who knows how to drive in the rain?

“People in Columbus don’t know how to drive in the rain”

It’s a common refrain I hear from anyone whenever the slightest bit of precipitation falls from the grey Midwestern sky. The traffic on the roads slow down by at least 5 MPH, and minor accidents pop up over the city, causing schedules to be adjusted by five minutes.

I’d like to find these terrible drivers, so they can be properly identified, but I can’t pick them out from the crowd. All I can find are their accusers.

I know I’m not one of the terrible drivers. The only accident I’ve ever been in was courtesy of a minivan that was too busy to stop and exchange insurance information after he put a nice dent into my rear bumper. I’m a good driver. I don’t think anyone of my friends or co-workers are the hazardous drivers either. They’re all the ones who are complaining and join me in my search for those menaces of the road.

I bet you’re a good driver too. You probably nodded your head in agreement with the first line at the top of the page.

Maybe it’s just a numbers game. Maybe there is just one bad driver our there ruining the roads for the rest of us. If you or I can’t pick him out from the crowd, it’s because he’s blending into the masses so well. He only strikes when it’s inconvenient for everybody else. The rest of us, we’re all important people. We have places to be, appointments to make, deadlines to meet. That other guy, he’s just taking abusing his privilege to operate a motor vehicle on the open road, without a care in the world. Wherever he’s going to, it’s not important. I have much more pressing matters than he.

So, to that one nameless, faceless, defenseless person who doesn’t know how to drive, please, for the sake of apparently everyone else in the city, learn how to drive in the rain.

I apologize for making a gross generalization about the public with my opening statement. Let me reword that.

“At least one person in Columbus (who certainly isn’t you or me) doesn’t know how to drive in the rain”

an open letter

An open letter to the leaders and staff of Cru (Don’t worry, it’s the good encouraging kind of open letter)

I figured out that Ohio State starts classes start again this week. I only know that because at church this past Sunday, the demographic shifted many years younger as I was forced to sit in what an older generation of Christians would term the “narthex.”

In years past, this time of year would have kept me occupied as a student leader in Cru. Of course now, three autumns removed from being a student, I can only watch from a distance. Only a handful of student’s timelines overlap with my own Cru experience. Classmates that I stood shoulder to shoulder with have moved into the next stage of life, outside the context of a Christian student body, but familiar faces still remain. Good friends populate the staff and intern teams. The summer has drawn to a close and they return to a routine that they have been doing for many years now, albeit in a different role than we had has students.

I can only imagine the stress and pressure that comes with these newfound responsibilities, the fatigue that can come from ministry. A promising contact card turns out to be a hoax, cold shoulders and mocking laughter comes from disinterested students. A student stands you up for coffee or lunch, or turns out to be simply humoring you. The constant follow ups and mentoring can be personally draining. The glitz and glamour of college ministry (if such a thing even exists) can quickly dissipate.

Despite of all the trials and hardships that come with ministry, God continues to grow the movement on campus. Somehow, among the butchered Gospel presentations, the awkward conversations, the unanswered knocks at the door, students will encounter something that they have never known before. You and I know this because we were once those skeptical students.

We were the ones who thought that Christianity was only for our parents, the ones who thought that the Bible was an outdated, unreliable, set of rules. We were the ones chasing grades over grace. We were the ones looking for acceptance when we have already been accepted. We were the ones who thought that love existed outside of Love himself. We were the ones who avoided our Bible study leaders. We were the ones who remained stoic and silent when we did show up to a Bible study. We were the ones who stood with our arms crossed and mouths closed as the band led worship in Independence Hall, wondering, “What did we get ourselves into?”

Yet we were also the ones who were asked to step up and become leaders. Yet we were the ones who started knocking on doors. We became the ones who were sharing our faith with complete strangers on the Oval, on the beaches of Florida, in South America, in Europe, and in our places of work. God continually placed people in our lives, not only that first week on campus, but throughout however many numbers of years we happened to be an undergrad, who pushed us, challenged us, and pointed us to Christ. Somehow, we became the ones who showed up to church on Sunday morning, removed from the college experience, wondering, “Where did all these young people came from?”

I ask the staff and leadership to remember, that the work God did through you, the work that he continues to do today, goes beyond Real Life or Cru or any other ministry. Cru isn’t a church, but it has been instrumental building the Church.  

Those same students have again descended upon campus again, with their preconceived notions of what their college experience would be like. We all had them at one point. But now, because of how we encountered God, our experience took a radical turn.

I doubt that the words that I’ve written are new. I just wanted you to know that the efforts of the staff and leaders before you have not been in vain. God used them before, and he is using you now. And for that, I am very thankful.

So I implore you, remember yourself when you talk to that freshman for the first time this week. Remember who you were and where you are now.  These young students are in the same position that we once were in. They won’t be exactly like us, but the similarities will be uncanny.  

They stepped onto the campus with their own plan for their lives.

Show them God’s (wonderful) plan. Sorry I couldn't resist

Sincerely,

A thankful former student, a current friend, and an eternal brother

noise report

Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint. They decorate us. We willingly emblazon messages on our shirts, caps, even the seat of our pants. Sometime back we had a national campaign against highway billboards. But the billboards were nothing compared to what we now post all over our bodies. We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”, silent and not so silent.

-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

That book, published in 1998, was well before the dawn of the social media age, and the internet was still in in childhood stages. First it was billboards that littered the highways with advertising slogans and messages, then the constant pale light of television, and today, of course it is the internet that hurls message after message towards the masses. The dystopian future described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 does not seem so farfetched today.

