Post 6:Is happiness hidden in turkeys?

What can Emile Hirsch and a discounted mocha teach us about happiness? Well, my experience this weekend has been that they can teach us an awful lot about happiness.

My sister Tara came to pick me up from SPU on Wednesday and before we set out towards my parents place I decided to get a mocha for the road. I had about two dollars left on my SPU card and it was going to cost me an extra two dollars to pay for the drink. The barista quite kindly said not to worry about it and to have a happy thanksgiving, so I walked out of the SUB with two-dollar venti mocha. Tara commented on this saying that she loves the holidays because everyone is so nice to others from Thanksgiving to right around New Year’s Eve. This comment quickly turned to discussion about this question; why cant we be this nice to people all year round? My solution is this; people are generally happier at the holidays.

Thanksgiving is sort of like the “kick-off” event that signals the commencement of the holiday season and during the holidays most everyone is happier than the rest of the year. Almost everyone has days off, great food, presents, and time with family to look forward to. Thus, “…since I am happy, everyone else should be happy too” so people try and be nice to everyone because “everyone deserves to be happy at the holidays.” This sentiment was confirmed for me on Thanksgiving.

My clan decided to take most of our leftover food (about twenty-five plates worth) and give it to the homeless in Seattle. While this may sound crass, it was like Halloween on the streets of Seattle that night. Our idea was apparently highly un-original as almost everyone we came across already had a plate loaded with food just like the ones we were handing out, which had been given to them by some other family with leftover food. Like I said, we get into this mind set that “everyone should be happy at the holidays, just like me” when the rest of the year almost of all of us can be accused of ignoring the people who are in need.

Thus I have to come to this unfortunate and highly pessimistic conclusion that I really hate, and it is this; at the holidays we are nice to people because we are happy and we feel others deserve the same. Yet for those who choose to follow God we are called to love people always not just when we are happy and it’s convenient. Now I want to get into what it means to be happy.

In the film “Into the Wild” Chris McCandless, the main character, is a bright young man who has been accepted into Harvard Law School and is well on his way to becoming a “successful” man. However, his family life has been nothing short of awful due his parents putting their business before their children, their endless arguing, and finally Chris’ discovery that his parents had lied to him his whole life and that he was actually a bastard child. And so, tired of his parents and of their forcing him to pursue success, he gives almost all of his college money ($24,500 dollars) to charity and sets out on the road hitching around the country. His goal is to simply be alone, free of any social obligations, live off the land and discover who he truly is with his final destination being the Alaskan Wilderness.

The whole time he is gone he doesn’t bother to tell his parents where he is and he hopes they don’t find out because he never wants to see them again. However, on his final stop before reaching Alaska he meets an old Catholic man named Ron who lives by himself because he has no family. As Chris gets to know Ron better he begins to challenge him and shows Ron that he has no life beyond the comfort of his own home. Shortly after pointing this out, Chris challenges Ron to climb a big hill with him, which he had refused to do earlier in the movie. Ron climbs and reaches the top of the hill, much to the joy of both of them. As Chris and Ron sit on the hill together Chris explains to Ron that he feels the principle joy of life isn’t found in human relationships but in the world all around us, to which Ron responds, “…there is some kind of bigger thing we can all appreciate, and it sounds like you don’t mind calling it God, but when you forgive [for example his parents] you love, and when you love God’s light shines on you.” Right after this the sun peaks out from the clouds and Chris exclaims “Holy S**t!”

Towards the end of the film as Chris is alone, highly emaciated and dying in the Alaskan Wilderness, he realizes that the only thing that can save him is medicine, in other words the society that he tried so hard to be rid of. Just before lying down on his deathbed, he reads in a book (I think one by Tolstoy) that a man could want little more in life than music, books, a quiet country life and a family to share it with. After reading this he writes his last words, “Happiness only real when shared.” This demonstrates his final epiphany that happiness does not lie in society at all (which he knew all along) nor does it lie solely in relationships or solely in nature, instead happiness lies in experiencing the joys of this world with the ones we love.

