2020: A Few Reflections

As this most interesting of years comes to an end, I've been doing a lot of reflecting, and a few (unoriginal) thoughts have shaped my thinking. I typically start these blogs with quotes and Bible verses, but today, those come second. This year has been a 12-month period that has allowed us more free time than ever, and I've been more introspective than ever. So enjoy these quotes, and know that these have shaped me this year. I hope they can do the same for you.

#7: "Three thousand times a day, we're told that our hair is wrong, skin is wrong, clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong but that it can all be made right if we just go shopping." -The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard

We have everything at our fingertips, and yet we're at historically high levels of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. We've bought into the lie that if we just had THAT, we'd be happy. And yet, we all know that THAT has never filled the hole of desire. We've got to reclaim contentment, the ability to find joy in what's before us and not what's wrong.

#6: "Listen to me, Corey. Throughout your life, there's gonna be a lot of opportunities that come up, and they're seem great, and they're gonna seem wonderful, and they're going to seem like they make your life a heck of a lot easier. But you have to walk away. And you know, at times, it's gonna be really difficult to do that, but you have to. Because you deserve better." -Boy Meets World

These words have echoed through my ears for more than a decade. We all know life is easier now in so many ways. We can have whatever we want, whenever we want. We live by the mantra, if it's good for me, it's good. "You do you." And yet, we'd be wise to remember the words of Paul, that just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we SHOULD do something. There are times when "no" is the only responsible response.

#5: "I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people's misdeeds somehow made me virtuous. I'd become, I realized, a member of that class of liberals who allowed themselves to glide by on way too few political gestures and lifestyle concessions and then spent the rest of their energy feeling superior to other people who supposedly don't do as much." -No Impact Man, Colin Beavan

To be honest, this is the most recent book I've read. And I've read a lot in 2020. But this hit me hard. And I don't think it's just true of "liberals." We've girded ourselves in self-righeousness. And by we, I recognize that I can't use that pronoun without including myself. So we point out what others do wrong. It makes us feel like we've done our part. Criticism is the tool of the day. But criticism is not the end of the road. It's a tool I use too often to make me feel like I've done enough. The truth is, too often, we ask for the powers that be to change things without taking the responsibility to institute changes in our own worlds. We push for greener laws from Congress, but we consume at ever rising rates with more disposable packaging than ever. We call on cities to enact more just laws around racial disparities, but how are we giving up our own privileges without being asked to help raise others up? Again, I count myself ever first in this collection of we.

#4:

-Great Dictator

It's true. "We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want." This call was as true 70 years ago as it is today. We have to re-establish our trust in our neighbors. We've got to step away from screens and towards one another. We've got to let go of power and reclaim humility. The desire for power has poisoned our souls, and it's not a Right or Left problem. Our connections are threatened. Our relationships strained. We've got to recapture the capacity to see value and purpose in one another, even (and perhaps especially) if we disagree.

#3: “Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I'm not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.” -Tattoos on the Heart, Greg Boyle

In 2020, the mandate across all sectors was to maintain and grow. Be creative. Be productive. Adapt. Grow engagement. But engagement was never Jesus' goal. Growth wasn't an aim in and of itself. Where we should always begin is, "What do people need?" and how can we participate in what God is doing in the world to bring that healing. Efficiency and engagement were never Kingdom values. In fact, the Kingdom of God is INefficient most days. Grace is in it for the long haul. Real problems demand more than 260-character tweets. They demand more than streaming hits. Grace compels us to roll up our sleeves and slow down.

#2: "If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!" "If," Rudyard Kipling

I've hiked to this poem being read by Ray Fiennes on repeat. I've spent time rehabbing my wife's old house while its words floated through the air over and over again. There's not a single line or stanza that doesn't perfectly express my hopes for what I might become. We're not finished products. And if I'm not one, then neither are you, and neither are they. That's the meaning of grace. And the Jungle Book author so captures the struggle of growing in 2020, even if he was writing it a century ago.

#1:

A Troll in Central Park

I turn to this song more than likely any other in existence. It's silly and from a movie that has long been lost to the annuls of irrelevance. But it's hope encapsulates all I've felt about 2020, and most of my life. Sometimes, when all else feels lost, I too "like to close my eyes so my heart can plainly see right through the way things are clear to the way they ought to be."

Silent...

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." -Ezekiel 36:26

By nature, I don't post much about current events. I usually say it's because conversations rarely breathe life on Facebook. I believe that with all my heart, but the truth is it's likely a result of cowardice. I don't like offending. I hold it as a deep sense of pride that I have friends from all across the country of unique backgrounds and worldviews and upbringings and political perspectives. I like to celebrate the diversity of my friends. I happen to think it makes my life richer. However, we've unfortunately so structured the world that everything is forced to fit into a "this" or a "that," an "either" or an "or," an "us" or a "them." And in a world like that, offending feels unavoidable. Problems feel unsolvable. So I often stay silent.

