So I had to write a “Formal Bio” due for the leadership institute I have just begun and said bio was due on July 31st. I ended up turning it in around August 10th. I had intentions to complete it before the deadline and had even sat down a few times to write it, and yet to no avail.
This lack of turning in an assignment on time is outside of my norm. Dating all the day back to my days in Mr. Lyons’s first grade class, I have distinct memories of being an overachiever/grade grubber/try hard/insert your favorite term here. However, in this particular situation, every time I sat down to write my seemingly facile bio, it seemed to turn into an extended time of contemplative introspection and existential musing. (Weirdly enough, the first grade math worksheets I was so eager to turn in on time didn’t trigger quite the same reaction.)
And yet, there I was, on August 8th with just a bunch of bullet points (and here again on September 9th finally finishing up this post). And, instead of writing the bio, I am writing this blog post due to the above-mentioned introspection this assignment has inspired. One would think that writing a short professional paragraph about myself would be easy. Or even manageable. I was even given some guiding questions to inspire content creation, which, for someone like me, is ideal! Give me structure, give me constraints, I want to make sure I do it right. And yet, those questions I thought would be so helpful have been the collective author of my responsibility demise.
Apparently when studying ancient Greek philosophy (you know, as we all do in our free time), I must have skipped over Plato’s humble suggestion to “know thyself” because questions like “What are some things you have been passionate about in your life and college experience?” and “What experiences have shaped you and how?” have been stumping me for the past couple weeks. I have gotten into the habit of sitting down, thinking about these questions, writing down a few lines, looking over said lines, and then spiraling into a journey of thoughts that may or may not be tangentially related to my initial task. I don’t think it’s necessarily writer’s block, but rather the opposite. I have too much to say about these topics, yet I have nothing to write that would be appropriate for a professional bio I’m supposed to send to prospective employers.
For example, question number 4 on this list is “What ministry experiences have shaped you and how?” I started writing some things about summer camp and Navs (the campus ministry in which I dabbled), but then I continued to think. I would be lying if I said those experiences and organizations hadn’t helped to shape me, but the main reason that’s where my mind went first was because I thought that was the “right” answer because those were “ministries”. However, as I continued to reflect, I began to realize that the instances where I have most thoroughly understood and believed my faith have been through conversations and interactions with communities of non-Christians.
I thought of how easy it is for me to remind my Christian friends about how their “worldly” accomplishments don’t define them because their identity rests in the fact that Jesus loves them so much that he came to die for their sins. I often say these things because I think I’m “supposed to”, but in the midst of these conversations, I often find myself wondering if I even believe the words coming out of my mouth. I know what I’m saying may comfort my audience and I desperately want to be a source of comfort for my friends, so Jesus-talk it is.
However, it is when interacting with non-Christian friends that I am forced to confront this default “right” answer because outside of Christianity, the Christian answer definitely isn’t “right” and could often been seen as rather nonsensical. Take for example any situation in life that seems hopeless: a malignant tumor, a ceaseless addiction, a broken marriage.
No matter how you look at it, these things are really hard. When my Christian friends experience such trials, it can feel comforting to remind them of the hope of Jesus: disease is not eternal; addiction is not eternal; infidelity is not eternal. No matter how excruciatingly painful these experiences are, Christians believe that this broken world we live in will one day be redeemed and we will be reunited with our perfect creator without tears or pain (Revelation 21:1-4). No matter how bad things get here on Earth (and according to 1 Peter 4:12-16 we can expect them to get relatively bad), we can have hope because of Jesus.
I have spent years comforting friends with such knowledge because when I see a friend suffering, all I want to do is to make it better. So before I stop to consider if I actually believe the words coming out of my mouth, I tend to spew them left and right because I think the listener will be comforted. This is all fine and dandy and I hope that my friends appreciate the quantity of bumbling words that attempts to make up for the lack of total and complete conviction behind them.
However, words can only provide comfort if they are believed. So, if someone thinks of “God” as a way for Americans to justify patriotism or homophobia or that Jesus was just a crazy Jew who lived a few thousand years ago, then telling them that whatever is happening in their lives will be okay because of Jesus is not only unhelpful, but could be quite offensive. If someone told me that some ancient figurehead who I primarily associate with justification for intolerance was the answer to my suffering, I would be offended.
So what to do? How can I provide hope for someone who can’t find it anywhere, who has searched for it in human connection or achievement or self-control or karma or luck? How can I tell someone that things will be okay when everything that has happened in their life seems to be evidence to the contrary?
The answer is, I can’t. I can’t tell someone that it will be okay because maybe it won’t. Maybe things will be better tomorrow, but maybe they’ll be worse. And there is often nothing I can do to assuage that reality because there is nothing I have found on this Earth that can guarantee healing and righteousness (although I’ve only been here for 23 years so I won’t sit here and pretend to be an expert on all the secrets and idiosyncrasies of this planet). And that is terrifying.
I would feel much more comfortable in a world of guaranteed healing and righteousness, but a glance down any street across the globe would reveal that unfortunately, that world does not seem to be the reality. I don’t believe in the hope of Jesus because it is convenient or logical or easy. Rather, I believe in it because my life relies on it. Because broken is a really hard thing to be and I can relate to the hopelessness in people’s voices when everything in their lives is telling them that life’s not worth living.
When I listen to someone who’s covered in wounds that continue to be inundated with salt, who has been betrayed again and again by the things of this world that promise hope, whose story breaks hearts as they seem to just keep getting knocked down, I more fully understand the gospel. For most of my life, I have “put hope in Jesus” while actually putting hope in things like my intelligence, finances, relationships, and health. But those things can be taken away in an instant and each time they have been stripped from me, I have experienced the hopelessness that I hear so clearly in the voices of my fellow broken.
All of these things that we rely on and put hope in are temporary and life can be brutally unfair. Those who have experienced this injustice and this pain and have nowhere to turn remind me of the only place I know to look. Because when I look to myself or my circumstances to find value and meaning, I find flaws and brokenness and the potential for failure at any moment, not unlike building a house on sand, which is advised against in Matthew 7.
All this to say, as seems to be the trend in the upside down kingdom of God, it has been experiences of brokenness without Jesus that have most authentically revealed to me the need for the grace and hope that can only be found in him. An unpopular opinion I suppose but alas! Such is life.
(I didn’t really know how to conclude this post, so the word document has been sitting open on my computer for a few weeks. Therefore, I would like to report that I did indeed submit the above-mentioned required bio and it can be seen below. A woman who read it came up to me and told me she would mail me a book she just wrote about algorithms and bias! Huzzah!)
