Irritants

When I was a kid, we didn’t have peanut allergies and gluten allergies. I realize I’m voicing my inner grouchy old man here, but peanut butter and cyanide were not in the same category when I was in elementary school. This became the topic of conversation with a friend one morning, but this dialog took a different turn than your average “retirees solving the world’s problems over coffee” conversation. My friend has her doctorate in medical things, so I had to ask--what caused the avalanche of allergies? She suggested one theory that I found particularly striking: Several generations of antibiotic and antibacterial use has left our immune systems underexposed to allergens and irritants. Now our puny defenses can’t protect our bodies from what were once merely low-level threats. It would seem that isolation isn’t the best strategy for health. I feel a metaphor coming on.

The possibility of “something bad happening” has kept many good people sequestered to the safety of their own living rooms. They don’t risk meeting someone they might disagree with. The mere suggestion of a contrary influence must be shunned. Even a conversation about people different from them has them breaking out in boils. They might be nobly motivated to be the best of society, but instead they become the armada of the anemic .

The healthiest people I know have been “exposed” to life. There’s something to be gained by exposure. They don’t blindly endorse the opinions of everyone, but they aren’t afraid of conversations.  Healthy people know encountering others is key to growth. Leaving the safety of one’s germ-free domicile isn’t always easy, but neither is anything that makes you stronger. Interaction with others gives you perspective.

Visually, you gain perspective by seeing different things at once.  In life, you gain perspective by seeing different things at once. Everyone should experience a period of their life where they are a minority.  Everyone should personally know people who are very different from themselves. When you trade categories for first names, the world becomes a better place. What once irritated you can become a point of dialog. Your opinion might not shift far from your antiseptic-wiping comrades, but you will be much healthier.

You can hide and survive in life. Or, you can engage and thrive. If you’re still hiding behind your bible, open it up and read which approach Jesus did. He ate with religious leaders and partied with government workers. He hung out with the in-crowd and the outcasts, the purebreds and the half-breeds. Jesus turned out okay. Somehow he managed to love even the people he disagreed with. In our world that seems to be irritated by everything, maybe Jesus (aka “The Friend of Sinners”) has a better approach.

Having cake and eating cake

Having your cake and eating it too sounds like a sweet deal. You always have this nice cake sitting there, so whenever your sweet tooth beckons,  you tap your endless supply of cake. You have it. You eat it. Unfortunately, this spontaneously regenerating cake is regretfully rare in our universe. Everyone wants one, but nobody has one. Word on the street is you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

That little saying about nonrenewable baked goods points to an immutable truth in life: You can’t do whatever you want without consequences. If you want to lay on the couch and eat fast food every day,  you won’t stay trim and buff. If you want to get wasted on Friday, Saturday is going to be rough. If you want to live like hell today, don’t expect a life like heaven tomorrow. Consequences are consequential.

All of us go through phases of living like we’ve got perpetual cake. Then at some point, we wake up smelling like bakery vomit and realize that nothing is left of our cake but crumbs. That’s when many of us realize that we aren’t exceptions to the laws of life. We scratch our cake-eating heads and wonder if someone has figured out a way to eat just enough cake. That search takes us to a chick named wisdom.

Wisdom is the collection of best cake-eating practices. Wisdom knows you can’t have it all, and she knows how much you should have. Wisdom knows how to best live life today so it doesn’t suck tomorrow. You might be surprised where this metaphorical babe hangs out--in church.

Good religion has balancing guidelines for how life is best lived to the max. A “cake rationing plan” of sorts. When you’re in the “wahoo, I’ve got cake!” phase of life, adhering to guidelines seems like obeying killjoy rules. The only thing better than a little cake is a lot of cake, right? But when you walk in the kitchen and find no cake for the week because you inhaled it all last night, following a plan starts to seem like a good option.

Tired of being cakeless? There’s a wise lady you should go see.

