Community – From Silence

Roots

June 25, 2018June 25, 2018 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

I found myself sitting in the hallway outside of my uncle’s home office the night before I left Los Angeles. The door to the room was propped open. Light spilled into the hallway and leaked across the rug and the parts of the walls.

Inside, my uncle sat at his desk. In one hand, he held the book on which he was concentrating. In the other, a pencil rested between his fingers as he held it up just enough for its end to touch his cheek. He was motionless until, all at once, the pencil would come flying down. A few marks would be made. A few lines would be drawn. Then, just as quickly, the pencil would return to its place.

The door to the guest bedroom further down the hall opened. I stepped out. Pausing briefly to step sideways, I leaned against the wall for a moment before sliding to the ground.

I let out a sigh. Just behind me, some of the light from my uncle’s office rested on my belongings, having been packed and repacked several times over the course of the past month. This time was the last for a while though. It had to be as compact as possible to fit into the back of my car as well as have enough space for two other people and their gear.

A silence returned to the hallway as I thought about the road ahead. The frames of my uncle’s glasses were just visible over the pages he was reading. He flipped a page. Silence again.

Minutes passed. Pages were turned. The pencil made marks. Silence. I began to wonder why I didn’t leave. But something, some impression of a thing, was building up in my stomach.

I knocked on the door frame. The book came down a bit. My uncle looked at me quizzically as I sat with my back against the wall in his hallway.

“You know,” I started, unsure of where I was going exactly, “I don’t think I have many regrets from my time at college.”

I fell silent, trying to figure out what I was trying to say or rather, why. I looked up to see that I had my uncle’s attention. The book remained propped up in his hand, but it hung more limply than it did before.

“I guess I have one or two though.”

He cleared his throat. “What’s that?”

“Well, I suppose that my main regret is that I came into APU like an idiot who just didn’t want to live under your shadow and ran from community when you offered it. I wanted to see if I could do this whole ‘adulting’ thing on my own. I wanted to try and pull myself up by my bootstraps. I think I was partially trained to think that way – to be self-sustaining, to not need anyone. And, well, I missed out on a great resource and relationship with you because of it.”

My uncle set his book down on the desk in front of him before saying: “The thing is, none of us are self-sufficient. We don’t even know how complicated and interconnected our society is because we don’t think about it. I don’t know how many people it took to produce a hamburger on my plate. I don’t know how many countless others it takes for every single activity of my day to happen!”

“Yeah,” I remarked, “I get that intellectually. But at my core, I still live out of a false story where true rugged individualism could be a reality. I never let that lesson to affect me and I guess I have to pay the consequences of that decision.”

Something clicked in my mind at that moment.

“I guess what I’m getting at is I’m sorry for not reaching out – and reaching out more. I’ve treated you like simply a stop on the way somewhere else.”

I paused. “I know it might not mean much now, being the night before I leave and all, but can you forgive me?”

—

I feel pulled. Pulled to stay and pulled to go. On one hand, culture has time and time again told us of the potential of the open road. The adventures you’ll have. The people you’ll meet.

On the other hand though, I’m been feeling an ache to put down roots somewhere for a while.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove tells the story of his friend Will and his family moving to a new place and attending a church known for taking community seriously. But after a while, Will realized that he’s not satisfied. Meeting with the pastor of the church to discuss his concerns about community, the pastor simply asked Will how long they had been attending, to which he replied a year.

“Then I guess you’ve got about a year’s worth of community,” his pastor said matter-of-factly, “Stay another year and you’ll have two years’ worth. Stay thirty and you might find some of what you’re looking for.”[1]

I was reminded again of the quote from Soong-Chan Rah I had come across in earlier readings where he stated that “Contemporary life is characterized by movement, oftentimes at high speeds, with the absence of any real connection to the world around us.”[2] When we move constantly, onwards and upwards to the next best thing, the world gets blurred. We can see miles of road, but the details and the depth to a place are lost.

American culture has taught us of the superiority of mobility. Out there is always the possibility of a new field, greener than any you’ve encountered so far. But we don’t take enough time to gather more than a surface level nutrition from the one we’re in now.

In an analogous fashion, C. S. Lewis likened his work of Mere Christianity to our desire to stay on the go. We treat our communities the same way Lewis foresaw how some might be tempted to use his book – as the end-all, be-all in life. But, Lewis wrote, Mere Christianity is simply getting a person to walk the halls of the faith. We must commit to one of the house’s many rooms to find that there are warm fires and hot meals, good books and comfortable chairs in which to rest.

In the same way, we must commit to community to begin to grow in a way we might not otherwise. Wilson-Hartgrove remarked that “I wanted to love my neighbor, but I had not stayed in one place long enough to know my neighbor or my neighborhood.”[3] This, of course, is not just an idealized love, but one where person begins to rub shoulders with one another and butt heads as time goes on – learning to live with one another despite our differences because of the reality that of community on which is based. The German theologian Bonhoeffer reminded his audience that:

Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.[4]

I feel pulled. Pulled because my heart longs for the road and longs for home all at once. It seeks for something impossible – an in-depth community at the speed of sound. And yet, what I may need is to slow down enough to let my roots sink down into the earth between my toes.

It’s happened once. It happened around a table with people who committed to show up for four years and to wrestle with some of life’s recurring questions. When I stopped living how I was living for just enough to let me invest and be invested into. When I didn’t fear living in the shadow of others.

I wonder how they’re doing?

—

Back in the hallway of my uncle’s house, I waited for my uncle’s response. It was quiet for a moment. One of those wonderful moments where there is a holy stillness of sorts as someone really listens to you and doesn’t simply brush you off.

Then, he spoke. “Of course. Just make sure to stay in touch and call us every once in a while. We’d love to see how you’re doing.”

I thanked him and began to head down the hallway when he called me. I started to turn around.

“Remember,” he said, “Keep in touch.”

“Oh,” I said with a slight smile, “I will.”

—

[1] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2010), 19.

[2] Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2009), 148.

[3] Wilson-Hartgrove, 36.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 13.

You Are What You Eat; Choose Wisely

April 15, 2018April 15, 2018 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

I am what some might call a veteran of the college life. My peers of the class of 2018 and I have been attending APU for almost four years. In that span of time, my friends and I have had the chance to sit in upwards of 250 colloquy discussions, reading more than 50 books, learning from a collection of 17 different professors, over eight semesters. And, without counting weekends, many of my peers and I have had around 1800 meals. Assuming that I had only three cups of coffee a day per weekday using a standard 12 oz. paper cup, I wager that I have had 21,600 oz. of coffee to keep me going since the first day of school.

The reason why I bring this up is because, for all of the conversations I’ve had, for all of the experiences we’ve shared, for all of the books we’ve read and papers we’ve written, I want to let you know that my time in college has boiled down to a few core truths. The one that I want to share today is, strangely enough, that you are what you eat.

The thing is, there are a number of different things that you can choose to chow down on throughout your college career. For me, coffee was definitely one of those things. As college students, we might want to stay up all night and eat our fill of the Taco Bells and McDonald’s of the college experience, basing our choices off of pleasure or usefulness. Aristotle imagined that most of our friendships begin this way. And while it is fine to have Taco Bell and McDonald’s every so often, if you make them your main source of nutrition, you might find yourself feeling ill after some time. The thing is, we need to make room for better food to help us grow in wisdom and stature – we need to make room for friends of virtue. These are those we find around us who spur us on to greater character and virtue.

The Reformer Martin Luther thought about that better food, especially when it came to one of the core symbols of the Christian faith. According to Luther, it is “through the interchange of [Christ’s] blessings and our misfortunes [that] we become one loaf, one bread, one body, one drink, and have all things in common.” Christ’s taking on of our form opens the possibility that we might take on his righteousness. This is symbolized in the elements of the Lord’s Supper. Later, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer extended his predecessor’s metaphor – in the same way that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, more mature Christians are invited to walk alongside and support their less mature sisters and brothers until they can stand on their own in the community. And just as how it is in remembering Christ in the Lord’s Supper that we are also simultaneously re-membered – rejoined – into the larger community of Christ’s body, we are reminded that in everything we do, we are formed by what we partake in. We are formed by the communities of which we are a part. We are formed by the relationships we pursue. We are formed by what we read and wrestle with. In short, you are what you eat.

The word we use to describe more mature persons watching over others on any journey of life comes from Homer’s Odyssey, when the young Telemachus sets off on a coming-of-age journey to find his father. He is successful thanks to the goddess Athena who guides, supports, and walks with Telemachus in the form of his father’s old friend, Mentor. Because Telemachus listens to Mentor and not the voices of others, he ultimately comes into his own.

