nobody struggles with perfectionism

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"Have no fear of perfection — you'll never reach it." — Salvador Dali

“I’m so bad at this.” I told my partner as we clumsily danced together. It was my first week at my friend’s swing dance class and it wasn’t going well. “I’m terrible,” I thought. “I'm sure she’s probably thinking about how bad I am." I looked around to see the other couples smiling and laughing. "Everybody else seems so good and I feel like a failure.” I couldn't wait to get out of there and not come back. 

the myth of perfectionism 

“Yeah, I struggle with perfectionism,” I used to think. “But only because I want to do everything with excellence? How’s that a problem?” Many in our society think of perfectionism in that way: a necessary evil that shows our commitment to doing good work. But the idea of struggling with perfectionism is a myth. Nobody struggles with being perfect. Nobody’s bothered when things go perfectly: when the date goes according to your plan, when everybody loves your party, when you speak up in the meeting and your insight wows your boss.

Instead, what we struggle with is imperfectionism, when our imperfections break through our carefully crafted lives and we don't measure up to our expectations. We can't handle our imperfections, flaws, and weaknesses. Imperfectionism is the real reason you hate, reject, and mentally beat yourself up day after day. Couching this as perfectionism covers up the real struggle: we can't handle being imperfect.

why we want to be perfect

We live in a society that's obsessed with perfection. From celebrity photoshops to our own retaking of photos over and over again to look just right (i.e. perfect), everyone wants to appear flawless. All of this builds out of the belief that perfection is not only attainable but probable. And so we all act as our own PR managers, obsessing over cultivating the perfect image. We spend our days projecting perfection, hoping we can fool not only the people around us but more importantly, ourselves. 

Everyone wants to be perfect. "Look at that person," we think. "They're so perfect. They never have the flaws and discouragements that I do." To fit in, we all act as our own PR managers, obsessing over projecting an image perfect enough for us to be accepted by our communities. So we suppress our imperfections and chase the "perfects," the perfect grades, perfect performance, perfect looks, perfect job, and a perfect spouse, hoping that through these things we can prove our perfection.

But while we spend our days in public trying to portray perfection, we spend our alone time buried under the weight of our imperfections: our flaws and weaknesses, our guilt and brokenness. We wonder how we can be so messed up when everyone else is perfect. We assume it's just us, and we get to work, hoping that soon we'll be perfect enough, both on the inside and outside, to be accepted by the people around us.

the allure of perfection 

We crave perfectionism not as an end, but as the means to get approval. Brene Brown, the shame and vulnerability researcher, calls perfectionism, “The belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.” At it’s heart, perfectionism revolves around fear, fear of being rejected by the group for not being perfect enough. The struggle with imperfectionism is based on two hidden beliefs: 

• If I'm perfect, then I deserve to be accepted.

• If I'm imperfect, then I'll be rejected.

We all use perfectionism as a way to hide our flaws and ensure we won’t be rejected. One of the most clear ways perfectionism impacts your life is through dating. We look for the perfect person, and then try be their perfect person, This creates tremendous pressure to appear perfect, because we assume this perfect person wouldn't like me if I'm not perfect. This fear of rejection drives us to hide and cover and perform our way through life. We overwork, over exercise, and overanalyze every social interaction. Men and women generally do in similar, yet different ways:

• Men seek perfection through success in athletics and career, think that if they project confidence, strength, and self-sufficiency, all pointing to being successful, then they’ll be seen as perfect.

• Women seek perfection through appearance and having it all together, thinking that if they look the right way, wear the right clothes, weigh the right amount, all while balancing friends, family and work, then they’ll be seen as perfect.

And so we spend our lives trying to formulate a way to win the approval of our communities. But this leaves you in a state of worry, afraid that your imperfections will break through, creating shame, fear, and dread that everyone will leave you. 

the struggle with imperfection

While the struggle with imperfection affects everyone differently, depending on your personality and the family and culture you grew up in. Below are some broad categories to help you discern where your underlying struggle with imperfectionism is. 

• You avoid anything you’re weak in: If you struggle with imperfections, you’ll only do the things you can do perfectly. You’ll avoid any activity or opportunity where other people could see that you aren’t perfect. This often means you’ll put off things you need to do, in an attempt to avoid the risk of imperfection.

• You fixate on your flaws: no matter what goes right, you instead focus on the few things that didn’t meet your expectations. This fixation leads to self-hatred, where you beat yourself up for not being the perfect date, giving the perfect presentation, or looking perfect.  

• You’re sensitive to criticism: we dread criticism, since it names our imperfections and makes us acknowledge their existence. We’d rather maintain the illusion of perfection than deal with our flaws. Performance reviews, feedback, and critiques cause us to become unsettled, afraid that we won’t be perfect. And if you feel perfect, you’ll freely critique others.

• You’re hyper-aware of how others perceive you: we’re always aware of how other people view us. You’re always thinking about what other people are thinking about you. This affects you physically, causing you to do things like check your appearance in every mirror that you pass, but also mentally, wondering if people liked your story.  

These four feelings don't identify the exact imperfections you struggle with, but they are the smoke that will help show you where the fire burns.

fighting through imperfectionism 

I ended up going back to my friend's swing class. I didn't want to, but three things happened to help me embrace my imperfections and to break through the fear and shame that surrounded them. Brene Brown uses the categories of compassion, connection, and courage to explain how we can fight through our imperfections. 

• Compassion: “I think you’re doing really well,” my partner said. “It’s just our first time anyways.” The compassion my partner showed me surprised me. Through her compassion, she gave me the space to admit it's okay to be imperfect. She reminded me that perfection is an unrealistic expectation for anything, but especially one you are just starting in. Her compassion then allowed me to show compassion to myself.

• Connection: “Don’t worry, Luke,” some of the more experienced dancers told me. “It takes three or four times before you get the hang of it.” Healthy connection happens when we share our imperfections with each other, creating bridges that span the isolating nature of shame and failure. They remind us: we’re not the only one struggling.  

• Courage: After the first class, I was faced with the choice: do I go back for another class? I didn't want to, but I also knew that the only way to overcome my fear and the imperfection I felt was to walk straight into it. Courage isn't a feeling, but a choice to continue going forward to face your imperfections. 

As you go through life, imperfection will always be a part of it, but it doesn't have to control you. These techniques are important through the risks and uncertainties of your twenties, and it's crucial to surround yourself with compassionate and courageous people. 

the ultimate answer to imperfectionism

While these techniques are helpful as you work through your imperfections, they still don’t get to the root of the issue. At its heart, your struggle with imperfection is an identity issue: we’re all afraid of being flawed. We’ll deflect, dismiss, or rationalize away anything that threatens our illusion of being perfect.  

Every religion and culture is built on this yearning for perfection. Religious teachers and societal thought leaders both advance the same perfectionistic thinking: be perfect as I am perfect. All or none. Either perfect or shamed. So everyone gets to work, hoping to prove to everyone around them how perfect they are. 

But Christianity is the complete opposite. Jesus says to you:

“Let’s be honest. I know you’re messed up. I know everything you’ve ever done and ever thought, so you can’t fool me. But I love you and want a relationship with you so badly that I lived the perfect life that you couldn’t. The cross allows you to admit you’re imperfect, because I took away the punishment for your imperfections. You're no longer identified by your imperfect life but by my perfect one.” 

Here’s what makes Christianity so different: Jesus is perfect, but He’s not a perfectionist. Perfectionists shame and reject the imperfect, but Jesus does the opposite: His perfection allows you to admit you're imperfect. Before you can't get the unconditional love and approval you're hungry for, you have to put down your mask of perfection and embrace the free gift of His perfection given to you.

"And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” — Luke 5:31-32

God can’t work if you won’t start

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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” — William Carey, missionary

“I used to think God guided us by opening and closing doors, but now I know that sometimes God wants us to kick some doors down.” — Bob Goff

a distant place

“Sit down boys,” my Mom said. “You need to watch this.” It was the night of 9/11, and we crowded around our TV, watching the rescue workers dig through the rubble. That footage was the first time I’d ever seen New York City, and changed it from a name to an actual place. Things soon went back to normal in rural Kansas, and New York City disappeared from my life.

Nine years later, I was in seminary and randomly picked up a book in the library. “Have you ever read this pastor in New York named Tim Keller?” I asked a seminary classmate. “He’s saying all the things I’m thinking about.” We started talking about the need for more people to bring the gospel to our generation, and at the end of our conversation my friend asked me, “Luke, would ever go to New York City?” “Nope,” I replied, “I don’t think I could. I’m just a normal guy. That’s not a place for people like me.”

Two years later, I had my ticket booked to go to South Sudan. Then a month before I left, I stopped in New York City for a few days on my way to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Boston. “So how was New York?” they asked. “It was good, but something weird happened,” I said. “I almost feel like God may be calling me to New York.” I hedged my words since they couldn’t be right...me...in New York?

Over the coming months, I came up with every excuse why I could never live in New York City. I’m a simple guy from a small town...that makes me a better fit for South Sudan. I don’t know anyone in NYC, and have no clue how I’d ever make money there.  It’s so big and I’m so little! Why would God want me to go New York City?

how does God work?

As we each look out at the world, we often wonder what’s going on? How can there be so much brokenness? So much hardship? So much suffering? In the face of all of this, Christian start to ask: where’s God at? Why isn’t He doing anything? And how can He be so distant when there are so many problems? These questions persist, causing many Christians to settle into a pessimism that nothing will ever change.  

There’s an underlying question here: who’s responsible for change? Us or God? Throughout history, the pendulum swings back and forth between humanity and God.

• We’re in control (human agency): this side overemphasizes humans ability to effect change in the world. In this view, God is either non-existent or disinterested, and we are responsible for solving our problems through our own hard work. When Christians start to think this way, it creates the functional atheism discussed in Lesson 6.

• God’s in Control (God's sovereignty): this side overemphasizes God’s control over all things, painting humans as passive bystanders. In this view the problems of the world are so daunting that only God is powerful enough to solve them. This over-reliance on God’s sovereignty helps people to shed their own responsibility.

The Bible rejects this either/or dichotomy by teaching that both of these ideas are needed for something to change. God’s in control, but He uses humans to accomplish His plan. While technically God doesn't need people to work alongside Him since can do anything He wants, He chooses to with and through human beings for His glory.

God works through ordinary people

Many Christians fall into this over-reliance on God, and assume that since nothing changes, God must be cold and distant, uninterested in the daily lives of His creation. “Why doesn’t God do anything about this?” they wonder as they go about the routines of their lives. They never stop to think how God accomplishes His will by partnering with ordinary people.

I didn’t understand this growing up. I knew my place. I wasn’t meant to go a top school or get a fancy job in a coastal city, that was for other people. I thought God used “special” people to do big things, and ordinary people like me to live normal lives. Many of us adopt this mindset, so we wait around for God and the special people to do something. So many people go through the routines of their life, waiting for a modern-day messiah, some ultra-talented leader able to tackle the problems of the day.

But as I got older and learned more about how the world works, I never saw any of these ultra-talented messiah types waiting around. I found that the men and women who impacted the world, in both large and small ways, were only ordinary people who had answered God’s call on their life. And I realized the Bible taught the same thing as well. Listen to Paul talk to the Corinthians:

For consider your calling, brothers; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.  -- First Corinthians 1:26-28

So you’re an ordinary person with not a lot to offer? Perfect! Paul says that’s the kind of person God’s looking to use in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, the church has it all backwards. We think God calls strong and talented people into things that are guaranteed successes. As discussed in Lesson 3, God calls weak and humble people into uncertain times and walks with them every step of the way. 

God calls you into the chaos

As I wrestled with whether God was actually calling me to New York City, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed. How could I ever make it there? And what did I ever think I could offer? But God opened my eyes to how that attitude exhibited a sinful desire to be in control of my life. I wasn’t willing to trust God that things could work out even if it was beyond my control.  

But then I began to notice how God called people in the Bible. He  always found the weak, the broken, and the scared, and didn’t call them into comfort and stability, but rather deeper into the chaos of life. Moses, Rahab, Gideon, David, Esther, Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Nehemiah, the Disciples, and Paul are just a few of the ordinary people God used to accomplish His plan. God called some of them to be celebrities and some of them to be outcasts, but all of them were called out of a smooth live into the turbulence of following God.

God called these ordinary people to things bigger than themselves not to crush them, but to force them to rely on Him. Our expectations for God have atrophied, as evidenced by our refusal to step out beyond our own strength. Since we all gravitate towards safe and comfortable lives that we can handle on our own, being afraid of God’s calling can be a useful sign that we’ve finally stopped telling God what we’re comfortable doing and listening to His will for our lives.

God calls you to get started 

Some people get defensive about this subject, since they feel many Christians put too much emphasis on doing something “big” with your life. They’re right to feel uncomfortable, since too much of what the church praises is shaped by a culture that desires fame and achievement above all else. God doesn’t require you to accomplish something noteworthy with your life, move to a third world country, or rise up the ranks of an influential job. Instead, God calls people to get started and to let Him work.

God doesn’t usually tell people what He is planning on doing with their life, He just asks them to start obeying Him, even in the little things. And so Abraham starts walking. David delivers some food to his brothers in the army. Peter leaves his job and starts following a new teacher.  Unfortunately, many of us have built-in excuses for why we can't start. But these excuses just keep you from working, since He'll clear so many of the problems and issues on the horizon by the time you get there. 

where to start?

Sadly, many people never get started. They coast through their twenties, assuming they have plenty of time, but soon the concerns of work and family set in. Eventually they get older and busier, and give up trying, assuming that God didn’t want them to do anything. This attitude permeates American Christianity, where we complain about the problems, but we never see our lives as part of the solution. 

We're often stuck in a bystander mentality, refusing to see God’s desire to work in and through us. We shrug our shoulders and say, “If God really wanted something to happen, He’d call somebody.” But God calls you to start, to get off of the sidelines of life and into the fray. The best place to start is look for places that you see brokenness. God calls by attuning our hearts to make us aware of specific hurts and breakdowns in our communities. Look at what you frustrates you, and set out to work with God to help the situation.  

If that doesn’t lead to an opportunity, begin to look for small ways to obey God. Or find someone who is already doing something and help and encourage their work. Lastly, pick up your Bible, turn to a gospel, and as you read ask yourself: What would it look like in my community if I obeyed this. My predication is that after a few chapters you will have a lifetime of ways to serve your community.  

what the world really needs

The world doesn’t need another church full of polite people ignoring its hurts and hardships. It also doesn’t need insecure Christians trying to build their own little kingdoms. And it doesn’t need more critics telling them everything's wrong.  Instead, the world needs ordinary people like you obeying God and bringing the gospel deep into the brokenness of our lives. It’s hard and slow, but I believe God wants to work through you to do some quietly incredible things.

a calling isn’t telling God what you want to do

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“We are not wise enough, pure enough, or strong enough to aim and sustain such a single motive over a lifetime. That way lies fanaticism or failure. But if the single motive is the master motivation of God's calling, the answer is yes."  — Oz Guinness

“Mom. Dad. I know what I want to do with my life.” We were driving home from a basketball game, the summer before my senior year of high school. “I’m going to major in rhetoric,” I announced, “And then go to law school to be a lawyer.” I spoke with the confidence you only have when you’re young, when you believe that the world is yours and nothing can stand in your way. "Ok, Luke." my mom replied. "That sounds like a good plan." And just like that, my 17-year-old self had made it clear: I was going to be a somebody.

Growing up, our culture tells us you’re in charge of your life. You need to make things happen, working to impose your will on the world around you. We’re told that successful people take initiative and create their own opportunities, not letting up until they achieve their goals. Before long, you’re the main character in your life novel, charged with the role of forging your path forward.

As we’ve assumed control for our lives, we've changed how we choose our careers. In the past, people talked about receiving a calling, a call from God into a certain vocation. While we still use that word, most young people have replaced their calling from God with a “telling,” where you tell God what you’re going to do with you life. Subconsciously, we don’t like callings, since it implies that we listen and respond to God. A telling makes us the authority; we tell God, our parents, and others what we want to do with our lives.

why we refuse God’s calling 

We all gravitate towards a telling because it allows you to maintain control over your life. Tellings allow you to project your desires onto God, instead of listening to His call for your life. In the resultant power struggle, there are three main reasons you reject God’s calling and replace it with your own telling:

1. You want to be more than God calls you to be: You have big plans for your life and you’re afraid that God will call you to something small. Like an Old Testament king who went into battle without consulting God, you attempt big things without asking God about them, afraid He might say no. Tellings like this one often result when we ignore our limits and try to do too much.

2. You want to be less than God calls you to be: You’d like a nice, average life, and you’re afraid that God might call you to something bigger and more difficult. Like Moses refusing God’s call to lead the Israelites, you often say, “I’m not gifted enough," and have a long list of excuses why you’re the wrong person.

3. You want to be something different than God calls you to be: You go along with God for a while, but when He calls you to something you don’t want to do, you go the opposite direction. Like Jonah, you rebel against God when His directions for your life don’t fit your plans.

The common thread between these is our desire to maintain control over our lives. Having grown up in a small town, I was afraid that unless I told God that I wanted to do something “big” like law, He would call me to some quiet and obscure life. I thought a telling was the only way I could ever get what I wanted out of life.

tellings thrive on idols

People always said the same thing when I told them I wanted to go to law school. “Wow, Luke, that’s impressive!” “Yeah,” I’d congratulate myself, “I’m going to make it big.” My telling got me what I wanted, respect and an association with success. We’re all driven towards telling God what we want so that we can get what we really want out of life, our idols. An idol is anything more important to you than God, a good thing that you’ve made into an ultimate thing.

While we’re all different, there are a few main idols that drive us to take control:

• Power/Success: if I do something where I’m successful and well-known, then people will think I’m a somebody. Greatest fear: living a quiet and obscure life.

