Peace Hacks

Years ago, I started my own church.

It’s a super long story, but Elaine and I moved to Little Rock, Arkansas for a year of training, preparation, and fundraising, then to Denver where she would work at a local hospital, and I would get started with something I had been dreaming of for a long time.

At one point in our prep year, a guy I had just met offered to donate a few pieces of art that he wanted to get rid of. He made it clear that he didn’t want to donate any money but thought his art might help. I didn’t expect much — motivational posters maybe? Instead, he handed me three original works, one by Marc Chagall, the other two by some guy named Picasso, and all the accociated certificates and paperwork.

I was blown away, as you might imagine, maybe a bit convinced that God was involved in what we were preparing to do, working a little magic here and there.

On the day of the acquisition, loaded with cardboard and bubble-wrap, I wandered around my friend’s very large front yard, waiting for him to get home. His sketchy dog followed me everywhere I went and, when the time was right, bit me on the leg. Did God do that too? Was it a sign? What did it mean? I applied my keen, theologically attuned mind to the situation and concluded that the artwork was clearly God’s seal of approval. The dog was just evil.

A few Band-Aides later, Elaine and I packed up, said goodbye to Little Rock, and headed West. As I made the 15-hour drive to Denver with $90,000 worth of art, bubble wrapped in the front seat of my U-Haul, I was full of hope. The world spread out before me like an empty high plains highway.

I couldn’t wait to get started. Our church was going to be different, finely tuned for the many in Denver who are curious/interested in hearing a bit more about Jesus, but no interest in mounting the cultural barriers so endemic to modern American Christianity.

I’ve pursued many good ideas in these 56 years of living, but few exploited my weaknesses like this one. Within two years, convinced that things shouldn’t be as hard as they were, I threw in the towel.

To this day, I question that decision. On one hand, you wouldn’t believe the mistakes I made; moments of selfishness and immaturity that still haunt me. On the other hand, what was I expecting? How could something that big be easy?

Since then, there have been a few other pursuits — equally impossible — that I’ve managed to stick with over the years. They, too, have been really good ideas, and taught me one important, albeit unfortunate truth about good pursuits.

Nothing good is easy

It’s an awful reality: if we set out to something truly good in this life, it will come bubble-wrapped in trouble.

I didn’t understand this until Elaine and I were a few years past our church planting days, two kids in, and 10 years of marriage under our belts. Up until that point, I was living under the idea that, if my life is frequently difficult, I must be doing something wrong, and/or the people I’m trying to do good things with are somehow getting in the way.

Like most humans, I’ve often blamed others for making things so difficult. Married folk know how easy that is. If your spouse would just stop/start doing XYZ, things would be so much better.

We need a scapegoat, a human one. If it’s not ourselves, it’ll need to be someone else, which is the easier of the two options, but one that will bring the most anger and bitterness into your life should you choose it.

The same goes for parenting, especially in the teenage chapters. Our kids can be impossible at times (directly proportional to their proximity to 16). In those moments we either blame them for their behavior, or we blame ourselves. In both scenarios, we’re tempted to quit; if our kids are THAT bad and/or we suck THAT much at parenting, what’s the point of engaging any of this mess?

Though I have limited experience in the pursuit of good things, I would impart one piece of wisdom to anyone hoping to help, change, feed, redirect, or otherwise improve all or part of world: you’ve chosen to dance on the devil’s lawn, and he/she/it will respond, sometimes with lethal force.

The greater the amount of good in the pursuit, it seems, the stronger the resistance.

As a believer in an all-powerful creator who self-identifies as “love,” I have no idea why the world is set up this way. Sure, many good things come out of this arrangement, but why set up the world where those good things can’t come a different way?

The reason might lie beyond our ability to understand, anathema as that is, so why not go ahead and stick with the good stuff? A life entirely void of good pursuits is going to be just as difficult, right?

The ones that I’ve stuck with have shaken the weakest, most selfish parts from me, leaving behind a fuller expression of myself and, I believe, the person God wants me to be. So, I say go, get married, start that church, adopt those kids, give till it hurts, love those teenagers, make insane sacrifices on behalf of others. When it hurts, that might be confirmation that you’re on the right track.

While I have alot of quits in my history, some of them were needed. I’ll never forget the phone call I had with my mentors a few days before we closed the doors of our church. None of them said, “NO! You’re so close. Hang in there!” They agreed, along with a few other close friends and one wife, that this might not be a good fit.