Mentors are essential to any successful journey, and many of us strive to practice good mentorship. The thing is though, we can’t force someone to choose what to partake in. It’s up to each person to choose his or her future. If we are changed and formed by the ideas, values, relationships, and communities we internalize–if we are what we eat– what choices do you want to define you? Who do you hope to be in four years?

Like Two Eight-Year-Olds in a Trench Coat

February 6, 2018February 6, 2018 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

With all of the craziness of last semester, it’s hard to find time for recollection and reflection. Readings for this class have to be done by such-and-such a day. Graduate applications are due the same day as two papers. And, oh, did you remember about the project that’s due for work in the next few days?

Granted, with the trajectory that many students like me are taking, we’re either going to graduate on time or crash and burn in a blaze of glory. Maybe both.

Funny thing, that. Graduation from college. In little more than ten weeks’ time, many of my friends and I will cross a stage, be handed a diploma, and land in adulthood.

Theoretically. At least, that’s what it seems like we’re supposed to be doing.

But on certain nights when I’m being honest with myself, I don’t know what life will look like after graduation. I don’t know if or when I’ll see many of my closest friends anymore. I don’t know where life will take us.

And that frightens and excites me simultaneously in a wonderful, horrific amalgamation of emotions somewhat typical of the human experience, as I’ve so learned.

As a senior looking at the immanent reality of life potentially outside of academia, I suddenly feel like two eight-year-olds in a trench coat wielding a cardboard sword and sent off to face the dragons of life.

I wonder how many people feel the same exact way?

I’ve found some solace in the story of a man in a similar circumstance. He was impulsive, rough around the edges, and not the sharpest one of his friend group. But he was dependable when his passions didn’t get in the way. I think that’s why his friends called him Rock, err, I mean Peter.

When Peter began following Jesus, he had just given up his fishing nets. He had little, if any, training for the road ahead of him. He was a blue-collar worker, through and through. And yet, it was this Rock, this Peter, that Jesus chose to be the Rock upon which to build his church. It was this Peter that took up the mantle of leadership after only three and a half years of training.

I’m sure he (and the rest of the disciples) felt the same way that many of us do.

—

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch of the imagination to say that I’m a self-professed nerd and proud of it. I count myself as one among many of the fandoms that exist throughout the world.

Lord of the Rings? You bet.

Star Wars? Of course.

Hunger Games? Maybe a bit of a stretch for it, but I can see its appeal.

The funny thing about each of these series is that each one of them boils down to the same story at the end of the day. Someone is called upon out of a backwater community to overcome some great obstacle or seemingly invincible evil. But, as time goes on, they find that they aren’t alone – they are joined by people who provide support, companionship, and advice along the way. Eventually, depending on how their allies have influenced them, the unlikely hero makes a decision that will have a sweeping impact on the world around them – for better or for worse.

But why tell the same story?

It seems as though the reason is that there is something about these stories that resonates with the core of our experience as a species. Something about these stories tells us that for any journey we go on, we need someone else to walk alongside us, providing companionship, support, and advice along the way. We need others to tell us that the journey is worth taking in the first place.

It reminds us, suggests G.K. Chesterton, not that dragons are real, but that our dragons are defeatable.

When I started on my journey at my undergraduate college, I came in confident of my positions. I thought I only had a few questions. I thought college was about merely refining the beliefs I held about the world.

I’m leaving college with more questions than I had coming in. I think that’s the point of college – to sharpen your hunger for knowledge, to whet your appetite for truth, and to give words and shape to identifying beauty and nuance.

But I’m also leaving college with a newfound respect for community.

I’m glad that the Gospel of John ends the same way that the book of Genesis begins. It begins, and ends, in darkness.

The Gospel of John’s final chapter opens a few minutes before sunrise. For those who have gotten up early enough, you’d know it’s one of the darkest moments of the day. The moon has set. The stars have disappeared. The world itself seems like it’s holding its breath.

If the chapter was part of a movie, the camera would open, hovering over the surface of the deep, just above the waters of the Sea of Galilee. As it pans horizontally, it would pause as it faced east.

And then, right where the sky meets the sea, the camera could just make out the silhouette of a small fishing vessel. On it are some men and women, not unlike you and I, puzzling over what to make of the past few years.

You see, just there on that very same shoreline came a man who invited each of them on a journey. And for those that followed him, they got to see him do some amazing things. At times, they heard him say some incredibly challenging things, too. But above all, as these men and women got to know this strange man from Nazareth, he taught them day by day how to write a better story with their lives.

And yet, in the last couple of weeks, everything went sideways. The world turned upside down and these men and women found themselves running for the hills in their friend’s moment of greatest need. They found themselves returning to writing the stories that the world told them made the most sense – basing their value and belonging on what they did or what they knew.

And for many of these men and women, what they did and what they knew had to do a lot with fish. And so, they returned to their old way of living.

Eventually, they decide to call it a night and draw in near the shore. As the boats get closer, though, one of the men leans out over the bow and squints. He points. Far off, there, on the shore, is a man. At first, nobody knows who he is. Neither would you in the same type of lighting. But as the boats draw closer, the look on his face changes. He’s puzzled, not sure whether to be overjoyed or ashamed.

As the light of the rising sun reflects off the water, it lights up his face so you can see who it is who’s doing the pointing. It’s Peter – Jesus’ right-hand man. So too, can the men and women see who is waiting for them on the shore – the same man that they left in his moment of greatest need.

But instead of reacting in a way that would make sense in a story that the world told the men and women they should tell, Jesus does something completely different. He doesn’t judge them based on how well or poorly they did. But he doesn’t laugh at the fact that they don’t know the answers to all their questions, either.

But instead of showing his power by saying “Let there be light” and throwing another star into the sky, Jesus turns to his friends who still don’t know how to react and bids them join him at the small charcoal fire he had started, one large enough to cook breakfast for his friends.

And it is over food that Jesus calls Peter, who still can’t look his friend in the eyes just quite yet, and recommissions him for the work to which he was called.

The notion of stepping out into the unknown is still a frightening thing. I have more questions than I believe I have answers. I wonder if my cardboard sword is enough to take down the dragons I face. I’m afraid to make mistakes.

But I take solace in the fact that when Jesus made the church, he made it out of humans. Humans like Peter, like Thomas, like Matthew, like Joanna, like Mary, like Martha. Humans that have in them the same amount of intelligence and stupidity, of humility and pride, of malleability and stubbornness that each of us is made of. That you’re made of. That I’m made of. They struggled with getting Jesus’ message as much as we do today.

And yet, Jesus continues to work with them. He reminds them that there’s a better story to tell. And it is the same story that allows us to do as the disciples did – to step into the dark, into the unknown, as sheep among wolves, as a bunch of eight-year-olds in trenchcoats, advancing the Kingdom in their own little ways.

The story that they learned to tell was one that said that community and belonging and meaning was not based on how much they knew, or how much they did, but on who they found themselves in relationships with.

Their stories tell me that regardless of where I end up, I can still tell a better story. And I suppose that in this, I can find some rest.

That is if I can get this paper in first.

Fishbowl

October 23, 2017March 25, 2018 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

There’s this room that looks out onto one of my university’s largest art galleries on campus. Some students refer to it as the Fishbowl. Though arguably a strange name for a classroom, a quick once-over of the place suggests to those curious a reason why such is the case.

The chamber, reminiscent of a study, is adorned with a small selection of furniture as well as the odd plastic plant. At its center rests two coffee tables. These are, in turn, surrounded by a handful of slightly worn armchairs and loveseats, suggesting that the place is often used as a rendezvous for small groups needing to discuss one thing or the other. The space itself is a tired triangular prism, whose longest side sags outward slightly in a curved glass wall. Should anyone walk on by, it would seem as though the university had decided to install a life size diorama of an early 21^st century college student’s room.

The Fishbowl earned its name in part because of its ability to mute any sound within or without, depending on where one would stand. Looking in, it is near impossible to hear what those inside are discussing. Looking out, witnessing crowds of people pass on by in silence lends itself to an experience similar to that of watching fish in an aquarium. All either perspective can do is pay attention to the expressions and body language of those on the other side at that current moment.

On more than one occasion, I have found myself being among those featured few in the Fishbowl. The room itself has developed some sentimental value for me since the first time I found myself in it. Some of the most meaningful and profound classes I’ve had at my university have been in there. And now, every so often, a group of students will shuffle in to sit down for an hour or so to talk about life. At the beginning of the year, I wouldn’t have considered myself close with any of them. But now, I cannot imagine my senior year apart from them.

