There have been a couple of seasons in my work that felt awful for how little control I felt I had over what I was doing, how little effect I thought it was having, and how exasperating every new effort felt. The first year of working with a particular group of junior high guys was one of those seasons. So was the first nine months of leading weekly Godly Play sessions with preschoolers. The challenges were strikingly similar.

I can now see how valuable those seasons were. Having to make it up as you go, trying something new each week, creating new problems by solving existing ones–there is no book, blog, or conference that can expand your skill set and knowledge base so dramatically. It feels downright awful some days, but it’s so worth it in the long run.

Remember that when you feel over your head and out of your league.

Bonus observation: the work of ministry allows for this kind of learning and growth in ways that I’m not sure many other types of work do. Teaching, probably. Community organizing? Making art? Those of us working in churches are lucky for the experience of feeling out of our depth and having the freedom–nay, the responsibility–to figure it out as we go.

I appreciate David Dark’s concept of “Attention Collections,” laid out in his book, Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious. Attention Collections are the songs on your mixtape, quotes from films that stuck with you, “your stories, your jams, your beloved enthusiasms.” Everyone has them, Dark argues. As much as any explicit religious catechesis, our Attention Collections indicate our religion.

Some of the pieces in my Attention Collection:

“Always double down on 11.”

“To be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.”

“I would walk with my people if I could find them.”

This weekend I’ll start exploring faith with our 8th grade Confirmation students, and I’m enthusiastic about the concept of an Attention Collection as a way for them to start to own the religion they’re walking around with every day, even though they don’t know it. Dark does this with college students, so it will need adapting for young adolescents.

I’m totally doing it though.

Let’s make a collaborative Attention Collection. Share a line, a quote, a song, a film, in the comments–a jam, a beloved enthusiasm.

 

It’s great when the turnout is more than you expect and more than you’re ready for. People are flexible, even helpful. They grab extra chairs and squeeze in next to strangers. Some of them even sit on the floor. There’s an energy born of good will and anticipation that makes it work.

You go with it, tweaking your program to suit this larger-than-you-were-ready-for crowd. It works.

Now you know. Next time be ready. You can’t ask for patience and flexibility over and over again and keep getting it. Adjust. Season to taste. Enjoy.

I saw Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins do a show last night where they celebrated an album they made 10 years ago by playing the whole thing, start to finish, like it was brand new. It wasn’t nostalgia.

What did you make a decade ago that you can still use?

I act like the work I’m doing today is only for today and that tomorrow and ten years from now require something new, different, better. I always want to be getting better, but the bonus of doing good work is that it lasts–you can use it more than once.

Let’s dig up some old work and put it to use again and see what happens.

You showed up to the meeting with that thing you worked on, and you presented it with conviction. The room fell silent. Then someone on the team said, “I’m not sure this is what we’re going for.” Uh oh. The thing you made isn’t the thing the team needs.

Good.

Especially when you’re new, opportunities for people to tell you that you’re off the mark and then–and this is critical–work with you to find the mark are valuable. They turn head-nodding into collaboration, and collaboration is almost never not good.

Our work is being perfected. Let’s not expect it to emerge from our brilliance fully-formed and gleaming like an iPhone prototype. If that’s what we’re waiting for we’ll never do anything that matters. Let’s make stuff our people need, share it, and then work together to fix it.

That’s a life right there.

I don’t ask, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”

I don’t announce the couple as, “Mr. and Mrs. [His First Name].”

And I don’t give permission to the groom to kiss the bride.

All of these traditional elements of a wedding service reflect a patriarchal, women-are-property expression of marriage. Nobody I know uses them.

I’m officiating six weddings over the next four months, and preparing for the first one is reminding me of all the things people expect in weddings, owing to how they are portrayed in film and television, that simply are not part of the wedding service my church uses. That’s because a wedding is a worship service. You never see that on TV.

When I first started out, I yielded to the demand for giving the bride away, because that subject never came up until the rehearsal, and by that time I was staring down the bride’s life-long expectation of being “given away.” I also said, “You may kiss the bride” early on because, again, I got caught flat-footed; it didn’t occur to me either that such a thing wouldn’t actually be in the service. I’ve learned since to be prepared for it, and I have really smart colleagues whose habits I copy when it comes to kiss instructions. “You may celebrate your vows with a kiss” probably works best, but Marci’s, “You may kiss your husband” is pretty irresistible.

