Let's Talk Jobs...

Once upon a time, I graduated from college.  It was the fulfillment of 18.5 years of work.  I had been going to school since I was four and I was now almost 23.  Pretty much everyone I knew during that time said that college was the thing to do.  My own experience with various non-college type jobs seemed to back up that plan.  There were just two problems:
1. I had about the same idea of what I was really meant to do in life as I did in 8th grade; I still wanted to be MacGyver, but the Phoenix Foundation apparently wasn't taking applications.
2. Apparently a lot of more mundane and realistic companies weren't taking applications either.

So there I was, complete with a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State, and absolutely no idea what to do with myself.  It's a rather common situation in the world today, but it's just plain depressing.  It's depressing, because it seems like everything your parents, teachers, guidance counselors, advisers and various other grown up type people have been telling you for 20 years was pretty much just a big lie.  Personally, I didn't think they were being malicious, they just didn't realize that the world had changed since they went through this nonsense.  Now, I'm not a big "look on the bright side" kind of person, I tend to see the world through gray colored glasses, so the fact that I spent almost a calendar year stocking shelves and selling office furniture at Staples, really came as no surprise to me.  It was just disappointing, and the whole time I felt like it was somehow beneath me, and I did my best "working for the man" routine: working enough so that the manager would leave me alone and trying to impress the girls with the fact that I could now lift a case of paper above my head with just the fingertips of one hand.
All the while, I was job searching, which is absolutely one of the least pleasant processes that has ever been invented by humankind.  You send out resume after resume, you look for openings, you grasp at straws and most of the time, nothing happens.  You just know that all these carefully crafted, nicely printed, lists of who you are and what you might be able to do are ending up in a file or a trash bin, and that is depressing.  It's depressing because you're not even worth a phone call or what my Dad calls a "we-hate-you, you-suck," letter.
Finally, I got a call from an environmental consulting company, I got a job "in my field," I was living the dream, I might actually avoid becoming the Gen-X stereotype of a college grad working in a convenience store and living in my parents basement.  It was then that I found out how observant Oscar Wilde was when he said, "the only thing worse than not getting what you want, is getting it."
As it turns out, the company that finally hired me was a poorly run, abysmally staffed, and borderline unethical company.  Staples, the object of my scorn, yet the source of my paychecks, was well run, invested in their employees and generally steered a good course.  After a year, I had been employee of the month several times, which actually felt kinda good, even if there was a tinge of irony to the whole thing, I had a 401K, been given several performance evaluations, training, raises and a promotion.  Then I left, and entered what can only be described as one of the circles of Hell, albeit probably one of the outer ones where people are kind of lost and wandering around in a daze.
I didn't make more money, I didn't like it better, in fact, it started to make me sick.  About a year and a half into it, I felt like I just needed to get out, so I made the only logical move, I took a promotion and moved down a couple of circles deeper into Hell.  It almost killed me, it almost destroyed my marriage before it ever got started and I will tell you with no exaggeration that if God hadn't grabbed me by my underwear and pulled me out of there with an atomic wedgie, I would probably have not lived to see 30.
But, thankfully, I got fired, or downsized, or whatever you want to call it, I was liberated.  I was set free in the nick of time to go to seminary and start reshaping the course of my life; I was 26 years old, but I felt a lot older than that.
I'm telling you all this, because I want to talk about jobs, I want you to know where I'm coming from, I want you to know that I didn't get here by my own wisdom.  I now have a Master's Degree, I am now the Pastor of a 200+ member church, I now feel that I am doing the work that God intended me to do.  I have a family, I can support that family, I am a homeowner and a taxpayer, at 39 I finally feel like a grown up.
But I know that the only reason I am where I am is because of the grace of God.  I know I am where I am, because, at a moment when all my plans had pretty much come to nothing and wrecked my life, my soul and my health, God gave me a vision of what I was actually supposed to do.  I followed that star and lo and behold: a vocation, a calling.
And I'm not special.  That's the thing, God has the same kind of plan for everyone (not necessarily to become Presbyterian Ministers, there are probably too many of us already).  Vocation is a real thing, but we treat it as if it's just a matter of "figuring out what you want to do," it's finding what you HAVE TO DO.  Sometimes you are going to stumble through a couple things, sometimes you're going to hate them, sometimes you might like them more than you thought.  The advice I have for young folks who are working through this process is to drop your assumptions and really pay attention to what every crappy job you work through has to teach you.
The work you do will ultimately mean more to you than it does to your manager, your boss or the CEO of the company you work for, the sooner you realize that the better you'll do.
The reason why monasteries are such spiritual places is because monks (or nuns) are trained and regularly practice the art of finding God in the most mundane tasks.  In their communities, someone has to peel the potatoes and clean the floors, but those are not impositions or distractions, they are, or rather they become, works of the spirit.
It's really hard to remember that when you're slinging fries or bagging groceries, but it's worth the work.  Good jobs and bad jobs alike, do a lot to shape who you are.  Don't let the good ones make you soft or complacent, don't let the bad ones make you jagged and hard.  Do what you do, whatever it is, to the glory of God, and you'll be surprised how good that is.