Some nights, we tell stories from our childhoods. Other times, we might talk about work. On occasion, we might try to plan the future. The common thread through all of these times is that on any given night, as the conversation wound down, if one were to pass by the Fishbowl, they would be able to see that it would be a rare sight to see a dry eye in the place.

During one of the most recent of those small gatherings, one of my friends confessed her apprehension of the road ahead. “I just don’t know what I want to do after college. I’ve spent all my life in school. What else can I do?”

The room was still. Her words resonated with each of us. We sat in the quiet, processing them each in our own ways. A moment of silence passed. She continued, a tear running down her cheek. “I just feel like two eight-year-olds wearing a trench coat all the time now. I thought I would know better.”

“I… I just don’t want to go.”

“None of us do.”

—

The summer before my senior year, I found myself sitting on top of a building on Gordon College’s campus. I had found myself attending the Compass RMI college program that was designed to help students explore whether vocational ministry was something to which they might be drawn. After spending twenty nine days with people I had not known before, I found myself on that rooftop the night before heading home having mixed feelings.

As I looked up at the sky, picking out the familiar constellations I had grown up with since I could remember, thoughts of home excited, saddened, and frightened me all at once. I was excited to head back to people I knew and loved. I was excited to share what had happened over the course of the last month. I was excited to sleep in my own bed again. And yet, I was saddened by having to leave this time and place that had become so meaningful and formative for a young Christian kid wondering if the pastoral call was on him. Most especially, I was frightened that I would never see the incredible people that I gotten to know over the span of Compass ever again.

I heard a grunt behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. One of my friends by the name of Sterling was trying to hoist himself up onto the roof. From my vantage point, I could just see the top half of his face peer over the edge of the roof between his hands. For some reason, even though I couldn’t see it, I could sense his slight half-smile was below the edge of the roof.

“Hey bud,” he said, in his slight Tennessean drawl, “How’s it going?”

Seeing that I made motions to help him up, he quipped, “Oh, don’t mind me.”

Within a few seconds, he had pulled himself on top of the roof. As he did, the wind carried sounds of laughter and shouts of joy up to us. I must have had a look of panic, since Sterling let out a small chuckle. You see, nobody was supposed to be on the roof. And yet, here we both were. And yet, no accusation of guilt came. The commotion was focused on something else entirely. We looked at each other, then at the field beneath us. Below, many of the other Compass attendees were running haphazard through some sprinklers.

Sterling took a moment to exhale. Walking to the edge of the roof to join me, he swung his legs over the edge and propped himself up on his arms as he leaned back. We sat there watching the others run about beneath us. Neither of us spoke for a while.

Eventually, the sprinklers shut off. With it, the others began to move back toward their respective living spaces. As the first of the group reached the living quarters, Sterling sighed and clapped his hands.

“Well, I guess that’s it for us. It’s been a good run, I think.”

I frowned. “I guess. Compass was a great time. It still is. I just don’t want to go, though.”

Sterling raised his eyebrow. “Why not?”

“We might never see each other again. We might not see anyone else again.”

Sterling turned back toward the field. Closing his eyes, he reclined, cradling his head in his hands.

“I don’t think that matters at the end of the day,” he replied.

Sterling’s seeming lack of concern struck a nerve in me. My face and chest felt hot.

“Why not?!” I demanded.

He opened one eye and looked over sideways at me. He was silent for a moment as he thought, his jaw moving slightly as though he chewed through the words he wanted to use. Then, slowly, he glanced back up toward the sky and spoke.

“Life is not ever going to be as smooth and unchallenged as it was here, at Compass. It won’t be as refined as we hope it will be. But, then again, that’s life. Maybe that is smooth and refined – living a dirty life but treating it like the greatest blessing.”

He paused for a moment, continuing to chew on his thoughts before continuing. “Because – because, it’s not about us. It’s about what we’re doing and who we are with. We might not want to leave Compass. We might not want to go somewhere else and stay here. But then, what was the point of this? What was the point of any of this?”

—

I think that Dietrich Bonhoeffer once made the observation somewhere that “being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than courageously and actively doing God’s will.” The role of the Christian is not so much living in isolation from the rest of the world and expecting that the world will find its way to one’s holy huddle. Instead, it is a role in which a person is sent into the world as a representative on behalf of Christ. The Christian instead is saved by grace through faith and is then called to live as a life-long disciple in response. He concludes elsewhere that “Only the believing obey, only the obedient believe.” Practically speaking, the Christian is meant to constantly be forging ahead, leaving what is familiar behind in some respects for whatever God desires.

I found myself flipping through an old leather-bound journal I had kept over the course of Compass a few days after the meeting up with my friends in the Fishbowl when I came across a quote someone had scrawled on the inside of the front cover.

It read:

You cannot stay on the summit forever. You have to come down eventually. So why bother climbing up in the first place? Just this: what’s above can see what’s below. What’s below does not know what is above. One climbs. One sees. One descends. One sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

Just beneath it was another handwritten note:

If not us, then who has God called for such a time as this? Here I am, God, send me.

The trouble with being sent somewhere is that one must first say goodbye to the familiar creature comforts of the former stage of life. And, admittedly, it can be hard for many people. In any circumstance that a person must end a chapter of their life, it is normal for a person to grieve the passing of what once was.

We grieve and mourn when what once was had been good and beautiful and meaningful in their own ways to us. I think it’s why I feel so encouraged by Nicholas Wolterstorff’s reflection on God’s own sorrow that helps me embrace these moments when he states “It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor.” In other words, God’s sorrow is over the broken, fallen state of the world. His goodness and desire that we might all experience his goodness more fully causes him that sorrow. We do not know how far we have fallen, but to see his face would be to know it and die from our own grief over what might have been paradise, lost. And yet, because of that sorrow being so rooted in his desire for others to experience what might have been and what can be, it has become his splendor.

And, come to think of it, I believe that those moments we share in the Fishbowl are moments where we allow ourselves to go through some of the stages of grief and sorrow. There is something about grief and mourning the passing of one stage of life to the next that reminds us that the last leg of the journey was a pretty good one.

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion,” wrote the Psalmist. We weep when we remember those good moments, places, peoples, and times that we are no longer with because our stories have taken us far from home. And yet, in a way, our tears communicate the goodness of what might be again. Perhaps if God’s sorrow is his splendor, ours might contribute as well.

A marriage and family therapist I’ve gotten to know well once remarked that even though counselors are trained to help others through the five stages of grief, it has been her experience to occasionally witness a sixth. After reaching a moment of acceptance, a person might, for one reason or another, turn toward gratitude even during loss.

“Perhaps,” she observed, “this is another way of dying to self – the letting go of the anger, fear, and frustration to appreciate the beauty amid the pain.”

The thing is about grief is the fact that we cannot know exactly how another person feels. Each and every case is unique depending on the circumstances leading up to it in the first place. It’s like walking by a room that you can’t hear inside of or watching a group of people far away. You can see some of what’s going on, but most of the processing is done internally.

As we sat there in the Fishbowl, all eight of us, I watched as tears made their way down my friends’ faces.

“I… I just don’t want to go,” she said.

“None of us do,” I replied. “But you know, with all the time we’ve spent talking about life and faith and other people, I can’t imagine you not in ministry of some form.”

I glanced around the room, making eye contact with every one of those gathered there before leaning back in my chair, a tear or two escaping my eye.

“A friend once told me that life isn’t always going to be refined and polished. We’re going to feel like two eight-year-olds in trench coats half the time. But that’s life I guess. And besides, we’ve spent some time on this mountain of ours, who else might go but you for such a time as this?”

We climb mountains to see. And then we must carry that knowledge down below to the valleys. And in the process, we might miss the summit. We will miss our friends. We long for home once more. But I think that the process of going, carrying our own bits of grief and sorrow with us reminds us of the goodness of what had happened there. And in a way, I think those bits of pain draw us closer together, too.

At one point, the Apostle Paul writes:

Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:

Though he was in the form of God,
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.
But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Therefore, God highly honored him
and gave him a name above all names,
so that at the name of Jesus everyone
in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might bow
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

I am grateful for a God who emptied himself and took on the form of a human because of his grief. And I am thankful for a God whose sorrow is his splendor, who was willing to be relegated to a cross and die for the sake of humankind. Because, I think, I hope that a God whose grief compels him to suffer for his Creation is one whose goodness is too much for anyone to imagine.

And that is something to rest in, even in our valleys.

Thanks be to God.

Butterfly Wing Flutters

October 16, 2017October 16, 2017 T. M. Loewen-Elofson2 Comments

I found myself sitting across from a friend of mine late one Thursday night. We had been going about our own business as usual when we ran into one another in the middle of the college coffee shop. Seeing that she had to read for class, and I needed to do some research for a paper, we decided to keep one another company and share a table.

