Or would you be spending time with family and friends? Would you be polishing off that last item on your bucket list? Would you be taking a few minutes to write a letter to a long lost acquaintance or a word of advice to a youthful relative?

Throughout life, we’re given ample opportunity to reflect on the blessings around us. The relationships we’ve built, the personal items we’ve acquired, the experiences we’ve lived. It’s amazing the richness of life we possess when we truly take a minute to look back.

Every achievement we can reflect on with joy. Every challenge we’ve faced and by living still, overcome. Every friend or relative who has entered and touched our story.

These situations are not rare, yet the number of times we take a moment to truly reflect on what they offer us are.

Understanding the ways in which you’re blessed help pave the way for how you can, in turn, be a blessing to others. Your story can help educate members of the next generation. Your skills can be passed down. Your history can provide guidance – both instructive and cautionary – to those who follow.

But it depends entirely on you. On how much you’re willing to share. On how much you’re willing to invest in those who come after you.

Christmas is a celebration of second chances. It’s the celebration of the day the Word of God was made flesh and entered a sinful world in order to redeem it and give us all a second chance at salvation. The story is a wonderful one, and reflecting on it annually gives us the opportunity to look at where else we’re given a second chance.

You have a second chance to approach your job with an enhanced attitude of appreciation and gratitude. You have a second chance to mend a relationship with a long lost friend or an estranged relative. You have a second chance to evaluate your life’s overall trajectory and make mid-course adjustments.

Christmas is a blessing that gives us the chance to reflect on and appreciate our manifold blessings. The day after Christmas gives us a second chance to look at our lives through new eyes and better answer the question: if today were your last day, how would you spend it?

Would it be a day well spent?

The post If Today Were Your Last … appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I’ve witnessed very few miracles in my life, but each is precious to me.

Unending Pizza

I wrote before about the miraculous experience we had at the Portland Rescue Mission one night while serving pizza. We knew only 12 pizzas were delivered – not nearly enough to feed our 200+ guests. The guys in the kitchen started making some macaroni and cheese, but none of us were confident we’d have enough food to feed everyone.

Worse still, the weather brought in more guests than usual – we were looking at a crowd upwards of 300 people.

Somewhat miraculously, though, the pizzas kept coming. We quickly polished off the 12 boxes of pizza we’d seen delivered. Then we found another box of pizza warming in the oven. Then another box. Then another.

We fed every guest. We covered seconds. We fed the residents. We fed the volunteers. We still had leftovers.

No one knew where the extra food came from, but we were all gracious for having it. Truly an amazing night.

The Dream Job

Unlike most of my friends, I never had a part-time job while I was in high school. My “job” was school itself. To that end, I challenged myself my senior year by taking 6 advanced placement courses and adding a 7th period for band.

I studied hard, but as graduation grew closer – and it became more apparent just how much college (and books) was going to cost me – I realized I was at a disadvantage. My friends all had summer jobs lined up. I didn’t.

I started filling out applications everywhere I could. I applied to every store at the mall, the movie theater, every fast-food chain in the area, the grocery store, the video rental store, everywhere. I even applied to work with my dad for the summer, something that should have been a given; I didn’t even get an interview.

After the third time even McDonalds refused to hire me, I realized I was in a bad spot. I sat down at the family computer and filled out a form on Monster.com, desperate for anything at this point. Then I stopped, closed my eyes, and prayed for a job.

The phone rang.

“Can I please speak to Eric Mann?”

“This is Eric.”

“Hi, this is Scott from Camp Cooper. Your younger brother’s working with us this summer, and it came to me that you might be interested in joining us, too. Basically, we need people. Do you want a job?”

I accepted over the phone and started as the Archery Instructor at Camp Cooper two days later. It began four seasons of what has been the most challenging, enriching, and fulfilling job I’ve had in my entire life.

Making Connections

My introduction to college wasn’t the smoothest of rides. I started in the marching band, hoping to hold on to at least one hobby/sport/activity from high school to ease the transition.

Unfortunately, the first day of band camp was set up specifically to humiliate former section leaders and drum majors to put us in our “rightful place” as obedient underclassmen. No matter what we did or how willingly we followed even the most insane of directions, we were forced to run extra miles, do extra pushups, and rehearse late into the night.

It was so stressful I couldn’t eat or sleep at all. I quit before the end of the week.

