For today’s post, I thought I’d share a quick list of my top 10 books from the past year or two. In no particular order:

1. The Challenge of Jesus, N.T. Wright: Fascinating insight into the historical cultural context of 1st Century Israel.

2. The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard: Quite possibly the most insighful exposition of the sermon on the mount available today.

3. Prodigal God, Tim Keller: A fresh perspective on the two sons and the father in the classic passage from Luke 15.

4. Angry Conversations with God, Susan Isaacs: An honest assessment of conflicts between people, faith, God and the church.

5. On The Road and Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac: Okay, I know that’s technically sneaking two books in one slot, but in so many ways it’s really one story. Powerful insight into the underpinnings of the late 20th Century cultural revolution.

6. Mere Discipleship, Lee Camp: This book has done more than any other to make me seriously consider how to live as if Jesus meant what he said, and as if his promises are true.

7. East of Eden, John Steinbeck: Somehow I missed this particular part of the Steinbeck library during my years as an English major in undergrad. A stunning portrait of the human condition.

8. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton: Still relevant over a century after its original publication. Why we believe what we believe.

9. The River Why, David James Duncan: Saving my favorite flyfishing books for the end. Duncan’s Kerouac-esque coming of age story about a  young man’s discovery of himself and the reason for everything. An annual part of my reading regimen.

10. A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean: Pure scripture for every fly fisherman. Like TRW (above), I make it a point to read this one at least once a year. It’s good for my soul and my sanity.

The link was to an article written by a guy named Matt Papa (find it here), a musician who takes the Christian music industry in general, and Christian radio specifically, to task for being, as he says, “altogether banal and shallow in both a musical sense and a spiritual sense.” Much of what he says is hard to argue with…that “mainstream” Christian music is (with some notable exceptions), shallow, insipid, formulaic, theologically questionable, and largely self-centered from a lyrical standpoint; and is weakly composed, arranged, performed and produced from a musical perspective. The deeper criticism is that this kind of music fails to reach listeners with an accurate presentation of the Gospel.

The question I want to address here, though, is one I raised in the original Facebook conversation: Is weak Christian music a case of art imitating life or life imitating art? Does shallow Christian music breed shallow Christians, or does shallow Christianity breed shallow Christian music?

The popularity of the so-called “prosperity gospel” (Jesus wants you to be happy, healthy and wealthy) is certainly reflected in much of what plays on Christian radio. Listen for less than an hour and you’ll pick up on the formula: my life sucked, Jesus came along (just for me!), now I’m happy. All set to a simple 4-chord progression. Wade says it’s like prom music to Jesus, making him sound more like a girl you want to date than the Lord & savior of the universe.

Hence the art-imitates-life-imitates-art conundrum. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Certainly, the shallowness of mainstream Christian music is reflective of much of mainstream evangelical Christianity in America today. Whether it’s the prosperity gospel or the “fire insurance” message (say a prayer to stay out of hell), the American church has failed in many ways to take people into an authentic understanding of Jesus and the gospel. The message of personal happiness, comfort and contentment fails to recognize the socially and politically subversive life, death and resurrection of Jesus and his message of radical love and forgiveness. In many ways it reduces God’s grace to a happiness pill. Just swallow this and you’ll feel better.

At the same time, there is a propensity for the kind of music that pours out of Christian radio to influence the church. Go into almost any church with a “contemporary” service, and you’ll hear many of the same shallow songs opening the worship service. (We even do it in my church, where I play acoustic guitar in the band.) The songs are easy to play, easy to sing, elicit happy emotions, and don’t require much in the way of mental or spiritual investment.

To be fair, there are, thankfully, many exceptions. Artists like Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, John Mark McMillan, Phil Wickham, and others do write songs that are theologically and musically rich and sophisticated, and they get their share of airplay on Christian radio and from church praise & worship bands. Our praise team at FUMC Williamstown likes to joke that we’re a Chris Tomlin cover band because we perform so many of his songs out of appreciation for both his theology and his musical complexity.

And as long as I’m on the issue of fairness, even some of the shallower offerings of Christian radio have value, especially for people who are new to the faith and need encouragement on a very basic level. Babies need milk. In fact, it takes awhile before they can consume anything else. But eventually you’ve got to introduce some meat into your diet.

