Most of the time, that thing you’re working on for hours and hours works out just fine, really well, perhaps exceptionally.

But the work is a slog and there’s no confidence in it. You’re sure it’s terrible and that soon everyone will know you’re not very good. The longer the project drags on and the closer the deadline looms the worse it feels and the farther away looks completion. You lose sleep, say mean things to yourself, and finally convince yourself that complete mediocrity is preferable to incomplete excellence. That’s how you sleep.

It has to be this way, right? Maintaining a rigorously critical posture to your own work makes it better, doesn’t it?

Maybe the nuance is that the more work you make and share the more that work is judged against a productive standard, the standard of your own body of work, and not the standard of what everyone else is doing.

“Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.”

Sage advice from my father. No doubt he inherited it, either from his father or from some other Supinger family patriarch. I say “patriarch” because it feels like a masculine sentiment, or at least I’ve experienced it as a criteria bound up with the ideal of masculinity that I learned growing up, namely that gullibility is weakness.

My dad never tired of trying to trick my brother and I into believing things that were not true. He was forever whistling between his teeth while driving to make us look around for an ambulance. When we fell for it, he would laugh and announce that we had swallowed the joke, “Hook, line, and sinker.” He would proceed then with an offer to sell us beachfront property in Arizona. I was a teenager before I got that joke.

If this was his program for inoculating his sons against trust, it worked terribly on my brother. Recklessly embracing the most outrageous assertions of the shadiest of people became his modus operandi at a young age. Rebellion takes many forms.

But it worked pretty well on me. Not that I’m an un-trusting person. I am very trusting of people in general. But I regard claims with suspicion, almost as a rule. I’ve developed what I think is a pretty nuanced mechanism for honoring a person’s motives and character, accounting charitably for the limits of a single perspective or less charitably for cognitive shortcomings, while still holding the claim they’re making at arm’s length.

Working on a sermon for Sunday,  I hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet have come to believe.”

There’s a philosophical flag to plant about the inevitability of believing things we can’t see and the implausibility of logical positivism. But there’s also a dog barking for gullibility here. One commentator makes the case that Thomas’ failing in John 20 is not so much that he doubted a claim he couldn’t square with his sense experience and worldview, but more that, by stubbornly refusing to believe the testimony of his fellow disciples, he broke communion with them.

I recognize the fear of gullibility I’ve lived with almost my entire life and the many careful machinations I’ve developed to avoid believing something false. Now, though, on this April Fool’s Day, I’m starting to feel an odd stirring of–what, exactly?–curiosity (regret even?) about what that posture has done to relationships.

I think I’m ready to see some beachfront property in Arizona.

 

She said, “I’m just gonna pull it,” with a resolve I’ve never heard from her before when dealing with loose teeth. We were sitting in the lobby on the lower level of the Oriental Theater during the intermission of “Matilda,” and bathroom goers were lined up all around us as we sat on a two-person upholstered bench against the wall, she with a wad of paper towel jammed into her mouth.

She had fiddled with this tooth for days. Finally, minutes before the end of the first act, it broke almost completely free of the sinews attaching it to her gums, and she held it there for all of the last number. When the curtain descended, she declared that we needed to go to the bathroom right away so that she could get paper towels to keep the tooth from falling out. I obliged. From our seat on the front row, we ducked and weaved our way downstairs to find ourselves on that bench.

She’s breathing hard, about to cry. “Do you want me to pull it?” I ask. She clenches her eyes shut and shakes her head no. She’s never let me or her mom pull one. They always just fall out, like a gift, so that her inability to bring the crisis to resolution is rewarded by gravity. The Tooth Fairy, of course, reinforces this, with her swelling reward tucked ‘neath a bloody pillow.

I don’t know what did it this time. I doubt it was my cajoling (“You can’t spend the rest of the show like this”; “you’re going to ruin your night”; “that paper towel is going to get soaked through.”) She took the reddening paper lump out of her mouth and looked at it intently for several moments. Then she declared her intention, and before I had time to celebrate the idea the deed was done and she was holding the tooth in her pinced fingers.

Her breathing relaxed as a smile spread across her face and she let out a cackle, the blood-soaked victory cry of a seven year old who grew up during intermission.

Ferret racing. That’s the analogy I once heard a youth ministry author* use to describe the work of developing student leaders. He even showed a video to illustrate his point.

Take all the distractions away. Make the object of leadership as simple as possible for students, as simple as “Go there and come back.” Eliminate 99% of the potential choices.

Many initiatives to give youth leadership fail for a lack of focus. We want to empower teenagers to be decision makers, and so we create a youth council and tell it to decide things about programming. But if we don’t narrow the scope of what we’re asking them to do we’re setting them up to fail, and we’re setting the church up to conclude that youth leadership doesn’t work.

There’s a world of difference between “Plan the youth ministry program for the year” and “Come up with a theme for the program year.” One is a concrete task that will show a measurable impact. The other is a field full of rabbit holes that involves mostly making lists.

It’s not about making it easy. It’s about making it effective. It’s about allowing students’ decision making to have as great an impact as possible and preventing their effort from being siphoned off onto minutiae.

