This Sunday I’m talking to our Confirmation class about the doctrine of Creation. It is essentially the module I made for this last year, although I added an emphasis here and there to respond to the questions this group of students is actually asking.

The question I always want to be asking with Confirmation curricula is: does it clarify faith? It’s not exactly a goal to persuade. It’s more a goal to clarify claims, to highlight confusions, remove obstacles, and welcome doubt; 13 year-old atheism doesn’t bother me at all, as long as the God they’re saying doesn’t exist is actually the one their church worships.

I faced him only once, when I was 12. He was only 11. He struck me out. He struck us all out. He was a man among boys, and his name was uttered in the dugout with awe and fear.

Halladay.

When he was drafted out of high school I remembered that at-bat, how quickly it was over and how glad I was for it to be over, the terror his fastball inspired, though it only ever went straight and down the middle. Still, I didn’t dare swing.

I next saw him in a big league uniform, and it was then that I started to boast of my brief encounter with him, our shared home town and little league progeny. When he became an All Star, when he pitched a perfect game, when he threw a no-hitter in a playoff game–“I knew that guy.” It wasn’t entirely true, of course. I didn’t know him, and were I to show up at some out of town stadium to meet him he surely wouldn’t know me.

Still, it’s the kind of marginal association you share with friends and co-workers because you hope that it imparts to you some significance, some importance. Proximity to greatness only means that you happened to be someplace, not that you did anything worth remembering. But some days that feels like a lot.

I saw him again yesterday, this time in the report of his death, at 40. His two-seater airplane crashed in Tampa Bay.

Last night I watched his career highlight videos for what felt like a long time. I re-read the feature Tom Verducci wrote for Sports Illustrated about him in 2010, about how he almost failed, almost quit, but then worked his way back. The news networks reporting his accident showed images from his Twitter page, and I felt some irrational guilt for not following it.

And now, today, I find myself saying it again: “I knew that guy.”

Churches. Synagogues. Mosques.

Elementary schools. High schools. Middle schools. Universities. Community Colleges.

Movies. Concerts. Malls. Restaurants. Nightclubs.

Post Offices. Military bases. Campaign rallies.

Offices.

No public space in America is safe. All of the above have been targeted by perpetrators of mass shootings.

An active shooter scenario plays in my mind almost every time I lead worship. I locate all the exits. I imagine the quickest unimpeded route to various spots in the sanctuary where a shooter may be taking aim. I have been doing this for nearly a decade. I’ve shared it with some of my colleagues, who confide they do the same thing.

I also do it in movie theaters.

My neighbor, when we walk our respective 4th and 6th graders to school, stands at the school entrance until his son is inside the doors. He says he’s been doing that since Sandy Hook. He has a scenario too.

With each new incident, our imaginary scenarios lurch closer to a when and further from an if. The people in charge of America’s gathering spaces must now add active shooter drills to their fire drills and tornado drills as basic disaster preparedness.

But mass shootings aren’t tornadoes. They persist because of choices, not weather.

More mass shootings are no doubt in store for us because we keep choosing to permit individuals to own almost any kind of gun instead of choosing to protect movie-going, worshiping, learning, working populace from showers of bullets.

Because if you are not permitted to own a military-style assault rifle, are you really free?

Mass shootings happen because of mental health issues in the shooters, and because of ideology, be it racist, terrorist, homophobic, or anti-government, and because of personal vendettas and grievances. The mix of propellants is unique to each incident.

And yet every incident involves at least one gun. Some are handguns, some are rifles, some are shotguns, some are assault rifles. Most guns used in mass shootings are obtained legally, some are enhanced by illegal accessories. But they are all guns. There simply is not another tool that an individual can use to inflict such mass casualty. It’s what assault rifles are manufactured to do and what conventional guns can easily be made to do.

And still the gun, the only common denominator in every mass shooting, enjoys intense sympathy, even reverence, among a powerful enough segment of America to prevent any meaningful restrictions on their acquisition. Indeed, the two decade death march that started at Columbine and has now processed through Virginia Tech, Aurora, Orlando, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, and many, many more public locales, seems only to have intensified guns’ protection. Gun control feels less likely now than it ever has.

Lord, have mercy.

 

 

I’m figuring out that Work/Life balance is not something that can be given to me, either by my work or my life. I have to make it. I have to work for Work/Life balance.

On the Work side, I have to make the best possible use of planning and preparation time. If I’m in the office and not in a meeting, I need to be making progress on designated projects. I need to be doing Deep Work.