Personally, my biggest issue with most mainstream Christian music is that it doesn’t reflect Christ. I know musical appreciation is a very subjective thing, but I find most of it to just be bad. And if Christ is to be glorified, the music that celebrates him should be nothing short of excellent.

Yes, music is entertainment and Christian music is Christian entertainment, and every song doesn’t have to be dripping with atonement theology to have value. But bad music with bad theology reflects badly on Jesus just as shallow teaching in superficial church settings does. It’s a barrier to the gospel. We deserve better from our music and from our churches. Jesus deserves better from all of us.

Shane Claiborne on Theology

The first thing you may notice, in addition to the updated theme, is a new page for scheduling speaking engagements & events. As my understanding of my ministry calling has grown over the past several months, I find myself more and more called to share with people from a wide variety of backgrounds in a wide variety of venues. So, if you have an event coming up and you need a speaker or presenter on some aspect of a life in faith, I’d love to talk to you about it. See the contact info on the “Speaking & Events” page for how to get in touch with me.

The other new thing I want to try to do this year is to start sharing shorter tidbits of insight that I’ve picked up here and there in addition to the longer essays that will continue to appear here. Along with that, I’d like to invite readers to submit ideas, articles, links, etc. for inclusion here on the main blog page. Just use the contact info from the “Speaking & Events” page to send me your ideas.

Finally, a reminder that the purpose of faithrants.com is to ignite conversation. If you have a thought in response to anything that appears here, I encourage you to submit comments either here or on my Facebook page. All I ask is that we keep the conversation clean and free of personal attacks.

Thanks for tuning in and please stop by occasionally to see what’s new. I’m looking forward to some great conversations in the coming months!

Clearly, Anna has found her muse. Enjoy:

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The Woman in the Sky

By Anna Webb

If you ask me, I will always tell you that my earliest memory is of my grandmother’s house. Two stories high, it sits on Grape Island in St. Marys, West Virginia. It is isolated, with only a couple of neighbors (that were always friendly, and never invaded each other’s personal space). The house is set high up, so that you can look down on the river from the front porch. Railroad tracks run alongside the river. Those trains kept me up at night when I was very small. A train always ran by the house around 12:30 in the morning, and I would sit up in my bed and listen, wondering if the train were something along the lines of the Polar Express, and if maybe one day, the conductor would wait for me to come outside so that I could board the train and be whisked off to some magical place.

Grandma Webb’s house was a place where imagination ran wild. My favourite place in the house was my Cubby Hole. In the living room, there was a small space, about four by four feet square, made by the end of the couch, an end table, a step, and the wall. Here, I would do my best work. I would take crayons and paper and pens and pencils and I would write and draw and create. I would play house, I would keep my treasures there, and I’m sure that I took several naps there, as well. I could spend hours in my Cubby Hole, without anyone else invading my space or bothering me.

Grandma Webb loved crafts. Every time I went to visit, she had a new craft ready for me to try. From her, I learned to paint, sew, and decoupage. I have piles upon piles of t-shirts that I decorated at her house. To this day, I have an instinct for a good fabric marker, and a knack for drawing on plain white shirts. Grandma’s house was the only place I was ever a messy child. Paint on my face and glue on my hands, my mother would shake her head and smile while she cleaned me up from a visit to St. Marys.

I learned to do a round-off in Grandma’s backyard, learned to swim in her pool, and rode a bike in her driveway. But most importantly, on the swing set behind the house, I learned to swing on a star. This was a song that Grandma Webb used to sing to me:

Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moon beams home in a jar?
And be better off than you are?
Or would you rather be a fish…?

There were other verses with various animals that I may or may not have wanted to be, but the chorus was what always stuck out in my head. And while other kids might have wondered whether they’d like to be a fish or a pig or a duck, I wondered what it might have been like to swing on a star. I pictured myself, on countless occasions, sitting on a star, hanging from wires attached to only God knows what, swinging back and forth, back and forth, watching everyone below me on Earth from my perch. I thought that I might be able to see all of the people I loved from there; that I might be a lookout for them, in case danger came. I thought that I might be able to hide myself away up in the sky, so that nothing could ever get to me. For years, this song intrigued me and kept my mind reeling. How would I ever get to the stars? I felt as though this were my life’s purpose: to learn to swing on the stars. As I got older, I decided that the only way I would ever be able to swing on my star would be to die, and go to Heaven, where the stars were abundant, and present.

