I’ve been meaning to write this particular blog for a month or so now, but it’s simply gotten away from me. So here we go…
Last month, our government released to us our “economic stimulus checks”, or more accurately, the largest infusion of Chinese-loaned money ever to land in our pockets and leach into our economy. Now, don’t get me wrong- I am not against doing business with China, or any other non-American entity, as we operate in a global economy and to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world would be foolish. To a point, I’m not even against BORROWING money from China, though someday I will write a blog about my thoughts on the unfortunate “debt culture” we find ourselves in. What I do find to be a crappy deal is when we are giving money that we don’t have in the form of “tax cuts” or “stimulus checks”, with no well-thought-out means to pay it back. That’s a no-brainer. Anyway, I digress from my point.
I believe, being the hook-line-and-sinker Obamanian that I am, that WE are the solution to our economic problems, but not in the way you might think. The other day, my wife came home and told me about a bumper sticker she had just seen. It read:
“CLASS WARFARE …Brought To You By Yuppies Who Don’t Tip”
I thought about this for like two seconds before it affirmed my feelings about this whole economy going in the toilet thing. Not that yuppies are the root of the problem or anything; it’s the people who don’t tip period, regardless of class or status, that really irk me (though in my 5 years of coffee shop experience, it seems as though the people who have less money and status tip better). I guess I view a tip as a thank-you, a hang-in-there, and one of the few concrete signs in the service industry of how much you actually mean to the person you are serving. To give me a tip is to tell me that you appreciate my service to you; that you believe it is not your birthright to be served by another human being, but a privilege that you pay for. And I will do my best to insure that you get fast, friendly, “legendary” service (in Starbucks-speak), not just a simple cup of coffee. So aside from the philosophical aspect of the whole deal, I think this tipping thing is one of the keys to turning our economy around, without cramming another tax down our throats.
The shortened version of my theory of our current economic problem is that peons like me don’t have enough money to buy stuff. That the top 10% of the population controls like half the wealth in this nation. Don’t quote me on that stat, but I’m sure it’s not too far off. Here’s my overly simplistic solution to the problem: tip. Tip well. Wherever you’re at, if they accept tips, tip well. I’ll share with you my rule: at coffee shops, a dollar in the tip jar, or whatever change is left in my pockets (leaving myself just enough for a refill if they charge for them, and if I won’t have enough for a refill, it all goes in). At restaurants, 20 percent is my minimum. Up to 25 percent for good service, and sometimes as high as 30 percent for great service. I know the classic minimum is 15 percent, I was taught that. But I think, at least in the case of tipping, crappy service should be rewarded with the bare minimum, not below that. I don’t give out many 15 percents, because I don’t often get crappy service. Call it karma, what-goes-around-comes-around, whatever… but I think the best way to guarantee your own security is to give security to others. And if financial security is what this country needs right now, then there is no better time to be tipping like it’s going out of style.
Here’s my case study. At the drive-thru Starbucks I work at, we earn tips by taking the total dollar amount of tips we’ve earned throughout the past week, dividing them by the total number of labor hours we’ve worked, and then are assigned a dollar amount based upon how many hours we worked that week. So in any given week, it usually comes out to somewhere between $1.30 and $1.50 per hour (non-drive-thru stores make a lot more; draw your own conclusions). Now imagine this scenario: out of the 500 or more customers we serve every day, just half of them, 250, tip us a dollar. That’s $250 a day, multiplied by 7 days in a week. That’s $1750. Divide that up amongst us baristas, and you’ve got somewhere between $4 and $5 dollars per hour, which is 4 times what we make right now. So, a person working a part-time, 20-hour work week (as most Starbucks employees do), makes between $80 and $100 per week. Now multiply that $100 by 120,000, which is my approximate number of people working hourly for Starbucks in the U.S. (8,000 domestic stores times an average of 15 employees per store), and your dollar a day becomes $12 million per week, $624 million per year. And that’s just using part-time hourly numbers. Even running with 100 customers tipping a dollar every day, you still arrive at an extra $250 million per year of cash money floating around in the economy. And that’s just Starbucks employees. Imagine that extra dollar or two tipped in every restaurant in the country. We’re talking billions, easily… maybe even trillions, I don’t know. But you get the point- it’s probably more than any economic stimulus package can provide.
Anyway, I think I heard somewhere that between 10 and 15 percent of U.S. citizens work in food service jobs. Imagine 15% of us having extra money… money to pay off credit cards, loans, mortgages. Money to buy food, clothing, gas (ha), pay our electric bills. Money to buy some stuff we don’t need, sure, but isn’t that what the economy runs on, anyway? As tight as times are right now for most of us, we need to be okay with giving more. And tipping is a good place to start. It makes sense to me. So next time you get the check after your dinner date, or you eye that tip jar at Starbucks, consider that one extra dollar out of your pocket might just be a dollar toward your own financially-secure future.
6.17.2008
6.02.2008
An Eye On Health Care
I had an eye doctor appointment this past weekend. First one in five years. I normally go more often than that, but 1) my eyes haven’t gotten much worse in these five years, 2) I like my glasses and 3) I did not have vision insurance until the past couple of years, through Starbucks. Anyway, five years is a long time to go between medical examinations, so I said, what the heck.
After getting lost trying to find the place, and reading old copies of magazines in the waiting room, I was taken into a room full of all kinds of widgets and gadgetry. The nice lady, who sat in the middle of this revolving chair thingy that spun around four or five place-your-face-here machines, had me place my face in all of them, and then took me to another room, where the Good Doctor entered. I was promptly told that I need a backup pair of glasses. And also a pair of sunglasses. Prescription sunglasses with some kind of special UV coating. Do I wear contacts? No. Do you want them? No. Have you ever had Lasik? No. Do you want to have Lasik? No. Okay, but keep in mind, it's a great option for you. Okay.
I was then read a laundry list of orbital diseases that I could contract, and how serious each and every one of them was. I then read the letters on the wall, followed the pen with my eyes, and was asked if I would rather have my eyes dilated, or use their big, fancy Opto-Map machine that takes a picture of the inside of my eyes. I told him I would like neither today, as I had to work in an hour and would rather not have dime-sized pupils and bright, blurred vision while I run a shift on the floor. And at the moment, I could not afford the extra fee for the Opto-Map machine, as it was not covered by my insurance, so I would like to pass today, please, thank you. Well, you need to do one or the other, so choose. No, thank you.
At that moment, I felt my name being entered into the “Shit List” database.
I was told he would come back to me, and sent out to look at new glasses. I was helped by a very friendly lady, who, after going over the plethora of options available to me- lens density, frame type, coatings, polishes, clip -ons, backup pairs, etc- explained to me quite nonchalantly that my new pair of glasses would cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. After insurance. Even after I deleted some of the options, like glare-resistant coating and a special polishing procedure, they still would cost me almost $200. After insurance. I thanked her for her help and explained that I would pass on the glasses today.
The Good Doctor then called me back into another room. So what’s it going to be? Neither, I can’t do it today. You know, I was just telling your wife that… (insert horror story here) and well, it’s like going to the dentist and not opening your mouth, and (insert horror story here), and we really care about you here, we don’t want you to end up like (tragic horror story victim), and all the diseases that are out there (insert laundry list here), and some things in life you just have to suck it up and do it.
After checking my breath to make sure I hadn’t swallowed this guy’s firstborn or anything, I sucked it up and said no, thank you. I will do it another time. I promise.
The Good Doctor then proceeded to insinuate that I was hopelessly doomed, and then he checked my eyes and from what he could see, they looked great. Awesome. On my way out, I set up an appointment for an Opto-Map scan, because in a few weeks, we won’t have a rent check that needs to clear as urgently and we’ll have recovered some from putting another $500 into car repairs. Walking out to the car, I felt like I had just been to a fire-and-brimstone revival meeting and rejected Jesus to his face. Quite honestly, I felt guilty and crappy.
But I never knew there were so many things that they could SELL YOU at an eye exam. No wonder they only charge $10 for the office visit- they know that once they’ve got you through the door, you’re good for at least another $300. And this is only the optometrist. There’s so many other doctor-types out there, I can’t imagine the HORROR STORIES they must tell people, the THINGS they can sell, the MONEY they must make off of us poor, scared, unhealthy peasants! And this is on top of paying hundreds of dollars a month for the insurance.
I think this is why I want that dreaded “government-run” health care. I want someone who cares enough to keep me alive and healthy, but who has no vested interest in selling me all this extra stuff. I want a nice, clean, impersonal service, not a guilt trip and a sales pitch. Keep the snake oil salesmen out of the biz, keep it minimalist, and keep it inexpensive. I can handle the taxes- it’d probably end up being cheaper than monthly health insurance payments, anyway. They do this in almost every other country in the world, and every other country in the world is healthier than ours. Why can’t we create a unique, American single-payer health care system that we can all live with?
Anyway, I’m glad I went for an eye exam. I’ll probably even go back to this place. But the whole experience speaks volumes to me about why we need something different, something simpler, and something that’s much less of a drain on the psyche and the wallet.
After getting lost trying to find the place, and reading old copies of magazines in the waiting room, I was taken into a room full of all kinds of widgets and gadgetry. The nice lady, who sat in the middle of this revolving chair thingy that spun around four or five place-your-face-here machines, had me place my face in all of them, and then took me to another room, where the Good Doctor entered. I was promptly told that I need a backup pair of glasses. And also a pair of sunglasses. Prescription sunglasses with some kind of special UV coating. Do I wear contacts? No. Do you want them? No. Have you ever had Lasik? No. Do you want to have Lasik? No. Okay, but keep in mind, it's a great option for you. Okay.
I was then read a laundry list of orbital diseases that I could contract, and how serious each and every one of them was. I then read the letters on the wall, followed the pen with my eyes, and was asked if I would rather have my eyes dilated, or use their big, fancy Opto-Map machine that takes a picture of the inside of my eyes. I told him I would like neither today, as I had to work in an hour and would rather not have dime-sized pupils and bright, blurred vision while I run a shift on the floor. And at the moment, I could not afford the extra fee for the Opto-Map machine, as it was not covered by my insurance, so I would like to pass today, please, thank you. Well, you need to do one or the other, so choose. No, thank you.
At that moment, I felt my name being entered into the “Shit List” database.
I was told he would come back to me, and sent out to look at new glasses. I was helped by a very friendly lady, who, after going over the plethora of options available to me- lens density, frame type, coatings, polishes, clip -ons, backup pairs, etc- explained to me quite nonchalantly that my new pair of glasses would cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. After insurance. Even after I deleted some of the options, like glare-resistant coating and a special polishing procedure, they still would cost me almost $200. After insurance. I thanked her for her help and explained that I would pass on the glasses today.
The Good Doctor then called me back into another room. So what’s it going to be? Neither, I can’t do it today. You know, I was just telling your wife that… (insert horror story here) and well, it’s like going to the dentist and not opening your mouth, and (insert horror story here), and we really care about you here, we don’t want you to end up like (tragic horror story victim), and all the diseases that are out there (insert laundry list here), and some things in life you just have to suck it up and do it.
After checking my breath to make sure I hadn’t swallowed this guy’s firstborn or anything, I sucked it up and said no, thank you. I will do it another time. I promise.
The Good Doctor then proceeded to insinuate that I was hopelessly doomed, and then he checked my eyes and from what he could see, they looked great. Awesome. On my way out, I set up an appointment for an Opto-Map scan, because in a few weeks, we won’t have a rent check that needs to clear as urgently and we’ll have recovered some from putting another $500 into car repairs. Walking out to the car, I felt like I had just been to a fire-and-brimstone revival meeting and rejected Jesus to his face. Quite honestly, I felt guilty and crappy.
But I never knew there were so many things that they could SELL YOU at an eye exam. No wonder they only charge $10 for the office visit- they know that once they’ve got you through the door, you’re good for at least another $300. And this is only the optometrist. There’s so many other doctor-types out there, I can’t imagine the HORROR STORIES they must tell people, the THINGS they can sell, the MONEY they must make off of us poor, scared, unhealthy peasants! And this is on top of paying hundreds of dollars a month for the insurance.
I think this is why I want that dreaded “government-run” health care. I want someone who cares enough to keep me alive and healthy, but who has no vested interest in selling me all this extra stuff. I want a nice, clean, impersonal service, not a guilt trip and a sales pitch. Keep the snake oil salesmen out of the biz, keep it minimalist, and keep it inexpensive. I can handle the taxes- it’d probably end up being cheaper than monthly health insurance payments, anyway. They do this in almost every other country in the world, and every other country in the world is healthier than ours. Why can’t we create a unique, American single-payer health care system that we can all live with?