Pop Bubblegum

It's Saturday, time for some lighter fare: Miley Cyrus.
Normally, I would absolutely not care about who she was or what she's been doing, but it's getting to the point where you can't just ignore it anymore.  As much as I would love not to know what twerking is or what YOLO means, I know, and I can't unlearn what I have learned.
Apparently Ms. Cyrus is creating a stir because she is acting like what church ladies used to refer to as a "loose woman."  But as far as I can tell, Miley in't really doing anything that Madonna hasn't been doing for 30 freaking years.  Maybe I'm just old, maybe I'm just cynical, but I really don't think that this little girl deserves the attention (or the criticism she's getting).  But I think, unlike what a lot of people think, that she knows exactly what she's doing.
This isn't a Lindsey Lohan or a Drew Barrymore situation, she's not getting arrested and turning up in rehab, she's performing, she's being DELIBERATELY controversial.  If you listen too much to the internet trolls and the trumpets of "moral" outrage, you would think that the whole VMA performance was some horrible accident that no one had any idea about ahead of time, but it was rather obviously choreographed.  She totally meant to do that.  She totally intended for a video of her swinging naked on a wrecking ball to be the stuff of viral video infamy.
Cheap publicity is in her DNA.  Her Dad is the definition of a one hit wonder, and his one hit is one of the single most vile, yet catchy, pieces of pop-country ever made.
But some people seem to be treating this whole personality change as some sort of personal tragedy, like she's going off the rails, like she's a genuinely troubled young woman.  If she is truly troubled, I apologize for what I'm about to say, but I offer the following as an alternative scenario to the all too common fall from grace of a child star.
She is doing this on purpose.
And she knows exactly what she's doing.
She has been playing a pop-star since she was a little girl, she was known, until a couple years ago, as Hannah Montana.  Hannah was the superstar alter-ego, a construction that was meant to shield a simple girl from all the hazards and dangers of astounding fame.  Does anyone not remember that?  She spent years of her life on a show that had, as it's PRIMARY FREAKING PREMISE, that being famous could be difficult, and that you needed to "keep it real" or else be eaten up by the world of stardom.
Hannah Montana was a pretty squeaky clean kids show, but Miley is now a grown up, and probably would like to be considered as a serious artist, rather than a shill for Disney merchandise.  But how do you get there from here?
You "go off the rails."  You stop being the nice little girl and you get a little crazy, you cut off your hair, you bump and grind in your gold underwear, you basically try to shock people.  All the little girls that have grown up with you are going to love it, because they're doing the exact same thing right now, except they're at college and not on TV all the time, but they're your fan base, they're the ones that really matter, they're the ones that are going to "get" your whole heartbroken, naked wrecking ball thing.
You WANT to offend the old people and the internet haters, you can handle that.  Hannah Montana made you freaking rich, you have the resources you need to insulate yourself from the trolls, no worries.  The trick to the whole thing is, you go crazy, and you let everyone know you're not Hannah Montana anymore, and then you get to become a grown up pop star.
Her partner in crime at the VMAs, Robin Thicke is doing a similar act, trying to get out of the shadow of his Dad, Alan Thicke, who played the squeaky clean, super nice, Dad on the show Growing Pains.  Let's show the world that we're not that nice, let's get the message out that we can be a little crazy and that we're not afraid to sex it up a bit.
I'm old enough to remember that this can work. Someone of my generation pulled the whole kid-tv-personality to legitimate musician rather well: Alanis Morrisette.  Alanis was a Nickolodean kid, and while I will probably always resent the song Ironic for not actually having any irony in it, I have to give Alanis her props for shedding the You Can't do that on Television (Google it, it was a thing) stigma and becoming a grown up artist.  She did it by being angry and dirty and shocking, which kept her fan base happy while making their parents a little nervous, well played Alanis. I think Miley was paying attention.
I suspect that Miley is going to follow a similar arc, and I think it's a well calculated plan.  She has a singular understanding of how "the machine" works and I don't think she's really as troubled as she wants us to think she is.  I think that she's trying to shake off the stereotypes, get a bit of an edge and leave Hannah Montana in the dust.
I'm pretty sure we would all want the same thing, if we had worn her blonde wig.

You will always have the poor...

You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.

-Jesus, (John 12: 8 NIV)

I have a weird relationship with money.  I know I need it, but I don't really like it.  It seems like I generally have just enough to get by, but never enough to feel comfortable.  I'm thankful about the getting by part, and in many ways I am acutely aware that I've got more than enough, but it's just strange.  I'm becoming a little obsessed with the word "enough," what does it mean?  Is there a concreted dollar value assigned to enough?

I know that, when I was younger, the amount of money I make now would have been an absolute boon, and I could have been living high on the hog.  But with two kids and a mortgage payment, "enough" seems to always be skipping out ahead of you somewhere.

For me this is sort a spiritual consideration: having the discipline to manage the adequate resources that I have, but for others it's a hard, cold, all too physical reality.  I can complain about money, but at the end of the day, I know that my kids aren't going hungry, and that provides me with a pretty good baseline for thinking about poverty, because I know there are a lot of people in the world who live with the basic reality of what is called "food insecurity," which is a different metric than what we commonly think of as the poverty threshold.  The "poverty line" is an important thing to consider, but in the real world, simply being above the poverty line doesn't amount to much of a life.  In our society, where there is such affluence almost everywhere you look, the poor seem more desperate and despairing.

When I was in Guatemala a decade or so ago, I saw people living in abject poverty, in cement shacks with dirt floors and no running water.  Funny thing was though, pretty much everyone in the village was in the same boat, they formed a community where a level of income that would drive an American to utter emotional ruin, was "enough."  People smiled a lot, and laughed frequently, and somehow had a dignity that is often missing from the desperately poor of this nation of ours.

Community and solidarity seemed to be the key, though they were unspoken values.

It seems to me that the community that God was trying to establish among the Hebrews and the kind of community that Jesus encouraged among his disciples were also governed by this mysterious concept of "enough."  I learned in my study of Guatemalan culture, that the indigenous religion and the syncretism that formed between that pagan form and Roman Catholicism, both had a certain leveling mechanism built in.  If you had a good crop, and were "well off" you were expected to be generous and support a celebration for the town, a Fiesta (a word we have badly bastardized in translating it as merely a party).  Call it redistribution of wealth if you want, but it was bigger than that, it was a socially valuable and largely enjoyable part of life.