When I was in Junior High, my grandmother passed away. As the world around me crumbled with my loss, I became depressed. I gave up all hope of swinging on stars, and all I wanted to do was hide in my Cubby Hole. As expected, it took me years to get over the death of the woman who was most important to me in this world. I couldn’t step foot into the house without feeling empty, and I wouldn’t even go near the swing set for the longest time. I felt like I hadn’t gotten to know my grandmother well enough. All my life, it seemed that the only thing that would’ve made life worth living would have been to live like her, and to grow up to be like her. After she died, I felt as though that were no longer possible. I didn’t know her at all. I couldn’t be like her.

With age comes wisdom, however, and now that I’ve settled into my first couple of years of adulthood, I realize that I’ve learned a lot about her, from those who loved her. She was a Saint in the eyes of most who knew her. She was strong, intelligent, and beautiful. I’ve been told that I have her hands, that I look exactly like her. Everyone I meet that knew my grandmother tells me these things about her life. They teach me how to remember her. And while I love hearing their ways of remembering, my way makes much more sense to me. I remember my grandmother as the woman who taught me to create, who taught me to play, and who taught me to swing. I remember her as the woman in the sky, swinging on the stars, and watching over me.

I’m a little worried that might have seemed a little too pat. It’s not my intent to say, “If you’re not in church, get to church! If you are in church, shape up!!”

None of what we’re talking about is simple. If you’ve been turned off of or away from the church, believe me, I know how you feel. There is little motivation to return to a place where you have experienced no love, no embrace, no redemption.

And turning churches around to be more open, more loving, and less self-centered is like trying to turn an ocean liner. You need several miles to do it. An about-face will just toss everyone overboard.

In the concluding paragraphs yesterday, I mentioned that, for the de-churched, the community you need may or may not look like the traditional organizational church. Let’s explore the implications of that for a moment.

Traditional churches, first of all, are hard to pin down. There are more types, shapes, sizes, flavors, and styles of “traditional” churches in America today than one could begin to count. You can’t even categorize them broadly…it’s not unusual to find traditional liturgical styles blended with hard rock music in one church, mysticism blended with deep scriptural teaching in another, somber choirs with charismatic preaching in still another.

Finding a “style” of worship that fits you perfectly is a quixotic undertaking at best. (That’s right. I said “quixotic.” Look it up!)

My advice, then, is to look beyond the style, the music, the order of worship, the preacher, the praise team, etc., and look at the people.

Where do you see people who share your struggles? Where do you find common ground with the honest questions being asked, and how is that community trying to deal with those questions?

It may take time. As my dad always said, it’s a process, not an event. It starts with conversations in coffee shops, restaurants, living rooms, softball fields, bowling alleys, golf courses, trout streams, classrooms, offices, body shops, beauty salons, cubicle farms…wherever you find yourself already in community with people.

Those conversations have to be honest. I mean brutally honest. Not the, “Hey-how-you-doing-I’m-okay-howbout-you” types of conversations we skate through life on. I mean the, “Man-you-look-awful-what’s-wrong?” kind of honest.

I was talking to a friend the other night in our favorite local watering hole. He’d told me a few days before that he was helping lead a suicide survivor’s support group, and he was asking me about To Write Love on Her Arms, a movement I respect greatly for its work in the areas of teen depression and suicide.

It would have been easy for me to just send him the link to the website, tell him to buy a t-shirt, and leave it at that. But as we stood together at the bar, I decided the best way to really dig into the issue, to make our conversation meaningful not only to us but to other people we may encounter, was to ask some hard, honest questions.

So I asked him why he was involved with the group. What was his personal experience that led him to take on that cause and that responsibility? And I found out about three recent suicides in his family, including his brother just days after his own business was wrecked by an arsonist-set fire.

