Trust Makes it Go

When it comes to trust, I think people put a lot of weight on credibility and intimacy, and we certainly factor reliability over time. A credible person not only has the credentials, they display competence. A safe person keeps a proper confidence, listens well, and allows for vulnerability. And the reliable person consistently comes through on time, under budget, and with high quality.

But self-orientation is the one we keep in the background, both in how we evaluate ourselves and in how we evaluate those we work alongside. I might rephrase the description above and instead couch self-orientation in terms of shared or common interests, rather than mine or theirs.

I think human beings do make decisions and take action based on self-interest. I think growing and mature persons are aware of the ways their own self-interest is in play. I think respectable and wise leaders are understanding of the interests of others they work with and alongside, and they are cognizant of the ways personal and organizational interests align when moving toward a goal. Furthermore, they have reached a point of maturity where the interests of the other, and others, are considered more important than one’s own self-interest. They are willing and able to put self aside to serve. That’s easier said than done.

In Philippians 2:1-4, Paul writes:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

Paul then goes on to cite the example of Jesus in the rest of the chapter, not only as one to follow, but as the theological justification for the dynamics that are in play in healthy Christian communities.

In Christian communities, trust is not only built through displays of credibility, reliability, and intimacy, but also by an orientation toward Christ and the kingdom of God and the seeking of God’s glory. If that’s a shared focus, good things happen, and we not only learn to trust one another, but to trust God’s leadership, guidance, and work within and among the community. As a result, we elevate the trustworthiness of people and we learn through experience the trustworthiness of God.

Bad Timing

A good stylist is hard to find.

Yesterday I stopped off at my local haircut chain. I’ve identified a couple of people on the staff at this location who do a great job. I’ve identified one person who doesn’t. As luck would have it, when I walked in, the fates aligned, I had a decision to make. Do I roll the dice one more time, advocate for my next best cut, pray to God I’ll be spared bad lines and uneven layers, risk numerous missed strands of hair I’ll later have to cut myself, and then likely visit a different stylist for a major fix a few days hence?

I didn’t have the energy. I walked back out the door.

Getting your haircut shouldn’t feel like playing Russian roulette. But for me, sadly, some days, it does.

Sign Up for My Newsletter. Reading is Recommended but Not Required. I’d Coerce You to Sign Up but I’m Pro-Freedom, a Reason the Newsletter is Free.

The game we’re playing is one that gives power to writers and creators. It’s a game that ensures writers can maintain their independence without most of the drudgery that comes with running their own media operation, and without having to cede control to a gatekeeper. We build tools that give writers and creators the full powers of the internet so their work can have maximum impact, reach, and revenue. We are helping to unlock the potential of existing writers to get greater value for and from their work, and so that new types of writers can enter the media economy and thrive. That’s the movement Substack is helping to drive. We don’t believe it’s going to slow down any time soon. On the contrary, we expect it to accelerate and expand.
Hamish McKenize, “Please Stop Calling it the ‘Newsletter Economy'”

The headline tells you I suffer the occasional spell of long-windedness. If you read my newsletter, you can too! Hopefully, your suffering will be minimal compared to mine.

I write an occasional newsletter that you can preview and then subscribe to (please!) on Substack. It won’t hurt you to sign on for the free edition. Who knows? It could even help you. Maybe you’ll learn a joke, crack a smile, gain an insight, discover a book, or nauseously endure one of my bad movie takes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I’ve been writing on Substack since spring 2020, having made the switch from another newsletter service early in the pandemic. I had the time. I didn’t move in order to launch a paid tier, as other writers were doing to connect directly with their readership and make a little money on the side.

I moved over mainly for the simple interface, something easy to use for a caveman like me, and the desire to send friends, family, and acquaintances an attractive looking email. I also felt Substack had a broader range of viewpoint tolerance and diversity. I support open inquiry. As someone representing a religious tradition that has historically valued freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of association, I’d like to be on platform that supports the open exchange of ideas. I know that means “bad” ideas will run wild, too. May the good ideas prevail! From what I could tell, Substack is the kind of place where arguments can be made by writers, at least for now.