• Comfort: if I do something that isn’t too hard, then I’ll never have to be uncomfortable. Greatest fear: doing something challenging and hard.

• Approval: if I do something prestigious, then my parents/friends/community will give me the affirmation I want. Greatest fear: disappointing others.

• Security: if I do something where I can make a lot of money, then I’ll feel safe from the uncertainties of life. Greatest fear: financial, emotional, or physical risks.

These idols and the tellings they create are insidious, not because you’ll openly reject God, but because you’ll start using Him to get what you want. Instead of Him being your God, you'll make Him into your cosmic genie, expecting Him to grant your every wish for life. You'll no longer serve Him, but will expect Him to serve you.

When I told people I wanted to be a lawyer, I always disguised my telling in spiritual terms, saying things like “I want use law to impact the world for Christ.” But at my core I wanted success, and only wanted God to help me get the most important thing in my life. 

the problem with tellings

“Something just doesn’t feel right.” I was sitting alone in the library on a Thursday night, my junior year of college, trying to will myself to study for the LSAT. But it wasn’t working I just wasn’t interested in law. This is how tellings often work. They may appear to work for a little while, but eventually the tension on the fault line between who we are trying to be and who we actually are becomes too much for us, leading to two types of events to occur:

Tremors Events: As I went through college, more and more warning signs suggested that law wasn’t right for me. I tried to take a business law class but dropped it because it was so uninteresting. I forced myself to study for the LSAT every Thursday night, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had started to feel the dissonance between my plan for my life and God’s plan for me. Despite these tremors in my “calling,” I ignored and excused them away, saying that once I was in law school I’d be excited about law. But the gnawing feeling that maybe law school wasn’t a good fit for me kept growing.

Earthquake Events: Having ignored the tremors I felt during college, I went to Washington DC after graduation for an internship. I went thinking this would be the start of my career in law, but it ended up being the place where my telling collapsed. I was miserable at work, and couldn’t wait for my internship to end.  

Tremors and earthquake events are painful times, but God graciously uses them to open your eyes to the fact that your way isn't working. 

how to get back into a calling mindset

Once back home in Kansas, I had to face the reality that I had no interest in law or politics, which meant my plan for the last five years had crumbled. But through this time, God used my earthquake events to teach me two foundational truths about my life: 

1. Your life is not your own: Since you're not your own, you don’t get to control your life. Instead, as a part of God’s creation, you have to allow Him to be in charge of your life. That sounds scary, but it makes sense when you consider the second truth.

2. God knows you better than you know yourself: God is not some angry authoritarian trying to force you into things you hate. Since God both created and knows every part of your personality and gifting, He's uniquely able to call you to something you can find joy in.

how to discern a calling from a telling

Even with tremors and earthquakes events, the struggle with the tendency to tell God what you want to do will never go away. Here are three questions to ask yourself to help expose if you're pursuing your idols or following God’s calling.  

1. If I got paid just enough to get by, would I still want to do this job?

2. If I could never tell anyone about what I did, would I still want to do this job?

3. If I knew I would always be obscure and never make it big, would I still want to do this job?

These questions help tease out whether you're pursuing the work itself or the fame, prestige, or money that comes with with certain types of work. The more trendy a job, the more important these questions become. If you answer no to any of these questions, it's likely you're pursuing your idols more than you're pursuing God’s calling.

God’s calling: your best way forward

As I reflect back on my telling towards law, I’m thankful God stepped in and altered what I thought was best. Law would've been incongruent with my gifts and personality. Sadly, so many people in their twenties are stuck in their teenage tellings. It’s never too late, though, to get out of a telling and start walking towards God’s best for your life. It won’t be easy, and you'll probably lose prestige, money, or comfort, but there are few better feelings in the world than serving God according to His call on your life.

"And the Lord came and stood, calling as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant hears.” — 1 Samuel 3:10

loving you community means you have to stop using it

"Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her." — G.K. Chesterton

“Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt whatever situation you believe to be the will of God.” — Jim Elliot

i love new york?

“I’m here for the party on the roof,” I told the doorman as I walked into the towering Manhattan apartment building. I was new to New York and had been invited to a friend of a friend’s rooftop birthday party. I took the elevator to the 42nd floor, and as I walked out onto the roof I was looking eye to eye with the Empire State Building. “Wow,” I said to myself as the party kicked off, “what a life!” That night as I left party, I silently exhaled that classic phrase, “I love New York.”

Few things are as ingrained in New York City as much as the slogan “I love New York.” It’s become more than just an ad campaign, but a phrase that encapsulates the feelings of awe that only a place like New York could create. It slips out during those sunny days and sparkling nights, when your dreams and desires magically fall into place.  

But the longer I lived here, I realized something was off. One night I would love New York, and couldn’t envision a better place to live. When I was happy, everything was great. But when things were hard, uncomfortable, or expensive, I started to think of any way to move somewhere else. Eventually, I began to understand that I didn’t really love New York, I was just using it to make me feel a certain way.  

our culture’s view towards community  

My attitude towards New York City wasn’t an accident, but a byproduct of cultural changes over the last seventy years. Starting in the 1950s, as the United States became more and more suburban, our society’s view towards community changed. Previously, people spent all of their time in one community, creating strong networks built on reciprocal sacrifice, since people knew if they helped others now, those people would help them in the future. But as the car became more prevalent, this culture slowly passed away.

In America's new suburban society, people stopped going to to work, school, and church in the same community that they lived, but instead drove past thousand of strangers every day to live isolated parts of their lives in other communities. This changed everything. People went from being a part of one community with strong overlapping ties, to participating in many distinct communities, which led to lots of individual weak ties. This change weakened communities, as it created a more anonymous lifestyle, which reduced the incentive for people to invest in the reciprocal communal bonds required to build strong communities. 

Over time, this switch altered how all of us view community. Due to the limited mobility of pre-World War II America, people were forced to focused on the public good of their local community, since their futures were intertwined. But as people utilized the mobility created by the car, they were now able to pick and choose from individual aspects of different communities. They could live here, work there, go to church somewhere else, and then do all of their shopping in yet another community. As a result, a new culture emerged, one that emphasized the private good over the public good.

a contract with your community

Now that people could choose communities based on what they could offer to them, it produced a culture that prioritized your own personal good. People weren’t forced to invest in one community for the public good, but instead became consumers of multiple communities, looking for ways to maximize their own personal good. Instead of asking what they could do to help the community succeed, people now ask how the communities around them can help them succeed.

We've all soaked up this attitude in our current culture. Today, few young people commit to the success of a place, instead, prioritizing to the success of themselves. This causes us to use places interchangeably, always looking for a community that could give us more of what we want out of life. This creates an unspoken contract with our communities that is at the foundation of the “I love New York” mentality. The contract goes like this: I’ll stay in this community as long as it give me what I want, but if and when it doesn’t, I will move on to another community that'll give me more of what I want.  

In this mindset, when we say "I love New York" we're not declaring our desire to sacrifice and serve the city, but instead that we love the way New York makes us feel. It’s just another form of self-love. This subconscious contract explains the hot and cold relationship that so many people have with the place they live. We are constantly judging our community (I hate crowded subways and cold winters), wondering if there is another community that could give us more while asking for less from us (maybe I should move to Austin or LA?). That’s a major reason why people in cities like New York are always moving. After a few years they find a community somewhere else that potentially offers them more.

the idolatry of the community contract

The goal of contract with your community is always to get more of the things we idolize. Idols are good things that turn bad when we try to make them ultimate things. An unspoken contract is attractive, since it gives you a feeling of control over your life to get what you really want. Living in one sustained community is hard, and the contract helps us to justify our desire to avoid anything that's uncomfortable. In my experiences, every person in the contract mindset wants one of two idols from their community, either success or comfort. 

Success: these people don’t mind being less comfortable as long as they are successful. These people main goal in life is to achieve, and to get the accompanying status and prestige. They’ll move to a global city or a foreign country, willing to sacrifice comfort and safety to reach their dreams. Their worst nightmare is a quiet life in an obscure small town.  

Comfort: these people don’t mind being less successful as long as they are comfortable. They want material and physical comfort, but usually also want safety and comfort from people and ideas who are different from them. These people often live in the suburbs or small towns, since they are willing to make less money and have less prestige in order to feel safe and secure. Their worst nightmare is living in a tiny apartment in a dirty, crowded city.

Neither success or comfort are bad, but when either one becomes an ultimate thing, we use our community to make sure we get it. And if our community can’t provide it to the level we want, we either leave or live in fearful anxiety. “What if I stay here and never achieve?” says the person idolizing success. “What if I stay here and my kids aren’t safe?” says the person idolizing comfort. In this mindset our idols are the most important thing to us, even more so than God. 

God wants us to stop using our communities

God makes it clear in the book of Proverbs how much he hates when we choose communities based on what they offer us. Throughout Proverbs God shows his vision for a healthy community by contrasting the actions of two recurring groups, the righteous and the wicked. Here’s one of these comparisons:

When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish there are shouts of gladness. By the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is overthrown. Proverbs 11:10-11

To English speakers, righteous and wicked are distant words difficult to fully understand. But in the original Hebrew, these two words have more depth of meaning than comes across in English. Here are one scholar’s definition of how Proverb's uses these two words:

Wicked Person: someone who disadvantages the community for his own benefit.

Righteous Person: someone who disadvantages himself for the benefit of his community.

These definitions show how your subconscious contract with where you live violates God's design for health communities. The wicked might appear successful, but as they disadvantage others for their own glory, they leave a trail of poverty, injustice, and abuse of the poor. God calls this behavior wickedness, and shows throughout Proverbs how this attitude causes much of the suffering we see in our communities. So, if you want to see change in your community, you need to stop using it, and instead love it so much that you will disadvantage yourself for the good of the people around you.

how do you love your community? 

So how can you live to this impossible standard? None of us love our community the way we should, but God provides an answer in Jesus Christ, the ultimate Righteous one that Proverbs points to. Jesus lived the perfect life towards his community that we could never live. He lived an obscure life in a small town, never yearning for the success and prestige of the big city. Later, he moved to the big city, not put off by it’s danger, crowdedness, or undesirable people. That danger ultimately led to Jesus’ crucifixion, his giving of his life for his community.

Jesus’ death on the cross showed how we should sacrificially love our neighbor, but also took the punishment from us for how we don’t. When Jesus’ community had deserted him leading up to the cross he didn’t say, “I’m not getting anything out of this, so I’m leaving,” but instead kept loving us. And as he slowly died the torturous death of the cross, he didn’t look out at his fleeing community and say, “This is getting uncomfortable, so I think I’m out.” Instead, he stayed, because he loved the people that he came to save. As you experience the Christ’s love for you, let it melt your heart to love your community, even with its many difficulties. 

let God show you your community 

So this leads us to the question, how should you choose where to live? One important thing to remember is that Jesus didn't go out of his way looking for pain and suffering, but only sought to obey God's will. Leading up to the cross, Jesus tells God, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” This is important to realize, as many people think that following God means moving to the most dangerous or exotic place that you can. 

Your role in God's kingdom is not to live a wild or flashy life, but is to obey, like Jesus, God's will for you. God calls you to renounce your predisposition towards either success, comfort, or both, and invites you to follow his plan for your life. When you’re following God’s will for your life, it doesn’t matter if you live in a crowded city, sprawling suburb, or tiny town, since God wants you there to love and serve your community.

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” — Jeremiah 29:7

a thirst for more will always leave you thirsty

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"Why do I have three Super Bowl rings, and still think there's something greater out there for me? I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, it's gotta be more than this. I mean this can't be what it's all cracked up to be. I mean I've done it. I'm 27. And what else is there for me?" — Tom Brady

"The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that accomplishments can produce deep satisfaction. That's false, because your desires are infinite and always leap out ahead of whatever has just been achieved." — David Brooks

thirsty for success

I ripped open the envelope, having waited weeks for it to come. "Hello Luke, we received your application and want to thank you for applying..." Come on, come on, where is it? I scanned down the page until I found it: "We'd like to invite you to be an intern for the upcoming Spring semester." Yes! Could you believe it! I was going to Washington DC!

And so I packed up my bags and fly back to Washington DC, excited at what this opportunity could bring. I walked through Union Station and caught sight of the Capitol for the first time. Unbelievable! This was it...I'd made it! As I settled in to my apartment three blocks from the Capitol, I was confident that this opportunity would finally answer my lifelong longings for success and significance. 

But it didn't. I got everything I ever wanted...I wore a suit and worked in an office building. I went to meetings with politicians in the Senate buildings. And I spent my nights at fancy events listening to policy experts and professors. But it all felt so empty. And lonely. And pointless. How did an opportunity that checked all of the boxes of what I thought I wanted still leave me so unhappy?

That's the trap of human achievement. Each of us look at the world around us and think, "If I could get this experience or that thing, then I'd really be happy." We don't say it out loud, it's more of a subconscious feeling. You think of your dream job, dream person, or dream possession, and put your hopes on those things for your satisfaction. We complement these big desires with smaller ones like a better apartment, a more exciting life, or more likes on your social media posts, trying to use all of these things to fill the emptiness we feel in life. 

our unquenchable thirst for more

This attempt at trying to find happiness through your possessions or achievements isn't anything new. In Luke 12, two brothers fighting over an inheritance come to Jesus for advice. After telling a story about a rich man and his desire for more and more, Jesus gives them a warning: "Watch out! Be on your guard against every form of greed, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." It's easy to let this verse slip by, since greed in our culture gets associated with money and rich people. Greed is a problem for pro athletes and Wall Street bankers, not normal people like us. But when Jesus uses this word for greed, he isn't talking about having lots of money. The word Jesus uses means "thirsty for more," and addresses the rich man's unquenchable thirst for more, not his barns full of possessions.  

Jesus rejects our culture's belief that greed and riches go together, and calls you to examine your underlying motives for what you have and what you want. Are you still thirsty for more, no matter how much you have? Are you thirsty for more pleasure, more comfort, more beauty, more status, more recognition, or just more Instagram followers? While these thirsts looks different for each person, they are the subconscious desires that drive your life. Sadly, much of our economy is driven by this thirst for more, 

While it looks different for each person, these thirsts for more form the subconscious desires that drive your life. But as we get more and more of what we think will satisfy us, yet still remain thirsty, we rarely stop to ask whether the things we’re consuming can ever satisfy us. Some people have more than others, but you will rarely meet another person who thinks they have enough. Society tells you that if you can get that lifestyle, which is always 25% more expensive than your current one, then you'll finally enjoy life.

the mirage oasis

But it doesn't work. If it did, after all, wouldn't you be happy from all the previous things you got that you thought would make you happy? Not only does this lie not work, but it also makes you forget every previous time it failed you. If accomplishments or possessions or status really brought long-term satisfaction, why did the ones you got in your past bring more lasting satisfaction? Your closet and garage are full of things you thought would satisfy, but now they're a few years old and out of style and you're ready to try again. Your thirsts enslave you, causing you to go through life acquiring more and more, while hoping that next round of stuff will be able to do what the last one couldn't.

Everybody, at different times, believes this lie. It motivates you in school, thinking that the right grades, internships, and leadership positions signal impending success. It motivates you to take the prestigious job, thinking that others will then give you the respect you want . It motivates you to date the prettiest person you can, thinking you'll feel valuable and wanted by the people around you. It motivates you through all of life, as you look to use the things around us to fill the feelings of insignificance we all struggle with in various ways. 

the answer to your thirst

So what's the answer to this non-stop thirst that we all struggle with? In John 4, Jesus meets a woman who, like all of us, has been searching for something to satisfy her. Jesus tells her she needs something different than the temporal things of this earth, that she needs a living water. He tells her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water I give him will never be thirsty again. The water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She's intrigued, and wants the water, but isn't sure how this living water works. "How do I get it?" she wants to know.  

While it's easy to say all the right things about Jesus being your living water, if you're honest, Jesus doesn't seem like much of a thirst quencher in your twenties. The boss promoting you, that guy wanting you, your social status increasing, those are some of the things that we believe will make the thirst go away. And it will for a few weeks, but then it will come back, and you'll be right where you started, looking for your next hit. Except now it'll take more and more to fill you up; a more exotic adventure, a better-looking person, a bigger paycheck, all to make you feel satisfied, like you have done enough to warrant your existence. 

The gift of living water that Jesus offers to both this woman and to you is Himself. It's a relationship with him and His Father, paid for by Jesus dying a death of thirst on the cross. Your relationship with Him gives you the unconditional love, respect, and acceptance that you're trying to use all of your possessions and accomplishments to get. To do that, put down all of the other things you are trying to use to fill you soul, and drink deeply from Jesus, the only thing that will satisfy your deepest longings. 

"For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water." — Jeremiah 2:13

"Jesus stood up and cried out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'" — John 7:37-38

your limits lead you to God

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“Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.” — Parker Palmer

The propellers hummed and my plane lifted off the dirt runway. As we gained altitude, I looked back over the East African horizon. Tears of exhaustion streamed down my cheeks. I was leaving South Sudan, to go start a new life in New York City. The question reverberated in my mind: how could I leave one of the poorest places in the world to go live in the richest? Was I betraying this struggling country? And if I left, who would help fix the problems of South Sudan?