Anyway, I’m glad I went for an eye exam. I’ll probably even go back to this place. But the whole experience speaks volumes to me about why we need something different, something simpler, and something that’s much less of a drain on the psyche and the wallet.
3.11.2008
I Have Been Attacked By The Hillary Clinton Campaign!
I've tried to stay away from blatant political posts so far this election cycle (there is plenty of time for that later in the year!), but I have to say something to this one. For those of you who don't know, I believe that Hillary Clinton is waging a very negative, divisive, rude and pompous presidential campaign. While she herself has mostly stayed away from dropping the big bombs, folks within her campaign have consistently shown the nation the true colors of a politician who is desperate to win for the sake of winning. Whether they're digging into his kindergarten papers, suggesting that he is unelectable because of talking openly about his teenage drug use, or spreading false rumors about him being a fundamentalist Muslim, to name very few, they've been finding new and even more desperate and petty ways to sling poop at Barack Obama, who's been running a relatively clean and class-act campaign, despite the fact that it's been widely reported that she's had problems running even her own campaign, both fiscally and organizationally.
Anyway, whatever. It's politics, and they're going to go after each other. I understand that. However, until now, it's simply been the campaigns "drawing distinctions" between themselves. Then, the other night, a man by the name of Tom Buffenbarger, the president of a prominent machinists' union, gave a long introduction for Hillary Clinton's Ohio victory speech. You'd think he'd like to talk about the virtues of his candidate, why she's good for America, why he personally likes her, etc. He decided to take the opportunity not to talk about his candidate, but to attack Barack Obama. Attack he did, but not just the candidate… he went ahead and attacked the very people who support him. Take a minute to view an excerpt from his speech:
Wow. So… he seems to suggest that Barack Obama's only support comes from college kids, who of course are completely naïve and ignorant of real life. He attacks the beverage Obama's supporters choose to drink, the cars his supporters drive, their footwear they wear on their feet, and suggests that his supporters are rich people who don't actually work for their money. Well, as an Obama supporter- one who has supported his presidency since long before he ever officially announced, has donated money to his campaign, has volunteered his time, has stood for 3 hours out in the cold to see him speak, and has worked as a Precinct Captain for his Minnesota caucus campaign- I'd like to personally respond to Mr. Buffenbarger's remarks.
"Latte-drinking": I actually prefer to take my coffee black, as I would imagine Mr. Buffenbarger does, because he seems to be a straight-shooting, no-nonsense kind of guy. Every once in a great while I will indulge in a soy latte of some sort. Mainly, though, I don't have time for lattes, because I work for Starbucks, and when I have to get up at 4 in the morning to send his crabby working-class behind off to the factory, I need a straight shot of no-nonsense caffeine, and FAST.
"Prius-driving": Okay, I admit it… I REALLY want a Prius. Or at least a super-fuel-efficient car of some sort. I hope they start coming out with more soon, so I have more options than just the Prius. I tend to be one of those greenie, let's-stop-wasting-resources-so-we-can-keep-the-Earth-livable kind of guys who hates burning gas and wishes he had more gumption and self-determination to ride his bike to work in rain or shine. But alas, Mr. Buffenbarger, you've caught me in my hippie daydream; I'll give you a break and come back to reality. In actuality, I drive a Mexic*AHEM*American-made Ford vehicle, probably not too far removed from the Dodge or Chevy that Mr. Buffenbarger drives. It gets 30mpg and I wish it got more. I'll be honest, though… it's not because it would be better for the environment, but because I am incredibly CHEAP. I am a penny-pinching fool, and would love to spend less of my miniscule paycheck on things like gas. I am sure that Mr. Buffenbarger understands this working paycheck-to-paycheck mentality, and might forgive me if I explained my situation.
"Birkenstock-wearing": My apologies, again, Mr. Buffenbarger- I own a pair of Birkenstock sandals. They are incredibly comfy and durable, and I've owned them for the last 5 years, the same pair, wearing them about 8 months out of the year. This year, though, I might need to replace them, because they've become worn out. Actually, they were probably worn out 2 years ago, but I didn't have the money to replace them. Mr. Buffenbarger, do you own anything that might be considered "above and beyond" what would be considered a necessity? A Snap-On ratchet set, maybe? Or a Makita saw? They're a little more expensive than the Sears Craftsman brand, but they last longer and are much more durable for everyday use, and you use them almost every day, so why not spend up a little bit? It's the same thing with my choice of sandals: I wear them all the time, and I'm going to spend a little more so that I can have a good product that will last for a very long time. I could buy the Target brand, but then I'd be spending $40 every year or two, when I could spend $80 one time on a good pair of Birkenstock sandals that will last me 5 times longer. Again, Mr. Buffenbarger, it's a matter of money for me, like it is for you; I don't make much, so I have to be careful with what I have and not spend much.
"Trust-fund babies": I assume by leveling this accusation, Mr. Buffenbarger seeks to depict us as wealthy, out-of-touch liberals who financially set themselves up by cheating the system. I don't fully understand the function of trust funds, but might look into them as I would any other legal financial savings plan. And as for being financially set and cheating the system, let me tell you a story: once upon a time there was a 3-year-old boy whose mother died of leukemia at the age of 31. This boy was privileged to live in a country where its government believed that investing in its people, especially those who may have fallen on hard times, was the most noble of tasks, and it established a national savings plan to ensure that everyone could live a financially stable life and not have to worry about going under because of a hardship, and could even retire in peace and comfort, being financially set after a hard life's work. This savings plan was called Social Security, and for the next 16 years, they cut this boy and his brother a check every month so that he might have good clothes, participate in public school and church activities, and save some for college. When this boy grew up and wanted extras like cars, his parents told him to go get a job, and so he did. When he left his parents' house, his went out into the world and blew that money on a year of failed college, and then 2 more of living the high life, working a full-time job while buying cars and lots of toys, taking road trips, learning to budget a little bit for rent and groceries, health care, and car insurance. This money dried up, however, and as he had no more cushion for his paycheck, he learned even more about living within his means, the value of each and every paycheck, the value of savings, and the value of penny-pinching. He's now stabilizing and learning to build a decent little life with his wife on $30k year.
The boy, by the way, is me. Someday I hope to make a lot more money than I do now, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. My candidate has proposed taxing these people, those who make more between $97.5k and $150k a year, a bit more out of their paycheck, not because he's out to steal your hard-earned money, but because the Social Security fund that helped give me my life might not be around for other 3-year-olds, or for me when I retire, 30 years from now unless we start putting more money into it YESTERDAY. (I watched a news clip about this one time, it seems to work: check it out) Your candidate has railed against this plan, scaring up votes by calling it a "10-trillion-dollar tax increase on the middle class", while proposing no specific plan of her own, and accusing my candidate of being naïve for even proposing this idea. I would gladly pay more to ensure that what Mr. Buffenbarger's candidate referred to as "one of the greatest inventions of American democracy" remains intact for as long as I am still alive, and certainly as long as this country still stands. Because, Mr. Buffenbarger, it's not about who makes more or who makes less, it's about the opportunity that each of us is afforded by our government.
And Mr. Buffenbarger, that's what college is all about. After learning from my wasteful spending mistakes, I've been able to save up a bit of money to begin taking college classes through a reputable institution. I used to be like you and was rather annoyed by the groupthinkish tendencies on a lot of college campuses. And why spend all that money on a degree to get you a job when all you'd have to do is work hard and move up in a factory or restaurant someplace to get the same effect? Just work a job, enjoy what you do, accept life as it is. I agree. That's why I chose to go back to school after 5 years- I enjoy learning. I enjoy learning about the way the world works, exploring different beliefs and the lives of other people outside of the four walls of my apartment. This exploration and belief that there's something else, something better out there is what brings many people to college, and what has also brought millions of people to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. This attitude is reflected not just in young college students, but in the college-educated folks in general who have been supporting him. Maybe I'm young and naïve, just like my candidate, but I think we can do this thing, and I think Barack Obama is a great start for people of my generation to begin getting involved in our public affairs again. We're excited, and maybe a little bit gullible, but my goodness do we want to leave this world in better shape than when we came in, something your generation might not, for the first time in the history of our country, do for us.
You're not against Barack Obama, Mr. Buffenbarger, you're against the very things that he is against; racism, classism, non-opportunism, left-outism, and societal biasism. I would suggest that your candidate is taking your anger and desire to change these things, and letting you loose against her opponent, for the simple fact that she wants to win this presidential campaign at all costs. She's already done it in New Hampshire, and those people are still very angry at her for misleading people into turning their anger against Barack Obama. Mr. Buffenbarger, before you get angry, make sure you're getting angry for the right reasons, and turning that anger into something constructive. It's hard to stay angry when you're a part of something big, broad and effective… it becomes a positive experience. That's why Barack Obama is such a huge "craze", and I'd invite you to join this craze. There's a lot of people involved in the Obama campaign… I'd never seen so many young people, old people, veterans, blue-collar, white-collar, green-collar, black, white, Latino, Asian, Somali… 20,000 people lined up outside the Target Center in Minneapolis, Mr. Buffenbarger. I think I even saw a guy who looked like you. Maybe it was you, I don't know. It's not all college campuses and college students, Mr. Buffenbarger: it's pretty much EVERYONE who's joined this thing. But if you don't want to, that's okay, too… just don't spend your candidate's time tearing people down. It makes you both look horrible.
Stand For Change Rally with Barack Obama
2/2/2008 Minneapolis, MN
Anyway, whatever. It's politics, and they're going to go after each other. I understand that. However, until now, it's simply been the campaigns "drawing distinctions" between themselves. Then, the other night, a man by the name of Tom Buffenbarger, the president of a prominent machinists' union, gave a long introduction for Hillary Clinton's Ohio victory speech. You'd think he'd like to talk about the virtues of his candidate, why she's good for America, why he personally likes her, etc. He decided to take the opportunity not to talk about his candidate, but to attack Barack Obama. Attack he did, but not just the candidate… he went ahead and attacked the very people who support him. Take a minute to view an excerpt from his speech:
Wow. So… he seems to suggest that Barack Obama's only support comes from college kids, who of course are completely naïve and ignorant of real life. He attacks the beverage Obama's supporters choose to drink, the cars his supporters drive, their footwear they wear on their feet, and suggests that his supporters are rich people who don't actually work for their money. Well, as an Obama supporter- one who has supported his presidency since long before he ever officially announced, has donated money to his campaign, has volunteered his time, has stood for 3 hours out in the cold to see him speak, and has worked as a Precinct Captain for his Minnesota caucus campaign- I'd like to personally respond to Mr. Buffenbarger's remarks.
"Latte-drinking": I actually prefer to take my coffee black, as I would imagine Mr. Buffenbarger does, because he seems to be a straight-shooting, no-nonsense kind of guy. Every once in a great while I will indulge in a soy latte of some sort. Mainly, though, I don't have time for lattes, because I work for Starbucks, and when I have to get up at 4 in the morning to send his crabby working-class behind off to the factory, I need a straight shot of no-nonsense caffeine, and FAST.
"Prius-driving": Okay, I admit it… I REALLY want a Prius. Or at least a super-fuel-efficient car of some sort. I hope they start coming out with more soon, so I have more options than just the Prius. I tend to be one of those greenie, let's-stop-wasting-resources-so-we-can-keep-the-Earth-livable kind of guys who hates burning gas and wishes he had more gumption and self-determination to ride his bike to work in rain or shine. But alas, Mr. Buffenbarger, you've caught me in my hippie daydream; I'll give you a break and come back to reality. In actuality, I drive a Mexic*AHEM*American-made Ford vehicle, probably not too far removed from the Dodge or Chevy that Mr. Buffenbarger drives. It gets 30mpg and I wish it got more. I'll be honest, though… it's not because it would be better for the environment, but because I am incredibly CHEAP. I am a penny-pinching fool, and would love to spend less of my miniscule paycheck on things like gas. I am sure that Mr. Buffenbarger understands this working paycheck-to-paycheck mentality, and might forgive me if I explained my situation.
"Birkenstock-wearing": My apologies, again, Mr. Buffenbarger- I own a pair of Birkenstock sandals. They are incredibly comfy and durable, and I've owned them for the last 5 years, the same pair, wearing them about 8 months out of the year. This year, though, I might need to replace them, because they've become worn out. Actually, they were probably worn out 2 years ago, but I didn't have the money to replace them. Mr. Buffenbarger, do you own anything that might be considered "above and beyond" what would be considered a necessity? A Snap-On ratchet set, maybe? Or a Makita saw? They're a little more expensive than the Sears Craftsman brand, but they last longer and are much more durable for everyday use, and you use them almost every day, so why not spend up a little bit? It's the same thing with my choice of sandals: I wear them all the time, and I'm going to spend a little more so that I can have a good product that will last for a very long time. I could buy the Target brand, but then I'd be spending $40 every year or two, when I could spend $80 one time on a good pair of Birkenstock sandals that will last me 5 times longer. Again, Mr. Buffenbarger, it's a matter of money for me, like it is for you; I don't make much, so I have to be careful with what I have and not spend much.
