Jesus Isn't Always Interesting

BOISE, Idaho, Feb. 26

     Thank God for spiritual highs, but there’s a danger in them if we’re not careful.  Youth ministry people, as for many other Christians, have long known and lamented the symptoms of what we might call “PRS”, or Post-Retreat Syndrome.

     PRS feels like a malady when you’re in the middle of it.  Some of my best experiences in college were the semiannual retreats my fellowship would take into the mountains of Virginia to worship, rest, and grow closer to Jesus together; PRS came on those Sunday afternoons when I’d find myself back at the quad, re-entering campus like nothing had changed.  Others have experienced “reverse culture-shock”, another form of PRS, when they’ve visited impoverished majority-world countries on mission trips, only to return to see American extravagance with fresh eyes.  Coming back from Chrysalis, Emmaus, or Winter Camp can have the same effect and make us wonder whether the experience happened at all, or whether it was genuine.

     The good news is that it’s all a normal, healthy part of the Christian life.  As Oswald Chambers was fond of pointing out, Jesus’ first move after his Transfiguration—where his disciples see him more clearly than normal—is to descend into the demon-possessed valley (see Matt. 17, Mark 9, Luke 9).  College students face this when they return to the drudgery of homework after worshipping hard-core for a weekend, and high-school campers face this when they leave church camp refreshed and energized, maybe having given themselves to Christ for the first time or committed to seek social justice in ways they hadn’t thought about before—and then face the difficulties of peer pressure, judgment, and marginalization in a high-school environment that hasn’t changed while they’ve been retreating.

     This isn’t to say that spiritual highs aren’t important.  My own faith development has been seriously strengthened by times of intimate closeness with God in retreat settings: ROCK! 2004 (the Baltimore-Washington version of CONVO) was one; my Chrysalis weekend was another, as was most of seminary.  And now I work in Christian camping, which is a form of parachurch revivalism—so I do hope that the Lord provides refreshing, fulfilling mountaintop experiences to the campers and guests who visit our programs at Lazy F.

     Even so, PRS begs a conversation for those in ministry, namely around this question: given that God does often speak through moments of spiritual high, how do we equip our students or parishioners to practice the Christian life even in seasons when it’s tiresome (it often is), difficult (Jesus says it will be), or uninteresting (let’s be honest)?  “There is no conceivable way,” C. S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters, “of getting by reason from the proposition ‘I am losing interest in this’ to the proposition ‘This is false’”—but it’s not always obvious to think so.  How do we equip disciples, especially youth, to be ready to meet the everyday, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other discipline of following Jesus when the dry times come?

     Recruiting potential camp counselors at Boise State University last night, I met some young adult Christians who seem well-poised for taking Jesus into the nitty-gritty of daily life, but they acknowledged the difficulty of persevering.  “The ‘point of death’ is easy,” one student said during the Bible study, probably referring to Philippians 2:8 and the grandiose commitments we make to Jesus when we see him most clearly.  “It’s the life thing that’s hard”—that is, giving even the uninteresting aspects of life to Jesus when it’s day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, or following him through the mundane.

     In the practice of ministry, especially youth ministry, there’s a place for the moments of deep, felt closeness to God—the sunrise hikes to the cross, the altar calls, the commitments to justice.  But we need to be preparing our kids, and ourselves, for when Christian life isn’t as interesting as we might wish it to be.  Discipleship does its best work in the mundane.  Let’s talk about how to take it seriously even after we leave the mountaintop.

     --John Harrell, Program Coordinator

Reflection Questions

•  Have you had a “mountaintop” experience in your own faith development (not everyone has)?  If so, what was it?

•  Take a moment to thank God that God sometimes gifts us with mountaintop experiences!

•  What is your routine of daily spiritual discipline?  Can you commit to reading a little Scripture (5 minutes a day, perhaps) and talking to the Lord a little (again, maybe starting at 5 minutes a day)?

•  Take a moment to thank God for being good, loving, and gracious even when we don’t “feel” God’s presence over long periods of time.  Ask God to help you follow him even when it’s not easy, adventurous, or exciting.

The God of the Geeks

SNOQUALMIE PASS, Wash., Feb. 24

     Geeks were in the news this week.  My weekly intake of the NPR Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! podcast took place while driving up toward this snow-covered wonderland yesterday—a triple expression of my own nerdiness, since it combined my loves of travel, camp, and NPR all into one.  Would that people with unusual interests always had it so easy.

     Peter Sagal, NPR’s very funny and gifted game show host—and someone whom, as a broadcast major myself, I wouldn’t mind having lunch with someday—was joking about the perceived usefulness of studying art history, a major not known for its post-college earning potential.  Apparently the president had accidentally caused a stir among art history majors for a remark he’d made (he later clarified), and so Sagal was quizzing a listener on the executive misstep.

     It “caused an outcry from art history majors all across the country,” joked Sagal. “They banded together and agreed to not put as much foam as usual on our grande lattés.”