As you look out at the world, the problems can be overwhelming. Every country, community, family, and person has things they struggle with. As you discern how to use your life, figuring out which areas to devote your life to will be one of the hardest, yet most important tasks. Because of this, I want you to think about how your limits interact with the opportunities before you.

a culture of unlimited opportunities

Over the last several generations, the relatively simple life of generations past has morphed into something much more complex. Young people used to live in their hometown, get married to someone they had known for years, and often follow in their family's traditional occupation. Now, that lifestyle has been replaced with one of choice and movement. Due to globalization, international travel, and the internet, you're now flooded with unlimited options in almost every area of life. Consider how your options have exploded in a few areas just in the past several years:

• Netflix: unlimited movies/TV shows to watch

• Amazon: unlimited books to read

• Instagram: unlimited people to meet

• Spotify: unlimited music to listen to

• Dating apps: unlimited people to date

• Twitter: unlimited news/knowledge of the problems in the world

• Colleges: unlimited both in where to attend and what to study 

While these changes have brought about some great things, it's fundamentally changed how we view our lives and make decisions. Too often, unlimited options overwhelm us and create an environment of no options at all. Netflix exemplifies this paradox: you scroll through a thousand different options, yet can't find anything to watch. So how do you navigate all of the opportunities that you have in life?

the tension between doing anything and doing everything

This proliferation of options has burrowed into our milieu, and changed how everyone views their life. As society embraced the idea of unlimited options, we were encouraged as kids that we could be anything we wanted to be. Contrary to some, I don't think this is incorrect. After all, I grew up in a tiny Kansas town surrounded by farming, and now I live in New York City and write. The problem is not with the statement but rather that we interpret the "you can do anything!" message to mean, "you can do everything!" There's a huge difference between the two; we all have the opportunity to do lots of things, but we only have the capacity and potential to do a few of them. 

This disconnect between unlimited opportunities and limited capacities creates tension in our lives. With this pressure to do more and more, we pursue opportunity after opportunity, whether in the jobs we do, friendships we make, or places we live. We're afraid of limiting ourselves by committing to one thing, wondering if there's a job, relationship, or city that's a better fit for us. And when we do commit, we continue thinking about the other possibilities, wondering if we made a mistake. 

what happens when you try to do everything

In your expectation to be able to do everything with your life, you work and work. Every young person believes they are a special case and will soar above the restrictions that hold others back. But then you hit a wall of exhaustion, frustration, or emptiness called limits. Here are the limits that every person faces in life: 

1. You have one life, and can only be in one place at a time: every person only gets to live life once. You can only spend each day one way, and once you do, you can't go back. You choose one college to go to, you marry one person, and you can only live in one place at a time.

2. You have limited skills: surprise, but you aren't good at everything. Each of us has a skill-set that qualifies us to do some things well, but conversely limits us from doing other things well. So many, out of ignorance or a desire for prestige, try to operate outside of their natural giftings. Eventually, most people get tired of that uphill battle, and go back to where God has gifted them.

3. You only have 24 hours in a day: you only have so much time and can only do so much. You can only use your time each day in a few ways, and you have to choose which friendships, jobs, and events to invest in. 

4. Your human capacities are finite: the human body is an amazing thing, but you are still a finite being. You are a person, not a machine, and you need to eat, sleep, and exercise every day. Also, you only have the capacity to learn and retain so much information, and end up forgetting most of life. 

If you struggle with busyness, exhaustion, stress, weight gain, and feelings of emptiness, you're body is trying to tell you that you are trying unsuccessfully to live beyond your limits. When you try to fly above the limits of your life, you may succeed for a few years, but you'll eventually come crashing down.

you deny your limits and try to do it all                                        

Throughout my first year in New York City, I thought I must have gotten it wrong. I had moved to Brooklyn and started a cleaning business, trying to learn a new city and way of life on the fly. But I felt like I wasn't doing enough. I cleaned apartments for rich people while children in South Sudan went hungry, not to mention all of the poor and homeless in New York City. Shouldn't I be doing more with my life? I began to wonder if moving to New York had been the wrong decision. 

As members of a culture that both tells us everything is possible and worships achievement, we all feel pressure to do more. Because of the knowledge of the problems in the world and the breadth of opportunities that exist, many young people feel pressure to achieve beyond their limits: they want to have a full time job, start a nonprofit for kids in Africa, volunteer on Saturdays in the inner city, maintain five best friendships, and says yes to every social event. 

While few people ever actually live a life like that, the pressure to make the most of your opportunities makes you wonder: should I be doing more with my life? So we look out at all of the problems and opportunities in the world and we feel guilty, wondering: who will help if I don't? 

• A computer programmer wonders if he should move to Uganda to help orphans.

• A school teacher wonders who will reform Wall Street if she doesn't.

• A banker feels guilty and wonders if he should teach at an inner city high school. 

• An accountant wonders if her life is a failure if she doesn't do something big, like help with the current refugee crisis.

• A woman feels so burdened with the struggles of her peers that she spends every free moment ministering to them. 

Living in New York City brought my struggle with my limits to the surface. I set out to accomplish three lifetimes of work in one, and felt frustrated when nothing seemed to be happening. I tried meeting everyone and doing everything, making promises that I didn't have the time or energy to later deliver on. If I'm not directly helping anyone, maybe God wants me to move to a different opportunity?

the world doesn't need another savior

What I, and so many other people, struggle with is a savior mentality: the idea that I have to be the one who saves the world. This savior mentality springs out of something called functional atheism, where we talk about God as savior and give assent to His promises, but inwardly believe nothing will happen unless we do it ourselves. When we struggle with functional atheism, we deny God's complete control over the events of the world, and try to usurp His authority in order to become the world's savior. 

Functional atheism, combined with our cultural individualism, creates a superhero mentality for many of us. This causes us to live our lives in one of two ways:

1. Pressure to try to do it all: this person sees the problems and tries to be the superhero. They spring into a flurry of activity trying to solve problems all over the country and world. This mindset leads to busyness and overwork but few lasting results, as you are trying to do more than God has called you to do.

2. Paralyzed by the scope of the problems: this person thinks they have to be a superhero to do anything, so, feeling insufficient to the task, they don't do anything. This mindset leads to apathy, since you don't feel confident that you can help.

Both of these paths, whether you try to blow past your limits or never even test them, lead to the same place: the constant question of "Am I doing enough?" and the accompanying guilt that you're not.  

your limits lead you to God

But the presence of limits in your life is not an accident. God put them there to force you to Him. Our society views limits as negatives, unwelcome intrusions on our personal freedom. To God, though, your limits are healthy boundaries that make us give up our savior mentality and let God by the savior again. 

1. God works through everyone: Remember, you aren't the only one that God is using to build His kingdom. God is working through millions and millions of Christians around the world to accomplish His plan, so don't take on more than what God has called you to. Your job is to answer God's call on your life and not to save the world. Also, keep in mind that your life has seasons, and God might be preparing you for a future calling that is different from your current one today. 

2. God calls you to live for depth, not breadth: Jesus commands you to love your neighbor. I don't think it is an accident that He didn't choose the person living next to you as the object for your love. God calls you to specific people and communities, so once you know where that is, invest your life in those people. Too many Christians hover over their communities, talking about grand plans to save the world while refusing to leave their comfortable circles and engage in the hard work of loving their neighbors. 

3. Prayer connects a limited person to a limitless God: Given your limited ability to influence the world, God gives you prayer as the means to have a limitless impact through Him. Prayer brings your concerns for the world to the God who is big enough to do something about them. 

Even though it been four years since I left, I still think about South Sudan almost every day. I think about the beauty and the suffering, the laughter and the hunger, wondering why God didn't call me there. But God has called and gifted me to live in New York City, and wants me to work within the limits of my life for His glory here. God uses tiny events and little lives, including yours and mine to accomplish His plan and usher in His kingdom.

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." (God speaking to Job) Job 38:4

life isn’t a masterpiece, but an experiment

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"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So many people worry when it comes to decisions. "What if I make the wrong one," they say? And when they say the wrong one, they really mean the one that makes them fail, or not succeed, which is just about the same. But to think in terms of wrong decisions is to be caught up in masterpiece thinking, the idea that there is a perfect life out there for you, waiting for you to live it. This type of thinking cripples you, and holds you back from your potential. Your best path forward isn’t to view life as a masterpiece, but as an experiment. This switch allows you to embrace the ups and downs of life as you figure things out.

masterpiece mindset: life as a performance

In the masterpiece mindset, you approach life like a performer on a stage. The unspoken goal of this mindset is to impress the audience, and to get them to think that you have created a masterpiece of a life. In this mindset, life is a way to prove to our audience, our family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances that we have a desirable life, a perfect story where we always perform well enough to earn the audience's applause.

If you've ever been in a live stage performance, you know the pressure to be perfect. You need to remember every line, follow every cue, and never miss a beat in order for the performance to turn out well. If even one performer misses a line, it can ruin an entire scene. While this pressure and precision works for a scripted show, it breaks down when you treat your life in the same way. The masterpiece mindset can create positive results at first, but it eventually breaks down since life never follows your script. 

masterpiece mindset: life should be perfect, so if you can't do something perfectly, don't try at all

When we operate out of a masterpiece mindset we want a perfect life that goes according to our scripts. But life doesn't work like that, it never follows our scripts, but is always changing. So when the inevitable setbacks and failures of life throws your script out the window, you feel like a failure, having ruined the show and disappointed the audience. When you hit hurdles and roadblocks under this performance mindset, you begin to ask the question, "Do I even belong on stage?" So you do one of two things: either you retreat off stage and never get back on, afraid of failing again. Or you reluctantly come back on stage, but only perform in the areas that you can be perfect in.

In a desire to have this masterpiece life, most people respond to failure in the second way. This causes them to develop two personas: a public, onstage persona and a private, offstage one. When you're onstage, you're in full performance mode, working hard to ensure that you always say the right thing, look the right way, and know exactly what you are doing. You’re wiling to be on stage, but only in performance mode, where you can hide your weaknesses while maximizing your strengths. But performing like this is exhausting, so you have your offstage persona, where you can relax and be yourself.

Since in the masterpiece mindset your value comes from your current performance, you'll only do the things you're naturally good at. And if you don’t experience immediate success doing something, you conclude that it’s not for you, leaving before other people can see you fail. When you are trying to put on a masterpiece performance you only get one shot. And there is no room for mistakes. Here are some characteristics of the performance mindset: Your value is based on your current performance. Here are some simple examples of the masterpiece mindset.

• I wasted two years of my life in a grad program that I can't even get a job in.

• The last time I tried to sing everyone was so much better than me...now I remember why I avoid singing.

• Sorry, I can't cook...I always burn whatever I make.

• I was so embarrassed when I got that question wrong...next week I'm not going to say anything.

• When you draw in front of people you always say, "Sorry, I'm such a bad artist."

• You get tense when you sense you that you may receive criticism or unpleasant feedback.

• When you're on a date, you change to become someone you think the other person would like.

The performance mindset can be devastating, since it puts so much pressure on people to perform their way into a perfect life. Then when life doesn't go as planned, they assume they've failed, which causes them to shrink back from their gifts for fear of being seen as imperfect. Oftentimes it only take a single piece of discouragement or one bad experience for performance mindset people to disqualify themselves from being on stage forever. 

experiment mindset: life as a series of experiments

In contrast to the exacting standards of the performance mindset, the experiment mindset has a lower, but more realistic, view of life. The experiment mindset is is built off of the realization that perfection is unattainable, but over time you can learn enough to be successful. Unlike in the first mindset, here failure and shortcomings are seen as part of the process of life, even though they’re not desired. So rather than denying the existence of failure, the experiment mindset gives you the perspective to work through setbacks as they appear in life.

The experiment mindset doesn’t see life like a performer and a stage, but rather as a scientist and experiment. In the scientific method, the scientist has a question that he seeks to answer with a hypothesis, his guess at an answer. But unlike the performer on stage, he never enters an experiment expecting to get the perfect answer on the first try. Instead, he recognizes that it'll take lots of trial and error to figure out the answer. So the scientist comes to the lab every day expecting to make lots of mistakes and false turns, but perseveres through the failure because he trusts that every experiment will bring him a little closer to his answer.

experiment mindset: life is a series of experiments, so when mistakes happen, learn from them

The scientist sets out to make a little progress every day. For the scientist, the only way to fail is not to get a wrong answer, but to give up searching for an answer. Scientists don't expect to produce a masterpiece immediately, knowing that it will take years and years of hard work to make any important discoveries. Only years after he started, having failed time after time, will the scientist solve the problem. 

Like the scientist, you are faced with big, complicated questions about life. What kind of work should I do? What is God calling me to do? Where should I use my gifts? Whom should I marry? It’s rare to be able to solve these questions with the first answer you come up with. But with the experiment approach, a no to any of your potential answers doesn’t have to stop you. Instead, you are one step closer to the right answer by not knowing which other answers are wrong. Often the best way to find the right answer is to cross out all of the other ones. 

And when you approach life as an experiment, you now have the flexibility to not be perfect. You can try new things and to take risks, since your goal isn’t to show that you haven’t it all together, but rather to learn about how God has made you. Since most people are caught up in proving to others in their 20s that they are on the way to a masterpiece kind of life, they can’t stop and experiment with different jobs, careers, or locations, to see which is the best fit for them. The experiment mindset allows you to take a job to see if it’s a good fit. You can try something for six months or a year, or even on the side, and if it’s not a good fit, you can do something else, but now you know that that isn’t an option you want to pursue.

It took me six major career experiments, and countless minor ones, before I had gathered enough information to understand what kind of work God wants me to do. So don't give up if you are at your first job and feel like you'll never find your niche. I spent a lot of that time in the masterpiece mindset in my twenties, wondering why I kept failing and felling ashamed of it. I thought I was making wrong turns, but now I see how every stop taught me more about my gifts and interests, which helped me narrow my choices down until I found the answer that fit me best.

Here are some simple ways to help you start thinking in more of an experiment mindset:

• You don’t want to fail or go the wrong way, but it’s okay as long as you are learning 

• You focus on learning, not performing

• You focus on perseverance, not perfection

• You prioritize small, nimble experiments over long, expensive productions

• You have unlimited opportunities to find the right answer

• When things go wrong, don’t blame others. Instead, focus on what you can learn

• Quit worrying about your weaknesses and focus on using your strengths.

Why This Is So Important:

When I was younger, I thought you answered the big questions of life by finding the right answer. Now, I realize it usually happens exactly the opposite way, you find the answer to your question by eliminating all of the wrong ones. So if we want to figure out the answers to the questions of our lives, we don't need more information, opportunities, or talents. Instead, what we really need is perseverance, to keep going through the process of experimenting with life and learning how God has made us.

the opposite of uncertainty isn’t certainty but faith

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"I was twenty-eight years old when a bleak thought occurred to me: "What if nothing happens?" — Steve Martin, reflecting on his fears of never making it as a comedian.

"There is nothing upon earth which is not stamped with the mark of instability and uncertainty. All the good things that money can buy are but for a moment: they either leave us or we are obligated to leave them...tell me not of your happiness if it daily hangs on the uncertainties of earth."  — J.C. Ryle

an uncertain start

“What in the world am I doing here?” It was 3am, on my first night in New York City, and that question reverberated through my head. I was laying on the tile floor of my empty Brooklyn bedroom, trying to fall asleep. I had landed a few hours earlier, alone in the city, with just a few months of savings and an idea to start a cleaning business. The uncertainty felt overwhelming. Would I get any customers? Would I make any friends? Would I make it before my money ran out? I drifted off to sleep as sirens and shooting filled the air.

You’re twenties, no matter what your story, are full of uncertainty. Will you find a job that fits your gifts? Will you marry the right person? Will your life turn out the way you want? These big, life-defining questions aren’t easy, and you’ll often feel stuck, unsure of how to go forward. Other times you’ll feel lost, unsure of where the path even is. And sometimes you despair, wondering if you’ll ever get answers?

uncertainty is unavoidable

Because these are the big questions of life, the answers are revealed  slowly,  and uncertainty becomes a permanent part of your twenties. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, since it’s a natural byproduct of good options: having lots of potential jobs to do, places to live, and people to marry. The problem with uncertainty, however, comes with how you respond to it. We usually fill the void between where we are and the unknowns ahead with worry, anxiously wondering: will I ever get these things that seem so important?

The problems with this approach though, is that uncertainty never goes away, it just morphs into different unknowns. When the questions you're facing now get solved, you will encounter another new wave of questions, often even more complex. This never-ending nature of uncertainty causes many to live in a state of anxiety, unsure of how to enjoy the present without worrying over the unknowns of the future.

society's answer to uncertainty

And so we spend our lives chasing certainty. Society says to  look for it through money, thinking a big bank account equals protection. Society says to look for it by avoiding risk, thinking  isolation can create safety. And society says to look for it through good degrees and jobs, thinking the right credentials will guarantee the right result. And so we all search for something, trying to set our lives on a piece of bedrock.

Society's answers might give us a feeling of control over our lives, but they don't actually address the underlying reasons for uncertainty. So uncertainty bubbles under the surface for years, until it burst into our lives, reminding us through disappointment, brokenness, and hurt that we're not in control. At this point, many people either throw up their hands in hopelessness, or they double-down on their preferred methods of perceived control.

the only answer to uncertainty

But when you get to the end of your strength, you'll find that the only lasting answer to the uncertainty of life is the certainty of God. In order to fully face the future yet avoid the paralyzing effects of anxiety, you have to trust in a God bigger than yourself. If you don't have an all-knowing and all-powerful God in charge of your life and working for your best, you'll force yourself into that role, taking on a burden you can't carry. You'll then use good things like work, self-improvement, and planning to obsess over your future.

So how do you connect your uncertainties to God's certainty? It happens through faith, which lets you transfer your unknowns onto Him. In this broken world, the opposite of uncertainty is never certainty, but rather faith in God's character and promises to you. That's the foundational question you have to wrestle with: in the midst of all of the unknowns, will you believe that God is both all-powerful and all-good? Many believe in one or the other, but biblical faith embraces both.