*Mark DeVries at the 2009 Princeton Forum on Youth Ministry

I wrote the title for this post first, which I never do. Body first, title last: that’s my rule.

I broke my rule to illustrate a point: energy spent on a title is wasted. This is true for blog posts and for blogs themselves.

A friend is considering blogging, but he’s a little hung up on the need for a catchy title, and that’s keeping him from starting. “Just start writing,” I told him. “Forget about the title until you have a post.” To underscore my point, I asked him to tell me the titles of some of the blogs I know we both read. Out of four bloggers I named, he triumphantly id’d the title of one of their blogs (he’s a smartass, my friend).

I read Marci’s blog and Jan’s blog and Seth’s blog and danah’s blog and Libby’s blog and John’s blog and a bunch of other blogs whose titles I couldn’t tell you if pressed. But–and this is what matters–I can tell you what they say. Because I’m reading the people more than the aptly titled product.

For the record, I feel the same way about sermon titles.

They’re tearing down a building across the street from where I’m staying. It’s quite a spectacle: a massive crane gently nudging the building’s frame so that stone and wood and porcelain come cascading down.

It’s cathartic to watch, because I like demolition. I never tire of seeing things torn down to the studs. I’m a sucker for the romance of new beginnings and starting over with a clean slate.

Before the crane came in, though, the workmen spent an entire day cutting out these hand-carved stone designs from the front of the building. They carefully removed each one to preserve it. It took ten times longer to do that than it took to knock the building down.

It’s a helpful reminder that nothing is completely bankrupt. Even if it’s being torn down, there’s artistry in there that deserves to be preserved and cherished.

“Reality Bites” came up in conversation this morning. Remember that movie, the 1994 ode to aimless postmoderns that starred Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Director Ben Stiller (and featured a memorable David Spade cameo)? It was set in Houston, which was the connection that brought it into the conversation. But we dwelt on the movie–or at least I did–for several minutes.

I was a senior in high school when “Reality Bites”came out, and the film’s soundtrack shaped the weeks surrounding my graduation in a major way (I was learning Squeeze and Juliana Hatfield; like the rest of the world I was discovering–only soon to forget–Lisa Loeb).

I saw the movie with the cast of a play I was in, a community theater production in Denver written by a woman taking a year off from Yale. Her brother was the Director. He was 16.

We were all tortured by the conflict between artistic authenticity and success that consumes “Reality Bites.” Some of us took ourselves way too seriously. We were certain, like the cast of “Waiting for Guffman,” that we were making groundbreaking art (for proof we gushed over the sole adult in the cast: “Jeff is actually in movies!”). Leaving the theater we promptly divided up into Team Troy (Hawke) and Team Michael (Stiller) and literally shouted at one another things like, “If you’re trying to make money as an artist, then you’re a fraud!”

I was on Team Michael. Troy’s intellectually superior artistic integrity came with a prickish demeanor, poor hygiene, and a raging pot habit. That wasn’t for me. Michael was shallow, sure. But he was likable. I wanted to be likable. I still do.

I wish someone had told me at the time that Teams Troy and Michael aren’t the only options.

Bonus: the German-dubbed montage near the end that features both a pay phone and a person smoking in a hospital.

 

I participated with a group of teenagers this afternoon in an exercise to claim shared values for work together. A dozen high school students and a few adults passed a stick around a circle, naming values in turn. The framing question was, “What value do you want our work to embody?”

“Hard work.”

“Dedication.”

“Honesty.”

“Understanding.”

I said, “Joy.”

[I’m not part of this group’s work. I asked to come and observe, and I was invited to participate in this exercise. So I said something.]

Around we went for several minutes until the list was approaching 20 items. The facilitator then introduced an objection round where anyone could take issue with any of the values that had been identified.

Only one was.

*****************

The objection to pursuing joy as a value is that you can do good work and not be joyful. Other values on the list are more important, like honesty. If you’re having a horrible day and can’t find an ounce of joy, you can still do honest work. You can still do hard work, responsible work. You don’t need joy.

Positivity maybe. That’s the alternative the group chose. Positivity is a bloody-lipped smile. It’s an attitude. Positivity is the up-kept chin in a hailstorm.

Joy got the axe.

*****************

But joy is a value.

Of all the values statements I’ve had to write, one stuck with me, because it required me to present the value as a sentence, and it insisted the sentence be explicit enough that it would require saying “no” to certain opportunities. In practice it’s the difference between saying, “I value collaboration” (which you can say anywhere) and saying, “I want to work in close partnership with people who care about the things I care about” (which you can’t say everywhere).

So here’s my flag planted for joy:

Joyful work–work that brings me joy and allows me to bring joy to others–is the only work I want to do. It doesn’t have to be joyful every day (I am a pastor blogging during Holy Week). But if it isn’t bringing me any joy today, and I can’t remember the last time it brought me any joy, and I can’t imagine it bringing me at least some joy tomorrow,  a down payment til next week, I won’t do it–either the work is bankrupt or I am.

Of course, depression.

Of course, privilege.

Of course, necessity.

I’m just saying that insofar as circumstances are within my influence I’m choosing work where I can receive and share joy.

Every time.