But I'm recognizing that that is an unsustainable approach. I don't know how to avoid the gridlock of partisanship, but I know that as someone who follows Jesus, silence is no longer optional.

I tell my students often that we usually miss the mark when it comes to talking about faith. We usually talk about faith as an idea we agree with. We talk about faith as belief. If we believe, that makes us a Christian and so the story goes. But we've so missed the invitation Jesus offered. Jesus invited followers, not believers. The word we often translate as "faith" in the Old Testament is a Greek word pistis. Pistis didn't mean some kind of intellectual assent, like believing that 2+2=4. Pistis was a faith that re-oriented action. It's an idea rooted in trust, like crossing a rope bridge over Niagara Falls and having faith that it will hold.

That's why, when Jesus met some fishermen, he invited them to follow. He didn't invite them to believe in an idea. He invited them to re-orient their lives around the reality of the Kingdom of God. He invited them to do what he did, knowing that in the fullness of that trust, they could. To follow Jesus means to surrender to the Kingdom of God and to the life-changing reality that it invites us into.

And let's be clear, that work isn't easy. LOTS of people backed away from that invitation. I'm beginning to think that it's because being like Jesus is a harder proposition than most of us like to acknowledge. The entire existence of Jesus is rooted in the movement of a God apart from the action and suffering of God's creation into its messiness. To be like Jesus, to follow Jesus, means to spend time with people like Jesus, which isn't comfortable very often. To be like Jesus is to oppose the systems that were built to dehumanize and marginalize. To be like Jesus is to reimagine who is in and who is out, and you'll find that very, very few were out with Jesus. To be like Jesus is to sacrifice and surrender for the good of those who couldn't help themselves. To be like Jesus is to grieve and lament the pain in the world and participate in hope springing eternal. To be like Jesus is to work towards downward mobility. To be like Jesus is to fight for the inefficiencies inherent in agape love. That's not an invitation most of us run towards.

In light of another shooting of an unarmed black man by police in America, to follow Jesus means that we can no longer remain silent, innocent bystanders trying to look away. Nowhere in the four gospels do we find a prescription for institutionalized American racism, as if we can simply take what Jesus says and shift them into policy plans. But to follow Jesus is to re-imagine family. And when I see my Black brothers and sisters have to strive harder for half the reward, when I see the disparities in education and work opportunities between Black and White communities, when I see Black men and women shot because they "look more dangerous," my heart breaks for my family. When I see my brothers and sisters hurting, my heart hurts. My family is hurting.

This isn't a Republican or Democrat problem. The truth is Jesus wouldn't have supported either party. I find it hard to believe Jesus would've ever participated in a system where one group is raised above the other. No party holds an exclusive claim on Jesus, primarily because Jesus didn't seek power, but gave it up to uplift others. Power seeks to keep power, and Jesus surrendered his. Jesus found the "least of these" and ran towards them in full force. No, this is a human problem that demands we reignite the latent empathy in our souls. It demands the same resurrection that Ezekiel cried out for, that our hearts of stone would be cracked and replaced with a heart of flesh, capable again of love and the ability to sacrifice for the good of our neighbors.

I don't know what the "right" ways to protest are. I usually don't know know what to "do." I really don't know how to be a part of this work and I certainly don't have the right solutions to the depths of these problems. How do you work against systems so entrenched that they don't even seem like problems anymore? The honest truth is I don't know. But I do know that following Jesus means asking questions to figure out the answers. I do know that following Jesus means participating in the work. I do know that following Jesus means spending more time in the kind of community Jesus imagined in the early church, one that broke down the lines of gender, race, and background. I do know that following Jesus means getting some skin in the game and risking rejection. I do know that following Jesus means restoring humanity to those we fear or rage against.

I pray. It's become easy to lambast the offering of thoughts and prayers in moments of tragedy. I suppose that sentiment, tweeted out from the comfort of a couch, can seem trite. And yet, I've found that miracles happen more often when people are praying than when they're not. I've found myself more drawn into the invitation of Jesus to participate when I'm praying. I've found myself more connected to the struggles and people I'm praying for when I pray.

I believe in building bridges. I've rarely been on the frontlines, and I'm not sure that I'll start finding myself there at all times. But what I am certain of is that the work of those who follow Jesus is to participate in making this world more like the one Jesus is calling into being. I am certain the work will likely involve surrender and sacrifice by me. But I'm all the more certain today that my silence is no longer sustainable, no longer faithful. Racism is sin, my friends, and our question as people following Jesus isn't whether or not to fight it, but why we aren't.

forever unfinished...

I Am White...

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... One ever feels his twoness,-- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -W.E.B. DuBois, "The Souls of Black Folk"

"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." -Galatians 6:2

"What's it feel like to be the oppressor?"

