A student’s name and short bio appeared in the materials given to the congregation at the annual meeting at which officers are elected. The student is nominated for a one year youth term as an Elder, and the bio states that this student feels a call to ministry.

This comes as news to me, who knows the student as well as I know any student, having led them in Confirmation and half a dozen trips or retreats. First thought: I’m clearly doing something wrong, as the Associate Pastor for Youth, to not know that one of the church’s youth is discerning a call to ministry.

Second thought: that first thought is dumb. This is right and good. A student has told someone from the nominating committee about this discernment and then shared it with the congregation at large; if one of the goals of youth ministry is to help the church welcome the gifts and contributions of young people, then this is a positive sign. A wider circle than the Youth Ministry staff and volunteers are church for this student, and that’s what we want for all our students.

Another argument for youth officers.

Keep telling the truth.

Keep admitting your mistakes.

Keep choosing curiosity over judgment.

Keep defaulting to empathy.

This may all feel like a dead end in an era when so much untruth is celebrated and when hubris is lionized, when takedowns and trolling have become such precious currency. But the alternative is a deader dead end.

Jesus said you’re the salt of the earth, and he warned that the unsalty salt gets trampled under foot. Yes, and the salty salt gets trampled sometimes too.

This Sunday the youth at my church will start working on the worship service they will lead in about two weeks. They prepare every element of the service, start-to-finish. This year I’m using a slightly modified approach with them.

It’s an awful lot to expect a group of, say, middle schoolers, to thoughtfully compose parts of a liturgy, like a prayer of confession, in under an hour. I don’t actually know any worship leaders who prepare liturgy in teams. And not all preparation is composition; we have a rich heritage of prayers to draw upon.

So this year I’m providing groups of youth with small packets for each element of the service that includes a brief description of that element drawn directly from the “Commentary” section of the Book of Common Worship and several examples. The Prayer of Confession packet contains five examples, including this one:

Merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart and mind and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. In your mercy, forgive what we have been, help us amend what we are, and direct what we shall be, that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your holy name.

Students might choose an element in its entirely, and that will be fine. I will be grateful for their careful attention to it. Or they might combine pieces from different examples. Or they may choose entirely to compose their own. The difference is that I’m exposing them really solid examples first.

The mistake I’m trying to correct is implying that worship leadership is always a feat of creative composition.

Between overwhelmed by the news and completely disengaged from it there is a medium that, though maybe not happy, is functional. If you value awareness of current events, this is the kind of week that could overwhelm you: a messed up election, the State of The Union, the end of an impeachment trail–one highly-charged event after another, each one announced with ALL CAPS BOLD TYPE HEADLINES, an avalanche of monumental happenings that might could make you surly for days. Maybe best to shut it all off.

Luxuriating in ignorance doesn’t feel responsible, though. Maybe they’re not the breathless spectacles the phone notifications promise, but they are still, at bottom, important national events that deserve our attention.

We can handle this. We can protect and give our attention at the same time. We can turn off the news notifications but open up the app a couple times a day. We can listen to one news summary podcast, not four. We can read a carefully written email newsletter rather than skim all the headlines.

Paying good attention to important goings on means not paying all of it. We can do that.

“Don’t speak about things you know nothing about” used to be a much easier maxim when the number of things about which you could speak was limited to a daily newspaper and three national broadcast television channels and when “know” merely meant possessing an adequate grasp of an agreed-upon set of facts.

Now we can know nothing about so much more.

“Have a take, do not suck” was the tagline of a sports call-in radio show I used to listen to enthusiastically. Jim Rome was at least a decade ahead of the “hot take,” to no great end.

A take feels less useful than an opinion or a view. My opinion may be worked out after careful consideration, but my take is off-the-cuff. My view of the matter is in dialogue with others’ views, but my take stands on its own. Takes lake the conventional humility of opinions, and even when the modesty of a view lacks authenticity, even when its humility is strictly conventional, it is still doing something valuable. Takes burn hubris for fuel.

So that’s my take on takes.

Maybe instead of valorizing the extra time that people are putting in and making heroes of those who stay late and come in on days off, you should focus more on making the most out of the time you are already allotted.

Eight hours is plenty of time to do meaningful work, and two hours is more than long enough for an effective practice session. If you consistently need more than that from people, maybe you’re doing something wrong.

“You’re pushing up against me,” said a voice two passengers in front of me during my commute home on the Red Line yesterday. I looked up to see a woman wearing headphones whose head was turned toward the rider in front of me but who was not looking at him as she added, “And it’s pissing me off.”

The train car was packed so that everybody was pushing (and pushed) against everyone else. The winter Red Line rush hour commute is an uncomfortable pressure cooker of humanity in bulky coats and backpacks, and it’s amazing to me that there aren’t fights on it every day. Mostly people handle themselves quietly and with the occasional apology for the stepped-on foot or the brushed-against arm.

But one shudders to imagine the ways ill-intentioned people abuse such forced proximity to other humans. Surely women bear the worst of that.

I studied the man who had been addressed. He didn’t react to the accusation. He wasn’t wearing headphones, so he surely heard her, but he stared straight ahead. I hadn’t seen him do anything in appropriate, but how could I? He looked really young, and I was grateful for whatever it was (maturity? Shame?) that prevented him from answering his accuser in the moment.

But I noticed how tightly he was gripping the hand strap–too tightly, like way more tightly than a person would need to for stability. His fingers were turning bright pink. It looked like a body’s worth of rage all concentrated in five fingers. I held my breath to the next stop and fled the car before the doors were fully opened.

Great Clips knows that I get my head shaved with the “0” guard on the trimmers. I say Great Clips knows this, and not any employee of that esteemed franchise, because every time I go I’m greeted by a person I’ve never seen before; turnover in that company is for real.

Yesterday was no different, except that when the stylist confirmed, “0?” I cracked, “Or less than 0.” She nodded in recognition and then pulled from the drawer a different set of clippers than the ones she was already holding. She explained that these were indeed less than 0 and that, though she rarely uses them, they were just the thing for me. I felt kind of special.

It only took a couple of passes along my left temple, though, before the guard flew off the trimmers and landed on the floor behind me. The stylist looked at the device, baffled, and then retrieved not only the guard from the floor but also the metal plate the guard clips to–and also the screws that secure the plate to the base of the clippers. She returned to the chair to show me this collection of pieces and to attempt reassembly. I even got to put in one of the screws. No luck. She deposited the mess back into the drawer and resumed the job with the first set of clippers, saying nothing.

So here I am with about four inches of my head less than 0 and the rest of it merely 0. It just don’t look right.

I saw two concerts this weekend, and both provided delightful surprises.

I went with two friends on Saturday to see Cold War Kids, whose set was opened by a female pop duo called Overcoats I’d never heard. They were GOOD. And they showed up onstage with the headliners a few times to great effect.

Then Meredith scored tickets for us to see Ben Gibbard on Sunday night. We’re Death Cab for Cutie fans from way back, but neither of us knew what to expect from a Gibbard solo show. There was plenty of material we’d never heard, all played on a stripped-down stage with only an upright piano and a guitar. But there were also some Death Cab standards, a couple of Postal Service callbacks, and a truly arresting moment in which Gibbard announced that he was going to play a song by someone who is no longer with us in order to keep him alive. The theater fell silent for a moment and remained hushed as he played a melancholy cover of a Frightened Rabbit song that should not move one to cry, but . . .

I collect music, creating lists that can be experienced the same way over and over again. Concerts remind me of music’s power to surprise. More concerts please.