The protestant missionaries that eventually arrived on the scene were appalled by this culture.  They saw drunkenness and debauchery and wasteful savages.  They brought, along with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the "protestant work ethic," and an emphasis on temperance.

If you became protestant, you stopped drinking, started saving money and getting ahead.  You also left your neighbors behind, you also removed yourself from certain aspects of community life.  And perhaps most importantly you entered what we might call "the rat race," the constant drive to get more and more and the constant process of ignoring any concept of what "enough" really is.

I don't mean to glorify the old way, because it has its flaws (just ask the women), but I find an interesting connection between that drama, which I can study from a distance, and the economic and social situation in 21st Century America, in which I am immersed.

Protestant ethics, for better or worse, are foundational assumptions in this democratic republic of ours, which creates a conundrum for the poor, and leads to a great deal of soul-crushing poverty.  We are bell curve kind of people, and we privilege success.  What I mean by that is that we cannot seem to envision a truly just society, because it doesn't seem fair to us.  If you work hard and follow the rules you should be able to get ahead.  But we all know that some people just aren't going to work hard so that there are always going to be poor people (Jesus said it after all, they're always going to be with us, who are we to argue with our Lord?)

Let's just say I find some flaws in that thinking.  First of all, there's the rather disturbing fact that the most important determinant of whether you're going to live in poverty through your life is whether or not you were born into it.  People who are born poor, tend to stay that way and people who are born rich tend to stay that way as well.  Second, there is the reality that poor people seem to have to work awfully hard just to feed themselves, and the rich seem to have much more leisure time for thing like golf and vacations and such.  Are their leeches on the system? No doubt, but the vast majority of poor people are working their tails off just to stay at the bottom of the curve.

Jesus wasn't being fatalistic about poverty either, he was responding to Judas, who was making a sanctimonious display of false concern for the poor.  Jesus spends more than enough time exhorting his disciples to care for the poor, and more than enough time healing the blind and the lame.

We need to work for a just society.  We need to consider the word "enough" before we consider getting what we "want."  We're actually pretty good at tossing crumbs to those "in need," what we need to do better is invite them to the table and make sure they have at least a chance at staying there.

We need to stop pretending that the ethics of getting ahead that have evolved during and after the enlightenment are not, in fact, virtues that befit followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

We are probably always going to have the poor, so maybe we should do as much as we can to treat them a little better, give them a few more opportunities, and see what happens.

More Popishness

During the Reformation, the fathers of the protestant tradition came up with many ways to describe Roman Catholic doctrine and dogma.  Many of these, less than complimentary terms were aimed directly at the figurehead of the Roman Catholic Church, the Bishop of Rome, aka, The Pope.  The Holy See of Rome has had some unfortunate characters wear the big hat over the centuries, no doubt, but in the early stages of his term, Francis is really impressing me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not converting any time soon, I like my wife a lot better than I like fancy vestments, I like preaching for more than 10 minutes, and I have way too many issues with authority to deal with a hierarchy like that.  But I am duly impressed by the latest successor to St. Peter.  He is taking up the cause of the poor and the common folk in a way that has been sorely missed in many Christian denominations.
What exactly is he doing? You ask.
He's doing what he is situated to do better than almost any other human being on the planet: he's talking, and when he talks he's kicking over idols, prejudices and assumptions.  If I say something as the Pastor of a Church, about 200 people will probably hear it, and that's an optimistic estimate.  When the Pope, as head of the Roman Catholic Church says something, millions of people hear it.  People who aren't Catholic or even Christian hear it.  It's fair to say that the whole world hears it.
And that is a great power and a great responsibility.
And this week I have heard and read about him saying some really wonderful things.  I heard him challenge his Church to start caring more about people that dogma, I heard him say that caring for one another is more important than calling out sin and pronouncing judgment.  I heard him attack the global economic system that worships money, not in vague scholastic terms but in real, emotional concern for the dignity of humanity.  In short, I heard the Pope say things that I've said and wanted to say myself, and in that, even though I am far from Catholic, I felt encouraged and uplifted.
If he can be a wise guide to a hardened and incorrigible Presbyterian, then he really is something.  If he can speak in a way that draws praise from his own flock and the flocks of others then he is doing what Jesus did.  If he can be honorable, rational and consistent in the eyes of atheists and agnostics then he is worthy of our attention.
The world has too many leaders who lack conviction, who are too ready to play politics and manipulate reality to suit their needs.  When I heard the Bishop of Rome say to the Church: "we have been too obsessed with homosexuality, abortion and birth control," I knew his words were dangerous, and brave, and that they call all of us who proclaim faith in Jesus of Nazareth to remember the one we call Savior.  They call us to remember that he didn't shy away from controversy, but he was controversial about the right things.  They call us to remember that he didn't attack poor, lonely, lost sinners, he attacked principalities and powers, what we might call nowadays dysfunctional systems.  Jesus attacked idolatry, greed and hypocrisy and he cast out demons, healed the sick and forgave the sinners.
How have we veered away from that basic framework?
It's a historical irony that now the Pope might be the voice of reformation for the church.  An office that once stood as the major impediment to a wave of holy change in the body of Christ, now may be the source of a voice that brings us all, Protestant and Catholic alike into a new accountability to the vision of our Lord.
I hope.  I'm listening.
Keep talking Francis.