After spending a half hour intently focused on our work, my friend looked up from hers and tapped the top of my book with her pen. I glanced up and rubbed my eyes.

“What’s up?” I asked, closing my book and setting it down beside me.

“Could I ask you a question?”

“Sure! What of?”

My friend took a deep breath and held it, weighing whether asking me would be productive. Then, having made up her mind, she leaned forward, shut her laptop, and whispered, “It’s about relationship advice.”

I raised my eyebrow. “Oh? Well, I’m not the most well-seasoned individual when it comes to that topic, but I can give it the old college try!”

She laughed and proceeded to tell me about this one guy that she met at college and had gotten to know rather well over the past few years. As she talked about him, I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed to get more animated. Her face brightened. She couldn’t help but smile as she remembered.

After a few minutes, she fell silent and leaned back in her chair. I waited for a moment to see if she was going to ask me anything. Nothing.

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table between us. “So,” I ventured, “it seems as though you’ve made up your mind about him. What would you need my advice on?”

“Well,” she started, “the thing is, even though I have feelings for him, I will be studying away next semester and I don’t know if he’ll be around after that.”

She paused. “I just don’t know if I should let him know that I have feelings for him and ask if he did for me as well. I don’t want to ask because if he didn’t I think that would make the few remaining weeks awkward. And I think that a certainty of a few weeks as good friends is pretty good.”

“But you also want to see whether he has feelings for you as well because pursuing a relationship would be more fulfilling.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but if it doesn’t work out, I fear that he’ll withdraw. I don’t want to lose him. I just want him in my life, even if these feelings I have go unaddressed. You know?”

I chuckled.

“More than you would expect.” I leaned back from the table and folded my arms. “I can give you two pieces of advice. But the thing is, they’re both antithetical to one another, so you have to choose one or the other. Both have perks. Both have risks. But I have lived or am living both. So, no matter which you choose, I get it.”

“Who knows,” I said, “Perhaps you’ll find a third way?”

—

There are some stories that are told. And then, I think, there are the stories we are meant to live.

For much of my college career, even though my mantra has been Be Here Now, I believe that my actions have told another story upon further reflection.

A story I used to tell myself was that the person that looked back at me in the mirror didn’t matter. Who a person happened to be didn’t matter. It was whether they could produce and be a constructive member of a team that meant something at the end of the day. Where I got that story into my head, I don’t know. Grade school? An unchecked case of theology gone sour? Something from childhood? In any case, I had internalized the narrative that in any account, I should not – I could not – be a burden on others.

Such thinking paralyzed me when it came to community. What if something I did caused another person to stumble or messed up their plans? What if my choices interrupted someone from following the call of God on their life?

But as I spent time living with and among and for others, that story began to get chipped away. Just today, my pastor mentioned that an overarching theme of many Old Testament stories is of a God who prefers to do life with friends and is influenced by them. “If God’s going to Houston,” he remarked, “then, by all means, he’s going to Houston. That’s sovereignty. But the stories of Moses and Abraham and the people of God remind us that if we ask him, he wouldn’t mind passing through Albuquerque.”

God, the Old Testament seems to indicate, does not prefer passive passengers on his road trips. He’ll put up with us, but the trip can get awkward if there’s no conversation the entire way. Plus, if we need a pit stop along the way, we might need to let him know before it’s too late. He wants to engage us in conversation when he’s about to move. There are some stories in which we are meant to be simply observers, the audience, the ones who listen and watch and try to gain something from a bystander perspective. But eventually, the story ends, the cast takes a bow, the curtain falls, and we are left trying to figure out what is next. But our stories are the ones in which we are the actors and must live into them.

Sometimes, oftentimes, we don’t have a single specific narrative we’re supposed to follow. To act responsibly in the time we’ve been given is one thing. To worry about every choice we make might be the butterfly wing flutter to set off a class 5 hurricane elsewhere is another thing entirely.

The funny thing is the fact that whenever we enter into community and engage others, we become burdens and burdened with those we are with. But that’s not a negative thing. Humans are inherently relational. We limit and define ourselves when we come into relationship with the other. I am not you. You are not me. But we find ourselves walking with one another for a time. By ourselves, in a vacuum, we would have no obligations or duties to others. The trade-off is that we have

By ourselves, in a vacuum, we would have no obligations or duties to others. The trade-off is that we have little, if any, story either. We lose out on meaning by ourselves. We must trade some of our freedoms to be with and for others. We must give some of them up to abide by our storylines too. A mentor of mine once stated that his grandmother advised him to choose his rut carefully because he’s going to be in it for a long time. We give up in committing to one rut, one way of living, one group of people, to live any differently for a time. But that rut gets you somewhere eventually. The story unfolds along that journey. When we relate to others, we allow them to write that story alongside us, too.

I’m reminded of a scene from a play that my university’s theater program is performing. Within the play Into the Woods, the protagonists find themselves confronted by a giantess out for revenge against Jack and demands that they hand over the boy as a sacrifice. In a bid for time, the protagonists sacrifice the narrator – the one who frames their story – as a replacement. He is consequently killed by the giantess soon thereafter. Later, as the characters attempt to process the ramifications of what they’ve done, they conclude that in absence of a previously established guiding narrative, they must now write their own. In a similar manner, I don’t think many of us have that sense of a specific narrative set out before us as much as a general one.

And for once, I think, that’s exciting.

Practically speaking, it means we needn’t worry about those butterfly wing flutter decisions. We have the space, we have the grace to make our own stories, that eventually, hopefully, can glorify God now and forevermore.

For me, it means being free to improvise and take life step by step. It means keeping one eye on the horizon but never fearing it. It means I can Be Here Now – I can write a new story instead of waiting on the sidelines, even though the sidelines seem more certain and secure.

You see, I’ve found someone that I think is helping me write a better story. When she laughs, she brightens my day. When she talks about what she’s passionate about, her face lights up and it’s hard not to get caught up in her animation.

Sometimes, we stay up until the early morning hours, looking up at the stars. In those moments, sharing bits about who we are. We tell our stories. We share them because we know we are all just stories in the end. Where we came from. Who we are. Where we might end up. It’s all a part of a larger story each of us is writing.

The thing is, though, when she tells one of her stories, you can’t help but notice her knack for setting up the scene, the characters, the plot all at once, and in a moment, set them all into motion. It’s why she studies theater, I think. She studies how stories are lived out and lived into because there’s something about the arts which can communicate elements of what it means to be human. All those moments and decisions that may send us off onto the next adventure as well as those that don’t – all of it helps tell us who we are and who we might be.

And, I must confess, I am no exception to this knack of hers. I am grateful that she helped me stop thinking I was supposed to be a member of the audience and to begin living my own story, too.

It’s funny who you meet when you begin to be present and appreciate the people around you. Especially in coffee shops. Particularly over great books.

—

“So,” I said, leaning back from my friend in the college coffee shop, “what type of story do you think you’re experiencing right now, friend?”

She looked at me for a second with a spark in her eye.

“Which do you want to have?”

When she answered, it made all the difference. But that’s not my story to tell. She’ll have to tell you herself one day if she so chooses.

God only knows what type of hurricane that will bring.

The Revolutionary Act of Making Toast

October 5, 2017 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

BY T. M. Elofson & Nico Chera

I found myself lying awake late into the night a few weeks ago.

I glanced at my watch. The display read 12:36 AM. I groaned. I had to be up at six for work. And yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t settle down.

Across the room, I heard a sharp intake of breath as my roommate Nick rolled over.

“Bud,” I whispered, “You still up?”

After a moment, I heard him exhale slowly before responding.

“Yeah.”

“Something on your mind?” I asked.

“Yup,” I heard in the darkness, “Always.”

I rolled over to peer through the dark. I could make out that Nick had been looking in my direction from his bunk.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

After a moment, Nick began to unpack some of the thoughts that had simmered in his mind over the course of the last few days. He expressed frustrations, hopes, fears, and ambitions. He asked questions about life and made observations. Finally, he paused for a moment, as if he needed to scrape the back of his mind for the last of his concerns.

“You know, Tim,” he started, “I want to be a dad one day, but I know that no matter how good of a father I am, I’ll still fail in some way. I’ll give my kids insecurities or flaws no matter what I do, and I can’t avoid it. And, to be honest, that terrifies me. You know what I mean?”

“Sure. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try.”

“Yeah, but the responsibility is way too heavy; I mean, it’s shaping someone for the rest of their lives, Tim. A human being! Messing up on something so precious…”

The room was silent for a while.

“Eh,” Nick continued. “So, that’s what I’m thinking about. What about you?”