"Trust-fund babies": I assume by leveling this accusation, Mr. Buffenbarger seeks to depict us as wealthy, out-of-touch liberals who financially set themselves up by cheating the system. I don't fully understand the function of trust funds, but might look into them as I would any other legal financial savings plan. And as for being financially set and cheating the system, let me tell you a story: once upon a time there was a 3-year-old boy whose mother died of leukemia at the age of 31. This boy was privileged to live in a country where its government believed that investing in its people, especially those who may have fallen on hard times, was the most noble of tasks, and it established a national savings plan to ensure that everyone could live a financially stable life and not have to worry about going under because of a hardship, and could even retire in peace and comfort, being financially set after a hard life's work. This savings plan was called Social Security, and for the next 16 years, they cut this boy and his brother a check every month so that he might have good clothes, participate in public school and church activities, and save some for college. When this boy grew up and wanted extras like cars, his parents told him to go get a job, and so he did. When he left his parents' house, his went out into the world and blew that money on a year of failed college, and then 2 more of living the high life, working a full-time job while buying cars and lots of toys, taking road trips, learning to budget a little bit for rent and groceries, health care, and car insurance. This money dried up, however, and as he had no more cushion for his paycheck, he learned even more about living within his means, the value of each and every paycheck, the value of savings, and the value of penny-pinching. He's now stabilizing and learning to build a decent little life with his wife on $30k year.
The boy, by the way, is me. Someday I hope to make a lot more money than I do now, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. My candidate has proposed taxing these people, those who make more between $97.5k and $150k a year, a bit more out of their paycheck, not because he's out to steal your hard-earned money, but because the Social Security fund that helped give me my life might not be around for other 3-year-olds, or for me when I retire, 30 years from now unless we start putting more money into it YESTERDAY. (I watched a news clip about this one time, it seems to work: check it out) Your candidate has railed against this plan, scaring up votes by calling it a "10-trillion-dollar tax increase on the middle class", while proposing no specific plan of her own, and accusing my candidate of being naïve for even proposing this idea. I would gladly pay more to ensure that what Mr. Buffenbarger's candidate referred to as "one of the greatest inventions of American democracy" remains intact for as long as I am still alive, and certainly as long as this country still stands. Because, Mr. Buffenbarger, it's not about who makes more or who makes less, it's about the opportunity that each of us is afforded by our government.
And Mr. Buffenbarger, that's what college is all about. After learning from my wasteful spending mistakes, I've been able to save up a bit of money to begin taking college classes through a reputable institution. I used to be like you and was rather annoyed by the groupthinkish tendencies on a lot of college campuses. And why spend all that money on a degree to get you a job when all you'd have to do is work hard and move up in a factory or restaurant someplace to get the same effect? Just work a job, enjoy what you do, accept life as it is. I agree. That's why I chose to go back to school after 5 years- I enjoy learning. I enjoy learning about the way the world works, exploring different beliefs and the lives of other people outside of the four walls of my apartment. This exploration and belief that there's something else, something better out there is what brings many people to college, and what has also brought millions of people to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. This attitude is reflected not just in young college students, but in the college-educated folks in general who have been supporting him. Maybe I'm young and naïve, just like my candidate, but I think we can do this thing, and I think Barack Obama is a great start for people of my generation to begin getting involved in our public affairs again. We're excited, and maybe a little bit gullible, but my goodness do we want to leave this world in better shape than when we came in, something your generation might not, for the first time in the history of our country, do for us.
You're not against Barack Obama, Mr. Buffenbarger, you're against the very things that he is against; racism, classism, non-opportunism, left-outism, and societal biasism. I would suggest that your candidate is taking your anger and desire to change these things, and letting you loose against her opponent, for the simple fact that she wants to win this presidential campaign at all costs. She's already done it in New Hampshire, and those people are still very angry at her for misleading people into turning their anger against Barack Obama. Mr. Buffenbarger, before you get angry, make sure you're getting angry for the right reasons, and turning that anger into something constructive. It's hard to stay angry when you're a part of something big, broad and effective… it becomes a positive experience. That's why Barack Obama is such a huge "craze", and I'd invite you to join this craze. There's a lot of people involved in the Obama campaign… I'd never seen so many young people, old people, veterans, blue-collar, white-collar, green-collar, black, white, Latino, Asian, Somali… 20,000 people lined up outside the Target Center in Minneapolis, Mr. Buffenbarger. I think I even saw a guy who looked like you. Maybe it was you, I don't know. It's not all college campuses and college students, Mr. Buffenbarger: it's pretty much EVERYONE who's joined this thing. But if you don't want to, that's okay, too… just don't spend your candidate's time tearing people down. It makes you both look horrible.
Stand For Change Rally with Barack Obama
2/2/2008 Minneapolis, MN
3.05.2008
When '08 Becomes "Oh, Wait..."
There are a bunch of kids playing in a playground sandbox. They’ve played there for years, but now the sand in which they’re playing has become dirty and stale. There are sticks in it, and rocks, maybe a shard of glass here and there, and the kids quickly learn that it’s nearly impossible to play in. So these kids come up with three separate ideas of how to fix the sandbox. Kid A actually kind of likes the prospect of sticks and rocks in the sandbox, and while he’d like to rid the play area of glass shards, he decides that a sticks-and-rocks-box might actually be much more fun- rocks are a little easier to pick up than sand, after all, and more sticks means MORE SWORDFIGHTS! Conversely, Kid B believes that the sand is a great thing, but that they need to take a rake through the sandbox, and then go through and root out all of the rocks, sticks and glass by hand. It may get a little messy, some kids might get cut and bruised, but in the end, she believes it’s the only way to get their sand to be clean again. Kid C loves Kid B’s idea of clean sand, but believes that the sand currently in the sandbox is old and musty and irreparably tainted anyway. He believes that what the sandbox needs is a fresh batch of sand, clean and cool, and then they can continue playing in their sandbox.
But Kid C doesn’t just encourage the “sandbox crowd” to get in on the action. He walks over and asks the foursquare crowd if they’d like to help out. He walks over and asks the tetherball crowd if they’d like to help, and the basketball crowd, the hopscotch crowd, the jungle gym crowd… pretty soon, he’s got kids from each playground crowd willing to help him out. Some of them don’t really care much about playing in the sandbox, but want to be helpful to their friends. Others have never played in the sandbox before, because the sandbox crowd has always kind of been the “cool kids” and they never felt very welcome there, but they jump at the opportunity to play there now. And some kids have played in the sandbox before, but stopped playing after the sand got too dirty and dangerous; others got tired of hearing the cool kids bicker about who was the coolest. But no matter where these kids had come from, Kid C went after them and made them believe that the sandbox was important again, and that they each had a part in cleaning it up.
This threw Kid B for a loop, because Kid B really, REALLY liked this sand. She wanted to keep the old sand in the sandbox; after all, her and her daddy had donated this sand to the playground. They wouldn’t even have sand in their box if it wasn’t for her, she thought. Her daddy taught her all about the sand. She is an expert; she KNOWS this sand. That’s not the point, Kid C and his playground pals tell Kid B. The point is, this old sand is gross, and we could go through it and pick out all the little rocks and glass, but it will still be the same, stinky old sand.
“You’re stinky!” Kid B replies.
Ignoring her comment, Kid C explains that he and his cohorts believe new sand would be a cleaner, safer, much more effective way to allow the sandbox to continue to be a fun place, and to allow more kids to play in the sandbox as well. Hearing this, some of the sandbox crowd begins to agree, and starts to encourage Kid B to do the same.
“You’re stinky!” Kid B says again.
“Why are you being so mean?” the kids start to ask.
“Because he’s stinky!” Kid B responds.
The kids continue to ignore her chants of “Stinky!”, and begin making plans for how to get this new sand into the sandbox, what kind of sand it should be, what they might make out of the sand, etc. Meanwhile, Kid B begins dancing around and yelling at them, telling them all the icky rotten things that Kid C smells like, and how badly he smells of them.
“Stinky!” she screams, “Stinky! He’s stinky!”
Inundated with noise, a few kids finally start to question Kid C why she might think he’s stinky. As they get a little closer to hear his answers, they begin to ask themselves, does he really smell stinky? No, couldn’t be. But wait… *sniff sniff*… hmm. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t tell for sure… well, she’s been around for awhile, she probably knows what stinky smells like… but wait, she kind of smells like the stinky sand that she plays in all the time… wait, I thought this was about the sandbox, not what these kids smell like? I’m so confused! I think I’m going to go play tetherball again. Other kids begin to tire of being accused of hanging out with a stinky person. Some decide they actually think Kid B smells better, and begin to tell kids that Kid C smells so bad, he couldn’t possibly get new sand for the box, anyway. Some kids scratch their heads and wonder, like the first kid, how we got talking about scent instead of sand. Some stay behind to back up Kid C; others go back to the playground. Others stand around wondering what the heck just happened.
Meanwhile, Kid B has amassed just enough kids that think Kid C is stinky that they make up more than those who think Kid C isn’t stinky, and based upon what Kid B said about Kid C being stinky, they decide to keep the old sand. Kid B is happy that she got what she believed she deserved, telling Kid C no hard feelings. The kids on the playground go back to their usual business, the football crowd and the foursquare crowd, but they’re all very mad, both at Kid C for getting their hopes up, and Kid B for calling them names.
Sensing this anger, and seizing his moment, Kid A calls out across the playground,
“Hey guys, wanna play with sticks?!”
But Kid C doesn’t just encourage the “sandbox crowd” to get in on the action. He walks over and asks the foursquare crowd if they’d like to help out. He walks over and asks the tetherball crowd if they’d like to help, and the basketball crowd, the hopscotch crowd, the jungle gym crowd… pretty soon, he’s got kids from each playground crowd willing to help him out. Some of them don’t really care much about playing in the sandbox, but want to be helpful to their friends. Others have never played in the sandbox before, because the sandbox crowd has always kind of been the “cool kids” and they never felt very welcome there, but they jump at the opportunity to play there now. And some kids have played in the sandbox before, but stopped playing after the sand got too dirty and dangerous; others got tired of hearing the cool kids bicker about who was the coolest. But no matter where these kids had come from, Kid C went after them and made them believe that the sandbox was important again, and that they each had a part in cleaning it up.
This threw Kid B for a loop, because Kid B really, REALLY liked this sand. She wanted to keep the old sand in the sandbox; after all, her and her daddy had donated this sand to the playground. They wouldn’t even have sand in their box if it wasn’t for her, she thought. Her daddy taught her all about the sand. She is an expert; she KNOWS this sand. That’s not the point, Kid C and his playground pals tell Kid B. The point is, this old sand is gross, and we could go through it and pick out all the little rocks and glass, but it will still be the same, stinky old sand.
“You’re stinky!” Kid B replies.
Ignoring her comment, Kid C explains that he and his cohorts believe new sand would be a cleaner, safer, much more effective way to allow the sandbox to continue to be a fun place, and to allow more kids to play in the sandbox as well. Hearing this, some of the sandbox crowd begins to agree, and starts to encourage Kid B to do the same.
“You’re stinky!” Kid B says again.
“Why are you being so mean?” the kids start to ask.
“Because he’s stinky!” Kid B responds.
The kids continue to ignore her chants of “Stinky!”, and begin making plans for how to get this new sand into the sandbox, what kind of sand it should be, what they might make out of the sand, etc. Meanwhile, Kid B begins dancing around and yelling at them, telling them all the icky rotten things that Kid C smells like, and how badly he smells of them.
“Stinky!” she screams, “Stinky! He’s stinky!”
Inundated with noise, a few kids finally start to question Kid C why she might think he’s stinky. As they get a little closer to hear his answers, they begin to ask themselves, does he really smell stinky? No, couldn’t be. But wait… *sniff sniff*… hmm. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t tell for sure… well, she’s been around for awhile, she probably knows what stinky smells like… but wait, she kind of smells like the stinky sand that she plays in all the time… wait, I thought this was about the sandbox, not what these kids smell like? I’m so confused! I think I’m going to go play tetherball again. Other kids begin to tire of being accused of hanging out with a stinky person. Some decide they actually think Kid B smells better, and begin to tell kids that Kid C smells so bad, he couldn’t possibly get new sand for the box, anyway. Some kids scratch their heads and wonder, like the first kid, how we got talking about scent instead of sand. Some stay behind to back up Kid C; others go back to the playground. Others stand around wondering what the heck just happened.