The bigger picture that I am trying to get at with all of this is that we can be happy and show love (be nice) always. We are a people called to show the world we love them because God loves us and we know the power of love (just like the Huey Lewis song). As were trucking through the mountains and especially the valleys of this life, God asks that we shine his light and his love even when we are covered in mud and we don’t know how. We can be happy people in the midst of tragedy when we embrace that there is good in everything not just in presents and turkey. We can show love even when we don’t feel like it, because we know that we have perfect love on our side. Finally, when we live in happiness and love, we live the life God intended for us. When we do this we can be living proof that God is good and that the only reason people don’t like him is that we have misrepresented him.

Post 5: Let's get intimate...

Ewwww gross! Intimacy! You can’t say that in church! How nasty! I hope that wasn’t your reaction to my title, but it may have been, and I won’t lie; I do make these titles to get your attention.

Whenever I say intimate people usually think sex, being married, and maybe chick flicks, specifically The Notebook comes to mind. This is really too bad because none of those things are the intimacy I care to talk about. I am not married nor do I presently have a girlfriend (so yes ladies I am available… just kidding) and as such I don’t have a physically intimate relationship, nor do I plan to until I am married. I don’t want this to be a blog about sex or adultery or lust because those topics have long since gotten old to most people so Ill stop here and say that this is about intimacy between friends. As a side note I’ll just say that physical intimacy is (obviously) intimate but in my minimal (and entirely regretted) experience it was even more performance based than real life and as such is untruthful and irrelevant to this.

Finally getting to the point intimacy is fantastic! I have a dear friend named Ben Fader, he is a curly haired theology student from Sea-Tac and his girlfriend’s (along with many others’) favorite word to describe him is, SASSY! He is a fantastic man and a dear friend. The other night Ben and I played “love drums,” a term I coined on the spot that night for drumming to bring God glory and tell him we love him. We played for probably fifteen maybe twenty minutes, we didn’t stop the whole time, we never lost time, and only four human words were said that whole; “let’s bring it down.” It was a grand old time and I think God provided a little soundproofing to the room we were in because it was one thirty in the morning and we were very, very loud and not one person complained, even though some people heard us down the hill.

The reason I bring up Ben Fader is that we have hung out five times by my count and never for more than an hour or two. Yet I consider Ben among my closest friends because we have a remarkable intimacy.

This is where some macho guys would shout, “GAY” and get really uncomfortable. However, I don’t see anything gay about exceptional openness and transparency due to a mutual feeling of comfort and understanding. Ben knows almost nothing about my history. He knows I’m from Lake Stevens, he knows I have had two real girlfriends, and he knows I am a youth pastor and a musician. Yet I have many other friends who know much more about me, more of my life story and more of how I react to things yet in spite of this they don’t see my heart and soul like Ben does. I don’t know why God established this between Ben and I but I wish more people could know one another like we do with as little time together as we have had. I know that to some degree this doesn't happen due to fear of people seeing who we are, and I spent a lot of time in my last blog talking about that so I won’t go too in depth here but I do want to share two relevant stories.

A week or so ago I was apparently sitting at a largely female dominated table at the SPU cafeteria. Some guys from my floor and girls from my sister floor were sitting one table over and apparently were spying on me. One guy in particular, big blonde and beautiful Collin, saw me being me and saw that some of the girls I was with were pretty entertained by it. At this point he said something along the lines of, “man, if I made half the crazy noises and said half the stupid things Kenny does people would think I was crazy!” I take that as nothing short of a compliment because quite frankly it means I pull off the role of Kendrick Barnes pretty well.

Today my friend Christa the highly convivial (I used a thesaurus for that one) art major from my sister floor told me a story that is quite contrary to mine. She said she was in one of her classes and was acting a little wild; as she said, “a bit too much like her self.” She didn’t really say what she did but apparently afterward some people basically shut her down for whatever it was. Hearing this did little short of break my heart, though I didn’t say it at the time. What I did tell her was that there is no such thing as being you too much and that I would whole-heartedly encourage her to be herself all the time in everyway, especially in front of me.