Because we got into that space of honesty, we were able to have a conversation that, in the future, will be able to help people. My work with teenagers over the past 5 years has opened my eyes wide to the junk that kids and families are facing that often lead to that sort of ultimate hopelessness. Being able to share my friend’s story, I’m certain, will save someone’s life sometime.

And because I was honest with him about my deep desire to bring hope into those places of hopelessness, my connections with experts in the field of depression and suicide, and my experience with organizations like TWLOHA, he has one more place to point someone he might encounter who might benefit from my voice, or the voice of one of those other people I’ve met in their lives.

Honest conversation is the first step to healing. Nobody ever BS’ed Jesus when he approached them. If they tried, he called them out. He got them to be honest about their circumstances so he could take them beyond those circumstances into the ultimate reality of God’s redemptive love.

It almost goes without saying that one of the places this whole issue hits hardest is in the gay community. The “voice” of the organizational church over the past several decades has been so hostile, so harsh, so judgemental, so HATEFUL to our LGBT brothers and sisters that it’s no wonder many, if not most, of them have given up on God. Because God’s supposed spokespeople have been so insufferable.

I’m not here to get into the whole issue of whether or not it’s a sin to be gay. It’s a sin to steal, to lie, to lust, to cheat, to be greedy, to gossip…you get the point. If being gay is a sin it’s no more of a sin than anything else anybody else does every single day. Besides, sin is not an issue of individual behavioral acts. It’s a mindset of putting ourselves first, above others and above God. It’s what happens when love is absent. So let’s drop that club from our hands, shall we?

I trust God when he says he loves EVERYONE. I trust him when he says Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection were for the forgiveness of ALL. I trust him when he says there is nothing we can do to earn our own salvation. I trust him when he says his grace is sufficient. And free.

For our churches to summarily dismiss millions of people because of who they choose to love is a travesty. And we desperately need more people who will speak truth into those lives, to tell them that God loves them whether his churches do or not. And to lead him into a loving relationship with Jesus that is higher and deeper and better than any other relationship of any other kind they’ve ever had in their lives.

Again, it’s complicated. That’s why I believe conversations like this one are important. They are the starting point from which healing and restoration can begin.

And as I’ve said before, I think it all starts with simply learning to love God for God’s sake and not for our own. Loving him because he created us, he loves us, he desires to be in relationship and community with us. Not because he can heal us (which he can), or because he can bring us joy (which he will). But because he is God.

The first of these tomes, Angry Conversations with God, is a memoir by Hollywood actress and writer Susan Isaacs. It’s a quick and fascinating read in which Isaacs chronicles her struggles with staying in relationship with God in the midst of personal and cultural stresses. Isaacs’ “Angry Conversations,” while directed at God, are really more accurately aimed at the various churches that offered hope and healing, but eventually delivered pain and distress.

At the heart of Isaacs’ “Angry Conversations” is, predictably, a childhood wound. She recounts her mother telling her that nobody would ever like her if she was angry all the time. Of course, she believed and internalized that statement. And so over time she found it difficult to even like herself because of her own anger. Which cascaded into other relationships, including her relationship with God. Eventually she learns that it is her desire to shape God in her own image, to love him for what he can do for her rather than for who he is, that is the root cause of her pain.

I think for many of us, both inside and outside the church, some sort of wound like that exists. In whatever form it takes, it causes us to distrust ourselves and distrust others, because we somehow never really believe that we deserve happiness.

And if you don’t think you deserve happiness, it’s very, very difficult to accept grace. Even from God. If you never see the best in yourself, you’ll never see it in others. And, if you expect God to fix your unhappiness problem and he doesn’t, you begin to distrust even him.

Every relationship, in some way then, is primed to let you down…including your relationship with the church and with God.

For many who are in that category I referred to yesterday as “de-churched,” something like this is at work. Either we grew up in a church we never really learned to trust because it never seemed to deal with our problems, or we went to a church looking for help but never received the help we expected, or the church itself was hostile to the particular issues at the heart of our unhappiness problem.

Which brings me to the second book.