Meanwhile, Kid B has amassed just enough kids that think Kid C is stinky that they make up more than those who think Kid C isn’t stinky, and based upon what Kid B said about Kid C being stinky, they decide to keep the old sand. Kid B is happy that she got what she believed she deserved, telling Kid C no hard feelings. The kids on the playground go back to their usual business, the football crowd and the foursquare crowd, but they’re all very mad, both at Kid C for getting their hopes up, and Kid B for calling them names.
Sensing this anger, and seizing his moment, Kid A calls out across the playground,
“Hey guys, wanna play with sticks?!”
1.27.2008
Part III: What This Really Is
Part III. What This Really Is
“F*ck your God.”
Before you get offended and shut me out, allow me to explain the significance of this quote.
I first heard this phrase used in the song “Judith” by A Perfect Circle. I later read an interview with the band’s lead singer, Maynard James Keenan, in a Christian magazine. He was asked, “When you said ‘F*ck your God’, were you speaking of Jesus?” He replied, “When I say ‘F*ck your God’, I don’t mean THE God, I mean YOUR god, or your perception of God.” This intrigued me, because I’d never really understood there to be “perceptions” of God, or different ways to think about who He is and what He does and that sort of thing. He was just a certain way, and the way that I was taught was the correct- and only- way that anyone needed to perceive Him.
I was reminded of this song one evening, a few years later, when one of my floormates at North Central University stood out in the middle of our hallway and screamed this at one of the other guys on our floor, with two middle fingers held firmly up in the air and his face red with anger. “F*ck your God” he said more than once, and guys came at him hard- “Brother, don’t say that!” “In the name of Jesus I rebuke you!” “You don’t mean that, dude!” And to that he said, “Yes, I do. F*ck your God!” And after a physical confrontation with one of our “discipleship leaders”- an upperclassman whose job it was model for us how a proper North Central student should live life- he stormed out of the building and didn’t return for hours. He did apologize for exploding like that, but not for what he had said.
(I’ll add that this guy became one of my good friends and apartment roommate at a later time, and that he is happily married and last I heard was leading worship and very involved in his local ministry.)
That moment, though, has really stuck with me. I had come into North Central the previous fall expecting to find that this successful center for church leadership would be all over the problems I had begun to see within Christianity, and would’ve already had solutions for fixing them. I expected that most people would’ve figured out by now that there was something wrong going on. Well, it turns out that I was the one who was wrong. While there were a few people interested in shaking things up a bit, the majority of people were interested in learning the same old thing, a very specific idea about God and everything revolving around that, and about more effective ways of getting everyone to buy in to the same old thing. A huge premium was placed on “holy living”- no, I won’t call it placing a premium- that IS what it was all about. The university president even had a little catch phrase that he would throw around constantly, and would usually elicit great cheers from students: “North Central students are CLEARLY SUPERIOR.” I’m sure he meant it simply as a feel-good rallying cry for all of us, but the superiority complex was pervasive. Things that North Central touted in its campaign for “clear superiority”: mandatory chapel services every day at 11am, no rated R movies, no dancing, no gambling, no alcohol in any amount, a 1:30am curfew, no one of the opposite sex allowed in any dorm (except for 3 hours every Saturday night), and a strict rule of not allowing any DVD players, VCRs to be possessed or any movies to be viewed in dorms at any time. No one even suggested cable as a possibility. Each and every student had to sign a pledge that they would not do any of these things, or various other activities or behaviors deemed inappropriate by the college. This pledge was called The NCU Way, and it was doctrine. I don’t use that word lightly- if you violated any part of this pledge for any reason, you weren’t simply breaking a rule, you were sinning against God Himself. People defended The NCU Way like they defended The Bible, creationism, and the existence of God. It wasn’t just The NCU Way, it was The Only Way, the way God truly intended for us to live. Anyone who didn’t agree with it should simply remove themselves from North Central, because when it all boiled down, you weren’t superior. They instilled this in the dorms’ resident advisors, and especially so in the discipleship leaders, who basically served as the lifestyle police, and though they could not take direct disciplinary action against you, they would rat on you behind your back if they felt you weren’t in line.
Then there was the political aspect. Being propagators of the gospel of unconditional submission to authority, they were especially fond of a man who seemed to hold very close to that what-I-say-goes model of leadership- the current president, George W. Bush. Though at the time I entered NCU I was a very big fan of Bush, I was very taken aback at the pressure to support him and the Republican Party, and the anger with which people would respond to those who would speak out against them. “George W. Bush is a man of God, and we are to respect those in authority, and God chose him by hand to lead this nation.” And even though at the time I agreed, I was thinking in the back of my head, “You know, I never saw this attitude when Bill Clinton was in office.” In the election of 2002, when we all went to vote at our polling place, the lines were buzzing with tension and pressure to vote straight-ticket Republican. Those who were unsure were mocked, and it was just assumed that they knew better. Later on in the year, around the time the rallying for the invasion of Iraq was becoming louder, it became the “cool” thing to do to go around stealing “Say NO To War With Iraq” signs off of people’s lawns and collect them in the dorms. One of them even got stolen and taped over “NO” with “YES” and was plastered on the wall on our floor as a trophy for all to see. In addition to inviting an anti-Muslim activist to come and speak in chapel about how the spread of Islam was the root of all the problems in the world- on the first anniversary of 9/11- the university, which had banned movies and cable TV from the dorms, began piping in the Fox News Channel to the TVs in all the common areas across campus. It was war all the time, Saddam Hussein this, al Qaeda that, and God was with us and we needed to go to war. The night the war began, I woke up from a nap to a song entitled “Rock Saddam Hussein’s Ass” being blasted down the halls and switched on my TV and watched the explosions on the screen. A few weeks later, it became an issue when a couple of students attended an anti-war rally at the state capitol, and it was widely considered that they should be punished, and possibly kicked out of school for it.
And God was FOR all this. Not only was He for all this, this was just how God worked.
By far the biggest issue at hand, though, was allowing movies to be watched in the dorms. Looking back, it was such a miniscule, dumb issue, but at the time it was so hotly contested that the Student Senate finally held a hearing to discuss and vote on a measure that would overturn the rule. The majority of the student body supported the measure, but our senators had made clear that it would be very difficult to convince them to support it. On the night of the hearing, the room was packed from wall-to-wall and to the rafters with students looking to voice their opinions and hopefully influence their senate representative. A two-hour long discussion broke out, and the premise came down to- will overturning this rule detrimentally affect the culture and values of the community? Person after person got up, explaining how allowing students the adult right to choose their own entertainment and make their own life choices would develop better spiritual habits, or how watching a movie was often a social bonding experience and not the “lonely, closed-door, community-killing” practice that many people believed it to be. Many others got up and explained that it would cause grades to drop, would waste time that we could all be using to do things for other people, or would compromise the strong stands that the university had taken to ensure that their students indeed remained “clearly superior”. The moment of the night came when a young woman got up and, sobbing through tears, expressed that God had shown her that the student body would be subject to the influence of Satan, and that Satan wanted so badly to infiltrate the North Central student body and that allowing DVDs to be possessed was that one little foothold that the devil needed to bring us all down. There were a few other appeals to this end. It was very much about keeping up the appearance of this holy lifestyle and sacred institution. After the discussion had ended, the Student Senate voted right in front of us to uphold the ban. People stormed out of the room, many of us throwing immature hissy fits that eventually were gotten over, but we all kind of felt the same- if this was truly what Christianity was about, holding life at an arm’s length, living in a sanitary bubble devoid of choice, being required to act and believe a certain way, we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
We all went back to our dorm rooms, angry and embittered, and this is where my friend made his pronouncement: “F*ck your God!”
A lot of the guys on my floor couldn’t understand how he could say such a thing, but I knew exactly where he was coming from, because I was there, too. I explained that he was rejecting the idea that God was contained within this institution that we were attending, these theologies and doctrines we were being taught were the only way to believe, and especially the idea that in order to follow God more closely and be an effective example to the world around us, we had to remove all the things of the world from our lives. We all kind of agreed; we’d had it with being “Clearly Superior”, we’d had it with the elitist attitude of holy living as The Way, and most of all, we’d had it with this God.
Myself, and most of the guys I was closest to, left North Central University completely disillusioned with who God was, and absolutely sick of the whole Christian thing.
After all this, let me make clear that my purpose here is not to complain about how badly I was treated, or how the people at this school are evil, or anything like that. North Central is a great school for a lot of people. I have friends who are still there, who have graduated, or are about to graduate. I met some amazing people there, some of the most enviably disciplined and dedicated individuals one could meet. I think that the intention behind these rules and restrictions and the pressure for “holiness” came from a good heart that wanted to see students reach their full potential, and the school believed that a strict system of discipline was the best way to achieve this. The problem I had was that this system was upheld as the “superior” way, that not living up to these standards somehow made you less of a Christian. But I am not angry anymore. Of course I went through a phase where I would get so angry at North Central and everything it stood for that it might make you uncomfortable. I also did horrific work as a student, passing one class with flying colors (Systematic Theology, ironically) and failed the rest because of skipping too many classes. I often blamed the environment I was in for failing to motivate me to learn at this institution, and numerous other things… except for myself. This was wrong, and I take partial blame for the angry attitude I had toward North Central. I’m over it.
I am not, however, over what my experience at North Central taught me, and the path it set me on. Put quite frankly, I needed to leave God in order to find Him. Now, it could be argued whether or not I actually “left” God, or if He left me, or whatever. What I did do, though, was leave the Christian context, and I have no regrets for doing so.
After North Central, I entered the workforce. I went into working in coffee shops, and living with dudes in various apartments in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We worked our jobs, didn’t go to church, constantly made fun of our Christian upbringing, spent many a night grilling out and drinking too much, and generally had the time of our lives. We took crazy road trips to the South, and to Canada, and in one specific instance, a trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba. We spent 4 days, you guessed it, drinking with Canadians and crashing on couches and standing out in the November cold in our boxers watching the Northern Lights. We learned about what makes a Canadian a Canadian, and I noticed three specific characteristics about these Canadians that were a bit different than most of the Americans that I knew. For one, they were very concerned with the world around them and their effect on it, not just locally, but globally. They were very up on their local and national government, yes, but also on the American government, and global situations. You just got the feeling that they didn’t see themselves as the center of the world. Next, I noticed that they had a very simple way of life. They weren’t concerned with getting ahead or the accumulation of wealth, the big houses, and the fast cars (the person we stayed with didn’t even own a car- she rode the bus! Gasp!) They wanted to go to college for the sake of learning and bettering themselves, and they wanted to work their jobs and pay their rent and spend lots of time being with friends and watching hockey and drinking beer and just enjoying life. The third and most pronounced difference I noticed between Americans and Canadians was the general lightness with which they dealt with the future. They weren’t obsessively worried about what was coming next. This intrigued me because I had come to a point where I had realized you know, this life is all about the anticipation of the next thing. I bounced this off of my Canadian friend, a Buddhist. Here’s an excerpt from the email that I sent to her back in January of 2004:
"…why is it that life revolves around anticipation? Is it a human need for there to always be something next? I know you said that for "some people" there is, but could it be that everyone is like that? I mean... everything about our existence is anticipation... we go to school early in our lives in anticipation of acquiring knowledge... we anticipate going to college after school and acquiring a degree we anticipate will get us a job that we anticipate will make us money. We anticipate meeting someone who we anticipate we will spend our lives with until we come upon the death that we anticipate... Christmas is a multi-billion dollar orgasm of anticipation... heck, even orgasms are built on anticipation! We sleep in anticipation of acquiring more energy for the day that we anticipate will come tomorrow. Religion is completely based around the anticipation of rewards to our eternal soul, in anticipation of the death of our physical selves... think of everything else about life... what would life be without anticipation? As you are experiencing, it's boring and meaningless. When you're not anticipating something, what is there to live for? You can actively live out everything you've been anticipating that you've achieved... but there will still be that want within ourselves, that need for there to be something next, something to work for... not even to be rewarded, but just to work for it and... anticipate. Life IS the anticipation, the journey... the means to an end we anticipate will be the end, but will not in actuality be the end of anticipation, for anticipation is what drives us and keeps us alive, makes us human. It's not about the destination, it's the journey... and that's about all I've figured out so far. Anticipation is a human need... of what, if anything, I'm not sure... maybe we'll never know... but maybe it doesn't matter anyway... it's the anticipation that we thrive on.