This is where I suppose I have to come back to Ben and I and how this all ties together. Our intimacy is born from the knowledge that there is absolutely no judgment in our relationship and that it is all love. With Ben I am more confident than I am with most people. This is also aided by putting God in the middle of us and praying together however, I also need to clarify something here. I cannot say that I am always, invariably myself. While I encourage everyone to be themselves and I always do my best to be me, when it comes down to it I am still human and still have fear of what “they will think.”

Last night I was thinking about condemnation and other social unpleasantries and I began to feel some confidence dropping and began to think, well maybe I need to chill out and be a little less… In the middle of those thoughts God said, “no you don’t, I like you just how you are.” Yes he said like, not love.

The reason he said like not love is this; we often see God’s love for us like we see our family’s love for us and that is that they love us despite our faults, however this is not what John 3:16 says. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son that who so ever believes in him shall not perish…” You have probably heard this before and maybe your thought right now is great, what of it? In this verse the Greek word phileo is used for love. Phileo is the term for brotherly love or the kind of our love that we feel for our friends. So lets look at this verse again. John 3:16 “For God so [desired to be you friend] that he sent his only begotten son [to die for you]…” God who knows you better than anyone (whether you like it or not) wants to be your friend! How much does that rock? God, who is the only one with a legitimate claim that he is better than us, who can see all our faults, but still wants to be our friend. How do we respond to this?

Like I said last week, we often judge people for who they are. I would so prefer it if we could kill this habit and become who we are, because there are NO pretty masks in this world. This starts with transparency with the people around us who we know (or maybe hope) won’t judge us. Our best friends, our family members, and our significant others because if we can’t be transparent with them then how can we ever become intimate with them. Again, I will point my finger at myself here. I didn’t tell my parents about my biggest regret in life until two years after it happened, and wish I’d told them sooner.

I hope we can all learn to be intimate with one another because it is amazing, especially when you hardly know the person. This starts with putting judgment behind us and looking forward to start becoming who we are. All of this is difficult, just like most things are when it comes to following God, but it is worth it, and it is best while done holding God’s hand along the way.

Post 4: I love Church-haters

I have a very dear friend named Wade Brickman and to be honest with you I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Wade. To get a feeling for what Wade is like you have to know that this month for no shave November he shaved his whole head face and after doing so he looked like a 230 lb baby. What’s wonderful about that is that the image isn’t too far from accurate. Most people would describe Wade as child stuck in a football lineman’s body; he is the epitome of the gentle giant. My favorite thing about Wade is his Lego collection. When I was a kid I had Legos, a big purple tub full of them and I played with them a lot, not as much as I played with Barbies and Polly Pockets, but still I liked my Legos. At nineteen Wade still has an awesome collection of Legos that any child would be very jealous of. What is even better is that he still plays with them and loves it. I suppose at this point I should clarify that Wade does not have any developmental problems and is just as mature as any other nineteen year old, not that that’s saying much.

Last summer I was at a camp (the one with the holy-rollers and people speaking in tongues) and Wade was there as well. For worship one night, I was dancing and laughing and speaking in tongues, as I often do in such situations, and Wade was walking around with a little green ball. The joy on Wade’s face blew me away. He was grinning from ear to ear and he had the most genuine smile you’ve ever seen. He loved that ball and he would throw it around a little bit and hug it and then look up and keep singing the worship songs and then he’d giggle and do it all again. Can I just say little green balls are not that exciting, God, on the other hand, is. This is a spiritual connection that goes far beyond anything I will ever understand, but there is something very important I think anyone can draw from this. God wants us to be child-like.

I realize how ridiculous everything I just said sounds, but it was Wade’s courage and confidence in who he is that allowed him to forget what anyone thought about him and to just play with that ball and hang out with God at the same time.