Faith in this God will let you weather the confusion, disappointments, and hardships that'll come in life. Faith allows you not just to tolerate the unknowns of the future, but to appreciate them, since they're the spots where God will most intimately act in your life. When I look back at my first year in New York City, God drew me closer to Him by forcing me to trust Him to meet my most basic needs. And He did. That doesn’t mean I don’t still struggle with uncertainty, but God’s faithfulness in the past lets me quit obsessing over having every question answered, and instead lets me embrace God’s journey for today.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”  — Proverbs 3:5-6

you can’t have it all

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"A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have, that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it."  — Lionel Shriver

"Eight years at McKinsey and then Harvard Business School!" I read. Ugh, I felt so far behind. I was browsing the bios of a company that a friend had been hired at, and I couldn't help but wonder, did I get on the wrong path somewhere? Every person had years of corporate experience, either at a Wall Street bank or a respected consulting firm. Meanwhile, I've taken a different path, eschewing the corporate world for a chance to do odd jobs and write. Sometimes I think, "If only I could have the freedom and creativity of freelancing, with the money, vacation days, and status of a corporate job, then I'd be set."

It's so easy to want to have it all. You want a rewarding job, plenty of money, a great marriage, strong friendships, personal independence, interesting hobbies, knowledge of the latest trends, all capped off with a relaxing evening spent at home. We yearn to have it all, however you define it, and think that once we get there we'll have arrived. 

life has limits

The problem with this approach is that the "having it all" life doesn't exist. Why? Because we're finite human beings; you only have so much time. This have-it-all ideal is built off of limitless thinking: if I want something then I can get it. But contrary to what society says, no one has it all. What comes to mind when we think of someone "having it all" is actually a composite lifestyle. We take this person's career, this person's home life, this person's vacation life, and combine it with an overarching lifestyle narrative, and soon we've create a collage lifestyle that can never be found in any one person. 

This collage lifestyle only exists in our mind, influenced by the social media we consume and the lifestyles we're exposed to. This collage lifestyle can't exist in real life because most of the the things in it are mutually exclusive, meaning the choices it takes to get one part disqualify you from getting the other part. Here are some of the most common "trying to have it all" contradictions I've noticed. 

• People in high-paying jobs want more purpose and meaning from their work, while people in meaningful jobs want more money and prestige.

• Married people want the freedom and adventure of being single, while single people want the stability and companionship of marriage.

• Suburbanites wish they lived in a cool urban area, while urbanites wish they could afford to buy a house and have big rooms and a yard.

• People who start working after college wish they had gone on more adventures, while people who travelled the world through their twenties will wish they had paid off their student loans (or at least they should).

everything has a trade-off

These scenarios show that life involves trade-offs, a simple way of saying that everything has an opportunity cost. In all of these scenarios, every decision requires you to say no to other good things. And while opportunity costs have always existed, they bring greater anxiety today, since the internet and social media make us more aware of all of the other opportunities we're saying no to.

When we compare ourselves to a composite lifestyle that doesn't exist, where the person has time to get married, raise kids, get a PhD, work 60 hours a week, keep up with every friend, and travel on the weekends, we always feel like we don't measure up; like someone else is getting more than we are. But despite how much society proclaims there are no limits to your life, trendy thinking can't change the fact that we live in a finite world with a limited amount of time. This clash between ideal and reality causes so many to live life in a state of constant discontent, always thinking they need more than they have. Driven by a "the grass is greener on the other side" mentality, they pursue trying to have it all, until they finally hit a wall of either exhaustion or discouragement.

the alternative

So what's the alternative to trying to have it all? Foundationally, it starts with a change in your thinking: instead of wanting it all, or using God to get it all, God has to become your all-in-all. That's easy to say, but hard to live out. But when you begin to believe that a good life is about getting God, and not a certain career, lifestyle, or relationship, these secondary things lose their ability to define your life. And when you can find satisfaction in God, and not in having it all, it allows you to learn two key things:

1. Trust God will give you enough: Instead of always focusing on what you don't have, you can appreciate what you do have, realizing how much God has given to you. Cultivate contentment with where you're at in life, and enjoy this stage in your journey. Don't fall into the trap of needing everything before you can enjoy anything. 

2. Trust God will give you what is best: We all have things we think we need to be happy, but God knows you better than you know yourself. As I've learned more about who I am and how I'm wired, I'm so thankful God has steered me towards opportunities that actually fit my gifts and interests, instead of those corporate jobs that I would have found miserable. He promises that He is giving you what is best for your unique life. 

You may feel like you've missed out, fallen behind, or are even going in the wrong direction, but God is working out a plan for your life. When I clean apartments while my friends go off to their corporate jobs, I have to remind myself, this is the life God has for me and He's doing something through it, even if I don't always get what that is. Remember that God is working in your lousy jobs, lonely nights, and lost years, all to tell His story through your life. You have to believe that God, like an artist painting a landscape, will eventually bring all of the little brush strokes of your life together into one beautiful piece of art.

"But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." — Matthew 6:33

God loves you for you

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"Ever since I was a child, ever since I became wrongly convinced I had to be bigger and smarter than I really was, I've been trying to perform, trying to convince people I was more capable than I really was."  — Donald Miller

learning not to be yourself

"Have you been crying, Luke?" my classmate asked, "because your eyes are all red." I froze, a wave of shame flashing over me. "Umm, no." I lied. "My contacts are just bothering my eyes." Whew, that was close. 

Middle school was hard. Elementary school lets you be yourself, and you don't know to hide your tears from the people around you. But in middle school you learn to split your personality, developing a public persona that people see, and a private one that you don’t dare share. The outer persona becomes a mask, letting you fake your way to fitting in, while also hiding your fear and insecurities far away from public sight. Middle school teaches you to act tough when you’re scared, to look happy when you feel sad, and to act confident when you hurt. You don’t like having a mask, but you rationalize that it’s worth it if it helps you be liked.

Like many, I went through middle school feeling like I didn't fit in. Actually, it wasn't a feeling, I didn't. Physically, I was short, slow, and chunky, and my hand-me-down clothes, and mom-given buzzcut did nothing to help. I bounced around on the fringes in middle school, before settling into an outsider identity. My more athletic and popular classmates sometimes teased me, but usually I got something even worse: ignored.

learning to perform

As I entered high school and the pressure to be athletic and attractive heightened, I felt more and more like an outsider, even as I conformed my outer persona more and more to try to fit in. These feelings of being an outsider reached a high point at the high school dances. True to my feelings, I mingled around the edges, talking with the other fringe guys while the girls in my class danced with the junior and senior guys. High school dances felt like this giant status competition, which made me feel like a leftover. And so as I sat on the sides, I resolved to myself: someday I’m going to be one of the insiders.

So I got to work. I’d stay up late shooting baskets and then get up early to work at the gas station across the street, so that I could buy nicer clothes than my family could afford. I noticed what people thought was funny, and figured out how humor could cut down the other guys while impressing girls. I studied and studied, thinking a little letter at the top of the paper would prove I was a somebody. I slowly started to achieve more, lured on by the attention and respect I started to get. And by graduation, while outwardly I got what I wanted, inwardly, I still hadn’t found the peace that I thought would come.

learning to fit in

I moved on to college, where I felt like even more of an outsider than ever before. I was out of my small town high school, so the popular kids were all from well-off families and big suburban high schools that taught them how to navigate the college social scene. I resorted to my “achievement will lead to acceptance” strategy, and threw myself back into using grades, clothes, and personality to make it happen. If I could get the perfect career, and be the perfect guy, and marry the perfect girl, I’d feel accepted, right?

As my 20s have passed, this cycle has repeated itself over and over. Even now, I still feel like an outsider more often than not, sabotaging any evidence of insider status in order to motivate myself to work harder. Those moments still make me feel like that 15-year-old boy sitting on the edge of the dance, thinking that if I just achieved a little more then the pretty girls would notice me. And so you work and work for that elusive feeling of acceptance, but only find exhaustion in its place. It’s easy to get older, but harder to grow up and let go of the identities you developed when you were young.

learning to accept myself

In the last year, I’ve finally realized that my real problem, even in middle school, was never that other people didn’t love and accept me, but rather that I don’t love and accept myself. I manipulated my memories to fit my narrative, that I was rejected and disliked. I kept trying to prove myself to other people, thinking that if they liked me, then maybe that would convince me to like myself.

I’ve been wrestling with this for years, and while I see the isolating exhaustion this causes in my life, I still struggle to believe that I have value if I don’t achieve. Your idol comes to you in your lowest moments to whisper, “You are such a failure...nobody actually likes you, and if you stop worshiping me they’ll abandon you.” That’s why idols are so powerful, since you’re enslaved to it when you’re doing well and rejected by it when you’re not.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve thought of one of the songs that twelve-year-old Luke downloaded from Napster (don’t tell anyone), Blessid Union of Souls’ “Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me for Me).” It was a fringe hit, but I loved it, since the song was about how the lead singer’s girlfriend likes him for him, not because he’s rich or handsome or talented. The chorus states over and over this key point, that "she likes me for me." That seemed like such a dream to me back then, that someone could accept you not for your accomplishments, but just because you’re you. I’m struck how this mirrors the radical claim of the gospel that we all so struggle to believe: that God loves me for me.

Is that true? Could God really love me just for being me, and not because of any other thing? It’s so contrary from the world’s message that gets fed to us from everywhere, that God doesn’t love you for you, but instead for what you do. And so we’re caught in this war between grace and works, yearning for grace to let us put down the masks we developed in middle school and reject the need to perform. Grace is the truth we need every day, that no matter what you do, God loves you for you.

some days everything changes

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Some days everything changes. God doesn’t tell us when those days will be; usually they just happen. For my family, January 2, 2001, was one of those days. The excitement of my sister’s impending birth gave way to the reality of her life…not everything was okay. The first time my brothers and I visited Faith in the NICU, it finally settled in that something was wrong; she was too weak to move, to eat, or to even open her eyes. Faith lay in her crib like a rag doll, while the machines around her groaned and beeped, monitoring and measuring this young life.

Those initial days soon turned into weeks, and Faith came home to join our family. Now able to open her eyes, but still unable to eat or move or hold her head up, we wedged her into the corner of the couch and crowded around our little sis. Soon everyone began to pitch in as we learned how to help take care of Faith. The tasks were novel to us, but it never struck us as strange that feeding Faith meant using a plastic syringe to pump 80 CCs of formula through a tube in her nose.

Meanwhile, Faith attended a steady stream of doctors’ appointments, seeking answers to the peculiar questions that her life posed. Tests were run, and potential diagnoses were crossed off the list one by one. After a chromosomal analysis, the doctors focused in on a rare condition with a strange name, Prader-Willi Syndrome. It’s easy to take your 15th chromosome for granted, until it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. When life gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of something happening, sometimes, you are the one.

A diagnosis is bittersweet. In one way it brings relief: a sense of closure to the process of unanswered questions and an uncertain future. But a diagnosis is also scary, because it puts a label and a story to the future of an eight month old baby that you care about so much. The stories accompanying the Prader-Willi diagnosis were hard…unencumbered eating leading to extreme obesity and an early death. Not only were the dreams and the hopes for a young life shattered, they were seemingly ground into a fine dust by the finality of the existence that awaited Faith.

As time passed, Faith began to grow and develop. Therapists visited, doctors prescribed, muscles gained strength and Faith started to show incremental progress. While every parent savors their child’s first steps, Faith’s first steps had an extra element of accomplishment and excitement. Her smile and giggle endeared her to us all, and she soon became the highly sought-after lead of all of the Finley home films and was the proud recipient of 37 different nicknames. Every day of high school started with each brother getting a hug, kiss, and double-monster high-five. Few kids had the vivacity for life, people, and pets the way that Faith did.

Nobody’s life is easy, but as the years passed Faith’s path posed special challenges. Through the difficulties of her life, God continued to work in and care for Faith. He provided the opportunities and finances for the surgeries and treatments that were needed due to her complications from Prader-Willi Syndrome. How does a rural pastor’s family pay for over a million dollars of health care? The answer is to let God pay for it, and He did.

School soon became a highlight for Faith, as it gave her an opportunity to be a part of our community and around kids her own age. Faith loves people, and soon you couldn’t go anywhere with Faith without running into somebody she knew. Everyone in Winchester knows that Faith is going to make sure that your dog or cat is alive and doing well! Middle school brought the opportunity to be in the pep club, the cheering section for all of the sports teams, and Faith soon began to refer to “my games” coming up on the schedule. Academics are a challenge, but who needs math and science and history when helping mom around the house is so much fun?

The irony is not lost on me as I help Faith study for a 7th grade science test on genetics. The terms and concepts fly over her head, a direct result of her own unwilling encounter with this material, not abstractly in some classroom, but experientially in her earliest moment of life. I can’t help but wonder from time to time why all of this has happened? Why did Faith’s 15th chromosome not come together correctly? Why did God choose this path for Faith? What is His plan for my sister’s life?

Special needs is a broad brush that we use to categorize any person who experiences difficulties with the average lifestyle of our society. As “normal” people, impatience and frustration characterize our reaction to prolonged encounters with these special people. To wonder when the questions will stop or how long we will have to keep serving, when the return on our time seems so little. In our society of accomplishment, which values achievement and success and getting things done, our friends and family members with special needs seem to have little to contribute.

But therein lies the rub: according to the social structures of this world. To the ideals that society esteems, people with special needs tend to be unnecessary additions to our communities that only add burdens to life. But is this God’s view? As I have reflected on this question, God has used Faith to drive the gospel home through the heart of my works-righteousness saturated life. You see, it is true, Faith doesn’t have the ability to accomplish great acts of achievement. Faith is gifted in amazing ways, but none of them will create large amounts of economic value or social advancement. Her greatest skills include putting puzzles together, feeding pets, and cheerfully doing the laundry. The real lie, however, that I have succumbed to, is to think that I have the ability to be somebody worthwhile. I live my life thinking that if I work hard enough and am diligent in maximizing my abilities, that I can then justify my existence in life, and ultimately my worth before God.

When God looks at Faith and me, He doesn’t see any difference between us. He doesn’t see one person who is pretty good at life, who is valuable to society because of what he can do and the work he can produce, while seeing another person that isn’t able to measure up to the level of attainment necessary to prove her worth. God sees two people who can’t make it through life, who struggle with the simplest things and who can’t make themselves pleasing to Him through their own merit. Faith’s life has shown me that no one’s value is based on the works that he or she produces, but rather on the works that Christ has produced for us.

What does this mean? That God sees me as a special needs person! He looks at my best efforts, the things that I think are showing how valuable I am to Him and to the world and He says that they are merely a series of stumbling, bumbling, and mumbling actions, unable to make even the smallest contribution towards warranting my existence or God’s love for me. My need for forgiveness runs deeper than just for the wrong things I’ve done, but also includes my overestimating the value of every “good thing” that I’ve ever done in my life.

There’s only one solution for both Faith and me. The answer is not to get her up to the level of achievement of the average person according to the standards of this world, but rather to see that both of us have to completely rest in the only person who ever was able to live a significant life: Jesus Christ. To live any other way is out of accord with the gospel of free grace. God is so patient with me as I have to relearn this over and over again.

Only in this climate can Faith and I truly use our gifts for God’s kingdom. I’m amazed at how God has created her in a unique way to serve in ways that I sinfully consider insignificant. Faith sees every person as having value; she sees every relationship as worth spending time on. Faith is never too busy to say hello, to smile, or to help with something around the house. I rush through life trying to do as much as possible so that I can prove to God and those around me that I’m a somebody. I am too busy to love my neighbor because then I wouldn’t have enough time to love myself. Faith reminds what is really important in life…it is the simple things, loving God and loving my neighbor.

As Faith grows older, her life continues to point me to Christ. She will never be rid of Prader-Willi Syndrome; she will always feel the difficult effects of this lifelong condition. But just as in one day in 2001, everything changed, another day is coming when everything will change again. When Christ returns to this earth, He will change Faith’s body forever, ridding her of this fleshly one that so acutely feels the effects of the Fall, and will give her a new spiritual body that will be eternally perfect. I long for this day, when Faith will finally be free of pain and hardship forever. Come quickly Lord Jesus.

shout your abortion: a night in brooklyn

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“Challenge the stigma around abortion,” the speaker urged from the small, makeshift stage. “These fucking politicians keep these laws in place because there is a stigma, a stigma around abortion.” She paused, letting her words soak in. “Abortion,” she continued, “is a beautiful health care event; it’s nothing like what protests make it look like.” The twenty-somethings clapped, and the older women nodded in approval, having long ago traded youthful exuberance for steady persistence in their fight for abortion rights.

I had just slipped in, standing in the back corner of an unused storefront, deep in Bushwick, a Brooklyn neighborhood full of that idealistic pessimism that pervades today’s disenchanted youth. I’d ventured out on the birthday of Roe v. Wade, intrigued by an event entitled Shout Your Abortion, billed as a night for women to share and celebrate their abortion stories. I’d come to watch, to listen, but most of all, to understand. My lack of black ripped jeans, shaggy hair, and shoulder-blade tattoos only highlighted the deeper ideological differences that existed between me and everyone else in the room.

I didn’t fit in, but that’s what I wanted. I’m concerned for the ever-increasing fragmentation of our society. We’ve splintered into various groups with differing presuppositions, which results in radically dissimilar lives. We then entrench our lives into like-minded groups, using clothes, hair, and lifestyle as coils of barbed-wire to keep the other side at a distance. We no longer find community in physical places, but rather in lifestyle enclaves, using first the car, and now  the internet, to ensure that we only have to interact with like-minded individuals. Hunkered down, everyone then lobs grenades across the battlefield, letting editorials, blogposts, and videos explode in the other side’s camp. Each group raises money to build new weapons to better score direct hits on their enemy’s ideology.