I need to be working at Home, too. Not working on work, but working on Home. The kind of leisure time that I associate with the Home side of this ledger simply does not arrive if I have not done some work to make space for it. This is why much of my day “off” is given to preparing meals and doing laundry, because if those things aren’t done the rest of the week will be badly out of balance.

The takeaway here is that Home and leisure are not the same thing.

Yesterday all of our 6th-12th graders joined in the worship service instead of holding their regularly-scheduled youth group programs during that hour. We committed to doing this on the first Sunday of each month from September to May, because we believe our youth need to experience corporate Lord’s Day worship, and if our youth gatherings happen at the same time as worship, well, you see the problem (we tried youth-only worship services once a month for awhile, but that proved both theologically fraught and programatically unsatisfying to everyone–youth, leaders, and staff).

We still did our unstructured social gathering time for all youth prior to the worship service yesterday. As they left it for the sanctuary, some students slipped out of sight. Others complained about having to go to worship, which is “boring.” Still others simply stated their intention to leave.

There are two camps fighting it out in my head over this. One is the Take-Your-Medicine camp, which plants its flag on the importance of youth participating in the grown up church community, doing the things their parents do, including participating in–and leading–weekly worship. Two youth were among the worship leaders.

The Take-Your-Medicine camp insists on the formative force of the prayer of confession, the Scripture read and preached, the benediction, and all the rest of it. Our worship is proudly traditional, but vibrant and engaging. The music consists of hymns and classical anthems, but you won’t experience those things with the force they have here. And the preaching? It seems a sin for a teenager to spend 30 or so Sundays a year for seven years in our congregation and not hear the kind of preaching that goes on. That would be deprivation, pure and simple.

So the Take-Your-Mediciners shout to grumpy teens, “Worship is good for you!”

The camp that answers back is the Relevance camp. It wants more than anything for teenagers to experience church as critical and life-giving RIGHT NOW, and it is most certain that sitting them in a pew for the one hour a week we have them is a terrible waste of opportunity. Instead, the Relevance camp wants youth interacting with their peers and adult leaders, forming the kind of nourishing relationships that uniquely grow at church. It wants them discussing the Bible and contemporary events, not just listening to someone read it and tell them what it means and how it applies.

The Relevance camp is willing to permit youth in worship for special occasions like Confirmation and Youth Sunday services where students lead the entire thing. Otherwise, it hollers for sweeping substantive changes to the liturgy (“liturgy?!”) to make it more interactive and appealing to young people.

The battle rages on. The Take-Your-Medicine camp takes a hill when the 9th grader reading Scripture kills it and I can see the congregation totally keyed in. The Relevance camp retakes the hill as I watch three students giggle and whisper through the sermon.

A colleague has a new baby at home, and he’s describing through bloodshot eyes the maddening resistance infants put up to all routine and schedule. I need to stop meeting every description of an episode involving his son with one from my own experience, now nine years old, but parenting a newborn is one of those things you endure that make you believe you have something of value to share with the world.

Mine comes down to this: the routine and the schedule that you so desperately miss and that you would pay any price to establish is nothing compared to the one your new family situation may ultimately give you. Almost nothing about the way I spend my time at home and the things I do fulfills the expectations I had for what my life would be like with a kid. It’s so much better.

A succession of routines produced the one we inhabit now. They were all delightful and deficient in their own ways, as is this one, which, I know, is but a truck stop on the parenting highway. God willing, there’s miles and miles of road to come that will demand more changes in habit, more overcoming of hangups, the acquisition of more know-how.

The thing I keep reflecting on, listening to my colleague, is how much I enjoy doing things that parenting forced me to learn. The easiest example is cooking. I’m not a great cook, but I enjoy it, all of it. I enjoy the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the roasting and the grilling and the Instant Pot-ing. It was a chore, but thriving as a two-career family with a kid required me to take ownership of it. Turns out it’s the element of our little family life I enjoy the most.

Parenting isn’t the only thing that forces this kind of learning-to-love-it. Practically every change is an opportunity to get good at something we never had to do before. Resisting it in the name of keeping things the way they were is short sighted. Your future self asks you to consider that.

A parent of one of the high schoolers from my church texted me a photo on Halloween night. It was of her son and four of his peers from the church youth group, all dressed up as a “bluegrass band.” There were hats, overalls, bandanas, jugs, and spoons. They’s said they were doing this, but I hadn’t taken them at their word.

I smiled, because teenagers deciding to do something silly together is fun. Also, these youth don’t live close to one another; they invested time and forethought into a common project they all cared about, not one that was assigned.