Selling God

Don’t do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don’t do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don’t do it.

when it is truly time,

and if you have been chosen,

it will do it by

itself and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

-Charles Bukowski

We just signed up to get replacement windows in our house.  It needs done, but it's really expensive.  We knew it needed to happen when we bought the house, and we knew it was going to cost some serious coin.  We thought we would get a couple estimates, but in the end we ran into a really good sales pitch and we went with it.  The salesman really believed in his product, he had confidence that if we bought his product we would not be disappointed.  I remember sitting through his spiel and being impressed by his conviction.  I knew I was being "sold," yet I had this sort of detached appreciation for the skill with which I was being talked into spending a heck of a lot of money.  

It was exactly the right situation; Michele and I had a need, we agreed upon the need, and we know that getting our old drafty, beat up windows replaced is going to be a good investment in the long haul.  But still, we weren't quite ready to pull the trigger.  Until we were convinced in our minds and hearts that this was the best way to meet our need.  That's where the salesman is at his best, and I admired the guy who sold us our windows, because unlike so much of the advertising that saturates our world, I didn't feel pressured, hustled or outright misled.  Even though I can see through the "our product is the greatest thing in the world" dogma, even though I could chuckle to myself when he revealed the latest-greatest "discount," I felt like I was at least an honorable participant in an economic process.  Ultimately what happened seemed pretty natural, and that's a good feeling.

Which brings me to the church, as most things do (occupational hazard).  I have been reading a lot about why people come to church, why people leave the church, why people never start going to church and even some things about why people think church is more or less irrelevant to their lives.  I'm also getting ready to teach a four week study about the practice of evangelism and faith sharing here at Good Samaritan.  And I have to admit that the idea that evangelism is somehow "selling God," is a rather odious  concept.  In fact, I tend to recoil from many practices that are common to the work of the evangelist.

I know we are supposed to share the gospel with people, but my soul and my stomach turn at the idea of a Jehovah witness style door to door campaign.  I am all too ready to believe that it just wouldn't work anyway, I'm all too ready to assume that most people are just like me and don't want to be hassled about religion.  Mostly because I don't want to go out knocking on doors, I'm simply not called or gifted to do that sort of thing.

It's not that I don't  believe in the product either.  I can't imagine facing grief without faith.  I can't imagine going through life disconnected from the community of the church (even if they can rub you the wrong way sometimes).  I don't much like the idea of trying to make sense of humanity without the exemplar of Jesus of Nazareth.  But I wonder how I would sell that to other people.

That last sentence even makes me cringe.  Is that what evangelism is, selling the church?  Yes and no.  We certainly are entirely too prone to adopting the sales techniques of the commercial world.  The problem is, we're really bad at it.  Seriously, watch the TV ads that churches make, they're horrendous.  I'm sure most of the churches that make them are good places, full of genuine and loving people, but they make bad TV.  Maybe it's because, as Jesus said, "The people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light" (Luke 16: 8 NIV).

Indeed, maybe it's because we have allowed the drive for worldly success to obscure our vision.  Maybe we have begun to drink the kool-aid and actually assume that our job is to purvey religious goods and services and that the solution is simply to offer the "best product" out there, and to diligently market that product with all the creativity and dedication we can muster.

I want no part of that, and I don't think that's at all the vision that Christ had in mind when he sent the disciples out into the world with the great commission.

I'm rather certain that Charles Bukowski would be bitterly amused to find one of his writings at the head of an article by a Presbyterian Minister musing about evangelism, but I couldn't help it.  when I read the words: "don't do it unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket," I thought, "Yes, that is what calling is all about, doing what you can't not do."  The reason why it's hard to "sell" God and church is because God doesn't want to be sold, and thus he does not call people to the task.  God calls people to witness, God calls people to serve, God calls people to shine like a city on a hill, but God does not call people to dangle the kingdom out there like a really sweet deal on a used car.

So yeah, as unlikely as it may seem, I'm going to open my series on evangelism with Bukowski...

May God have mercy on my soul.

Minor Tragedy?

