But so have the abuses.

I once heard Rob Bell say that the core question of Christianity is, "Does today have to be the same as yesterday?" Can things change? Will I always be stuck in this pain? Will I always be stuck remembering past victories, past relationships, past glories without ever achieving anything new? Am I damned to repeat the same day, the same habits, the same behaviors again and again?

Jesus' ministry was often framed by these questions. Was he the Messiah or just another charlatan promising glory and delivering only magic tricks? Would he really save the people from an oppressive empire? He raised the dead once but could he save himself? And Jesus' answer to these inquiries, these questions, these pleadings was found in the Resurrection.

At the core of Jesus' message is the idea that yesterday is not today. We have been given grace, we have been given a new day, we have been given the power that resurrected Jesus from the dead so that we too can be resurrected every day.

So may we die to the sins and habits of last year, the memories that haunt and the victories that bind. May we forsake the apathy and the slumber of nostalgia. The light of the dawn is upon us. Jesus is making all things new and we are no longer defined by yesterday. There's still hope. There's still a future. There is still resurrection.

Enough to Let Me Go

2010-06-09T15:46:00.010-04:00

I nervously flipped my book over to read the back cover for the seventh time in roughly two minutes. After blankly staring at the picture of a thirty-something author with horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly tossled hair, I opened the book again, rifling through the pages but avoiding eye contact with any of the words. It was mid-winter and I was sitting in a warm, but largely vacant, coffee shop. Occasionally the sound of the barista's machine would interrupt my anxious reverie. Inevitably, songs about dreams coming true (ooh ooh, ooh, ooh) would return to soundtrack my date. I was 17 and enamored in the way that only an adolescent on a first date can be. The only problem was that the other half of my date hadn't shown up yet. I had brought a book along, suspecting that she might be late, but I was unprepared for a total no-show. Thirty minutes after we were to meet, several of my friends walked in and I quietly slipped out into the mercurial February evening.

I used to have a friend that was incapable of handling rejection. He dwelled on the smallest perceived slights for days on end. Elementary memories continued to haunt his thoughts fifteen years later. Eventually, his feelings of rejection would evolve into obsessions or they would die away into a bitter, all consuming melancholy. We would sadly watch him spiral again and again, knowing that nothing but time could partially alleviate his depressive states.

Often times, we think of rejection as the opposite of love. To be rejected is to not be loved, to not be accepted, to not be wanted. And there may be some truth to that. At the same time, perhaps love gets some of its power from rejection.

C.S. Lewis writes in his book The Four Loves, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

Love, dating, relationships, and friendships all require something of both people entering into them. There is always a possibility, sometimes strong and sometimes a faint specter, of rejection. While this can lead to hurt feelings and wounded memories, it also grants love a special power.

Because really, love and relationships are a means of saying that, although I will always have the power to reject you, I won't. I accept you, as you are, faults and all. The vulnerability necessary to put yourself out there, be it on a date or within a friendship, lends power to the connection.

Throughout life, I have been rejected many times. Everyone has. Some of us respond by dwelling on our rejections and betrayals, to the point where we wrap ourselves in cocoons of selfishness and self-pity. Yet for relationships to work, for one to find true happiness and meaning, we have to be willing to be vulnerable, to be let down, to be rejected.

Any question of friendship, any proposal, any invitation to coffee brings with it a good chance that one person will be let down. The same is true in our interaction with God. Jesus put Himself out there, and He was often hurt because of it. Would the story of the crucifixion have been as heart breaking had the Disciples stayed with Jesus? What if Peter had not denied Jesus, but followed Him to the bitter end?

The beauty of Jesus' message is its nature of unconditional acceptance, even in the face of rejection. More than merely forgiving sins or glossing over mistakes, Jesus accepts His followers. Families, friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives will all cause hurt and pain to their loved ones. One cannot live a meaningful life with a bubble wrapped heart. There will be rejections, there will be separations, there will be times when we are left waiting at a coffee shop for no apparent reason.

Yet, if we find our identity in the acceptance of Jesus, the rejections of life don't hurt so much. In fact, they can provide encouragement. Were you rejected now? Don't worry. Not only are you always accepted by God, but present rejections may make future relationships that much more meaningful.

Faced with a Dodo's Conundrum

2010-04-11T19:49:00.010-04:00

I didn't read The Catcher in the Rye until I was 20. I couldn't help but feel that I missed out on something. Kind of like watching a John Hughes movie with someone who grew up in the 80s. The Breakfast Club and Ferris Buehler are cool and all, but I normally don't drown my angst with Tears for Fears.

Similarly, I'm sure there was a point in my life where I might have connected with Holden Caulfield and his rants about phonies and geese, but I just felt a little lost reading it. Sort of like I was going back to my high school only to find out that everyone there grew up in a post-Slime Time Live childhood.

A couple months ago I read a memoir by Frank McCourt called Teacher Man. Throughout the book, he tends to have moments of identity crisis that either result in him having lonely sex with a barmaid or drunkenly wasting a semester abroad in Ireland. In the midst of McCourt's melancholy musings (I'm good at that alliteration stuff), he writes about the experience of working with teenagers decade in and decade out. To paraphrase him, they always stay the same age but you continue to get older.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a night class staring out the window. Unfortunately our window opens up to a direct view of a brick wall. It's really a bit of a sick joke, but it reminds me of that Regina Spektor album cover which makes things a little better. Anyway, as I was thinking about ginger-haired pianists, my professor started to talk about growing up. He asked the class, which ranges in age from 19 to 50, "How many of you still feel like kids?" With the exception of three people, everyone raised their hand. My professor said this was because we have no rites of passage in Western culture. I began to wonder whether killing a wolf would make me feel like a man.

But then again, I doubt I could kill anything even if my adulthood depended on it. Perhaps I could write the wolf a nice haiku instead.

The truth is, I don't know what 21 is supposed to feel like, but I often doubt whether I'm doing it right. But I also think that a lot of college students act out of the same insecurities. Why else has it become a red-eyed ritual to get as smashed as possible the night of a 21st birthday? Maybe it's because we all want to feel grown up, mature, responsible. Or maybe it's just out of a masochistic urge to inflict punishment on one's liver. In any case, I settled for coffee and some Beatles albums on my most recent birthday.

I know this guy at school that drenches everything in at least 28 layers of irony. A conversation with him is frustrating, because you never know if you're being mocked in some hyper-facetious sort of way.

It seems that The Catcher in the Rye is about that too. Although some people relate to it on a very literal level, perhaps J.D. Salinger is really trying to illustrate the pains of trying to grow up. Holden masks his insecurities in cynicism and sarcasm. He won't let anyone close except for his teacher. And even then, his trust is violated by the guy's all around creepiness.

It's easy to be cynical. It's easy to hide behind identities and sarcasm and irony. It's easy to get drunk, 21 or not. It's easy to pretend to be grown up, but it's not so easy in reality.

I want to be a high school teacher, but I still feel like a little kid when I say that. Kind of like announcing that I want to be an astronaut. Or a fire-fighting poet, just so I could be strong and sensitive (ladies).

I don't know when I stopped being a kid (or if I have). It may have happened without me noticing. It kind of feels like zoning out during a walk in the woods, only to discover an hour later that you're much farther and much more lost than when you started.

I might always feel that way, I might not. There are days when I feel independent and there are days when I feel very lost. But whenever I get too worked up, I calmly (and sometimes frantically) hold to the idea that a God that is with the poor in spirit is a God that is very close to me. And a God that treats eternal life as an endless continuum that begins at birth is a God that is not very concerned with flimsy rites of passage or age markers.

I think God is more concerned with me, with us, existing in the present. Not in the past, not in how things once were or could have been. And not in the future, how things might be or what could happen. If eternal life is a seamless reality stretching from earth to eternity, if heaven is coming to reside among us, then maybe I merely need to focus on the day to day rather than staring at my feet or worrying about what was or will be.

Every day has potential. Every life has the ability to affect change, even in the most mundane of situations. The past is done, the future is not here. All we can focus on is the here and now and a God that exists very much in the present.

How a Resurrection Really Feels

2010-03-31T01:04:00.001-04:00

This is my 20th year living in Michigan. It would be 21 except for a brief, but thoroughly impacting, move to Missouri and back when I was 2. Sesame Street shower curtain...I will never forget you.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Michigan experience, it tends to involve snow. Lots and lots of snow. Our winters are long, cold, and gray. In fact, Grand Rapids has the most cloud cover of any city in the United States. And I've been to Gary, Indiana...that's saying something. Though I think Gary's may be smog.

So the moment a directionally challenged robin misses his flight to Florida and ends up in Michigan in the dead of February, we all go a little crazy. And on the first day that the thermometer flirts with 45, a legion of pasty, undercooked white people emerge from their basements like moles coming to the overground for the first time since Thanksgiving. Neighbors mow their lawn around snow piles. Hairy, middle aged men go out for shirtless jogs while college students break out shorts for a week straight. About a week ago, I saw a girl walking around campus in a hoodie, shorts, and Ugg Boots. Mostly though, this is just a teaser for the warmth to come. Snow inevitably makes one final appearance and everyone sobers up for a couple weeks.

But once spring really hits, sometime around April, the city feels liberated. People start smiling again and coats are unceremoniously stuffed into musty closets. And then...we throw festivals. Festivals for dancing, art, chalk-drawing, zombie-walking, and enchiladas.

It's right around this time of year when the death of a long, gray, dirty winter has given way to brilliant blue skies and the gentle haziness of spring. When summer comes, we flood the shores of Lake Michigan and spend evenings at golf courses and on porches. Yet after several months, the weather will turn sweltering and people will get cranky again, anticipating the melancholy relief of a colorful autumn. Following the stickiness of late August, we find relief in the cool months ahead. Thus, we have more festivals.

And so, life takes on literal seasons of tension and release, death and life, peace and activity. And it is right as we are celebrating the current fade from winter to spring that we observe Easter, a story about death transitioning into life.

Such seasonal change is told of in the ancient Hebrew poem, the Song of Songs. The second chapter recounts the story of a young, oft-separated couple, a Lover and his Beloved. The poem picks up as the Lover is running across a barren winter landscape of mountains and dead forests, all with the intent of finally reuniting with his Lover. As the death of a long winter gives way to the new life of a magnificent spring, he comes over the final hill above his Lover's cabin.

But before he can reach her house, he is stopped by what the Scriptures refer to as a lattice, a large wall separating his Lover's garden and house from her Beloved. The Lover excitedly calls to his Beloved to join him, to run across the landscape so recently kissed by spring. He yells through the wall that "The winter is past; the rains are over and gone."

Meanwhile, she is on the other side of the wall, thrilled but ashamed. While he has been running miles and miles, she has remained unprepared. Her garden and her house are covered in shadows. Despite the new life of the springtime, her vineyard is being destroyed by small rodents and foxes eating away the grapes and choking the life out of the ground. She is ashamed, her beauty is failing her, and her life is being picked away. So, despite herself, she tells him to go.

And, reluctantly, he does.

He will not violate her will. He will climb mountains to be with her but he will not force himself over her wall. She tells him to run, to go, to flee. She is fixated on her death. She is still living in a long winter of death and shame. She has become more comfortable in her lonely seclusion than she is her Lover's presence.

So often we live in our winters. We get stuck in a rut and a form of discontented comfort. We find routine in our barrenness and sadness. It seems that come February, it's easier to give in. Life seems so far off. The resurrection of spring is but a distant memory or a fleeting hope.

In times like these, we fixate on the foxes in our vineyards, the shadows in our lives, the hurts of a recent past. We begin to live in an eternal winter, secluded from the life outside our walls.

The thing about resurrection is that it can only happen after death. No one is resurrected from life. No one goes from spring to spring.

And yet, we tend to treat resurrection as an afterthought. I remember sitting through The Passion of the Christ years ago, a horrific movie about the brutality of the crucifixion. For two hours we watch Jesus being beaten to a pulp, bloodied and tortured. It isn't until the final minute where we see one fleeting shot of an empty tomb. Then the credits roll.

But resurrection, as depicted in the Bible, is more than the epilogue to a tragic story about the Messiah's death. It's more than a happy ending.

Resurrection is a motif, a recurring theme that informs the very nature of the Scriptures. Paul writes of being crucified with Christ and his subsequent life. Song of Songs speaks of a deathly winter turning into a lively spring. In Genesis, God speaks life into nothingness. The very idea of salvation is a mirror image of resurrection. There is a constant theme of life being born out of darkness, death, and nothingness.

But this beautiful theme of resurrection can easily get lost in our sadly legalistic notions. Religion that emphasizes perfection tends to obsess on death at the expense of new life. Because resurrection isn't for those with an unblemished past.

It's for those of us that are inherently too far gone...too far into our sin...too far into our death...too far into temptation.

Too far into the hurts and wounds of our past, the hardships of a winter that we may not have chosen.

Resurrection is for the prodigal sons and the rebellious daughters. And it's also for the scarred sons and the wounded daughters. It's for those of us that just can't go on, that can't get our garden right or control our temptations. It's for those of us that have been secluded behind our wall for too long.

And yet...if we invite Jesus over our wall, if we can admit our death, if we can come to terms with hurts that have been inflicted on us, if we can move past our winter...He can still resurrect us.

He has come so very far for us, wounded and imperfect as we may be. So may we accept His invitation, may we see that "The winter is past; the rains are over and gone." Spring has come. Resurrection is finally here.

One Small Instrument

2010-01-27T15:16:00.004-05:00

I sighed and put down my musty copy of Teacher Man. Staring at the wall, I listened as Neil Young's voice drifted out of my computer speakers, singing something about golden hearts and girls made of cinnamon. Three weeks into my prerequisites for the college of education, I had learned very few things about educating, but had learned a lot about Frank McCourt's thoroughly depressing life. I learned that students throw sandwiches at teachers and that McCourt had a healthy, if not bizarre, sex life which consisted of an attractive ginger haired women who liked to seduce professors and a fat Irish woman who served up fish and chips at a dreary Dublin pub. Mixing his search for relief from his meandering teaching career with a pent up bitterness toward the harsh Irish Catholicism of his youth, McCourt often mixes his sexual encounters with religious metaphor, in a way that recalls a particularly graphic Springsteen song. I seriously began to reconsider my career choice.

There are several types of people in the post-high school world. Maybe only two. First, there are the determined ones. The determined ones are like my best friend Ryan. Ryan has known since early high school that he wanted to accomplish complicated things involving technology and computers. I think he may be taking over the world or at least the missile defense system, kind of like that one 80s movie where Ferris Buehler turns the American military infrastructure into a massive game of Pong.

Then there are the drifters. I don't mean the mechanics and plumbers of the world, they have focus even if it doesn't involve working on computers or paying lots of money to read books and write papers about the sex lives of Irish teachers. No, the drifters just don't know where they're going. I know this one girl that bounced around a couple of colleges after graduation, only to end up on a long term missions trip to Ecuador. And I get that. Not that I'm writing this from Ecuador, I would be much warmer if that were the case. But the idea of deciding my future right now seems intimidating at best. Because I think we all want to make a difference in the world. But how is that done?

Does a teacher really make a difference? I know we all pay lip service to them, but we also quote things like "Those that can't do, teach." (And those who can't teach, teach gym...take that Mr. Roscamp! Making fat fifth graders run a mile...)

In middle school, all I wanted to do with my life was to be a sports columnist. I wrote these page long rants that were so sarcastic they would make Jim Rome blush. I emailed them to guys like Rick Reilly, Steve Rushin, and the blonde dude with the high-pitched voice that anchors the weekend sports report on the local news. Soon, my ambitions evolved and I decided that instead of being the next Michael Wilbon, I would aim for being the next Rob Bell. But I think I really just wanted his glasses.

Later, I wanted to be Conan O'Brien. Or at least Andy Richter. I would even settle for La Bamba. Though my lack of melanin inspired me toward this dream, my lack of a Harvard education deterred me from it. After all, how meaningful is the Pimpbot 5000 anyway? Does Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog really make a difference in anyone's life, other than giving self-awareness to 40 year old men in Darth Vader costumes. So, following graduation, I backed into political science. For three years I sat in male-dominated classes listening to impassioned students debate the effects of socialism in Kazakhstan. On a positive note, I did learn that Kazakhstan was a country, but I could tell my place was not anywhere near politics or science.

And so, two weeks before Christmas, I decided that I would go into teaching. I envisioned myself as the cool teacher, the guy that wears argyle sweater vests and plays Arcade Fire and U2 from his room during lunch. I would make students stand on their desks and tell them about sucking the marrow out of life. I would be John Keating, or at least Will Schuester. My future would involve a cute red-haired guidance counselor, but not a nagging blonde wife, I wouldn't marry her. Our children would be sentenced to a life of pale skin and red hair, but then maybe they could take Conan's place when he retires.

I went to tell friends about my newly discovered future plans and was greeted with comments like, "Don't go to Muskegon or they'll slash your tires and shoot your windows out" and "You'll be eaten alive." Then professors began assigning me books about depressed Irish men that teach in New York and told us horror stories about students that turn classrooms into Lord of the Flies. A friend told me about the time when she was student teaching and a student threw a desk at her. My visions of sweater vests and desk standing gave way to an image of myself breaking out into a flop sweat while students marched around the class with conch shells and GATs. Where am I going?

I read this book a while back by John Irving called A Prayer for Owen Meany. The book featured a teacher that was a bachelor and a virgin for life. He moved to Canada to get away from Ronald Reagan. But that's not the real point. The book's main character, Owen Meany, is a little person. His voice never matures, always relegated to an ugly prepubescent shriek. He is a prophet of sorts but lives a hard life, separated from his distant and ignorant parents and haunted by visions of his own death. Owen is a small man in a sprawling world, given little purpose outside of his New England town.

Yet Owen is always convinced that he truly has a role to play, he refers to himself repeatedly as "God's instrument." Through this belief, he is able to handle all the hardships that 700 pages can throw at him, the nightmares, the death of his friend, and his eventual involvement in Vietnam. In the end, Owen becomes a heroic martyr, sparing the lives of innocents while sacrificing himself. Owen is God's instrument.

I heard a sermon a while back by Rob Bell that talked about our spiritual lives as a symphony. Everyone, Christian or not, is playing an instrument in the symphony. Some are very out of tune and we recognize them right away. But some are very in tune to the melodies of Jesus. They are not the center of attention, they may be one small instrument in the back, yet without them the whole symphony, the whole piece, would be drastically changed.

Maybe our focus has been too much on the world changers and the earth shakers: the presidents and authors, the actors and musicians, the celebrities and insult comedy dogs. Perhaps the reason that people like me drift is because we haven't become content with the idea of playing our instrument.

Each of us has a part to play and without it, the whole composition is drastically changed. It may not always be the flashiest part to play, it may never get the solo or recognition. But without it, the whole piece is not the same, the melody is altered and everyone is missing out.

