Remembering Whidbey: Part 1

A few years ago, I flew to Washington state with some friends to attend a conference. We spent a week at an old army base called Camp Casey that was located on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. We all worked together at a Christian college outside of Chicago and we were at this conference to think about things like mentoring and spiritual formation on a college campus.

To be honest, I have never experienced anything close to the happenings on the islands off the coast of Washington. Somehow, the week on Whidbey etched itself into my life and created a more meaningful experience than I think I’ve ever had.
   
I have to admit, I am not very good at meeting new people. I much prefer the comfort of spending time with people I know to the nervousness of connecting with people I’ve never met. So initially, this conference was a bit off-putting. It was a highly relational gathering of people who seemed to, unlike me, draw energy by connecting with new people.
   
Right away, I was feeling stretched. Not only were these people new, but they were professionals in the same field I was in and so I knew that I would battle my innate tendencies to compare myself with all these people for the next 5 days. They were far more experienced, thoughtful and put together than I was.
   
Situations like this make me feel a little bit like the kid who, no matter how hard he tries, always seems to spill his lunch on his shirt and come back from the bathroom with toilet paper on his shoe. I think I spend far too much time checking my shoes for trailing toilet paper and looking for stains on my shirt. Its hard to feel comfortable with those kinds of preoccupations.
   
But, alas, here I was, and I was excited, even if it manifested itself as anxiety and intimidation. What is more, the guest speaker for the first two days seemed interesting. He was a big man with long curly hair. He was dressed like he had just gotten off a sailboat but his hands were so big it looked like he made a living hacking out canoes from tree trunks. And he was the president of a graduate school to boot. He seemed like a bit of a wild card so I was excited to see what he was all about.
   
After dinner together, he got up and began telling stories. Better stories than I had ever heard. He told us a story about how he would pick up loose change that people drop and keep it, but then offer it back in exchange for some conversation. Who does that? I liked it a lot. Then he told us about what we were going to be doing the next day. He said we would be walking through our lives and digging up all the pain and hurt and joys and delights of our past and putting it all together to see if we could make sense out of what God was doing with our lives.
   
So the anxiety was back. I had been had. He lured me in with his funny and compelling tales of bribing old ladies to talk to him on the bus and then he drops the bomb, we were going to have to be honest with each other and with ourselves about our lives. I wish I could remember looking around the room at the others there at that moment. Looking back, I sort of imagine myself begin to curl up in a ball, trying to protect myself from the inevitable process we were going to walk through together.
   
For now, though, the night was over, and I could go back to telling jokes with David and Greg, watching the waves hit the pebble covered beach, getting transfixed by the campfire, and thinking deeper thoughts than I normally do. This was a better day than most.

on feeding tubes and incubators

When my second son was born, just a few weeks ago, he had a few complications and so the doctors sent him to the NCU for a few days of close observation. During that time, he wasn’t eating enough from a bottle so the doctors inserted a feeding tube down his little throat to make sure he was getting enough nutrients. They kept him in one of those little plexiglass incubator boxes that regulates the temperature and had him attached to various machines in order to monitor his vitals.

This was all emotionally taxing to see, but the hardest thing was watching him using the feeding tube. It felt very unnatural. He wasn’t supposed to be able to exist on his own in this little box, he was supposed to come home with us and need us to care for him and need my wife to feed him. This other thing just wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. This felt like artificial independence to me.

I think about that when I hear people talking about being independent Christians. Churches have started using the phrase ‘self-feeders’ when they talk about the goals of their discipleship program. The idea is that Christians should be totally independent people, completely capable of existing on their own...spiritually speaking.

(Now I will admit that far too many people feel like they cannot survive unless they have a pastor teaching them. They simply don’t believe they can understand Scripture unless someone who has a fancy degree tells them what it means. I understand why pastors and church leaders would want to wean people away from cognitive dump spiritual growth and toward a dynamic personal life with God. There are many benefits to training people to think, study and pray for themselves.)

But I have begun to wonder if we have missed something significant along the way to becoming self-feeding Christians. I’m wondering if we have come to think that Christian maturity is synonymous with Christian independence. The most mature Christians will be the ones who do not need anyone else to maintain spiritual vitality. To put it another way, to depend on someone else is to demonstrate a lack of maturity in faith.

I’ve come to see this as artificial independence. It’s kind of like we champion the idea that the strongest in our communities are the ones who are solidly encased in a plexiglass incubator with feeding tubes down their throats. So we all strive for that. We want to be satiated and comfortable within the confines of our meticulously controlled spiritual eco-system. We do not need anyone to feed us, we are capable of feeding ourselves. No wonder people think they don’t need to be a part of the family of God... they really don’t.

