work less, volunteer more

I want to make a difference. But I spend most of my hours and energy at work, behind a desk, in front of a keyboard, in jobs where I doubt my boss would even notice if I wasn't there. While there are jobs that are needed to make communities function well, nurses, teachers, plumbers, I've personally never had one of those jobs.

And then the jobs that do appeal, that strike me as an effective opportunity to really make an impact for good, well they also strike alot of other people that way too and there are no shortage of applicants, making them rather difficult jobs to get. And the thing is that gets me, is that if I got one of those jobs, well I'd just be doing a job that they could easily get someone else, probably equally if not more talented, to do in my absence, because, well there are alot of other people stuck in cubicles wishing their jobs made a difference too.

So what's a girl to do? How do I really make an impact? How can I rearrange the pieces on the chess board?

Well, as of last week when I handed in my temporary job - my new game plan is work less, volunteer more. Budget pared back, I have worked out we can live fine and pay our mortgage on about 20 hours of work a week. I've got 10 worked out, and hopefully a few ideas for the other 10. So now I am a free agent to volunteer at will, where I see I can make the most difference.

So project number one - a social enterprise initiative. Having never run a business before this is all going to be one huge learning curve. Idea - create employment for disadvantaged women through starting a sustainable handmade home/giftware business. Fingers crossed.

I've also enrolled in the refugee volunteer program and am thinking about getting involved with a christian budgeting service. I think that finding ways to fill my free 20 hours will be a very easy task indeed.

Getting to this stage hasn't been easy though. It's taken me a long time to give up on the idea that I've had ingrained in me that I would have a successful corporate career, and somehow it would come to me through the course of that, how to brilliantly transfer those skills to make an impact. This has very much been the safe, expected road (I did spend six years studying for it after all) - the road where I can see the path mapped out (albeit not the rather important transferring of skills part), where I know the terrain, I know my identity. I can answer in one word at the dinner party, when asked what I do. It's the path of much less risk.

It's also hard to let go of the idea that I should be earning five days a week - everything I reasonably can. We have a mortgage to pay after all. That idea feels very deeply ingrained in me, with a guilty hold that I'm somehow cheating my husband not to.

But the well mapped out career path didn't work for me. It didn't fit my strengths, my values, who I was. I don't want to spend twenty years running myself ragged, working on a career I don't care about, earning far more money than I should be spending, and getting nowhere towards my goal of wanting to make a difference.

This new way, well I'm not quite sure what it's going to look like. It's full of risk. I have no idea whether my business will succeed or achieve what it's supposed to. Money will be a lot tighter. People will probably look at me pityingly, as if I couldnt' get a real job, and ask me repeatedly, forgetting the answer each time, why it is I'm not using my law degree. And I have absolutely no idea what to tell people when they ask me what I do at dinner parties.
But at least I feel that for the first time I'm moving in the right direction.

boldness

goethe
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

I first saw this saying on a quotable card in a little bookshop in San Fransisco. The truth of it hit me in an inescapable, niggling, unsettling way. The times I fail, are mainly because I don't try, or I try, but I give up too easily. How many grand schemes and ideas are shot down in my head before they get a chance to come to life? How few risks do I take, conscious of the pressing concerns of appearances, or fear of failure, or because I'm tired, too busy, too distracted to pay attention? How easily do I sacrifice potential ideas and schemes and initiatives, without thought to regret, to the potential?

I'm so conflicted. I want to live large. I want to live a life that counts. That connects, that tries, that dares to be brilliant, and out of the ordinary. But I'm a melancholic with thin skin. I worry my ideas will fall flat, won't work, that I'll look silly. I worry I'll over commit myself and burn out in spectacular fashion. It all seems too hard, too much, too many details I can't work out, too many things against me. And I have a deathly fear of failure.

How do I resolve this conflict, this conflict that tears within me?

There really is only one way forward, only one way that I'll ever be at peace with myself when I'm 80. And that way quite simply has to be to choose boldness over fear.

How exactly that's done, remains to be seen.

good fences make good neighbours

Ok so it's time to get a bit more practical.

