I send out a weekly newsletter to youth and parents that lists the schedule for the coming Sunday’s activities and announces upcoming special events and, regularly, features a pastoral note. I’m wondering if it’s worth it.

Almost every week somebody asks me a question that the newsletter already answered. They didn’t read it. They didn’t even get it. This used to irritate me, like I went to all this trouble to share the information in advance, and people couldn’t do the minimum to make use of it. But I’ve accepted by now that we all are besieged with too much electronic communication to make good use of, especially if we have kids. I get multiple emails from Daughter’s school every week, and her cheer team uses an app called Band that pings me with a constant stream of information and updates. Then there are email reminders about doctor and dentist appointments, all mixed in with whatever is hitting my inbox related to me. It is simply too much for people to be expected to manage.

So I’m wondering if there’s a better way than the weekly email. Much of what’s in the newsletter is static from week to week anyway; we’re always meeting before worship at 9:15 and after at 11:15–does that require a weekly reminder email? The only reason to share that is for people who don’t know it, prospective participants, and directing them to a webpage where those times are listed is easier than asking them to sign up for an email newsletter. Same with the event announcements and sign up links: put them on the website and send people there. Don’t clutter up their inboxes and expect them to take meaningful action.

I feel like the weekly newsletter is an anxious product that we make in order to feel more in control of what’s happening in the church and the world right now. The anxiety is well-placed. Change is afoot. Yet it seems certain that the things keeping people from regularly participating in the things we’re working on go well beyond a well-written-and-visually-attractive weekly email. We are in the position people are always in when we’re seeking enrollment in something we think is important, and that is the choice of other people.

That choice can be harmed by insufficient communication. It can be enabled by reliable communication. But it feels like we’re trying to compel participation with a barrage of information, and that’s both ineffective and unhealthy.

So a website with the stuff that is static from week to week and event signups. Email to send people there. Smiles and warm welcomes when they arrive.

I have a relationship with my Kindle, not love/hate so much as love/fear: I fear that reading it is damaging my soul by replacing paper and ink with pixels. It’s dramatic, I know.

For two years, though, I’ve used my Kindle for as many school-required texts as are available, and for one big reason that paid off once again on the year-end paper I turned in on Sunday. The highlighting and note-taking capability of a Kindle are widely known and useful enough, but the ability to export all those notes and highlights, to have them show up as a pdf attached in an email, a pdf that you can print and read as a kind of personal Cliff’s Notes–that changes the game.

Yes, one of the things I appreciate most about my e-reader is the ability to convert it to paper.

I couldn’t get started on a big project with a looming deadline. It was a 20-25 page paper for school. I started with the bibliography. It was mostly finished in about 20 minutes, and now my fingers were moving and my mind was pumping with the things from each source I knew I needed to include in the paper. 24 hours later, the paper was done and turned in, a full day before the deadline.

Start with the bibliography.

There I responsibilities that need fulfilling sending shots of dread through my chest whenever I think of them. They’re on the calendar or they have an approaching deadline. They feel important. I probably volunteered for them. Still, I can’t get feel anything but impending doom when I think about them, and my mind produces scene after scene of disaster, mostly revolving around the certainty that I won’t be prepared and people are disappointed.

Do you do this?

The only thing I’ve found that relieves this dread is the performance of the responsibility. Take Christmas Eve. My responsibilities for that are clearly defined, and I know them weeks and weeks out. Still, as the day approaches my breathing gets short and my sleep is visited by dreams in which I show up to the wrong church or without my shoes. And this is after 17 years of doing it. Yet in every one of those years, the moment arrives when I have to open my mouth and start speaking, everything slows down and the breathing deepens. It always goes (more or less) well. So why does my brain spend endless days certain that it won’t?

Asking the people in your church or in your neighborhood or in your family about their ideas and their hopes provides you more than data. Those conversations generate engagement. The act of saying out loud something that’s been stirring in their head or their heart rearranges the board. No, the board was moving before, when you asked and when you listened.

A committee did a “big idea” exercise on Zoom using the annotation function and a screen shared whiteboard. The leader asked and we posted things we’ve thought about but not shared. Now we’ve shared them, things are different. Many of the ideas won’t get done (most), but they’re out there now and needing to be dealt with. That changes the game.

It just needs a leader to ask.

Years ago I served a church with a preschool whose Director wanted to install about 50 feet of fencing between the entrance to the school and the sidewalk that led to the parking lot. A toddler had recently bolted from the building and run unimpeded to the lot (unharmed), opening the Director’s eyes to the need for a barrier. It was a compelling case, so we took it to the Property Committee. They said no.

The committee were not monsters, and they weren’t without sense. They had questions for which we didn’t have answers: what kind of fence? Chain link or wood? How high will it be? Will you fence in the whole school?

We answered these questions with some agnosticism, because we didn’t care about the details as much as we cared about the big picture. There’s a safety risk here. We need a fence. But what hurt our case more than our in-the-moment answers was the committee’s perception that we hadn’t really thought it through. Thinking it through is a committee’s whole reason for existence.