“You know,” I started, “I think I’m thinking about our toaster.”

We laughed.

“Those are the real questions that keep us up at night: The toaster ones.”

You see, we have a love-hate relationship with our apartment’s toaster. It sits perched on the counter, its black matte and chrome glory tarnished by specks of rust. Some days, it works perfectly. On others, like the days when we happen to be running out the door, it is a devoted disciple of Murphy’s Law. Half of the toast (or waffle) ends up undercooked. The other borders on singed.

We have our theories about why this occurs, but despite our best efforts, it always seems to malfunction at the most inconvenient moments.

Honestly, it seems to me that we’re often like my apartment’s toaster – designed to do something important, but having a quirky tendency to misfire. And when it happens, we burn a lot more than just toast.

—

This summer, the rising juniors of the Honors College at our university will read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – a story which follows three brothers as they wrestle with their father’s legacy. It’s become one of my (Tim’s) favorite reads over the course of my college career due to Dostoevsky’s skillful rendering of each of the brothers’ worldviews: The eldest son Dmitri is a sensualist who cares little for anything other than experience; Ivan, the second brother, an intellectual who cannot settle on a committed perspective other than cynicism; and Alyosha, a monk who seeks salvation.

I think the Brothers Karamazov has become one of my favorite pieces of literature because the three brothers can be used as stand ins for ways of living that we can fall into as people, that is, the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. I first realized this was the case when I read one of my peer’s papers trying to reconcile Dostoevsky with Plato’s notion of the tripartite soul.

And, while I disagree with Plato on some accounts, I think that humans do, in fact, have their identity rooted in a triune balance of the circles I previously mentioned.

These three circles emphasize that, within the human experience, there are realms in which certain items hold their being. A rock, for example, is fully physical. It has no spiritual or mental component. Likewise, a mathematical concept is based in the intellectual realm.

Finally, the last circle is that of the spiritual. This one is admittedly difficult to describe, and I suppose it is so for several possibilities. However, the reason I stick by is because, as Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling states, the only thing you can say about faith is that, once you have it, you can’t really communicate it to others. Faith is concerned with a divine authority speaking into the lives of a community that may not abide by the same rules as the rest of the community outside of the faith. An example of this is someone trying to empirically prove that a guy rose from the dead and was also simultaneously divine and human. Outside the context of faith, it doesn’t communicate well. You might get a couple confused looks and raised eyebrows, though. I suppose that the closest we can come to talking about the spiritual circle is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer might describe as the sanctorum communio, the church which transcends time and space, i.e., the cloud of witnesses we hear about in Hebrews.

As humans, I believe that we are made to have our identity balanced between the three circles. When we overemphasize one or more sides, we become imbalanced and can fall into despair. According to Kierkegaard in another of his works, The Sickness unto Death, the human person is a project of becoming that is constantly trying to relate the elements of themselves that are finite and infinite. However, this task is impossible to do unless there is some form of divine agency which brings both together. This is because only the divine can reach the infinite without stretching itself too thin, neglecting the self that the divine had set out for the person with an equal footing in both dimensions.

For those who didn’t follow what I said, it boils down to the fact that in this respect, we’re kind of like the toaster that sits smugly in the kitchen. We overcook one side and undercook the others by ourselves. We get unbalanced because we spread ourselves too thin trying to be something we’re not. But, without a principle or narrative by which to develop, we have no way to figure out where that balance is or rein ourselves in to it should we strike upon it randomly.

Despair, then, is knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that we cannot generate meaning for ourselves ex nihilo – that is, in the void where a larger superstructure should, but being unable to move beyond it.

The reason why I love the Brothers Karamazov is tied to this fact, insofar that each of the characters start off as imbalanced and attempt to move towards or away from a more integrated understanding of themselves.

For those who choose to become more integrated, like Alyosha, their identity is rooted in the world around them while also mindful and guided by a metanarrative. But for those who choose otherwise, they find themselves increasingly disjointed, as seen by Ivan’s state at the end of the book being unable to land on a worldview more in line with that of Smerdyakov or that of Alyosha. We cannot exclusively ground ourselves in any one of the circles, but must move towards integration of the three through some means.

—

Perhaps because of that unresolved late-night talk about parenting and toasters, Tim and I (Nick) have since had a lot of conversations about who we are as people and what we should strive for. We’ve noticed that we tend to break our experiences down into three broad categories: physical, mental, and spiritual. At first, we treated those categories as if they were mutually exclusive, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the lines between them are really quite blurry. Then on top of that, we realized that we also had our own favorite categories and often judged the others through the lens of our choice.

For example, I have a heavy mental focus, so it’s easy for me to downplay the importance of taking care of my body. After all, the body is messy and “impure,” and it often gets in the way of rationality. My default tendency is also to dismiss people’s spiritual experiences as the result of emotional manipulation, confirmation bias, and/or the desire to see something that isn’t there. My default is to think the spiritual is an illusion. It has to be, my mind says, or else there are things which won’t fit into the categories and frameworks that the mental provides. I devalue the physical as well as the spiritual because they threaten my favorite way of understanding how the world works.

For other people whose focus is primarily spiritual, the realm of the physical is often thought of as a transient distraction, while the realm of the mental can be downright threatening. From my perspective, it often feels like spiritual people are afraid of asking hard questions because they are afraid that a meaningful answer may emerge which threatens their way of knowing the world. Perhaps spiritual people are sometimes afraid that the mental will boil down the unknowable and miraculous into something mundane. On the other hand, the physical, with its comforts and lusts and boundaries, is thought of as fleeting and therefore unimportant. Oftentimes spiritual people care a lot more about being ready for the world to come than about fixing the world’s problems here and now — it’s easy to use the spiritual reality as an escape from how awful the physical one can be.

Finally, overly physical people tend to avoid the spiritual and the mental both. Their default is to think that the most important thing is what we can see in front of us. Sometimes physical people think of the mental realm as unimportant because in its contemplation, it creates barriers to action–these kinds of people believe we need to think less and do more. Similarly, the spiritual can also be viewed as a distraction, except the other way around. Some pie-in-the-sky promise or ‘higher calling’ shouldn’t get in the way of what we need to do here and now. Physical people might also try to avoid the mental or spiritual by distracting themselves with more extreme pleasures or shinier possessions.

In reality, our experiences are usually some kind of combination of these categories, and thinking about them or experiencing them only in one of those ways prevents us from understanding more fully and being more whole as people. If you’re like me, some of these phrases I just used may even have struck you as odd. Calling a group of people ‘mental people’ kinda makes it sound like they’re insane, calling them ‘physical people’ makes it sound like they’re violent or sensual, and calling them ‘spiritual people’ makes them sound like monks or nuns or gurus.

It’s almost like we intuitively know that restricting ourselves like that hurts us, and yet we do it anyways. For however many reasons, we choose to prevent ourselves from becoming balanced. The reality is that we are physical, mental, and spiritual beings, and we absolutely need to respect and understand all three parts of ourselves if we want to be healthy. If we don’t, we risk becoming malfunctioning toasters.

—

The first step in fixing any problem is realizing that there is one. And if we’re being honest, we could all be more balanced people. The thing that’s hard for me (Nick) is the fact that acknowledging a problem doesn’t fix it. No matter what I do, I will, for the rest of my life, make mistakes that have damaging consequences for myself and others. Somehow it feels inevitable. Despite my gifts and talents, I often feel like the worst of toasters.

In the end, I (Tim) think it all comes back to toast. Well, bread and wine actually. Or body and blood. By itself, bread is just bread, and we humans are, in and of ourselves, flawed beings. But something happens to that bread, whether one believes it to be in the imagination or reality, when it becomes something more in context of a community oriented toward God, where grace can be encountered, even though it may seem absurd. And something happens in people, too, when grace can be shown, calling us toward something holier, even in spite of ourselves.

There’s a passage in Galatians 2 that is usually translated as “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Interestingly enough, it can also be translated as “I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

It’s so easy to compartmentalize ourselves and our Christianity into one of those sectors, sometimes leaving us wondering how we could possibly be the people that God wants us to become. There’s part of me that thinks that, as Kierkegaard waves from the sidelines, the reason why is because we aren’t seeing correctly. Becoming ourselves may be the human project, but we would be sorely mistaken to think that we are the architects of that project–it begins and ends with God.

While we are most ourselves when we land in a place shared by all three of these circles, this isn’t to say that when we are decentered the actions we do are irredeemable. Even when the toast burns, you can scrape off most of the char. That is to say, yes, we make decisions and slip up from time to time. We have our virtues and our vices alike. And yet, there’s the absurd reality that despite our sin, we seem to come out all the more polished in the end. After all, Christ carries us always, even when we break down.