This is getting out of hand.  Pretty soon we're going to have revise our cliches; the saying "American as Mom and apple pie" is going to have to add "shooting incident" to the list.  This time around (see how I said this time around, because if you look back at my blogs over the past few years you will find me lamenting several incidents very similar to the one at the Navy yard earlier this week),  I'm not going to try and analyze the causes or critique our culture for creating a stew of violence and dysfunction where this kind of thing happens about every other month; I'm just going to talk about our response.
I'm not even going to talk about the whole response, I'm just going to zoom in on one little corner of the response.  I'm not going to try and get in the heads of the victims or their families, or even their casual acquaintances.  I'm not going to cogitate on how this latest tragedy will affect the thousands of people who work at the Navy yard (a few of whom are members of my congregation and live in my community).  I'm just going to talk about sports, but not in the "hey this uncomfortable, but did you see that football game?" kind of way.  I'm going to look at how sports responded to the latest shooting and what that says about our society.
The new NFL season is upon us, baseball is coming down the home stretch towards the playoffs, hockey and basketball are about to launch, it's a great time of year in the world of sport.  And then something terrible happens, thirteen people died a few more were wounded and scores upon scores have had their worlds cracked down the middle.  So the Nationals wore Navy hats in a game against the Braves and we had a few moments of silence, and... the games go on.
You might think that I'm about to be critical of that, but I'm not.  I actually admire it.  I'm actually a little envious of it, because sport is now doing for millions of people, what the church used to do.  Think about it.  Sports provide a framework and a setting for the human community to come together and celebrate and grieve, they unite people and generate fierce opinions and allegiances.  Sport has become sacramental in our society, you can lament that if you want, but it's a fact.  Sport is actually demonstrating a consciousness of it's place in society, and taking it seriously.  The morning after the Navy Yard shootings sports center opened with a piece about the Nats/Braves game and Linda Cohn, with admirable gravitas, told us that sports help us heal from stuff like this.
They do too!  I remember after 9-11, when the games began again, it was a triumph and a heart-swelling moment.  As a representative of organized religion I am tempted to be pharisaic and negative and talk about idolatry and such, but I'm going to take Jesus' advice seriously, "whoever is not against us is for us," Mark 9:40.  It is a true fact that sports play an important part in the lives of millions of people, in fact, much to the dismay of many churchy-type people, they are whooping our butts.  Seriously, try having a church event on Sunday afternoon during NFL season, see how that goes over.
I think that sports are able to give people a whiff of transcendence, but not so much that it actually makes them uncomfortable.  In the story of the Exodus, God was present on Mt. Sinai as a fire and smoke and thick darkness, and the people were terrified and most of them wouldn't go near.  They sent Moses, their hero, their liberator, their law giver, he was the only one who could approach the mysterium tremendum.  The people were encouraged by God's transcendent presence, they just didn't want to get too close.
Sport allows us to glimpse transcendence in tiny bites; an inspiring story here, a personal triumph there, a superhuman performance that sometimes gets called miraculous every so often.  And they mostly don't require you to confront your sinfulness, or follow any really laborious moral code.  Thousands upon thousands of people will shell out $500 and deal with all manner of inconvenience in order to "be a part" of the home crowd, but if you give them one little reason, or ask for a little too much, they're going to run away from Church faster than you can say stewardship campaign.
I know all about idolatry, and I know that this probably doesn't bode well for our culture.  I know that in the waning days of the Empire the Romans had similar obsession with games and diversions, but I wonder if maybe this time things are different.  Maybe God has changed his mind and has decided that sports really are more effective at inspiring worship than a bunch of words and songs.  I'm a preacher and I watch Sportscenter every morning before I ever get to my office and start reading scripture, it just goes so well with my coffee!

Putting aside my sarcasm for a moment, I do offer my condolences and prayers to the people affected by the Navy Yard shootings.  I am glad that all sorts of human communities have taken a moment to recognize that there is no such thing as a minor tragedy.  Sometimes, in church and in baseball, all we can do is take a moment and be quiet to mark our sorrow about what has happened in this broken world.

Lucky Fourteen

Fourteen years ago we had no concept of what fourteen years would be.  Honestly, you can’t blame us, fourteen years before we got married we were ten and eleven years old.  All you old timers who are sitting on forty or fifty years of marriage will have to forgive us, because in our chronologically limited perspective, fourteen years is a long time, it’s still more than a third of our lives.  Which is interesting if you think about it this way: for the first ten years of life, your parents are the most important people in your life.  For the second ten years of your life, you are the most important person in your life (sorry tweens, teens and twentysomethings, you do tend to be rather self-absorbed), all of the sudden, when you get married, you have to learn how to make someone other than your mommy, your daddy or yourself, a priority in your life, and that can be hard.

So here we are at a tipping point.  We have been married as long as we were children, as long as we were adolescents, we’re going to start creeping up on that point where we have been a couple longer than not.  I guess we’ve learned some things, I know we still have a lot to learn, but it’s good to take inventory every once in a while, so here are some of the things we’ve learned in fourteen years of marriage:

Teamwork is hard, but really important: too many people approach marriage as a goal, like the wedding is a victory celebration for all their hard work on the dating scene, but it’s totally not the goal, it’s just the kickoff.  All we really had after our wedding were some gifts we didn’t know what to do with and some pictures of ourselves looking about as nice as it’s humanly possible for us to look.  In fairly short order though, before we even wrote the thank you notes, we had to learn how to sacrifice what we wanted as individuals for the good of our relationship.  It was worked out in fits and starts, it involved some tears and some hurt feelings, it often felt like a lot of work, sometimes it still does.  But we needed to do that work, not just for the sake of staying married, for the sake of staying sane.  We’re both pretty glad that we had four years to work it out between the two of us because…

We didn’t get to be blissfully alone for very long.  You know how the song goes: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (insert name of spouse here) with a baby carriage.  Don’t get me wrong, kids are great, they teach us the real meaning of love in a way that we never could have imagined on our wedding day, when we were positively oozing with talk of love.  But kids also push us to the absolute limits of what we can handle as grown ups.  We really appreciate each other most keenly when we’re dealing with our two kids.  Parenthood is not something either one of us wants to go alone (props to all the single parents out there, but I bet you wish you had a little more help sometimes).  Kids happen, they are a force of nature, and probably the only thing more frustrating than raising a couple of people that are a lot like you, but not quite you, is not being able to have them in the first place.  Which brings us to the hard reality…

Things won’t always go swimmingly, and we needed to learn to handle the bumps in the road.  We were lucky, neither one of us really thought that life was full of hallmark card sentiments and sappy love-story moments.  But it still came as a bit of a shock to both of us that person we just promised to spend the rest of our life with isn’t always going to look, act and smell as wonderful as they did on our wedding day.  The bumps in the road have built trust in each other.  It’s not the naïve expectation that we are each other’s savior, rather it is the reality of finding another who will stick with us in the rough patches, even if they are the proximate cause, or at least a major contributor to said rough patches.  We have noticed that a lot of people spend years on the dating scene looking for someone who shared their interests, was compatible (whatever that means), and gave them that tingly feeling in their guts.  If that’s you, stop it now!  What you really need is someone who is going to “be there when you fall, and not hold you down when you fly.”  Some goofy kids actually wrote that into their wedding vows fourteen years ago, but had no idea what that sort of thing actually entailed or how often they would have to rinse/lather/repeat.  Which means…

Don’t give up.  Most people that have stayed married for a lot longer than fourteen years have told us, when we asked the right questions, that it’s mostly a matter of sheer stubbornness.  You have to be dedicated and single-minded and not consider failure an option, and you both have to be that way, it doesn’t work in halves.  Luckily for us, we’re both ridiculously stubborn, but it can still push us to the limit.  On good days, like an anniversary, we know it’s all worth it, like when those little people we’re raising come and give us a hug for no reason at all.  At some point it’s not flowers and chocolates that show how much we love each other, it’s the much more mundane realities, like a sandwich packed for you before you go off to work, or a new Batman t-shirt waiting for you when you come home some random Tuesday.  There are times when we can sit together doing nothing at all, and realize that you don’t remember what it was like before that day you got married, and you don’t really want to think about not being together, and that’s after only fourteen years.