If you aren’t already on board, go sign on for my newsletter. It’s Friday night. Make it a wild and memorable one.

Boredom Can Be Okay

If you are looking for a riveting interview, read Daniel Silliman’s conversation with Kevin Gary in Christianity Today. The subject? Boredom.

Boredom isn’t all bad. As a parent of two kids, I worry that they aren’t bored enough. Too many easy distractions are at hand, too much entertainment is far too available, and technology, wondrous thing that it is, can constrain just as much as it can free us to explore creative possibility.

And I’m probably not bored often enough. I’m just as prone to reach for my phone, an iPad, or a project in order to occupy my thoughts and my time.

Silliman and Gray talk about boredom: what it is, the problems it presents, and how we deal with it in our moment. At one point, their conversation turns to boredom, and Gray is asked about boredom in church and whether we should, occasionally, be bored during a service of worship. Gray responds:

Church services can be part of a boredom-avoidance scheme: “Let’s try to really entertaining with our music!” I do think that does us a disservice, because we’re guiding people to steer clear of boredom rather than engage with it.
It’s an uncomfortable mood state. But learning how to push through that to get to something enjoyable and meaningful is a discipline and, I would say, a virtuous practice.
With a liturgy, there’s nothing going on and then there are epiphanies where all of the sudden, significance breaks through. There’s a lot of tedium between the beginning and the end, but then there are moments of, Oh my gosh, this is joy. But you have to be patient with the bored state.

Gray is also asked what to do if we find ourselves bored during a church service. He advises:

More often than not, I just sit there in my head and mull around a bit. But I think that’s okay. I think that can be a good practice, to be in your head, thinking about your thoughts. I’ll ponder the Scripture and maybe compose my own sermon, how I would talk about them. That’s a way of attending to the text. But even if I’m not doing that, I think it’s a good thing to practice just sitting.
Apart from church, we no longer have many spaces where we sit with ourselves. I think there’s value in learning how to sit.

Boredom can be a gateway to creativity, insight, and innovation. It can also serve as a great occasion and reminder to just “be.”

A Way of Love, Joy, and Peace

There is an emotional and even spiritual weight to life; we all feel it, especially as we age. An easy life is a myth, if not a red herring–the by-product of an advertising-drenched and social media-duped culture. Life is hard. Full stop. No comma, no but, no endnote. All the wise men and women of history have said as much; no new technology of substance or pill will ever erase humanity’s fall. Best-case scenario, we mitigate its effects as we advance Jesus’ return. But there’s no escaping the pain.
Why do you think there’s so much addiction in our world? No just substance abuse but more run-of-the-mill addictions to porn or sex or eating or dieting or exercise or work or travel or shopping or social media or even church?
And yet, even church can be an addiction, a dopamine hit you run toward to escape a father wound or emotional pain or an unhappy marriage…but that’s another book.
People all over the world–outside the church and in–are looking for an escape, a way out from under the crushing weight to life this side of Eden. But there is no escaping it. The best the world can offer is a temporary distraction to delay the inevitable or deny the inescapable.
That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At this side. Like two oxen in a field, tied should to should. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At this pace. Slow, unhurried, present to the moment, full of love and joy and peace.
An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke it.
John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry [affiliate link], p. 87-88

Jesus not only offers us “equipment.” He offers us himself. And he not only offers us himself in his incarnation and on the cross, or from his place at the right hand of the Father, or from heaven. He lives “in” his disciples. Our life is hidden with Christ in God, even as we are called to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves in Christ.

Comer is playing here with Matthew 11:29-30, driving home the notion that we must join our life to Jesus’ life, we must walk in step with him as his students, apprentices, and disciples, and learn his way. I’m leading a retreat this weekend, and this book will serve as grounds for discussion. We will explore the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. Notice, in all of these disciplines, all of life must be ordered in such a way that creates space for their keeping and observance. They require ordering and differentiation. They necessitate clear choices and make more plain the pace, narratives, and commitments of the everyday culture and habits of life that subvert, compete with, and challenge the pace, story, and way of life in the kingdom of God.