The Boredom Threshold

I recently sat through a couple hours of a civic meeting. When I left, more than half of the agenda items were untouched. No stranger to boring situations, I've observed that people reach a point when patient listening moves beyond their grasp. The exact point varies from person to person, but when the “boredom threshold” is achieved, some action must be taken. In said meeting, some found spam emails on their phones become strangely interesting, some brashly cleared their throats in a failed attempt to rush a speaker, some snored gently as consciousness itself became too great a chore, and others collected their papers and walked out the door.

When the boredom threshold is hit in life, action must be taken. We are compelled to break away from the usual “wake-shower-work/school-TV-sleep” routine and do something that actually gives us a bit of a buzz. Clearly everyone has a different threshold for this. “Adventure” for one person means jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, and for another it means an evening of watching NBC instead of the usual ABC. You weren’t designed to whittle your life away in abject boredom. There are too many great experiences in life for you to re-waste your time re-reading the Twilight Series.

When the boredom threshold light glows on our dashboard, it tells us we’ve been fueled with too much caution. If we don’t pop the hood and add some risk to our lives, our vehicle might just die on the side of the road from ennui. Part of our human engineering is this need to mix it up from time to time. Occasionally, you’ve just got to do something different. Picking  that “something different” is where things might get messy.

The boredom threshold dictates that your life needs to a shift from caution to risk, but here’s the tricky part: nowhere in your owner’s manual does it say that you need to do something “bad”. Clearly this is confusing, because frequent “boredom busters” include Vegas benders, imbibing too much cheap beer, and getting unprofessional with that girl in accounting. We muster up the energy to break from orbit, and then we fly to planet evil. Somehow, we get convinced that our break with the mundane requires a break with morality. It’s a lie.

When your boredom boils over, it’s time for a risk. Maybe you need to round up friends and family for the most epic croquet game ever. Maybe you need to convince a friend to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with you. Maybe you need to go cook a meal at a homeless shelter. Maybe you need to find a problem that no one else is solving and take the first step to solve it. Maybe your boredom threshold breach is your signal to kick in the gates of hell and do something good in this world.

Reached the boredom threshold yet? Go do something…good.

Pink Phones and Mall Clothes

There I was, sitting in Panera working when a flock of middle school girls invaded the “quiet” side of the restaurant. Suddenly the laptop computer haven was flooded by a sea of mall clothes and pink-cased iPhones. Loud, non-stop, simultaneous talking was accompanied by impossibly louder, endless giggling.

“Cold drinks make my braces hurt!”

“My cat has a cold!”

“I want you to be my locker partner this year!”

“I’m going to the bathroom! Who’s with me?”

At first I was annoyed. I couldn’t even hear that horrible flute arrangement of Clapton songs Panera insists on playing. I had work to do, and I didn’t care to know how dumb their parents were and which boys were cute. But suddenly the menagerie of failed cosmetic attempts made me smile. What changed my opinion on all the talking, texting, giggling, and wondering aloud if those shorts make them look fat? I realized they were doing exactly what teenagers should be doing, because they weren’t victims of human trafficking.

The statistic I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for the past month is that up to 300,000 girls aged 11 to 17 in the United States are lured into the sex industry. My mind fights the insanity of that reality by simply going numb. Forcing past the enormity of confronting the world’s second-most profitable crime (following drug dealing), I’ve learned that I can help simply by being aware, alert, and active. I won’t turn a blind eye to the reality--I will be aware. I will take note of teens who appear trapped and abused. I will take action and report it to authorities and organizations that can help.

And the next time I see a dozen pink iPhones headed my way, I’ll probably move across the room.

In da club

Suppose a friendly life form from the other side of the Milky Way decides to check out this swirly blue planet across the galaxy called Earth. It looks like a nice, deserted place to vacation. As he approaches in his space ship, he is pleasantly surprised to see satellites and space stations, and relishes the possibility of making intergalactic friends. He eagerly turns on his speakers to hear transmissions from the locals, and pop radio tells him everything he knows about the inhabitants on the planet. He decides to check out that red planet next door instead.

