If you’re invited to an event that feels bigger than you, where you’re the only bloke in a room of heavy hitters not in a suit and where your contribution to the goings on feels negligible, it’s not. You can still add value.

You can connect with new people. That’s good for everyone. We need more connections.

You can be curious and listen intently. It’s valuable for folks to feel heard.

You can express gratitude. The world is short on gratitude.

Those things add value right now.

But there’s a long game too, and you’ll be adding value to that in time as a result of your attendance at this shindig. This invitation is an investment in you that will pay dividends down the line, because your vision is expanding over wine and bacon-wrapped dates–your understanding of the work your people are doing; your imagination about the work you might do; your appreciation for the impact these kinds of investments have had on the heavy hitters, too.

You belong here. You just don’t know it yet.

 

This weekend was the Presbytery of Chicago’s Work of Love (AWOL) event for about 65 middle school youth, in which we learned about food insecurity, spent the night in a church, and then rode public transit to a community garden on Chicago’s south side, where we shoveled and raked and picked up trash in 30 degree weather.

I slept well last night.

An analogy for adolescent development occurred to me on the Red Line, as I urged a triad of squirrely seventh grade boys to pay attention to their surroundings and stop swinging from the hand straps. Early adolescence is a photograph with a blurry background but a clear foreground. Viewing it means focusing intently on the sole object in focus to the exclusion of everything else contained in the image. Development happens as the ability evolves to take in more of the photo and shift one’s focus from the foreground to the background and then back again.

Foreground: one’s immediate group of peers; the hand straps on the train; soda; Bible stories.

Background: the person addressing the group; the other riders on the train; dinner; the Biblical narrative.

It feels like the intensity of focus early teenagers have is an asset and not something to be disparaged until they grow out of it. But the challenge of working with adolescents still feels like nudging them toward adjusting their focus to take in more of what’s in the picture.

Oestreicher, I know you’re out there. Is this analogy helpful?

 

 

 

Another blog died today, suffocated by its author’s expectations for herself: the posts are uninspiring; they’re too confessional; she doesn’t enjoy blogging like she once did and isn’t reading enough to write well; her creativity needs other outlets.

Like the balance of most blogs ever created, this one’s brave observations went gently into the dark night of unhelpful standards for work that is worth doing.

R.I.P.

Inspiration is snake oil. There’s strength in vulnerability. Worthy work is not fun for long stretches of time. Writing well depends more on regular publishing than it does the right kind of reading. Creativity is something you find after the fact.

Blogging is building a body of work, and so I’m giving creativity and inspiration over to the artists, although I’m fairly certain they, too, will say that their songs and films and books and sculptures and poems and lesson plans and games are a body of work that feels shoddy more often than it feels worthy of publication. Yet the best ones keep at it.

The best blogging is off the mark for extended periods, and making it very, very often feels like drudgery that no reader with better things to do would enjoy. Yet when you review the body of work from those awful periods, aren’t you grateful to at least have something to show for your frustration?

Isn’t something is better than nothing?

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.