So I have slowly become content with my part. Students may throw desks at me or they may stand on them quoting Thoreau. But either way, I know my calling, I know I have a part to play no matter how significant or insignificant it may feel. As long as I focus on the Conductor, I know that I can never be out of tune.

¡Viva Conando!

2010-01-22T18:51:00.003-05:00

Emma Pillsbury and Apple Orchards

2009-12-14T13:45:00.002-05:00

The snow was beginning to come down hard and the ice on the streets was thickening. The day light had long since faded and at a small high school outside of Grand Rapids, a group of nervous teenagers sat inside a multipurpose room chewing (and chewing and chewing) on rotisserie chicken and something that looked to resemble corn or at least yellowish pellets. I was in the midst of my second homecoming and this time I had asked out a girl that I had known since kindergarten. I kind of liked her back when my hair had a part and she had Ruth Bader Ginsberg glasses. We had since changed significantly, her for the better but my hair was still struggling, though part-less. After a night of awkward eating, we loaded up into my Japanese ice-skate of a car and careened toward the after party. We arrived at the party, me in a newly purchased suit and her in a dress and high heels, long since running out of conversation topics after I had taken her through an oral history of The Chronicles of Narnia and the reasons why the scraping of the toothpaste bottle against the toothbrush bristles makes me want to never brush my teeth again (don't worry though, I do). Lacking the skill to park my car correctly and thrown off by the snow, I proceeded to drop her off in a three-feet deep snowbank across the street from the party and then drove away to park. In every picture from that evening, my date and I are strictly adhering to the 12 inch rule. We were pretty much soul mates.

Several years ago, I was kind of lonely so I decided to go to one of those college church groups that play Tobymac and have a lot of blue lighting. I arrived knowing that a girl who I used to be friends with when I was younger also attended the group. Hoping that she might be interested in drinking coffee with me after the service, I patiently waited for it to end so that I could ask her out. I had waited for at least an hour when the preacher got up and announced we would be watching the crucifixion scene from The Passion of the Christ to end the evening. For the uninitiated, other than maybe concentration camp sequences from Schindler's List, I'm not sure if there is a more horrific scene to watch five minutes before you plan on asking a girl out. I went ahead with it anyway, but had kind of lost my desire by that point. Which was good because she said no, something about having to work or maybe mowing her carpet. I blame Mel Gibson.

Several months ago, I fell for this girl that I met in one of my classes. She was cute, she loved to read, she wore glasses, and she made jokes about Harry Potter and Supreme Court justices. After getting to know her for about a month, I finally got up the courage to ask her out. A day before I was to do so, she told me how much she wanted to go to an apple orchard. Well, lucky for her, I am all about orchards. In fact, I don't know anyone who knows more about orchards than I do. I don't really know anyone that knows anything about orchards, but still. They have cider and trees and pie, what else could anyone possibly want? As we were exiting class, I led off my carefully thought-through proposal with, "What are you doing this weekend?" And out of her mouth came the words that no single guy ever wants to hear, "Well, my boyfriend and I..." I exited for the parking lot as smoothly as possible, mumbling something about apples and missed opportunities.

It has been stated on this website before that I watch Glee. I'm secure so I think I've come to terms with the fact that a show about singing quarterbacks and pregnant cheerleaders is appointment viewing while my best friend watches Man vs. Wild and UFC fights. I justify this by the fact that I'm going to school to be a teacher. Perhaps this will prepare me for the musical numbers that break out in the middle of my English classes, hopefully inspired in equal parts by Chaucer and Steve Perry.

But I think the real reason that a lot of us twenty-somethings and high schoolers watch this show is the aspect of conflicted relationships between many of the characters. There's something very appealing about the relational and romantic struggles of others. Such themes separate popular television shows like The Office and Glee from others. There's a reason why the relational travails of singing Spanish teacher Will Schuester and cute, red-haired guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury brings me back every week. It's because I, and most of the viewers of Glee, want to see ourselves in those characters. Everyone has felt like the pre-Pam Jim Halpert or the quirky Emma Pillsbury, faced with unattainable relationships and loneliness.

I read a quote once that said, "When one is single, they must also be content with the idea of being single for the rest of their lives." I understand, in the context of the essay what the author was trying to say, basically that we have to find our identity in God and be content with that before we try to enter into a relationship. And that's all well and good, but it doesn't help much for those of us who are just trying to find someone else to share our life journey with. In fact, I don't think that logic worked for Adam either. He was with God, in Eden, without sin...and he was still lonely.

There are several reactions that people tend to have when seeking out a relationship that they are unable to find. Either they settle for something less than they should (see Emma and the football coach on Glee) or they become far too desperate (see your local church's "Singles Ministry"). At this point, relationships become less about finding a soul mate to share life's journeys with and instead take on an aspect of selfishness, intentional or not. For those entering into foolish relationships, it's a demonstration of a lack of trust. For those overly desperate, the concept of a relationship becomes rooted in what will best give them a momentary sense of identity.

That's not the same as being lonely or genuinely hoping to find that "one" person though. This is where I take issue with the idea of becoming content with being single my whole life. I don't buy that, I don't have that desire, and I'm not going to become content with that idea, no more than I will become content with the idea of becoming a nuclear physicist. That's not my calling. I'm glad it is for some people, but that's not for me.

And yet, I'm beginning to realize that it's out of my hands. So maybe my friend was on to something. Not that us single people have to become content with being alone from now through eternity. But there is something significant about the realization that you are no longer in control. Not a passive, "God will take care of it, I'm just going to do whatever I want" mindset...but a perspective that acknowledges His involvement in all areas, the small and the large.This doesn't mean that we lose the ability to shape our future or that we are absolved from consequences because, hey, God will take care of it. But it does mean that God is very involved at a personal level and has a vested interest in the decisions we make, especially in ones as important as marriage or relationships.

A personal God changes everything. A personal God sits with the girl whose date never showed up. A personal God walks with the guy that just got left waiting at the coffee shop. A personal God is intimately involved and deeply concerned.

That doesn't take away the loneliness or the need for human connection and relationships. Yet we are given the hope that a God concerned enough to know the number of hairs on each individual head is a God concerned enough to ensure that we will not be alone forever.

Great Men...and the Rest of Us

2009-12-06T21:13:00.002-05:00

There's a song on Sufjan Stevens' album Illinois called "Casimir Pulaski Day." The song is about a friend that has "cancer of the bone" and Stevens sings it in a fragile voice seemingly only held up by his gentle strumming. He quietly tells of "Tuesday night at the Bible study, We lift our hands and pray over your body but nothing ever happens." He ends with, "All the glory that the Lord has made and the complications when I see His face in the morning in the window. All the glory when He took our place but He took my shoulders, and He shook my face, and He takes and He takes and He takes."

I was talking with a friend last week over coffee. She went through a particularly painful divorce several years ago and her ex-husband quickly remarried. My friend told me of the painful loneliness that she has experienced over the past few years. While her ex-husband kept the house, she was forced to move out into a shoddy apartment ten miles away. Every night her ex-husband and another woman sleep on the same bed that my friend's parents bought her as a wedding gift some twenty years ago.

Throughout the Gospel narrative, Jesus is constantly in conflict with the religious leaders of the day. Jesus was the rogue rabbi messing up the social order of the old teachers and officials that made it their life goal to tell everyone else how unholy and unacceptable they were. If Judaism was a ladder, the Pharisees were at the top. If Judaism was that scene from A Christmas Story, the Pharisees were Santa and everyone else was Ralphie getting a collective boot in the face. Until Jesus came along.

This new rabbi walked around with a group of fishermen, tax cheats, political zealots, and prostitutes. Perhaps in modern terms, Jesus was followed around by a group of auto mechanics and Ron Paul supporters, had lunch at Bernie Madoff's jail cell, and went out at night to minister at the gay bar. Jesus went to broken people. This made the Pharisees very angry. This was a very upside down way of looking at Judaism and the world and they wanted no part of it. They were the kings of the hill and told Jesus as much. Jesus' response? A doctor doesn't spend his day seeing healthy people, he sees the sick. Jesus didn't come to save those that were doing just fine, he came to reach those that were confused and hurting.

Whether or not God used evolution to create the world has never been a very big concern of mine. My faith does not hinge on the age of the universe or the scientific accuracy of the Genesis 1 narrative. Yet what I do find troubling of Darwinism is its extension to society as a whole, the theory of Social Darwinism.

I have an atheist friend that says his beliefs makes him feel connected to the universe. I suppose that's a nice thing to feel one with daisies, robins, and trout and all, but that doesn't give me much hope for the future.

If anything, Social Darwinism and atheism merely reaffirm the status quo.

It's like the "Great Man" theory of history. History is made by those exceptional persons that rise to power, thus molding history from their perch atop the hill. But that doesn't give a lot of hope for the rest of us. I'm glad that Napoleon could do what he did, but I really just want to be a writer or maybe a teacher. I don't really have the drive to conquer Western Europe, in fact, I spent half of my morning watching What Not to Wear (in HD!) so I could avoid writing an essay on Western Europe. I haven't been in a relationship in a while and prospects aren't looking so great. I'm a worrier and I tend to get lost in my thoughts. I'm not particularly smooth and I am completely lost when I look under the hood of my car. There's a good chance that when I die, my funeral will not be a state event or even a Michael Jackson event. Crowds probably won't shut down LA and people likely won't be building me monuments of memorabilia and teddy bears outside my gated estate.

So what does that say about me? What does that say about us that have a hard time getting our cars to start and our hair to calm down, much less getting a 4.0 or going to law school or changing the world? What about those of us that aren't born into the presidency or don't have the tools to become a millionaire? What of us that clean toilets for a living or put shoes on people's sweaty, swollen feet for the minimum wage?

What of us that watch friends pass away from cancer? What of us that go through divorces or breakups at no fault of our own? What of us that can't sing like Bono or speak like Barack? What of us that are just getting by?

Western culture has been dominated by the ideas of social Darwinism, of getting to the top or keeping up with the whomevers. American Christians attend church in monuments of steel and glass, replete with lobbies that look like O'Hare airport and parking lots that look like BMW dealerships. Church becomes for the people that have it together. And if you don't have it? If you struggle with sexual temptation or have been divorced or aren't quite the right look...well then, you're just not living a life of blessing. God wants to bless you. God wants you to live your best life now. God wants you to live the American dream, just like Glenn Beck and Joel Osteen.

When Jesus came, religion was nothing more than a forecasting of social Darwinism. The idea of "survival of the fittest" didn't originate with a British scientist in the 19th century. It was just an extension of a global system where the strong survive and the weak are victims of the system, necessary steps for the "great men" who make history.

Jesus' message resonates because it's upside down. It's like nothing else. Too often, Christians or religious leaders will try to pervert Jesus' message to fit a system that reflects the world. Christianity becomes an asset, just like that boat that God wants you to have. But that's nothing more than the message of the Pharisees.

God is with the poor in spirit (the beat down, the ones starting to lose faith), those who mourn (the ones who just lost a friend to cancer, the lonely and imperfect), the meek (the weak, the bed-headed), those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (those who want to want to be righteous), the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers (the ones caught in the middle), the persecuted (those that life has taken advantage of one too many times). God is with us, the messy, the poor, the Ralphies of the world. God sits alone with us on a Saturday night, God sits next to us when we're failing the exam. God is in the mess, not above it.

So stay strong. And if you can't, well, then you're just who Jesus came for in the first place.

I'm holding on / I'm holding on to you / My world is wrong / My world is a lie that's come true / And I fall in love with the ones that run me through / When all along all I need is you
- Jon Foreman, "Sing it Out"

Glee

2009-11-11T21:27:00.010-05:00

I am a 20 year old male. I am straight. And I watch Glee. Every week. It's a show about, well, a glee club at a high school, filled with dancing quarterbacks, pregnant cheerleaders, and conflicted guidance counselors. It has love triangles, even love squares, and every high school stereotype imaginable. I don't miss an episode.

In the show, the characters are constantly combating issues of identity. They are forced to confront who they are versus who they want to be, the expectations placed on them versus their true desires. Such is evident in the main character Finn, the starting quarterback of the football team who also happens to have the makings of a Broadway lead. Or the gay kid with the weird Beyonce obsession who also happens to be the best kicker on the football team. Or the kid in the wheelchair...well, you get the point.

There's a band I've been listening to lately called The National. Transplanted to Brooklyn via Cincinnati, they sound something like Leonard Cohen backed by the E Street Band and tend to write rather intense lyrics, which are then mumbled by lead singer Matt Berninger. One such song from their album Alligator is called "Baby We'll Be Fine," a heartwrenching story about a man slowly losing a grip on his life.

The song begins with Berninger singing of a sleepless night, during which he prays for recognition at work and even for his boss to hug him or offer some show of affection to the struggling worker. He eventually falls asleep only to wake up and manically run around the house and take a 45 minute shower, all the while telling himself that things will work out. In a great lyric, the man "puts on an argyle sweater and a smile" only to end up bored and depressed again that night. Calling upon his girlfriend to offer him "some entertainment" he begins to undress her, only to spill whiskey all over himself, at which point he breaks down begging for forgiveness as Berninger continuously repeats the line, "I'm so sorry for everything."

Following a common theme, The Who penned a song in 1978 called "Who are You?" In it, Roger Daltrey tells Pete Townshend's story of a man who ends up in a bar in Soho, nearly passed out on the floor when he is approached by a cop. The officer tells the man, "You can go sleep at home tonight if you can get up and walk away." After a belligerent exchange with the cop, the broken down drunk, reflecting on an eleven hour workday and sinking into deeper melancholy, pulls himself off the ground and stumbles home, ending the song with a powerful verse:

I know there's a place you walked / Where love falls from the trees / My heart is like a broken cup / I only feel right on my knees / I spit out like a sewer cup / But still receive your kiss / How can I measure up to anyone now / After such a love as this?

I had a couple of good friends from high school that all went off to college at the same time. Most of us stayed in the area, maybe separated from each other by 20 miles. At first we all stuck together, but slowly the distance and difference in schools began to wear on the relationships in the group and we all drifted away. From afar, I watched several of these friends begin to get heavily involved in the party scene at their respective schools, spending their weekends getting trashed and their weeknights getting high, as is customary at any off campus apartment complex stinking of spilled beer and stale weed.

I think it's fair to say, the majority of poor decisions made in life come from a lack of identity. Perhaps all bad decisions do. Even something as simple as a poor fashion choice, like skinny jeans, can be traced to a lack of identity, a result of searching for something that will affirm us. Such a search for affirmation is poetically expressed in that song from The National, which tells of a man going so far as to wish for his boss to hug him or his girlfriend to give up her body for him, merely so he can know who he is. But it doesn't satisfy him. Likewise, getting drunk and preaching to the bar from atop a chair merely leaves the protagonist from The Who song stumbling home alone and guilt-ridden.

The thing is, if you don't have a proper definition of who you are, someone or something else will define you. Always. Such a struggle for definition will often encompass one's entire life. Perhaps that's why Glee has resonated so strongly. Aside from the catchy songs and creative writing, the show really addresses the conflicts inherent in all of us searching for an identity that will exceed others' expectations and meet ours.

But no temporal identity can really ever satisfy. Your intelligence will always let you down, the athleticism won't last, and the answers to life's questions are not found at the bottom of a bottle. There will always be someone smarter, stronger, faster, better, or ready to replace you. That's why Jesus' upside down message is so powerful.

Jesus meets us where we are at, in a place of broken down identity and poor decisions, whether we're stumbling home alone on a Saturday night or sitting in a pew Sunday morning. Jesus gets past all our temporal identities and frail facades. Jesus defines us as His followers, as children of God, no more, no less.

I heard it said a couple of Sundays ago by Rob Bell that "Jesus did not bring a ladder, He brought a cross." There is no ladder to climb, no goal to attain, no identity to inhibit. We are loved and that's enough. So stop trying, stop searching, and rest. Jesus has identified us, how can we measure up to anyone now after such a love as this?

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for Glee.

All I Want is You

2009-11-07T12:12:00.022-05:00

You say you want diamonds on a ring of gold / You say you want your story to remain untold / But all the promises we make / From the cradle to the grave / When all I want is you

You say you'll give me a highway with no one on it / Treasure, just to look upon it / All the riches in the night / You say you'll give me eyes in a moon of blindness / A river in a time of dryness / A harbor in the tempest / But all the promises we make / From cradle to the grave / When all I want is you

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in my Spanish class when our professor asked us to go around the room and each say something about our future goals and desires. Feeling especially deep on this Monday night, I quickly scribbled "Quiero un sandwich" in my notebook.

As people were volunteering their most heartfelt of dreams, the girl in front of me raised her hand and announced to the class, "Quiero un novio rico," which she translated as "I want a rich boyfriend," a sentiment echoed several times by others in the class.

(Side note: "Quiero un novio rico" actually translates to "I want a delicious boyfriend"...so don't use that phrase around native Spanish speakers.)

There's a Ricky Gervais movie in theaters right now called The Invention of Lying. In it, no one on earth has evolved the ability to lie yet, everyone always tells the truth no matter how offensive or hurtful it may be. For example, when Gervais' character Mark gets fired from his job, his secretary tells him "I've loathed nearly every minute I've worked for you" and his coworker comes over to tell him "I've always hated you." When he goes on a date with his dream girl, she picks up the phone midway through dinner to tell her mother that "He seems nice, but fat." She later tells Mark that they can't be together because she doesn't want "little fat kids with stub noses."

The lyrics at the beginning of this post are excerpted from one of my favorite songs from my favorite band, All I Want is You by U2, from Rattle and Hum. (Click the link to see the fantastic music video, otherwise a live performance is at the end.)

I think the reason this song is so powerful lyrically is because it gets to the root of relationships.

I'm getting to that weird age where friends from high school start to get married. Guys that you built Hot Wheels tracks with in kindergarten and girls that you chased around the play ground are now preparing to walk down the aisle and say their vows.

There's something particularly powerful about wedding vows and I think it's because they recognize the difficulty of frail human relationships, just like that U2 song. To be able to say to someone that you will love them in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse...that gets to the heart of relationships. Because they're not easy and they're not simple and they're not a prolonged honey moon.

But even with this recognition; even with the recognition that your boyfriend may not always be rich (or delicious for that matter), even with the recognition that you may have fat kids with stub noses....relationships still fail.

I think that's because our human relationships are really only a beautifully frail metaphor for the relationship between Creator and Creation. There's something that gets to me about the lyrics of "All I Want is You" because that's what everyone wants, and needs, to hear. I don't want your money, I don't want your gifts, I don't care if you're rich, and I don't care if we get sick, I don't need your promises...all I want is you.