I’m sick of that society. I’m sick of it’s brokenness and impotence, unable to do anything but create more division and more scar tissue. It’s a system that deals in manipulation, demonizing the other to capitalize on the innate power of fear. Fear that divides. Fear that blames. Fear that causes every group to traffic in stereotypes and secondhand accounts of how the other side wants to destroy everything that we cherish.

I’m not suggesting that we give up truth, but rather that we rethink this “fight” for it. Is it effective? Is it helpful? Has anything positive come of it? Last year I read an author who spurred me to think in a new light of how I interact on social issues. He suggested that people make decisions on sticky social issues not on the basis of facts and logic, but because of a direct personal experience. So, if you ever want to see someone change their stance on a controversial topic, don’t bombard them with a rationalistic diatribe, but rather find a way to get down to the story of their personal encounter with that issue. Conversations and arguments will only bounce off a person unless you first comprehend the way that an issue has personally affected their life.

All of this took me to Bushwick, seeking to understand why these women had decided to have an abortion. I wanted to hear their stories and their reasons for making this choice, a choice that forever altered the lives of both parties involved. One-by-one the women came to the stage to share. The circumstances for the pregnancies varied; some were abandoned, some were abused, some were assaulted. But all felt alone and afraid, powerless in their pregnancy and in the impending idea of supporting a child.

I listened as the women shared tremendous hurts. A woman told of the intense guilt that she felt for aborting her rape-induced pregnancy. “I felt as if I was becoming the very monster who did this to me in the first place,” she told the audience. “I prayed to some faceless god to make me not a woman, to make me anything else.” Many began their stories by saying that they didn’t like abortion, and never wanted to have one, but that given their circumstances they didn’t feel like they had had any other choice. One woman summarized this theme, saying, “I believe in life at conception, but I needed dominion over my body.” Her boyfriend showed no interest in their baby, leaving her unsure of what to do. Every woman, without fail, felt damaged and isolated, rejected by their child’s father, while hiding their situation from their friends and families for fear of being shamed and rejected.

I began to understand that for these women abortion was not about a baby, but was instead an avenue to empowerment. It helped them regain the dignity and self-value that had been robbed from them by the fathers of their children. One woman said, “I needed to end my pregnancy because I was able to be an arbiter over life and death.” They felt victimized and powerless, lured into a social game set up by men (women receive sustained attention from men only if they are sexually active), only to be cast off by the same men when the circumstances of their relationships changed (pregnancy). A woman shared how her choice to have an abortion salvaged her life after her boyfriend left, allowing her to complete school and later attract the sort of respectable husband who never would’ve married a single mom. The handout they provided summarized this empowerment theme, stating that abortion is “crucial to having any semblance of gender equality in our country.”

I realized towards the end of the night that almost every story told had one common theme: an irresponsible man that put a pregnant woman in a compromised position. Many of the women believed in the sanctity of their baby’s life, and even knew before their abortion of the impending hurt and depression that would follow. But they went ahead with their abortions because of the destruction that a man had caused in their lives. Abortion was the way they coped with the abuse or abandonment of their relationship.

As I reflected on the train home, it dawned on me: abortion isn’t a problem because women love having abortions. Rather a majority of abortions seem to happen because men put women in horrendous situations, whether through assault, abuse, or absenteeism. Abortion, at its heart, is a power issue. Abortion disproportionately affects the powerless; the women who have the most abortions are either college students, minorities, poor, or a combination of all three. Blaming women for abortions might be easy, but it treats the problem topically, rather than at its genesis.

Abortion’s root cause isn’t primarily women, it’s men. Babies are aborted when men abuse their physical and emotional power. Women are an easy target for blame, since they are the ones that walk into the abortion clinic. But I don’t think the answer to the abortion crisis is to harp on women. The key response, instead, is to confront men, and to raise up the boys of our country into a different type of man. Into men who love women gently, care for them sacrificially, and are willing to commit to life-long relationships. We need to go upstream of a woman walking into an abortion clinic and inject ourselves into the lives of these future fathers, teaching and mentoring these malleable young lives, renewing how we as men collectively treat women in our society.

I’m not suggesting this will be easy or comfortable, but it’ll be worth it. It will require us as men to leave our comfortable lifestyles surrounded by other solid men, and enter into the offices, construction sites, fraternities, sports teams, and many other areas of life that are filled with men who, out of their own hurt, hurt others. It will require us to be open, to show weakness, and to allow renewal and healing to come to the pain and insecurities that cause men to treat women poorly. Imagine a society where abortion fades away because women don’t need it to fight back against the compromised situations that men have placed them in. It’s seems impossible, but that’s the kind of society that I want to be a part of; one where we leave our grenade-tossing culture wars behind, and find healing and peace in the middle, together.

being a better friend to the homeless

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I swiped my metro card and went through the turnstile. Trains on Sunday nights are infrequent, so as I waited I put my headphones in and started walking down the platform. Lost in thought, I passed a homeless person. I wouldn't have noticed her, truthfully, if it weren't for the smell radiating from her shopping cart. I got to the end of the platform and the train hadn't come, so I walked back, passing her again. As I went by the second time, I felt that tug at my heart, the one that says, "You should talk to her." So I turned around and sat down. "Hey. I'm Luke."

With the broader church's current interest in the poor and marginalized, there's a strong push to talk to homeless people. This is a good thing, but we need to be careful how we have these conversations. I often hear people encouraging others to ask a homeless person for their story, to help them feel valued or known or something like that. While I think the intent is good, I'd suggest that you pause for a moment before you ask a homeless person to tell you their story.

While the causes for homelessness are varied, they all have one thing in common: they all create shame. Job loss, eviction, divorce, substance abuse, a criminal record, or something along those lines are often present in a homeless person's past. In different ways, our society sees all of these events as failures, which then translates to us seeing homeless people as failures as well. So when you ask a homeless person for their story, you can unknowingly force them to define their lives by their failures, and make them talk about the things that they feel the most shame about. 

Think about your own life and the things that cause you to feel shame. It might be failed relationships, sexual sin, infertility, lack of a career, or your body type, just to name a few. Now imagine if a rich stranger walked over to you, and within a minute asked you to tell him everything in your life about one of these topics. You'd be appalled. But this is what we do to people when we ask the marginalized to tell us their story.

When you force someone to share their story on your terms, you create a relationship where you're superior and they're inferior. They're made to talk about things that they find painful, while you get to listen from the comfort of your good life. When you meet a person on the street or at a soup kitchen, they don’t need someone to remind them of the problems in their life. Instead, they need someone to believe in their God-given worth as a human being. They need someone who sees the equal value that every person made in God's images has. Someone who refuses to define an equal as a person who has the same lifestyle or background as they do.

So how do you do that? It can be difficult, but it starts with the question, how do I treat this person as my friend? You would never pry into the hurt of your friends' brokenness. The best way to develop a friendship with a homeless person is to find topics that interest them but allows them to not have to talk about themselves. A great topic with men is sports; I've never met a homeless guy who doesn't have an opinion about the Knicks. And with women, it's a little trickier, but if you can perceive that she may be a mom (in my experience most are), letting her talk about her kids or grandkids can bring such joy. And if you're eating a meal at a shelter with them, you can always talk about how you like the chicken or how you're looking forward to the dessert. These questions might seem simple, and you may have different ones, but the key is to talk to them like you would a friend.

And when you treat someone as a friend, with love and respect, they often become comfortable enough to share some of their hurt and pain. I was eating with a man at a church meal for the homeless, chatting about things, when he blurted out, "I don't know how this happened. Last year, I had an apartment and was working for a recording studio, and now I'm homeless." He then went on to tell me the story of how his life had fallen apart. At that point, all you can do is listen with empathy and affirmation. "Man, that's really tough." He didn't need my money or my sympathy; he needed someone who understood that his homelessness didn't take away his humanity.

Last night, as I sat down next to the homeless women, she looked up, surprised. "Oh hey, I'm Chris," she answered. After we exchanged pleasantries and I gave her the fifty cents in my pocket, I noticed twenty tangled strands of green beads in her cart, so we started talking about the big St. Patrick's Day parade that happened last week. By the end of the conversation, she'd told me that she'd lived in New York City for twenty years, having grown up as a military kid in Paris. It turned out she knew a little French, and as my train arrived, I was able to tell her how cool it was that she could speak French growing up. As my train took me home, I thought about my butchering of the French language during a recent trip to Paris, and I realized she wasn't just my equal anymore, but she was now my superior.

Homelessness is difficult to solve, and I'm not under the impression that I made some monumental change in this woman's situation. But I want to encourage you to see people as people, regardless of how they look. At life's core, we're to value people not for their possessions or their lifestyle, but for their inherent God-given worth. That's hard to do, but it becomes possible when we think about how Jesus wanted to spend time with us even in our brokenness and stench. So let's not make homeless people tell us how broken they are, as if they're any worse than us, but instead treat them as friends who we respect and honor.

the things on which dreams are made

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After an earlier rain storm, the afternoon sun poked through the clouds at the track stadium in Sapele, Nigeria, the site of the 2016 Nigerian Olympic Trials. The 400m mens finalists approached the starting blocks as the crowd stirred with anticipation. Paul Dedewo knelt down in lane four, exhaling deeply as he placed his hands on the edge of the starting line. One race remained. One last opportunity to hit the qualifying time that would allow him to compete at the Rio Summer Olympics. Years of intense training would culminate in the next 45 seconds. If he was on the right side of 45.40s, he would claim his place among the world’s elite. If he was was one one-hundredth of a second too slow, his Olympic dreams would vanish. “Runner’s on your mark,” the starter shouted. “Get set.” The athletes coiled their legs into position, bracing for the gun. With a puff of smoke and a reverberating bang, Paul sprang into motion.

Every four years, thousands of amateur athletes dream of competing in the Olympics games. Runners, gymnasts, swimmers, and more spend years toiling in obscurity, honing their skill, waiting for a chance to show the world that they’re the best. This essay traces the dream of one Olympic hopeful, Paul Dedewo, as he trained for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Planting the Seed

Everyone’s born with dreams. A child dreams of being an astronaut, or a doctor, or maybe even the president of the United States. It’s cute, and adults love encouraging children to think of the big things they could be when they grow up. But by high school, dreams aren’t as en vogue. We encourage these same kids, now teenagers, to realign their expectations, to think more practically about their lives. “You’re just average” the message gets reinforced, “and the sooner you accept that and get on with life, the better off you’ll be.” But for some people, it’s the opposite; as they grow older dreams they never thought of before open up, and the miraculous somehow becomes attainable.

Paul Dedewo knows the moment he started dreaming of running in the Olympics. It was in 2008, as 17-year-old Paul watched Usain Bolt fly onto the worldwide stage at the Beijing Olympics, winning three gold medals with his electric speed, stealing everyone’s attention with his easy grin and exciting celebrations. Up to this point, Paul had been on the outside of the track circle looking in. His parents moved to the Bronx in New York City from Nigeria in the early 1980s, not looking for Olympic dreams for their young family, but simpler ones of opportunity and stability. The co-youngest of seven children, Paul grew up naturally clumsy and uncoordinated. He didn’t have the eye-hand coordination to excel in the typical sports, and thus didn’t get plugged into athletics. 

During his freshman year of high school, Paul did go to the information meeting for the track team. He walked in and sat at the back of the room. Soon, the room filled with muscular and athletic guys, guys way beyond who Paul felt he could compete with. And so he walked out, his track career over before it had even begun. This isn’t how the story of someone with Olympic aspirations typically starts.

Flickers of Hope

But three years later, just months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the regret of walking out of that meeting still gnawed at Paul. So, towards the end of the track season his junior year, Paul approached the track coach about joining the team; he wanted to run the 100 meter dash. The coach said yes to the first part, but after eyeing this scrawny junior, stuck him with the distance runners. That summer, Paul watched Usain Bolt electrify the world, himself only having run a handful of 800s, and even then, he never finished higher than 36th place.

The fall of his senior year, equipped with his newfound dreams, Paul played the part of a distance runner and dutifully ran cross country. More races, more mediocre results. That winter though, during indoor track, an opportunity opened. The best sprinter for Paul’s high school tore his hamstring. This was a blow to the team’s chances of winning the conference meet, but it left a vacancy on the 4X400 relay. After the coaches tried several other guys, the assistant coach convinced the head coach to give Paul a chance. In his first relay race, Paul ran a 55.9 split; not great, but fast enough to get a second look. Paul kept running, and his split times kept dropping, first to 53.2, then to 51.9, and all the way down to 51.1 at the indoor city championship. As Paul entered outdoor track season, he was regarded as a rising star, with the potential get even faster.

To reach his dreams, and to make up for lost time, Paul woke up at 6 A.M. every morning to train on his own before joining the team for afternoon workouts. At first this helped, and Paul ran a 50.44 time in the 400m, the fastest in the city that spring. But soon, the extra training caught up with him. He developed overuse injuries, which caused him to adjust his stride. This adjustment caused a hip injury, which effectively ended his senior season, taking away his opportunity to audition for a track scholarship. With no viable scholarship offers, Paul chose to run track at City College, a small Division III school with a mediocre program that was inexpensive and close to home. Paul’s big dreams again looked improbable. 

After a freshman year of steady improvement, Paul burst onto his conference track scene during his sophomore year. Paul began to tap into his unrealized potential, and at the conference championship he won the 110m and 400m hurdles, 200m and 400m dashes, and the 4X400 relay. Those five first place finishes led his team to the championship, giving Paul a taste of being the hero. Despite these achievements, Paul knew he was in a tiny pond, and that guys his age ran 400s that were three seconds faster than his. This drove Paul to skip his summer rest period and to train all the more with the goal of reaching his dreams.

As Paul stepped back onto the track that fall, something wasn’t right. Every step brought a painful crunching in his knee. An MRI confirmed what his body foretold, Paul’s meniscus was torn and he needed surgery. The surgery was a success, but required six months of rest and rehab. When spring came, Paul’s knee had healed, but new pains started. He had another MRI and found out that the cartilage around his pubic bone was inflamed. This kept him out of outdoor track his junior year, but even as it improved, he started to suffer from sciatica, an inflammation of the sciatic nerve, a major nerve in your leg. With sciatica, every time Paul ran his leg became numb. This continued through his senior year, costing Paul the ability to run in both the indoor and outdoor track season. And after those setbacks, Paul did what was reasonable: he stopped running and he stopped dreaming, betrayed by his injury-prone body and his need to get a real job.

Dreams Resurrected

A year later Paul received a phone call from his older sister; a new sprint coach had joined the gym that she worked at and she wanted Paul to meet him. A week later Paul met Radenko, a 6’5” former swimmer for Serbia, who now sought to train elite athletes. Paul went through the equivalent of a physical interview, as Radenko tested every area of Paul’s strength and speed. At the culmination of the process, Radenko breathed life into Paul's ashed-over dreams: “You have the ability to be special!” He later added, “Someday Paul, you have the potential to set a world record!”

And so they began training together, trying to unearth Paul’s potential. After three months of training five days a week, Paul lowered his 400m time by a full second to 47.2, a drop that often requires years of work. Unfortunately, Paul tore his quad tendon, which shelved his training efforts for the next eight months. In 2015, Paul entered the track season completely healthy, ready to grow faster. Under Radenko’s coaching, Paul shed incredible amounts of time. He completely skipped 46 seconds, next clocking a 400m time of 45.99. Then, at the second-to-last meet of the year, Paul surprised everyone, running a 45.41 400m time, only one one-hundredth of a second slower than the auto-qualify time for the Rio Olympics. One one-hundredth of a second short of running in the Olympics! Paul, the guy who couldn’t convince his high school coach to let him be a sprinter six years earlier, was now the 56th fastest 400m runner in the world! The initial disappointment at missing the Olympic standard by such a minuscule margin was reduced by the knowledge that Paul had the entire 2016 season to shave .01 of a second off of his time. Since he had lowered his time by three seconds over the last two years, this seemed quite doable. Paul’s Olympic dreams were blazing.

The Final Stretch

Paul entered the 2016 track season with one goal: to hit 45.40 and to make it to Rio. With that goal, Paul engaged in another year of the grueling lifestyle that is Olympic training. Through all of his training, Paul has worked a full time job. He leaves work at 5pm every night to train through the evening, arriving home after 11pm, exhausted, with just enough time to eat and sleep in order to get up the next day and do it all over again. 

Paul began training in January this year, as the Rio Olympics loomed seven months away. His training started smoothly, and he was hopeful that he could make it through a season injury-free. In February, however, he began feeling a slight pain whenever he put any weight on his left foot. Paul cut all of the running from his training, hoping that the pain would go away. Despite the reduced workload, his pain continued to grow, culminating in him being shut down in March. He waited for two weeks while his insurance approved an MRI. When the MRI returned, the podiatrist diagnosed Paul with a stress fracture in one of his metatarsals. Paul spent the next four weeks in a walking boot, losing valuable training time. But even after he was cleared to take off the boot, the pain persisted, and another MRI was ordered. A different doctor read this one, concluding that the earlier stress fracture was a misdiagnosis, and that it was only a blood vessel that crossed the bone in an unusual place. The second doctor felt that the pain was a result of a nerve being pinched somewhere in his foot. While this might seem like better news than a broken bone, nerve injuries have no ready-made solutions. A bone will heal according to a timetable, but nerve inflammation is a more fickle ailment. Fortunately, Paul’s pain began to subside in May, and he was able to resume training. In May, Paul ran a 45.57, which while still off the qualifying time by thirteen hundredths, put him in a good position for the Nigerian Olympic Trials in July.