And her response:
“…what I have come to decide is that not only is anticipation a human need, it is that which will destroy all chance of eternal happiness- but is also that that gives us the greatest happiness. Human nature is to succeed and excel and learn and grow and become more. I read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and he speaks of this affliction. The book refers to these type of people, i.e. you and me and ninety percent of the world, as “ego travelers” and the quote reads "He's here but he's not here. All that he sees, all that he wants is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it’s all around him. He longs to be further up the trail but when he gets there he is unhappy............why? Because again, he is here." I believe the key is to strive to achieve and have that anticipation but still always immerse yourself in the beauty that surrounds. The destination does not always have to be the end result, perhaps the journey is the destination for the destination always seems to disappoint.”
In a strange sort of way, I heard the God that I knew, but had felt very distant from, coming from this Buddhist. This went against what I had been taught, that God speaks only through Christians, and only in King James English. Haha, okay, that last part is not true, but you see what I’m saying. You’re taught that even though something may ring so true inside you, if it doesn’t come from a specific type of person or stream of thought, then it can’t be true. It was through this that I began to realize that God does not limit Himself to Christianity, because Christianity is a man-made religion, and God is alive and active regardless of what label we slap on it, or how we think He is. I think my biggest dilemma at the time was that I just could not follow a God who was solely concerned with the ultimate destination of our eternal souls, and as a consequence would throw into the fire everything else. I like this world. I think it’s an awesome place, full of all kinds of natural wonders and possibilities and cool people and cool things. I also know that this world does not live up to how it was meant to be, and that there are some horrific things that occur by the human hand every day and in every place. Does this make the world bad? I don’t think so. But does it need help, and to be saved from the evil things that we are all prone to? Yes, and I think that God loves this place, too, so much so that He sent Jesus into it to provide that help and exemplify that way in which we can help alleviate those evil things. However, humans are not God, and as we have this ability to make decisions by ourselves- free will- we will make wrong decisions, bad decisions, evil decisions, every last one of us. Should this stop us from having hope for better things? Quite the opposite- this should give us the hope- the anticipation- that as imperfect as we are, God is still able to use who we are to bring good into this world. This idea that we are just anticipating the next thing after this life, that it’s all about what’s next, and to hell with everything else, makes us irrelevant and useless, because God placed in us a desire to work for the betterment of ourselves and those around us . I think we have lost sight of what is at hand, and possibly most important, and that is that God IS here and now, inviting us to actively work with Him to improve our condition IN the here and now. When we immerse ourselves in the beauty that surrounds us, we realize that God is here and available to us, wherever and whomever we are. God put in us a sense of anticipation of good things, and this anticipation is meant to drive us while we are alive and in the world, a sense of hope that God can use people to bring about good things in this world, that even when we can’t see clearly what’s happening, and despite the fact that we will screw things up on occasion, we can anticipate that what God is doing is and will be good.
This realization that God likes this world like I do- and definitely much more so- is what kept me from completely walking away from Him. It was wonderful to know that God wasn’t so concerned with the things that North Central, and the churches I had previously been involved with, held as their highest priorities.
But I think the biggest thing that I learned was that God is alive and active outside of the boundaries of Christianity. We were all taught that we had to convert people to a certain way of living FIRST, get them to subscribe to these certain “truths”, and THEN God could start being active in a person’s life. But I would say just from the time that I stepped outside the safety and structure and promises of the church, I saw God alive and well (maybe even more so than I saw IN the church!) in this world that Christians so love to hate, in people who Christians wouldn’t touch with a ten-and-a-half foot pole, and in places where Christians wouldn’t be caught dead going.
The religion of Christianity has hijacked God, and is holding Him hostage and saying to the world, “Say the right words, and do the right things, and you can have Him.” And this defensive attitude is backfiring, because most people are saying, “That’s great. You can keep him” and moving on with their lives, because Christianity is not the sole perpetrator of God’s work; indeed, God alone is the perpetrator of God’s work.
Religion, including that which we call “Christianity”, is really in the end a man-made, fully inadequate structure that tries to quantify and, all too often, DEFINE God to meet our own expectations and purposes. And when God becomes defined, He ceases to be God, and he becomes a god. And as our gods begin to fall apart, we defend them, and as we defend our gods, we lose what it is we were trying to define in the first place.
As history shows, when we offer what we think is a final definition of God, our ideas are quickly shown the door, so that something new can emerge…
“F*ck your God.”
Before you get offended and shut me out, allow me to explain the significance of this quote.
I first heard this phrase used in the song “Judith” by A Perfect Circle. I later read an interview with the band’s lead singer, Maynard James Keenan, in a Christian magazine. He was asked, “When you said ‘F*ck your God’, were you speaking of Jesus?” He replied, “When I say ‘F*ck your God’, I don’t mean THE God, I mean YOUR god, or your perception of God.” This intrigued me, because I’d never really understood there to be “perceptions” of God, or different ways to think about who He is and what He does and that sort of thing. He was just a certain way, and the way that I was taught was the correct- and only- way that anyone needed to perceive Him.
I was reminded of this song one evening, a few years later, when one of my floormates at North Central University stood out in the middle of our hallway and screamed this at one of the other guys on our floor, with two middle fingers held firmly up in the air and his face red with anger. “F*ck your God” he said more than once, and guys came at him hard- “Brother, don’t say that!” “In the name of Jesus I rebuke you!” “You don’t mean that, dude!” And to that he said, “Yes, I do. F*ck your God!” And after a physical confrontation with one of our “discipleship leaders”- an upperclassman whose job it was model for us how a proper North Central student should live life- he stormed out of the building and didn’t return for hours. He did apologize for exploding like that, but not for what he had said.
(I’ll add that this guy became one of my good friends and apartment roommate at a later time, and that he is happily married and last I heard was leading worship and very involved in his local ministry.)
That moment, though, has really stuck with me. I had come into North Central the previous fall expecting to find that this successful center for church leadership would be all over the problems I had begun to see within Christianity, and would’ve already had solutions for fixing them. I expected that most people would’ve figured out by now that there was something wrong going on. Well, it turns out that I was the one who was wrong. While there were a few people interested in shaking things up a bit, the majority of people were interested in learning the same old thing, a very specific idea about God and everything revolving around that, and about more effective ways of getting everyone to buy in to the same old thing. A huge premium was placed on “holy living”- no, I won’t call it placing a premium- that IS what it was all about. The university president even had a little catch phrase that he would throw around constantly, and would usually elicit great cheers from students: “North Central students are CLEARLY SUPERIOR.” I’m sure he meant it simply as a feel-good rallying cry for all of us, but the superiority complex was pervasive. Things that North Central touted in its campaign for “clear superiority”: mandatory chapel services every day at 11am, no rated R movies, no dancing, no gambling, no alcohol in any amount, a 1:30am curfew, no one of the opposite sex allowed in any dorm (except for 3 hours every Saturday night), and a strict rule of not allowing any DVD players, VCRs to be possessed or any movies to be viewed in dorms at any time. No one even suggested cable as a possibility. Each and every student had to sign a pledge that they would not do any of these things, or various other activities or behaviors deemed inappropriate by the college. This pledge was called The NCU Way, and it was doctrine. I don’t use that word lightly- if you violated any part of this pledge for any reason, you weren’t simply breaking a rule, you were sinning against God Himself. People defended The NCU Way like they defended The Bible, creationism, and the existence of God. It wasn’t just The NCU Way, it was The Only Way, the way God truly intended for us to live. Anyone who didn’t agree with it should simply remove themselves from North Central, because when it all boiled down, you weren’t superior. They instilled this in the dorms’ resident advisors, and especially so in the discipleship leaders, who basically served as the lifestyle police, and though they could not take direct disciplinary action against you, they would rat on you behind your back if they felt you weren’t in line.
Then there was the political aspect. Being propagators of the gospel of unconditional submission to authority, they were especially fond of a man who seemed to hold very close to that what-I-say-goes model of leadership- the current president, George W. Bush. Though at the time I entered NCU I was a very big fan of Bush, I was very taken aback at the pressure to support him and the Republican Party, and the anger with which people would respond to those who would speak out against them. “George W. Bush is a man of God, and we are to respect those in authority, and God chose him by hand to lead this nation.” And even though at the time I agreed, I was thinking in the back of my head, “You know, I never saw this attitude when Bill Clinton was in office.” In the election of 2002, when we all went to vote at our polling place, the lines were buzzing with tension and pressure to vote straight-ticket Republican. Those who were unsure were mocked, and it was just assumed that they knew better. Later on in the year, around the time the rallying for the invasion of Iraq was becoming louder, it became the “cool” thing to do to go around stealing “Say NO To War With Iraq” signs off of people’s lawns and collect them in the dorms. One of them even got stolen and taped over “NO” with “YES” and was plastered on the wall on our floor as a trophy for all to see. In addition to inviting an anti-Muslim activist to come and speak in chapel about how the spread of Islam was the root of all the problems in the world- on the first anniversary of 9/11- the university, which had banned movies and cable TV from the dorms, began piping in the Fox News Channel to the TVs in all the common areas across campus. It was war all the time, Saddam Hussein this, al Qaeda that, and God was with us and we needed to go to war. The night the war began, I woke up from a nap to a song entitled “Rock Saddam Hussein’s Ass” being blasted down the halls and switched on my TV and watched the explosions on the screen. A few weeks later, it became an issue when a couple of students attended an anti-war rally at the state capitol, and it was widely considered that they should be punished, and possibly kicked out of school for it.
And God was FOR all this. Not only was He for all this, this was just how God worked.
By far the biggest issue at hand, though, was allowing movies to be watched in the dorms. Looking back, it was such a miniscule, dumb issue, but at the time it was so hotly contested that the Student Senate finally held a hearing to discuss and vote on a measure that would overturn the rule. The majority of the student body supported the measure, but our senators had made clear that it would be very difficult to convince them to support it. On the night of the hearing, the room was packed from wall-to-wall and to the rafters with students looking to voice their opinions and hopefully influence their senate representative. A two-hour long discussion broke out, and the premise came down to- will overturning this rule detrimentally affect the culture and values of the community? Person after person got up, explaining how allowing students the adult right to choose their own entertainment and make their own life choices would develop better spiritual habits, or how watching a movie was often a social bonding experience and not the “lonely, closed-door, community-killing” practice that many people believed it to be. Many others got up and explained that it would cause grades to drop, would waste time that we could all be using to do things for other people, or would compromise the strong stands that the university had taken to ensure that their students indeed remained “clearly superior”. The moment of the night came when a young woman got up and, sobbing through tears, expressed that God had shown her that the student body would be subject to the influence of Satan, and that Satan wanted so badly to infiltrate the North Central student body and that allowing DVDs to be possessed was that one little foothold that the devil needed to bring us all down. There were a few other appeals to this end. It was very much about keeping up the appearance of this holy lifestyle and sacred institution. After the discussion had ended, the Student Senate voted right in front of us to uphold the ban. People stormed out of the room, many of us throwing immature hissy fits that eventually were gotten over, but we all kind of felt the same- if this was truly what Christianity was about, holding life at an arm’s length, living in a sanitary bubble devoid of choice, being required to act and believe a certain way, we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
We all went back to our dorm rooms, angry and embittered, and this is where my friend made his pronouncement: “F*ck your God!”
A lot of the guys on my floor couldn’t understand how he could say such a thing, but I knew exactly where he was coming from, because I was there, too. I explained that he was rejecting the idea that God was contained within this institution that we were attending, these theologies and doctrines we were being taught were the only way to believe, and especially the idea that in order to follow God more closely and be an effective example to the world around us, we had to remove all the things of the world from our lives. We all kind of agreed; we’d had it with being “Clearly Superior”, we’d had it with the elitist attitude of holy living as The Way, and most of all, we’d had it with this God.
Myself, and most of the guys I was closest to, left North Central University completely disillusioned with who God was, and absolutely sick of the whole Christian thing.
After all this, let me make clear that my purpose here is not to complain about how badly I was treated, or how the people at this school are evil, or anything like that. North Central is a great school for a lot of people. I have friends who are still there, who have graduated, or are about to graduate. I met some amazing people there, some of the most enviably disciplined and dedicated individuals one could meet. I think that the intention behind these rules and restrictions and the pressure for “holiness” came from a good heart that wanted to see students reach their full potential, and the school believed that a strict system of discipline was the best way to achieve this. The problem I had was that this system was upheld as the “superior” way, that not living up to these standards somehow made you less of a Christian. But I am not angry anymore. Of course I went through a phase where I would get so angry at North Central and everything it stood for that it might make you uncomfortable. I also did horrific work as a student, passing one class with flying colors (Systematic Theology, ironically) and failed the rest because of skipping too many classes. I often blamed the environment I was in for failing to motivate me to learn at this institution, and numerous other things… except for myself. This was wrong, and I take partial blame for the angry attitude I had toward North Central. I’m over it.