I'll never forget hearing those words. I was a sophomore in college, completely unaware of so many of the deep-seated realities of racism in our world. Yet there I was, the only white guy in a class called Black Liberation and Womanist Theology as a religion major. I loved the class. It stretched me. I read things that made me more uncomfortable than anything I'd ever read, books with words like oppression and White Devil.

But that particular day kicked off with a bang. Justin, a Black defensive lineman on the football team who looked like he could finish me in one swing if he'd wanted to, asked me those eight words as class started. I was startled. Not even that, I was defensive. I was stunned. I wanted to hide in a shell for the next 90 minutes and sprint to the door.

But I didn't. And he wasn't trying to intimidate me. It was a legitimate question. And after 90 minutes of conversation, I started to get it. He wasn't accusing me of oppressing him. He wasn't accusing me of bigotry and racism. In fact, by the end of the class, we'd done more honest sharing and grown more comfortable with each other than any other 90-minute session would've allowed.

He was getting at a deep reality that I was uniquely positioned to speak to. In very few moments in my life do I have to worry about how others are perceiving me because of my identity. I don't need to identify myself by my whiteness because we've largely imagined it as the default (imagine why there is a Black Congressional Caucus but not a White one). I don't have to prove myself twice over because of my gender like so many women still have to do. No one needs any explanation or asks any questions when I describe my sexuality or faith. I get to just be me.

Not everyone in our world gets to live with that same freedom. For so many, they're forced to live within the constraints of what W.E.B. DuBois coined "the double-consciousness," the reality that for most Black folks in America, they must live true to themselves AND project an image acceptable to the world around them. I know this is true, because I've never wondered if I'd be safe when pulled over. I've never wondered if the police would be called because the car I was driving looked "too nice." I've never wondered if I'd get beaten for talking to a white girl. I've never wondered if I'd be allowed to buy a house in a particular neighborhood.

I didn't even know to think about those questions. It took what Donald Miller calls an "inciting incident." It took being uncomfortable and being forced to wrestle with questions that tinged me with guilt and sadness and defensiveness and frustration and exhaustion. It took Justin. We all need an inciting incident. We all need a nudge. I still need lots of nudges.

But I also know that we need compassion. Compassion is a simple word with so much depth. Literally, it means to "suffer together." To carry one another's burdens. We all have burdens. We all carry pain. We all carry suffering. Instead of it motivating us towards comparison, forever arguing over whose suffering demands greater redress, our shared pain ought to attune our ears to hear the pain of others. We're all intersections of unique stories and pain, and that intersectionality ought to highlight our own pain so that we can see and sympathize with the pain of others. It doesn't require us to prioritize some over the other, nor does it necessitate that we delegitimize honest and painful reflections as not "woke" enough or not "activated"enough.

As I watch our country's cities burn, I can't help but hear pain. It's been crying out for far longer than just the past few days. It's been crying out for centuries. We've been inflicting pain on our Black brothers and sisters for far too long. It doesn't have to look like lynchings and cross-burnings. It doesn't have to wear white hoods. It looks like restrictive housing policies, localizing poverty in African-American communities while opportunity immigrated to the suburbs. It looks like policing policies and attitudes that result in dead unarmed Black men. It looks like the side glances and off-handed jokes we make about the Black students who don't really belong at our school except that they play sports or met some diversity quota. It looks like assuming the man in front of you is a janitor, not the physician, simply by virtue of their skin color.

But I hear pain. Where hope has been silenced, opportunity suppressed, and equality denied, pain sometimes requires a louder voice. Systems don't often respond to whispers. They don't often respond to single voices. Sometimes the voices of hopeless pain must scream from the tops of their lungs in protests. Regardless of our response to the mediums that voice takes, we have to hear pain. We have to hear trauma. We are called to compassion, to hear the suffering of our neighbors and try to help carry it.

This is the work of God's people. God's people were never called to a life of passivity. We're called to stand in God's presence and proclaim the kingdom of God. if you're curious what that kingdom looks like, it often involves embracing the least of these, the forgotten, the voiceless and hopeless. Throughout scripture, God has stood alongside those suffering. God has seen our suffering and heard our cries of pain and declared, "I am with you." If we want to stand in the presence of God, there are worse first steps than to stand with those God stands with and amongst. There are worse places to stand than with those crying out. Listen, and we may just hear the voice of God speaking.

I have so much to learn about loving God and loving God's people. I have so much to learn about my own prejudice and my own pain. I have so much to learn about the pain of Black Americans. I need so much more courage and less defensiveness. I've got to let go of so much of the fear that drives me! But that's the work of faithful disciples of Jesus. May we take that on, striving faithfully every day to take another step towards becoming the people God made us to be and working for a world of shalom like the one God created this world to be. It won't be without pain. It won't be without discomfort. But Jesus never invited us to those things. God began with a garden, getting God's hands dirty with the work of creating a new world. May we get our hands dirty and do God's work.

forever unfinished...