A Letter to Myself, 12 years ago

September 11, 2013
Dear Me,
I know what you're doing right now, you're sitting on your futon in the apartment in Pittsburgh watching the news.  I know that you're watching a couple of big pillars of smoke rising into a sky so blue, on a day so beautiful, that it just seems to mock the tragedy that's unfolding before your eyes.  I remember how you felt, I remember some of the things that were going through your mind.  I remember that mostly, on that day, it was just shock, and trying to deal with something that just seemed too terrible to comprehend.
I've got some good news and some bad news, but let's start with the good, because I know that's what you need more right now.  In the next few days you're going to see and hear some amazing things, you're going to see the best of what human beings can be in the rubble of the worst of what we can do.  You're going to hear about flight 93 that went down not too far from where you're sitting and how a bunch of people gave their lives to save a lot of others.  You're going to see police, firefighters and more random volunteers than you can possibly imagine, wade into a hell of twisted metal and rock and put up an American flag and you're going to have that image with you for the rest of your life, and it will still bring tears to your eyes every time you think about it.  You're going to listen to speeches by politicians that aren't completely self-serving and arrogant, and you're going to watch the greatest nation on earth collectively grieve, and it's going to be beautiful.  It's going to restore your faith in humanity, which I know is a little shaky right now.
Hold on to that faith, you're going to need it.
You're going to need it because it won't be too long before we start beating the war drum.  It won't be too long before the shock and the desire to just help out any way we can gets replaced by the dark and inevitable sentiment: "You hurt us, now we're going to hurt you worse."  Never mind that the real reason why Al Quaeda (yeah it was them, and you're going to hear a lot about them for a long time) did this was because they believe that the United States is basically just a big bully that imposes it's will on the rest of the world.  They look at this like taking a big swing and punching that bully right in the nose.  Well they did it, and we're bleeding.  The problem (for them) is that, unlike that big awkward kid in the fourth grade, we're not just going to run off and sob to mommy, we're now going to hunt them down like dogs.
We have been hunting them in the mountains of Afghanistan for over a decade.  We invaded Iraq because we thought they might be there along with Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (neither thing was actually there).  We finally got Osama Bin Laden (the supposed "head" of the operation) living in a suburban neighborhood in a city in Pakistan.  The Navy Seals went in, offed him and we dumped his body in the ocean.  They made a movie about it.  It felt kinda good, but it really didn't make the world a better place.
You know that thing about not learning from history and being doomed to repeat things?
A bunch of people just died this morning, but much larger numbers are going to die as a result of what happened this morning, over the next 12 years there is going to be a staggering cost,  a lot of which is just going to serve to prove the bastards right.
There are going to be massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.  There are going to be thousands of mothers who lose their children.  Soldiers are going to be put in untenable situations, in the name of revenge. There are going to be thousands who never come home.  There will be thousands who come home broken.  There will be thousands who are okay in body, but will be haunted by the horror of war.  We are going to have our freedom hedged in the name of security, we are going to do terrible things in the "war on terror."
The ledger is never going to balance.
Violence just begets more violence.
The world is going to change, but not noticeably for the better.
It seems that maybe (keep your fingers crossed) the diplomats are finally getting foothold back from the warmongers, but it's too early to tell.  It's been 12 years and we can still drum up enough fear to have people calling for us to invade yet another country where nobody wants our "help."
Today, there are a lot of people putting up little pictures of the twin towers burning with the slogan "never forget."  For anyone who lived through it, is there really any danger of that?
I hope we don't forget the lessons we have learned from the last twelve years either.
I hope we don't forget all the young men and women who have given up part or all of their lives in the vain quest to end hate and fear by violent means.
I remember that you were thinking about some of this stuff this morning, but hoping and praying that maybe it wouldn't all play out that predictably, but it did, and it still is, sorry.
But hey, you get through seminary, you find your way into pastoral ministry, you have a couple of kids, and Dr. Who comes back on TV!  So chin up kid.
Love,
You, just older.
P.S. Read as much Wendell Berry as you can get your hands on, watch your sugar intake and for the love of Pete, start exercising.

Changing our Destiny

Once you start down the path to the Dark Side,

Forever will it dominate your destiny.

-Yoda

I admit that the first President I honestly remember is Ronald Reagan.  You are all welcome to feel sorry for me, or to feel old, whichever happens to strike you.  I remember hearing about Reagan winning the election against someone named Jimmy Carter.  It seemed at the time, that Reagan was the perfect guy for the Oval Office, he was slick, he could crack a joke, he had pretty good hair, and he was hawkish enough to make us feel safe.  Over the years though, the legacy of the Reagan years had been a mixed bag to say the least.  He played a major role in toppling the Soviet Union, but his economic policies have proven to be the path to the Dark Side (they were successful in the short term, but lead you to ruin in the long run).