During the first week of June, with the Olympic Trials less than a month away, Paul began to experience sharp pain in his knee when he ran. At first, he tried to run through it, but the pain continued to build until he could barely walk. Another MRI, his fifth of the year, revealed a piece of torn cartilage floating in his knee. This was devastating news, as surgery would require six weeks of recuperation. But at his current state, if Paul could hardly walk, how could he hope to run? The weeks leading up to the Nigerian Olympic Trials were hard ones, full of soul-searching questions: why is my body so injury-prone? How did the doctor misdiagnosis a stress fracture? Why did I miss the qualifying time by .01 last year? It’s not easy seeing a dream that you’ve worked so hard to achieve slip out of your hands at the last possible moment. Paul went to physical therapy every morning before work, trying to reduce the swelling and pain. As the date neared for the trials, the pain lessened some, and Paul decided to go to Nigeria to give it one last shot.

Paul’s plane touched down in Lagos, the capital city of Nigeria, bringing him to the country of his heritage for the first time. A truck filled with armed soldiers escorted the athletes to Sapele, the site of the trials, tucked seven hours away in the heart of the country. After arriving, Paul began working out on the track, hoping he could run through the pain and hit the qualifying time. As the day of the 400m prelims arrived, Paul managed to fight through and win his heat. He ran a 45.79, which while still being .39 off of the qualifying time, resuscitated a glimmer of hope for the Olympics.

A light rain fell on the morning of Paul’s last chance to make the Olympics. The sun came out, and the time came for the 400m finals. The young boys from the neighboring villages that Paul had befriended were lined up on the edge of the fence, rooting for their Usain Bolt. Paul crouched in his blocks, with one last chance to seize a spot in the Olympics. One last race. One final opportunity. The starter’s arm went up and the gun went BANG.

BANG, BANG. The startling noise echoed through the stadium. The crowd gasped, waiting to see who’d false started. The runner was Paul. The dream was over. And just like that, the Olympics were gone.

— Afterword —

I wrote this because I believe stories like Paul’s are the true Olympics. Yes, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles and Usain Bolt are the Olympics, too, but those are the money Olympics, where everyone trains full-time surrounded by the best that money can buy: the best equipment, coaches, medical care, and so on. But the real Olympics is the guy who gets up at 5am every day to practice his fencing, before slinging boxes at UPS for eight hours. It’s the woman who spends her evenings rowing, while trying to balance work and life and kids. The real Olympics are the thousands of athletes throughout the world who work so hard, but for different reasons come up just a little bit short. I wanted to tell Paul’s story because I want their story to be heard. The story that you can and should dream big, but that even if you do come up short, that that doesn’t mean you should never have dreamed. Some people may say that Paul failed in his dream to make the Olympics, but how can being the 56th best in the world at something ever be seen as failure?

Earlier this week, Paul and I watched the 400m prelims, the race he could’ve been in. We watched guys run that he had beat, both time wise and head-to-head. Paul’s times would have put him in the middle of the pack, but since he never hit the qualifying time, he wasn’t able to go. It was one of those evenings where all you can is smile and shake your head. Paul was so close; if only one of things that had gone wrong had turned out differently, Paul could’ve been there. But God chose a different path for Paul, even if that is hard to understand.

a day at a time: an essay about my mom

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Something didn’t seem right. It was an early spring day during my freshman year of high school, and as I walked home from school I realized that my parents had recently been making a lot of trips to Kansas City. That day’s trip made four visits to the city in the last three weeks. Our family of eight lived in a small town about an hour outside of Kansas City, and while my dad loved to stock up on groceries in the city, four trips was out of the normal routine. “Hmm, I wonder if everything’s okay?” I thought to myself. “Of course it is,” I reassured my 15-year-old mind, “It’s probably just a coincidence.” I arrived home a few minutes later, and after my customary post-school bowl of Frosted Flakes, I forgot about my hesitations.

An hour later, I heard the gravel crunch as my parents pulled into the driveway. My brothers and I helped to bring in the groceries, while my parents started to put the food away in their typical, matter-of-fact manner. After the groceries were stored my dad told us, “We’re going to have a family meeting in the living room.”. After several minutes of effort, he corralled my three brothers and me (my oldest brother Justin was at college)  into the living room. My sister, Faith, born just 15 months earlier with severe special needs, was already there. We all wondered what the meeting was about, since my dad only used that language for significant announcements.

As we sat and waited, my mom joined us last, silently sitting on the piano bench. “Boys,” my dad began in his usual measured, steady tone, “Your mother and I have something to tell you.” At this, the uneasiness from my walk home returned. “A few weeks ago your mom found a lump on her chest,” my dad continued. “She went to the doctor last week and had a biopsy done, and we got the results back today.” My dad paused. “Mom has breast cancer.”

Life can change so much in a minute. One moment your mom is a healthy, vibrant woman in the prime of her life, and in the next she is fighting life-threatening cancer, unsure whether she will make it to 50. A drastic change, and yet outwardly, she looked the same.

As we sat in stunned silence, I looked over at my mom, expecting to see her confidently taking in the news. My mom’s personal strength and work ethic have always been a foundational part of my family. What I saw, though, shocked me. She had lowered her head into her hands, and was weeping. This jarred me: if Mom is who you go to when you’re scared, where do you go when she’s scared, too? My mom’s reaction alerted me to the seriousness of my dad’s words.

“Cancer,” I thought, “People die from that, don’t they? Cou…cou…could Mom die?”  It was a question I’d never had to think about before. My dad explained that while my mom had the most aggressive type of breast cancer, the doctor thought it had been caught early. With surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, there was hope that she would survive. I intellectually understood my mom’s cancer diagnosis at this point, but I was unaware of the coming storm that cancer would bring to my mom and my family.

That night happened to be a Family Night at our church, a once-a-month event where the church shared a meal together. As we finished eating, my dad stood up and made his way to the front. He cleared his throat and told the congregation that he had an announcement. As he repeated everything that he had told us a few hours earlier, I looked around. My mom and all of the other women began to cry, while the men either looked at the floor or off in the distance, as the sadness gathered in the corners of their eyes. A thick heaviness canvassed the room. After my dad finished, one of the elders prayed for my mom, and the all adults hugged and consoled my parents. I’d never, ever, seen adults cry like this.

Despite the diagnosis, life went on as normal for the next several weeks. The news of my mom’s cancer trickled out through the community. While a cancer diagnosis is never easy, everyone recognized the particular gravity of this situation. If something happened to Elizabeth, who would care for Faith and the boys? One day at school, the shop teacher, with whom my relationship with was strained, unexpectedly stopped by my bench at the end of my woodshop class. Normally a gruff and hard man, he spoke in a softened tone that I had never heard from him before. “How’s your mom doing Finley?” he gently asked. “I think she’s doing okay,” I answered, unsure of what to say. “Well,” he responded, as a mist developed in his eyes, “We’re all pulling for you guys.”

The day arrived for my mom’s surgery. My parents left early in the morning to go to the hospital, while my brothers and I went to school. It’s a strange feeling, to know that as you sit in your classroom your mom is lying on an operating table under a surgeon’s knife. Mom came home that night, exhausted from the day’s events. The surgeon declared the surgery a success; that they had gotten all of the cancer.  Even at that age, though, I knew that doctors always seemed to say that, and while it was good news, the future was still uncertain.

In anticipation of her upcoming chemotherapy, my mom returned to the doctor the next week  to have a port put in her chest. The port allowed the powerful chemotherapy drugs to flow into a larger vein than what was possible with an IV. My parents explained to us how the chemotherapy worked to treat the cancer. The concept puzzled me…so you inject poison into someone with the idea that it will kill all the fast growing cells, whether they are cancerous or not? But how will you keep it from killing Mom’s good cells? Wait, you mean you can’t? And so Mom’s life hangs in the balance, dependent on which side wins in this cell-by-cell battle between toxin and cancer? As I struggled to grasp how this all worked, I couldn’t have predicted what it would look like as this war played out in my Mom’s body.

The Kansas spring was in full bloom when my Mom began her first of three chemotherapy treatments. While the chemotherapy dripped into my Mom’s body, I attended my younger brother Daniel’s first middle school track meet. I went home after watching him run, to be ready for when my parents got home. Mom trudged through the door shortly before six, more tired and  worn down than I had ever seen her before. She sat down in her chair at the table as we got supper ready. We prayed over our food and began to eat, but my mom was too exhausted to do anything but lean over the table and prop her head up with her arms. She forced a few bites of food down before she went and laid down on the couch. My brothers and I looked at each other, shocked at how all of the strength and life had been sapped out of Mom.

The effects of the chemotherapy only worsened over the following days. My mom, the person who tirelessly cared for our family, now spent much of the day in bed, overcome with fatigue and nauseousness. During this time, our church family cared so much for my family. In addition to babysitting Faith, they provided meal after meal for my family. A different person from the church stopped by every night at 5pm with supper for our family. Soon, those disposable tinfoil pans filled every spot in our refrigerator. After a few days, my mom regained some of her strength, and life returned to some semblance of normalcy. But the meals continued through all of the chemotherapy treatment time period. 

Our neighbor’s spaghetti bake was one meal that forever stands out in Finley family lore. Our neighbor called my mom on the night that she was to provide supper, fervently apologizing for ruining our dinner. After my mom asked her what the problem was, she explained how she had accidentally left a potholder in the oven when she checked on the casseroles halfway through. The potholder caught on fire, yet she realized this only when her oven and entire kitchen filled with that plasticky smoke of cheap polyester.  She wanted to throw the casseroles away and go buy something for us, but Mom assured her that the spaghetti bake would be just fine and that we would be glad to eat it. As we took our first bites that night, our mouths were filled with the overpowering flavor of smoke that had penetrated every piece of spaghetti. Despite our protests, my parents insisted that we show our thankfulness for the food by eating it, regardless of it’s taste. And let me tell you, we didn’t waste an ounce. Not only did we eat it that night, but we proceeded to have it as leftovers for two more meals. After that third meal my mom caved, and avoided the brewing mutiny by mercifully pitching what was left.

A week after her first treatment, Mom’s hair began to fall out in chunks. Ever the practical one, she announced to Dad that if her hair was going to fall out, he might as well just buzz it off. Dad got the hair clippers, and with no attachment proceeded to cut off all of Mom’s hair. We gathered around the bathroom and watched, astonished by the scene. Mom emerged after ten minutes completely different, now having just a slight stubble of hair. She wore a bandana from that point on, tied around her head like a do-rag. Some of my enduring memories from this time period are of Mom, in her red bandana, running our family like always. On Saturdays, she called us to our rooms and led the charge in changing the sheets and making the beds. “You’ve got to get that corner tight, Luke!” she would say, as she jumped in and pulled the fitted sheet down further, ignoring my groans of protest. “That’s better; now pull the triangle up on the sheet and then put your arm right there and make a crease. Now tuck it so it’s tight. Okay, that looks good; yeah, you can go…Matthew, it’s time for your bed!” Despite everything going on in my mom’s life, she never allowed it to be an excuse to cut corners or to let things go.

The week before Mother’s Day that year, the high school band traveled to a music competition in Branson, Missouri. While walking around a touristy area, I stumbled into an odds and ends shop. The shop had a variety of bandanas, and while I had never gotten Mom a gift for Mother’s Day before, I wanted to get some for her. I picked out two bandanas, one navy and one forest green, and once home, wrapped them up in Christmas wrapping paper. I’ll never forget how much she smiled when she opened her present. She told me how much she liked my gift, and I beamed when she added them to her bandana rotation and wore them around the house. Looking back, I’m struck at how my parents never allowed my mom’s cancer to become about them, and continued to be so others-focused. 

Mom received two more chemotherapy treatments over the coming weeks that each affected her just like the first one. We got through those tough days and weeks, through the hard work of my mom and dad and the support of our friends and family. As spring turned to summer, chemotherapy ended and Mom began six weeks of radiation with daily treatments in Kansas City. Our church family and local community again cared for my family so much during this time, as my dad couldn’t maintain his role as a pastor and be gone to Kansas City for five hours every day. Someone passed a signup sheet around for people to volunteer to drive my mom to her daily treatment, and soon all the days were covered. Each volunteer would show up at 8 A.M., helping my mom get ever closer to being cancer-free. Eventually the six weeks of radiation ended, and the only thing that we could do was wait. Wait to see if the surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation had been effective. Wait to see if mom still had cancer. Wait to see if mom would live.

With cancer, unlike the initial diagnosis, there’s never a corresponding announcement of being cured. Instead, the news trickles in. Mom continued to go doctor’s appointments throughout that summer and fall. While the scans showed that my mom was cancer-free, there was never a grand pronouncement that it was over. Remission doesn’t mean that you are cured, it just tells you that they can’t find any more cancer at that moment. Hearing that a scan comes back clean doesn’t make you celebrate, so much as it allows you to exhale. Good news is  tainted with the knowledge that the cancer could return and wreak havoc at any time, maybe a month, or a year, or even five years later. You’ve learned your lesson not to trust cancer; if you could, it wouldn’t have shown up in the first place. 

My family settled into a post-cancer routine. My mom’s hair slowly started to grow back in, and by the end of summer she had shed her bandana. School and sports and caring for my sister Faith filled the schedule again. My mom took a giant Tamoxifen pill every day, a drug designed to lessen the chances of the cancer coming back. Every day for five years it sat on the breakfast table, a daily reminder of the continued risks that my mom faced. Soon, the scans were only every six months, and then they became yearly. As each scan came back cancer-free, life went on, and these turned into routine events in my high school life. High school turned into college. College turned into seminary. And seminary turned into now.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write all of this, the tears rolling down my face. It’s been fourteen years this spring since my mom had cancer, and as I pull these memories out of my past, I admit, I don’t get it. Why did God heal my mom? Why did she happen to find that lump before the cancer spread? Why was the treatment effective? Why has her cancer never returned? I’d love to tell you how much I prayed for her to get better. But I didn’t. I’d love to tell you how much I was trusting in God to heal my mom. But I wasn’t. Not because I didn’t want her to live, but I just wasn’t there yet with God. It’s hard as I reflect on this. As I’ve gotten older I’ve met more and more friends who have lost their mom when they were young; I realize that God allowed my mom to survive, even when I didn’t do anything to deserve it.

But isn’t that grace in it’s truest form? Grace is that he gave us this gift, a gift of physical life for my mom and emotional life to my family, not because we deserved it, but merely out of his love for us. God didn’t heal my mom on the conditions that we prayed this much or even trusted him to do it. He did it because he loves us.

My family has never really talked about the time period that my mom had cancer, but my brothers have all individually remarked how radically different our family would have turned out without God’s gift of giving my mom these extra fourteen years of life. Who would’ve picked up my midnight phone calls and listened to my dreams and disappointments for hours on end? Who would’ve waited for teachable moments to gently show me areas where I needed to change and grow? Who would have kept our family together and on track, through the ups and downs of five boys learning to become men? Who would have so tirelessly cared for Faith through all of her needs? God’s been gracious to give us this gift.

My sister’s birth and my mom’s cancer, both occurring within a year and a half of each other, were earthquake events that shaped my family’s life. It’s been hard for me to rebuild trust, not with a person, but just with life itself. My analytical mind races: if each of the five brothers gets married and 40% of the population gets cancer, then four siblings/in-laws will undergo what Mom went through. And on top of cancer, will our kids be born with a special need? Having a sibling born with special needs pops your idealistic bubble that that always happens to someone else’s family.

But what allows me to press forward is the simple faith in Christ that my parents have shown me every single day of my life. That Jesus doesn’t promise to make it all better today, but we can trust that because of his resurrection someday it will be. My mom keeps plugging away in the face of hardship in this life, because that’s what God calls her to do.

While I have her long, thin nose, her wiry hair, and her penchant for snappy little phrases, the most important thing that she has given me is the ability to just keep going and trusting in God, no matter what life gives. Mom shows this balance between her faith and her daily work with how she ends each day. She always reads her Bible standing up in the kitchen, since she’ll fall asleep from exhaustion if she sits. We’re called to trust what God is doing, but we don’t get to just sit around and wait for it to happen.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that the best plan is to give God time to be faithful to do what he has promised. That means sometimes you have to plow ahead through the disappointments and hardships of life, knowing that the rain will stop  and the sun will come out again. I love my mom, and am forever thankful for her.

Postscript: I know that a lot of you reading this will recognize your role in this story and your contributions to our family throughout this time. Thank you so much for all that you did!

what to do when you go to a party

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It’s Saturday night and the party you’ve been waiting for all week is finally here. As you start to get ready, your mind fills with a stream of questions; you wonder what you should wear, who else is going to be there, and what time you should show up? But in all of the anticipation for a party, few people ever ask the most basic question about parties: why am I going?

Most people assume they go to parties to see their friends, meet new people, celebrate an occasion, or just escape the monotony of life. But if you want to understand why you go to a party, you need to move past these more surface-level reasons and explore the deeper motives of your heart.

why do you go to parties?

At your core, you attend a party for a mix of two main reasons. The first reason people go to parties is to connect with other people. Deep down, every person wants to connect with other people. This is why we spend so much time at parties either talking to our friends or getting to know new people.

Why is connecting with others so important? Because every person is searching for a sense of belonging. We all have a deep fear of being alone and excluded, so we pursue friendships to feel safe, comfortable, and secure.

This is why so many people either show up to a party with their friends or find them the moment they walk through the door. They do everything they can to avoid strangers and other unfamiliar people, unwilling to risk their sense of security and belonging to meet new people. So instead, they spend the night surrounding themselves with people who feel familiar, whether it’s because of shared interests, cultures, or experiences.

The second motive for going to parties, however, is the opposite of the first. We don’t just go to parties to connect with other people, but also to find our place in the group. Everybody wants to see how they measure up against the rest of the people at the party.

This is why so many interactions at parties aren’t so much about connecting with another person, but rather are about standing out from the group. We compete against our peers in different ways to see where we fit on the social hierarchy. We want to be the best looking, the funniest, the richest, the skinniest, the smartest, the coolest, or the most successful, all to stand out from our peers in ways that our local culture finds valuable.