Children are born Narcissicists, as my friend Tim the Kilted Southerner says, but this is a survival mechanism really. They cry when they’re hungry so they don’t starve, or when they’re hurt so their parents know to come and care for them. With this Narcissism, however, comes the knowledge that they are special. While we all hope that our children will stop putting themselves first and cease to be Narcissicists at some point, I would also hope that the children I may one day have would never forget that they are special. It is our knowledge that we are special that allows us to be confident in who we are. But can I just say it is so hard to feel that we are special when things we encounter everyday tell us we are not. TV, grades in school, things people say to us, even our own friends and family tell us directly or indirectly that we are not special. When that happens we begin to lose who we are. We shut down our natural reactions and revert to how normal people expect us to act out of fear that what we do or say might cause people to tell us yet again that we are stupid, immature, lame, un-cool, annoying… and ultimately not special.

I wish that children couldn’t learn put-downs until they were old enough to use them responsibly. We begin to lose our child-like selves and become who we are not when people attack what we are, because that HURTS. When our families tell us we are not good enough, when are friends say we are annoying, when our grades say we’ll never make it, it ruins us. What saddens me is that many Christians are better at this than most other people.

I go to Seattle Pacific University, which is a Christian college. Even though it has a reputation as being the “liberal Christian college” and some people seem to thing it is a joke of a Christian school, it isn’t a joke and it is Christian. I’m going to speak in very vague terms for this story so as not to embarrass anyone. There is a guy in one of my classes who has a particular habit that drives most people nuts. Often in class he acts on this habit and every time he does there is an audible groan from the whole rest of the class. Initially, I groaned with everyone else but at some point I realized that his habit was one that I have as well. While this sounds so cliché I thought about how I would feel in his shoes and the only answer is, terrible.

As all this was running through my head, I thought about a story from Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Miller was attending Reed College, a super liberal, free thought, legal drugs etc. kind of place where nudists hardly received a second look, and there are probably three Christians in the whole place. In the story he talks about a man (whose name I can’t remember) who talked and looked just like Elmer Fudd and who didn’t know is left from his right. Miller was helping Elmer Fudd move into his dorm room and quickly found out that Elmer Fudd was essentially a genius. Miller also went on to say that through out that whole year he never heard a single person make fun of Elmer Fudd behind his back or to his face.

Isn’t that strange. In a Christian community where all should be welcome we mock this man whose habit doesn’t really inconvenience us or harm us or anything else, yet in what most would consider the most heathen of places, this man who is a little different is welcomed and a bad word is never spoken about him. This is terrible! God calls us to be child-like and confident in who we are, yet the “Christians” mock who you are and the “heathens” embrace you. No one wonder people hate church. This same thing is what turned me further from God in middle school.

In seventh grade I had a Mohawk and wore spiked bracelets, chains on my black pants, an AC/DC t-shirt and about five lbs worth of hardware on my body all the time. The principle of my private Lutheran school called me into his office when I showed up at school with the Mohawk and he informed me that my hair was a poor representation of the school and that I would have to cut it. I didn’t believe in God at this point so my thought was, “stupid Christians.” That same night I went to a new youth group where I didn’t know anybody. Right when I walked through the door I was welcomed with open arms and received lots of compliments on my hair. I have since abandoned the Mohawk and hardware but I have never stopped appreciating the people who loved on me that night.

Because of my experiences, many like the one I just described, I have developed a heart for people who hate church. I know your pain and I hate that that sort of behavior has been instilled in who we are. But I also know the love of Jesus. I know that he saved a prostitute from the pious mighty men of the church and I know that we are called to embrace everyone and that we have failed miserably at doing so. I am sorry for any of you who have been hurt by other Christians doing this very same thing and I wish I could turn back the clock and undo those things. But as it is, I am afraid all I can do is tell you that Jesus wouldn’t have wanted it to be that way, and that he does not judge you.

Post 3: Redpill vs Bluepill or God and the Matrix

The Matrix is real! No really it is! Well kind of, but more on that later...