I like people, but I also like my space. I'm a strong supporter of civility, you know, good fences make good neighbours (Robert Frost's brilliant 'Mending Wall' poem). I don't really know my neighbours, I just do the nod, or, if I get really stuck, engage in a little small talk. I get nervous about the idea of pulling down walls, of going past the 'neighbour' phase - it's safe, you're not stuck if the woman in the house behind you turns out to be emotionally needy and clingy, or the man in the house in front a little weird but delighted that you're now best friends. If you see my point.

But I've also been getting this vibe from God that I can't be serious about living him out, if I'm not prepared to get a little messy with my neighbours. So, I've decided to make brownie - and this week take brownie to all of my neighbours and introduce myself (yes, I've never even spoken to some...) and invite one set over for coffee.

Watch this space.

Marketing an Easy Faith

Mic Duncan at a recent dinner concluded on his given topic about the future of the Church, that the future lies not in recruiting new believers, but in evangelising its own.

At the risk of being terribly harsh and hypocritical, I agree that New Zealand churches really are full of ‘half believers’; of those that have prayed the prayer, made it in the door, but, well to be frank, very little else. Nothing that looks like the vibrant reality of the life Christ was a proponent of. Churches instead are often preoccupied with numbers; numbers of bums on pews, giving numbers, new believer numbers, numbers through programs. And many Christians seem to think that praying the prayer and making it in the door and through a program or two is enough. Yes we know that faith without works is dead, but works are hard to quantify. Apathy, disconnection, disobedience, what do they really look like? Sure it’s easy enough to impeach a minister for having an affair, sex is easy enough to slot into the disobedience, lack of integrity, just plain wrong categories, but a lack of interest in God, failure to care for those around you, secret pride, apathy about justice – it’s often hard to tell. Faith without works often still looks like faith through the limited lens of Sunday services.

Imagine the impact of the Church if its members lived up to the call of Christ. Or even just tried really.

As I write this I think about a recent Canvas article talking about the rebranding of Christianity and the marketing machine that is so many mega churches. The article talked about the lengths some New Zealand churches are going to, to ‘recruit’ churchgoers, creating marketing machines, with celebrity bands, sound engineers and full time designers, slick dance and production, online media and big name speakers. I can’t help but wonder about a correlation between the ‘half believers’ in pews and the marketing hype of modern Christianity.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the marketing per se I have a problem with. I love Godmarks billboards (you know, the black and white “I don’t mind if you yell at me, at least we’re talking” types), I do – I often sit in traffic and start talking honestly to God after seeing one of their billboards. And I have numerous friends who have come to faith through a mega church marketing ploy, who never would have darkened the door of a small, quieter community church.

I do have a problem with the marketing selling the church and the people, but not Christ, with hype that doesn’t seem to end and the core of the gospel take over as the focus. I have a problem with marketing that glosses over the core bits of Christianity like sacrifice and obedience and instead promotes prosperity and happiness. And I have a problem with marketing that doesn’t deal with the hard questions of life, like the mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, or someone who just lost their job with a mortgage and five kids to support.

I know churches don’t intend to market to the exclusion of any of the above. I attended a marketing mega church for five years. And all of the staff would be horrified to think that they may be doing so to the exclusion of the things above - they intend to present the gospel, to connect, to be real. But they also seek to market the gospel, to make it fun, more palatable, to make it exciting. And in that tension I think it’s hard to not push out key elements of the gospel that don’t gel with the marketing direction.

The Canvas writer asks “But even if churches attract new flocks, what will happen if the PR power runs out?”. And it does, it loses its power over people eventually, for some earlier than others. Of my friends who came to faith in the mega churches, all of them left when the road got bumpy or the façade didn’t seem real or they failed to connect. Their new glossy faiths didn’t equip them to deal with crisis. For some it was months, others years. Some went to smaller less flashy churches, others left altogether.