Parties allow us to put our best selves forward and see how we stack up against our peers. After all, you can only know if you’re funny or attractive or clever if you can compare yourself to other people. This explains why we spend so much time, though, and energy getting ready for a party. We know people will be compared and contrasted against other people all night, so we take extra time to make sure we look our absolute best.

Why are we so motivated to stand out from others? Because we are each driven by a deep desire for status. We want to be ranked higher on the ladder of social hierarchy than our peers. We watch how other people with different status levels respond to us to gauge our status, basing our self-worth on their reactions. As Robert Greene wrote:

We humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive. We are constantly monitoring differences and comparing ourselves with others. But for some people status is more than a way of measuring social position—it is the most important determinant of their self-worth. 

This is why every party is full of a thousand little status competitions, whether it’s who pays attention to whom, who gets the most attractive people to talk to them, or who gets accepted into which social circle? We evaluate each other on every little thing, then use this information to determine where we fit into a group. We love these status competitions and often end up rehashing the events of a party the next day with our friends to figure out who won or lost them.

These two motives for going to a party, to feel both a sense of belonging and a sense of status, can’t be separated, though, and turn into one main motive: we try to become friends with the highest-status people possible, hoping that they will help us feel both secure and valuable.

so what’s the problem?

You might be wondering, what’s so wrong with wanting security or status from a party? While there is nothing inherently bad about security or status, problems occur because of these motives because of our ultimate desire at a party. We will do whatever it takes to both increase our sense of safety and status.

This causes us to see other people instrumentally, as a means to help us reach our goal of high-status friends who make us feel comfortable. We use other people to benefit ourselves and ignore or discard anyone who can’t be used to help us reach our goals.

When we go to parties driven by these motives, we evaluate everyone there by subconsciously asking, “What can this person do for me?” We instantly judge everyone at the party based on our cultural stereotypes, deciding which people can help us most. We make split-second decisions based on their clothes, body type, skin color, and much more.

If we believe that another person can help us feel more comfortable and increase our status, then we’ll interact with them and try to become their friend. But if we don’t think they’ll help us reach our goals, then we’ll ignore them and exclude them from our circles.

I’ve seen this happen so much at parties and I’m sure you have, too. People are incredibly friendly towards any high-status person but act as if any lower-status person is invisible. They have no use for them, so they make it clear through both verbal and nonverbal cues that they aren’t welcomed.

If you don’t believe me, then watch how people treat those with special needs. My sister has special needs, and everywhere she goes, even among Christians, she gets ignored. Why? Because special needs people have nothing to offer the typical person; they won’t help you feel either more comfortable or help to increase your status.

That’s the way that our world works: everyone evaluates and uses other people for what they can offer you. We try to befriend and spend time with people who can help us feel comfortable and popular but exclude and ignore anyone who doesn’t have anything to offer to us.

Jesus’ thoughts on our motives

This kind of behavior isn’t anything new, though, it was just as common in Jesus’ day. At a dinner party hosted by a leader of the Pharisees in Luke 14, Jesus observed the guests as they filtered into the party. As the guests were gathered around the table, Jesus used a parable to call out the guests’ behavior:

When Jesus noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. 

But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Jesus noticed that the other guests at the party were doing everything that they could to sit in the places of honor. They wanted to become friends with the highest-status people they possibly could, hoping that these relationships would help improve their lives.

Why were these places of honor so important? They are how they would create security and status in Jesus' culture. If you could sit by the host, then you could build helpful friendships that would make you comfortable, popular and all-around success.

Through this parable, Jesus forced the guests to confront their motives for why they chose where to sit. Jesus saw that they only loved and cared about themselves. They’d do whatever it took to advance their interests and only saw other people as instruments toward their own goals. Later, Jesus warned his disciples to avoid people who were only out for their comfort and status:

Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers.

These people were only motivated by their interests and would use the people on the edges to enrich themselves and satisfy their selfish ambitions.

While our parties look quite different than the ones Jesus was at, our hearts are the same: we idolize the places of honor and will do whatever it takes to get to them. C.S. Lewis wrote about these desires in an essay called “The Inner Ring.” He wrote:

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

He goes on to say:

This desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.

Lewis wants us to see how deeply we are driven by the desire to become an insider, all in the hope that it will give us the sense of security and status that we so badly want. We struggle and fight and compete for these spots on the inside, afraid that our lives will be meaningless if we get left out.

This desire for the inner ring causes us to do all kinds of evil things to try to get inside of it. As Lewis says:

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

When parties are filled with a spirit of selfish ambition and self-promotion, we’ll do whatever it takes to secure our spot in the inner ring, causing them to become toxic places where jealousy, envy, and conflict thrive. Parties become filled with social games, cutting remarks, backhanded putdowns, and unspoken status battles. We’ll tear other people down, insult them, reject them, ignore them, and more, all to help us reach our selfish goals for the party.

so how should you act at a party?

If you want to change how you act at parties, then you need to completely flip your prevailing around. When you go to parties you shouldn’t ask, “Who can help me get what I want?”, but should instead ask, “Who here could use a friend?” Instead of evaluating other people for how well they could meet your needs, look for people whose needs you could help meet.

The best way to find these people is to just look around. Who is standing on the edges? Who is all alone? Who is being ignored? Who has nothing valuable (in the eyes of the world) to offer the insiders? Find the person standing all by themselves and go over and say hello.

When you ask “Who here could use a friend?”, your whole approach to parties gets reversed. You’re no longer looking at people as instruments to help you get what you want, but rather are seeking to love and serve them because of their inherent worth and value. Human beings don’t gain their worth from their athleticism, looks, or job, but rather because they are made in God’s image. Because of this, every person at a party is equally valuable, no matter where they fall on our society’s social hierarchy.

This is a central message throughout the Bible. God is always commanding us to remember the outsider, the foreigner, and the person who doesn’t fit in. We see this in Leviticus when God tells the Israelites:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 

Why are the Israelites to love the stranger as themselves? Because they know what it's like to be on the outside. Too many people, Christians included, quickly forget what it’s like to be on the outside and live their lives doing everything they can to avoid the stranger. They surround themselves in their comfortable and high-status circles, rejecting everyone different from them.

Jesus shows us what it looks like to love the stranger as ourselves. He spent so much of his time on earth loving and serving the people on the edges that society had rejected and forgotten. He never judged people based on the status hierarchies of his day but found ways to befriend the poor, the outcasts, the crippled, the lepers, and the nobodies, all because he loved them and saw them as precious in God’s sight.

Jesus calls us to do the same, to humble ourselves and love other people, as we consider them better and more important than ourselves. All of the Pharisees at the banquet wanted to be exalted, but it was Jesus, the one who humbled himself by washing his disciples’ feet and loving the people on the edges who ultimately was exalted by God.

where do we get the power to welcome others?

So where do we get the power to love people not for what they can do for us, but rather because they are worthy of love in and of themselves? From Jesus, who left his place in the ultimate inner circle, the Trinity, to come to earth and bring all of us as outsiders into friendship with God.

When humanity fell into sin, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could have forgotten about us and continued to enjoy their eternal friendship in heaven. But God chose to love us and save us not because of what we can give to him, but just because he loves us and wants us as friends. We are the object of his love, not an instrument for his self-love.

Because of this love, Jesus chose to be excluded from the greatest friend group that has ever existed, the Trinity, so that we could be welcomed in and included for all of eternity. Jesus could have stayed in heaven and lived a safe and high-status life, but instead, he came to earth and became the ultimate outsider, ridiculed and mocked by the people he came to save before being rejected on the cross by God the Father.

Because of what Jesus has done for us, we can find our need for security and status met through God’s love for us. We are a part of God’s eternal friendship circle, giving us ultimate security and status. Now, because we are satiated by God, we can go to the edges of our circles and love people there, even if they never promise to give us anything in return.

When you let this sink into your heart then it allows you to go to a party with a completely different frame of reference. You no longer need to use other people to help you get what you want, but you can love others and express the love of God that you have experienced to others. That type of attitude will completely remake a party, changing it from a self-interested, cliquish environment to one where everyone is welcomed and valued.

what to do when you’re hosting a party

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Hosting a group of people for an event is not an easy task. Between inviting the guests, preparing the food and drinks, and making sure everyone has a good time, hosting can be a stressful experience.

But while you can find plenty of tips, tricks, and techniques about how to host a party, there’s almost no information on why you should host a party. Like with many things, we get so fixated on methods of hosting that we forget all about our motives for hosting. What should motivate you when you host an event, whether it’s a reception, a dinner, or an all-out party?

If you’ve never considered your motives for having a party, your reasons for hosting are likely more influenced by the cares and concerns of our culture rather than being shaped and formed through Jesus’ teachings on hosting. Jesus went to a lot of parties, after all, and surprisingly, had quite a bit to say about our social lives. So what does it look like to let Jesus’ gospel impact why we host?

why are you hosting this party? 

Because motives are something that we rarely talk about, we often default to our culture’s motives for hosting without ever taking the time to examine what is going on in our hearts.

While every event has an acknowledged motive, whether it’s to celebrate a birthday, honor a holiday, or celebrate a wedding, underneath that is our true motive, the thing that drives us as we host. In our culture, the true motive of hosting is almost always to create and display social wealth.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we often host as a way to both impress other people and form socially advantageous connections. We use our parties to show off our talents and resources, receive praise from other people, and strengthen our relationships with people who could help us. Parties become a litmus test for our social status and as a way to build social wealth. If we can get the popular, attractive, and well-connected people to come to our event and enjoy it, then we’ll raise our sense of self.

We learn in our culture to approach hosting transactionally, only inviting and serving people who can help us get what we want, whether that’s affirmation, security, or access to social power. That means that our root motive so often in hosting isn’t to love others, but rather through serving them to love ourselves!

If you don't believe me on this, then consider the common fears around hosting. We worry about whether people come, whether they'll have fun, whether the most popular people will leave early, whether your guests will like your choices for food or drinks or music, and lastly, whether the one person (or group) whose opinion you care about most will be impressed. All of these common hosting fears have one thing in common, they all revolve around the question: "What will other people think of me?"

These fears show the true motives of our hearts: we host others to help ourselves. After all, why do couples spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding reception? Why do people rent out fancy event spaces? Why do we anxiously obsess about every little detail at our party? Because we all see the parties that we host as more than just events, we see them as displays of our social status and worth. 

While it’s great to do things with excellence and enjoy the fruits of our hard work, hosting in our culture is too often about a desire to get other people to like us, respect us, and enter into mutually beneficial relationships with us. We’re willing to go through the stress and expense of hosting as long as the other people can help us get what we want out of life. But when we approach hosting from this perspective of "What's in it for me?" then we don't serve other people in love, but rather use them to love ourselves. 

Jesus' problem with this approach

So much of the hosting in our culture is done in this transactional mindset: I will serve you, as long as you can help me. This kind of hosting isn't new, though; Jesus was confronting it 2,000 years ago as well. 

We see this in Luke 14, at a dinner party given by a prominent Pharisee for the social elites of Jesus’ day. As they were all eating, Jesus turned to the host and told him:

When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 

But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

This passage would have shocked his original audience and still makes us uneasy today. Is Jesus telling us that we can never host our family or friends? That we can never spend time with those closest to us?

But that's not what Jesus is trying to do. He’s using an idiomatic expression (i.e. it's raining cats and dogs) to get our attention. Jesus often used expressions to get our attention, similarly to when He said elsewhere that to be His disciple you need to leave your spouse, children, and entire family. Jesus isn’t telling you to literally hate your family or never hang out with them, to do so you’d have to disobey large parts of the Bible.

Rather, Jesus is trying to get you to see that when you host a party, you should invite people not for what they can do for you, but rather just because of your love for them. If this is your motive for hosting an event, then you’ll invite people who can’t you back and have nothing to offer you in terms of social advancement.

In God’s kingdom, other people aren’t a means to our ends, but rather an end to love in and of themselves. We aren't supposed to show love to other people because of what they can do for us, but rather just because they are made in God’s image.

If we're honest, we all know how hard it is to live like this. We gravitate toward the people around us who can help us advance in life while avoiding everyone who doesn't promise any return on our social investment. James echoes Jesus’ thoughts in his New Testament letter: 

Believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the poor man, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet," have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? 

We so quickly dismiss the poor, the outsider, and anyone different, so that we can chase after the time, attention, and approval of those who are wealthy, attractive, and well-connected. In God's kingdom, though, there's a radical reversal of values. As James says in the next verse: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?

When Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, we are to love all of them, even the ones we'd rather never be around. These are the people, the ones who are forgotten and passed over by the world who are going to be at the center of God's eternal party in heaven. 

So, do you host and invite people primarily on their ability to help you out (by feeling connected, cool, successful, and secure), or because you want to love others and help see them thrive in community? When we host out of a God's kingdom mindset, we don't use other people for our glory but rather serve them for God's glory.

what would this look like in real life? 

At this point, I hope you feel the tension between our cultural motives for hosting and Jesus’ kingdom motives. But, I don't want you to think that the main takeaway from this passage should be that you need to disown your friends and anyone with money.

I hope instead that you consider why and who you host and spend time with. As the hymn writer John Newton commented on this passage: 

I do not think that it is unlawful to entertain our friends. But if these words do not teach us that in some aspects we must give preference to the poor, I am at a loss to understand them.

So what are some practical ideas to change how you host? While there are many things you could do, my main suggestion would be to adopt a "gleaning" policy for your hosting. Let me explain. In the Old Testament, God told the Israelites: 

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. 

In this principle, God shows how to balance success in life with compassion. He doesn't tell the Israelites that they have to leave all of their harvest, yet He also requires the people to act intentionally to love the poor and outsider. To apply the principle of gleaning to hosting, whenever you host a party, set aside 10-20% of the invites to people who you wouldn't normally invite to your event.

How do you do this? When you draw up the guest list, instead of asking: "Who do I want to come to my party?" and filling your party full of people who you like, enjoy, and feel comfortable around, ask another question: “Who could use an invite?” This second question turns our focus away from people who could help us in some way so that we can invite people just out of a desire to love them, serve them, and welcome them in.

As you invite people to your event, reserve 10-20% of the spots for people who could use an invite. Try to think of people who are on the edges of your community and could benefit from being invited to your party. Maybe they are new to your city, haven't gotten connected yet, or are seen by most people as unpopular and undesirable? Or maybe they are from a different class or race or marital status, one that your group doesn't naturally hang out with? 

A simple step I've tried to make towards this principle is to buy an extra ticket whenever I go to a concert or game or event. It's usually $15-20, and then I use it to invite a younger or newer guy to join the group. And if you don't know of anyone who could use an invite, then ask your pastor or some ministry leader for suggestions. Chances are they know of people who are new, lonely, or just struggling to make friends at this moment in their lives. 

So many people on the edges are struggling socially, mainly because they don't have the looks, status, or confidence that causes other people to want to invite them to their events. Invite these people to your events, not because they will help you to look cooler, build status, or find the most attractive spouse, but because you love these people and want to help them thrive. 

There's also a silver lining to this approach. When you invite people from the edges of your community they will be glad to be invited, unlike high-status insiders who are flooded with invites. These people won’t play social games and since you aren’t evaluating them transactionally, they won’t be evaluating your party based on how much they can get out of it. Instead, they will bring a real spirit of joy and excitement and will be thankful for being included in the group. 

Again, I'm not saying that you need to throw away your entire friend group and hang out with strangers every time you hold an event. But if you try to give away 10-20% of your invites to those who need them, you'll introduce those people to your friends and help give them the social connections they need to thrive. 

where do you get the ability to do this?

There's just one hiccup to all of this; it's hard. When you start extending invitations to people based on love rather than for what they can do for you, it will be painful to some degree. Your social status will take a hit and you may find yourself in some awkward or uncomfortable situations. 

But when you understand the gospel and God's heart for you, everything should change. Why? Because the gospel tells us that Jesus didn't have to invite any of us to His wedding feast, but only did so because of His love for us. Imagine if Jesus had stood in heaven and taken our approach, "I'm only going to let the cool, put-together, and morally perfect people into my party. And if they're annoying, awkward, or have messed up their lives, I don't want them around."

But Jesus didn't do that. Otherwise, none of us could ever be welcomed in. Instead, Jesus looked down on us in love, not because we could give Him anything, but because He wanted to see us thrive. Matthew 9 says that Jesus looked at the harassed and helpless crowds (us!) around him and had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

This sacrificial love is what motivated Jesus to come to earth, not just to extend an invitation to God's eternal party, but also to pay the admission price on our behalf: to give us the wedding garments of righteousness that we would need to be welcomed into the wedding feast of the Lamb. 

While it’s easy to forget of our lowly condition before we were rescued by Jesus, Paul reminds us what we were like in 1 Corinthians 1: 

Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. 

Our parties aren't to be an opportunity to subtly boast about our affluence, connections, and social wealth, but rather as an opportunity to offer the same welcoming grace to others that we've experienced from Jesus. 

When we realize the compassion and grace that the ultimate Host has had on us, may it melt our hearts and make us willing to extend ourselves to love our neighbors and invite other people in, even if they are, like all of us, a work in progress. 

If God has blessed you with a solid group of friends, a secure social situation, and a home and financial resources to host, then use these blessings not to further your kingdom, but rather to be a blessing to others.

what to remember when you don’t get invited

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Many people think that the gospel is an abstract idea that only impacts the big questions of life. But God cares about every part of life, and because of that, when properly understood, the gospel speaks to every aspect of our day-to-day lives. That’s why I’m going to do three posts here in December on how the gospel changes how we see parties and events. The first one is on invitations.

You’ve had that sinking feeling before, right? When you realize that you didn’t get invited to a party or event or hangout that everyone else did. Whether you saw it while scrolling through Instagram, overheard it from friends, or were left out of the post-event recaps, realizing that you weren’t invited to a party is never a fun feeling.