And that's the heart of the Christian message. I think a lot of times we go around trying to impress God. I know I do. When I go a whole week praying every night, I feel that I have somehow earned God's attention on further matters. I feel like the favorite son. But when I miss a week...or a month...when I have to blow the dust off my Bible when I pick it up, I feel terrible. I may even try to win back God's affection by adding a little extra to the offering that Sunday or having one night where I put on really solemn music, something like Seven Swans or that really heavy David Crowder song from Illuminate until I feel good and sorry for not talking to God. And then I usually go to bed without praying, but still feeling absolved from my Protestant guilt.

But I think that's missing the point. Because really, what Jesus said by coming to earth and living and dying as one of us was that He desired our relationship. He didn't come to give a workout schedule or a five step guide to living your best life now, a how-to for praying down blessing or achieving the American dream.

Relationships on earth are beautiful and necessary, but they always must come to grips with human frailty. Maybe relationships fail because we try to make others into our personal Jesus and when they fail, so does our idealism and romanticism.

But when we base all of our relationships off of Jesus, we are no longer looking for that most fundamental of affirmations. Because Jesus' message at its most basic and beautiful core continues to be, "All I want is you."

(Pardon the brief language at 3:42)

Sexy Nurses and Wild Things

2009-10-27T16:54:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I observed a girl at college asking several guys what they thought of her potential Halloween costume. The guys were getting pretty excited about her dressing up as a seductive nurse. From what she said, I had a hard time seeing what this had to do with the medical profession. I also didn't see why the guys were so into this fantasy. Most of my nurses wear pastel colored scrubs, sometimes with a floral top and they always have freezing cold hands. More often than not, they tend to be older than my parents. I typically don't want to linger during my physicals either so the sexy nurse thing seems just a bit odd.

There's this great movie currently in theaters called Where the Wild Things Are, a title familiar to most anyone who had a childhood in America after 1963. The offbeat movie adaptation, as constructed by Spike Jonze, is impressively rendered with a very melancholic tone. The movie revolves around Max, a boy who escapes to an island after running away from his mom during a fight. Max's whole world is starting to unravel as his single mom has found a new boyfriend to compete with Max for attention and as his sister has grown indifferent to the trappings of childhood, including her little brother. So Max escapes on a boat to an island full of fantastically depressed "wild things," creatures with beaks and claws and a serious need for some Prozac.

The wild things view Max as a savior, making him their king in the hopes that he will rescue them from their sadness. Max tells them he has secret powers that will bring happiness to the land. Previous kings have come and gone, as evidenced by a pile of bones and crowns in the middle of the forest, eaten by their subjects at the first sign of failure. But still the creatures hope that Max can reunite their group, torn asunder by feelings of hopelessness and dreams that have been long lost. When Max inevitably fails, the wild things turn on him, channeling their sadness into anger, even trying to eat him. Eventually Max leaves the island, as the sad wild things bid him a tearful farewell. Nothing is resolved, nothing is changed. The king was a charlatan and he left them unfixed.

I think that a lot of us aren't too far off from those wild things in the movie. We all have an awareness, as human beings in a screwed up world, that something is not right. Something needs to be fixed. Something, at our core, is not how it's supposed to be.

So, we try to correct that feeling of emptiness and we try to find an identity. The wild things tried to find an identity in Max. They pinned their hopes on various kings. When the kings let them down, they ate them.

Who are our kings? Who do we look to find an identity in?

Sometimes it's material things. I am the driver of a Porsche, I am the owner of this TV, I am wealthy. Of course we don't actually say those things. Or maybe you do, in which case you speak like C-3PO. But words are really unnecessary, it's obvious where a materialistic person gains their identify from by their actions.

But material things can't satisfy, they can't really change someone. So maybe, we look for acceptance in others.

The sexy nurse girl tried to find her identity in guys. If they wouldn't pay attention to her normally, maybe they would if she objectified herself in the name of some holiday or drunken party.

Where are we getting our identity from? Who is our king?

Is it sex? Is it money? Is it relationships?

The thing is, as long as our identity is about us, we're never going to be happy. That may seem counter intuitive, but it's really not. Because when my identity is only about myself, what makes me happy, or what defines me in the best way possible, I become selfish and ugly. Relationships are no longer about others, they're about me. What am I getting out of this relationship? How is this person making me happy?

But people that find their identity in Jesus: they are in tune with eternity. Relationships are seen through a whole new lens, what was selfish becomes selfless. The Way of Jesus is all about the fact that it's not about me. None of it is about me. And that's a very freeing thing. We don't have to find temporal kings anymore, we don't have to sell ourselves out for someone's cheap, selfish affirmation. Those most in tune with Jesus, most in tune with the Way, have found themselves as His Followers. Not perfect, not sinless, but broken and committed. And that's a beautifully liberating way to live.

Rescue is Coming

2009-10-25T15:42:00.001-04:00

To the hustlers, killers, murderers, drug dealers, even the strippers / Jesus walks with them / To the victims of welfare, we living in hell here / Jesus walks with them

There's a very poignant scene in Peter Jackson's movie The Two Towers. The whole movie we've watched the good guys, including the appointed king Aragorn, be beat back into a fortress called Helm's Deep. The evil forces led by Saruman have been advancing, forcing Aragorn's army to take refuge deeper and deeper into the fortress. The situation seems hopeless, the castle is being overrun, and all the dudes that look like regurgitated demons are slaughtering Aragorn's army. In one last desperate plan, Aragorn, Gimli, and Orlando Bloom decide to take a final ride into the heart of the battle in an attempt to distract the bad guys while the women and children escape to the mountains. Just as all hope seems lost, and while Orlando shoots demons in slow motion, it happens. He's back. Gandalf, the wizard who was killed a movie (or at least four hours) earlier, appears over the mountains just as dawn breaks. Dressed in brilliant white and surrounded by an army, he leads the charge downwards, leaving a wake of Orkish things in his path. Gandalf descends into the belly of the battle, the middle of the ugliness, and in doing so saves the day.

I have long struggled with my view of Jesus, especially regarding his sermons, like the Beatitudes. I always read the Beatitudes, and really the Bible, as a list of all the things that holy people do, a laundry list of righteousness. Kind of like the worst syllabus ever. Don't get me wrong, I liked the things that Jesus talked about, but they all seemed so hard to attain. Impossible to attain, really. I could spend my whole life trying to hunger and thirst for righteousness, whatever that meant, but realistically I'm probably never going to get there. And even if I do, I'm only one for eight in the Beatitudes alone. And then, I haven't even touched the fruits of the Spirit.

Perhaps the biggest distortion of Christianity is when it becomes something to attain. Christianity was never supposed to become a commodity.

The story of the Bible and the Beatitudes and Jesus has nothing to do with what we have to attain to be okay with God. That's legalism. When Jesus says, blessed are the meek, he is really saying "blessed are the people that don't have it together." When Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, he's really saying "blessed are those who haven't obtained righteousness yet, and who may have no chance of doing so in the near future." Blessed are the not good enough, the screw ups, the ugly, the rejected, the people with bed head and chest colds. Blessed are those that get turned down for dates, get laid off, struggle to make it through the day. Blessed is the single mom, the family on welfare, the couple with the hurting marriage. Blessed are those that are at the end of their ropes. Blessed are those that live in the Mondays.

Because Christianity isn't about getting somewhere on our own volition. It's about Jesus coming here. Like Gandalf, Jesus charges into the midst of our battle, into our mess. We don't escape to Jesus or to some far away place of spiritual peace. Jesus brings it here. Jesus walks with us here.

Jesus is bringing heaven here, crashing into earth. He wants to redeem, he is making all things good. Christianity is not about escape. Christianity is about rescue.

Are you going through a divorce or a break up, a situation out of your control? Rescue is coming. Are you unemployed, struggling to make ends meet, just trying to get by? Rescue is coming. Are you struggling to pass a class, to pay your bills? Rescue is coming. Have you been giving into temptation, do you have sin that you just can't let go of? Rescue is coming. Are you struggling with issues of sexuality, lust, greed, pride...have you lost control? Rescue is coming.

Jesus is making all things new. He made the earth, He made us, and He said it was good. We are His creation. And we are being made new. God isn't looking to evacuate the religious to some daily mountaintop experience, leaving the rest of us poor, sinful schmucks to wallow around in our own mess. He wants to bring heaven to earth. Rescue is coming.

Mr. Hustle

2009-10-12T23:17:00.004-04:00

Growing up, I was never so sure about Jesus. For a long time, I was also pretty unsure about myself.

Sitting on my bookshelf is a small, plastic trophy of a basketball player with really short shorts and a sprayed on gold tan. Below him sits a long-broken plaque that reads in faded letters, "Mr. Hustle: 1998 Basketball Camp."

More than a sign of my lone athletic achievement in twenty years of life, this trophy is also about finding an identity. You see, from pre-school through graduation, I attended a small Christian school just outside of Grand Rapids. Despite the small size of our school, we were and continue to be, one of the best basketball programs in the city and state. Our state championship run began in the mid-nineties, just in time for an entire elementary school, and one red-haired, book loving kid with Harry Potter glasses and the entire dc Talk discography, to get caught up in basketball fever.

Personally, I would have preferred to stay home and read books about fighting mice and British detectives, but instead every June I convinced myself to join my friends and go to the basketball camps put on by our high school's varsity coach. These two weeks in June would serve to weed out the 10 year old boys from the men, as evidenced by my best friend's shelf which sagged under the weight of a small army of little gold men with basketballs. My shelf, on the other hand, was full of Snoopy books, Narnia boxed sets, and Donkey Kong 64 manuals. I was very jealous of my friend's bookshelf.

So, being the straight A elementary student I was (save for penmanship...if only Mrs. Neibor could see me now!), I quickly used process of elimination to determine which trophy I could reasonably attain. The one-on-one trophy was out because I couldn't score on anyone, much less beat them. Likewise, the free throw trophy was a wash since I couldn't make a free throw. PIG was also a non-starter, unless I could find someone incapable of copying my jump shots from inside the paint. Which left...Mr. Hustle, the trophy that they give the kid that either runs a lot or whose parents' have paid far too much for four years of basketball camps, yet have only generic Sunny D and a Hanes T-shirt to show for it.

So I hustled. I hustled to loose balls, I hustled to miss my free throws, and I hustled to the bathroom. Eleven years later, the trophy still sits on my bookshelf, next to a stack of old scripts from the high school plays I was in, and yearbooks filled with pictures of missions trips and memories that have nothing to do with basketball.

Until recently, I wasn't sure what to make of Jesus. I liked what other people said about Him. I liked how Donald Miller wrote about seeing the lines on His face. I liked how Rob Bell talked about a socially conscious Jesus and how Max Lucado made me feel like Jesus wanted to take me to a baseball game, and even though I don't like baseball, Jesus would make it fun anyway and probably pay for my nachos. I liked how my friend Julian talked about Jesus as someone who was concerned with all people, not just the privileged or the super spiritual.

I also liked the artsy Jesus, the kind that Flannery O'Connor wrote about and Bono sang about. I liked the Jesus that Bruce Springsteen referenced. I liked the Jesus that J.D. Salinger had Zooey Glass talk about. And I liked to think of Jesus as Aslan, because it seemed a lot cooler to have your God be a lion as opposed to a fat Chinese man in a loin cloth.

But I also didn't like some Jesuses. I felt uncomfortable with Mark Driscoll's Jesus, that Jesus sounded like he wanted to give me a swirlie or at least practice his UFC moves on sinners. I also was kind of uncomfortable with Joel Osteen's Jesus. I like the idea of a loving God, but I'm not sure I want to follow a Messiah that walks around with a "free hugs" sign. I have another friend that told me she wants to feel the whiskers on Jesus' face when she sits on his lap, like a dad with his young daughter. That was nice for her but I didn't really like that either, I don't really want to feel the whiskers on anyone's face and lap sitting was never my thing.

But that all started to change, right around the time that I gave up on my dreams of NBA greatness. Through a series of events in high school, I began to find an identity in the giftings God had given me. I got involved with acting and I found out I liked to write. I was following Jesus, but I was just beginning to realize what that meant.

I think a lot of us Christians waste time trying to "find ourselves." We want to find identities, so we go after meaningless pursuits. Once we identify our interest, we try to shape Jesus into it. That's not always a bad thing, it's good that socially conscious people recognize the social consciousness of Jesus. But it can also lead to Jesus becoming nothing more than a detail of our lives rather than the center. For example, while beliefs taught by Jesus, such as the intrinsic value of life, are recognized by many politically motivated Evangelicals, other obvious teachings of Jesus are conveniently shelved in the pursuit of political power. Jesus no longer becomes the center of our lives, but an aspect of an agenda. We pursue temporal things, earthly treasures and fleeting power, nothing more than plastic Mr. Hustle trophies.

Following Jesus means finding an identity in Him, rather than conforming Him to fit a self-appointed identity. Jesus is not part of an agenda and He's not a self-betterment tool, He doesn't offer get-rich quick plans or instant blessings. Jesus offers a lifestyle, a Way of living that is straight, but narrow.

The Way of Jesus is full of the poor in spirit, the meek, the weak, the merciful, the persecuted. It's for the people that can't get the trophies, those that haven't spent a lifetime pursuing temporal things but have lived in a way that is in tune with eternity, that brings heaven a little closer to earth. Jesus is not an identity we invent, but our identity is found in Him.

Bullhorn

2009-10-06T18:51:00.006-04:00

In the middle of my college campus there is this massive blue sculpture. I think it's supposed to be a gateway to learning or something collegiate like that. It's probably three stories high and looks like the unfinished structure of a really ugly barn. I guess this represents that learning is never finished. Get it? Seems a bit obvious for art.

Anyway, this is also the place on campus where people have rallies and demonstrations, usually involving a fraternity, free Red Bull, and speakers blasting Nickelback or something that sounds just like Nickelback. But every September, a group comes consisting of four or five very grim looking, bearded people who hold signs saying things like "God hates you" and "We love hell." In the middle of the sign holders, a preacher with a bullhorn will list the things that he believes will send you to hell, including earrings, ripped jeans, and eating Lucky Charms. The first year that this happened, it became a week long event. By Friday, the middle of campus was full of protest groups, including one offering "free hugs" and another sitting around a hookah, all barefoot and strumming acoustic guitars. A few feet away, the preacher continued to debate with those who challenged him, listing off all the things that a good Christian did and did not do. I wasn't sure which group I felt more uncomfortable around.

There's a famous quote by Karl Marx that says, "Religion is the opiate of the people." Yet what this preacher was offering didn't seem very comforting or opium-like.

There's a story in the Bible about Jesus. He's hanging out with His disciples and teaching some followers one day, when the Pharisees approach Him with a woman that was just caught "in the act" of adultery. Under the law, the woman was to be stoned. The religious leaders hoped to entrap Jesus, surely someone claiming to be the Messiah couldn't condone adultery. While the Pharisees were working themselves up into a lather, explaining the situation to Jesus, He simply stooped down on the ground and started drawing. The woman was about to be stoned for adultery, and Jesus was drawing pictures? I think the modern day equivalent would be if Jesus were playing Tetris on His cell phone.

And yet, after the Pharisees were done yelling and having their orgy of self-righteousness, Jesus stood up, looked at them and the woman and calmly said that whoever was without sin could feel free to throw the first stone. One by one, they left, until it was just the woman and Jesus, the only one there who could have rightfully whipped a rock at her head. Yet rather than stoning her or even walking away in disgust, Jesus simply asked her "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" The woman replied, "No one, sir. Then Jesus looked at her and said, "Then neither do I...Go now and leave your life of sin."

Not only did He not stone her or issue a lecture on her failings as a wife, He refused to even condemn her! He merely told her to go and stop sinning, she wasn't condemned and she wasn't a failure.

Religion, such as that demonstrated by the preacher on campus or the Pharisees of Jesus' time is really a rejection of grace. It's a way of saying, "No God, you just don't get it. I can't accept free grace, I really should jump through some hoops. After all, we are talking about heaven here, grace shouldn't be easier to get than a credit card." So we construct ways to get around grace. We invent religion.

I have been asked before, how can I know that Christianity is true? How can I say that my religion is superior to others? And it's a difficult question. But what I do know about my faith, is that in essence, it is a recognition of my frailty and my failings. I don't have to attain anything, I don't have to find Zen or Nirvana, I don't have to bow to Mecca every day and hope that I'm all right and accepted. I can come to my God broken and ugly, battered and bruised, beat up or beat down. Because that's how life goes, isn't it? Have you ever met someone that has attained "Zen" yet also lives in the real world? Most of us don't have time to live on a mountain finding inner peace. When there's laundry to do, kids to pick up, and exams to take, meditation tends to take a back seat.

Now perhaps that's a crude characterization of other religions, I admit, but my point isn't to compare hermeneutics or religious traditions. My point is that only Jesus offers true, unadulterated grace. The greatest distortion of Christianity is when it becomes the religion of the elite, of the rich ruling class or the trickle down economists. Jesus was the complete opposite of an elitist or a self-righteous, unearthly "holy man." Jesus was not religious. Religion is not Jesus.

Jesus is grace. Jesus is love. Jesus accepts you. That does not mean that you won't have to change, He did tell the woman to go and stop sinning. It also doesn't mean that we are irresponsible for our actions or that there is no eternal accountability. But it does mean that you are not condemned.

Maybe Karl Marx never needed anybody, never had one of those days where he couldn't do anything right, never got sick or was stood up or let down. Never flunked a test, never had more to do than could reasonably be done, never fell behind or missed a deadline. But I would venture to guess that most of us don't live in that world where everything is perfectly scheduled and ordered, where shirts are always pressed and hair always combed, where cars always run and colds never come. The truth is, we can't do it alone. We need love, we need acceptance, we need grace. We don't need religion, we need Jesus.

Religion doesn't need grace. Religion doesn't need Jesus. That preacher on campus, the Pharisees, Karl Marx, they don't want grace, they don't need Jesus. But I do. Every day. And I receive grace. And I receive Jesus. Every day.

God's Refrigerator

2009-09-27T20:00:00.004-04:00

The other day, I drove past a church sign that asked, "If God had a refrigerator, would you be on it?" And I thought to myself, I'm not sure I would make it onto God's fridge. I mean, He has a lot of kids. My family has two and I don't even think I made my mom's refrigerator. I know there's a Snoopy magnet and a picture of some family friends, but I'm pretty sure there's no me. And God's refrigerator, I surely haven't done anything good enough to get put up there. I mean, that's some stiff competition what with people like the Pope, Max Lucado, and Kirk Cameron.

Yesterday, I was awkward. There's this girl that I've been wanting to ask out for some time. I finally decided to go for it a couple of nights ago when we were together and I suggested that we should get Subway sometime out on campus (ladies). She didn't really give me an answer so I just chalked it up as a closed door. The next day when I ran into her at the mall she said, "Josh, I think you owe me lunch." My response? "Umm, oh, oh lunch! I mean, yeah, definitely. Umm, right now?" Which would have been a somewhat acceptable thing to say, save for the fact that it was 6:00 at night and she was currently on the clock at her retail job. After an awkward pause I walked away shaking my head as she turned to help someone out. Brad Pitt I am not.