I’m still haunted by the hell of giving up on such a big dream, and the relational fallout that Elaine and I experienced afterward. Watching my friends go on to start churches that are today successful and thriving makes me feel like a bit of loser sometimes.

But I know that all good pursuits are, in addition to being difficult, very risky. Failure happens sometimes (or worse) and we’re compelled to pat ourselves on the back for trying (if we’re still alive), and move forward.

So, moving forward, I don’t want to pursue good things in a vain attempt to make myself feel better, or prove something, or redeem myself. Our world requires a bunch of people who are willing to pursue good things — damn whatever torpedoes. Some might call these folks idealistic, but the world doesn’t turn without them.

We are all tasked with the care and feeding of each other and for some reason that’s going to hurt.

And that’s a good thing.

 

30 years ago, the pastor of my small-town Texas church took his Sunday morning pulpit to declare that the House of Representatives was now under republican control. “If this doesn’t excite you” he preached, “there’s something very wrong.” As a new convert to Christianity, and somewhat uninterested in politics, it wasn’t clear to me why this was such a good thing, or what it had to do with JesusI, so I faked an approving nod and clapped along with everyone else. Over the next few years, and through hundreds of conversations about Jesus and politics, I learned that no self-respecting Christian could be anything but conservative.

From our vantage point, liberal folk didn’t care about unborn babies, or go to the right kind of church, or in general possess anything that resembled a moral compass. They were godless; modern-day Ninevites worthy of our segregation. When we spoke of them, it was less than kind, most times far afield from the precepts of love and humility outlined in our holy writ. We were good people; they posed some level of threat to just about everything we valued.

Years later, after graduating with a Master’s in Theology from one of the most conservative evangelical seminaries in the country, I married a not-so-conservative physician, moved to Colorado, and began a career in pastoral ministry. The cultural differences between Texarkana and Downtown Denver were legion, especially with regards to politics and religion. I was unprepared for the difficult, secular, highly educated conversations that followed, and painfully discovered the truth that always lurks on the other side of the story.

Since then, the divide between conservative evangelicalism and just about everyone else has widened. America got woke, elected a black president, ramped up her racial justice conversation, normalized the Gay and Trans communities, legalized pot, and in so many other ways stomped on our hot buttons like never before. By the time Trump came along, we were primed to put a stop to this nonsense. It didn’t matter that he was accused of sexual assault by a legion of women, or that he called for physical violence at his campaign rallies. The Access Hollywood tape alone should’ve ended our support.

But he spoke our language, frequently affirming that liberals were the scourge we all believed them to be. Our country was allegedly in ruin after the Obama administration and Donald Trump promised to regain everything that was lost. It didn’t matter that he did bad things; “all politicians do bad things,” we said as we ranked him the best president America has ever seen.

Up to this point, my camp had racked up loss after loss in the political arena, now threatened by anything that didn’t sound like us. It was time to fight, and this guy was our warrior. We finally had a leader who understood us, one who would stand face to face with America’s greatest evil. Maybe we’d win this time.

It’s no surprise that we gave carte blanche to the hate speech that so characterized his administration. I’m not merely referring to his personal attacks on individual politicians and others, or the way he emboldened hate groups, but his unrelenting assault on any American who doesn’t support him. In too much of his rhetoric, this cross-section of our country is said to have one aim: the destruction of America.

His magnum opus of course was his Jan 6 address to a large gathering of angry, white patriots – many of them evangelical – allegedly cheated out of an election and ready for the fight they’d been dreaming of.

“Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore…”

“We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy”

“…our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that.”

“…you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

“Our country has been under siege for a long time.”

“They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.”

“They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it.”

“…if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

None of that was intended to incite hatred and/or violence against a particular race, religion, gender identity, socio-economic status, caste, etc. By today’s definitions, Trump’s speech doesn’t qualify as hate speech. But his words were clearly intended to convince a large group of Americans that another large group of Americans must be opposed. Because he employed themes like ruthlessness, siege, assault, the indoctrination of children, and the destruction of our country, his hoped-for level of opposition was unmistakable: Trump made a call for violence without making a call for violence and his army responded accordingly.