This left me living on campus, alone, a full week before other students would arrive. I was a bit stressed out. Luckily, the university was holding an info day for student groups that Saturday. I pinned the flyer to my mini fridge and looked forward to finding a way to meet other people on campus.

Saturday came and I trekked to the student union, hoping to avoid my former bandmates and their judging looks. Eerily, the union was empty. None of the clubs seemed to be there – save one.

Two people were sitting at a table arguing about whether or not they’d missed the event. I walked up and introduced myself, learning for the first time about Chi Alpha and making my first friends on campus.

It turned out, the event was really on Sunday but somehow both Chia Alpha and I received misprinted flyers that said it was on Saturday. I helped them pack their brochures and signs back into the van, then we all went out to lunch to laugh at the confusion.

I was an active member of Chi Alpha for the next two years. We had weekly Bible studies and worship services. I went on retreats with the group. I got to know a lot of people through the organization, and it’s one of the primary forces I credit with helping me get through college.

Had we not both received misprinted flyers, there’s no chance I would have ever found Chi Alpha, let alone become involved with the group for so long.

All Around Us

There is much about the world that is unexplained – not all of it is miraculous, often the unexplained is just a lack in our understanding of this place we call home. But sometimes, events conspire in such a way as to present seemingly impossible circumstances and coincidences.

Like more than enough food to feed a crowd of hungry people.

Or an unsolicited job offer from an unexpected source at a moment of need.

Or a friend and mentor when one is so desperately needed.

You don’t have to look too far to find answered prayers and miracles all around. You just have to be willing to look.

The post Mired in Mystery appeared first on Eric A Mann.

That’s a load of crap.

Regardless of the culture involved, there are some things that are always wrong whether or not the culture recognizes them as such. Rape is always wrong. Murder is always wrong. Discriminating against someone because they’re different than you is always wrong.

Trying to make the argument that any of these inherently evil things are acceptable is trying to bake intrinsic evil into the culture that allows them. The thing is, I don’t believe anyone is inherently evil; nor do I believe a culture is inherently evil, either. However, everyone is always given to be selfish, and the evils above are rooted in manifestations of that selfishness.

That doesn’t make them excusable or acceptable.

Torture

Another such evil is torture. It’s something that happens in this world, it’s something that perpetrators (and benefactors) will always try to justify, but it’s also something that is always evil and wrong.

Last week, a Senate report disclosed the lengths to which American officials tortured prisoners suspected of terrorist activities. Whether you call these techniques torture or “enhanced interrogation,” the fact remains that individuals representing the United States used methods specifically designed to inflict pain and fear to extract information from prisoners. ¹

Later last week, a justice on the US Supreme Court came out in support of these practices:

“I think it is very facile for people to say ‘Oh, torture is terrible,'” [Justice Antonin Scalia] said. “You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people.

“You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?” ²

Whether or not someone would act in a certain way when pushed to their limits does not necessarily justify it. If someone were to attack, injure, or kill a member of my family, I would very likely be driven to some form of retaliation. That does not excuse or justify my actions.

If I was in a position where I knew there was a ticking bomb in play, I had in captivity an individual who knew the location of said device, and it was up to me to stop them … I’d probably be driven to do something terrible to get that information. Again, this does not excuse or justify my actions, but it does explain them.

I am not God. My willingness to act when given no other option does not justify that action or make it morally acceptable.

Humans tend to be selfish, and we’ll often take the easiest way out of a situation if given the option. Torturing a prisoner in the hope of extracting information is easy. It’s also morally reprehensible and makes us no better than the alleged terrorists from whom we try to extract that information.

They use violence to instill fear in us. We use their imprisonment paired with violence to instill fear in them. At the end of the day, torture lowers us to the same plane as the criminals and monsters we seek to defend against. Then we take a step further and aim to provide legal (or even moral) justifications for our actions.

That a justice on the Supreme Court would defend such behavior is absolutely chilling. That so many people have supported his hollow argument even more so.

There is a such thing as a more absolute. Torture is absolutely wrong.