I am not, however, over what my experience at North Central taught me, and the path it set me on. Put quite frankly, I needed to leave God in order to find Him. Now, it could be argued whether or not I actually “left” God, or if He left me, or whatever. What I did do, though, was leave the Christian context, and I have no regrets for doing so.
After North Central, I entered the workforce. I went into working in coffee shops, and living with dudes in various apartments in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We worked our jobs, didn’t go to church, constantly made fun of our Christian upbringing, spent many a night grilling out and drinking too much, and generally had the time of our lives. We took crazy road trips to the South, and to Canada, and in one specific instance, a trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba. We spent 4 days, you guessed it, drinking with Canadians and crashing on couches and standing out in the November cold in our boxers watching the Northern Lights. We learned about what makes a Canadian a Canadian, and I noticed three specific characteristics about these Canadians that were a bit different than most of the Americans that I knew. For one, they were very concerned with the world around them and their effect on it, not just locally, but globally. They were very up on their local and national government, yes, but also on the American government, and global situations. You just got the feeling that they didn’t see themselves as the center of the world. Next, I noticed that they had a very simple way of life. They weren’t concerned with getting ahead or the accumulation of wealth, the big houses, and the fast cars (the person we stayed with didn’t even own a car- she rode the bus! Gasp!) They wanted to go to college for the sake of learning and bettering themselves, and they wanted to work their jobs and pay their rent and spend lots of time being with friends and watching hockey and drinking beer and just enjoying life. The third and most pronounced difference I noticed between Americans and Canadians was the general lightness with which they dealt with the future. They weren’t obsessively worried about what was coming next. This intrigued me because I had come to a point where I had realized you know, this life is all about the anticipation of the next thing. I bounced this off of my Canadian friend, a Buddhist. Here’s an excerpt from the email that I sent to her back in January of 2004:
"…why is it that life revolves around anticipation? Is it a human need for there to always be something next? I know you said that for "some people" there is, but could it be that everyone is like that? I mean... everything about our existence is anticipation... we go to school early in our lives in anticipation of acquiring knowledge... we anticipate going to college after school and acquiring a degree we anticipate will get us a job that we anticipate will make us money. We anticipate meeting someone who we anticipate we will spend our lives with until we come upon the death that we anticipate... Christmas is a multi-billion dollar orgasm of anticipation... heck, even orgasms are built on anticipation! We sleep in anticipation of acquiring more energy for the day that we anticipate will come tomorrow. Religion is completely based around the anticipation of rewards to our eternal soul, in anticipation of the death of our physical selves... think of everything else about life... what would life be without anticipation? As you are experiencing, it's boring and meaningless. When you're not anticipating something, what is there to live for? You can actively live out everything you've been anticipating that you've achieved... but there will still be that want within ourselves, that need for there to be something next, something to work for... not even to be rewarded, but just to work for it and... anticipate. Life IS the anticipation, the journey... the means to an end we anticipate will be the end, but will not in actuality be the end of anticipation, for anticipation is what drives us and keeps us alive, makes us human. It's not about the destination, it's the journey... and that's about all I've figured out so far. Anticipation is a human need... of what, if anything, I'm not sure... maybe we'll never know... but maybe it doesn't matter anyway... it's the anticipation that we thrive on.
And her response:
“…what I have come to decide is that not only is anticipation a human need, it is that which will destroy all chance of eternal happiness- but is also that that gives us the greatest happiness. Human nature is to succeed and excel and learn and grow and become more. I read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and he speaks of this affliction. The book refers to these type of people, i.e. you and me and ninety percent of the world, as “ego travelers” and the quote reads "He's here but he's not here. All that he sees, all that he wants is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it’s all around him. He longs to be further up the trail but when he gets there he is unhappy............why? Because again, he is here." I believe the key is to strive to achieve and have that anticipation but still always immerse yourself in the beauty that surrounds. The destination does not always have to be the end result, perhaps the journey is the destination for the destination always seems to disappoint.”
In a strange sort of way, I heard the God that I knew, but had felt very distant from, coming from this Buddhist. This went against what I had been taught, that God speaks only through Christians, and only in King James English. Haha, okay, that last part is not true, but you see what I’m saying. You’re taught that even though something may ring so true inside you, if it doesn’t come from a specific type of person or stream of thought, then it can’t be true. It was through this that I began to realize that God does not limit Himself to Christianity, because Christianity is a man-made religion, and God is alive and active regardless of what label we slap on it, or how we think He is. I think my biggest dilemma at the time was that I just could not follow a God who was solely concerned with the ultimate destination of our eternal souls, and as a consequence would throw into the fire everything else. I like this world. I think it’s an awesome place, full of all kinds of natural wonders and possibilities and cool people and cool things. I also know that this world does not live up to how it was meant to be, and that there are some horrific things that occur by the human hand every day and in every place. Does this make the world bad? I don’t think so. But does it need help, and to be saved from the evil things that we are all prone to? Yes, and I think that God loves this place, too, so much so that He sent Jesus into it to provide that help and exemplify that way in which we can help alleviate those evil things. However, humans are not God, and as we have this ability to make decisions by ourselves- free will- we will make wrong decisions, bad decisions, evil decisions, every last one of us. Should this stop us from having hope for better things? Quite the opposite- this should give us the hope- the anticipation- that as imperfect as we are, God is still able to use who we are to bring good into this world. This idea that we are just anticipating the next thing after this life, that it’s all about what’s next, and to hell with everything else, makes us irrelevant and useless, because God placed in us a desire to work for the betterment of ourselves and those around us . I think we have lost sight of what is at hand, and possibly most important, and that is that God IS here and now, inviting us to actively work with Him to improve our condition IN the here and now. When we immerse ourselves in the beauty that surrounds us, we realize that God is here and available to us, wherever and whomever we are. God put in us a sense of anticipation of good things, and this anticipation is meant to drive us while we are alive and in the world, a sense of hope that God can use people to bring about good things in this world, that even when we can’t see clearly what’s happening, and despite the fact that we will screw things up on occasion, we can anticipate that what God is doing is and will be good.
This realization that God likes this world like I do- and definitely much more so- is what kept me from completely walking away from Him. It was wonderful to know that God wasn’t so concerned with the things that North Central, and the churches I had previously been involved with, held as their highest priorities.
But I think the biggest thing that I learned was that God is alive and active outside of the boundaries of Christianity. We were all taught that we had to convert people to a certain way of living FIRST, get them to subscribe to these certain “truths”, and THEN God could start being active in a person’s life. But I would say just from the time that I stepped outside the safety and structure and promises of the church, I saw God alive and well (maybe even more so than I saw IN the church!) in this world that Christians so love to hate, in people who Christians wouldn’t touch with a ten-and-a-half foot pole, and in places where Christians wouldn’t be caught dead going.
The religion of Christianity has hijacked God, and is holding Him hostage and saying to the world, “Say the right words, and do the right things, and you can have Him.” And this defensive attitude is backfiring, because most people are saying, “That’s great. You can keep him” and moving on with their lives, because Christianity is not the sole perpetrator of God’s work; indeed, God alone is the perpetrator of God’s work.
Religion, including that which we call “Christianity”, is really in the end a man-made, fully inadequate structure that tries to quantify and, all too often, DEFINE God to meet our own expectations and purposes. And when God becomes defined, He ceases to be God, and he becomes a god. And as our gods begin to fall apart, we defend them, and as we defend our gods, we lose what it is we were trying to define in the first place.
As history shows, when we offer what we think is a final definition of God, our ideas are quickly shown the door, so that something new can emerge…
12.29.2007
Part II: What Is This?
Ideas, though often ill-advised, are generally a good thing. Sometimes there are bad ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What were you thinking?!" And sometimes there are those great ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What was I thinking?!" The exchange of ideas is one of the most important parts of who we are as human beings. We're hard-wired to approach a situation and begin thinking of things- problems, solutions, methods, or even something completely unrelated to the topic in front of your nose- you know, ideas! Cute little bubbles above your head, light bulbs, question marks, etc. What makes us human is thought, and the essence of thought is ideas.
Humans have figured out that if they can control thought, they can control other humans. They, often unconsciously, establish certain thought patterns. Usually these patterns have a very specific goal in mind and because of that they become rigid and immovable, and any ideas introduced into the fray become enemies that must be silenced, because this whole thing is already thought out to its end. This is where we enter into the realm of the "ideology". Ideologies have the tendency to shut down thought, to discourage ideas and to bring into line anything that is separate from the established thought process. It would seem to me that this act would cheapen the decisions made from this process… it would make everything simple, and it would get results, but it would cheapen everything. This is the epitome of industrial age thought, and the cheapening of things is a necessary and acceptable byproduct. But when it comes to people, I don't think anyone is interested in a cheap and simplified way of treating each other, especially when it comes to faith tradition.
There was a time during my senior year of high school that myself and some other people, mainly from the Pentecostal youth group I was involved in, decided it would be a good idea to start a Tuesday morning Bible study at school with some students from other churches. We asked permission from the principal to have a designated room, and asked one of the math teachers (who also served on the adult leadership team at youth group) to be our faculty representative. So we'd meet, and the idea was to have a topic of discussion pulled from a passage in the Bible and toss around ideas amongst ourselves, hashing out what it meant. We'd invite our friends, and I think at one point we may have put up fliers on the walls around the school or something to "advertise" our little weekly early-morning shindig. I think we mainly existed to make a statement to the folks around us, something to the effect of, yes, you go to school with Christians and yes, we're here and active and yes, we can pray and read our Bibles in this public place because yes, it's our right. We were alive and we were organized, so watch out! God's really gonna get ya now! While I liked the idea of having a group of us meet and talk about God stuff, I think I wanted it to be more about the conversation and the exchange of ideas than about the delivery of some kind of message, or keeping up some kind of appearance. However, I think that's all that most of us knew. Each week, we'd take turns leading the discussion, which was less a discussion and more like delivering a "message", a compilation of passages that we felt strongly about, to those who gathered with us- usually about 8 or 10- and no one would really have anything else to say about it and so off we'd march through the door of our meeting place, knowing that people knew where we met and who we were, and that they were probably watching us and might even ask us what we were doing in there and so we should be ready to speak confidently of our convictions. We'd then walk into our first period class and lose whatever we'd just talked about.
I think where it went wrong was in missing the conversation part. Somewhere in our subconscious effort to make a statement, we lost what we (or at least what I thought we) were going for- a group of people on a similar path exchanging stories along the way. Instead, we became some kind of support group for preaching at each other to keep each other "in line". And I think it happens all the time. We have this disproportionate focus on our message delivery- how we're presenting what we're saying, how we look while doing it, etc. And when it comes to learning about God, we are trained to sit and listen to the message. We don't know how to converse with one another anymore, because we emulate that which we are accustomed to- a monologue designed to convince someone of something. It becomes a sales pitch. There's no room for disagreement, and by the very nature of a message-delivery-focus, there is a specific need to have a unified front, with not even a hint of disagreement, because well, what does that say about the God that we serve? The message delivery becomes the most important part, and don't even bother questioning what the message is in the first place. And so it is no wonder that none of us really knew what to do with a "Bible study", and those who had the most sharply-honed message eventually began to assert their authority. Pretty soon, one person began assigning verses for each person to look up and read to the group, ensuring that everyone had something to say, but what was said was set up to be a unified voice, the voice of the message-bearer. Conversation was limited to a few comments on how to apply said message to one's life; no one even thought about stirring the pot a little bit.
My goose was cooked.
Not only did I not feel comfortable in this sort of environment, I probably spent too much time and goodwill trying to explain how this approach was even less effective than what we had been doing before. But there was to be no change; we must be unified, I was told. God hates division in His church. I was not the lone voice of discontent; there were a few others who felt very cramped by this approach as well. We began to talk about meeting on our own; this talk was swiftly met with vehement scolding from other students in the group, as well as adult leaders from the youth group. So instead of stirring the pot, I simply removed my spoon, as did a handful of others. I think the thing eventually dried up and died after awhile.
