Snowy Days

Somewhere along the way, Christians decided that you are supposed to be happy. My guess is that it has something to do with our affinity for scriptures like “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace…” and songs with lyrics like “nothing gonna steal my joy”. I’ve heard people say they knew someone was a Christian by the way they smiled. It seems like if you aren’t happy the assumption is that you are having faith issues. 

Maybe it’s because of those expectations that so many church leaders, myself included, rarely talk about the very real struggles that we face. My go-to description of what living with depression is like came out after Anthony Bourdain committed suicide last year.

“When you have depression it's like it snows every day.

Some days it's only a couple of inches. It's a pain, but you still make it to work, the grocery store. Sure, maybe you skip the gym or your friend's birthday party, but it IS still snowing and who knows how bad it might get tonight. Probably better to just head home. Your friend notices, but probably just thinks you are flaky now, or kind of a jerk.

Some days it snows a foot. You spend an hour shoveling out your driveway and are late to work. Your back and hands hurt from shoveling. You leave early because it's really coming down out there. Your boss notices.

Some days it snows four feet. You shovel all morning but your street never gets plowed. You are not making it to work, or anywhere else for that matter. You are so sore and tired you just get back in the bed. By the time you wake up, all your shoveling has filled back in with snow. Looks like your phone rang; people are wondering where you are. You don't feel like calling them back, too tired from all the shoveling. Plus they don't get this much snow at their house so they don't understand why you're still stuck at home. They just think you're lazy or weak, although they rarely come out and say it….

The thing is, when it snows all the time, you get worn all the way down. You get tired of being cold. You get tired of hurting all the time from shoveling, but if you don't shovel on the light days, it builds up to something unmanageable on the heavy days. You resent the snow, but it doesn't care, it's just a blind chemistry, an act of nature. It carries on regardless, unconcerned and unaware if it buries you or the whole world.” (full description here)

As the Church, we have to do a better job of talking about mental health issues. Too many people put on a fake smile when they walk through our doors. They pretend everything is fine and that they are too blessed to be stressed when really they are surrounded by a blizzard no one else can see. Instead of pointing out the 267 times the word joy is mentioned in the Bible, maybe we should spend more time talking about how there are more lamenting psalms than thanksgiving psalms, or how Jerusalem’s wall was rebuilt because the king noticed Nehemiah was sad. We glance over the times that grief and anguish overcame Jesus, Elijah begged to die, basically the entire book of Job, the fact that we have a “weeping prophet”, and David’s several low points. We unintentionally alienate those who struggle with mental illness by our avoidance of the subject. 

But more damaging than ignoring mental illness in the church is trying to “fix” people. Depression is not a spiritual issue but a psychological and health issue. We can’t tell someone to pray the sad away anymore than we can tell someone who just had a root canal to pray the pain away. And that’s the rub. We believe in prayer. We believe that God still heals people, but we also know that God also doesn’t heal every person that’s been prayed for. The apostle Paul asked three times for the thorn in his flesh to be taken away, and God’s answer was “My grace is sufficient”. I pray that we all find God’s grace to be sufficient, that we learn to embrace our weaknesses for Christ’s sake, and that we never point to someone else’s weakness and think ourselves better. 

Keep It Simple

Welcome to 2019.  Many of my friends told me they were glad to see 2018 go away.  Actually when I was on the road playing music NEW YEARS EVE was a big deal!  With all the excitement and anticipation of ringing in the New Year, I never felt excited about New Year's Eve, I was always sad about the year, which had just passed.  And to be completely transparent our family had a rough 2018, so this year I was ready to move on to the New Year.

Everyone seems to make resolutions in January and we normally break them by February.  I decided this year I would keep it simple.  I would start walking, drink water instead of soda and watch my portion size on my meals and I could lose weight.  Ok we are the third week in and my alarm clock goes off at 6am and I walk 5 days a week for 2 miles and have been drinking mostly water and I have lost 10 pounds. I have found myself at peace walking /praying in the mornings and I do feel better, the 6am alarm is annoying but I have gotten through it.   Now the trick is in a month will I still be doing it?

Do you have a goal or a resolution you are trying to keep?  Many of the new resolutions consist of going to church more often, read more of the Bible, lose weight, be healthier and start exercising or maybe learn a new hobby.  Whatever it is you have got to keep a goal in mind and try to reach that goal.

Psalm 32:8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. 

