On Our Way To Crazy

Remember a thousand years ago when I was posting excerpts from the books I was reading? Yeah, me either. That was something I really wanted to keep up and it just fell out of my head. Good thing I have 28 more days of posts to fill! I promise to try hard not to bore you.

This is a book of essays. I loved it because Sloane Crosley grew up in a world both similar to and completely different from mine. She writes about how growing up in suburbia robs you of any interesting childhood identity, about that first insane crazy boss lady we all worked for, and about being asked to be a bridesmaid for someone you haven’t spoken to in ten years. This quote, about Oregon Trail, made me laugh out loud because I used to do the exact same thing. And so did you.

“Unlike other games of the day, which had me leaping through traffic or called me gumshoe, Oregon Trail left lots of room for creativity. It seemed ripe for misuse. Like a precursor to the Sims, you were allowed to name your wagoneers and manipulate their destinies. It didn’t take me long to employ my powers for evil. I would load up the wagon with people I loathed, like my math teacher. Then I would intentionally lose the game, starving her or fording a river with her when I knew she was weak. The program would attempt an intervention, informing me that I had enough buffalo carcass for one day. One more lifeless caribou would make the wagon too heavy, endangering the lives of those inside. Really now? Then how about three more? How about four? Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive plains. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations ‘nonsensical’ in front of fifteen other teenagers. Eventually a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box: MRS. ROSS HAS DIED OF DYSENTERY. This filled me with glee.”

“Yes, worship includes the experience of raising our voices together in songs to God. And, yes, worship involves prayer. But a broader – more scriptural – view of worship is about serving the poor, righting injustice, caring for those in need. When teenagers – whether they’re already followers of Jesus or not – experience this kind of worship in action, they have the enormous opportunity to have a tangible experience of God in their lives. This often leads to faith (or more faith). More importantly, it leads to sustainable faith. …for today’s teenagers, experience is what they trust. And, if we’re really honest, this is how we all live.”

I don’t write a lot on this site about youth ministry philosophy. For one, I think it would bore most of you. But mostly it’s because I am still very much figuring things out. I took the job at the church with zero experience. Sure, I had volunteered for a long time and headed up a project every now and then. Then one day two years ago (!) I jumped headfirst into being in charge without a fat clue what I was doing.

Obviously, I have learned a lot in the past couple of years. I am confident planning services and writing lessons and doing events and counseling kids. I get thrown for a loop approximately a hundred times a day, but I feel like I have my feet under me a bit. One thing I have realized over the past several months is that you can’t just operate on a week-by-week basis. You have to be coming from somewhere deeper. You need a basic working philosophy that informs the things you teach, the events you plan, the leaders you involve.

So I have been working on mine. I’ve been working from a community- and relationship-based idea from the beginning, even when I didn’t really know I was doing it. We don’t preach at the kids. We are very discussion-oriented. I don’t want our kids to grow up in a world where church is where you’re on your best behavior and you get in trouble for breaking the rules. I want them to connect to a faith and to a God that loves them wherever they are, and to a community of peers and adults who do the same. I’m still working on what that looks like, but I think I’m starting to get it.

Mark Oestreicher is the president of Youth Specialties, an organization that I love love love. This book is a bit of a history of youth ministry, a bit of conversation, and a lot of philosophy. I don’t agree with the whole thing. But I found a lot of passages that really put into words what we’re trying to do in our group. And that is really encouraging.

“Kids are just dying to be acknowledged. They need somebody to connect with them on a personal level. They need leaders who’ll take the time to listen and affirm that they’re okay, and they’re loved – no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they’re dealing with. If that connection isn’t made, it’s highly unlikely that youth will allow leaders to take them on something so sacred as a spiritual journey.”

“One spring I decided to give up evil music for Lent. It meant seven weeks of listening to the radio and wondering which songs were evil and which were just about evil. I decided the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was okay because it was anti-devil, but the Grateful Dead’s ‘Friend of the Devil’ was soft on Satan. I gave myself permission to keep cranking Jim Carroll’s ‘People Who Died’ because it was so saturated with evil that it amounted to a critique of evil, but not Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, which was just plain evil. I made a specially edited tape of London Calling to omit the bad stuff. These theological judgements made my head hurt, and I was relieved when Lent was over. On Easter morning, I treated myself to ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’”

“I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them all together, and they add up to the story of a life.”

I’m not a book reviewer by any means. (You should be reading Kari’s blog if you want good reviews.) But! I do love reading, and this year I want to do a better job of remembering the books I read and what I liked about them.

So every so often this year, I’m just going to post a few passages from the books that strike me. Hopefully I will be able to look back and remember books and paragraphs that meant something to me, made me laugh, or shifted the way I look at the world.

Last week I finished a book called Sin Boldly: A Field Guide to Grace by Cathleen Falsani. It was fantastic – one of those books that you don’t want to read to quickly for fear of missing something, the kind that you put down after each chapter so it can sit with you for a while. It put words to a lot of thoughts I’ve been having lately, and it came along at the perfect time.

“‘We’re all great creatures of second chances,’ Sech told the congregation. We expend too much energy beating ourselves up for our mistakes, screwups, and shortcomings. Fixating on them can lead to ‘internalized oppression,’ the rabbi said. ‘Let it go!’
Deliver yourself from your narrow, sorrowful place, he said, adding that the word for ‘sorrow’ in Hebrew also means ‘narrow’ and that, seeing as how it was Passover, we might want to think of that spiritual self-imprisonment as something we have to ‘pass through.’
‘Bust out into freedom,’ he said. ‘You wanna be free? Work on it!’”

“I have a favorite t-shirt that reads, “Jesus is my mixtape.” When I bought it, I thought its slogan was charmingly quirky, but over time it has acquired this transcendent quality, a motto that sums up my belief that everything – everything – is spiritual. At the center of that everythingness, as a pastor friend of mine likes to describe it, is a universal rhythm, a song we all play, like a giant, motley orchestra. Sometimes in tune, sometimes off-key. We call it by different names. Still, it remains – if only we have ears to hear it – the eternal soundtrack that plays in the background of our lives.”