After going away and pretending to be interested in the store's shoe boxes and mumus, I decided to try again several minutes later when she wasn't busy. I approached her and asked what her Monday schedule looked like. She responded that Monday was not good, but Tuesday she was free. My response should have been, "Tuesday's great!" Instead the words that came out of my mouth were something like, "Oh, but I don't have class on Tuesdays...and I think that it may be the fall equinox or the season premiere of Antiques Roadshow, I get the two confused, which is weird because they seem totally unrelated. So, yeah..." Then my face grew uncomfortably red, and when I say uncomfortably I mean a cross between the worst sunburn of your life and Bill Clinton's hue when denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky. I walked away again and realized that not only had I botched a second opportunity, but that I would never be smooth. Forget Brad Pitt, I'm not even Jim Halpert.

A while ago I was talking with a friend about Jesus, Christianity, and religion. She told me that she couldn't accept grace because she felt it would be a cop-out. My friend told me that she smokes pot frequently, something that amounted to an unforgivable sin in her eyes. A sin that the church just couldn't forgive.

The biggest fear in modern culture is that we're just not good enough. Not good enough, not attractive enough, not smooth enough. For Christians, this plays out something like: not holy enough, not Christian enough, not saved enough.

My junior year of high school, I came down with a horrible head cold. It was mid-February and I felt awful. I sat down in my first hour study hall and told several friends, in no uncertain terms, that I felt like a cross between dying and death. I had a cold. At which point my friend turned to me, and said in a loud voice, "Don't claim that!" By which she meant that my admission of a cold showed a lack of faith, which in turn led to me getting a cold. I told her that it didn't matter whether I said I felt like crap or not, I was going to have a cold. I claimed that cold...because I had a cold.

So many of us experience insecurity in our faith, and that insecurity tends to be fed by church. Churches that tell you that you have to get on God's refrigerator, that you just have to be good enough, that you can't get head colds or broken-down cars.

When Jesus came to earth, he mixed the sacred with the secular in ways that have never since been seen. This was the Son of God, the long-awaited Messiah, the Way, the Truth, and the Life and he was hanging out with...hookers? Sluts? Tax cheats? Pimps? Common whores? Jesus was sitting down and eating with people that couldn't get any further away from church, the Pharisees, and religion. Jesus' death symbolically tore the Temple curtain that He had already spent his entire life practically tearing.

Our God got dirty. He was the Messiah of the prostitute, the redeemer of the pimp. But more than that, He spoke to people who were not smooth. He spoke to people whose life was not like TV, people struggling to get by. Jesus was the Christ of the awkward, the downtrodden, the people with colds and cancer.

Ever since then, the church has frequently done its best to re-mend the Temple curtain, separating itself from the world. Jesus became stuffy and religious, the God of the medieval Catholic Church and the Crusades. The symbol of the privileged and the Republicans. Slowly Christ went from the healer of the wounded to Jesus of suburbia.

But that's not it at all. Jesus' message was that we no longer have to be good enough. We don't have to deny our troubles and sickness. We don't have to learn to be smooth or suave, we don't have to strive to make it onto God's Honor Roll or refrigerator. We aren't ranked, we aren't judged, we are loved.

We are loved. Wherever we are, whatever we've done. Whether you've smoked pot every day for the past two years or have mumbled the rosary every morning since childhood. You are loved and accepted for who you are. You don't have to get perfect. You don't have to have a 4.0 or even a 2.0. You don't have to take a bath before you take a shower. Jesus accepts you and wants you dirty and imperfect. If we had the ability to perfect ourselves, we wouldn't need Jesus.

Jesus wants the meek and the weak. Jesus wants the shy and the awkward. Jesus wants to bring heaven and earth together.

Jesus wants you just as you are.

Do the Right Thing

2009-09-20T21:08:00.000-04:00

Last week, President Obama was addressing a joint session of Congress concerning his health care reform proposals, following months of highly charged town hall forums and Fox News rallies. Midway through his speech, Joe Wilson, a white Republican congressman from South Carolina, yelled at the President, "You lie!"

I was talking with my friend not too long ago about relationships. My friend, who is black, was telling me how she could never date a white guy. She said her family would not accept it, that being in a relationship with someone who is not black would serve as a rejection to her race and culture.

I was sort of hurt by my friend's view. Not so much because I wanted to date her, but because it hurts to be automatically excluded for something you have no control over. I didn't choose being white any more than she chose to be black. But that's the reality we were born into.

This conversation reminded me of a documentary I was watching on CNN not too long ago called "Black in America." Part of the documentary focused on interracial couples, including a seemingly contented married black woman and white man. While the couple's interview was playing, footage was being shown of the couple walking through a park hand-in-hand with their young son, who was happily swinging between mom and dad. The video ended as the couple was asked whether or not they would get married again if they had the choice, given the attitudes and adaptations they had to face. After a pause, both replied "probably not."

Probably not. Powerful words coming from a married couple.

Yet as much as I was taken aback by my friend's comments and saddened for the couple who seemed so good together, I could not help but understand it. Because as much as we talk about reconciliation and refer to racism in the past tense, it's as real today as it was a century ago.

Is it okay for my friend to reject all men with a different shade of skin from her dating life? I don't know. But I do know that it is foolish to discount personal and cultural history from the modern discussion of race. Perhaps it is selfish to ask someone to reject their racial heritage for the sake of a relationship. But is it right to reject love for the sake of preserving a sense of history? Certainly both individuals entering into an interracial relationship would have to be willing to make sacrifices and adaptations that other couples would never have to consider. Perhaps there are no easy answers.

The problem with modern day race relations is that, by and large, those that can afford to ignore them have ignored them. We've become a "nation of cowards" in Erik Holder's infamous words.

Trying to ignore cultural differences is both foolish and frustrating. But it can also be dangerous as we become more and more isolated, merely because we are not willing to address issues of race.

As a result, racism and ignorance are manifested in seemingly less obvious ways. Would Joe Wilson have had the audacity to shout down a white President? George W. Bush was one of the most unpopular presidents in American history and he never got heckled by a congressman during a speech. What about the health care debate? As white conservatives see change coming, as society shifts away from a homogeneous Anglo-centric culture, groups tend to isolate themselves in an attempt to "preserve" the past. Why, after so long, are we still hearing the question asked about our President, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" Terms like "socialist" and "fascist" have become, more or less, code words for "black." They certainly are not being referred to in their political context, in which socialism and fascism are on completely opposite poles.

Compared to earlier times of the Ku Klux Klan and segregated drinking fountains, racism has become relatively subtle and even harder to address, especially within the white community. It's why instances like the Henry Gates arrest can immediately set off an explosion of anger. It's why Glenn Beck expresses the view that President Obama is just like a white man when he speaks, intelligent and articulate. Prejudices have become ingrained, fault lines have been set in culture and no one is willing to address them. And when they are manifested, they are quickly glossed over.

White privilege has been accepted as the norm in modern America. The attitude of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" extends to areas as wide ranging as the health care debate to unemployment lines. Those opposed to social welfare or universal health care tend to be those who can afford to be opposed to it, those who have never known poverty, those who were given "boot straps" at birth. You can afford to vote based on only one issue when you have never known material want.

We can't ignore cultural differences. They aren't going away by us not acknowledging them. We're never going to know what we don't know. I am never, no matter how hard I try, going to be able to fully comprehend what it's like to be a person of color in America. But I can seek to understand, to relate, and to empathize with my brothers and sisters who are subjected to prejudices that I will never have to experience.

Because I am my brother's keeper. I am responsible to God to love and care for all His children. I don't want to miss out on what may be my most meaningful friendship or relationship because I'm held back by fear or a sense of awkwardness or, worse yet, prejudice.

But nothing can change if it goes unaddressed. It's time to stop being cowards, to stop avoiding being hurt or sounding foolish. We need to recognize our prejudices so that we can finally move beyond them.

The Right Stuff (Part Two)

2009-09-15T21:11:00.011-04:00

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am proud of this country.

With these words the cable news channels and talk radio ignited into a patriotic frenzy in February of 2008. Michelle Obama, wife of then-Senator Barack Obama, was speaking at a routine campaign event when she made the mistake of being honest with the crowd. For a campaign already in the throes of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, this utterance threatened to derail the hopes of a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, born to a Muslim-turned-atheist father and an agnostic mother, of ever becoming president.

What went unasked in this fervor was perhaps the most obvious of questions: what was it that Michelle was supposed to be proud of?

A few weeks ago I was talking with my good friend Tiffany. We were talking about the healthcare debate and she said that it all came down to the rich people trying to keep the poor people down, the privileged trying to become more privileged at the expense of others.

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in a political science class when my professor asked our opinion on the health care debate. One girl was particularly angry when she raised her hand and told the class that she, "shouldn't have to pay (health insurance) for people that aren't working, sitting on their butts all day, and dealing drugs."

Recently television pundit Glenn Beck has become a frighteningly powerful voice for the modern conservative movement. Last March, Beck started something called the 9-12 project, in which he encouraged people to return to the patriotic feelings of September 12, 2001 and to unite behind his 9 principles and 12 values for America.

The number one principle says that "America is good."

The number two principle? "I believe in God and He is the Center of my life."

Beck later went on to say that President Obama has a "deep-seeded hatred for white people."

Throughout the past decade, the evangelical church has become inextricably tied to the conservative political movement in America. This has also occurred at a time of great change in our country, a time when our first black President was elected on the promise of dramatic political change, a time when whites are quickly becoming the minority, a time of great cultural and social shifts. As a result, conservative, white Christians have rushed to embrace a foggy vision of the past, a time of peace and comfort, a time that may never have existed. A time of Americana.

What Beck and others are really calling for is a return to the known, the 1950s "moral America," the time of romanticized revolution and Constitution writing.

Conveniently forgotten are the agnosticism of the "Christian" founding fathers, the genocide of "Native Americans," and the racial atrocities of the 1950s.

Conservatives have forgotten the 3/5 compromise and "Bloody Sunday" but remember Leave it to Beaver and "Morning in America."

There's something seriously perverse when our number one principle has become "America is good," and God has been relegated to number two.

America can be a force for good in the world and it has been. My point in this is not to rant or to grind an ax against the United States. I am blessed to live here and many wrongs have been righted that existed at the time of our nation's founding.

But it is true that a gauzy view of the past has infected the church to its detriment. We have become overly concerned with preserving our way of life and as a result, have left others out in the cold. How is it that basic health care provisions are not a right, but a privilege? Where in the Bible is social welfare declared evil, but Wall Street capitalism declared righteous? When did our Bible become the Constitution and our prophet Rush Limbaugh?

The beauty of Christianity in comparison to other religions is that our God got messy. He came here, to this screwed up world. He embraced change, declared Himself the one way to heaven and He was hated and killed for it. He preached that, yes, all life is precious. But because of that, we are our brother's keeper.

So let us check ourselves. Let us not confuse political views with spiritual truths. Christianity should never become a means to protecting a personal agenda. Because while the conservatives' number one rule may be "America is good," God's number one rule is still that "you shall have no other gods before me." That means no country, no Constitution, no worldview, no agenda.

To quote that most famous of conservatives, "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side, my greatest concern is to be on God's side for God is always right." Well said President Lincoln, well said.

For Part One of this series of essays, click here.

I Never Loved Nobody Fully (Part 3)

2009-09-02T22:57:00.015-04:00

For Parts One and Two you could go here. Or here.

By my third year in college, I've gotten very good at being a professional college student. Every morning I get up, shower, put on jeans and a t-shirt and hoist a backpack over my shoulder that is surely making my spine look like an origami project. I drive out to campus, get out of my car, and for the next nine hours, my iPod becomes permanently attached to my head. Once I get to class, I go for the seat in the back corner and pull out my laptop. I take notes and, depending on the class, find out which character from The Office I am most like. (3 out of 4 quizzes agree, I am...Pam Beasley?)

Human interaction is kept to a bare minimum most days. I go to class and get out of there, heading off to work, home, or some coffee shop or friend's place. It's all rather tedious, but pretty comfortable. I am one of 24,000 students after all.

A while ago, I was standing outside of a lecture hall listening to my iPod and wondering how much coffee I should have drank in order to stay awake during a lecture called "State Sovereignty and Cooperation in the Global Era (An Introduction)." As I was contemplating coffee and why I can never seem to get male characters on Facebook quizzes (apparently I am also Janice from the Muppets) a cute, tired looking girl came up and stood right next to me. Immediately I was presented with the option of removing my iPod and trying something called talking, or staying in my comfortable world of The Shins and floor staring.

As I weighed the options over in my mind I began to get nervous. I mean, I wasn't feeling particularly interesting this morning. And I didn't want to go all red-faced on her, the Irish side of me tends to come out at bad times. So I stared more intensely at the floor until the doors to our lecture hall opened. Several minutes later, the girl sat down in front of me and stretched her arms back into my aisle. On her wrist was a Livestrong-styled bracelet with the word "Confidence" written in all caps.

One of my favorite books on spirituality and Christianity is Sex God written by Rob Bell. In it, he has a chapter called "She Ran Into the Girl's Bathroom." Bell writes about his first middle school dance in a very segregated cafeteria, both genders claiming a side of the room as their own.

Those of you who have walked this road know the determination and fortitude it takes to leave the boys' side, walk across the lunchroom-turned-dance-floor to the girls' side, and make your request. It takes all that a young man has in him not to buckle under the enormity of the pressure. But I did it. I made it to the other side and asked her if she would like to dance with me. Her response? She burst into tears and ran into the girls' bathroom, where she spent the rest of the night.

He goes on to write:

When you make a move toward a person, when you extend yourself to them, when you invite them to do something, when you initiate conversation, you give them power. Power to say yes or no. Power to decide. This is true from junior high dances to marriage proposals to inviting someone for coffee. Everyone who has ever received a no knows exactly what I'm talking about.

We've all been there. It's always easier not to extend ourselves, it's easy to be comfortable, to keep the power.

We have a cultural adversity to discomfort.

It's why break-ups are now handled via voicemail, or worse yet, text messages. It's why we check Facebook relational statuses before making a move. We have a false sense of community with people, a false sense of relationship. We have made our relationships comfortable and in the process, have lost much of the human aspect.

I was a very shy kid. According to high school personality tests, I am "melancholy."

My best friend growing up was very loud and outgoing. According to high school personality tests, or anyone that's met him, he is a "sanguine."

It's easy to hide behind these labels. I justified not talking to the girl because I just wasn't feeling interesting, I was tired, I was shy, I'm melancholy, I'm not outgoing....

Or to the reverse effect: I have too many friends, I don't want to commit, I don't want to be tied down with a relationship, I'm too outgoing, I am just looking for a hookup or fling, I'm sanguine...

Our obsession with labeling and justifying has made us selfish. We tend to live in bubbles. A bubble of technology, of Facebook, of comfort. We try to dull the sharp edges of relationships by asking others out via the Internet, by emailing, by avoiding real contact.

How do we break out of this bubble like mentality? We extend ourselves. We unplug.

We do hard things.

You may face rejection. We've all been there. You may be let down. We've all been there too. But most things that come easy aren't really worth having.

So extend yourself, go for it, put yourself out there. Don't hide behind an iPod or a screen. God created us for community, for relationships. Let's be willing to be uncomfortable.

Snoopy and Salinger

2009-08-30T15:12:00.009-04:00

Growing up, I loved to read. The Hardy Boys, The Chronicles of Narnia, Basil of Baker Street, Redwall, you name it and I probably read it. Needless to say, I was quite the king of the playground in elementary. Me and my books about fighting mice.

I had a special place in my heart for comics. Not the superhero kind, I never got into those. The newspaper kind. Especially Peanuts. I particularly liked the character of Linus Van Pelt in Charles Schulz's fantastically melancholy, downbeat comic strip. Linus is intelligent, but in a quirky way. He tends to overthink things, but he avoids becoming hapless like Charlie Brown. He knows who he is, but he's also insecure enough to carry around a blanket wherever he goes.

Over the past month I've been reading the book Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of the artist and his strip by David Michaelis. Throughout the book, Michaelis sprinkles strips to illustrate his points. Two of them featuring Linus struck me particularly while reading last night.
(Click pictures to enlarge.)

I love the book Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It's really two different short stories combined into one book. The first volume tells the story of Franny Glass, an attractive, intelligent college student who is on the verge of a breakdown, climaxing with a fainting episode in a restaurant bathroom. The second half picks up several days after Franny returns home to her parents and her slightly older brother Zooey.

The entire book is essentially a series of conversations, mostly between brother and sister. Franny defines college as "just one more dopey and inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything." She goes on to rant about the arrogance of professors, the idiocy of her boyfriend, and the general stupidity of her place in life.

In an attempt to stave off the monotony of her life, Franny becomes obsessed with constantly repeating the "Jesus Prayer" (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner. ) Through this she hopes to internalize the prayer, so that it is always being said in her spirit in order to "pray without ceasing." She becomes obsessed.

In Franny's attempt to find inner peace, to find meaning, to find some greater purpose than the pedantic uselessness of college, she gives herself a nervous breakdown.

Maybe peace is what happens when we stop trying to attain it.

The founding documents of our country establish the inherent right of every man and woman to the "pursuit of happiness." This phrase would have been understood by the colonists in very material terms, namely as the right to land. For us now, it means many things...the right to find contentment, to make money, to get more. And yet, the more we pursue happiness, the more our inner peace seems to fade.

Life is full of seasons. Nowhere is this more eloquently put than in the Old Testament poem of Ecclesiastes 3. A time to mourn, a time to dance. A time to be silent and a time to speak. A time to weep and a time to laugh.

How about a time to move and a time to be still?

Because we judge progress by movement. We're a restless generation in a constantly restless culture. So often we look to something better in the future as a way to assuage temporary discomfort. If I can just get through this semester, then I'll be happy. If I can just find another job, then I'll find peace. If I can just, just, just...

There's an old cliche that says, "Wherever you go, there you are." And it's true. Because if you can't find contentment where you are right now, you're not going to find it a new job, a new class or a new relationship. There will always be another arrogant professor, another cruel boss, another girl that just doesn't understand you.

God is very much in the present. Jesus is not waiting for us down the road. He is walking right beside us, in the midst of the difficult classes, in the midst of the work disputes, in the midst of our messes.

Find the sacred in the common, find the glory in the mundane. Jesus is right here, where are we?