As I grew up, I became interested in learning a bit about Jimmy Carter, the plainspoken southern gentleman that got his political butt handed to him.  History generally shares the opinion that Carter was a ineffective, if not incompetent President, and I'm not a political expert, so I won't argue that point.  In my opinion though, it strikes me that Carter was perhaps the best human being to ever have the misfortune of being elected President.  Carter is intelligent, insightful, with deep moral convictions and consistent ethical principles; in other words, he was bound to be a lousy President.

It saddens me that such admirable, humane qualities are almost anathema to successful politicking.  It saddens me that, even a Democratic populist like Obama, feels the need to engage in saber rattling and sending messages via tomahawk missile.  This, I suspect, is largely a result of our system turning down the path to the Dark Side.  Nixon resigned about a week after I was born, Ford bumbled and stumbled through a few years, and Carter was elected, I surmise, as a sort of anti-Nixon, a relative outsider to the political system, a solid citizen, and rather determined to do things a different way.

But Iran, OPEC and the USSR were a little too big and scary for us to trust to a peanut farmer from Georgia, with a down-home accent and a decidedly not-made-for-TV sort of look.  Never mind that he was a brilliant guy, never mind that he always tried to do the right thing and keep a cool head, not good enough, I guess we needed Reagan and his cowboy-actor bluster, or maybe that's just what we deserved.

If Carter had won, maybe we would have actually learned the lessons of Vietnam about not being able to be the sheriff of the world.  If Carter had won maybe we would have gotten more of a start on responsible environmental and economic stewardship, instead of Reagonomics and unchecked ecological pillaging.

I don't know for sure, I was only six, and I grant you that I am judging Carter largely by his later work, the wisdom of which is due largely in part to his being chewed up and spit out by the world of politics, but I know that his Law Day speech in 1974 is one of the finest examples of rhetoric this side of MLK's I have a Dream speech, and it proves that he is no wimp, he's bold enough to call out a room full of southern lawyers about voting rights.  If you have the time, read what then Governor Carter had to say, particularly read the little homespun tale about having a handful of rocks for his slingshot and having to put them down to get cookies from his Mama.  Now think about any other president in the last 40 years that would honestly put down the rocks...

American politics has gone down the path to the Dark Side.  It didn't look that bad in the Reagan years, but by now we have found out what life is like inside Vader's mask.  If we had taken the path of integrity and common sense, instead of the quick, easy path, we might not be where we are now, if we had just put down the rocks...

Minimums and Margins

One of the most important things that is beginning to happen in our society is the honest consideration of a living wage.  There are labor movements happening before our very eyes, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century.  Near Pittsburgh, there is a place in the south hills called Homestead, which had lots of retail type businesses.  Now it's kind of a bustling shopping-mall kind of place, but Homestead also has a dark history, it's where Andrew Carnegie and his manager Henry Clay Frick hired Pinkerton detectives, basically as mercenaries, to break a strike of steel workers, they succeeded rather brutally, and the cause of labor unions was severely set back.
You can make a lot of arguments about whether unions are good or bad, but history teaches us one thing rather clearly: without organized labor, the worst impulses of greed and lust for power will roam free and crush lives and dreams, and eventually people like Carnegie and Frick will have their names on parks, universities and monuments, despite the fact that the blood of those they crushed cries out from the ground.
So now in Homestead, instead of steel mills they have box stores, and across the country retail workers are beginning to cry out for the same sorts of things that the steel workers wanted: honest and fair pay for what they do.
The problem is that working in a big store like Wal-Mart or Best Buy is generally considered to be a low value job.  You generally make minimum wage, which has not come close to keeping up with inflation over the last 50 years, you do not have what people consider a "skill," which would give you options about when and where you work.  Let me tell you, as someone who has worked in retail, it is a hard job, it's frustrating, it's boring, the hours are generally terrible and the pay is depressing, but because we are becoming more and more of a consumer society it's where millions of people make their living (or don't make their living).
Wal Mart is the poster child for modern retail.  The things they sell are cheap and disposable, they treat their workers pretty much the same way.  They are economic bullies, just like Carnegie and Frick, but without the bullets.  They don't need the bullets because big business has been slowly undermining the advances that labor made in the first half of the 20th century.  A company like Wal Mart does by sheer scale, what would have been a dream for Andrew Carnegie: they simply ignore the critics and their own disenfranchised employees.  Don't like working for Wal Mart?  Fine, quit, there are ten people waiting for your job.  Don't want to shop at Wal Mart?  Fine, don't, pay more somewhere else, there are a million people without your ethical standards and a million people who probably have no idea that we're even the modern equivalent of a robber baron.  And guess what, we lobby, threaten, and strong arm suppliers, politicians, city governments and just about anyone else that gets in our way, and it's all perfectly legal, because we don't have any rules any more, because of free market dogma.
But I don't want to just pick on Wal Mart, because they're not alone, they're just the most visible.  Listen to all the people who will tell you that people who work at McDonalds ought to be happy about their minimum wage job, but minimum wage is not a living wage, at least not if you want to live in an actual apartment with heat and running water.  Poverty is a major problem in this country.  The poverty line for a household with two adults and two children is around $22,000, but that is the absolute floor.  That assumes that you probably get some kind of government assistance, that assumes a whole lot of things.  The current Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25 per hour.  If you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, no vacations, no sick days etc. your gross pay is $15,080.  To top it off the "poverty line" is based on calculations that date back to the 1960's and, as most people will recognize, life has gotten more expensive since then in more ways than simple inflation data can reflect.  The poverty line reflects food and shelter, it does not account for vehicles, insurance, or healthcare, let alone, phones, internet access, or numerous other things that, while they would have seemed like a luxury or even a pipe dream in the 1960's, are now rather necessary to basic function in our society.
Something is broken and people are being crushed just as surely as those Homestead steelworkers, but there are Pinkertons gunning them down, there are only big corporations bloating on profits, as children go to bed hungry.
We can do better than this, we need to do better than this.  We owe it to our neighbors who we are supposed to love, and our children who will one day have to grow up and learn to make their way in the world.  Our goals and our methods need to change.  We need to carefully examine what we define as "enough" and stop striving constantly for excess.  The poverty line is not a good indicator of what it takes to live,  I mean really live, with some security and some margins to your life, with sabbath time and some basic comforts and advantages.  What I'm describing is a biblical idea, it's what the economic codes of the Old Testament are working for, it's what Jesus describes as the Kingdom of God, it's a world where people have enough, and children and families come before profits.  It's not a joke, it's not a pipe dream, it's a reality that our Creator takes rather seriously and we should too.

