A reporter interviews a coal miner and admits, at the miner’s probing, that he has never personally been to a coal mine, and then abashedly lays down his assertion that coal emissions are damaging the climate. “I’m having a strong reaction to this,” says the reporter. “Because I realize I’ve never actually experienced the thing I’m talking about.”

Stop it.

If we demand lived first-hand experience of a thing as the only reliable basis for claims about that thing we’re sunk. I have never fired a gun or been part of gun violence, yet I know that guns kill more than 33,000 Americans annually. I’ve never been to Syria, yet I’ve learned that a staggering 470,000 people have died in its civil war.  And I’ve never visited a coal mine or a coal-powered electric plant, but I know that emissions from burning coal makes up a significant part of CO2 emissions in the U.S.

We live in a world of information. Much of that information is researched and peer reviewed. Much of it also is not. Some of it is even full on fabrication. I believe that reliable information is out there, though, and that the answer to fabrication is better information, which is still readily available.

 

Testify.

I spoke with a group of people who are new to our church last night, a room of about 15, to introduce myself and share why I’m here and what I do. I still haven’t gotten over the embarrassment I feel in talks like that. 

When I was a young adult volunteer living in an intentional community, I was asked to tell my story at one of the weekly community meetings. I said to the Leader with some panic, “But I don’t have a story.” His reply held some pity but also some offense, and in a way that is quite concrete it oriented me toward the things that would follow in my life. 

“Everyone has a story.” 

My hesitation then came from comparing my story to the story of all the remarkable people in that community and finding it paltry by comparison. My hesitation now comes from not wanting to elevate my story over other peoples’, because now I have a role in a community that lets me tell it. 

Everyone has a story. 

The story of a call to ministry and a story of how you got out of bed this morning. 

Everyone has a story. 

Tell yours. 

The more of it you do, the easier it will be. That’s as true for writing as for running, for praying as for cooking. The more of it you do, the easier it will be.

The barrier to beginning next time comes down a little when you begin this time. Next time, having done it before, won’t feel so intimidating. This is not how we often think about it. “By saving my strength today, I will have more to give tomorrow,” we tell ourselves. The truth is that saving our strength today only prepares us to save our strength again tomorrow.

Every time doesn’t have to be epic. Overcook the chicken today. It’s more likely next week’s chicken will be better for this overcooked one than for the imaginary one you never started on. Write a weak blog post today. It’s more likely to make tomorrow’s better than skipping today is.

Say “Yes” to requests to do things that intimidate you. Those requests are a gift. They give you another thing to put on your list of things you’ve done and can do again if you choose. Don’t say “Yes” out of obligation. Don’t say “Yes” when all your other Yeses are piled up all around you. Say “Yes” if you can actually do it. Just don’t say “No” because you haven’t done it before.

The more of it you do, the easier it will be.

When I moved to southern California in the summer of 2007, I felt like I’d been there before. I had. When I was 11, my grandmother drove me, my brother, cousin, mother, and aunt from Colorado to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland. It was amazing. 

But what I experienced as a transplant was more than nostalgia. I inexplicably felt at home in a way I hadn’t in previous moves. The freeways, the landscape, the climate: everything about the place felt familiar. 

Robert Kaplan’s Earning The Rockies is helping me understand why. It’s because California is The West, and I, having grown up in Denver, am from The West. I just didn’t know it until California. 

I was 31. I had lived in Kansas, Missouri, Northern Ireland, and New Jersey since leaving home in 1994. All of those locales had things about them that took getting used to: the unbroken horizon in the plains; the east coast traffic circle; the dense forests of the midwest. Nothing about relocating west in 2007 presented such an adaptation challenge. I felt like I knew the place from the day we unloaded our truck. 

Kaplan’s central thesis is that the geography of the American content is inseperable from its politics and its identity as a world leader, even as, yes, an empire. It also seems to me that this country’s geography shapes us, it’s citizens, in ways we don’t fully understand. We are Western, Mid-western, Eastern, and Southern without realizing it (maybe the Southerners realize it–I’ve never lived there, but everyone Southern I know possesses a strong sense of regional identity).

Kaplan’s thesis must also hold for churches too, right? The institutional rigor of churches I’ve experienced in the Midwest and the East is a stark contrast to the relaxed and flexible posture of the churches in Colorado and its Western neighbors, and much of that has to do with the geography of the places that birthed those churches.

The Chicago church I serve now is older than the city that held the California congregation I served. It is and always has been a metropolitan institution. My previous church emerged on a citrus grove after WWII. That makes for very different kinds of churches with very diffeent sets of instincts. 

I close this meandering reflection on geography with one of the more prescient observations from Earning The Rockies, about the global and geographic forces at work in this country’s past and future. 

Much of this territory fills out the lower 48 only because the United States won a military and political contest with Mexico in the 19th century: to repeat, another morally ambiguous legacy that later helped the country right the world in two great wars in the century following. With Spanish language culture surging back, as it has been for decades now, traditional American Protestant culture is not only being made more nuanced by a new Global Cosmopolitan culture but by a specifically old world, Counter Reformation Catholic culture to the south, furthering America’s dissolution into the planetary maelstrom.

Disagreeing with an idea you’ve never personally held is less influential than opposing one you have. If you tell me I’m wrong simply because you’re right and you have always been right, I’m less inclined to believe you than if you tell me I’m wrong because you used to think like me but have been persuaded to change your mind. 