Yes in the mega church they could connect in small groups or different programs with people who could answer their questions, but the problem is that big, loud, uber marketed churches aren’t usually conducive to environments to connect in, and a continuous stream of positive messages often deters people from asking questions and opening up about honest struggles. It’s hard to market Christianity and at the same time preach on the theologically difficult and emotive subject of the problem of pain. I respected what the leaders of my mega church were doing, but in the end I had to conclude that the marketing and the hype distracted me from (and the Church from having the energy to focus on) really growing in what it meant to be a follower of Christ in day to day reality.

At my mega church, as long as I attended three services a week, a small group and was on ushering every month, I was doing great. No matter that I had no time for non-Christian friends or hobbies or time alone. Numbers and programs and attendance became the hallmarks of how I was doing as a Christian, because it’s just too hard to monitor it another way in a Church that size. And consequently I was never really challenged to leave that place of ‘half believership’, to delve deep into what it means to follow Christ.

And while most churches don’t (or maybe more accurately, can’t) go to such lengths, how many spend inordinate numbers of volunteer hours on producing slick worship shows and building bigger and better buildings and the altar call gets tinted to focus on a Christ that will meet all your expectations and more? I know that most churches I’ve attended have ‘marketed’ in that sense – but are we really looking at what the cost is for these marketing campaigns, what we are excluding and what sort of foundation we create for the people who respond and those already in our pews?

church wanted

I am currently unattached. Not in a relationship. Single.

I refer not to my relationship status, but my church status. I am currently without church.

I'm surprised to find that it bothers me. I'm not really super pro church, ironically given that my husband is embarking on pastoral leadership training this year with my full support. I should clarify - I'm pro the concept of church, in the biblical, original fresh sense. Not so much the organism that has evolved out of the Bible and languishes today in our cities.

For travel reasons I've been without church for quite awhile, as we cycle toured around the world. And it didn't really bother me. For sermons and music its hard to pass up the quality I can download on my ipod. For community, I had my emails, skype and of course my husband.

In many ways the attendance of church can be an event not to be missed, missed as in regretting not going that is. It can be a place of stale ideas, false community, pasted on smiles - nothing resembling or even whispering of promises of, the abundance of joy Christ promised.

But yet at the same time I think a more accurate comment would be to say that I miss church. Even when attending these lifeless buildings, I miss church.

I miss community, real community, the gritty type that calls you and asks you out on a friday night, the type that knows when you're down, that listens and shares their life with you. Community that comes in all shapes and sizes, the type you would never probably associate with in your average world. And in a world where it is too easy to network and keep in touch with friends, the concept of community seems to have been diluted to some once a month coffee catch up.

I miss rubbing shoulders with people who really are connecting with God. Or who aren't, but are open about that, and their desire (or lack of at that time) to connect. Who really want to know God and be known. To be humbled by the stories of others passion and hunger for God, is the best medicine for my apathy, or pride if I was being honest, which I might as well be.

I miss creative spaces where you are opened up to thoughts and ideas and worship spaces you had never thought of before. Of sermons with ideas that cut to the quick, that challenge, annoy, make you ponder the real meat of life.

A good church can root you. Can be your community, your carer. It can be what keeps you on track, focused on spiritual matters in a world where everything else is so much more pressing. It can be your mentor, your accountability. It can be your resource center, your reference point. It can be your place where you find purpose in service. It can be a creative place where you encounter God and your own creativity.

And so the unenviable search for the right church must begin. And begin with a sense of hope, of new and good things, and of the guiding hand of God.

Teachers as students: a lesson in humility

The best law professor I ever had was a Philosopher who lectured Tort law.

He was a large, balding, animated personality. A man who was truly excited by the series of contradictions that is tort law. He created this safe space where students, who would never dare venture an opinion in other classes, could vocalize theories, muse over possible answers or troubling trends. He welcomed our comments, and was open to the possibility that our musings could influence his opinions. Even the really off the wall, not such a bright moment suggestions were examined for possible insight.