The lesson I learned is that committees are filled with people with technical questions related to the thing they are charged with overseeing and not the big picture. If a fight breaks out between the big picture and some committee members unanswered question, the unanswered question will win. I learned that I need to anticipate all the questions and prepare answers. If the committee prefers different answers, fine; discussions about competing suggestions get further than questions with no answer.

Come in with answers. They don’t have to all be right. They just need to be answers.

[We came back with a more detailed proposal a few months later and got the fence]

I spent more time than was justifiable Sunday evening and Monday morning culling my Spotify library. In 2020, Spotify changed the way its Liked Songs playlist worked for users so that, when you add an album to your library, all of the songs on that album no longer get automatically added to the Liked Songs list. I didn’t take much stock of the change and kept adding albums and songs to my library. As the tally of Liked Songs crept toward 8,000, though, I decided to get under the hood and see what was actually in there.

Digital music is like digital photography in that its greatest advantage–the sheer size of a collection–is also its greatest hindrance. I’ve also spent obscene amounts of time trying to organize, backup, and categorize years worth of digital photos–and for what? For the collection. I used to have my music collection lined up in plastic cases on a shelf, and I still have collections of pictures in photo books, but a digital collection is something very, very different. Still, I want to be able to get my hands around it and to know where it begins and ends.

8,000 songs is not a collection. It’s a mess. So I cut it down by half. I went through every album in my library, removing many of them entirely (some were nostalgic relics of albums I had as a teenager but that I’m never going to actually play start-to-finish–sorry Richard Marx; others were albums I’d added with the hope of listening to them later but never did). For the albums I kept, I un-liked the songs on them that I don’t actually, well, like. For an album to justify its existence in my library, there need to be at least three songs on it that I like. However, movie soundtracks, as a category, are exempt from this rule; I don’t really like any of the songs on “The Bridges of Madison County” soundtrack, but I like to play it in its entirety when I’m in a certain mood.

Here, then, is a five-song random shuffle of my new, slimmed down, Liked Songs playlist. I stand by all of these.

I wasn’t punk but I wish I was. Neither was I rock or rap or metal or new wave. I had a country phase, but I was mostly tuned to the pop stations, and when I could afford to buy tapes and CD’s, I bought what I heard on the radio. Not college radio. Top 40 radio.

Whenever people ask me if I was into Pixies or The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Ramones, Tupac, or Nirvana I admit that I was not, and with some guilt, as if I would be a more well-rounded adult if I were. But I simply wasn’t exposed to most of it from my perch in the suburbs. If commercial DJ’s didn’t play it, I didn’t hear it. The Cure and Lemonheads T-shirts I saw at school were as foreign to me as the Hard Rock Cafe shirts–they seemed like something people were into who were in on a joke I didn’t get. It was intimidating.

The miracle of streaming music means it’s all there for the taking now. I can listen at 45 to the things the cool kids were listening to at 15, but for the first time. And there are podcasts to help you, like the Spotify original Bandsplain, which I love. Most of it I still don’t like; I’ve always had more of an ear for conformity than for transgression, and the undercurrent of rebellion seeded in most “alternative” music still jars my sensibilities.

I should probably stop trying to be a teenage punk.

I switch email apps on my phone frequently, either because the one I’m currently using lacks a particular function another one promises or simply because I’m bored with it. I also regularly replace the user interface and the icons. I even swap phones; I own two budget model phones and move a single SIM card between them for no reason other than my need for constant novelty from a device I use dozens and dozens of times every day.

I wear the same pair of shoes daily and rotate my shirts each week between five nearly identical black and grey button-ups. I sit in the same spot at the same time every morning to drink the same coffee and do the same two things: write a blog post and read newsletter subscriptions on my Kindle. I am a creature of routine and habit.

But not with my phone. I can’t explain it. It serves no purpose, and it actually creates complications: text message conversations don’t sync between them, so sometimes when I send a message to someone their response goes to the other phone and I never see it. I’ve told myself hundreds of times while switching the SIM card that this is the last time I’m switching, that it’s silly and immature to be doing this. But within a matter of days I am sure to miss something about the one I shelved–the feel of it in my palm, the operating system, the calendar app. And so I switch again.

All this to say, I apologize for not replying to your text message. Give me about a week.

A coward’s words on courage are no less true for the speaker’s cowardice. Speaking truth must lead to living it for the speaker to have integrity and for the speech to be believable, but speaking and living remain distinct challenges that should not be collapsed into one another.

Most of us are acutely sensitive to our shortcomings when it comes to living the truths we wish to voice, particularly those truths concerning love and giving and forbearance. So we don’t speak. We can’t, because we’re not living well enough.

Maybe we have confused the relationship between these two things. We posit living truth as a precondition to arguing for it, because we hate nothing more than a hypocrite who talks out the side of their face. But there’s a difference between preaching a truth you believe and struggle to embody and speaking a truth you think people want to hear but that you don’t actually believe. The former is aspiration. The latter is pandering.

What if there is a causal relationship between defending the truth we believe in public and following it in private? What if we can speak ourselves into truthful living?