Naked Leprechauns Cage Fighting

2009-08-24T01:19:00.008-04:00

Don't wanna hear the noises on TV

Most nights during the summer end with me laying on my couch several hours after midnight mindlessly channel surfing and wondering why I'm not in bed. It is often during these times that a confident man in a plaid shirt appears on the TV screen with his blonde wife. He proceeds to tell me and every other college student/insomniac still awake at 2:30 that he has finally found meaning in his life thanks to a little blue pill called Extenze. It looks legitimate to me, I mean, they show guys in lab coats moving scientific looking potions around a table. Who needs the FDA when you've got those guys?

Don't want the salesmen coming after me

I'm terrible at selling things to people. I once was tasked with passing out coupons to people in the mall on behalf of the store I was working at. I got so flustered that midway through I had to set down my box of fliers in the middle of the food court and go to the bathroom to towel off my face, covered in a cold sweat. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, I couldn't sell insulation to an Eskimo.

I don't want it faster, I don't want it free

Navigating checkouts at stores lately is like navigating your way through a Gitmo interrogation. And I've been on both sides of the counter for these interactions. Mainly, they involve the cashier telling me that I can get my socks for free courtesy of Visa, me saying I don't really want free socks, and a manager with a clipboard several feet away ensuring that I don't leave that store without free socks (and a lifetime subscription to People.)

MTV what have you done to me? Save my soul, set me free!

Everyone these days is fighting for everyone else's attention. I'm sure it all started out innocently enough, a little competition never hurt anybody. But somewhere along the way, our American system of capitalism and our Western system of all out consumerism infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

In several weeks, myself along with tens of thousands of other people will be descending upon Chicago for the opening weekend of U2's North American tour at Soldier Field. U2 set the standard in the 1990s for outrageous sets with their Zoo TV and Pop Mart tours, meant to parody materialism and consumerism by featuring overwhelming materialism and consumerism. The Zoo TV set of 1991 is still impressive, a massive wall of TV screens towering several stories above the band. Pop Mart in 1997 featured an equally intimidating golden arch and a lemon-shaped spaceship that the band emerged from for their encore. After ditching their irony (and War of the Worlds styled sets) for most of the 2000s, U2 is now back with a 10 story high stage, dubbed by engineers and the band "The Claw." One claw exists on every continent that the band will be touring. The carbon footprint, needless to say, is a bit high.

One of the largest churches in the United States is housed in the former arena of the Houston Rockets. Every Sunday, 16,000 (sixteen thousand!) congregants pack Lakewood church. On the other side of the country, California's Saddleback church houses a skate park, beach volleyball courts, and a full concert theater. Across the United States, youth group complexes now function as Jesus' nightclubs, full of screens, graphics, and coffee bars.

Whether or not such church luxuries are called for or not is a different topic. But it is true that every year the ridiculous gets a little less ridiculous.

Why? Because we're bored. We've seen it all, we've done it all, and we're just waiting for something bigger, faster, and better to come out so we can be briefly entertained.

We are never satisfied.

Just as we want to be constantly entertained, constantly improved, constantly bettered by products we purchase, we want such gratification from our relationships as well. Everyone knows the guy who goes through a girlfriend a week or the girl who recycles boyfriends like pop bottles. It's because we're bored. We're just not satisfied. We make instant judgments, evaluating people's relational worth with the same amount of care we devote to choosing a mayonnaise brand.

It's no wonder that the more "developed" society has become, the more religion has declined. How does a religion, such as Christianity, that focuses on prayer, time investment, and relationship development survive 21st century America? Well, it either gets transformed into a get-rich-and-happy-quick scheme (Your best life now!) or it requires people to change their lifestyle.

We want everything to be like McDonald's. Quick and easy. But relationships (at least the worthwhile ones) take time. What potential relationships are we overlooking now because we feel bored or unamused? And how often are we ignoring Jesus because we just don't feel the excitement anymore? We cast aside relationships and people that don't entertain, we give up on God when we lose the warm and fuzzies. All of us are guilty of wanting constant satisfaction, all of us want to be entertained. But perhaps its time to refocus.

May we all rid ourselves of a consumerist mindset when approaching others. May we approach others as Jesus did, with love and, perhaps most relevantly, commitment.

Oh, and in regards to the title? I had to get you to read this somehow...Leprechauns! Cage fighting! Sex! Leopluradons!

(Excerpted lyrics from "Windowsill" by Arcade Fire from their fantastic album Neon Bible)

Carpe Diem

2009-08-17T15:37:00.009-04:00

I work at a large retail store, the kind of place where you can buy a chain saw and a pair of pleated khakis within the same visit. Much of my job involves moving large boxes around a stock room. I share the stockroom with another guy named Ryan who has Asperger Syndrome and looks a lot like Adam Morrison. His job consists entirely of sitting at a desk in the stockroom and rebuilding ratchets that the store can exchange out cheaply. Every morning at 11:00, Ryan comes into the stock room, quickly waves and says "Hi" and goes to his desk. At his desk sits a small set of speakers hooked up to an old portable CD player. Ryan uses these to play his prolific collection of Disney movie soundtracks, of which he has every song memorized in its entirety. And he sings them all. Loudly and very off-key.

I have to admit, I didn't take to Ryan's singing too well my first few weeks on the job. At first it was fine, I mean as fine as it can be to share a stockroom with William Hung. But by the time I was hearing "It's a Small World After All" for the fifth day in a row, I was starting to get just a tad annoyed. Eventually though I adjusted and even began to stop into Ryan's corner to discuss our favorite Disney movies and to settle debates with coworkers as to which movie "A Whole New World" was from. (It's not Pocahontas, FYI)

The thing about Ryan is that you can never get him down. He skips through the store, he gets so excited when talking about Disney movies you wonder if you're about to get hugged. On lunch breaks, he reads these fantasy books about dragons and fair maidens to be saved, laughing and smiling the whole time. Ask him about his favorite song and he gets a big smile and stutters out, "I...I just couldn't pick one!" Help him move a heavy box and he'll give you a high-five worthy of The Todd.

One dreary, melancholy Monday morning, Ryan came into work and gave his customary hi and quick smile before taking off his damp coat and setting to work on his ratchets. Today he had brought in The Newsies soundtrack. Loudly and with particular enthusiasm, Ryan began to sing out Seize the Day with such gusto that I nearly expected a crew of newsboys to enter the backroom and begin a choreographed dance routine.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Dead Poets Society. There's this great scene when the class of boys first meets their new English teacher, John Keating. He takes them to look at pictures of past graduates of their prestigious New England boarding school. He offers this commentary to the boys.

They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.

To many people, phrases like "Carpe Diem" have become nothing more than motivational schlock. That's great that some people, somewhere have "extraordinary" lives, but the majority of us are stuck in the grind of ordinary life. How does a college student trying to balance work and school "seize the day"? How does a cashier make her life extraordinary? How does an insurance agent "carpe diem"? Most of us are just grinding it out, just trying to get by...just fixing ratchets for a paycheck.

The thing about Ryan is he always seizes the day. He seizes the moments when he reads in the break room, he takes moments of ratchet-building and makes them extraordinary. So many of us misinterpret "seizing the day" as something that people with money or good jobs do. But that's not it at all.

There's this quote from Fight Club that goes, "You are not what you have in the bank, you are not your khakis..." So often we get caught up in what we are and what makes us extra-ordinary. We are already extraordinary because we were made by an extraordinary God who made us for extraordinary things. That doesn't mean we leave the real world to go to some fantasy land. It means we are to seize the moments we have, no matter where they are.

Make your work extraordinary. Make ratchets extraordinarily. Read a book extraordinarily. Make a difference in someone's life, give a helping hand or just a smile. We make things mundane, every day has the potential to be something great no matter where we find ourselves.

The Right Stuff

2009-08-14T00:25:00.012-04:00

Being a political science major lends itself to awkward situations. Mainly they begin as they did about a week ago. An old acquaintance who I hadn't seen in quite a while came up to me and we began to talk about what was going on in our lives. He asked me where I was going to school and what I was majoring in. The minute the words "political science" left my mouth, I regretted not saying "dance" or "tourism management." Because when you tell someone that you pay thousands of dollars a year to study politics, they either glaze over and change the subject to something more interesting to them, like lawn fertilizer, or they take the opportunity to give a dissertation on the state of America. My friend chose the latter. He began to explain to me how it was good that I was majoring in political science because, to sum it up, it was well past time for us to get some good, small government, conservative Christians in the public sector. Periodically he would look to me for affirmation on his Reagan-esque viewpoints and I would smile awkwardly and try to change the conversation to lawn fertilizer.

At my old church, I used to sit behind this big, bearded white guy who would, without fail, wear a Bush-Cheney 2004 t-shirt to church every week. Walking through the parking lot after church, it was clear that if the car bumpers could vote, George W. Bush would win re-election in a unanimous landslide. Every election year, tables were set up by the exits where volunteers would pass out voters' guides full of recommendations for the Republican candidates.

Obviously the Evangelical church skews conservative, but this isn't really about that. It's about the church aligning itself with a political movement. It's about the American church becoming a voting bloc.

Because political movements come and go. Just as a liberal era extended from the New Deal of FDR to the sputtering finale of the Carter administration, the pendulum swung right from 1984 to 2008. And not all political movements are made equal. The next conservative era will not be another Reagan-conservative movement. It will evolve and it will accept things that the Reagans and Bushes of the 80s would not. Case in point, George W. Bush was a "compassionate conservative," clearly contrasting himself with the Newt Gingrich Republicans of the previous decade. Where does that leave a church commissioned with spreading an unchanging message?

How can the church spread an eternal message when it is so focused on temporal gains?

Trying to recruit God for a political cause is not new. There's a passage in the Old Testament book of Joshua where Joshua is walking near Jericho, days before the walls would collapse and the Israelites would overtake the city. Joshua comes upon an angel. His first question for the angel is, "Are you for us or for our enemies?" The angel replies "Neither." Centuries later, the Jews of Jesus' time would try to recruit the Messiah as a political leader that would overthrow the Roman empire. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world.

Isn't that what we do today? We try to recruit God for America, for the Republicans, for the Democrats, for our pet cause. The problem with this is that political parties have opposition, they have enemies. By the church aligning itself with the Republicans, millions of people are turned into opponents of an agenda, rather than broken people that need help from Jesus and his followers, themselves broken people that need help from Jesus daily. I think that is why the church has missed the mark so badly with the gay community. Rather than reaching out to hurting people and telling them of Jesus' love and forgiveness, the church has turned a whole group of people into an opponent standing in the way of a political agenda. This is not to say that the church should be condoning gay marriage or a gay lifestyle. But we also should not be alienating these people with our "for us or against us" mindset.

In addition, when the church aligns itself with a political movement based on one cause (say, abortion) it automatically adopts all the other political positions of the movement, wittingly or not. Eventually, critical thinking is all but abandoned. Since when did tax cuts for the top 1 percent of Americans become a moral necessity? When the church become a body politik.

We are all entitled to our political views. But let's not mistake our personal views with spiritual truths. God is not a Republican. God is not an American. Let's not make the mistake of confusing a political agenda with God's will.

I Never Loved Nobody Fully (Part 2)

2009-08-10T22:26:00.001-04:00

Part one found here.

A couple of days ago I saw this cute girl wearing a shirt that said in large, glowing letters "I Fall in Love at Least Twice a Day."

Yesterday I was at work, busy attempting to set up a display in an aisle way. Nearby a young woman was talking loudly on her cell phone about her relational woes. Finally, she sighed deeply and told her friend, "I just need to marry a doctor."

Another night, I found myself at a local college church group. We were broken up into small groups. I was put into a group with three other guys and we were asked to share with each other our greatest temptations. Without a moment's hesitation, the guy sitting next to me, who had likely just stepped out of a Hollister ad moments earlier, pointed at each one of us and said, "Women, women, women!" He then went on to share his deepest struggles with us, which could essentially be boiled down to the fact that beautiful women liked him too much and it was distracting him from Bible-reading. Struggling to relate to this magnet like effect on gorgeous women, I excused myself to get a drink.

Later on in the course of our discussion, another guy spoke up and said that he was tempted by two things, beautiful women and fishing. After going into depth on the beauty of beautiful women, he turned to me and announced, "Last night I gave into temptation all night long." Disturbed and slightly horrified by this unsolicited view into his personal life, I calmly told him in an inappropriately loud voice, "That is way too much information." Looking perplexed he replied, "No...I mean, I went fishing all night." I glanced back and responded, "Oh." The awkwardness past, my fellow group members began to talk about burgers which quickly turned into an improvised country song from the fisherman featuring the frequent, twangy repetition of the lyric, "Good woman and a good burger."

It is a natural want among people to desire a relationship with another person, to find someone that is not only understanding, but accepting. Yet relationships can also become something of a dance, go too far in one direction and desire becomes desperation.

Everyone has met that person that's just a little too desperate. Maybe some of us have even become that person in a relationship.

Desperation tends to come when we're looking for an identity. The unhealthiest relationships seem to occur when a couple finds their identity and security solely in each other. Rather than being individuals in a relationship, they sacrifice all individuality for the sake of becoming a singular couple.

The girl at work was convinced that a doctor would give her identity. Her persona would change from a struggling twenty-something to a rich wife with a prestigious position and a noble future. The guy in my small group found his identity as a magnet to attractive women. The other guy found his identity in attracting women and fish in equal measures. The girl in the t-shirt found her identity in getting attention, enticing guys with the possibility of "falling in love."

It's easy to slip into the trap of wanting something too much. But healthy relationships that I've observed and been apart of tend to come when both people are secure in themselves, and even moreso, have found their separate identities in Jesus. Finding an identity in Jesus can be difficult to do at first, it's hard to sacrifice our ideals and romantic views of ourselves in order to become a Jesus Follower. But once we recognize that we are not just so-and-so's boyfriend or girlfriend, but instead a Follower of Jesus and a child of God, the desperation that fuels identity-dating is weakened.

We don't need another person to validate us, Jesus did that a long time ago. He thought we were worth dying for. Every other relationship is just icing on the cake.

Wake Up Dead Man

2009-08-08T23:24:00.003-04:00

There's this really poignant scene at the end of the movie Doubt. Meryl Streep's character (Sister Beauviere) is sitting in a courtyard at her church with her fellow nun, played by Amy Adams. Sister Beauviere is a strict and rigid woman, inflexible in her beliefs and dogmatic in her actions, specifically as they relate to an issue in her school between a priest and a young boy. The whole movie builds up to this one scene when Beauveire admits to her fellow nun, in a state of emotional collapse, that she indeed has doubts. "So many doubts!"

There's this really harsh lyric at the beginning of the U2 song "Wake Up Dead Man" from their album Pop. It's quite a gut-wrenching song, written by Bono and guitarist Dave Evans (The Edge) while Evans' marriage was falling apart. Internally the band was being pulled apart by the playboy ways of bassist Adam Clayton, who checked into rehab shortly after the album was released. The song opens with Bono's distorted voice pleading:

Jesus, Jesus help me
I'm alone in this world
and a f---ed up world it is too
Tell me, tell me the story
The one about eternity
And the way it's all gonna be
Wake up, wake up dead man
Wake up, wake up dead man

Jesus, I'm waiting here boss
I know you're looking out for us
But maybe your hands aren't free
Your Father, He made the world in seven
He's in charge of heaven
Will you put in a word for me?

U2 has long pushed their faith to the forefront in their music. Much of their second album October reads like a worship record, in addition to the overt soul searching of The Joshua Tree. Such a spiritual past makes this song even more powerful, as sung by a man that sounds like he's at the end of his rope, spiritually and emotionally, even questioning Jesus' ability to do anything about his situation. By including such a harsh profanity (a U2 rarity), the sense of desperation is even more heightened.

Can you imagine the doubts that the Disciples in the Bible had after they saw Jesus brutally mocked, tortured, whipped, beaten, and crucified? Beaten and crushed, savaged beyond recognition according to Isaiah. Now Jesus is in a tomb and the Disciples are realizing that they spent the last two years of their life following around a man claiming to be the Son of God and now He's dead. Gone. What a horrible three days that had to be. I can just imagine Peter standing outside of Jesus' tomb crying, weeping, yelling "Wake up dead man!" He had to be wondering if this guy was a fraud the whole time. How was it that He could raise the dead yet He couldn't even stop Himself from being wrongly crucified?

In twenty years of church going, I have yet to hear a sermon devoted solely to the topic of doubt. There's a near aversion in the church to admitting such a common and sometimes daily struggle. This makes such questioning feel wrong or sinful, something that precedes some horrible backsliding into sin and debauchery. And perhaps sometimes that is the case, but more often than not, doubt is merely a symptom of trying to live a holy life in an increasingly unholy world.

Doubts tend to come at the worst times. Following a tragedy, a dissolution of a relationship, or maybe just a time of great insecurity. Doubt comes when we're vulnerable, tired, or run down. Yet doubt is not a sin, nor is wrestling with God.

There's a temptation to push faith away in times of doubt. I've done it many times. I've been mad at God, confused with God, hurt and blaming God. Eventually I either feel so guilty that I've questioned God that I don't want to talk to Him or so frustrated with Him that I blame Him and stop talking with Him.

Yet perhaps the best reaction is that of Jacob's from Genesis. Jacob didn't give up on God, he struggled with Him. God's big enough to take it. He's heard it all and He's not surprised. God answers, God gives wisdom and God does not discourage wrestling with Him. One's faith might even become stronger in the process.

Thick and Ordinary

2009-08-02T22:43:00.003-04:00

Recently, I came across this quote by John Lennon, "Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

It reminded me of a coworker who was ranting to me not too long ago about the ignorance and hypocrisy of evolution-denying, Bible-thumping, judgemental Christians. Hypocrites, people that claimed to follow Jesus but were just as flawed as everyone else. Thick Christians. Ordinary Christians.

In times like this, there is a temptation to, as Shane Hipps puts it in his book Flickering Pixels, "try to rescue Jesus and the gospel by severing their ties with the church." This is exactly what I wanted to tell my coworker, that not all Jesus Followers were hypocrites. I felt mad at these people that my coworker described, charactures or not. Why were these people screwing it up for the rest of us real Jesus Followers?

Until I began to realize that I was that hypocrite. I was the one that acknowledged Jesus in church, but with the same mouth denied Him as I ignored the plight of the hurting and tore down other coworkers with my harsh and spiteful words. I was the hypocrite that could curse one minute and break into a worship song the next. I was that hypocrite who paid lip service to the importance of helping the poor and the needy, yet didn't lift a finger to help them myself.

There's this great passage in J.D. Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfied is going off on the Bible, Christianity, and the Disciples.

I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples.

Later on, Caulfied talks about how he used to argue with a Quaker friend about the stupidity of Jesus' Disciples.

He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn't have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn't blaming Jesus or anything. It wasn't His fault He didn't have any time.

But the beauty of the Bibical Disciples is that Jesus not only picked them, He loved them. He accepted them, this ragtag group of fishermen, tax cheats, skeptics, political zealots, and traitors. Not only did He select them to be His Disciples, He commissioned these wildly imperfect, frustrating people to carry His message throughout the world.