The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller is perhaps the single best exposition I’ve ever encountered on what the Gospel actually is in all its fullness (beyond the “believe in Jesus so you can go to Heaven when you die” gospel most of us grew up with). Keller uses the familiar story of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15, and peels back the layers of it to reveal the entire scope of the Biblical narrative in 22 verses.

Those of us who identify with the idea of being “de-churched” will, most likely, find ourselves in the younger son, who flees his home in search of something better, but never finds it.

But Keller has amazing insights for us regarding the older son, the one who stays home and is loyal, but ends up bitter and resentful of his father’s generosity when the younger son returns.

Jesus directed the character of the older son at the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the time who advocated strict adherence to moral and religious codes. What Jesus so brilliantly reveals, and Keller exposes, is that the Pharisees’ “love” for God was really only to serve themselves. They performed good deeds so that God would notice them and reward them. They shunned those who failed to live up to their moral standards in order to maintain their sense of superiority in the eyes of God.

Love that seeks to serve self, though, is not real love.

It’s tempting, if you find  yourself in that category of “de-churched” (or maybe, like me, “recovering de-churched”) to say, “YES! Exactly! That’s why I don’t want anything to do with churches! They are self-serving, their love is really for themselves and they only extend it to me for what I can do for them!”

And in many cases, you’d be right.

But that gets us to the meat of the question I posted yesterday: Can you be part of THE church (the Body of Christ) without being part of A church (a particular organization)?

Keller’s conclusion, and I believe the conclusion Jesus leads us to in the story of the Prodigal and the entire sweep of scripture, is, in essence, “No.”

That’s a hard answer for many of us in the de-churched community to hear. We desperately want to find a way to connect to Jesus without having to deal with the baggage of churches. We want to be “spiritual, but not religious.”

But you can’t fully engage Jesus on your own. It requires community. That may or may not look like the traditional organized churches we’re all familiar with, but it is inescapable. And community requires people. And people are messed up, flawed, broken.

Like churches.

My hope is for those experiencing disdain for churches is that you will find a community of believers that helps you see God for who he is, not who you want him to be, and to discover a joy that transcends whatever circumstances burden you in your life. Find people to help you forgive the churches that have damaged you. Find spiritual guides to help you connect to communities that value the fullness of the Gospel.

And my hope for our churches is that we will stop preaching a Gospel based on what God can do for you, and instead help people discover the transcendent experience of the fullness of God’s love.

And my prayer is that all of us, together, learn to accept that love for what it is, to love God for God’s sake and not our own sake, and to respond with the same kind of love for one another.

Most often, though, it has been a season for me where my writing needed to take a backseat to some serious reading. And so at every spare moment, I have thrown myself into books…sometimes keeping up with two or three at a time, with one laying on my bedstand, another on the end table in the family room, and one loaded up on the Kindle for reading during lunch hours, in waiting rooms, or for quick moments between phone calls and e-mails.

Most of my reading this summer has been theological. That’s actually been the bulk of my reading habit for the past 2 or 3 years as I’ve sought to better articulate the gospel, teach scripture and lead teens and other adults in discipleship.

But it took a week in Montana to clear my head, a memoir by a part-time actress/writer out of LA, and a short book by a well-respected Presbyterian minister (I’ll talk more about those in a future post) to bring me to the point of focus for this blog, and, I believe, in some way, my future career in ministry.

On the second leg of my return flight home from Big Sky country, I was seated next to a couple of teenagers, apparently sisters, whose (I guessed) younger brothers were in two of the seats behind us. Now, I have spent the past 5 years of my life immersed in youth ministry. It has been my passion to help teenagers know Jesus and understand the reality of who he was and is.

But for the life of me, I could not bring myself to start a conversation with these kids. I felt absolutely no sense of the Holy Spirit inspiring me to even speak to them, let alone engage them in a conversation or, as the church folk say, “share the Gospel” with them. None. This was not just denial. It simply wasn’t there.

In fact, it was so not there that I couldn’t help but notice the not-thereness of it. Which caused me to ponder about it. “Why,” I thought, “am I, a fairly well seasoned veteran of youth ministry, not even the least bit moved to talk to these kids?”