The post Moral Absolutes appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I made it past the check-in box and held the door for a guy delivering pizza. Apparently it was once again pizza night at the shelter. Most often, the residents prepare a meal for the guests, but this week it looked like a local business had arranged to deliver pizza instead. ¹

Unfortunately, he only had 12 boxes of pizza. ² Twelve boxes, multiplied by 10 slices per box, is only an entree for 120 guests. On average, we serve between 200-250 guests. On colder nights – or once word gets out that it’s pizza night – that number crawls above 300. There was no way 120 slices of pizza was going to work out.

I raised a concern with the guys in the kitchen, and we all double-checked our count. We had 12 boxes of donated pizza – they were numbered – and no real backup plan for when we ran out of food. They scrambled and started heating up some macaroni and cheese so we could fall back to something warm when the pizza disappeared.

We opened the doors, and our guests came in excited when they saw pepperoni on the plates.

I was serving the entree – the pizza – and felt bad only giving people one slice at a time. Some of the guests were really hungry and got back in line for seconds, another reason for me to worry about our limited food supply.

I finished off box after box, and kept calling to the kitchen to get updates on the waiting mac & cheese. It wasn’t looking good; the macaroni was going to work, but wasn’t going to be warm.

One of the cooks fired up the warmer oven and got ready to put the rack of macaroni in … but found instead a few more boxes of already warm pizza.

He kept bringing things out to me. We served box 12. Then box 15. Then box 20.

We kept finding more pizza in the kitchen. Every time the cook went back with an empty box, he found a full, fresh box of pepperoni pizza just out of the oven. When we were done with the night, we’d severed just north of 300 people – and had three full pizzas left over.

We started the night with a clean kitchen. We started the night with twelve numbered boxes of pizza. We started the night praying that God would provide for the guests.

We ended the night with thirty-one empty pizza boxes and three full ones. We ended the night having fed 307 guests with plenty of left-overs for all of the volunteers who wanted any. We ended the night with no explanation where the other twenty-one boxes of pizza had come from.

Like the first twelve boxes, these ones were numbered. “13 of, “14 of,” etc. No one had made a second delivery. No one in the kitchen or at the front desk saw more than twelve pizzas come in. No one had any idea what had happened.

For the first time in my life, I witnessed an event that can only be called miraculous.

I’m thankful every day that miracles like this happen and that they’re possible in the first place.

The post Witnessing a Miracle appeared first on Eric A Mann.

Just fifteen minutes.

Often, we’ll sit down to build out a to-do list for a day, a week, a year, and we populate it with more work than we can possibly accomplish in that time period. Our daily task list contains at least 10 hours of work, more than we can reasonably accomplish in an 8-hr workday.

Our yearly task list contains perhaps 5 years worth of bucket list worthy items. It’s unreasonable to think we’ll come even close.

We set milestones. We fall short. We grow discouraged and begin to doubt if we’ll ever reach the finish line. If we’ll ever reach the next milestone at all.

Running a Marathon

I’ve run three marathons in my life, and even more half-marathons. Every one is an exercise not in endurance, but in recognizing the difference between milestones and more reasonable accomplishments.

At the starting line, imagining you can run “a marathon” seems fun. A few miles in, you’re still excited about completing “a marathon.” Then the fatigue sets in. The pace group you were following has inched farther ahead and you notice another pace group – or two – coming up from behind. Your iPod shows you’ve dropped a few seconds from your usual mile time, and your internal estimates of distance start to feel off.

Mile twelve seems like it was intentionally misplaced by a block. Mile fourteen seems to have moved a few blocks farther down the course. By mile eighteen, you no longer care about “the marathon.” You see a sign offering “free rides to the finish and a consolation beer for quitters” and debate following that guy in the red shirt who shrugs and walks off the course.

I didn’t grow up a runner. When I signed up for my first 5K race, everyone thought I was nuts. My first half marathon, only the friends running with me actually believed I’d go. My first marathon … people actively tried to talk me out of running.

But I signed up. I showed up. And I finished the race. My trick: I stopped counting the milestones.

Instead, I made deals with myself. “OK legs, if you keep up this pace until that next car, then I’ll slow down and let you relax a bit.”

Mile seventeen, I realized my bad running form had strained my IT band. Running was painful – walking even more so. I kept going, but the thought of making it to mile eighteen – let alone the finish line – seemed ridiculous. So rather than wait for the next milestone, I gauged my progress in city blocks and car lengths.

I broke the insurmountable task of completing a marathon into achievable chunks. Every car passed was a victory. Every intersection a celebration.