Often there's a view that we need to get saved before we get saved. In other words, we need to get perfectly clean and acceptable before we can accept God's grace or, for that matter, share it with others. Other times, we try to establish perfect molds for true Jesus Followers. Once you look a certain way, speak a certain way, vote a certain way, listen to a certain type of music, attend a certain church...then, and only then are you prepared to share Jesus.

But that's the beauty of Jesus choosing broken Disciples. He never once asked them to be perfect, He didn't tell them to share His message once they spoke more eloquently or became more religious. He just told them to go.

So, in response to John Lennon, I am thick. And I am ordinary. And I may screw up the message of Jesus from time to time. I'm sorry for my hypocrisy, I know I need to do better as do other Followers of Jesus. We've failed so many times and we will fail again. But what better way to illustrate grace then through a broken and cracked medium? Through faults and flaws, Jesus' grace is revealed.

You see, Jesus got down in the dirt. He lunched with hookers, he had tea with tax cheats, and he hung out with lepers. Jesus didn't look for the extra-ordinary people. Extraordinary people don't need extraordinary grace. Ordinary people, thick people, broken people, deeply flawed people, they need an extraordinary grace. And who better to share that message than fellow flawed people, themselves redeemed daily by a grace that thrives among the broken and the common?

I Never Loved Nobody Fully

2009-07-23T01:12:00.007-04:00

I lay in my bed staring at my navy wall, wondering if I was even capable of raising my head off the pillow. My body ached, I couldn't breathe through my nose, and my throat was killing me. But I knew the time had come. My first Homecoming was upon me and I had a responsibility to get in the front seat of my dad's Dodge Stratus and be driven to my date's house.

So I rolled out of bed, medicated myself on enough Dayquill to sedate a small camel, and put on an oversized sports coat that belonged to my dad sometime around 1997. I was only 14, a freshman in high school (hence the parental shuttling in the Strat) and I had been asked to go to Homecoming. I wasn't exactly what you would call a "catch" in high school, especially freshman year. I had long, thick, weirdly curly hair with blonde highlights and Harry Potter glasses that did nothing for my round face slowly making its way out of the awkward "fat kid" phase that was middle school. Luckily I went to a small school and by that point, I was pretty much accepted as one of the group, overly sarcastic and awkward as I was.

Several hours later I was at our table in the school auditorium, where I had ordered a piece of steak that presumably came from the cow's tail. I was the only one not to get chicken and I had just been served the toughest piece of meat that I have ever encountered in twenty years of life. The "steak" proved un-sawable, so I did what any awkward, Dayquill-drunk freshman would do...I stuck a fork in the fillet and brought the entire thing three inches off my plate and quickly lowered my head to greet it while no one was looking. As soon as I had the entire thing hanging out of my mouth, like a starved dog carrying a dead rabbit, the entire table decided to look at me at once, steak and all. My date looked on in horror as her knight in shining armor attempted to swallow an 8 ounce cow hoof. She didn't talk to me the rest of the night and ended up on another guy's lap at the "after-party." I sat in the corner feeling incredibly embarrassed (as only a freshman can) and very, very congested.

That was my first date. On another occasion, when I had become much more smooth, I inadvertently squirted my date with Lime creamer from a coffee bar. She was very understanding when I bought her chocolates several weeks later.

A little later in my high school career I decided to ask out a particularly cute girl to prom. I was terrified. When I finally got up the courage to blurt out, "Did you want to go to Prom? I like pie" or something equally awkward, she managed to change the subject to something totally unrelated, like the weather or the universal healthcare system in Peru within a matter of .6 seconds. It stung a little, I was even going to order chicken if she said yes.

Recently, I fell in love. Some guys fall in love with Megan Fox or Jessica Alba, me, I have crushes on Regina Spektor and Zooey Deschanel. I'm not choosy, I would take either out for coffee. I would even avoid the lime creamer with Zooey and I would be much more entertaining than Jim Carrey ever was in Yes Man. We would talk about Franny and Zooey and how Ben Gibbard is okay, but how she's really looking for a guy that played a mafia hitman wearing a dog costume in a high school play called Wooing Wed Widing Hood. I would tell Regina about how much I love to play piano and that I respect her role in the anti-folk movement (Thanks Wikipedia!). I would even learn how to say "hello" and "where is the bathroom?" in Russian to show off my bilingual skills.

But really, I'm not waiting on a call from Zooey Deschanel and I'm not holding my breath that Regina Spektor will read my Youtube comment about "Fidelity" (hint: it's the one that's misspelled, rants about religion, and has a lot of !!!1!111s) Really, I'm just looking for someone that accepts me for who I am. I think that's what we're all looking for. I mean, everyone has that dream person they would like to meet, even if that just means someone who shares common musical tastes or other interests. There's nothing wrong with that, otherwise you get the person that takes any relationship that is offered to avoid being momentarily lonely.

But I think a lot of us get caught up in wanting a dream girl/boy, so much so that the fantasy becomes stronger than reality. Instead of accepting a relationship and working at it, we become obsessed with "being in love" and some airy ideal of a perfect human, perfect wedding, perfect relationship etc. Perhaps it's time to hold relationships to a higher standard and to learn to cherish others for who they are, quirks and all.

Lakers, Froot Loops, and Why My Hips Don't Lie

2009-07-17T02:06:00.013-04:00

"L-A!"
"L-A!"
"K-E!"
"K-E!"
"R-U-A-LAKER?"
"HELL YEAH!"

It was a humid afternoon in late August when I found myself traipsing across a very unshaded campus with a group of sweaty freshmen and some very excited members of a local fraternity. These, our "Orientation Weekend" leaders, loved the college that I had been apart of for approximately 12 hours. When they bled, it was Laker blue. When they sweat, it was Laker black (and leftover alcohol). While most of the members of my group seemed content to get all school spirity, I was feeling kind of miserable in the back of the pack. I didn't know much about this college, but I knew I never was that motivated to leave home or my friends in high school. I mean, I guess being a "Laker" was cool, but I didn't feel strongly enough to be yelling "hell yeah" about it. But I just got strange looks when I responded to the frat boy's call of "R u a Laker" with "Sort of!" "I guess so!" "I'll let you know how I'm feeling in the morning!" I began to regret wearing jeans in the August humidity and looked forward to ice breaking in the air conditioning.

Later that day, we were all herded into a gymnasium in which we sat in little circles with other freshmen and had to reveal deep secrets about ourselves, such as, "Which song best describes your life?" At a loss, I told the group that "My Hips Don't Lie" was a very accurate depiction of my life, and that, in fact, my hips have never spoken anything but the truth. The looks I received made me quickly regret my word vomit and I mumbled something about "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" being my real answer. I decided to pass on the following morning's class, in which a woman with a doctorate would attach birth control devices to vegetables, followed by a question and answer session.

College is fine, I guess. I mean, it's kind of cool to be able to get up and make a Froot Loop run at 2 in the morning. The community building exercises left something to be desired though...for those not interested in a local burlesque show or a marshmallow fight (or watching a rerun of Scrubs next to the couple in a constant state of making-outedness on the community couch), there wasn't much community to be had.

So I decided to make the rounds of the local Christian groups. One group really liked me, but I just wanted to be friends. A girl in the group told me I should go...then she said that when new people come, they get their butts grabbed. But if I wasn't okay with that, just say so. I wasn't okay with that and I didn't want to have to say so to avoid getting groped. The next group was very beautiful, everyone was tall and very, very tan. They also were all friends. I was pasty and all gingerish and kind of on the quiet side. I left early.

That was all two years ago, before I entered this weird hybrid age of twenty. I think this is the age where we're supposed to have things figured out, you know, our majors and all that stuff. But I don't. I technically am majoring in political science, but if I hear one more argument over the superiority of Keith Olbermann as it relates to Sean Hannity or the advantage of Keynesian economics in Tajikistan, I may stick a pencil through my eye. But I don't know what else to do.

The thing about being in college is that everyone else knows what you should do and they tell you. Good people, well intentioned people, people that I look up to. They all have some idea of what I should do; some are good ideas (teacher?), some are bad (Christian comedian?) I know this girl from my high school, she graduated two years after me. I was looking through the local newspaper this spring when I came across my high school's top ten seniors, where it lists their GPA and their "future plans." She said that she wanted to join the circus and then become a treasure hunter, and I think that was before she became a part of a motorcycle gang. I thought that those were the best future plans that I had ever heard.

So I don't know what I'm supposed to do, and it's kind of scary. I trust God to show me but I just sense a lot of quiet. I think we all do in college. The biggest decisions of our lives are facing us and a lot of us just feel clueless and a bit helpless. So I go into this fall with a sense of uncertainty. I don't know what the future holds. I trust that God does.

Your Own Personal Jesus

2009-06-30T22:01:00.007-04:00

I used to have a Jesus action figure. It was a very awkward toy. What do you do with a plastic Son of God? But since my parents were starkly opposed to the Power Rangers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I had to work with what I could get and that meant playing with Biblical toys. Samson was one thing, he could just beat the crap out of the other toys and I didn't feel bad. Jesus I kind of left off to the side, unless Mufasa needed to be saved, there wasn't much I could feel good doing with the peaceful looking, well tanned, blue sash wearing marketing ploy.

Several years ago I was a part of a mission trip team to the Dominican Republic. I was a freshman in high school at the time and, to put it gently, was still making it through my pudgy, awkward phase. It was a horribly humid morning and our drama team was set to go to a children's hospital to perform a couple of skits and sermons. When we got to the hospital, I was surprised to see a mural on the wall of Jesus Himself. But what was strange about this Jesus, was that he was as white as I was, though admittedly slimmer and with a less red face. Other than that, this Jesus looked like he performed most of his ministry in Dublin. He reminded me of another mural that was at my old church, where a very sedated looking shepherd (Jesus?) was holding a lamb that looked like an unfortunate poodle. This Jesus was also very white.

There's another famous picture of Jesus that I saw for the first time several years ago. It shows a black Jesus, with dreadlocks and tied hands, looking quite sad. I thought it was a beautiful picture because this Jesus, with his tired, determined eyes and dark skin, looks like He is really carrying the pains and disappointments of a people that have become far too familiar with pain and disappointment.

There's this popular 80s song by the terrifically depressing band Depeche Mode called "Your Own Personal Jesus." I read an interview with the lead singer about the song, in which he commented on the dangers of turning fragile, broken humans into "personal Jesus's," in becoming too wrapped up in another person to the point that you put your faith and hopes in them. But beyond putting our faith in other people, I think we often try to turn Jesus into our "own personal Jesus" by molding Him into what we think He was or should be.

During my first year of college, I met this girl named Kate in one of my gen ed Political Science classes. Throughout the semester I got to know her better and we sat next to each other in class. She was cute and I was lonely, and we began to go out to the campus coffee shop after class, the type of place where all the drinks taste like caffeinated creamer. We talked about things like God, abortion, and gay marriage, you know, typical first date stuff. Kate was really liberal, she was a Christian, but one of those Christians that likes to bring Jesus along to parties. Jesus, to Kate, was a confidant, a good listener, but nothing else, except maybe a designated driver. Kate told me she didn't like Bible thumpers. I began to think I had thumped one too many Bibles in my time and we eventually stopped getting coffee.

My next semester in college, I met this other girl named Sarah. Sarah was the polar opposite of Kate. Kate didn't care for church and liked jello shots, Sarah was a Calvinist who split her time between church and the College Republicans. We had to do a project together on a social issue, and I suggested universal healthcare. Sarah looked at me like I had just suggested that we do a presentation on the benefits of puppy genocide and later told me that she doubted a true Christian could vote for a non-Republican.

Me, I used to like thinking of Jesus as my personal trainer. Kind of like Paul Giamatti in that movie Cinderella Man. I wanted Jesus to always be in my corner, fixing me up and giving me advice in a Bronx accent, fiercely loyal and dressed in classy vests. Lately, I prefer thinking of Jesus as someone who I could hang out with, who I could talk to about girl problems, The Beatles, or Harry Potter depending on the day.

I have many other friend with many other views on Jesus. I have liberal friends that like to think of Jesus as someone who listens to a lot of Ani DiFranco and NPR, drinks chai tea, drive a Prius, and is very, very loving. These people probably like lyrics, such as that one in the worship song about "heaven meeting earth like a sloppy wet kiss," one of the most uncomfortable things delivered from a church stage since the youth group presentation on STDs back in middle school. I have a lot of conservative friends too, they like to think that Jesus definitely listens to only Christian music (though he may sneak the occasional Coldplay song, like all good Christians do), reads lots of John Bevere, and has a special spot in his heart for Sarah Palin.

Where do I come down in all this? Well, like I said, I have my own views of Jesus that I use to communicate with him, because frankly, it's kind of hard to talk to an invisible friend. I do know that John Bevere scares the crap out of me and that I don't really want a sloppy kiss from many people, and I really don't want to sing about them. So I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using images and people to understand Jesus, so long as these images don't contradict Him. Kate's image of Jesus seemed to be used to justify her lifestyle and that wasn't right. Sarah's view of an angry, Republican Messiah didn't seem to be very healthy either. And an Irish Jesus in the Dominican Republic was just odd. Personally, I am still trying to figure Jesus out, but what I do know is that He transcends any image or box that I attempt to put Him in. He is so much bigger than any image that I use to relate to Him, yet He is still a very personal Jesus. And that is a very beautiful thought.

The Defense Rests Its Case

2009-06-25T12:59:00.007-04:00

Sometimes I feel like being a Christian means being God's defense attorney, God's Bob Loblaw if you will (had to fit in one Arrested Development reference). And honestly, it kind of sucks being God's attorney. Because there's a lot of things that happen that are really hard to defend. It's hard to make a defense for a loving God after Hurricane Katrina wipes out an entire city or after two planes take down two towers and thousands of lives in New York City. It's hard to build a persuasive defense when you watch a friend slowly die of cancer. It's hard to stand up for God in biology class when a professor is pacing the aisles slowly tearing down the idea of intelligent design or when confronted with evidence that would seemingly undercut the basis of the Bible or the idea of any sort of god.

And frankly, a lot of times when I try to defend God, I feel like I'm not getting much help from the Big Man Himself. In fact, it often seems like I'm trying to defend myself and my belief system more than I am trying to defend God's existence or wisdom. It can get very frustrating.

About a year ago, I was taking a literature class at the local university. It had been a long, difficult, cold semester, made much more difficult by Dr. McLeod's class in which I had just received a C- on my first major paper and a D+ on my midterm exam. As much as I reread the story about the lazy Indian boy who became a philosopher and eventually evolved into a guava fruit, I apparently was missing the nuances and deeper meanings of the guava and Dr. McLeod let me know it. About this time, we began reading a story about another Indian boy, this time one who was a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu at the same time, often praying to Krishna and Jehovah in the same paragraph. My professor thought it was beautiful, I was still hung up on the half boy, half guava book. Once I got past the guava though, I began to think the new book was quite terrible. The whole thing, much like guava boy, was heavy-handed religious philosophizing wrapped up in a cute story about a boy who lives on a boat with his pet tiger who may or may not have eaten everyone else aboard.

Eventually it came time to discuss the deeper meanings behind Tiger-boy and his multi-faith perspectives. With all the restraint I could muster I raised my hand and told the class that religion is not a buffet line on which you can have a main course of Krishna with a side of Jesus and a dessert of Allah. In fact, I felt that this story was doing a disservice to all the religions presented. Rather than respect religious beliefs and truth, the author had created some watered-down mishmash of religious platitudes that ultimately resulted in the conclusion that to each person, his own truth. My professor illustrated this by drawing lots of squiggly lines on the board. Long story short, the class got mad at me and my professor drew a lot more squiggles and a couple circles to illustrate each student's argument about God. Let's just say, I was alone in my views with my vertical lines in a lovely shade of green.

My point in all that, is that for one frigid, dark morning in February, I defended God to a room full of philosophizing college students. It felt good, the kind of stuff that good Christians forward emails about. Now in that instance, I think it was good that I presented my views, I think it was an important thing to do. The lines were clear cut, the debate was set, and I was fed up with being spoon fed crap about guavas and tigers.

But the "argument" gets much harder when real life is involved. When a loved one gets a terminal illness, it's a lot harder to be dogmatic. And I don't want to be. That's not to say I lose my faith when bad things happen, but I also stop feeling the need to be God's lawyer. Because not only has God survived a lot of arguments for and against Him for a lot longer than the time I've been on earth, I think these arguments can detract from my faith. Rather than seeking to grow in relationship with God, I attempt to intellectualize God. So often Christians, and non-believers, get wrapped up in the science of God and He becomes some sort of theorem to defend and analyze rather than a Father to love and be in relationship with.

There's a great quote by Donald Miller from his book Blue Like Jazz about defending God: "My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago, and now it's about who's smarter, and honestly I don't care."

I think that is a good ending point. This is not to defend an intellectually lazy faith, that doesn't line up with the Bible. But maybe it's time to focus more on our relationship with God and living in a way that honors Jesus as opposed to trying to debate the pedantic details of his existence. Which is going to draw more people to Jesus, a good argument about the irreducible complexity of a flagella or a daily demonstration of the love of Christ in relationships and in words?

Lord, I'm Discouraged

2009-06-14T21:42:00.011-04:00

Last fall I was looking around for some new music, as I often tend to do when I should be doing something else not involving a computer screen, such as studying. I had heard a lot of buzz about The Hold Steady, a band transplanted to Brooklyn via Minneapolis. The band had just begun to get national attention outside of bored college student circles with the release of "Stay Positive." Drawing heavily from Bruce Springsteen, the band's songs are Catholic barroom anthems, often crass, always blunt, and sometimes poignant in their descriptions of broken lives and broken faith. I was listening to a track this weekend from "Stay Positive," the bluesy middle number "Lord, I'm Discouraged." I rarely post lyrics, and even more rarely read them when someone else does, but Craig Finn's story is especially applicable to the rest of this post.

Lord, I'm discouraged / The circles have sucked in her eyes / Lord, I'm discouraged / Her new friends have shadowed her life / Lord, I'm discouraged / She ain't come out dancing for some time / And I tried to light candles / But they burned down to nothing / She keeps coming up with excuses and half-truths, fortified wine / There's a house on the south side she stays in for days at a time

I know I'm no angel / I ain't been bad that way / Can't you hear her? / She's that sweet missing songbird when the choir sings on Sunday / And I'm almost busted / But I bought back the jewelry she sold

And I come to your altar / But then there's just nothing / And she keeps insisting / The sutures and bruises are none of my business / She says that she's sick / But she won't get specific / This guy from the north side comes down to visit / His visits, they only last five or six minutes

Lord I'm sorry to question your wisdom / But my faith has been wavering / Won't you show me a sign / Let me know that you're listening?