The other day I was thinking, as I am inclined to do from time to time, specifically about where I would be without God. In consideration of the fact that I know myself pretty well, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my life would be all about sex, drugs and rock n roll if not for God. First, I would have tried drugs in middle school (when I didn’t believe in God) had they been available to me, but fortunately they weren’t. Second, I am a man, and the inner recesses of a man’s brain are ugly at best and beyond disgusting at worst when it comes to sexuality and such. Suffice it to say my history would attest to this as well and I don’t feel the need to say any more on that. Lastly, the only thing that would motivate me to do anything would be music. I would not be in college. I would not care what my parents or anyone else said. I would be in constant search for the next high, whether it was going to come from sex, drugs, or rock n roll. That would be the extent of my existence.

To explain myself further, I am reading a book right now called Things Fall Apart in which there is a character called Unoka. Unoka is known in his village for being a flute player and a drunk. Whenever Unoka manages to acquire money, he always ends up squandering it on alcohol, so his life consists of drinking and making music. I won’t lie, my natural reaction to this is, “What’s so bad about that?” shortly thereafter I recognize the hollowness of that kind of existence and how that would be essentially living for nothing.

So then what is it about that lifestyle that has such appeal? Obviously any number of musicians live their lives this way, why? That life is easy, that’s why. You don’t really have to work at music if you know how to play well enough, the most musicians still do. I suppose I should take a moment to say that any music teacher would disagree with me here and say that you have to constantly be practicing and working on you craft but really, once a degree of competency is reached it can be retained and even slowly expanded upon with no more than leisurely practice and occasional performances. Thus living this life all one would have to do is play music, which they enjoy, and drink, which they also enjoy. There is no challenge (essentially) so it’s all play and no work. I won’t lie there is still some appeal there to me, so why don’t I do it? I love Jesus too much.

Most people would interject here with, “Wait, you could totally play music for God the rest of your life and that would honor him and be fantastic.” Except that’s not what he wants me to do. That life would bring surface level pleasure, my true joy however lies in learning to know and love my Padre better, why? Because it just keeps getting better. Right when I think God has shown me his glory in the most unimaginable way, in a way, which could never be beaten, he tops it! As the Beatles said, “It’s getting better all the time.” A week or so ago I found out my roommate Matt is quite the handyman and I told him, “You just keep getting better and better!” God is the same way but on an even grander scale.

Now I must return to why I am not a drunken musician and it has everything to do with the Matrix. To re-cap, God keeps getting better all the time; he keeps showing me new and greater love all the time. I know this very well, and, as my Mom says, there are some things you can’t “un-know” once you’ve learned them, now matter how badly you want to. You’re stuck with them the rest of your life. This knowledge is one of those things. Now we have arrived at the Matrix.

In the movie “The Matrix,” when Morpheus has his hands outstretched toward Neo with the blue pill in one hand and the red pill in the other he tells Neo he has a choice. Take the red pill, and be free, but you can never go back or take the blue pill, be none the wiser, and carry on with your mediocre (at best) life. This is, obviously, a tough decision, however, the thing is, even if he chooses the red pill, which he does, he still “can” go back if he wants to. All they would have to do is plug him back into the Matrix and leave him there till he died. The problem is that he would know there was something better out there and that is “the question that drives us mad;” what if I had chosen the better life, that’s why he could never go back.

Taking the red pill is just like choosing God, and just like choosing God it’s hard. He asks us to put his will first, to choose the red pill every time. I won’t pretend that every time God has asked me to do something I have listened. In my heart I am still an awful coward of a man who, despite being very out going, has a very hard time talking to people about God if they don’t know him already. For this I need to apologize both to believers and unbelievers. To believers I am sorry that I have not taken this love we know so well and told others about it. To those of you who may not believe in God right now I must apologize even more because there are a number of you who he has told me to talk to and I haven’t. He wants you to know he loves you, he love’s you enough to send a messenger to tell you that he is thinking about you and wants you back and wants to shower you with love, unfortunately, I killed the messenger, over and over again.

I am also sorry for any promises you may have heard about the ease of the believer’s life. Accepting God’s love is easy, the life that follows is not, but it is better. The life that follows is full of love and joy unimaginable. It is full of wonders in the mundane places but it is equally full of challenges but let me tell you from experience, it is better than being a drunken musician. I could never be happy as a drunken musician now because I would know that I was denying something far better.