He’s why we need toast for more than just food in a physical sense. Frederick Buechner once wrote that eucharist/communion is “…a game we play because he said to play it.” He concludes, saying, “Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. If it seems like a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.”

When we are invited to take all three circles as they are, and not as we should like them, it won’t always seem to make the most sense. Abraham offered up his son as a sacrifice with full trust in the strength of the absurd, expecting that somehow he would have Isaac restored to him; he believed this despite the fact that it flew in the face of reason, experience, and basic common sense.

And while we are not called to the same actions, it stands to reason and experience that no matter how burnt or undercooked the toast may be, there is always space for redemption.

I think the same can be said for us, as well.

Even at 12:36 in the morning.

—

Nico Chera is a rising senior attending Azusa Pacific University majoring in Computer Science and the Humanities within the Honors College. He enjoys toast – lightly buttered.

Within Those Amber Moments

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

Every so often, I find myself walking through some small group material curriculum with one group of friends or another on occasion. We would gather somewhere either on campus or nearby, shooting the breeze as we waited for everyone to drop in, collect themselves and their thoughts, and ready themselves for whatever we decided to discuss for the evening.

On one of those nights, I remember I was meeting with a group of students who had volunteered to be mentors to some incoming first-year students to the university. We had elected to gather at the Starbucks just down the street from where many of us lived. As the mentors trickled in and slid in line to place their orders, I paused for a moment to take a quick look around.

The glass windows of the coffee shop caught the light of the setting sun, casting a large swath of the place in a golden hue. Outside, where we had placed all of our books and bags, a gentle breeze swept in, turning a page or two in the notebook I had set upon a table a moment or two earlier. There was a faint whirring that grew in volume. My laptop, which I had opened before walking inside, had been taking its time starting up. As it did, it shed a blue glow upon the tabletop before it.

And then, my name. I heard my name somewhere being called. I looked back to where I was, back to the counter where the barista had just placed my order – a cold brew by itself. Nothing added.

I made my way to our table. The others, at this time, had already gotten their drinks and had set about touching base with their friends. As I sat there, sipping my cold brew with my eyes closed, I listened as some talked about this event or that class. It was as if I wasn’t even there for a moment.

—

When I came to Azusa Pacific University as a freshman, I distinctly remember unpacking all of my gear on the first day in the middle of the standard chaos of Orientation Weekend before spending three hours alone in my room, exhausted from all of the socializing that went on outside my door and around campus. I guess it was an apt response at the time to the community-building process, since I spent most of my first year only half-heartedly making connections. The reason, you see, was because in those early weeks of college, I used to ask myself a question that even I didn’t have the words for. It never fully formed on my lips, but had haunted me in the form of a specter since my days in high school. It was a question about the nature and value of community. It explored its impact and benefit. It wondered whether community was simply a thing we do to distract ourselves from the bigger problems.

I found myself finally putting the question to words in a quiet moment I shared with a mentor of mine late one evening.

“What if… what if…” I started, unsure if whether the next words out of my mouth was going to shock or horrify the man sitting across from me, “What if what we’re doing here is just a joke? Like, what is the point of relationships if in three years I’ll be packing my bags and will probably never see you again. What if these – these friendships that we seek, these relationships we crave – are just a waste of time in the grand scheme of things?”

As I look back on that brief snapshot of a memory, I can say that I am grateful that my mentor didn’t respond in the way that I feared. He didn’t dismiss my question as pointless. He didn’t admonish me for having such thoughts. He also didn’t simply provide some type of cop-out answer that many of us would tend to offer as a Band-Aid to place on an infected gash.

He just sat there in silence as I simmered in frustration and anger. As the minutes ticked by, the only motion that he made was to take an occasional sip from his tea. He could very well have excused himself from my place of darkness and pain, from my doubt and cynicism. And he could have tried to say something to correct my thinking. And yet, I think that if he had, it would have only denied the depth of the issue in the first place. We tend to do that with all sorts of our problems – sweep them under the rug and pretend they don’t exist. And yet, when we put off those problems, be they obstacles or questions or doubts, they tend to fester there in the dark.

In a way, though, I believe my mentor was answering my question in his actions, or rather, lack thereof. I was in a crisis about what community was and what role it was to play in my own life. And instead of simply seeing the question as another thing to answer for the sake of checking it off his list, he sat there for an entire hour, listening.

I used to buy into the notion that the reason why people get together in groups is for the sheer utility of it – that it was useful for some end in mind. Aristotle mentions it’s utility, pleasure, or virtue. Hobbes basically suggests it’s to keep another group of outsiders from killing us. In a similar manner, I bought into community by weighing my investment of time and energy against the profit I would receive further down the line. Community, for me, was only there for what I could receive from it. But, as I moved from high school onto college, flying more than six hours to a place I would learn to call home, I began to realize that what I invested here may not pay off in a long game, that my investment would potentially vanish in its entirety upon graduation.

My mentor knew this, probably more than I would ever know. But instead of receiving some satisfaction by providing an easy answer, he sat in the tension with me. And in that space, his willingness to simply give his presence and his time asked that frustrated freshman who sat before him whether by doing this, he was receiving anything.

Community wasn’t primarily defined for my mentor as what he could receive from it, but what he could give.

One of my favorite professors once mentioned that the point of any education a person receives is to affect how we live at our core level. If we are not changed or transformed in some way, we have just wasted our time. When I look back on that evening with my mentor, I think that my professor’s insight could not have been better illustrated than by that moment.

Lying on the table between the two of us, its pages dog-eared and marked up by pen, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. At one point, Bonhoeffer points out that the key to community was the mindset that it is not what one can get from the group that will matter, but what each person can bring to give away instead. It was about how each person could be Christ to one another, not demanding that others be Christ to us.

And yet, even though the words lay only two feet from my head, it was the eighteen inches from my head to my heart which proved to be the most difficult terrain to cross. Even though I knew what Bonhoeffer had to say about community in his book in my freshman year, I never let it begin to affect me until the start of my senior year.

When a half dozen of my friends and I gathered at my professor’s house around his fire pit, we broke bread and shared soup. One of us, Meredith, remarked, “I find it incredible that we get to read Bonhoeffer and talk about his thoughts on community, because… Well, because I think we’ve been living out an experiment of whether what Bonhoeffer was suggesting in his works really is what true and meaningful community is. We’ve been trying to live the question out and wrestle with it ever since we set our bags down in Engstrom.”

The rest of us were silent as we reflected on her observation. She continued by asking simply, “Well, how have we developed since freshman year? How can we live out Bonhoeffer’s message even now as this community?”

We sat there for a moment as we stewed over her challenge. It was a while before anyone else spoke that night.

—

Eventually, the other voices in the Starbucks began to peter out. I shook my cup. Empty. Well, I thought, All things must come to an end sometime.

Glancing upwards, I saw that the others were waiting for me to say something. I flicked the trackpad of my laptop, muttering to myself about what we were supposed to go over that evening again. Eventually, my browser helped me locate the appropriate file. It opened. Admittedly, even though I was excited to go over the material with my friends, I felt as though it might, in some way, be more productive to just remain in that amber time with those others.

I decided that it would be best to launch into the curriculum after all – it was the reason why I dragged everyone out for the evening in the first place. I remember noting how fitting it was that the material we happened to cover was on some element of community which leaders can foster in the people of which they are a part.

As the conversation continued, there came a point where one of the mentors, upon hearing all of the questions that I had been asking of them, turned and asked, “Well, what about you?”

In that moment, it was as if my brain decided to pull the carpet out from under my tongue. For a second there, I knew what I wanted to say, but in the next, what came out of my mouth was a jumbled, disorganized mess. I tried to backtrack, but what I had to say was noticeably absent from my mind.

And suddenly, I laughed. I- laughed because of my momentary clumsiness and because in this space, I knew that I could feel free to make mistakes. The others joined in after a brief second, perhaps out of the awkwardness of the mangled sound or out of sympathy. But I would bet that it was because in that space, there was a grace there that I have learned to expect.

Perhaps I might not ever see any of these young men and women after I graduate, but I don’t think that invalidates these moments. Instead, it makes them all the more precious, because it reminds us that community is a means of grace through which God can be most present. Where the Christ in me can rise to meet the Christ in you. Where instead of looking only to receive, we can look instead to give. Perhaps that’s what makes these amber moments what they are – they remind us of something close to home.

Ring Around A Story

July 12, 2017July 12, 2017 T. M. Loewen-Elofson1 Comment

I found myself sitting in a Chick-fil-A with some friends of mine the other night. We were feeling in the mood for a quick bite after small group one evening and we knew that we were a short drive away.