The challenge to myself for this year is daily.  I want to be a person who says, “ I am glad I did that” rather being the person who said, “I wish I had”.  Now, just to be clear I am not signing up for skydiving or anything like that.  It can be as simple as opening the door for someone or helping my neighbor. When I end my day I want to be able to say there was more “I am glad I did that” than “I wish I had”.  If I can say that I feel I have won that day.  Never have more than two days where I did not “Win the Day”.  If I can just keep it simple I will become a better person.   

Good luck with your goals for this New Year.  How many “I am glad I did that” will you have?

The Other Book In The Pew

I was trying to make space in my garage over the winter break and came across some boxes labeled “downstairs books” that had remained unopened since we moved to Florida. When I opened them I found, amongst many other books, several hymnals from the Church of the Nazarene. It was at that moment that I realized I probably had a problem. For whatever reason, at some point, I thought it was an excellent idea to collect hymnals (Marie Kondo would be so disappointed in me). I would have collected United Methodist Hymnals too, but there’s only one and it was published in 1989. 

Yep, 30 years ago the UMC received it’s first and only(ish) hymnal. Several things have contributed to the lack of new hymnals. The prevalence of good projectors that can display lyrics and liturgy, the cost of physical books, the availability of lyrics and information online, and the increasing number of new songs.  In one sense, as soon as you publish a hymnal it’s already out dated. While the UMC hymnal was published in 1989, it was approved in 1988. The latest song that mad it’s way into the Hymnal was “Hymn of Promise” by Natalie Sleeth in 1986. (For a modern comparison, if we released an official hymnal this year, Good Good Father would be just as old).  

I’m old enough to remember singing out of hymnals on a regular basis. My dad was a minister of music for my entire childhood and I don’t think there was ever a Sunday when a hymn wasn’t sung in some form. I still love several hymns, and whenever I actually attempt to piddle around on the piano, it’s usually to the hymnal. But even with my deep connections to the hymns, I’m ok with the fact that my kids will likely never sing out of a hymnal in their life. 

Even just typing that seems weird and like a violation of some deep, universally understood rule. But the more I think of it, the less sure I am that there will ever be a need for them to sing out of one. I’m sure they will learn the great classics, they already have been exposed to parts of the hymnal I never used as a child (the Great Thanksgiving was new to me when I became a Methodist), but I’m not as worried about them learning all the ins and outs of hymns as I am them appreciating the poetical and musical complexity of them (and whatever other songs we sing in church). Take lyrics like “Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise / Thou mine Inheritance, now and always / Thou and Thou only, first in my heart / High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art” (6th century) and compare them to “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away / bop shoe bop, shoe bop whoo” (1974). We can do better than that. Which is why I’m grateful for the modern songs that still embrace theologically accurate, poetical, and beautiful melodies. 

In the end though, it’s not even about the music or the poetry. It’s about the God that the songs are glorifying. It’s been 30 years since ink met paper and formed our hymnal, but we could sing for a thousand more years and still have new songs to sing about God’s love. Our worship isn’t limited to what is inside a book, but rather basking in the presence of a limitless God. 

So That...

    As a borderline millennial, I am in the unique position of seeing the humor in some of the crazy things millennials do and also the crazy side of what some of the older generations accuse the millennial of. One of my personal favorites are companies blaming millennials for killing the fabric softener and laundry detergent industry. One large company even said that millennials don’t know what fabric softener is used for and so that’s why they don’t buy it. Here’s a bit of a confession, I don’t really know what fabric softener is used for, so they weren’t completely wrong. But, if I were going to take a wild guess, I would say that it softens fabrics. I’m aware it probably does much more than that. I would assume it also conditions the fibers of your clothes, helps them to last longer, and because of the “softening” makes them more comfortable to wear. Confession #2- I have never bought fabric softener in my adult life. When I have used it, I can tell that the towels seem to be a bit more fluffy but that’s about it. And because having fluffy towels is low on my priority list, I (like most millennials) choose not to spend extra money on fabric softener. Millennials also are more likely to wear clothes more often between washing. This can potentially sound way more gross than it is, but according to cleaninginstitute.org you can wear a pair of jeans three times before you need to wash them. 

    In short, millennials aren’t against people using fabric softener or washing their clothes after every individual use, they just have a different expectation of how much money it should cost to wear clean clothes. It can get all sorts of confusing. There are some who have very different definitions of clean, there are some who make their own laundry detergent in 5 gallon buckets for less than $20 a year, and then there are some who are actually against the chemicals in some laundry detergent products. It’s not like millennials planned to take out an industry or to change expectations, but many of them came to the same conclusion for a variety of different reasons. 