Now my favorite elements of the wedding are the Declarations of Intent, where the couple expresses commitment to the covenant of marriage and everybody gathered voices their their support for the couple, and the sermon. I keep it short, but I revel in the chance to expound theologically upon marriage as a covenant, as an adventure, as resistance. I use this Chesterton quote in my sermons all the time: “Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable.”

All this to say: bring on the weddings, man.

 

“Painful as growing is we can’t forget it’s our ticket to taking the reins.”

Today is Daughter’s first day of third grade and her first day at a brand new school. She’s afraid she won’t find a friend. She’s also afraid of the science teacher who reportedly hangs a skeleton from the ceiling.

We’ve managed first-day-of-school with her before, but not while we, her parents, were also navigating first-days of our own; Meredith is in the third week of her new job, and I’ve got seven months under my belt but staring down the barrel of the start of youth programs this weekend. It’s not great. You’d much rather accompany your kid on her first-day with a clear head, confident of where you stand in the world.

But this is how growth and learning happens, isn’t it? You don’t get to set the conditions for the challenges you face. They show up–sometimes on schedule, sometimes not–and call on you to respond, to meet them with whatever you’ve got. You don’t get to wait until you’re on your A-Game before acting.  That’s true for parenting, pastoring, and every other meaningful work we want to do.

So here’s to pushing through, faking it, putting on a brave face, and all the other strategies we employ on the first-days.

In the first church I served as Pastor, there was a man named Keith who held a prominent leadership position in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). He was the first person I’d ever met who worked for organized labor. He was smart, genial, soft-spoken, and exceedingly humble. And true to every stereotype, he and his spouse, Sandra, were deeply committed (and connected) to the Democratic Party. When Keith retired, his party included speeches by Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. My spouse and I were invited to that party and seated up front with those Democrats, because Keith and Sandra were very generous to us.

I wasn’t raised to think one way or another about the cause of Labor. For 35 years, my dad worked for a company notorious for busting up unions, but I never heard my parents talk about that. They mostly swam in conservative evangelical political waters, and so I imbibed more antipathy about unions than I did enthusiasm. But the people who I heard speaking about Keith at his retirement told stories of him supporting and defending and showering their generosity upon people who reminded me a lot of my parents: young workers without college educations subject to the demands of big companies to make a living. That evening changed my impression about organized labor and the people who belong to it.

Personal experience has a huge impact on how we think and feel about things like labor unions. If nobody in your family has ever been in one, they’re an abstraction, like they were for me before I was Keith’s pastor. Now, every Labor Day, he’s the person I find myself thinking about.

 

 

I caught up over the phone yesterday with a good friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in months. Sure we’ve texted and messaged and commented on one another’s Facebook statuses (stati?) in a pretty constant stream, but we haven’t actually spoken since I can’t remember when. Maybe March?

That phone call made the rest of my day better.

I don’t adequately appreciate the telephone. It’s a bloody marvel, isn’t it? You just can’t achieve the depth of conversation the phone affords with the sprawling array of text and photo-based tools we’re all using. Pace, volume, and pitch are just a few of things that a telephone conversation allows you to experience that, unless you’re face-to-face, no other medium can handle (my experience with video calling apps like Skype makes me even more enthusiastic about the phone. I was once asked by a search committee to do a Skype interview and I insisted on a telephone conference call instead–though those aren’t perfect, I guess).

I appreciate more about my friend and what’s going on in his life after an hour on the phone than I do after months of almost constant digital contact.

Reach out and touch someone today.

 

First, make the thing. Then decide what to call it. If you start with the title first, how will you avoid making design choices to fulfill the expectations of some random name?

We designed a youth retreat some years ago and started with the title, “No Question.” The name came from some insight early in the planning process, but the further we got in putting the event together, the less any of us remembered about that insight, and yet still we designed–talks, small groups, exercises–toward “No Question.”

What you call something matters. What that thing actually is, though, matters more.

If a name is required at the beginning, say if you’re launching a website or a new worship service, it’s probably helpful to make a prototype first–compose your first blog post; assemble your first liturgy–and then ask, “What does this thing want to be called?”

All this to say I always title my blog posts after I’ve written them.