By the time I finished the race, limping, sore, dehydrated, and exhausted, I had a huge grin on my face. I didn’t just complete the marathon, I ran another block without stopping! Oh, and when they put a medal around my neck I realized that all of those blocks I’d just run added up to 26.2 miles. I’d finished what I thought I’d never do – what everyone had been telling me was impossible.

I ran a marathon, one block at a time.

Life is a Marathon

As I’m now in month 11 of a year-long blogging effort, people ask with increasing frequency how I manage to keep it up. They point out the effort it takes to devise new topics and sit down to write.

“I don’t have enough room in my schedule for that,” is the most common comment I hear.

Really, though, my secret isn’t that I write a year’s worth of content. It’s that I sit down and work for fifteen minutes at a time. While I wait for the coffee to brew, in between meetings that ended too early, while I wait for the bus.

All yearly blogging takes is a year of random fifteen-minute periods strung together.

It’s amazing what you can do, how much you can produce, and how far you can run when you break the seemingly impossible task into smaller objectives.

The post Fifteen Minutes appeared first on Eric A Mann.

Unfortunately, a large college often means freshman-level classes are equally large.

Often, introductory-level classes have several hundred to a thousand students. Lecture halls are enormous, and no one usually gets direct access to the professor – there are often teaching aides who fill office hours instead. If you want to dive deeper into the content, you instead ask a TA or create a study group that meets outside of class to study the content further.

It’s this experience in particular that drove my brother to attend a far smaller school. Even introductory classes were limited in size, presenting direct access to the subject matter expert if you have questions.

I see these patterns somewhere outside academia, too.

The Church

Over the past several years, America has witnessed the rise of the mega church. Congregations of, at most, a few hundred tightly-knit individuals have gradually been replaced by bodies of several thousand believers, many who attend church just for the worship and sermon and never meet their fellow attendees.

The sermons are fantastic, impactful, and inspiring. The worship services are amazing and moving. But the fact that we worship and learn in an audience of thousands with little deeper connection to the material feels very much like Christianity 101 would at a large university.

Home churches and small groups likewise feel very much like the study groups we used to form freshman year to muddle through introductory chemistry without the professor.

What, then, would a 400-level church look like? In academia, this is a small group of people being led and taught by a qualified subject matter expert. How would we replicate this within the Church?

The post Mega Churches and Freshman-level Lecture Hall appeared first on Eric A Mann.

Throughout my walk with Christ, I’ve found music to be an amazingly powerful influence within the Church. I’ve seen music help bridge different generations. I’ve seen entire church plants formed around specific styles of musical worship. I’ve seen music used to reach out of the Christian bubble and talk directly to the greater community.

But I’ve also seen music used in very dangerous ways, twisting and corrupting theology into an unfamiliar mess.

Where I Belong

At one point, one of my favorite songs on Christian radio was Where I Belong by Building 429. The chorus is very singable, and I still find myself humming the tune from time to time.

All I know is I’m not home yet
This is not where I belong
Take this world and give me Jesus
This is not where I belong

When I first heard the song, I didn’t think much of it. I liked the tune, I liked the majority of the lyrics, and I’d belt it out at the top of my lungs while driving down the freeway. ¹ It wasn’t until later that I understood just how messed up the theology presented in the song really is.

The gist is that we humans are made for another world – heaven. That what happens in this world doesn’t matter because we’re waiting for our savior to take us “home” to heaven instead. It was a sentiment heavily cited by those I knew deep in debt – why worry about it when this isn’t our home in the first place? It was also heavily quoted by global warming deniers – if the world really is getting warmer, why does it matter since we’re going somewhere else anyway?

I decided to dig into the scripture to see what the Bible actually said.

One of the singers quotes the book of Philippians as being an inspiration for the song. Specifically:

But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ ²

The “citizenship” argument has been used by many to claim we don’t belong here, but are instead meant for another world in the future. Unfortunately, they’re completely off-base.

Made for Earth

In the beginning, God created the Earth and he created mankind out of the earth in order to tend the Garden of Eden in partnership with Him. Considering that the first man, Adam, was literally made from the Earth and the idea that we weren’t made for Earth seems even more preposterous.