For one thing, if you fashion yourself to be the holder of all the true ideas, they aren’t your ideas. You got them somewhere. Tell us where. Own their borrowed-ness.

Don’t tell us a story of your correctness. Tell us the story of your conversion. 

Who is your fiercest critic?

It’s yourself, right? 

But which one? 

The manifestation of me that is hardest on me is the 20 something version. He’s the one who didn’t know what he was going to do with his life but who knew what he believed in, and so he’s the one who bellows the loudest when a decision requires some compromise. He knew almost nothing, but he just knew, you know? And he felt it was his duty to call out your compromise. He spoke the truth in love. 

Our mind never fully changes, does it? Even after we embrace new learning and allow it to modify our belief, the argument goes on. We act on new belief and live out changed convictions in public, while in private we trade barbs with the version of ourselves that is still certain that the old belief was the right one. 

Stay in that dispute.When we declare the present day Us fully right and enshrine the beliefs she holds right now in an unassailable casing, we lose touch with something. Empathy, maybe? Humility? 

The 20 something me knows less than he thinks he does, and that is annoying. It’s destructive, even. But he has a conviction about him that I still need. So I haven’t banished him. 

Yet. 

I sent in the thing. 

By the deadline. 

Three weeks before the deadline, I’m fact. 

No response. 

No matter. 

I sent a follow up a week before the deadline. 

No response. 

Matter. 

Stew. 

Fret. 

Wait. 

Then… 

“you never sent me the thing.” 

%*#&!!

I’ve been wronged. 

This isn’t fair. 

Some people. 

Wait. 

What email address did I send it to? 

How did I spell it? 

No. 

No no no no no no. 

I misspelled the email address when I sent in the thing there weeks before the deadline. 

I misspelled the email again when I sent a follow up a week before the deadline. 

%*#&!!
I’ve been wrong. 

I’ve been unfair. 

I’m some people. 

Last Sunday evening we went to a pot luck at a nearby church. The gathering was hosted by members of that church who sponsor a Syrian refugee family. They invited the moms group my wife belongs to, because it, too, sponsors a Syrian refugee family: the daughter, son in-law, and granddaughter of the family sponsored by the church. Church, moms group, and sponsored families all assembled over casserole dishes. 

One moment from the evening stood out. With toddlers scampering up and down the chancel steps in the church’s social hall, Syrian and American dads sat on the chancel and watched. Not much could be said, owing to language, but also owing to the recklessness of two year-olds in a perpetual state of near collision. Sure enough, one of the toddlers got too close to a standing floor banner and it started to topple over. In a flash, three dads sprung from their seats and caught it. The toddler was never the wiser. Still unable to converse, the dads shared knowing looks of relief and then sat back down. 

This transpired while the women sat talking with one another, free mostly of the accident-prone little ones, making plans for tutoring, sharing medical advice–all through the translator who had come as well as with Google translate in their phones. 

The moment was an illustration of the power in this nascent community in which the movement and progress is being driven by mothers whose partners stand mostly at the edges, wiping noses and catching falling objects. 

I like it. 

I worked in the youth ministry of a church where the entire year’s programming was built around fund-raising events, like eight of them. It was too much. 

I’ve also worked at churches that didn’t raise enough funds for youth ministry to do it well, or that didn’t target fund-raising to specific events or trips for it to be effective. 

Somebody once objected to a youth mission trip fundraiser: “Why should people give money for this? These kids’parents can afford it.” 

He wasn’t wrong. At least as far as appearances go, appearances for these specific people who are here at this precise moment. 

But raising money to supplement the budget for a youth mission trip is more than a practical exercise. It’s more than math, and its more than dollars and cents. It’s about inviting the congregation to personally participate in the mission students are taking. It’s about sending. 

It is also about building and supporting the norm that everybody gets to go, regardless of whether or not they look like they can afford the registration and the plane ticket. Vigorous fundraising that is well planned and carefully targeted enables me to tell a new student next year that they should come on the trip, even though their parents–or parent–are balking at what we’re suggesting families contribute toward the costs. That new student may become two the next year and then two more the year after that. 

As much as anything else in church life, fundraising for youth mission trips is about the students who are here now and the ones who will be here tomorrow. 

I spent six hours on Saturday perched in the wooden bleachers of a city park gymnasium for Kiddo’s first ever gymnastics meet.

Six hours.

A couple of things made it worth it. One, Kiddo rocked it. She earned some medals and a spot at next weekend’s citywide meet, where I’m sure the bleachers will rival Saturday’s for comfort (gymnastics newbie excursus here: Kiddo medaled in the balance beam even though she nearly fell. Almost falling but not falling is actually rewarded. I dig that).

Second, I got to see the city in a way I haven’t seen it since moving here. Judging by the North Side Region gymnastics league, the Chicago Parks District is a robust civic institution that represents a multiplicity of demographics in the city like nothing else I’ve seen.

Roughly 15 “parks” had teams at the meet, all of them based in a different city neighborhood. The hundreds of kids rolling and jumping around the gym were a spectacle of diversity and neighborhood identity. Gymnasts wore team leotards and marched in behind a team banner while parents from all of these neighborhoods crammed into every corner of the gym with posterboard signs and recording devices and nervous applause.

If he’s willing to stay off his phone, a newbie gymnastics dad could meet some interesting people from neighborhoods other than his own.

Six. Hours.

The park district gymnastics team costs $40 for three months. That makes it accessible to almost every elementary-aged aspiring olympian in Chicago. It’s suddenly my favorite thing.