And it wasn’t just to make us feel safe and cherished. I think what made him so special was his humility. It wasn’t humility for humilities’ sake, but a real respect of us, the students, as active contributors to things of importance. Every class you felt as if he went in thinking ‘what can I learn today’. He never saw tort law as open and shut, knowledge was not static and students had something of value to contribute, despite our lower food chain status.

Space to truly learn
As students, we had a space were we got involved in thinking, rather than just being taught, a sad reality of most of our university careers. In fact more than that, we had a responsibility to think, or the class and possibly tort law, would be the lesser for it. It transformed the classroom. It was magic.

Transferable experience
Perhaps not everyone has experienced the average law lecture. Students with well highlighted books tremble at the thought of being called upon, so that the professor can laud their superior knowledge over us. But surely we are all in situations, far more often than we’d like, where we sense that whether a minister, a boss, a parent or some type of leader, does not respect us as having value to contribute. Or a question is asked that could lead to good discussion and real learning, but the conversation is quickly shut down by the person who quickly tells how it is. The person seeks merely to transfer their knowledge to us, or to ‘influence’ us as a subconscious notch in their belt, to change us as they wish.

Situation Reversed
I have to admit I write fairly fluently on this, because I’ve been in more situations than I’d like to admit, where I’m the one dishing out my experiences, or knowledge or insight into God, without truly seeking to create a space where God, or knowledge can flourish.

Henri Nouwen speaks to this brilliantly in his book ‘Reaching Out’ (Doubleday, US, 1975):

“Someone who is filled with ideas, concepts, opinions and convictions cannot be a good host. There is no inner space to listen, no openness to discover the gift of the other. It is not difficult to see how those “who know it all” can kill a conversation and prevent an interchange of ideas. Poverty of mind as a spiritual attitude is a growing willingness to recognize the incomprehensibility of the mystery of life… In short, learned ignorance makes one able to receive the word from others and the Other, with great attention.” (p 103 – 104)

Nouwen advocates for ministers, teachers and parents to cultivate a ‘learned ignorance’, to allow the student to discover knowledge, to truly learn and mature, and to allow seekers the space to discover God.

I led a small group a number of years ago, where the members were, lets say, somewhat odd. From a worldly perspective they weren’t that skilled up, their opinions often from left field, not well thought through, or just plain wrong. There was something in me that resisted just letting them talk without ‘setting them right’, that resisted actually respecting their views and asking God ‘what can I learn from them’. If I was honest with myself, I saw it as bringing myself ‘down’ to their level.

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” 1 Cor 1:26-28

The girls picked up on my attitude. I think it stopped that small group from being a place of real honesty, where God really could move. And as for my well thought through opinions and insights, they bounced off them like rubber balls.

How many other situations are occurring like this? How many people have been put off the Church, and Christ, because we are so quick to tell them how wrong abortion, or homosexuality is? How many conversations are shut down because we know the answer?

I needed a good dose of humility. Frankly, it’s easier not to. False or forced humility is a pointless exercise. True humility takes time and patience, and a total reworking of how we see people, a new view of people who might seem foolish in the world’s eyes. It means listening, truly listening, and sometimes without even getting your two cents in. It’s adopting my tort lecturer’s attitude of genuine excitement about what everyone can bring to the table, no matter how unorthodox the packaging, or how weird or misguided 99% of their other views are. Only then can we, as teachers or leaders, create a space where God’s wisdom is free to truly penetrate and changes lives, starting with ours. In reality, the truth is that “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” But for the grace of God will my life ever have true influence.

I think at the end of the year with those girls, I was the one who had learn't the most. I had come to see that each of them, no matter how odd or thick or boring or random, had some corner on something brilliant, that they had gone through different experiences, and journeyed with God in some way that I had not, and in some way that I could learn from.

Waiting in Vietnam

I expected my time in Vietnam to have its frustrations. I know the limits of this kind of work, of helping people, helping out NGOs, especially with only a three month time frame. I’ve read enough books to know this would be a culture that didn’t value efficiency like I did. And three months is not a lot of time to settle in, establish working relationships and get things done. I was prepared for that. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this.