Then another thought occurred to me. And it was the one that had been growing unspoken in the back of my mind for many months, and had begun to emerge from the fog during quiet times on Montana trout streams. It was the recognition that, lately, I’ve been more comfortable sharing my faith with strangers at parties and pubs than the with kids that I’d been so clearly called to serve for the past several years.

My heart, it turns out–my new calling, if you will–seems to be pointing somewhere else. Not that I don’t still have a desire to serve and work with teenagers, but that God has broken my heart for another group of people.

And it turns out, it’s a group I already belonged to.

Call us the de-churched. The abandoned. The escapees. The ones who slipped through the cracks. The people who have, for whatever reason, grown distant from the churches they either grew up with, or were for at least some period of time exposed to, but with whom they never connected, or somehow lost their connection.

If you’ve kept up (or put up) with my sporadic posts here over the past year or so, you know that I’ve been in a season of frustration with the organizational church. I have tried with all my might not to be one of THOSE people, who bitch and whine about the hypocrisies of the church without taking at least some notice of the considerable plank in my own eye (Matt. 7:3-4). (You can be the judge at how successful I have or haven’t been with that!)

But more and more I’ve noticed folks in that situation, who know there’s something better, something eternal, some joy that’s available, who have just never been able to find it in a church. Maybe they just didn’t look hard enough. Maybe they were damaged in some way by a church that has become overly judgmental, critical, and moralistic. Maybe it was their own fault. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there’s plenty of blame to be shared.

I know these people because for the better part of 20 years I was one of them. In fact, in many ways, despite half a decade in church leadership, I’m still one of them.

And it leads me to the inescapable question: Can you be part of THE church without being part of A church? Can you belong to, participate with, the Body of Christ, without belonging to an organization claiming to do the work of Christ? Does one necessitate the other? And how can we live in that tension?

And it turns out, it’s in the heart of that question where I find my passion for ministry coming alive and growing and rapidly gaining momentum.

I’m still trying to figure out what all of this means and where exactly it’s leading. But I do know a couple of things for sure:

1. Someone needs to speak truth into the lives of those who have separated themselves from THE church because of the way CHURCHES sometimes behave.
2. Someone needs to be a voice for those people in CHURCHES who have far too often forgotten or missed the point of what it really means to be THE church.

So that’s where I find myself. The path is opening into a clearing. The view is widening but it’s still obscured in places.

I invite you to join me in this conversation. Tell me why you hate churches. Or why you love YOUR church. Tell me what questions you want to ask about Jesus and redemption and healing and restoration that somehow the organizational church has never been able to answer for you. Tell me what you think about the question itself. Let’s be honest with each other, even when it’s hard. And let’s respond with love and respect, even when THAT’s hard.

I’m not promising you any profound insights, but maybe together we can find new ways to ask the questions. And maybe those of us in the church can find better ways to answer.

In the coming days and weeks I want to explore this issue more thoroughly. We’ll take up the conversation here on the blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. This is important. For many it is literally a life or death issue.

I have no agenda to get folks connected to churches simply for the sake of filling pews. I want  to help people find answers. Find the real Jesus, experience him, get a taste of the kingdom life that he promises. Sometimes a church will be the appropriate place for that to happen. Often, it won’t.

Either way, my prayer is that together, we help each other find hope.

High School reunions have their own particular kind of strangeness, though, especially if, like me, you come from a small town where the school is the nexus of the life of the community. To a large degree, the people you graduated with were more than just schoolmates. They were the people you grew up with; the people with whom you learned not only academic lessons, but life lessons. The people you played Little League baseball with, went to Boy Scout camp with, attended church with. Your families got together for dinner and card games, or met randomly in the grocery store and spent hours in conversation. Summer afternoons were spent at the swimming pool or in the county park, tossing a frisbee or shooting hoops. Winter evenings saw improptu trips to the bowling alley or the Pizza Hut down the road.

St. Marys, WV, was a place where kids did more than attend school together. We did life together. We learned love and trust and certainty and forgiveness,  fear and cynicism and anger and doubt, with each other and from each other. We laughed and cried with each other, we dated each other, we got in trouble with each other. And then we drifted apart into the wide world, where we created new relationships based on the lessons we had learned from those childhood relationships. Some stayed put and raised their own families in much the same environment and the same ways we were raised. Others traveled far and moved frequently, setting down roots too distant to reach our hometown very often.