The second part of the argument above that fails is that Paul, the author of Philippians, was saying we weren’t meant to be a part of the world in his letter. Instead, think carefully about who the letter was actually authored for: Roman Christians living in a colony. In the old world, when you moved to a colony you were leaving behind all you knew to live in a new place and build a new home. Your citizenship still belonged to Rome, but you were never going to call Rome “home” again.

Instead, your job as a colonist was to bring Rome to your new home. To bring in its culture, its literature, its art, it language, its government, its very way of life. With this in mind, imagine the impact of telling a Roman colonist that their citizenship is not of Rome but is of heaven. That means your home is Earth, and your responsibility is to bring heaven’s culture, literature, art, language, government, ³, and very way of life to your new home.

We were tailor-made for Earth. This is our home, and it’s our responsibility to live here and help usher in God’s kingdom and reign. To say we’re not home or that we’re really meant for another place is terrifying.

The Scary Part

If the Earth is not our home and not our responsibility, then why does God leave us here? Why do we care about keeping the oceans clean, protecting the environment, preventing the extinction or over-predation of various species? If we treated the Earth the way people treat hotels, rental cars, or any other form of temporary property, the planet and all who inhabit it would be doomed.

God made the world and called it good. He made us and tasked us with ruling over the Earth and subduing it. How is it, then, not our home?

A Horrifying Picture

Remember we’re talking primarily about music and the uniting power it holds over communities and populations. I had the opportunity to attend a Building 429 concert last year – they were performing with a handful of other groups I enjoy and I was looking forward to the entire concert.

Until they began singing Where I Belong.

The concert venue can hold almost 20,000 people, and was filled nearly to capacity. My friends and I were surrounded mostly by youth groups – various churches had sent shuttle buses to the concert so as many local youth could attend as possible. ⁴ It was a packed house – so when the band threw the words on the screen behind them and asked the audience to join in, I heard almost 20,000 teens shout at the top of their lungs:

“All I know is I’m not home yet … this is not where I belong …”

Singing and connecting with the music, and believing the truth behind the lyrics deep in their being. I saw a small group of people on stage lead a crowd of thousands off track with a very dangerous theology. It also made me wonder just how many bought in to the actual ideas versus how many just followed along with the crowd.

The post Dangerous Theology appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I’ve both found jobs through connections made on Twitter and helped Twitter friends find work.

The online communities of which I’m a part are amazing. But is “community” the right word?

This past Sunday, our pastor had a lot to say about the idea of community and how a real community is a physical thing. It’s a group of people in a place and using the word to define the relationships formed online through the Twitters and Facebooks and Instagrams of the world cheapens the term and reduces the (perceived) value of real community.

Considering he’s coming off a 3-month sabbatical from both teaching and social networking, I can see where he’s coming from. Hearing his explanation still had me bristling a bit. After all, I place a very high value on my “communites,” so his critique of people who place too much value in these non-relationships hit a little close to home.

Tuesday morning, my first visit to Facebook was met with this video:

Independently, neither really say too much to me. But coming just days apart, while I’m also feeling particularly burnt out on the whole concept of maintaining virtual relationships with individuals across timezones, state boundaries, and continents these two critiques of “social” networking were incredibly revealing.

Taking a Break

Starting today, I’m taking a break from both Twitter and Facebook for at least a month.

I’ll still keep my accounts open. I’ll still tell WordPress to automatically-broadcast whenever I publish. But I won’t open either site or interact with them until November at the least. This is as much a “digital detox” as it is a personal experiment: I want to see if disconnecting from the always-on worlds of digital networks has a real impact on my in-real-life relationships.

I fully expect to update you next month with the results. If nothing else, it will be a personally-fulfilling endeavor.

The post Digital Detox appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I loaded up with two 1-liter bottles of water – one with plain water, one with Gatorade mix to help restock electrolytes. ¹ With ample streams nearby and bearable heat overhead, this seemed to be more than enough.

Except it was a dry heat that sucked the moisture right out of your throat; we all ended up drinking twice what we were used to. My 2 bottles of water, which would have lated an 8-mile hike any other day, were both completely empty in less than 4.

I stopped at a river crossing and filled up – both my bottles and those of the rest of the group. Then we pushed on.

And the mosquitoes followed us.

I’m not affected by mosquito bites aside from being annoyed at being bitten. Everyone else, on the other hand, was itchy and swollen. We hiked even faster to avoid the clouds of insects, and the majority of our water was gone long before we reached our destination.