When that happens it’s so easy to let your mind fill up with self-doubt and spiral out of control: “Do they think I’m annoying? Am I not as cool as everyone else? Maybe people don’t want me around?” Everyone struggles with these questions when they don’t get an invite they were hoping to receive.

Having lived in New York City for the past seven years, I’ve had plenty of practice in handling not being invited to something. Between New York’s tiny apartments, crowded restaurants, and the fact that everything is expensive here, guest lists are always tight. And so as we head into the holiday season, I wanted to share a few things with you that I remember whenever I’m not invited to something.

1. remember that you can’t be close friends with everyone

The first thing I remind myself of is that I can’t be close friends with everyone so it’s okay if I’m not invited to their events. Life is full of limits and none of us have enough time or energy to be good friends with everyone around us. It’s unrealistic to be close enough friends to a wide group of people to always be able to expect an invite.

I read an insightful article from a sociologist in the New York Times about friend groups. She shared how we can only maintain a certain number of friendships in our lives. Most people can maintain an inner circle of four close friends, a middle circle of 10 great friends, and a general group of around 40 good friends. Her research showed that if you try to have more friends than these at each level, you’ll either run yourself ragged or the friendships will break down.

While you might disagree on the numbers, it’s a helpful principle for me to remember: I don’t have the capacity or ability to be friends with everyone! There are only 24 hours in a day and I only have so much physical and emotional energy. If this person only invited their 10 or 40 friends to something, it’s okay that I wasn’t included. It’s more important to invest in the people that you click within your circles of 4, 10, and 40 friends and build deep friendships with those people, even if it means you get fewer invites overall.

2. remember that each personality brings out different group dynamics

The second thing I remind myself of when I’m not invited to something is that different personalities bring out different group dynamics. Because I have a relatively strong personality and am fairly talkative, it’s often good for me to not be invited so that other people will feel more comfortable and open to sharing. My personality isn’t always the right mix for an event, so by not being there, it gives other people the opportunity to shine.

Personalities at a social occasion are like ingredients in a recipe: sometimes you need to leave some of the stronger ingredients out so that other, more gentle ingredients can be highlighted. While strong flavors like ginger or olives or habanero peppers are great, a good cook knows how to balance flavors and often leaves them out to let more delicate ingredients take center stage.

My personality and social gifts aren’t better or worse than anyone else’s, but they are different, so I need to remember that it’s often better for other people if it’s a smaller group or if I’m not there. We all have different social gifts and temperaments, so a wise host knows how personalities will interact and will strategically think about who would be a great fit for the other guests.

3. remember that you’ll never be liked by everyone

The third thing I remind myself of when I’m not invited to something is that no matter what I do, there will always be people that don’t care for me. It’s just the truth. No matter how hard you try, you just will never be able to make everyone like or think that you are fun or interesting. It’s impossible.

So often when we’re not invited to something, it’s easy to fall into self-doubt: “Why do they not like me? Am I not good enough for them? Do they find me boring?” Oftentimes, though, the problem isn’t with you but rather with their perceptions or ideas of you. Their issues, whether it’s petty differences, envy, stereotypes, over-sensitivity, or just plain miscommunication have caused the problem and not your personality.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check for how your character flaws (we all have them!) might have hurt them, but you should be careful not to take on the issues of everyone who doesn’t like you. If you’ve done your best to engage, befriend, and take an interest in them, yet they are still chilly towards you, accept the situation and focus instead on people who do respond well to your friendliness.

4. remember that you are already invited to the ultimate party

The last thing I remind myself of when I’m not invited to something is that I have already been invited to the greatest party ever: the wedding feast of the Lamb! Jesus compares eternal life with God to a wedding feast over and over and invites each of us to this eternal party.

John picks this theme up in Revelation 19 when he writes about this feast:

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

‘Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.’

Then the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’”

This is the ultimate thing to remember when you aren’t invited to some party or event: Jesus, the Son of God, thinks so much of you that He has invited you into His kingdom to spend eternity celebrating with Him in His new heavens and new earth. And He wanted you to be at His eternal party so badly that He came to earth and was crucified for your sin all so that He could extend an invitation to you.

As you remember this, you’ll realize that your value doesn’t come from who invites you to their parties, but rather from the fact that God has chosen you to spend eternity at the greatest party of all time. When you realize how deeply you are loved and wanted by God, then you don’t have to look to others and their invitations for your self-worth and sense of acceptance. Instead, think about the fact that you are so special to God that He put His plan of salvation into effect just so that He could spend eternity feasting with you.

It’s still disappointing to not be invited to an earthly party, but when you realize what’s ahead for you, you’ll see that these temporary events are just a small reflection of the glory to come in God’s kingdom.

so what now?

At this point, you might be saying, “Well that’s good news for future me, but what about right now? How do I revive my pulse-less social life?” As I go through life, I try to remind myself that God not only owns the cattle on a thousand hills but also controls the invites to a thousand parties. So often people are willing to trust God with the big things of life, like needing a new job or healing from being sick, but they don’t trust Him with their little concerns, like something to do on a Friday night.

But God cares about it all. He knows that you need friendship and community and He delights in giving His children good gifts. Because of that, as you love your neighbor and care about the people around you, you can trust that God will give you the invites that you need at exactly the right time. I’m not invited to everything, and never will be, but in God’s grace, He gives me the invites that I need.

the biggest problem that you’ve never thought about

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There's a problem in our culture hidden in plain sight. You experience it when you open up Spotify and are overwhelmed by all of the artists, when you scroll through Netflix yet can’t find anything to watch, or when you read so many restaurant reviews you're not sure which one you want to go to. The undiscussed difficulty that we face as a culture is the problem of abundance.

This is a strange problem to have. For 99% of human history, ordinary people haven’t struggled with abundance but rather scarcity; there wasn’t enough of anything, whether food, clothing, or opportunities. People lived simple lives trying to eke out an existence, spending all of their lives in the same village, surrounded by the same people, eating the same simple food meal after meal.

Because of these scarcities, Western culture focused its efforts on creating more and more stuff. Through things like trade, the Industrial Revolution, the assembly line, the tractor, and all kinds of other technology, human ingenuity increased society’s ability to produce, manufacture, and create. This led to a cultural breakthrough in the 1950s; because of the manufacturing capacity gained in World War II and the invention of easy credit, many Americans, for the first time, had access to more things than they needed.

But now, we’re so removed from the days of scarcity that our culture has swung too far the other way. As consumption has increased, companies have pushed to give the American consumer more and more choices. Now many people are struggling not because there’s not enough, but rather because there’s too much. In a development that would shock our ancestors, our culture suffers from having too much, giving us access to too many calories, too many choices, and too many opportunities.

As I look around our culture today, few people are talking about the problem of abundance. In a strange twist of fate, the greatest obstacle to the good life, especially for young people, is not that there is too little, but rather that there is too much. Young people are faced with:

• Too many places to live, so they jump around from city to city, spending their lives wondering whether they should move.

• Too many good careers to pursue, so they become hesitant and worry that they are choosing the wrong one. 

• Too many calories to eat and drink, so they struggle to be healthy and eat and drink in moderation.

• Too many single people to date, so they ignore good options in hopes of a dream option blowing them away. 

• Too many people to be friends with, so they develop a large number of shallow friendships instead of pursuing relationships that have depth. 

• Too much social media to consume, so spend their lives scrolling their phones. 

• Too many places to travel to, so they live in a constant state of discontent.

• Too many needs to help with, so they feel overwhelmed and never get involved with anything.

• Too many brands at the grocery store, so they spend five minutes trying to figure out which kind of yogurt to buy.

• Too many possessions to buy, so they fill up their homes with all kinds of luxuries and things they won't use. 

• Too many products to choose from, so they read review after review in search of the most perfect can opener.

These are just a few of the ways that our culture's abundance causes problems in our lives. Our lives are overwhelmed by all of the choices and options that we have, causing us to grow restless with monotony, become paralyzed with uncertainty, or struggle with lethargy. Our culture has sought after abundance for so long, that even though we’ve reached our goal, we haven’t switched our internal messaging to give people the tools they need to say no to the ever-increasing amount of choices, possessions, and opportunities available to us.

But if we don't learn how to live simple lives, God-centered amid abundance, we'll continue to struggle with things like gluttony, towards food and shopping and travel, or feeling numb, as young people sit alone in cities of millions scrolling on their phones. Of course, we shouldn’t hope to go back to a world of scarcity (and there are still some people dealing with scarcity today), but we should be careful to understand what our world of abundance is doing to our souls.

Our culture tells us that pursuing abundance will always bring life, but in reality, it only leads to misery. As the Bible says in Proverbs 23:

Listen, my son, and be wise, and set your heart on the right path: do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags. 

So what do you need to do to live a healthy life in 2022? You need to learn to say no. No to the constant temptation to pursue more of everything, whether it's more money, work, opportunities, friendships, choices, square feet, or whatever you think you really need. If you don't, you'll be overwhelmed by abundance, causing you to struggle with debt, weight gain, distraction, superficiality, restlessness, and a constant need to change and try new things. In a culture that believes that too much is never enough, you have to draw boundaries and put limits on how you live. At some point, you have to say no to new friendships, new dating options, new restaurants, and new careers, so that you can invest in the choices that you have made in the past. 

I've always liked an exercise Warren Buffett uses to cut down on choices in a culture of abundance. He says that if you want to live a meaningful life, you need to write down the 25 things you want to accomplish in life. Then, you need to take a marker and cross out 20 of those things and forget about them forever. Now, spend your life focused on the five things you have left and you will have enough time to do these things well.

While this might sound harsh, it's so important to constantly prune your life. Most people try to improve their lives by adding to them, but in a culture of abundance, you need to take things away. You need to prune the many superficial and unnecessary things from your life so that you have time for the things that your soul hungers. Your soul doesn’t want another Amazon delivery and the metaphorical junk food of our consumeristic society, but rather depth, purpose, and meaning.

Our culture is a bottomless pit; there are more books to read, more TikToks to watch, more new restaurants to try, and more people to meet than you could ever get around to in a hundred lifetimes. If you don’t learn how to say no to the abundance that knocks on our door and seeks to steal your attention, you’ll damage your life until you do.

Of course, no one wants you to say no. Big companies and big government want you to say yes to abundance since that keeps a culture addicted to consumption coming back to spend more money. But if you want to live a life of depth and richness and beauty you must. Your soul depends on your brain saying no; no to endless TV, no to moving every three years, and no to the temptation to live your life completely online.

Where do you get the ability to say no to our culture of abundance? By pursuing the only thing that will ever satisfy your soul: God. The Australian pastor Mark Sayers says, “Even a culture of super-abundance cannot fill the God-shaped hole.” The psalmist David agrees with him in Psalm 16, only God can give human beings the satisfaction that they are looking for through abundance. He writes:

You have given my heart greater joy by far, than when grain and new wine most abundant are.

A life full of abundance can make you happy for a moment or two, but it will never give you joy. Possessions and experiences and opportunities are good things, but when we lean on them as ultimate things, they will cause our souls to shrivel up and die. It’s only when you look to God for your joy, security, and peace, and not the abundance of this world, that you can live a life of God-glorifying moderation. What good is it, after all, to gain the whole world yet lose your own soul?

why you shouldn’t practice what you preach

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You’ve no doubt heard the familiar moral encouragement to “practice what you preach.” We use this phrase as a culture to motivate people to match their actions to their words. But while the intention behind this saying is good, trying to practice what you preach will create all kinds of problems. Let me explain.

Let’s start with the obvious: there’s a lot of preaching in today’s world. Because of apps like Instagram and Twitter, everyone has a pulpit from which they can preach to others. Because of this, lots of people, whether their academics or activists or just an average joe, feel comfortable sharing their opinion of our culture and giving grand pronouncements on how to fix every issue we face.

The problem with all of this preaching, though, is that it’s rarely backed up by any meaningful action. That’s the whole reason we have a saying like “practice what you preach,” because most everyone doesn’t. People spend their lives preaching to others about what is wrong and what needs to be done but never get around to doing anything to help solve the problems their complaining about.

This tension between our love of preaching and our dislike of living out our ideals leads to two major problems. The first problem this causes is that it makes everybody self-righteous. They believe that since they have the right ideals they must be a good person. Because they have good intentions, whether it’s to solve poverty, reform the government, or improve other people’s lives, they believe in their inherent goodness.

But these good intentions, uncoupled from any real action to work towards them, create a self-righteous attitude. We judge other people’s actions against our ideals and see all kinds of ways that they fall short. People who live in their idealized world of good intentions quickly become arrogant, self-confident, and convinced that everything would be solved if people would just listen to them.

The second problem with trying to practice what you preach is the more serious one: no matter what you do you’ll never measure up to your ideals, leading to hypocrisy. You’ll preach about all of the things that other people should be doing to solve the problems of our culture but then will never find the time, money, or energy to work on them yourself.

Even if you do commit to practicing what you preach, you’ll find that putting your ideals into action is much harder than you anticipated. The world is a complicated place and solving long-standing and complicated problems takes a lot more than the ability to broadcast your ideals. As George Washington told Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton as they tried to lead a young United States, “Winning was easy, young man, governing’s harder.”

This turns so many of the “preachers” into hypocrites: what they say doesn’t match up with who they are. Why is this the case? Because when they realize that their practices are not reflecting what they preach, rather than adjusting their ideals they rationalize their actions.

Faced with the dissonance between their ideals and actions, their self-righteousness causes them to come up with excuses to explain why they shouldn’t be expected to live up to their ideals. They say things to themselves like:

• “Well, I really do want to solve this, but since I was stuck in a broken system myself and have all of this student debt, it’s understandable that I can’t do anything.”

• “Well, of course, I care a lot about this social problem, but I’m not at a stage of life where I don’t have time to do anything in person, so the best I can do is to post about it all the time on Instagram.

• “Well, I would love to be out there on the front lines, but my calling just so happens to be in this cushy corporate job, so unfortunately I’ll just have to complain about others from the comfort of my suburban lifestyle.”

• “Well, I would be the first one to help if I could, but since this problem is caused by those people and not me, my only role is to point out their failures to them.”

These are common rationalizations for why people can’t practice what they preach. We point the finger at others and blame them for inaction on the major problems of our day, but then find convincing excuses for why we can’t do any of the hard work ourselves.

If you try to practice what you preach you’ll always end up with a culture full of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. People will spend their lives preaching to others about what they need to do, but will never do anything themselves. They use their idealistic intentions as a way to judge others while doing nothing to help.

Jesus had strong words for people who heaped large moral burdens onto other people but made little effort to follow their own rules. He said this in Matthew 23:

The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do.  For they preach but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.

Jesus points out that the Pharisees preached, but they never practiced what they preached. They came up with all kinds of things other people had to do, but never felt these rules applied to them. And so while Jesus tells his disciples to respect the authority of their leadership positions, he wants them to reject their example.

So if you shouldn’t try to practice what you preach, what should you do? The key to living a life of integrity and authenticity is to flip these two phrases around. Instead of trying to practice what you preach, you should only preach what you practice.

This means that before you preach something to others, you should ensure that you are practicing that thing yourself. Only share your ideals for others after you have implemented them in your own life. If you aren’t practicing something in your life, then wait until you do before you place those expectations onto other people.

Why is it so important to only preach what you are first practicing? Because it will cause two things. First, putting your ideals into practice first will make you humble and teachable. You’ll quickly see how hard it is to turn good intentions into meaningful results. It’s 1,000 times harder to do something than to talk about doing something. As Richard Rohr says: “Right words make all of us feel falsely important; right action keeps all of us forever beginners and not so important at all.”

Practicing before you preach will help to cut through your self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance (that often afflicts well-educated young people), and instead will help you become a humbled people who can admit that life is complicated, nobody has all of the answers, and that there’s no such thing as a quick fix.

When you admit these three things, something strange will happen: you’ll become much more effective, since you’re now willing to work with other people and learn from their wisdom. The practicing of your ideals will give you fresh insights and newfound wisdom so that when it is time to share them with others, you’ll have more helpful things to share. You’ll also approach other people with grace and show them mercy when they fall short since you know how hard it is to live up to your ideals.

Practicing before you preach also creates credible and trustworthy leaders that people want to follow. When other people see that your actions back up your words, they’ll recognize your integrity and will join you in the work. As the old saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”

When other people see someone who is doing the difficult work rather than just telling other people what to do, that leader will have so much more of an influence than a “words only” person could ever have, no matter the size of their online audience. While words are important, what changes the hearts and minds of communities and cultures are not people who have all of the right opinions, but rather a person whose life exemplifies their beliefs.

What’s the takeaway from all of this? Be patient and avoid the temptation to preach something before you’re practicing it. Make sure that your life supports your ideals before you start expecting other people to listen to you. Otherwise, your words will ring hollow and you’ll just be another self-righteous hypocrite.

So before you preach to others, examine your life and make sure that you’re first doing what you want other people to do, so that as the Apostle Paul says, “After preaching to others, I might not be disqualified from the prize.” Paul knew how easy it is to never get around to practicing what you preach, so he made sure that he was living out his message.

That’s what made Jesus so unique. Jesus was the perfect embodiment of preaching what you are first practicing. He lived out God’s will perfectly all of his life, so when he started preaching to others after 30 years of ordinary life, they felt the authority and authenticity of a person who lived out what he expected of others.

I hope you will spend your life, especially your youth, putting your ideals into practice, gaining the hard-fought wisdom and insight that you can only get from real-world experience. While preaching your ideals before you practice them seems like it will speed up social change, like many “shortcuts” it will take you much longer to get where you want to go. Live out your ideals in practice, and I guarantee that you’ll have plenty of time and opportunities to preach to them when you are older.