But wherever we landed, we learned much of what we know about how to exist on this planet from the group of people we grew up with and graduated with. Our influence on one another was and is virtually immeasureable. In counteless ways, we gained our identity in those times with those people.

And so when we come together for our reunions at the obligatory 5-year intervals, there are a couple of distinct social and interpersonal dynamics that come into play.

The first is the one where we almost literally turn back the clock. We see each other through 18-year-old eyes, remembering the times spent together, re-telling stories of our great adventures of adolescent discovery, and in many ways picking up exactly where we left off.

The second dynamic is a bit more complicated. It’s the one where we realize that the person sitting across the table from us or sharing a beer with us is not the same person we knew 30 years ago. And then we realize that we are not the same either. We have lived almost two full lifetimes since we knew each other. We have been molded by different experiences, different environments, different circumstances. We have shared both triumphs and tragedies with others who have gained importance in our lives while the kids we grew up with have diminished in our memories.

It’s the tension in those two dynamics that make reunions strange for me.

On the one hand, we all want the people we grew up with to think we have found success in life. It is hard not to fall to the temptation to embellish, whether in our clothing, our mannerisims, or what we choose to reveal about the current state of our lives. Our class has never been particularly prone to that kind of behavior, but I’m sure over the years we’ve all indulged ourselves a little bit…probably less out of a desire to impress people than out of a desire not to disappoint them.

On the other hand, though, we all want to be known for who we are…especially among the people who had such a strong influence in shaping us. And so even in the embellishments and indulgences, we try awkwardly to reflect the real us, the person we have become, the person who grew out of those 12 years of shared existence.

As I made my way around the riverboat where we had our reunion dinner, visiting with old friends, meeting and re-acquaitning myself with spouses, I tried to listen closely to what my former classmates were saying. Not so much the words that came out of their mouths, but what they were really saying. And I noticed something remarkable.

It seems that once we cut through the initial phase of rekindling relationships, and through the secondary phase of realization, we hit a third phase that was both heartbreaking and beautiful.

I noticed that, even in 30 years of separation, we are all somehow united in our brokenness. Whether it was failed relationships, job losses, struggles with kids and stepkids, health problems, or deaths of loved ones, it seemed everyone was carrying some baggage about something in life that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t complaining or self-pity, and it most often wasn’t shared in all the bloody details. It was just an openness to speak out the fact that life is life, that sometimes things suck, but we’re still in there doing the best we can.

Maybe we’re all just getting old enough that we don’t need to BS each other anymore. Or maybe we realized that even though we are now complete strangers in many ways, we once shared a piece of this life together that was real and still connects us across time and space.

It may sound strange to say that I find being united in brokenness to be beautiful. But it was a stark reminder to me that none of us has to be alone. Those who seem to have it all still have crap in their lives. And those whose life seems to be crap still have hearts and love. And we all have a deep desire to be redeemed in the midst of it all. To be united through it so that we can experience something better despite it all.

I am reminded of the story in John 21 where, after seeing Jesus in his post-resurrection glory, the disciples are gathered together, wondering what to do, trying to figure out what it all meant. And Peter decides to go fishing. To reconnect to something from his past, to something real, something that once defined his identity. And Jesus shows up. And the disciples’ choice is whether to continue searching for their identity on their own or to look to the risen Christ to define them. To cut through their hopelessness and unite them in something real, even in the midst of their doubt and pain.

I told somebody the other day that I felt like I had more significant, honest conversations during that 3-hour class reunion than I’ve had in church in the past 5 years. Now maybe that says something about my approach to church that I need to re-examine, but I think it says something bigger about our ability to simply encounter people in the reality of life, in the honesty of our circumstances, and to simply say, “There’s hope. I know it because I’ve found it. And yes, sometimes life still sucks, but there’s hope. There’s hope because there’s love.”

My prayer for all of my classmates from the Class of 1981 is that somehow, in the midst of it all, across the years and miles that separate us, we will always allow our hope to connect us. To each other. To the world around us. To the love that unites us and redeems us all.

Godspeed, my friends! Looking forward to our 35th!!