This is where we have missed something. We have missed the fact that we aren’t supposed to be able to exist on our own. We are supposed to genuinely need each other. What if we extracted the feeding tubes from our throats and stepped out of our climate controlled incubators? What if my spiritual journey was less about ensuring that I am fed and focused more on feeding my sisters and brothers? What if I stopped asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and began to ask, ‘What’s in me for you?’

Two things would happen I think.

1. We would learn what it means to be generous.

Asking a different question might lead us down new roads and help us explore what a real generosity of life looks like. It means that we would learn to orient our lives around giving grace, showing mercy, extending forgiveness, pursuing shalom, and helping others flourish. This would be a way to practice giving up my life for the sake of the ones in my community. Imagine what kind of communities we would have if we came into them practicing that kind of generosity.

2. We would learn what it means to trust.

As you may have been thinking all along, if I take out the feeding tube and start feeding others, won’t I starve? Well, not necessarily. However, instead of being artificially independent, you will have to trust the sisters and brothers who gather around you in community. You will have to entrust your spiritual vitality to them and God’s Spirit working through them. That may be hard to do, but real community will never be easy.

(I’m not saying that we don’t practice spiritual disciplines or pursue personal spiritual formation. What I’m saying is that we miss something if we view personal spiritual transformation as the only end of our spiritual journey, and that we might be surprised how much God shapes us as we give our lives to our communities.)

Learning to entrust ourselves to the community of God is one way we learn that real faith is about cultivating dependence, just like my son is living a more human existence because he is dependent on us for everything. As my son grows he will need different kinds of support from us, he will always need us, just in different ways. As much as society may tell us the goal of life is independence, it seems to me that the goal of the life of faith is to realize what real dependence looks like. Human independence doesn’t seem to be all that human to me. We flourish when we are connected to one another, because its not good for us to be alone...

where would I fit on the pyramid?

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a local diner, having a breakfast meeting with Ben. We were discussing all forms of ministry and life related issues when next to us a conversation got so loud it was impossible not to hear. Two young adults were discussing what immediately became clear as a high school cheerleading team. Presumably, these two were coaches, advisors, or maybe camp directors. That I will never know. What I do know is that the conversation made me as sad as I have been in a while. As plain as day, one coach said to the other, "What do you do with the ugly girl? You put her in the back where she belongs."

No joke, direct quote. Ben and I sat there stunned. Walking around today has left me wondering...where would I have gotten placed in the pyramid? Where would any of us have gotten placed? I'm pretty sure our hearts couldn't handle hearing the answer to that question... What does it say about the world when the ones given charge over our young people use that kind of matrix to make decisions? What hope do any of us have if that's the message being sent to all of us? Is there any wonder people make some of the decisions they do when that kind of garbage shapes the way we see the world? Most days the world is harsh and ugly, and people who think like that only make it harsher and uglier.

Today is a sad day. Perhaps no more sad than other days, but the cold, vicious nature of the "real" world was simply booked on the main stage this morning. Personally, I'm tired of the main stage being filled by this kind of act. Acts that disregard real, honest humanity in favor of culturally embedded and captive ways of thinking that are as shallow as Josiah's kiddie pool out back. Acts that fail to see that we have allowed movie stars to determine the value of a human being and that we have in large part just accepted their determinations because we like the flavor of their Kool-Aid.

There is only one thing that keeps my head above the water on days like today. That (to quote Jason Gray), everything sad is coming untrue. Everything sad is coming untrue. That buoys my spirit, because I remember that Jesus asked people who weren't the best and the most beautiful to follow him, he asked regular gals and guys, people who likely would have been "in the back, where they belonged" by anyone else's estimation, these folks had a place in Jesus' movement. The scene in the diner this morning is no surprise, right?

I think Ben was right, perhaps there is no better reason for us to invest ourselves in the world (our schools, our neighbors and our neighborhoods) than simply to be a different voice, a voice that says, "There is another way. You don't have to be defined by these silly and shallow notions of what beauty is and what gives you self-worth... ...there are other ways of seeing the world. There are other definitions of what true beauty is, different ways of measuring how much value you truly have..." Come to think of it, I think I'll move to the back of the pyramid anyway, I'm not sure I want to be chosen to be the lead in this play...the scary part is, most days I feel like I play the part all too well.