In Disciples Indeed, Oswald Chambers wrote, “I have no right to say I believe in God unless I order my life as under His all-seeing Eye.” The gospel we often preach focuses on life in the world to come. But the good news of Christ is not only concerned with what’s next. It has implications for life as it is lived today. Following Jesus will not make life easier in the immediate. In some ways, it may make it harder, at least in the short term. But in the long run, faith in Jesus is wisdom, not only for the resources that will be near at hand for this life as a citizen in his kingdom, but for the ways in which it will prepare us to serve in God’s great universe in the coming world without end. Our souls are made for eternity. Apprenticeship to Jesus prepares us for all that eternity will hold, not only for lasting fellowship with God, but for service.

Brandon Sanderson’s Underground Lair

The novelist Brandon Sanderson constructed a lair beneath the lot next to his suburban home. Head over to Cal Newport’s website to see a few pictures. It’s awesome.

Austin Kleon’s been sharing progress pictures of his new studio in his email newsletter. I like seeing the spaces where writers and other artists do what they do. This New Yorker profile has a picture and brief description of the small, private cabin Wendell Berry constructed for writing in 1963. He has since published over fifty books. Berry’s Port William stories are among my favorites, especially Jayber Crow [affiliate link].

I find idea of the writer’s cabin–or underground lair–romantic. Maybe one day I’ll build my own, but my work would need to lead me there.

October 2022: Tunes

Listen here.

“We got a breeze!”

This past Monday morning my son went out the garage door to shoot hoops before school. As soon as he exited the door, he re-entered the house, and shouted up the stairway, “Dad, we got a breeze!” After playing an early afternoon soccer game with temperatures in the upper 90s on Saturday, and enduring another warm day on Sunday, cool air settled over Central Texas Monday during the overnight hours. During my morning walk, it was 57 degrees. I wore a vest for the first time this fall.

David’s eruption of enthusiasm for the change in weather has remained my favorite moment of the week. I already knew the weather was cooler before he announced the fact. But his discovery and declaration warmed my heart. It is as though he walked into something that was too good not to share with another, and the other he chose was me.

I found this moment an entryway into meditation on praise and celebration and gratitude, on awe and wonder and childlikeness. We had found ourselves in a prolonged heat wave and then woke one day to find moving air that no longer felt like a blow dryer but instead relieved and refreshed our bodies. Without announcement, conditions changed. The realization was felt before it was thought. I wonder if that is what it was like when a lame person Jesus commanded to stand up and walk stood up and walked, or a man with a withered hand stretched out his arm and found strength, or a blind person commanded to see opened their eyes and perceived. First, incomprehension. Then delight.

The day’s graces are not always a cool breeze, so evident you cannot miss them. But sometimes they are. And when they are, we not only invite others to share in our joy. We return thanks to the gift giver. We praise the Lord.

It’s Always Zero Hour

I’ve been a faithful reader of Os Guinness for years, and most of his more recent titles have concerned themselves with America specifically or the West more broadly: Impossible People, The Case for Civility, A Free People’s Suicide, Last Call for Liberty, The Magna Carta of Humanity, and now Zero Hour America: History’s Ultimatum over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give (InterVarsity Press, 2022)¹. I heard him speak at The University of Kansas in 2006. He was one of several speakers in a series called “Difficult Dialogues on Knowledge, Faith, and Reason.” I met him briefly after his presentation and asked him to sign a copy of Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin. He was winsome and kind.²

In his latest book, Guinness is very concerned for America and for the state of the American experiment. Guinness writes, “America will fall–unless.” He says this book is not a “doomsday pronouncement” but a wake-up call to the internal movements, ideas, and forces that will lead to America’s implosion if left unchecked. Guinness warns that the enemies are already inside the gates. Sounds like gloom and doom to me.