There was a week or so of settling in, getting to grips with culture shock, the noise, the crowds, the rocket fuel strength coffee. Then work began. Ok, a few hiccups, the website they had asked us to produce turned out to already exist. No worries, we updated it and added content. There were communication difficulties over other work. I could work through those, more time drinking coffee and talking things out. There were the doubts over the long term effectiveness of what we were doing, but again such are the expected limitations with a short term stint.

Then there was the frustration of three weeks sick in bed with shingles, my tiny hotel room getting smaller by the day. And then one of the NGOs failed to come to the ball and get organized to use my husband’s and my time here, leaving us with a spare month to sit around. I didn’t expect things to be quite this quiet.

And so I find myself in week ten, waiting.

I confess, most people don’t like waiting, or delays, but I really, really don’t like waiting. I like control. My personality type likes being able to set goals and met them. Efficiently, effectively. I’m not ok with doing ‘nothing’ on an ongoing basis. I love to get things done, to achieve, to think big and go after it. I get a high from being busy and productive. I’m a product of my culture and I don’t mind one bit.

The thing is though, I’ve been waiting in some form or another for the last four years.

I graduated University with a law degree and a job at a top firm. My future was bright, albeit it turned out not to be one that I wanted. I was bored, and the next three jobs brought more of the same. I was restless and moved around, trying to find something that would fit my strengths and give me something worth working hard for. I was always waiting for something, this job to end, to move cities, to start the next job or volunteer opportunity. Frustration turned to depression and a vital fear of never achieving something of worth. You stop trying, you loose sight of what you want, you stop living in the present. You know that in the midst of it you should work out a way through, but you’re so busy with jobs you don’t like and activities to keep you sane after those 40 hours, that you don’t find the time.

This three month stint was a desperate grasp at control. Here, not dictated by the need for a pay check, I can achieve, do some good, something worth doing. Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover it. God doesn’t always meet our expectations does he? He doesn’t go along with our timetables, or provide dream jobs or drop our life direction in our laps. He works to his own timetable.

There is a tension in me that lies at the core of my anxieties – does God even have a timetable for me? Do I just relax and trust God to ‘use’ me, does he have all our steps worked out and is just biding his time? Or do I need to take initiative and push through to bring the most good to the broken world I see around me? A difficult theological question. There is no doubt that God does indeed have specific good planned for some, the Bible being a record of many of them. But for all of us? For me?

I simply don’t know, and after struggling with this question theologically for some years, am not sure I’ll ever know for sure. I do know however that one thing we can look to God for, is that “God works all things for the good of those who love him”. (Rom 8:28)

Here in Vietnam, in the space and the time I find myself forced to live with, I’ve ended up spending a lot of time talking to God. I’ve started to journal and blog, therapeutic disciplines I never quite get myself together to do. I’ve spent more time than ever in prayer over my next steps at the end of my time here. I’ve spent time reading books. I’ve reflected on the past two years I’ve spent overseas, thought over lessons to be learnt. I’ve worked through what I‘ve learnt about myself, about what I want from life. Sure, before I would think things through and through until my head hurt. But I never had time on my hands like this, to just think, to really process.

One book I’ve been reading is Henri Nouwen’s ‘Reaching Out’. At one point he gives the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet who is struggling with the question of what to do with his life, to become a poet or not:

“I want to beg you as much as I can…. to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer… “

(p 41, emphasis added)

I’m not ok with all that is unresolved in me. I want to know where I am headed, I want to know that I will achieve something worthwhile with my life. But maybe, just maybe in my enforced solitude, in my waiting, I’ve begun to be ok with letting this evolve out of me. I’ve begun to see a little worth in the waiting, and the desperate need to live fully present, even if it is not the present you want.

I think I have to approach life with initiative, pushing forward, but with one ear cocked listening for that still small voice at all times, even looking for what he has to say when things are not as you want them, and being ok with the ‘downtime’. Maybe it will be ten years or so before I work out what unique contribution I can make to the world. In the meantime I can learn to take steps towards developing my strengths, to thinking about what it should be, and most importantly to learn to live in the waiting period.