Don't make me come back there...

I was in the dentist's office this morning, waiting to have a couple fillings done, my kids had missed the bus because of passive aggressive moping, and did I mention I was at the dentist?
Anyway I was not having a spectacular start to my week.  The news was on the TV.  These days I generally prefer to gather my own news from the many and varied outlets of the interwebs, it just seems like a more responsible way to process the horrors of modern life.  I can determine the source more readily, I can usually find intelligent commentary, and I don't have to sit through commercials (all the advertising is neatly posted along the margins, so I can attempt to ignore it while I read).  The news, CNN I believe it was, quickly validated my world awareness strategy, as they covered the ongoing Syria kerfluffle.  They had a 30 second segment with someone in khakis and a desert-looking shirt talking about the hundreds of thousands of refugees, both internally and externally displaced by the conflicts in Syria, then they quickly cut away to a distance shot of the White House parking lot where they had just seen the House majority leader, John Boehner depart from a "fancy" car (the fanciness of the car was apparently important enough to be included in the description Mr. Boehner's arrival to discuss the Syria situation with President Obama and Minority leader Nancy Pelosi).  The news gave people getting out of a car almost equal time with the plight of the refugees.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Now Syria is not an easy thing to understand, some very intelligent people who are familiar with the dynamics of the region are kind of throwing up their hands in exasperation at the complexity and spaghetti-like entanglements of the whole mess.  But it troubles me that most of the American people, who will shortly be forming opinions about whether or not we ought or ought not to get involved in Syria in any way, and may get a major case of angry if we do or don't do what they think is the right thing, are being informed as much about the fancy car that an unnaturally tan politician has disembarked from, as they are about the staggering number of women and children that have been chased from their homes and are living in crowded camps in the desert.
I can't really begin to wrap my mind around what the right thing to do with regard to Bashar al-Assad really is.  My gut tells me he probably deserves a tomahawk missile with his morning tea, but as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya, power vacuums should not be taken lightly.  The whole military angle is just way outside my field of expertise, and I'm really upset that so many innocent people have died and are dying, whether they were killed by bullets or Sarin gas is really not much of a thing I worry about, they're just as dead, and they're just as innocent.
I get the conventions of warfare and why they're important, but as seems to be the case with pretty much every armed conflict since Korea, this doesn't exactly fit the definition of war (see Friday's post), but it's still a violent conflict, and people are still dying, and soldiers are still going to be put in harm's way, and it at least seems war-like.
What really made me wish that the dentist had some novocaine for my brain this morning, was the all too brief snippet about the refugees.  There were kids about the same age as my kids, going to school, just like my kids, except in a dusty tent instead of a nice safe building.  There were people who have to worry about things like getting enough food and clean water, instead of missing the bus and a couple of bad fillings in their teeth.
I had been having a bad morning, but I got a rude slap of perspective.
I noticed some things though, like the blue lettering on the side of the tent: it said United Nations.  Like the same United Nations that just said, "No," to armed intervention, basically because Russia and China will block any vote in the security council.  A bunch of people on the TV were talking about that, how Russia has a vested interest in Syria, how they've got they're only naval base outside of the former Soviet Union in Syria, how they've been best buds with Assad for a long time.  Russia is saying that they don't think armed intervention will help, because of complicated stuff like power vacuums and geopolitical instability, but they're really just looking out for number one right?
Then it occurred to me that Russia, our old enemy from the cold war days, with a James Bond villain for a president, that Russia, might actually be right about a lot of stuff.  If they really do have such a vested interest in Syria, they might actually know a thing or two about the joint.  It occurred to me that they learned some of the same lessons about the pitfalls of the whole empire thing a few decades before us.  I seem to recall them being Afghanistan fighting some of the same dudes we are fighting, and having a bit of trouble getting out.
I know, it's hard to take advice from someone you don't like, but they just might actually be right.
Which brings me back to the United Nations.  Everyone likes to give the UN a hard time for being irrelevant and not being the global military peace-keeping force that we think we actually need.  It's true, the political reality of trying to get Russia, China, the US and various European nations to agree on what we ought to do about a mess like Syria is rather bleak, but while the UN really is not big on breaking down the door and getting the bad guys, they are actually pretty good at running cities of refugees in the desert.  They've had a lot of practice, in many different deserts.
I don't know whether we ought to start flinging cruise missiles upside Assad's tyrannical melon, but I do know that we ought to be doing what we can to help all those women and kids who are left out in the dust and the heat and the cold, while the boys fight over the darn sandbox.  The UN, apparently, does that.  So while Obama confabs with people who arrive in fancy cars about whether or not we should break out the whuppin stick, someone is bringing a drink to those who are thirsty, and clothing those who are naked, and giving shelter to those who are homeless.  I think I know what it more important, even if the "news" does not.