Excuses and half-truths, fortified wine / I know it's unlikely she'll ever be mine / So I mostly just pray she don't die

I used to think of God as a fairly angry man, sitting up in the clouds in a very impressive office (probably with lots of rich mahogany) and a lot of angel secretaries. I felt that every time I prayed, one of God's angels would bring him my celestial clipboard with a list of all the prayers that I had sent up to heaven in the past year. If I talked for over five minutes, He would check me off the list and we would be cool for another 24 hour time period.

I have this friend that I've known for some time now, going back to my early teens. I don't want to give away much about them in case mutual friends are reading this, but they have been like a sibling to me growing up. We came from similar backgrounds, being raised in the church and all. Lately, our relationship has changed. My friend began doing what a lot of us do in our twenties, searching for a purpose. My friend chose to do this through sex and alcohol, looking for an identity at the bottom of a bottle. We don't talk about it much, it kind of goes unspoken, neither of us are totally comfortable with the subject. The character in the song reminds me a lot of my friend. I hope my friend is not in as dire straits as Craig Finn's friend, but I get very discouraged when I think about them. I pray that God gets their attention, even as I struggle with the feeling that I can't get God's attention myself.

I think a lot of the problem with Christians that struggle in talking to God, is that we think we're not supposed to sin because it makes God angry. I used to think that if I sin, God gets ticked and, frankly, I don't like talking to people that are angry at me. I do enough of that with customers at work. Don't get me wrong, I believe sin does make God angry. But more than that, I think sin makes God sad. I get angry at my friend, but it's an anger based in love and based in sadness. Throughout the Bible, when God gets angry, it's always based out of an intense love. Even the laws in Leviticus, which to us in 21st century America seem obscure and pedantic, were implemented to protect the Israelites from illness and pagan influence. Many see Christianity in its strictest sense as too restrictive, but that's not the point. The rules and precepts taught in the Bible are not meant to restrict, they are meant to protect.

When I feel sad and fearful for my friend, that's just a pale, faint reflection of what God feels for them. I know God is listening because I know He loves my friend more than I ever could. Though my friend's lifestyle disturbs me, I know it breaks God's heart, a God that promised He was closer than a brother. The sign that Finn is looking for in his lyrics has already been given to him. The love that he feels for his friend is the sign, the reflection of God's deep love for her expressed through a fragile human relationship.

Art Shows on the Radio

2009-06-07T23:27:00.005-04:00

Tonight I was driving home from my friend's house when I turned on NPR. As it was after 10:00, they were playing something from the BBC. I like listening to NPR at night, because the voices are British and talking about the news which makes me feel smarter, especially compared to Chad Kroeger's decidedly non-British voice on the alternative rock station.

For this particular segment, the British people were doing a human-interest story about an art show. The reporter, who sounded like she had glasses and looked very much like Tina Fey, was standing inside of an exhibit created by a Pakistani artist. From what British Tina Fey said about the exhibit, it all sounded very impressive. She used great, artsy adjectives and probably fit in well with the people at the exhibit. Whereas I probably would have described the exhibit as "red," to her it was "violent." Yet despite her impressive use of appropriate adjectives, the visual aspect was very much lacking from the broadcast. After a while, the whole thing got frustrating as I was merely listening to voices describe something that I could not see. For all I know, the exhibit didn't even exist and the BBC just needed something to talk about so they pulled in a reporter who looked like Tina Fey and knew artsy adjectives to fill air time for tired Americans. I changed the station.

I know this guy who is an atheist, I'll call him Dan. He is very, very sure of himself. He used to be a Christian, even an evangelical one, but now he's not. Some people find God, my friend found science, specifically Richard Dawkins. He likes to quote Dawkins like guys with Rob Bell glasses like to quote Monty Python. He is certain of his faith in science. Once he said that he lost his faith in God after he realized that every scientist that believed in evolution was not out to disprove Christianity.

The thing about Dan the Atheist is that he always wants tangible proof. He has to have it. In fact, I have a suspicion that Dan really wants to believe in Jesus, in God, in everything, but he is unwilling to take the leap of faith, a leap that he considers greater than the one he is taking now.

God is frustrating like the British art show was frustrating. I hear from preachers and teachers a lot of impressive adjectives about God. God is great, God is loving, God is faithful, God is close. They are all beautiful descriptives, I like this God. But despite all these adjectives, without experiencing this God I feel very left out and I eventually turn my attention away to something that I can understand and wrap my mind around.

But I have experienced God. I have sensed God, I see God's handiwork everyday in nature, in music, in people. Yet there is still something missing, I still cannot see God. Many people in the Bible wanted to see God. Moses wanted to see God, and did. Thomas wanted to see and touch God, and did. But for the rest of us, the chances of seeing God pass by are pretty slim. For all I know, Dan the Atheist did experience God at one point, but somewhere along the line he became convinced that the experience he did have was not enough.

Any worldview requires faith, it's just a matter of how much. No one will eliminate doubt. I think nihilism exists because people gave up on faith, their minds got tired. Me, I kind of like faith. It's frustrating at times, and I have my doubts. But it's also very beautiful . I like that Jesus does not give me an option to dismiss Him. I like that Jesus does not allow people to patronize Him as nothing but a good teacher. I like that He said He is the only way to heaven (John 14:6). I like that the Bible establishes firm moral principles

Dan considers Christianity as requiring too much faith. And when you look at things like the concept of Heaven, or the Cross, or water turning to wine, it all seems like too much. But as I live everyday and as I see God's provisions throughout my life, the bigger things don't seem like too much of a leap of faith. When I see family members saved from alcoholism, the Cross doesn't seem that far-fetched. When I see lives redeemed after years of sin and depravity, water turning into wine doesn't seem too much to believe. But beyond the "miraculous," my faith is strengthened every day when I see acts of compasion to the poor, or a kind word to a hurting coworker, or even someone willing to just listen to a lonely friend. My doubt will never be fully gone until the day I'm in heaven with Jesus, but I'm okay with that. I have doubts, but I also have Jesus and that's enough for me.

Things I Learned in the Church Bathroom

2009-06-03T00:51:00.008-04:00

About a year ago, I began attending a church in the downtown area of Grand Rapids. Stylistically, it's not really my kind of church. All my childhood, I was raised in an Assemblies of God mega church in the suburbs where my dad was a pastor until I was in high school. Eventually, my family left the church for a variety of reasons. After this, I began attending church on my own, first trying out several other suburban mega churches, but nothing felt quite right. So, as much by God's direction as a lack of other options, I ended up at a small Reformed church in a poor part of town. As I mentioned above, stylistically the church is very different. Modern, U2 sounding worship-rock bands are traded in for a balding, folksy man with an acoustic guitar and his tambourine playing wife who likely listen to Bob Dylan and Rich Mullins in equal amounts.

The other worship leader at the church appears to be Andy Samberg's Reformed twin brother. It's hard to sing along to "As the Deer Panteth" when in my head Andy Samberg and T-Pain are on a boat. Actually, it's kind of hard to sing along to "As the Deer Panteth" under any circumstance.

Needless to say, I have been questioning my place at this church for some time. Yet what has kept me there (besides my laziness in Mapquesting somewhere else to go other than a well advertised mega church) is the teaching. The pastor there is genuine, a real person who decries theology that would have me serving God as a means to advance my 401k. He seems to reside in the same world that I do. He doesn't pass out voting guides printed up by the Republican Party and he doesn't seem all that concerned with the overall lack of LCD screens throughout the auditorium. He loves Jesus and that's enough for him.

During every service, there is an elder that walks the aisles greeting each and every member and often passing out candy to his favorite kids. He kind of looks like Morgan Freeman from that movie "The Bucket List." I hated that movie, but I liked Morgan Freeman's character. Maybe because he reminded me of the elder at church. Anyway, last week during offering I was faced with the awkward dilemma of disrupting the people around me by getting up to use the bathroom or spending the entire sermon wondering if holding it can actually lead to physical injury. Later, as I was standing at the sink Morgan the elder came in to wash his hands.

As we were standing next to each other drying our hands, Morgan turned to me and gave me a bit of advice that has stuck with me ever since. "Young man," he said in his grandfatherly voice, "When I was younger, I used to think that living was natural. But as you get older, you begin to realize that this is not natural, it's a gift."

How many of us, those in college or the workforce or raising a family, regard the day as something that needs to be gotten through? We have trained ourselves to work and work and work so that one day, we can appreciate the nirvana of promotion or retirement. In the meantime, we're wasting the days we have been given. We think that life is "natural," it's something that just happens every day, like the sunrise or Jimmy Fallon's unfunny monologues.

As a part of our harried lifestyles, we've convinced ourselves that God is found in churches, retreats, and "mountaintop experiences." And He certainly is. But He is just as real during the days that were merely trying to endure. He's just as real when we're working and saving and scraping during the week. We want God to operate on the same plane that we do. Just as we work and work for promotions, we pray and pray for "breakthrough," while not really knowing what that means other than it being some sort of spiritual promotion.

I used to pray that God would use me at work. When I prayed this, what I really wanted was to lead a revival service in the break room while Israel Houghton performed in the Home Fashions department. Guest appearances by Rob Bell, Kirk Cameron, or at least the Christian Baldwin brother wouldn't hurt matters either. I wanted something big, something revolutionary. When this didn't happen, I would go home disappointed. Eventually I began to realize that I was looking for something huge to fall out of the ceiling instead of focusing on the personal interactions around me. In fact, I was being quite unpleasant to several coworkers. I was turning into that guy, the Christian who won't crack open a beer but is happy to run his mouth about a coworker that took a 35 minute lunch.

Sundays are no more holy than Mondays. I once read a quote that said "Everything is Spiritual," and I think that's quite beautiful. So often we treat life as a natural occurrence that is always going to be there for us when the alarm goes off in the morning. We focus and strain for some far off goal, some spiritual breakthrough. We stopped appreciating the Mondays.

So, maybe it's time to begin to appreciate the Mondays. Maybe it's time to appreciate the tambourine playing worship leader or the tardy coworker or the alarm that comes way too early. Everything is spiritual, every day, every moment, every interaction, is God's. It's time to live our Mondays just like we live our Sundays.

God of the Mondays

2009-05-23T01:26:00.007-04:00

Several weeks ago, I was wandering through a Christian bookstore. I don't particularly care for these places, I can only handle so much Kirk Cameron at one time and when combined with a KJ-52 soundtrack and a non-fiction book section that features none other than model Jesus Follower Michael Savage, the whole experience becomes a bit overwhelming for me. Anyway, the first thing I came to in this bookstore, was a display on Biblical cures for diseases with specific books for specific ailments. As I am deathly allergic to anything that grows or walks on four legs, I reached for the book regarding allergies. I don't particularly remember what the book said, though I don't think it recommended Zyrtec, which has been working out quite well for me.

Recently, I was sitting in a church service in which the pastor was speaking of "breakthrough." Breaking through the average life, breaking through the frustrations of the week. The music grew louder as the pastor and the worship leader began to exhort the congregation to get their breakthrough, to live their "best life now" as Joel Osteen puts it. This seems to be a common sermon topic in the Charismatic church, yet I was having a hard time connecting with the pastor this particular morning. In fact, I felt quite frustrated.

Back in high school, my school used to take retreats every fall. In between pillow fights that left doors bloodied and freshmen reaching for two-by-fours and the occasional bathroom-turned-Slip N Slide, these retreats often had powerful times of worship and preaching. We were several hours away from anywhere, on a beautiful lake in Northern Michigan right as the easygoing humidity of late summer gave way to the melancholy beauty of autumn. It felt like God was not just present, but that He was in the room next door. At night, the sky looked like a picture from NASA, the wind felt like God Himself was sighing contentedly looking down on His children (though perhaps looking away from the guys cabin when the rave party in Ninja Turtles boxers began).

But as I sat in my pew on Sunday and as I later read about God's five-step-diagnosis for hay fever recovery, I couldn't have felt farther away from those October getaways in high school. Was a spiritual breakthrough really the answer? Was I doing something wrong? Because frankly, most Sundays, I don't think about God on the way to church. I think about school, I think about the ornery customers that only Sunday afternoons bring to the mall...but not about God. Does this mean I need a breakthrough? Do I need to get to the place where everyday is like those nights in high school, close to God and totally at peace with myself and those around me?

Yes...and no. Because not every day is memorable. Some days are a grind. Some days are better than others. More often than not, I don't live in a world of retreats and spiritual highs. I live in the world where Monday happens, where snow falls in feet, where transmissions go bad, and customers complain, where pop quizzes happen and so do allergies.

Following Jesus is about following Jesus in the daily grind. I am all for breakthrough, for retreats, for times of peaceful reflection. But that's not necessarily real life. Anyone can serve God when He seems close enough to touch. But how do I serve God when I'm being corrected or falsely accused? God does not change, but my circumstances do. Rather than focusing on achieving some state of spiritual nirvana, perhaps we need to focus on serving God when things are just okay. Mundane does not mean the absence of God, ordinary is not ungodly. It is in these times where we prove ourselves faithful and where we can truly learn what it means to serve a God that exists in real life. Paul exhorted the Thessalonians to "aspire to live a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, as we commanded you." God doesn't care about our earthly sense of importance and He isn't always looking for us to breakthrough or to change the world as we see fit. God is in the Sundays, but He is also very much in the Mondays.

And yes, my local Christian bookstore does sell books by Michael Savage.

Bruuuuce

2009-05-12T00:32:00.008-04:00

There is plenty of quality music being produced in the 21st century, you just have to look for it. It's no longer played on the radio, which has been overrun by Auto-tuned rappers and cringingly bad country pop featuring lyrics about the USA inserting its metaphorical boot into the world's metaphorical posterior, along with ba-donk-a-donking honky tonks (or something like that). But it is out there. Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Gaslight Anthem are just a couple of bands that have found heavy rotation on my iTunes playlist this year. These bands all make good art, quality music, but I rarely find myself coming to their albums over and over again. If I do come back to modern albums by modern bands, its often due to the memories with which I associate the music and not the quality of the music. For example, I associate Tom Delonge's bloated spaceman rock album "We Don't Need to Whisper" with my senior year of high school. Great memories, questionable music.

Certain artists transcend this musical ADD, yet none moreso than Bruce Springsteen. At 59 years old, Springsteen still puts out better music than the large majority of those less than half his age. Yet to really experience Springsteen, you have to see him live with his merry band of E streeters. So this is what my friend Ryan and I decided to do, even if it meant two stressful Monday mornings in front of multiple laptops, praying to the gods of Ticketmaster for favor while repeatedly clicking the "Best Available" button in multiple windows. One failed attempt for Chicago tickets, two new Passports, and plenty of Canadian dollars later, my friend Ryan and I were the proud recipients of two tickets to see Bruce himself in Toronto.

After making it across the border with little more than two "eh's" (they really do say that!) and following the horrible discovery that hockey coverage trumps all coverage of the NBA playoffs in Canada, we were ready to get to the arena. (Did you know that Phoenix's hockey team is moving to Hamilton? Neither did anyone else in America.) Arriving right on time is apparently frowned on in the land of French Ritz-Bitz (they tasted just a bit classier) as the start time of 7:30 came and went. By 8:30, the stragglers were finally filing in for the sold out show as the Air Canada Centre went dark while the dramatic opening chords of "Badlands" erupted from the stage. Springsteen, who looks about half his age on stage, ridiculously fit in a black t-shirt that even Simon Cowell couldn't pull off, ripped through an extended "Badlands" and an exuberant "No Surrender" before slowing things down for Working on a Dream's opening Western epic "Cowboy Pete."

Springsteen clearly recognizes that times are tough both North and South of the border, as he continued the tour's theme of hard times and working class struggle. Yet even Springsteen's legendary lyrics couldn't capture the mood as well as Nils Lofgren's searing three minute solo in the middle of the decidedly non-folk take on "The Ghost of Tom Joad." While the first half of the act sagged a bit in parts, The E Street band would bring things back up by the end of the sign request segment with a cover of "Louie Louie" and the soaring "Waiting on a Sunny Day."

In classic Springsteen fashion, the concert went well past the two hour mark, lasting at least two and a half hours, if not a bit longer. The strongest moments of the set came right before the main set closer "Born to Run" with the modern trio of "Radio Nowhere," "Lonesome Day," and "The Rising." The only people in the arena enjoying themselves more than the band were the fans, both old and young. It is hard to adequately describe a Springsteen concert, but it is one of the few shows that I have wished to return to the minute it ended. Rasping around on stage like a Pentecostal preacher, the whole show was a showcase of the power of music. Songs like the encore's "Land of Hope and Dreams" and "American Land" can encourage optimism in the hearts of the most downtrodden American. Who knew that it would take going north of the border to experience patriotism in its most musical form?

Springsteen's music remains timeless, much as his classic themes of struggle, survival, faith, and lust. Springsteen has outlived many musical fads and he shows no sign of stopping now. He transcended the Beegees era and he looks set to get through the T-Pain era in classic form. 37 years after he first welcomed us to Asbury Park, he's still The Boss.

Beginnings

2009-01-02T01:24:00.002-05:00

I am not normally one for New Year's resolutions. I have always related to the Death Cab for Cutie song, "New Year" in which Ben Gibbard sings "So this is the New Year and I don't feel any different..."

While it is true that the changing of a calendar does not amount to the disappearance of December 31's problems, there is something to be said for the idea of a fresh start.

Tonight I was reading two separate passages in the Bible: Genesis 1 and Luke 1 26-38. Both passages tell the story of beginnings.

The Scriptures open with a clean slate. God forms the universe and everything is new.

The Gospel of Luke begins with the story of a new beginning. The slate is wiped clean.

God always offers a new beginning. New beginnings do not always amount to leaving the consequences of past actions behind, but they do amount to a second chance.

The world already existed when Jesus was born. Sin was long prevalent.

Debts were still owed, consequences remained.

But Jesus took the heaviest debt upon himself and offered a broken world a second chance and a fresh start.

Everyone could use a fresh start in at least one aspect of life. Why not make 2009 the year of new beginnings?

Bono, Barack, and The Boss

2008-12-12T22:24:00.003-05:00

Hello faithful readers. I just wanted to let you know that, for the next few weeks, I will be guest-blogging on my friends' new site "Set Phasers to Blog." From many Christmas Eves spent sitting next to my uncle at the dinner table, I can reasonably guess that that is a Star Trek reference. I personally do not associate myself with that show in any way, though I will gladly associate myself with Josh and Ryan, two brothers and my good friends, who are running the site.

I will be helping with a weekly series called "The Epitome of Man," in which we discuss acceptable man-crushes (every straight guy has one, whether they admit it or not). I will be writing posts about Bono, Barack Obama, and Bruce Springsteen. I will also make an effort to write more frequently on this site, "Static Prevails," which for the unitiated, is a tribute to Jimmy Eat World and not Star Trek. And now it is time for me to leave you and for you to make the short journey over to Set Phasers to Blog for Part 1 of the 10-part series, "The Epitome of Man."