In these types of rhetorical political debates gloom and doom is pretty common, and memory is always pretty short. If we’re in a battle for America’s future, the stakes are high. I think Guinness rightly diagnoses the paradox of freedom as a major source of America’s strife (“the fact that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom“), that freedom is understood more in negative than positive terms in this country (freedom from and not freedom for), that apart from faith we are under-resourced in the forgiveness and reconciliation department, and that civics education is important (not the self-loathing kind, but the sober and judicious kind that acknowledges past wrongs while maintaining and preserving good and central truths and traditions). I think these are all worthwhile points of concern and debate. I just don’t think these fault lines mean that it is “zero hour,” the absolute moment of decision. It is quite possible that zero hour has already passed, and may soon come again.

Besides, it is always zero hour.

In his final chapter, Guinness cites Friedrich Hegel’s famous statement, “What experience and history teaches us is this–that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” That’s a dramatic overstatement. But Hegel gets away with it because, as Guinness observes, “nothing lasts forever, and each society contains the seeds of its own destruction.”

In Top Gun: Maverick, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is told by an admiral, “The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed to extinction.”

Maverick replies, “Maybe so, sir, but not today.”³

America, as an experiment in ordered liberty, must say something similar every day. There are 330 million people in this country. We are geographically enormous and regionally diverse. We’re not nearly as bad as our critics say, nor as spotless as our apologists claim. But we’re a pretty good place. Millions of people migrate to this country each year, most of whom wish to stay. And plenty of our citizen go about their lives quietly, doing their jobs, going to Little League games, and playing Bunko with their friends. But I guess Bunko doesn’t test well in focus groups, while apocalyptic messaging does.

While it might be politically advantageous and rhetorically effective to claim that the end of the world is near, isn’t it always so?

Yes, it is. We just don’t know how near. Which is why reading a prophet like Guinness is helpful, at least for me, in understanding our times, tracking intellectual currents, diagnosing problems, and assisting me in thinking through America’s history, ideals, values, and possibility, and advocating for a vision of our common life that aligns more closely with what is best about this place, while also works to address present wrongs and move us toward a greater approximation of justice.

That’s the work of politics. We all have a part to play. I try to play mine, not only as a voter, and not only as a citizen, but also as a person of Christian faith.

1. Amazon affiliate link.
2.He also signed a copy of Time for Truth to Molly and I. We attended the talk together.
3. I’m really glad I saw this movie. You should see it, too.

For Itself

Here is Charles Bernstein’s Why Do You Love the Poem?

For the sentiment. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the sentiment.
For the message. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the message.
For the music. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the music.
For the spirit. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the spirit.
For the intelligence. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the intelligence.
For the courage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the courage.
For the inspiration. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the inspiration.
For the emotion. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the emotion.
For the vocabulary. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the vocabulary.
For the poet. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the poet.
For the meaning. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the meaning.
For what it stands for. — Then you don’t love the poem you love what it stands for.
For the words. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the words.
For the syntax. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the syntax.
For the politics. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the politics.
For the beauty. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the beauty.
For the outrage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the outrage.
For the tenderness. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the tenderness.
For the hope. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the hope.
For itself. — Then you love the poem.
From poets.org

This poem arrived in my inbox on July 27, and I’ve kept it there, returning now and again. I subscribe to their poem-a-day email newsletter. Not every selection that hits my inbox connects with me. Most don’t. But this one has hung with me.

My reason for returning is tangentially related to the poem. Bernstein makes a fine distinction between our appreciation of a thing for what it is in itself and our appreciation of a thing for its benefits. He’s right to do so. Our love for a thing can be self-centered rather than other-centered. We get this wrong all the time.

This isn’t just true of poems, or movies, or painting or other forms of art. It can be true of our relationships with friends, family, loved ones. It can be true of our relationship to God.

That’s why we should always search our hearts and examine our motivations. Do we love first because of a benefit we receive or because of an appreciation of something intrinsically good, true, and beautiful standing apart from my experience?

If we get the order wrong, we dishonor the moment, the person, the encounter. But if we get the order right, the benefits only increase in their richness, glowing more magnificently, appreciated more deeply, because we have rightly appraised their source.