Inside the establishment, the five of us sat around a set of two tables in the center of the restaurant. The crowds that normally thronged the place had long since gone their own separate ways. The only sound apart from the soft instrumental music was the gentle sweep of a broom far across the room. Somewhere, off in the distance, I heard my friends talking.

I watched as the last of the rush hour traffic slowly dissipated, a lone car winding its way past in the night. Across the road, my university campus stood quietly, tucked behind bushes and trees as if it were listening for something.

I paused to scratch a note on a napkin. Looking up, I saw that one of my friends was looking intently at my hand.

“Oh,” I said, “don’t mind me, I’m just writing down something for later.”

She didn’t seem to care.

“What do those rings mean?” she asked.

I smiled.

“Now, that is a bit of a story,” I said. “Do you have a moment?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Why do you think we’re here?”

“Well,” I started, “it might take a while. I wrote it down somewhere. D’ya mind?”

She shook her head.

“Here goes.”

—

Frederick Buechner once wrote that “it is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preacher’s sermons that are the ones that we hear most powerfully.” The same can be said for stories, I think. In some strange way, we have discovered means by which to communicate as a species, where we can take one intensely personal concept, ascribe to it a sound, and send it across the void to a receiver who can take that strange, chaotic, random, arbitrary, wonderful noise and translate it into the idea once again, more or less. But in doing so, we imbue the noise with our own experience.

My notion of love is similar, but not exact, to the person that sits across from me. Such an abstract concept must have some concretion to it, and we fill in the gaps with our memories that we affiliate with the notion of love. And depending on how we were impacted and informed through these experiences, our notions of love may be related, but not exactly the same. Perspective matters.

—

I finished the story right as a staff member had come by to inform us that the restaurant was closing for the night. We thanked her and stepped out into the warm evening.

“So, what did you think?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “You told me a story about the ring, but you never came out with what the ring means exactly.”

I smirked. “Does it matter?”

Her inquiring look turned to that of annoyance.

“Well, yeah, it does,” she protested. “There has got to be a single meaning behind the ring.”

She paused for a moment. “Right?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “What if you read the story and I wasn’t here? How would you know if what you believed the ring to be about was right?”

My friend was silent, deep in thought. “Well, that wouldn’t matter, because you’re here now.”

“Aw, come on,” I laughed. “That’s cheating.”

We all stopped outside my apartment complex. Here and there, one could see streetlights with their warm glow dot the area here and there. Occasionally, a tree would obscure the streetlights for a moment, until a breeze pushed their branches out of the way for a moment. In the distance, someone was shooting off leftover fireworks from their fourth of July celebrations.

After looking around for a brief moment, I turned to leave but paused, a playful smile creeping across my face.

“Here’s your last chance!” I said. “Take another guess.”

“Well,” she pondered, “You must have had some intended meaning when you wrote the story.”

I nodded as she continued. “But at the exact same time, I don’t know what you were thinking exactly at that moment. Plus, I only know my own experience.”

Her eyes lit up. “Are- are you saying that the meaning is flexible? That there’s a certain frame around which meaning is determined? Is there no right or wrong answer?”

“Maybe,” I replied, “but that would make the purpose of storytelling pointless. Something needs to serve as an anchor. I think the author only generates half of the meaning, and the other is your own experience.”

I paused at the edge of the sidewalk. “That’s why stories are so powerful. They adapt. Tolle lege.”

—

I think the reason why we get so caught up in trying to determine one simple meaning from a story down is because we like the idea of control. We appreciate that there should only be one author and the characters simply support the plot. And yet the biblical scholar Walter Wink once observed that objectivism is possible, but not in the sense which modernity holds – that all bias can be removed and one absolute truth can be reached. However, objectivity is possible through acknowledging the biases of the authors to the best of our ability and moving through it.

I used to think that I was the only author to my story, but now I know that we all play a role in writing each scene, and each narrator has a different take on the unfolding events. Hence, every author only makes half of the meaning. The task of interpretation is left up to the recipient.

The beauty of post-modernity and storytelling is the fact that one’s perspective isn’t wrong, but it’s also not complete either. We need to continue to make room to hear others’ takes so we can see a fuller perspective.

Both ask us, in other words, to be willing to sit down over a meal with another person. By doing so, we can evaluate how each perspective is valid, rather than falling into the binary of absolute right and absolute wrong.

Oftentimes, I’d wager, the reason why a person holds a position is because it has worked for them to some capacity. Now, the task is uncovering why, how, and to what extent each position works.

And that requires a lot of listening.

—

I had reached the door to my apartment and was turning the key when my friend cleared her throat. I glanced up.

“Do you ever think you’ll write a story about us, then?” my friend asked.

“Perhaps,” I concluded, “but that’s a story still being written. And God knows what that means…”

My friends rolled their eyes and began to walk away.

Far off, their car started up and drove off into the night. It was almost quiet again. But as I listened, I heard that somewhere, someone was playing jazz.

Personal Over Professional

June 14, 2017June 15, 2017 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

I found myself sitting in my supervisor’s office recently. The reason why I found myself sitting in a chair in the middle of the room was to assess how I have been doing at the job I have been given. My assessors sat across the room from me, flicking through their notes.

“For the most part,” they began, “you seem to have done pretty well.”

They paused. A pen clicked. I waited for the other shoe to drop.

“One of the only problems we need to work on is that you seem to come across as too professional to be relatable.”

There it was.

For the most part, this trait wouldn’t be too much of a problem in a career. Except, I work in my admissions department at my university, trying to share parts of my own experience with students and families who are interested in the school.

In other words, it’s my job description to be relatable.

I think my problem lies in the fact that I still get stuck in the rut of a narrative that it’s better to be efficient than real to others. Somewhere along the line, I bought into the notion that I inherently have no value. I either produce or I get out of the way. Others value results, not relationships. Therefore, I cannot be a burden to anyone else.

Intuitively, as a guy finishing up his undergraduate degree in ministry, I know that this cannot be further from the truth. But in practice, when I reflect on many of the choices I’ve made up through high school and into college, I realize that when I respond with a gut reaction, my gut is still very much a firm believer of this narrative.

I don’t ask for help. I project a polished image. I psychologically own situations I am in, subconsciously believing that how they end are a direct reflection on my own worth. I stay out of others’ ways. When in leadership, I tend to over-function and lose sleep.

Relationally, I tend to undermine relationships that I think are getting too close because I know that one day, I will probably be a burden on those involved. In a twisted sense of the word, I think I act that way because I care about those persons involved because to have them care for me is to be a hindrance and limitation to their potentials.

What a great cocktail for a guy who thought he was cut out for ministry, right?

The strange thing is, when I find myself back in this rut, I remember my time as a summer camp counselor in New Hampshire. Come to think of it, the summer camp should be starting right around now.

After finishing my freshman year of college, I found myself teaching kids about wilderness survival skills and outdoor cooking throughout the summer. In the evenings, I would stroll back to the cabin that I oversaw and made sure all the campers had taken their showers and done their chores before settling down. But, while being a counselor was fun, I began to feel burned out and disillusioned by camp ministry – the kids would never pay attention to the Bible studies in the mornings or the devotionals at night I had prepared. No one seemed to care about faith. I began to look forward to the evenings when the day was done so I could sit up at night, alone with my thoughts.

I had already become well habituated with writing blog posts, not unlike this one. But, living in the woods, even with all its perks, did not provide any naturally occurring signal or electricity to charge a laptop. Writing blogs, in other words, was out of the question. And so, I found myself resorting to journaling with pen and paper by flashlight once more.

At the beginning of the last two sessions of camp, we had a single ten-year-old join us with the intention of staying for a month. He wasn’t a good kid, wasn’t a bad kid, but seemed to keep to himself for the most part.

One evening, I walked into the cabin to see this kid’s feet poking out from under my bunk. After clearing my throat, the boy crawled out from under, holding my wastebasket full of paper, rough drafts of some thoughts I had written days, weeks before.

His eyes were as round as saucers.

“Are you a storyteller?” he asked, animatedly.

I muttered something, which he took it as a mark of affirmation. He ran off to the far side of the cabin to share his discovery with the others. Before long, the cabin had conspired to refuse to fall asleep until I had told them one of my stories.

It became a ritual – every night, I would have to stop by the main house in order to print off another blog post before making my way back to the cabin. The boys loved them. Honestly, I didn’t see it coming – these were the thoughts of a college student about college. Why would campers in grade school care about that?

To be honest, I admit my writing isn’t the most engaging thing. For the most part, when I started telling my stories, the cabin didn’t make it to the end. One by one, the campers would drop off to sleep. But every night, as I turned to turn off the light, the month camper would be awake, still listening on his bunk.