    Why is any of this important? Well, it’s not. At least talking about fabric softener isn’t really that important (unless you’re in the fabric softener business). But what is important is that for all of their quirks, millennial are at least good at asking “Why?”. Why are we spending tens of thousands of dollars on a college education that no longer provides the job opportunities that it did 10 years ago? Why haven’t wages gone up proportionately with the cost of living? Why are kids eating tide pods? Asking why is extremely important.

    Almost as important is the phrase “So that…” For every “Why” there should be a “So that”. Why do you brush your teeth? So that my teeth are clean, healthy, and more importantly so that they don’t fall out. Why do we have a thrift store as one of the ministries at our church? So that we can have money to pour back into our community, helping meet their financial needs and point them back towards Jesus. Hopefully you can see the pattern by now. For everything we do at the church, someone is eventually going to ask us why we do that. Why do we eat bread and grape juice once a month? Why are we doing a fall festival on Oct. 28th? Why do you need Jesus? These aren’t just trivial questions, there is a lot of complexity, depth, and beauty in them. There is a reason why we do everything we do, and ultimately that reason is so that we can be better followers of Jesus. But sometimes you have to work to get there. Sometimes you have to ask a lot of whys and get through a lot of so thats, but the important part is that you are thinking about it. 

The Last Straw

I would never have thought that something that weighs one sixty-seventh of an ounce would cause so much hatred. If you’re like me, ounces are already confusing (why are there 16 in a pound, it makes no sense. And don’t even get me started on why fluid ounces are completely different). Then you throw in a horrible fraction on top of that, and it’s hard even to quantify what it means. For the record, it means that it’s 1/1072 of a pound, or in other words, you would need 1072 straws to make one pound. That’s right. I’m talking about straws.

You’ve probably seen in the news or on Facebook that several cities and companies are moving away from the plastic straw. What was meant to be a small step towards protecting the planet and especially ocean life has turned into a huge debate. Here are some of the facts that have emerged. 

    There are roughly 7.5 million plastic straws around America’s shoreline.

    There can are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws on the entire world's coastlines.

    There are nearly 9 million tons of plastic trash that ends up in the ocean each year.

    By piece, straws make up only 4% of the plastic waste produced. 

    By weight, they make up only 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic waste each year.(Source)

If you were to do a little bit of math, you could figure out that American straws account for less than 0.1% of the straws in the oceans, and 0.00000022% of the total weight of plastic in the ocean. If you are pro straw, those are some good numbers for you. So basically, the argument has become something along the lines of side A saying “American’s throw 7.5 million straws into the ocean each year, we should do something about it” and side B saying “That’s only 0.00000022% of the plastic waste, it’s not a big deal”.  

Straw debates might also include something about money or people needing them. Plastic straws are super cheap, usually about half a cent. A paper straw is five times as expensive at two and a half cents. So yes, your straw budget would go up five times, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s still cheap (and yes I just used the same argument from above about percentage wise it’s not a big deal). And it's true that kids and some people with particular disabilities need straws to drink. Paper straws meet that need, but even if there were no straws provided, you can purchase metal or reusable silicone straws from Amazon for less than a dollar a piece and bring them with you.

    I struggled with deciding where to go from here. I thought about the old story about a girl throwing starfish back into the ocean (the bottom line is even though she can’t save them all it makes a difference for the ones she can save), I thought about rehashing the “what would Jesus do” thing that I kind of covered in this blog post from a few months ago. However, I think I need to talk about buts for now. 

    At its core, this issue is about whether or not using plastic straws is the best thing for our planet. There is no way to say that it is. Everything that follows that simple question becomes a “but.” BUT paper straws taste gross (they do taste different). BUT people with disabilities need them. BUT plastic straws are the cheapest. BUT I like my straws. BUT they don’t even make up a significant percentage of the ocean plastic waste. All of those things might be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that plastic straws aren’t good for the sea turtles in the wild.

    This principle applies to so many other aspects of life that matter more than a piece of plastic that’s .42 grams (see how much easier metric is). Here’s some simple questions for you. Is spending time with your kids more important than spending time on your cell phone? Are we supposed to love our neighbors? Should we spend time with God? The answer to all of those is yes. When it becomes that simple, it’s like a punch in the gut when you want to add on a “but” to justify playing candy crush instead of playing with your kid. Or trying to explain why an extra 10 minutes of sleep is more important than praying to God. When life gets complicated, make it simpler by asking the fundamental questions. You still might not find the answer you’re looking for, but you’ll find something along the way.