     It was a good joke, one that justifiably got a big laugh from the studio audience.  It speaks to my own experience as an unemployable collegian, too: when I graduated in 2009, most of us journalism students knew, even as our commencement speaker exhorted us to re-make the journalism industry, how hard it was going to be to find jobs in our field during a recession.  I myself never entered it and went to grad school instead.

     But underlying Sagal’s quip is a strange, and quite suburban, assumption that our culture seems to have adopted, often to the detriment of the youth in the pews.  It runs something like this: Success and happiness in life depends upon attaining financial security.  In order to attain it, you’ve got to work in a lucrative field, which requires a good collegiate (or, more and more, a good graduate) degree in that field from a noteworthy school.  As there seem to be fewer rich art historians, poets, philosophers, and painters than I.T. professionals, lawyers, airline pilots, and doctors, we suppose that degrees in the humanities are trivial at best, fiscally irresponsible at worst.

     As a result of that line of thinking, many members of my generation are tempted to enter fields in which they have no passionate interest, or if they do spend their collegiate years studying what they really enjoy, they have to wrestle with the well-intentioned queries of friends and loved ones who want to know “what you’re going to do with your degree”.

     Not that there’s anything wrong with being an I.T. professional, a lawyer, an airline pilot, or a doctor, of course; we should thank the Lord that we have such people pursuing their passions and keeping us, as it were, alive and un-sued.  But when did non-lucrative courses of study—degrees like philosophy, art history, theatre, classics, literature, English, flute performance, and all the rest—stop being intrinsically good, worthwhile ends in their own right?  Have we stopped giving ourselves permission to study things simply because we’re passionate about them, even when it means financial sacrifice, even if it means barista time after college?

     Since these questions speak to the core of what a life worth living looks like, they’re of great consequence for how we minister to the kids in our families, churches, and camps—which pursuits we tell them are Worthwhile (with a capital “W”) in the days after they graduate.  “The study of language, history, and ideas does not appear to be as useful as computer training,” claimed Klassen and Zimmermann’s excellent book, The Passionate Intellect, “but because of the dignity of nature and human nature, they have intrinsic worth, and their patient study honors God’s creation and thus glorifies God.”  Are our kids hearing this from us?

     Jesus put the goal of life as simply to love the Lord with our entire being, and our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–40 and parallels), serving the Lord with all of our intellect and passions, everything that makes us “tick” as unique persons created in God’s image (see Gen. 1:26–27).  And we should note that the ideal of “financial security” and “comfortable retirement” appear nowhere in the Lord’s re-telling of the Greatest Commandment.

     To be sure, the Scriptures ask us to take education and wisdom seriously (e.g., Prov. 8, 1 Tim. 4:16), along with the development and stewardship of our talents, resources, and gifts, often including the financial ones (see Matt. 25:14–30, Luke 19:11–27).  What we teach young disciples ought to include those elements as well.  But whenever security, comfort, or access to Western luxury overtake our devotion to Jesus and our diligent expansion of the fascinations and creativities that he has given us (“talents,” in the lingo of Matthew 25), it’s a form of idolatry: remember what the Lord said about the seed choked by thorns, that “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matt. 13:22; cf. Mark 4:19, Luke 8:14).

     The church needs to wrestle with this, particularly in how it imagines ministry to youth and children in youth group and at camp, and especially in the ’burbs and the middle class (which, full disclosure, is my own background).  At Lazy F, we try to encourage our staff to “geek out” in their own ways, to live unashamed of their fascinations.  To use real examples from 2013, we had staff with geek-fascinations in group psychology, dance, painting, Justin Bieber’s music, and the ligaments of the human knee, to name a few.  My own fascinations are with airplanes, as anyone on the team can tell you, and road-tripping.  For me, it’s fun to write from Snoqualmie Pass, and it’s fun to listen to NPR, especially when it’s an act of geeky worship to the God who gave me those interests in the first place.  Let’s declare that we’re done with scaring our kids into chasing comfort.  Let’s convey Jesus’ permission to be creative and to explore what fascinates them, whether it’s the poetry of Angelou, the bar exam, the plays of Euripides, the practice of neurosurgery, or the paintings of Van Gogh.  God will provide our financial needs in the long run if we trust God and let ourselves be nerds for God’s glory.  Let the youth geek out.  Long live art history.

    --John Harrell, Program Coordinator

Reflection Questions

•  What’s something that fascinates you so much that you could talk about it for 15 minutes without apologizing, even if everyone else loses interest?  (Could it be a sports team?  A field of study?  An activity?  A person?  Pancakes?)

•  Try this.  Go out on a “geek prayer walk”.  Take a five minute walk—just you and the Lord—and tell God about whatever it is that you geek out about.  Don’t try to sound “holy” or anything: just be yourself and talk about what fascinates you.

•  How can you encourage the kids, teens, and young adults in your life to explore their God-given fascinations—even the ones that might not make them much money?

•  Thank God that God gave you fascinations and passions.  Ask God to give you ways to develop and explore them.