This pattern continued until the last week of camp when our cabin went on our overnight hiking trip. That night, as the boys collapsed into their sleeping bags about the shelter, I didn’t expect the boys wanted to hear another story. But as soon as I turned off the light, I heard the same boy object:

“Hey, you promised!”

I sighed and turned the light back on. I pulled out a piece of paper I had tucked in the side of my backpack – the last story I would tell them. It was a little longer than the others. But I read it until the end.

When I finished, the shelter was silent. The darkness within the cabin seemed to hold its breath. Most of the campers had fallen asleep long ago. I yawned and moved to click off the light.

“Wait!” I heard, the same boy making his presence known, “Could we – talk?”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Sure,” I said, “Let’s sit over by the fire pit so not to wake the others.”

We walked about ten feet over to the small ring of stones where we had recently cooked smores. My co-counselor was watching the last of the smoke rise from the ashes.

“We got it from here, James,” I said. He nodded and headed over to his nearby hammock.

We sat by the fire for a moment before I ventured, “What’s up?”

I couldn’t see the camper’s face. The darkness had obscured his eyes from me. He said nothing, though it looked as though he was searching for words.

I heard water hitting the ground before I saw it. It was slow at first, but it gradually grew the constant sound of water pit-pattering against the stones of the fire pit. It continued, uninterrupted, for fifteen minutes.

Finally, a sob escaped the camper’s mouth. “What-” he choked out, “What caused you to write that story?”

I glanced down at the piece of paper, now a sodden piece of pulp, in my hand. I had begun crying, too. “My friends,” I said. “My family.”

I found myself revisiting that same story today, after work. It narrated my last day as a freshman at my university, saying goodbye to strangers who had become some of the best of friends.

I wrote of how I had been sitting in an empty dorm room, my gear outside, when I had been suddenly struck with a sense of loss. The room was filled with people, with memories, once – not even a week ago. Now, it was gone, disappeared into the past.

I had come to call the place home. But, as the walls and the room itself became increasingly bare, the very life that resided within the room breathed its last. I was looking at the corpse of a year’s worth of strangers who became my family, of mornings and nights filled with incredibly meaningful conversations, of “mountaintop experiences” and more than one visit to the valley of the shadow of death. And my friends were there through it all.

And now, now it was all over.

A lump formed in my throat as I stepped outside. A friend was heading home, her bags already all packed away in her parents’ car. Her eyes red, she looked at us, the faithful few, and asked, “Why is it that loving people is so exhausting?”

In that moment, I remembered that a professor of mine once told me that to truly love something, we must acknowledge that one day, that person or thing will die in its own way.

We allow for change in all its forms, but change is only a nuanced term for the continual putting to death of one thing to make room for something new. To love the people that we are force us to act in the same manner, else we risk falling for an idea of the person and not the person themselves. And this love, this state of caring for one another even until death and beyond, is what makes us human.

I could have said something, but instead, I stood, a tear running down my own face, silent, a smile softly playing at the corners of my mouth.

The camper and I sat in silence around the dead fire, unsure of what to say. Eventually, he began to share his own story, one filled with brokenness and hurt and pain – the likes of which I would have never guessed a ten-year-old would have experienced. I heard of his fear of abandonment and a father that had been the world to him who he never could see. I heard of how he got up every morning wondering whether it was his fault. I heard of how he put on a brave front every morning and worked constantly to do something of note so that maybe, one day, his father would call him and congratulate him and tell him he was proud.

“Those words,” he stammered, “Those words your friend said have given me words for this pain I have.”

He paused and looked up across the fire pit at me, “It’s just, I don’t want to be a burden, you know?”

I gritted my teeth.

“More than you know, man.”

I never got to follow up with the camper after that night. Upon returning to camp, I found myself having to pack up my bags to make it back to my university on time for my sophomore year.

I found myself in a friend’s living room, checking my emails when I saw an email had been forwarded to me by way of my camp director. It was from my camper’s mother.

For a good portion of the email, she mainly addressed the director and thanked him for the program that he had put on, going into detail all the elements of the program that made the camp stand out, but as I reached the end of the letter, I stopped scrolling.

The last two paragraphs were addressed simply, to my son’s counselors.

I still have them.

The reason why I hold onto these paragraphs, the reason why I love doing what I do, was summed up there.

Thank you, it read, for investing a month of your lives into my son. He loved the program and he loved having you as counselors. In fact, he won’t stop sharing the stories you shared about your own lives at night.

But I want to thank you, especially, because my son hadn’t really smiled in a long time since his father left. But when he talks about his counselors and his time at camp, all he can do is grin. I don’t know what you said or did that changed something for my son, but it has made all the difference.

It’s strange how, when we find ourselves poured out into others, when we take the time to invest in the people that we are with, they have a habit of always leaving something behind.

Why is it that loving people is so hard? Because we fear that if we let go, they might not return. So, we don’t burden others, or try not to be, I think. But if we live that way, we can never fully be present with those with us in their triumphs and trials.

It’s only when we open up to others that connections like the friends I’ve made at my university or the moment shared around the fire pit can occur.

Why is loving people so hard?

Because, I think, it’s when we are most fully ourselves.

The pen clicked again. I was back in my supervisor’s office. I refocused as I came back from my thoughts.

Blinking, I started, “Sorry, come again?”

My supervisor smiled. “Sure! What I was wondering was, do you think we can work together on being more relatable?”

“Oh,” I paused, smiling slightly, “Most certainly.”

Those Human Moments

June 9, 2017June 9, 2017 T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

I have become indebted to a good number of people around my university because of all their investment in me. This summer, I’m staying at my university, in part because of a job, but also because I’m taking a summer class with someone I am grateful to know.

I ran into him the other day as I was trying to take a picture for my university’s Instagram. He was sitting on a marble block and reading under the shade of a tree, preparing for our next discussion on the life and works of Kierkegaard.

To be honest, I don’t know if he would be on campus this summer if not for me. To the best of my knowledge, he has no summer classes apart from the one he’s teaching for me. But this past spring, after I received an email from our financial and academic service on campus informing me of the sheer impossibility of my graduating within four years, my professor found me sitting, shell-shocked, in the hallway on his way to class.

I felt the blood drain from my face as I finished reading the email. I thought I was on track. How did this happen?

My professor had just turned the corner when he saw me out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he paused and asked what happened. After informing him of my dilemma, he closed his eyes, thinking. A few moments later, he looked up, spun on his heels and walked back down the hall to locate a form. Finding it, he returned and handed it to me.

“This is a form for an independent study and course replacement,” He said, “And, while I can’t teach every single one of those classes you need, I can teach your upper division philosophy course.”

“What?” I asked, still recovering from the email.

“I don’t have my summer plans firmly established yet, but it seems as though you need some help.” He prompted, still holding the form. “Let’s see if we can meet over coffee or something over the summer and talk about something you’re interested in. Let’s get you back on track for graduation.”

I blinked.

He smiled, “Well, do you want to talk philosophy or not? Come on, it’ll be fun.”

I took the sheet, folded it, and placed it in my bag.

“Sure,” I started. “I’d like that. Thanks!”

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Besides, I’m late to class!”

And with that, he disappeared down the hall as if nothing happened.

I found out later that I received the email due to a mishap in the system that could easily be fixed. But by the time that happened, the deadline for dropping classes had already passed. Not that I would drop it if I could, because when a professor, err – when anyone – goes out of their way to help others I usually try to spend time with and become that type of person.

This story brings to mind a quote from one of my favorite shows. As the plot reaches its resolution the main protagonist, realizes that his companions won’t remember their previous adventures with him as history. As they begin to fall asleep, he remarks, “I’ll be a story in your head. But that’s OK: we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”[1]

The thing is, even after I graduate and move on to other things outside of college, I will still remember the people who have influenced the time I have spent here. These will become some of the stories that I will remember fondly when others’ stories have connected with mine.

Frederick Buechner writes “I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”[2]

Those moments of overlap, those moments of sharing our secrets in moments of vulnerability— when a professor stops to help a student, when friends show up at three in the morning to support another, when strangers become family through the sharing of their lives over a fire—are the moments when we are most human.

For me, this professor helping me in a moment of need was just one example of numerous times someone has poured into me. I don’t know if it would be possible for me to recall them in their totality. At least, not in a reasonable amount of time.

I am grateful for them all.

—

[1] Doctor Who (2005). “The Big Bang.” Episode 13. Directed by Toby Haynes. Written by Stephen Moffat. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 26 June 2010.

[2] Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (HarperCollins e-books, March 17, 2009), 40, Kindle.