Around this same time, I was in a Social Problems class with a few of the same people who were in the Bible study and youth group with me. Our big semester project was to, with a partner, choose a social issue, invite a person from the community on each end of the spectrum to give a presentation of their side of the topic, and then present our own point of view. This was worth half of our grade- the other half was based on attendance and our performance in a stock market game, and though I had no actual stock in Enron, I can say that I incurred a personal loss when the company crashed, as my partner and I invested heavily in their stock, causing us to earn an "F" on that portion of our grade. But I digress. So after a demonstration at our school by a "God Hates Fags" church group with fiery signs and screaming people protesting the genesis of a Gay-Straight Alliance at our school, a group in the class chose the issue of homosexuality as their topic. The first presentation was from some lady from a local GLBT support organization, and was very interesting, to say the least. The next presentation was from the minister of a local ultra-conservative Baptist church. After giving his spiel about homosexuality being a perversion, God's impending wrath, and God desire to "save" people from homosexual sin, an angry discussion broke out amongst two of the Christian people in my class and a few others. Feeling it was not my God-given duty to make people feel bad about how they felt about gays and lesbians, I sat on the sidelines until one of the people from my youth group said "C'mon, Ian? I need some support here. Tell them you believe this stuff, too."
And I couldn't.
I didn't believe it was my place to argue against a lifestyle that, for all I knew, might not be completely in someone's control. I mean, yeah, gay pride parades and naked dudes and rainbows and stuff weren't my thing, but if my first reaction is to be grossed out, or even to hate them, shouldn't I step back and check why I feel that way in the first place, and that maybe I should be feeling how God feels about them? And as far as what the Bible tells me, I think God might actually love fags. And if God hates fags, why does He love me? Am I that different from a homosexual dude that God views him differently than He views me? I'll bet he and I and the next guy have the same problems, and might even love God just as much. I think far too much time is spent divining between sins. I also don't think Jesus was killed for being exclusive of certain people groups- it was because His message was so incredibly IN-clusive that the establishment killed him. And I think He'd probably stand out in front of the "God Hates Fags" people and challenge them to cast the first stone. Call me weak, but I just can't do it. And I heard an earful for it. "If you can't stand up for your sister in Christ, can you even stand for CHRIST?" "I'm supposed to stand for Christ, not against people." "Well, Christ stands for people!" "And fags aren't people?" "I can't believe you!" I guess I can't, either, but I think if Christ actually was with us today in the flesh, after he got done shaming the "God Hates Fags" people, he might want to have a few words with all of us because not any of us is without fault; no, not even one.
I just don't want to be, and I don't think a Christian should be, known best for what they are against. And the majority of the time, that's where we're at.
After these episodes, I began to feel as though there was a deeper thing going on than God and gays. I'd see it in youth group worship band practice when someone would introduce a new song or a new way to try a song. Or when someone would challenge the usefulness of those little fill-in-the-blank sermon follow-along sheets. Or when I asked about our attendance at the youth conferences we'd been involved with for the past few years, only to find out that a decision had been made by someone disconnected from all of us to uproot us from that sphere of influence. "God is moving. God is good." I don't know how many times I heard those sorts of words in connection with various odd and shadowed decisions by the "spiritual elders" that I was supposed to honor and have respect for.
"God is moving in a different direction."
Here's a thought: God is constant. It's us who move in different directions. Why is it that we have this need to invoke God when making decisions? I absolutely agree that it's important to discover what He's doing, but what He's doing doesn't involve every decision we make. Rather, it should be flipped: every decision we make should involve what He's doing. What He's doing is good, and you can join in the good things He's doing in any way you are able. Slapping the God label on things which are ultimately human decisions is just plain wrong at best, and evil at worst. I wonder, too, if that is actually a closer application for the Biblical mandate to "not use the Lord's name in vain."
Eventually, things came crashing down at the youth group. Initially, we were given permission to take a group to this youth conference, and we made plans accordingly. Then as it came down to crunch time, we were told that if we went on this trip, we'd be kicked out of the youth group. Long story short, we resigned our various positions in leadership and left. The 6 or 8 of us who left eventually began conducting our own Bible study. We were accused of being divisionists, of hurting the youth group (the numbers began to dwindle even further after we had left), and I was accused by name of being a hand of the devil, "leading people astray".
This is the first time I realized clearly what I was seeing. Because I knew I wasn't "the hand of the devil", because I knew I was following God, I began to see that what I WASN'T following was the man-made system that was the church. Now, before I get all bleary-eyed about my patriotism for this or that, let me make something very clear- there was some pride involved. Of course there was. I felt that I was very right for doing some of these things, and while feeling you're right about something is a good reason to do something, it should never be the ONLY reason. As an eighteen-year-old, that wasn't always the case. But what I will say is that I began to notice that this whole thing called Christianity had a very deeply-seated streak of self-preservation in its system, that it was often less about God and more about just keeping this thing going, and keeping it going on a very ideologically set path.
It's a really funny human tendency, how we can take something that at first is so good, so genuine and turn it into something so synthesized, so robotic that it takes all the life out of it. Nowhere has this been so evident than in Christianity. We've become afraid of talking about what it is we're actually supposed to be about, and we're afraid of new ideas, because we're so worried that our "good and pure" religion is being defiled, so we take control of it and entwine God with all of our theologies, traditions, morals and leadership structures, and then we wonder, "Why is all this bad stuff happening in this world? Where did all the good go? Why don't people care about God anymore?"
I'll wager you that people care much more about God than we give them credit for.
It's our god that people don't care about.
Humans have figured out that if they can control thought, they can control other humans. They, often unconsciously, establish certain thought patterns. Usually these patterns have a very specific goal in mind and because of that they become rigid and immovable, and any ideas introduced into the fray become enemies that must be silenced, because this whole thing is already thought out to its end. This is where we enter into the realm of the "ideology". Ideologies have the tendency to shut down thought, to discourage ideas and to bring into line anything that is separate from the established thought process. It would seem to me that this act would cheapen the decisions made from this process… it would make everything simple, and it would get results, but it would cheapen everything. This is the epitome of industrial age thought, and the cheapening of things is a necessary and acceptable byproduct. But when it comes to people, I don't think anyone is interested in a cheap and simplified way of treating each other, especially when it comes to faith tradition.
There was a time during my senior year of high school that myself and some other people, mainly from the Pentecostal youth group I was involved in, decided it would be a good idea to start a Tuesday morning Bible study at school with some students from other churches. We asked permission from the principal to have a designated room, and asked one of the math teachers (who also served on the adult leadership team at youth group) to be our faculty representative. So we'd meet, and the idea was to have a topic of discussion pulled from a passage in the Bible and toss around ideas amongst ourselves, hashing out what it meant. We'd invite our friends, and I think at one point we may have put up fliers on the walls around the school or something to "advertise" our little weekly early-morning shindig. I think we mainly existed to make a statement to the folks around us, something to the effect of, yes, you go to school with Christians and yes, we're here and active and yes, we can pray and read our Bibles in this public place because yes, it's our right. We were alive and we were organized, so watch out! God's really gonna get ya now! While I liked the idea of having a group of us meet and talk about God stuff, I think I wanted it to be more about the conversation and the exchange of ideas than about the delivery of some kind of message, or keeping up some kind of appearance. However, I think that's all that most of us knew. Each week, we'd take turns leading the discussion, which was less a discussion and more like delivering a "message", a compilation of passages that we felt strongly about, to those who gathered with us- usually about 8 or 10- and no one would really have anything else to say about it and so off we'd march through the door of our meeting place, knowing that people knew where we met and who we were, and that they were probably watching us and might even ask us what we were doing in there and so we should be ready to speak confidently of our convictions. We'd then walk into our first period class and lose whatever we'd just talked about.
I think where it went wrong was in missing the conversation part. Somewhere in our subconscious effort to make a statement, we lost what we (or at least what I thought we) were going for- a group of people on a similar path exchanging stories along the way. Instead, we became some kind of support group for preaching at each other to keep each other "in line". And I think it happens all the time. We have this disproportionate focus on our message delivery- how we're presenting what we're saying, how we look while doing it, etc. And when it comes to learning about God, we are trained to sit and listen to the message. We don't know how to converse with one another anymore, because we emulate that which we are accustomed to- a monologue designed to convince someone of something. It becomes a sales pitch. There's no room for disagreement, and by the very nature of a message-delivery-focus, there is a specific need to have a unified front, with not even a hint of disagreement, because well, what does that say about the God that we serve? The message delivery becomes the most important part, and don't even bother questioning what the message is in the first place. And so it is no wonder that none of us really knew what to do with a "Bible study", and those who had the most sharply-honed message eventually began to assert their authority. Pretty soon, one person began assigning verses for each person to look up and read to the group, ensuring that everyone had something to say, but what was said was set up to be a unified voice, the voice of the message-bearer. Conversation was limited to a few comments on how to apply said message to one's life; no one even thought about stirring the pot a little bit.
My goose was cooked.
Not only did I not feel comfortable in this sort of environment, I probably spent too much time and goodwill trying to explain how this approach was even less effective than what we had been doing before. But there was to be no change; we must be unified, I was told. God hates division in His church. I was not the lone voice of discontent; there were a few others who felt very cramped by this approach as well. We began to talk about meeting on our own; this talk was swiftly met with vehement scolding from other students in the group, as well as adult leaders from the youth group. So instead of stirring the pot, I simply removed my spoon, as did a handful of others. I think the thing eventually dried up and died after awhile.
Around this same time, I was in a Social Problems class with a few of the same people who were in the Bible study and youth group with me. Our big semester project was to, with a partner, choose a social issue, invite a person from the community on each end of the spectrum to give a presentation of their side of the topic, and then present our own point of view. This was worth half of our grade- the other half was based on attendance and our performance in a stock market game, and though I had no actual stock in Enron, I can say that I incurred a personal loss when the company crashed, as my partner and I invested heavily in their stock, causing us to earn an "F" on that portion of our grade. But I digress. So after a demonstration at our school by a "God Hates Fags" church group with fiery signs and screaming people protesting the genesis of a Gay-Straight Alliance at our school, a group in the class chose the issue of homosexuality as their topic. The first presentation was from some lady from a local GLBT support organization, and was very interesting, to say the least. The next presentation was from the minister of a local ultra-conservative Baptist church. After giving his spiel about homosexuality being a perversion, God's impending wrath, and God desire to "save" people from homosexual sin, an angry discussion broke out amongst two of the Christian people in my class and a few others. Feeling it was not my God-given duty to make people feel bad about how they felt about gays and lesbians, I sat on the sidelines until one of the people from my youth group said "C'mon, Ian? I need some support here. Tell them you believe this stuff, too."
And I couldn't.
I didn't believe it was my place to argue against a lifestyle that, for all I knew, might not be completely in someone's control. I mean, yeah, gay pride parades and naked dudes and rainbows and stuff weren't my thing, but if my first reaction is to be grossed out, or even to hate them, shouldn't I step back and check why I feel that way in the first place, and that maybe I should be feeling how God feels about them? And as far as what the Bible tells me, I think God might actually love fags. And if God hates fags, why does He love me? Am I that different from a homosexual dude that God views him differently than He views me? I'll bet he and I and the next guy have the same problems, and might even love God just as much. I think far too much time is spent divining between sins. I also don't think Jesus was killed for being exclusive of certain people groups- it was because His message was so incredibly IN-clusive that the establishment killed him. And I think He'd probably stand out in front of the "God Hates Fags" people and challenge them to cast the first stone. Call me weak, but I just can't do it. And I heard an earful for it. "If you can't stand up for your sister in Christ, can you even stand for CHRIST?" "I'm supposed to stand for Christ, not against people." "Well, Christ stands for people!" "And fags aren't people?" "I can't believe you!" I guess I can't, either, but I think if Christ actually was with us today in the flesh, after he got done shaming the "God Hates Fags" people, he might want to have a few words with all of us because not any of us is without fault; no, not even one.
I just don't want to be, and I don't think a Christian should be, known best for what they are against. And the majority of the time, that's where we're at.
After these episodes, I began to feel as though there was a deeper thing going on than God and gays. I'd see it in youth group worship band practice when someone would introduce a new song or a new way to try a song. Or when someone would challenge the usefulness of those little fill-in-the-blank sermon follow-along sheets. Or when I asked about our attendance at the youth conferences we'd been involved with for the past few years, only to find out that a decision had been made by someone disconnected from all of us to uproot us from that sphere of influence. "God is moving. God is good." I don't know how many times I heard those sorts of words in connection with various odd and shadowed decisions by the "spiritual elders" that I was supposed to honor and have respect for.
"God is moving in a different direction."