Not a day goes by when one cannot be bombarded with constant “noise,” some of it self-inflicted. True solidarity is hard to find. Gyms ironically have televisions at every treadmill and are posted all around the weight area as blaring music plays over the loudspeakers. Of course one can combat this with a good pair of headphones, but that simply substitutes the “noise” for one that is more pleasant and personal. The first thing one does after starting the car is tune to the right radio station or playlist instead of adjusting the mirrors and checking blind spots. When one gets home from work or school, the television turns on right after the briefcase or backpack hits the floor. Even the bathroom, once a sacred palace of solidarity is no longer private thanks to smartphones.

The realm of social media is a microcosm of the modern world. The noise here is amplified even more. And here people cannot distinguish between what is meaningful and what is frivolous. 

Not a day goes by without a post from someone who attempts to rise above the Buzzfeed lists and the recycled memes in order to impart some great truth upon his social media sphere of influence.

This video will change your life!

This will restore your faith in humanity!

Of course that short video will not change one’s life and do very little to alter an already entrenched world view. The instrumental music that plays in the background (probably sounds something like this, great song by the way), perfectly matched up with pictures and video designed to inspire some type of truth may bring the viewer to tears. One will feel compelled to re-post the video and raise awareness for whatever great social injustice flavor of the month, but awareness without action is useless.

The post to restore one’s faith in humanity looks good in a vacuum, when it again is accompanied by the same music that played in the video before. But after one leaves the glow of the computer screen and powers down the smartphone and encounters people in the real world, the sad corrupt and broken reality of human nature is exposed within a matter of a few seconds, and no amount of videos of people practicing random acts of kindness or children standing up to bullies or coming alongside the picked upon will change that fact.

Willard again writes later in the chapter:

In the shambles of fragmented assurances from the past, our longing for goodness and rightness and acceptance -and orientation- makes us cling to bumper slogans, body graffiti, and gift shop nostrums that in our profound upside-down-ness somehow seem deep but in fact make no sense: "Stand up for your rights" sounds good. How about "All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten"? And "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty"... All that is really profound in the cute wisdom is the awesome need of soul to which they incoherently respond. We sense the incoherence lying slightly beneath the surface, and we find the incoherence and lack of fit vaguely pleasing and true to life: What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few sand up for responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible. And does one learn in kindergarten how to attract people and make a lot of money by writing books assuring people they already know all they need to know to live well? And how do you practice something that is random? Of course you can't. What is random may hit you, but whatever is purposely done is certainly not random. And no act of beauty is senseless, for the beautiful is never absurd. Nothing is more meaningful than beauty...Absurdity and cuteness are fine to chuckle over and perhaps muse upon. But they are no place to live. They provide no shelter or direction for being human.

These inspirational viral videos, the uplifting stories that come a dime a dozen, are today's "cute noise" and they are indeed a very shaky place to build a lifestyle around. I know this because I have watched those videos and am guilty of reading that article (and in this case, guilty of trying to impart some life lesson on you. The irony is not lost on me). Some of those videos are well put together and succeed at breaking through my stoic nature and would evoke tears had my tear ducts not dried up long ago. But after clicking through, I am still the same person I was before. My life has not been changed by a promotional video. Those videos are effective in proper contexts, but the internet is not that place.

Bible verses and hymn lyrics, sermon excerpts come from the Christian crowd, truths that I agree with and will affirm. But what good are they on someone’s newsfeed? I am not doubting the power of scripture to be clear, but has the person posting this truly sat down and reflected and meditated and prayed over what they posted and come to the conclusion that the rest of the world needed to know what they were thinking? Or did the Christian just want people to know that they fulfilled their spiritual duties by having a “quiet time” at some obscure coffee shop? Were these words ripped out of context to make the verse point to the person who read it rather than to Christ? In the words of John, was the person who posted attempting to decrease himself in order for Jesus to increase, or was he posting to increase the number of his notifications? When a non-believer reads these spiritual musings, do they simply feel annoyed because someone else can’t keep their religion in their pants, or chuckle because there is a glaring inconsistency between the spiritual Christian they see on Facebook and the foul mouthed self-righteous asshole they know in real life? Eventually, for everyone, it all turns to noise.

In John 12, Jesus is living is last days in Jerusalem before he is betrayed and crucified, when this happens:

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” John 12:27-30

When the voice of truth rang audibly into the world for people to hear, they confused it for something else. Perhaps it was thunder, or angels, but not God, not the voice of truth. The crowds around him, even though he as the embodiment of truth and goodness, 100% God and yet 100% man, still did not grasp who he was.

Though he had done so many signs before them, they still not believe in him…Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. John 12:31, 42-43

When real truth breaks into your life, when something that transcends the witticisms of social media posts, will you be able to recognize it? When you hear it, will you explain it, share it with others, not out of motivation for the approval of your peers, but to bring glory to the one who made it known to you?

A solid foundation to build a life upon is there to be found, but it is not found in the noise of everyday life. It is not confined to 140 characters (Trust me, all @phildaddy90 likes to tweet about is food, bud light lime, pooping, and working out) or some angsty 20-something's blog. I have a few suggestions of where to start, but I think you can guess which direction I'll point you in. 

Sheep know the voice of their shepherd, and that voice is always calling out. I hope you can hear it above the noise.