My smile broadened as I recalled the long van ride to North Carolina last July during which three students entertained themselves for hours with a sprawling description of a fictional bluegrass band, including instruments, names, and, of course, outfits. Phone-less for 10 hours, this is what they did instead of Snapchat. Now, three months later, they’ve actually brought it to life.

Talking to a parent the following day, I smiled all over again to hear how she and her husband (whose son is in the band) spent trick-or-treating time with the other band parents. They hadn’t met each other before. They had a lovely dinner.

This is the story of the Church Youth Bluegrass Band.

Halloween was an excuse to hang out with the parents of Daughter’s bestie back in the day, to spend a warm autumn evening strolling the lanes and cul-de-sacs of their subdivision, since nobody trick or treated in our condominium complex. I have five years worth of pictures of these two preschoolers dressed as ladybugs, Ariel, dragons, and some other things I can’t make out through the fog of memory.

Last Halloween was our first away from Bestie and that subdivision, and we spent it as the grateful guests of my brother in law. Daughter accompanied an older cousin to her suburban haunts and brought in the candy haul of the ages, aided by the wits and experiences of a MIDDLE SCHOOLER.

Last night we did what our city neighborhood does on Halloween. We met up with two of Daughter’s classmates and their parents on a designated corner and proceeded to speed walk up and down tightly packed bungalow streets. It was fantastic. Our neighborhood is not kidding around when it comes to Halloween. Pretense is all it is, for kids to give reign to their imaginations, sure, but also for grown ups to have a walk and to gawk at their neighbor’s living room renovation, to lightly interrogate friends’ parents about where they live and what they do, to encircle a fire pit and drink hot cider with the neighbors out on the stoop.

Of course, Halloween is also pretense for that stooge (and every neighborhood has one) who can’t spot the line between the frightful subtext of the holiday and the sensibilities of children. He dons a grisly outfit and growls menacingly at trick or treaters. Some delight in it. Daughter did not. Only moments after encountering him, she declared her desire to go home, where she required me to lay next to her to until she fell asleep.

Trick or treating in the high 30’s is not going to be pleasant. But Daughter’s Target-bought unicorn costume is ready, because yesterday I soaked it in water to remove the slime it accumulated at the Sunday afternoon slime making Halloween party we hosted for her friends. I also laundered the white turtleneck and pink leggings that go with it, along with every article of dirty clothing and linen in the apartment.

I did all this in between cooking a really nice corn chowder for Wife and I to have for our lunches this week, a Mississippi roast for last night’s dinner, four chicken thighs for shredding over salads, and three breaded Tilapia filets that were supposed to be Sunday night’s dinner but were neglected in favor of leftover party appetizers.

It was a pretty standard Monday, and I loved it.

Mondays are my days off, and I fill them with cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. I end Mondays utterly relaxed and rested.

Rest, for me, does not require no work. It requires different work.

Sunday mornings are full of youth activities at my church. The youth choir rehearses, then three different youth groups meet all at the same time. In between there’s half an hour of informal community time for all students, 6th-12th grade. That is a lot of activity for one morning.

And yet there are days like yesterday when I’m not part of any of it, when I spend a few cursory minutes greeting youth during that community time and nothing else. A year ago that would have really bothered me. I would have felt like I wasn’t doing my job. I’ve learned something about ministry with youth in this context over the last several months, though.

For one thing, I’m able to greet students because I have had experiences with them outside of the Sunday morning program, when, as yesterday, my time is divided among many other things. I’ve been to Montreat with some of them, to Detroit with others. I spent the past Friday night at a lock-in with some of them. We’ve been on retreats. The possibility of even a brief, familiar exchange on a busy morning is created days, even months before.

Days like yesterday are when the advance work of youth ministry pays off. I mean the advance work of ordering the bagels and making sure all the rooms were set up properly, photocopying curriculum and related resources, ordering leaders’ binders with the materials they need, and sending out the weekly e-newsletter with the day’s schedule. I also mean writing the curriculum. I also mean creating the year-long curriculum plan that it fits into. I also mean inviting those leaders to serve in the first place and investing some time (not enough) in getting to know them and encouraging them for their work.

Some contexts for youth ministry reward face-to-face relational work with a modicum of advance planning and preparation. My last context was more like that. I planned, but if I felt the plan needed changing I could do it on the fly. What mattered was all of the students’ interactions with one another and mine with them.

I’m learning that there are some contexts where in-the-office, administrative, reflective work of planning and writing and setting leaders up for a good experience pays off just as much as the relational work does in other places.