Here's a thought: God is constant. It's us who move in different directions. Why is it that we have this need to invoke God when making decisions? I absolutely agree that it's important to discover what He's doing, but what He's doing doesn't involve every decision we make. Rather, it should be flipped: every decision we make should involve what He's doing. What He's doing is good, and you can join in the good things He's doing in any way you are able. Slapping the God label on things which are ultimately human decisions is just plain wrong at best, and evil at worst. I wonder, too, if that is actually a closer application for the Biblical mandate to "not use the Lord's name in vain."
Eventually, things came crashing down at the youth group. Initially, we were given permission to take a group to this youth conference, and we made plans accordingly. Then as it came down to crunch time, we were told that if we went on this trip, we'd be kicked out of the youth group. Long story short, we resigned our various positions in leadership and left. The 6 or 8 of us who left eventually began conducting our own Bible study. We were accused of being divisionists, of hurting the youth group (the numbers began to dwindle even further after we had left), and I was accused by name of being a hand of the devil, "leading people astray".
This is the first time I realized clearly what I was seeing. Because I knew I wasn't "the hand of the devil", because I knew I was following God, I began to see that what I WASN'T following was the man-made system that was the church. Now, before I get all bleary-eyed about my patriotism for this or that, let me make something very clear- there was some pride involved. Of course there was. I felt that I was very right for doing some of these things, and while feeling you're right about something is a good reason to do something, it should never be the ONLY reason. As an eighteen-year-old, that wasn't always the case. But what I will say is that I began to notice that this whole thing called Christianity had a very deeply-seated streak of self-preservation in its system, that it was often less about God and more about just keeping this thing going, and keeping it going on a very ideologically set path.
It's a really funny human tendency, how we can take something that at first is so good, so genuine and turn it into something so synthesized, so robotic that it takes all the life out of it. Nowhere has this been so evident than in Christianity. We've become afraid of talking about what it is we're actually supposed to be about, and we're afraid of new ideas, because we're so worried that our "good and pure" religion is being defiled, so we take control of it and entwine God with all of our theologies, traditions, morals and leadership structures, and then we wonder, "Why is all this bad stuff happening in this world? Where did all the good go? Why don't people care about God anymore?"
I'll wager you that people care much more about God than we give them credit for.
It's our god that people don't care about.
12.26.2007
Part I: What's Happened?
Certainly, our world is not the same as it was a quarter century ago, when I came into this world. Twenty-five years ago, we were marveling at the power of persuasion held by the family television. Already proven in its ability to give us an "insider's look" at the world- as it had just recently done so by bringing the harrowing images of the Vietnam War into our living rooms- we were learning of its profound ability to shape our public discourse into a superficial made-for-TV scheme of shallow one-liners and endless photo opportunities that only the wealthy could afford. Books like Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" would document this shift in-depth. Fast-forward ten years, and we're marveling over the Internet and its ability to connect billions of people worldwide and allow us to write to our relatives, manage our own finances like never before, and buy our Christmas presents in our underwear from the comfort of home. A few years later, we were learning of the vast cache of knowledge available to us by way of the internet (no longer spelled with a capital "I", such was its wide acceptance into our culture), its ability to endlessly entertain with the success of such "for fun" websites as homestarrunner.com and ebaumsworld.com, and its ability to connect and begin relationships with people we didn't even know were out there through the use of instant messaging, as well as websites such as lavalife.com, match.com and later, eharmony.com. And just in the past five years, we've seen the rise of MySpace and Facebook, where we can all post our silly party pictures and keep tabs on our friends by watching their every move on their "profile", a webpage which is in essence the "face" of a person on the internet. We've also seen the rise of the blog, in which anyone, anywhere, can talk about anything from dirty political rumors to the hot dish they cooked last night. We are able to find what amounts to a college education's worth of information through entities such as Wikipedia, which also allows us to contribute our own two cents on a topic, creating an ever-changing encyclopedic one-stop-shop for the knowledge of mankind, and also an incredibly easy way to blow an entire afternoon online. We can even get an ACTUAL college education as numerous public and private schools now offer online classes and degrees.
We're discovering how dependant we are upon this connection with each other, and discovering the value of everyone's collective ideas available for all to see. We no longer take a "talking head" at his word, but go delving for the information ourselves and come to our own conclusion. Through this conditioning of discovering the truth for ourselves, we have learned that "truth" is much more subjective than we had once realized, and that more often than not, the truth is found hanging in the balance between many perceived "truths". We have become skeptical of anyone claiming to "know the truth" about this or that, as we now have the ability within our fingertips to verify and often dispute that claim. We've also learned the value that our own personal experience provides us, and sharing our experience with others' experiences shapes a much more personal and compelling "truth" than any one claim to the same effect. Summarily, truth is no longer found in any centralized body or structure, whether political, commercial or religious. It is on the topic of religion that I would like to speak to, and I'll use a timeline of my own life experience to illustrate.
I come from a mainly Baptist background, having a grandfather and an uncle ordained into the American Baptist denomination. I spent the first 10 years of my life in fairly traditional hymn-and-sermon Baptist churches. From my young memory, I remember these churches being places of kind-hearted and charitable people, accentuated by weekly potluck dinners and the implied importance of community, friendship and giving. After an out-of-state move, my family made the switch to a local Pentecostal congregation. These incredibly outgoing people were very focused upon seeing the glory of God physically manifested in every moment of everyday life, fighting militantly against the forces of darkness that threatened to overcome the world soul-by-soul, and a very specific teaching of submission to authority; generally speaking, your "spiritual elders"; more specifically, the pastor of your congregation. It was here that I would receive the bulk of my religious conditioning. After spending five years here, my family moved on to plant a church in a nearby town. This church was affiliated with the Baptist General Conference, a fairly conservative denomination, and was to be built on the Willow Creek/Saddleback model of "seeker-sensitive" churches, basically an approach designed for those who had "given up on church, but not on God", as the church literature would say. Here, I was exposed to many new and different ways of "doing church", from high-gloss Powerpoint presentations and tightly-produced worship bands to entire sermon series built on Hollywood movie themes. The entire flow of a Sunday service, and everything else about the way the church handled its business, was carefully choreographed, timed, and- quite often- scripted. The "growth story" of this church, an important part of a church's credibility, is now considered classic: we went from a living room to an elementary school, from an abandoned post office to an old car dealership and finally produced a large-scale fundraising drive to build our own church building. My father served on the elder board, and was also a lay advisor to the Great Lakes Baptist Conference, the regional governing body. My mom was nursery coordinator. My brother drummed for the worship band. I myself was involved in the youth leadership at this church. Simultaneously, I was involved in a youth group at an Evangelical Free denominational church, as well as continuing to serve as a student-leader and worship leader in the Pentecostal youth group at the church my family had left, also serving with them as an assistant camp counselor for two years. I was also occasionally involved in the local Young Life non-denominational organization.
Having such a relatively diverse church background and being immersed in leadership-this and ministry-that developed in me a strong sense that this was just what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and so in high school, I applied for admittance into the strongest ministry-oriented college that I knew of (and because they'd been sending me sweet-looking flyers since I was in 7th grade!): North Central University in Minneapolis. I was excited to gain admittance, and had it all planned out: I was going to start school, meet a girl first or second semester, marry her by junior year, graduate in 4 years and become a successful youth pastor, winning scores of souls for Christ and maybe writing a book or two about it. It'd be great.
I had written, in my admissions essay, of a desire to bring about a "revival"- an oft-used term in Pentecostal circles which typically means a large-scale change or deep shift brought about by the faithful in accordance with God's will. "Revival" usually looked like a whole bunch of people writhing in the aisles or dancing around at the front of the church yelling at God in strange languages. The pressure to "come on down and receive what the Lord had for you" was great; if you didn't get out of your seat or you weren't in the room for whatever reason, you risked "missing out"- the implications of which were never really clear, but you knew it might mean that something in your soul was in jeopardy, so you just didn't even go there. I mostly rolled with it, but I also felt like there was something more to be had, something much more practical, something much less weird, and that's what I wanted to see happen. It seemed to me that the "revival" I read about in the Bible was often at odds with the established order of things, and this revival I kept seeing was like a broken old 33 vinyl record playing on the 45 setting- the same old thing, but much more frenetic, and ultimately annoying. I knew this wasn't "it".
Before I'd leave for North Central, I'd begin to develop some ideas about what this whole thing looked like, or at least, what it SHOULDN'T look like…
We're discovering how dependant we are upon this connection with each other, and discovering the value of everyone's collective ideas available for all to see. We no longer take a "talking head" at his word, but go delving for the information ourselves and come to our own conclusion. Through this conditioning of discovering the truth for ourselves, we have learned that "truth" is much more subjective than we had once realized, and that more often than not, the truth is found hanging in the balance between many perceived "truths". We have become skeptical of anyone claiming to "know the truth" about this or that, as we now have the ability within our fingertips to verify and often dispute that claim. We've also learned the value that our own personal experience provides us, and sharing our experience with others' experiences shapes a much more personal and compelling "truth" than any one claim to the same effect. Summarily, truth is no longer found in any centralized body or structure, whether political, commercial or religious. It is on the topic of religion that I would like to speak to, and I'll use a timeline of my own life experience to illustrate.
I come from a mainly Baptist background, having a grandfather and an uncle ordained into the American Baptist denomination. I spent the first 10 years of my life in fairly traditional hymn-and-sermon Baptist churches. From my young memory, I remember these churches being places of kind-hearted and charitable people, accentuated by weekly potluck dinners and the implied importance of community, friendship and giving. After an out-of-state move, my family made the switch to a local Pentecostal congregation. These incredibly outgoing people were very focused upon seeing the glory of God physically manifested in every moment of everyday life, fighting militantly against the forces of darkness that threatened to overcome the world soul-by-soul, and a very specific teaching of submission to authority; generally speaking, your "spiritual elders"; more specifically, the pastor of your congregation. It was here that I would receive the bulk of my religious conditioning. After spending five years here, my family moved on to plant a church in a nearby town. This church was affiliated with the Baptist General Conference, a fairly conservative denomination, and was to be built on the Willow Creek/Saddleback model of "seeker-sensitive" churches, basically an approach designed for those who had "given up on church, but not on God", as the church literature would say. Here, I was exposed to many new and different ways of "doing church", from high-gloss Powerpoint presentations and tightly-produced worship bands to entire sermon series built on Hollywood movie themes. The entire flow of a Sunday service, and everything else about the way the church handled its business, was carefully choreographed, timed, and- quite often- scripted. The "growth story" of this church, an important part of a church's credibility, is now considered classic: we went from a living room to an elementary school, from an abandoned post office to an old car dealership and finally produced a large-scale fundraising drive to build our own church building. My father served on the elder board, and was also a lay advisor to the Great Lakes Baptist Conference, the regional governing body. My mom was nursery coordinator. My brother drummed for the worship band. I myself was involved in the youth leadership at this church. Simultaneously, I was involved in a youth group at an Evangelical Free denominational church, as well as continuing to serve as a student-leader and worship leader in the Pentecostal youth group at the church my family had left, also serving with them as an assistant camp counselor for two years. I was also occasionally involved in the local Young Life non-denominational organization.
Having such a relatively diverse church background and being immersed in leadership-this and ministry-that developed in me a strong sense that this was just what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and so in high school, I applied for admittance into the strongest ministry-oriented college that I knew of (and because they'd been sending me sweet-looking flyers since I was in 7th grade!): North Central University in Minneapolis. I was excited to gain admittance, and had it all planned out: I was going to start school, meet a girl first or second semester, marry her by junior year, graduate in 4 years and become a successful youth pastor, winning scores of souls for Christ and maybe writing a book or two about it. It'd be great.
I had written, in my admissions essay, of a desire to bring about a "revival"- an oft-used term in Pentecostal circles which typically means a large-scale change or deep shift brought about by the faithful in accordance with God's will. "Revival" usually looked like a whole bunch of people writhing in the aisles or dancing around at the front of the church yelling at God in strange languages. The pressure to "come on down and receive what the Lord had for you" was great; if you didn't get out of your seat or you weren't in the room for whatever reason, you risked "missing out"- the implications of which were never really clear, but you knew it might mean that something in your soul was in jeopardy, so you just didn't even go there. I mostly rolled with it, but I also felt like there was something more to be had, something much more practical, something much less weird, and that's what I wanted to see happen. It seemed to me that the "revival" I read about in the Bible was often at odds with the established order of things, and this revival I kept seeing was like a broken old 33 vinyl record playing on the 45 setting- the same old thing, but much more frenetic, and ultimately annoying. I knew this wasn't "it".
Before I'd leave for North Central, I'd begin to develop some ideas about what this whole thing looked like, or at least, what it SHOULDN'T look like…
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