If your sole input for life goals, meaning, and purpose come from pop music and media, you would think that life is all about what happens “in da club”.  Looking sexy, rolling with friends, losing control, and getting low on the dance floor is what life is about. After all, you were born this way. You might live in this illusion for a brief season, but real life disagrees.

If our alien friend would have landed, he would have discovered that pop radio is nothing more than a curious facade that benefits a segment of the economy more than it benefits reality. Real life stretches far beyond the club in all directions. There is vocation, learning, purpose, meaning, family, and endless other facets of life that have precious nothing to do with being “hot”.  Pop radio has it wrong--even ugly people can have a great life on this planet.

What happens “in da club” is a blip. All the flexing, name-branding, spray tanning, and intoxication is a sliver slice of the pie of life.  “Da club” agenda is a misguided notion force fed you by an industry that ranks its own needs over yours. You can live in its vaporous reality for a transient moment, but eventually you’ll be ejected from the club. Sooner than later, the bouncer of real life will toss you on the sidewalk.

Maybe our energies are better spent on life “out da club”. Maybe the next intergalactic traveler will risk landing.

Street Cred

Credibility needs connection. People want to know that you understand what it’s like to be them before they will listen to you. There was a point when J-Lo’s small army of publicists realized that she was losing influence with mere common people. A spin campaign hit the song charts, assuring us peasants that she was still “Jenny from the block”. Thus pacified, we continued to buy her CDs, watch her movies, and overlook the fact that parts of her anatomy were insured for more than some of us might earn in a lifetime.

Politicians charter tour buses to towns so small both bumpers can’t fit within city limits. They talk about their “roots” and “getting back to basics.” They want credibility. Superstar actors slum in indie film roles between filming blockbusters. They want street cred with their fans. They intuit that if the average guy measures too great of distance between the seats and the stage, they’ll stop listening. If they are going to keep in touch with their followers, they can’t be more than an arm’s length above them. Maybe we’re jaded, but most of us are pretty good at sniffing out someone who doesn’t “get” us. Jesus knew this, too.

When it came to picking a team to share his good news, Jesus didn’t draw from the pool of religious leaders. They had the right letters after their name, and they had positions of authority and power. They were religious experts, but they didn’t have street cred. Those guys didn’t have a clue what it was like to be an ordinary dude. Jesus picked blue-collar guys, grassroots leaders, and government workers. This scares me a bit.

I’ve got a string of religious degree letters after my name. I’ve paid the bills by talking about faith and spirituality. I was ironically ordained an “elder” before I was thirty. But I desperately hope that I never disconnect from how Jesus connects with us as real people: Living, breathing, cubicle-dwelling, dog-walking, kid-raising, raise-needing, sport-event-attending, collapsing-on-the-couch-in-the-evening people. To disconnect faith from life is to make spirituality merely a topic or a hobby. It might as well be geology or collecting Pokemon cards.

My hope is that I always stay “Steve from the block.” As I process centuries of spiritual scholarship, my goal is to bring it to practical use today—for real people. Besides, no one part of my anatomy is worth independently insuring for a million dollars.

Pet peeves

I did a guest post for Scott Couchenour's excellent Serving Strong blog last week. You can read it here.

What Google doesn't know

The auto complete function on Google’s search window gives us an interesting glimpse into the answers people hope to get from the interweb. Case in point: When you pose a query starting with “how to k”, just under “how to knit” comes “how to kiss”. Face sucking tutorials make four of the top ten searches. I find this interesting and honestly, a bit misguided. I’m not sure I would have consulted my laptop for amorous advice. There are some thing you learn with another person.

Before the written word, knowledge was passed from person to person. Village elders told stories around campfires and apprentices learned beside masters. Writing was the first step of the removal of knowledge from relationship. Now you didn't have to ask a person, you could read a document. The printing press made mass publication possible. Knowledge could now be delivered widely and stockpiled in libraries, and an individual could draw from the learning of another without human contact. The Internet has taken this an exponential step further.