Thoughts on Late Night TV (But Mostly Keanu Reeves)

2008-12-11T00:16:00.006-05:00

Some observations while avoiding sleep...

When guys first start growing beards, say, around eighth grade (fifth if you're that guy...I'm looking at you Matt Boersen), the hairs don't come in too well. Typically, there is at least a centimeter between "whiskers." Now, I try not to judge facial hair too much, as I only shave to avoid a trash stache. I also was asked recently whether I could drive yet. That being said, Keanu Reeves really needs a friend because he is missing whole patches of hair on his face. Picture will be forthcoming...
James Carville bears a striking resemblance to a fetus...
I was talking with my friend Ryan today about celebrity crushes, particularly as it relates to one Miss Jessica Alba. I voiced my opinion that it was hard for me to have a crush, even a distant one, on someone whose head just seems so blissfully empty. That being said, I think I have a crush on Tina Fey. Ryan has a man-crush on Anderson Cooper. (But not Wolf Blitzer, though his beard does put Keanu to shame. Acting skills are a toss-up.)
Anderson Cooper could stop a hurricane just by looking at it. He doesn't meet his camera cues, he confronts them.
There are very few truly pale people on television. There are also very few people of color on television. Apparently TV likes an orange-ish middle ground.
Paula Abdul looks like she mugged Queen Amidala and stole her outfit on the way to Letterman.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Obama Impression

2008-11-26T11:18:00.000-05:00

This guy puts Fred Armisan to shame. He's got a couple videos on Youtube, this one's pretty funny. Thoughts from Barack after the 2nd debate.

Of Tina Fey Glasses and David Caruso

2008-11-10T23:54:00.003-05:00

Six months ago I dropped an obscene amount of money (for a college student gainfully employed, but less gainfully paid, by Sears) for the opportunity to see Chris Martin and his band of Brits play a show in Detroit. Though the show was originally scheduled for July, it was moved back to November, presumably due to the time it took for Mr. Martin and his wife Gwyneth to think up a new fruit to name their next child after. That being said, I am totally going to name my daughter Banana...or Gertrude, I haven't decided yet.

Last Monday, the tickets were finally redeemed and I set off for Detroit with my former guitar teacher and the coolest "Yearbook Adviser" ever, known to all as MC. Also along for the show were Mrs. MC and a Ryan (of the Nelson variety). Before we left, I showered and dressed in my Barack Obama t-shirt, jeans, a gray hoodie, canvas shoes, and my dark-rimmed glasses. Needless to say, I felt pretty unique as I shuffled through my iPod before arriving on Kanye West while wondering if the Obama t-shirt would stand out too much. Upon arrival in Auburn Hills, I realized that everyone at a Coldplay show has short spiky hair, Tina Fey glasses, votes for Barack Obama, wears canvas shoes, and wears half-zip sweaters (one of which I am wearing currently).

The show began with Chris Martin thanking us for skipping CSI: Miami to come watch Coldplay perform, a sacrifice that I was more than willing to make (sorry, Mr. Caruso). The show was fantastic, the sound quality amazing, and the staging incredibly well done. But things like that are only so much fun to write about. Much more noticeable were:

Chris Martin's newly found style of walking. I wonder if he walks like that off-stage, and if so, I certainly hope to run into him on the street someday. It's really a mixture of a prance (hey, it's a Coldplay show, what did you expect?), a Bono "Sunday Bloody Sunday" march, and a six-year old that has to go. On stage it played well, even if he was wearing an outfit that I imagine was designed by Charles Dickens himself.

And the drunk people. Yes, people with half-zip sweaters and Tina Fey glasses know how to drink. I wandered out about halfway through the show to get some water and got stuck in line at the bar behind a man who looked like the lovechild of Barry Manilow and Clay Aiken. He had just been cut off after his third beer and his wife began to inquire as to the origin of some random dude's hat. Dude with a hat tried to blow her off, at which point blonde yuppie wife began to loudly proclaim that she wasn't trying to fight him. At this point, 25 year old grad student turns around and asks if there's a fight going on. I just wanted my Aquafina, but blonde yuppie wife now asks grad student girl if SHE want to fight, and throws in some well-delivered expletives. It ends with them hugging it out and loudly professing their love for each other. I return to my seat just in time to see blue faux-hawked man in front of me trying to put his arm around random girl next to him during "Yellow." I refocus my attention on the band and remember why I'm sober. I also realize how awkward it is to be sitting next to another dude during a song like "Yellow."

Coldplay played for about an hour and 15 minutes before sending the crowd out into an unseasonably warm Detroit evening. Near Lansing, MC began to talk about the first time he was at Ryan's house. He was sitting on a couch when Ryan's grandmother entered the living room and walked straight through without speaking, a moment MC described as, "Seeing an old person walk through a room without ever acknowledging you or making eye contact makes you pee yourself a little." While this is certainly irrelevant, it did make me laugh...

So there you have it, for one night in November I Viva-La-Vida'd with Coldplay. Perhaps they're not the most technical band ever, but they do put on a good show. Though not half as good as blonde yuppie wife and grad student girl...

President Barack Obama

2008-11-05T00:34:00.003-05:00

This is a moment in which all Americans can take pride. We've come so far as a country. God bless President Obama, and God bless the United States.

Great SNL Clip

2008-11-02T15:32:00.002-05:00

Ben Affleck's best performance (though Gigli is close). I actually enjoy Olbermann's show more often then not, though I have often wondered whether or not he is about to suffer an on-air aneurysm.

Thoughts on Race

2008-10-28T20:17:00.005-04:00

Last week, a customer at the retail store where I work part-time, implied that I was being racist because I inadvertently helped a white customer who had cut in line, before I served her. She became irate when I, again inadvertently, set her credit card on the counter instead of handing it directly to her.

Yesterday, I was on Politico and saw a new commercial going up in Michigan that links Barack Obama to Jeremiah Wright and Kwame Kilpatrick.

Today, I turned on NPR and heard a report about the surge in membership among white supremacist groups based on Obama's candidacy for President.

Racism is alive and well in America today. So is white privilege.

Often I have heard Caucasian Americans say that they don't care about skin color. Because of this, racism must not exist. After all, no one's running around in white robes with burning crosses anymore. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you'll be fine.

I will never know what is like to walk into a store, and immediately be watched because of my skin color. I will never know what it is like to go into a job interview, knowing that I am starting out at a disadvantage before I even say anything. I will never have to go into a restaurant and wonder if I will be served, as is still the case in the South.

So, while I disagree with many of Reverend Wright's statements and while I know that I was not intentionally withholding service from my customer, I also am very slow to judge. I don't know what I don't know, I can never fully understand what it means to be a person of color in modern-day America. But I do understand the advantage that I have in many occurrences, just because of my skin color. I never have to overcome my level of melanin in order to be considered for a job. No one talked about George W. Bush being the 43rd white guy to be President, but everyone talks about Barack Obama potentially being the first black President, and what he has to overcome to get there.

While I do not agree that God did, or should, "damn America" I also can see the life track of Reverend Wright, and it is a lot different than mine. This is a man that grew up in the throes of the civil rights movement, a man who served his country honorably but was seen as less than because his skin was a little darker than someone else's. Most of the people feigning horror at Reverend Wright's comments never had to live in poverty on the south side of Chicago, never had to deal with a government oblivious to their basic needs. Now, I cannot defend, nor would I care to defend many of Wright's comments. But I also know that I cannot rush to judgment on someone's character because they may not see the same America that I do.

I will never understand what it is like to be a person of color in America. But I can empathize with my fellow Americans, my fellow children of God, who are daily subjected to attitudes and judgments that I will never have to endure. And by recognizing the existence of racism and prejudice, we can begin to address the problem instead of trying to gloss over it with false assertions of equality. Though we may be created equal, we are not born that way. The problem can only be addressed if it is first recognized.

Prosperity and Poverty

2008-10-26T22:48:00.004-04:00

Last week, I was reading the book of Malachi in the Old Testament. In chapter three, God is speaking to the leaders of Israel. He tells them in verse 5,

"And I will come near you for judgment;
I will be a swift witness
Against sorcerers,
Against adulterers,
Against perjurers,
Against those who exploit wage earners and widows and orphans,
And against those who turn away an alien -
Because they do not fear Me,"
Says the Lord of hosts.

Later on in the same chapter (verse 10), God says this,

"Bring all the tithes into the storehouse,
That there may be food in My house,
And try Me now in this,"
Says the Lord of hosts,
"If I will not open for you the windows of heaven
And pour out for you such blessing
That there will not be room enough to receive it."

Now I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but this chapter really stuck out to me in light of the current state of the American church. Personally, I have heard Malachi 3:10 quoted with great frequency from various pulpits. Teachings about blessing have become so prevalent as to warrant a label, the "Prosperity Gospel." Yet, could it be that we are ignoring Malachi 3:5 in favor of Malachi 3:10?

Yes, I believe that God does bless His children. I have been the beneficiary of many of God's blessing, often as I tithe. But I also must come to terms with the fact that God is extremely concerned with the plight of the poor and the underprivileged, the aliens and the widows.

The American church has long emphasized blessing, blessing, blessing. Preachers all but declare that it is God's intention for you to be wealthy. I have heard pastors go so far as to proclaim that if you are not living in "total victory" (in relationships, in finances, etc.) you are not living within God's will. Not only does this theory of constant blessing and "total victory" come into direct odds with the actual life of Jesus, it plays up Christianity as the vehicle to the American dream while ignoring those that have not been the beneficiaries of being born into privilege.

Instead of focusing on the "least of these," the church has become focused on how much God can bless me. But God is not Santa Claus, he is a holy judge, and He will judge His children and His earthly leadership on how they treated the poor, the downtrodden, the alien. God is not so much concerned with the stock broker's vacation fund, as He is the heart of the person. Through our actions, the intentions of our hearts are revealed.

Perhaps my pastor, Dave Beelen, put it best when he said that the gospel is not that God wants us all to be constantly happy. The gospel is that we are worse, more depraved, then we could ever imagine and conversely, God's love is greater than we could ever imagine. Yes, God does bless us. But God will also judge based on how we show love to those that are in need.

My Civic Duties Continued

2008-10-20T21:48:00.007-04:00

So, after weighing out how little a field trip to the library would benefit my education, I decided to devote another afternoon to the greater cause of getting Barack Obama elected. And what better way to do this then to head downtown with the lovely Anna Bennett for another day of phone banking and Carl Levin meeting. So around 3:30, we headed back down the cobblestone-lined street, which incidentally is home to a pothole so deep that I am pretty sure I drove past the devil on the way back up, towards the Obama headquarters. Anna decided to pass on a second visit to the Clear Water Initiative, much to my chagrin.

75 calls later, I was much wiser in the ways of politics in West Michigan. When I walked in, my sleep-deprived precinct manager Aaron handed me a list of people to call. The youngest on the list was a 61 year old woman. Now, contrary to what I had thought as of Thursday evening, old white people are not always members of the Barack Obama fan club. Especially Earl, our conversation went something like this:

"Hello, is Earl there?"
(Wife yelling, sound of Earl turning off his 24 hour Rush Limbaugh stream to pick up the phone)
"Hello, this is Earl."
"Hi Earl, this is Josh calling from the Barack Obama campaign...(insert eloquent explanation of democracy and universal health care in the 21st century global community)...might we be able to count on your vote in November?"

It was at this point that I realized that Earl had been waiting for this phone call for the past 78 years. As he exorcised his Sean Hannity demons to me over the phone, I began to explain to him that we obviously had a difference of opinion and I would proceed to remove him from our phone list. It was at this point when Earl decided to get philosophical and exclaim, "Opinions are like a--holes, everyone's got one!"

With this piece of Socratic wisdom in mind, I told Earl to have a nice day and to be sure to not skip doses of Metamucil any more. I then moved on to call a woman who asked why she had to vote over the phone. I calmly explained that I was in fact, not asking her to vote, but rather to state her presidential preference. The conversation quickly digressed to the point where I was asking her how much she liked Barack Obama, much like the scale used for a middle-school crush. (She checked yes!)

Next, I moved on to call Marion. After telling her who I was, Marion responded with a noise that could only be compared to that of a Wookie gargling tabasco sauce. After another failed attempt to communicate with a more earthly dialect, I quickly hung up and marked her as an Obama supporter (it was a happy sort of gargling).

So, while I interrupted Judge Judy for at least 25 retirees, I like to think that I also offered a form of catharsis for this important voting bloc. Take Earl, he had been saving up that rant just for me! And Marion, she obviously was eager to test out her new language on someone, and I was just that person. So yeah, I like to think I made a difference.

My Civic Duty of the Day

2008-10-16T18:57:00.012-04:00

So, I now know what it is like to be on the other side of those annoying political phone calls. Yes, for one afternoon (okay, more like one hour) I was Josh from the Barack Obama campaign. This title was even more rewarding than being christened Josh the Holiday Adviser from Grandville Sears. Yes Virginia, while Santa Claus may be real, he doesn't give me tax cuts. Slightly less glamorous was my title as Josh the Pamphlet Stuffer for Roy Schmidt, but still...

So what did I learn in my foray into the political realm? Well, several things.

A) Don't assume that every store front displaying an Obama sign in metropolitan Grand Rapids is indeed a campaign headquarter. Otherwise you will find yourself in the African-American Art Gallery and a strangely empty graphic design studio. Such experiences also taught me the value of trusting Anna's sense of direction above mine. But on second thought, with her directional sense we would not have toured the offices of the Clean Water Initiative.

B) Old white people like Obama. Seriously, it was hard to focus on my pamphlet stuffing while Luanne called out Bingo. (Dang it B2, so close...) I suppose I was unfairly skeptical after seeing the video in which one woman, uncannily like my BFF Luanne, declared that if we voted Obama (quoting here) "blacks would take over the country." Several points here: honestly, who uses the term "blacks" or, for that matter, "whites" anymore, except for when discussing paint? Why do we have to categorize people by color palette? I mean seriously, most of the time I am more an uncomfortable pink than I am white. And I have never seen someone with "black" skin outside of a burn victim. Brown, yes. Black? Not so much. Not that it matters, I don't really care if you're blue honestly. Well, okay, I might have a difficult time voting for a blue man, but I'm sure if I agreed with his foreign policy, I could go there. What would drive Osama out of his cave faster than blastings of "Smurfing Summertime?" This is certainly not to dismiss the problem of racism, I think racism is much much more prevalent than most of us would like to admit...but that's another topic. (See, "Barack Obama isn't like us" by one Mrs. Sarah Palin) Moving along...

C) Certain people should not be given a phone to represent themselves, much less an entire presidential campaign. While I am no supporter of John McCain, perhaps diagnosing his likelihood of a stroke goes a bit too far. I mean, it is certainly true that McCain looked like he was going to suffer a self-induced brain aneurysm last night, but it may be inappropriate to use this factoid to lead off a conversation with an undecided voter. Not that said twitchy volunteer did this, he just loudly proclaimed the statistical likelihood of McCain's cranium exploding Wednesday night following every completed phone call. Kind of awesome? Yes. Appropriate? No.

So, my friends, rest assured that the democracy is safe for one more day. So, go volunteer. Go vote. Unless you're Marlene in Kentwood, you really had a bad attitude in our conversation...

Of Barbara Walters, Bill Ayers, and Bad Economics

2008-10-15T16:30:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I heard someone announce that they were voting for God's candidate, John McCain. Several weeks ago, someone told me that "If you are a Christian, you will vote for John McCain. Period." Again, this week I opened up my email to find that a friend had sent me a list of reasons people vote Democratic. The reasons ranged from the strange (apparently I have an unhealthy fascination with Sean Combs and Barbara Walters, though I am not sure in which order) to the downright offensive (I apparently am pro-convicted murderers, but anti-baby, not to mention I lionize William Ayers while dismissing Jesus.) Well, I knew this email was not right, namely because I am partial to Joy Behar and Kanye West, and I have always professed a higher admiration for Jesus as opposed to Vietnam protesting professors.

This email, and many like it, set up one premise, that in order to be a Christian you must be a Republican. Why? Well, as one friend put it, it is a "Biblical principle" that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. This was before he purposefully began to address Barack Obama as that socialist "Osama," and began to wave the bloody flag of 20th century Russia.

So do I have to be a Republican in order to be a Christian? I can go on and on with examples of people saying such within the Evangelical community. I have heard people go so far as to ridicule voters that claim to be "undecided" by asking, "Well, are you a Christian?" Why is this? What about the Republican party has so many Evangelicals convinced that John McCain best represents Jesus? Is it merely abortion? Well, I am pro-life, but that's about where my association with the Republican Party ends. Not to mention, it is Barack Obama that supports the 95/10 initiative which aims to decrease abortions by 95% within 10 years. What have the Republicans proposed? Well, most focus on judicial appointments. Fair enough. But it was John Roberts himself who referred to Roe v. Wade as the law of the land with precedent to back it up.

The Republicans have seemed unwilling to compromise at all on abortion, taking a hard-line stance that refuses to entertain scenarios where abortion is still legal. This is unrealistic and leads to my personal belief that "pro-life" has become nothing more than a cheap campaign slogan, along the lines of "Country First." What does it even mean? And if abortion is overturned, what then? Then states vote individually on the issue, some legalize it and some do not. Is that progress?

So, if we move past abortion, how else does the Republican platform reflect Jesus?

Jesus did not spend his time on earth preaching supply-side economics. The Republicans have hijacked two social issues (abortion and gay rights) and used it to further an economic agenda that has doubled our national debt over the past 8 years. Where were the socially concerned Republicans when thousands of low-income residents of New Orleans were under water, yet without it for drinking purposes? Three days it took the Republican administration to even land in New Orleans, only to tell the leader of operations that he was doing a "heckuva" job. What about the 47 million uninsured, including 10 million kids that are now not covered because of Bush's veto pen (CNN, 2008)? The idea that this was merely a fiscally responsible decision is stunning hypocrisy when we are dropping 12 billion per month (NPR, 2007) to fund an overseas war yet can’t insure our own children.

Why were there only 36 black delegates at the GOP convention? Why did half of the prime time coverage consist of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin leading delegates in a mockery of Obama's service as a community organizer? These were thousands of "pro-life" people jeering Obama's service to the south side of Chicago, in which he truly was doing work that represented Jesus. He worked with churches to help a community devastated by the closing of a steel mill and living in apartment complexes ridden with asbestos infestations. For his work he earned all of $13,000 a year (The Nation, 2007).

And the Republicans scoff, all while reveling in 15% capital gains taxes. Look, if you can defend your positions on government, more power to you. But do not stoop so low as to hijack Jesus for your political gain. To quote the most famous of Republicans, Abraham Lincoln, "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."