None of that would’ve happened apart from an hour-long address that too closely resembled hate speech. The target might not qualify, but the content rivals that of any of history’s despots, influencers, and big-mouths who manipulated the emotions of their supporters and spoke hatred into being.

If Trump’s pre-riot pep-talk qualifies as hate speech on any level, we didn’t catch it. To us, it was all true. Still is. Not only was an election stolen, it was the liberals who pulled it off. “We knew this was coming,” we told ourselves, “how could we be so stupid?”

Trump’s “Stop the Steal!” rhetoric fueled our anti-liberal flames like never before.

But our problem isn’t with crafty, manipulative politicians who can convince us of just about anything. We are segregated, and our objectivity has suffered for it. Anything that doesn’t reek of white, straight, conservative, suburban evangelical Christianity cannot possibly emanate from the almighty and is therefore unholy, unclean. Evil. Any media outlet that supports the 2020 election results, for example, is clearly biased. If lawmakers launch audit after audit and determine no significant foul play, they’ve drunk the same Kool-Aid.

The same goes for other difficult issues that have arisen since Trump took office: COVID, fuel prices, inflation, etc. Any data or opinion that doesn’t indict liberal America is quickly dismissed. When the most qualified people in the world offer their rigorously researched, peer-reviewed perspective – even when theirs represents the vast majority of qualified opinion – we’ll accuse them of being part of this unprecedented, worldwide conspiracy if they in any way fail to think like we do.

We are now rid of just about anything that might challenge our point of view, or help contain the anti-everything wildfire that’s made such a smoldering mess of our objectivity.

Ironically, our contempt has segregated us from the truth and made us suckers for everything else.

That’s the fruit of segregation, especially when it’s fueled by the volatile mixture of religion and hatred. If we don’t get a handle on our hatred, our journey from truth will continue to grow, if you can imagine such a thing, as will our inability to catch it when our favorite politician, many times over, turns to the time-honored, tyrant-tested tradition of hate speech.

How many times throughout history have God-fearing people been suckered into this God-mocking garbage?

We should know better.

On October 1 of last year, I decided to quit drinking. I’m not sure if you could call my relationship with alcohol alcoholism, but there was quite a bit of alcohol in my ‘ism and it wasn’t easy to walk away. I didn’t get the shakes, or any other detox effects, but I have struggled with some pretty massive cravings over the past 12 months.

I’m trying to decide if I’ll go another year, or drink just a little bit here and there, or declare it quits forever, or somewhere in the middle, which I’m not sure is possible.

On the upside, I’ve made some interesting discoveries – as anyone who moves into a place they’ve never been. One in particular stands out on this anniversary.

When I think about a non-alcoholic future, especially with regards to the approaching holidays, it makes me sad. I have friends and family that drink on a regular basis (some on a more-than-regular basis), and we spend a fair amount of time together in the latter parts of the year. I don’t look forward to someone pulling out a nice bottle of whiskey, or the temptations that come along during tree-trimming time when the egg-nog comes out. One can only drink so many NA beers.

However, when I think about the past, I feel good, happy, a bit proud. I struggled in those moments when I had to sit and watch everyone drink, but the memory of it isn’t that bad. I feel no different thinking back on it than I would if I had drank.

Aside from the frustration when the restaurant bill is evenly divided and I have to contribute to everyone else’s booze fest, I have OK memories of the moments when everyone else was drinking and I wasn’t.

In general, my NA past life has been fine – maybe more than fine.

But when I think about an NA future, it seems sad, like I just broke up with a girlfriend who’s going to be at every party from here to eternity.

The way I think about past and future is interesting. It’s helpful to allow past experiences to shape my perspective on whether or not the future will be good.

It’s super helpful when I think of parenting. When I consider the future, what comes to mind are the very real sacrifices that are required, while the past is full of wonderful memories that keep me going. I would trade them for nothing. I remember the bad times, but they’re a small part of something much more powerful and easily worth the pain.

Forgive me, I’ve said this before, but all good pursuits are difficult. That’s been my experience. All the good that I’ve tried to do in this life has been attended by multiple ass kickings. There’s no way around it.

These days, when future trials, sacrifices, and heartaches (that haven’t happened) get me depressed, I try to sit down with an old photo album or some other reminder of how good things have been, and find a little hope for how they will be.

That’s helpful as I think about what this next year will look like, and whether or not alcohol will have a place in it.

 

Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash