There is the story, and there is the story about the story.

Yesterday somebody shot at Republican lawmakers near our nation’s capital. That’s a story–a harrowing, upsetting story. Yet you knew it would only take a couple of hours for competing stories to emerge, each one about the story of the shooting yet grounded in its own narrative world of villains and heroes.

The story and the story about the story.

This happens in the Bible too.

Yesterday I spoke with a colleague about a story he’s preaching soon, the story of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis, in which Hagar, who has born a child for Abram and Sarai, is sent away by Abram at the request of his wife. That’s the story. But there’s another story there that my preacher friend wants to tell, about the stories that have been told about that story over the centuries, even about the story the characters in the story are telling themselves about their story as it’s happening, even–stay with me here–the story about the storyteller.

The story and the story about the story.

It’s good to know which story we’re in.

This is part three of a story the first and second parts of which you can read here and here, respectively.

How is it possible that I do not have a ticket home, or to Kansas City, the closest thing I have to home at this free falling stage of life? The airline ticket agents sure don’t know. All they know is that we’re in May and the month on the ticket I’m holding is July.

I imagine how I must look to them. Bewildered, sweaty, limping as I jerk an army green duffel bag and a ripped open tote around the ticket line. Is this the kind of thing they see every day? I decide that it is.

The exchange at the mercifully empty ticket counter is long enough for me to piece this puzzle together. This was the plan, back in January, after I had surprised absolutely no one by proposing to my college sweetheart during her one visit of the year: get married in July, the month before she starts medical school. Because my volunteer posting is supposed to last until August, I’ll need to get permission to leave early, and I’ll need to stay as long as possible. So leave a week before the wedding date? Sure. I made the arrangements with the denomination’s travel agent for an early July flight from Belfast to Kansas City, a mere formality to precede the nuptials that would inaugurate the rest of my life.

That was not such a great plan, it turned out. March was long. April was longer. My fiancee was planning a wedding by herself, preparing for medical school, and beginning to wonder if this plan was not in fact a terrible mistake. So an April ultimatum: come home early or this wedding can’t happen.

Done. I would abort my international experience to romantically ride home and save the wedding. I made the call. A May flight, the travel agent thoroughly annoyed.

Is that why the domestic leg of the trip was never changed? Was I being shown a lesson: the whims of your romance, ultimate as they are to you, do not merit the shuffling and reshuffling of international itineraries?

“Sir, you will have to buy a Chicago-to-Kansas-City ticket,” the agent tells me. “There are still seats available on this flight,” she adds, indicating the time on my irrelevant July ticket. Of course these flights are all at the same time, regardless of the day. Of course the world is mechanical and predictable. This is the truth greeting my heroic spontaneity on a muggy May afternoon in O’Hare.

How? How am I to purchase an airline ticket? I’m days from turning 23 and have spent my first full year out of college as a volunteer, making no money, actually borrowing other people’s money for the privilege of living abroad while my fellow graduates have been getting jobs, even starting families. I can’t buy a plane ticket. I can’t buy a hamburger. Those are adult functions, and I am no adult. I am a child playing grown up–I will take a flight; I will get married–, ticket-less in the airport as in life.

To be continued. 

Fulfilling the expectations of the job you were hired to do is good. Do it whenever you can.

But also ask if those expectations are the right ones from time to time.

The vows a couple composes for their wedding are not all that unique to them and their story, just as the daring political jab inserted into my last sermon was not without ample homiletical precedent and the final scene of The Leftovers series finale was not completely unlike anything seen on television before.

Everything is conventional, thankfully. The strident atheist is as conventional as the most devoted fundamentalist. The bandana-faced protester follows convention just as easily as does the flag-waving patriot. All of us express our convictions and seek to make our mark through the conventions of the communities we yearn to belong to.

That’s a good thing. Conventions are a kind of constraint–the protest chant should rhyme; you should stand for the anthem–, and without constraints no real creativity is possible. Altering a convention makes an impact. Proceeding as if there are no conventions does not.

Owning the conventions we’re choosing is the better way to make a mark. That way, when we feel the need to make a change and to shed a convention that used to fit but doesn’t anymore, we’re not stepping out into nothing, just to a different convention.

200 words is my blog post convention.

The person you’re working with matters more than the organization they represent, right? I mean, if you’re building something important that meets a real need, something that might not work and carries some risk for all involved, isn’t character what really counts? If you like your co-conspirator, if you trust her and learn from her, does it matter all that much who she works for?

The community I volunteered with in Northern Ireland often hosted meetings between people from warring sides of The Troubles. Neither of the meeting’s participants could safely tell their own that they were meeting with this other. The trust and respect that undergirded the meeting was threatened by affiliation at every moment. Yet the only reason meaningful change took place there was that some people were willing to risk their own lives to work with people who were affiliated with the wrong group.

I don’t minimize this. People died. Lots of people. The risks were real, and not just to one’s safety, in sitting down across the table from someone whose cause had murdered your friends, as your cause had murdered his. The risk of dishonoring the loss of your own is as real–and as grave–as the other risk, the deadly risk.

I met again yesterday with someone from an organization that doesn’t believe what I and my people do and that some of my peers say I should avoid. But I like him. I trust him. And the things we’re thinking about doing feel important.

I heard someone say yesterday, “The existence of an actual conspiracy is not an excuse for conspiratorial thinking.”

“Yes,” I thought.

Nefarious actors may be conspiring to deceive, cheat, steal, and murder. Just as likely not, though. Just as likely, incompetence and ambitious fumble around to breed calamity. Even so, what is gained through our furious dot-connecting and eyebrow-raising, our breathlessly-muttered certainty that there’s more at work than they are letting on? Nothing.

There is a lot to lose, however, and conspiratorial thinking is a great way to lose it. It is one of the best ways, in fact, of frittering away the moment’s opportunity in superstition and fantasy, more effective at that end than even a marathon viewing of The Lord of The Rings trilogy. “If only this can be proved,” it promises, “That will change everything.” But it can’t be. And if it were, the world would not fundamentally change. The conspiracy theory is the louse whispering in the dark that he’s about to leave his wife so that the two of you can live happily ever after. But he won’t. And if he did, you would not live happily ever after. He is still a louse.

Let’s keep this in view, then: thinking and acting as if the things that matter are still up to us is the better way. Assigning agency for things to undisclosed plots is a grave forfeiture of the agency we actually have to work out in the open for things that matter, like welcoming strangers and feeding the hungry and preserving health care.

Let’s not waste the day searching for evidence of the other shoe about to drop.

The important work of recruiting and equipping youth ministry volunteers, the work that makes the biggest impact on their experience, is brush-clearing. Handling the van reservations, collecting all the consent forms, producing a detailed schedule: when these things are done ahead of time, volunteers can relax into their work of relating to students and getting to know them.

Some youth ministry volunteers are brush clearers. Anxious about a one-on-one conversation with a teenager, they will eagerly make a snack run instead. Handle the snacks ahead of time.

The longer I’m at it, the more it feels like the most important parts of professional youth ministry work involve clearing the field so that the volunteers can do their work freely.

Maybe church doesn’t have to be the most important thing for people. Maybe making the most of the sliver of commitment some people are able to give church participation is as defensible an approach to ministry as continually looking for ways to deepen peoples’ their commitment, measured mostly in the number of church activities they attend.

This is accommodation.

Ever since I was a hair-on-fire seminarian I have been sermonizing against the fragmentation of contemporary life and the sinister ways a cult of “busy-ness” tears at Christian community and discipleship. It’s really hard to grow in relationships of mutuality and accountability in one hour per week.

That is not less true than it used to be, but I’ve gone from pronouncing “one hour” with an irritated gasp–“one hour?”–to pronouncing it with a fully-formed breath approaching admiration: “One hour!”

This is adaptation.

The reality of our schedules is a constraint upon ministry in our context. Kicking against constraints leads to frustration. Embracing them can lead to creative breakthroughs.

What can we do in an hour?

One of the advantages of living in a major city like Chicago is that it’s a place people come to visit. Sometimes on the same day.

Over the course of today’s lunch and dinner, I will spend time with four distant friends and their nine (that’s right: nine) combined children.

Book your trips now, people. The weather is amazing.

My kind of town indeed.