Today, you don’t have to call your dad about that strange rattle coming from your car--you can google the solution. No need to drop by to get a recipe from grandma--an endless supply of culinary guides reside online. Never before has virtually every answer been in the palm of our hands. Countless answers might be a few keystrokes away, but there are some things you’ll never learn from a screen. Kissing is one of them. Spirituality is another.

Things like kissing and faith are of a different nature than facts stored in the digital cloud. Knowledge in these arenas isn’t culled from data--it’s learned through sharing an experience with others. You can learn the basics about your pucker and information about Jesus through your phone, but knowing requires human interaction. Regardless of the strides virtual reality takes, some things will never be known without relationships. If you want to know who won the World Series in 1970, there’s Google, but if you want to learn to kiss, you’ll need a willing partner. And if you want to find God, you need to spend time with people who know him.

Pastoring and proctology

Pastors and proctologists have a lot in common. Kids don’t particularly grow up daydreaming of our career fields. We both talk to people about things they don’t discuss in casual conversation. Both fields put up with plenty of...well, you know.

It’s awkward being in a “business” that everyone needs, whether they want to admit it or not. People freely speak about the person who sold them a new car. No one talks about the contractor who built their new home in hushed tones. Words about the kid’s preschool teacher happen without a wince. But somehow, our trades aren’t things you mention in mixed company.

I suppose the root of the problem is that we both dig into things that people prefer to keep hidden. (Unlike my medical counterpart, I do this metaphorically.) No one wants to admit their life is beyond their own rescue. No one wants to confess flaws and failures. No one wants to accept that self-addiction is at the root of their problems. But when healing comes, everyone sits much easier.

Conventional wisdom says start a business that everyone wants. (Something that mixes hi-tech gadgets, American football, and Tex-Mex food should cover most of the bases.) But pastors and proctologists recognize that just because someone doesn’t crave your wares doesn’t mean your job is beneath other careers. “Wants” tend to drive many business models, but some of us have to be in the “needs” business. At some point, everyone will face a need for God in their lives. And when they do, we pastors will be behind them all the way.

In hindsight, pastors and proctologists know they chose the right path. Coveted roles or not, we go where we are needed when the time comes. For us, it’s about looking for the right opening.

Used People

The approach you take to buying something new is far different than buying something used. The premium price of “new” commands perfection--no flaws, blemishes, or surprises that disappoint. If it’s a car, even the smell must be right.

The standard for “used” is lower. Simply put, we expect less. We’re not looking for spotless--we’re looking for something we can drive to work. It isn’t fresh from the factory. Perfection is unrealistic, and we shrug away wear and flaws as part of the deal we are getting. Door dings, coffee stains, and intermittent rattles come with “used”. We accept them because the object of our desire has a history. Before we encountered it, someone else stood in the slush of winter and scraped its windows. We overlook the incidental mars and mangles and appreciate the item for its intended purpose, because no one expects perfection after use. After all, “used” means something has been used. “Used” comes with a willingness to forgive.

Instead of the perfection expectation that comes with “new”, I’m thinking life might be easier if we treat everyone we meet as “used”. Everyone has a history. We’ve all been through a few fender benders. The paint gets chipped and the upholstery stains. Each of us has been on the road long enough to get us where we are, and--self-delusions and best intentions aside--we aren’t perfect. I’m not saying we don’t hope for change and improvement. I’m saying we cut each other some slack in the judgement noose.

The expectation of “new” rivets our attention to our standards: “Does this person meet my checklist?” The “used” posture focuses more on the relationship: “I know neither one of us is perfect, but how can we make this work?” Whether it’s the guy behind the register or the gal you might put a ring on, they’re used. Value the relationship, not the new car smell. After all, what is between people matters more than what is behind them.