I made it to camp about an hour after my water ran out. Severely dehydrated, I’d stopped sweating, had a horrible headache, and despite having eaten nothing but trail mix since daybreak, couldn’t even stomach the thought of food. We pooled our bottles together, and two of us braved the clouds of bugs to trek back to the creek for refills.

I’ve never been thirstier in my life.

The next day we arrived on more heavily trafficked trails – that featured real campgrounds ² and even running water from a drinking fountain. Every time we passed water, or a lake, or a stream we’d stop and top off our already full water bottles. No one, not even me, wanted to risk running dry again.

The day after we made it home from the trip, I met another group of friends to attend a conference at the Rose Garden Arena in Portland.

It was a hot day, hotter than it’d been in California where I was backpacking. I had an empty water bottle with me so I could fill up from a drinking fountain when I went inside (sports arenas have this stupid rule about no outside beverages, including water). It was so hot, though, that the vendors from inside started coming outside and peddling bottles of water to the crowd waiting in line.

Just as the line started to move.

I saw men and women by 1.5-liter bottles of water, remove the cap, and pour the water out on the ground so they could take the bottle into the arena. After spending a week in the mountains where every single drop of water was a precious, valuable, life-giving, hard-earned thing I watched people purchase water for no other reason than to pour it on the ground so they could use the container.

Before that day I thought people who cried over water were insane. On that day I joined in their insanity.

Through a lack of drinkable water I discovered just how vital it was and just how much I’d learned to take it for granted. I was angry at myself and ashamed for how I’d lived before learning that lesson. It’s fundamentally changed me as a result.

Fasting

This week starts an event called Seven at my church. It’s an event where my church, in partnership with churches around the city gather to fast and pray together for a movement of God in Portland.

The goal is a seven-day fast. This is intense for anyone not experienced with fasting, and still intense even for those who are. The first year I participated, Seven happened to coincide with the Portland Marathon – I pushed to fast for the entire week before running a marathon. ³ Since then, I’ve used this week as an opportunity to reflect on things in my life I’ve begun to take for granted.

Things I don’t normally consider.

Things of this world that separate me from God.

Having limited access to water on a hiking trip taught me to better respect the gift of plentiful, drinkable water we have on hand. Fasting from food before running a marathon taught to to appreciate the wonderful food we have available – and just how available it is – and how it empowers us to do reckless things like run for 5-6 hours straight.

Fasting from television (and the horrors or myths of horrors perpetrated by the media) helps show other places and avenues to look for information and entertainment. The world is full of beauty, and that beauty is deeper than an electronic box of light in the corner of the room.

I can’t say for any one person what kind of a fast will be helpful or educational to them at any given time. That’s between you and God. All I can say is that scarcity, planned or unplanned, helps shine a light on the dependencies in your life. It exposes the lack of gratitude we have for gifts of our existence. It helps bring us closer to the God of the universe.

The post Fasting appeared first on Eric A Mann.

But I didn’t really get it.

I’m a naturally inquisitive person, and my childhood was no exception. I asked questions all the time and was often criticized for it by my teachers. Apparently mine wasn’t what anyone expected a “childlike faith” to be.

High school really challenged me.

First off, I had a major falling out with my youth group. One Wednesday night, our youth pastor presented a topic I didn’t quite understand – or at least I didn’t understand the way he presented it. When I raised my hand to ask a question, I got a shock:

Look, this is the way it is. If you disagree or just don’t get it, then you’re going straight to hell and that’s a fact. Don’t try to argue, don’t try to change the subject.

I was mad. I didn’t understand his lesson, and my attempt at asking a question was met with not just condemnation but damnation. I pushed back and actually voiced my confusion and my frustration that he was ignoring my question.

Eric, you’re no different. This is a simple message. If you don’t get it, then you have some serious problems in your life and obviously don’t know God.

Apparently I didn’t.

That was the last night I went to youth group. I stopped paying attention to sermons on Sundays and would skip as often as I could find an excuse.

I didn’t consider myself a Christian any longer.

Conservative

I realized at about the same time that all of my opinions about the world were heavily rooted in conservative Christianity. Political stances, social opinions, my outlook on other races and people groups – I had accepted what mainstream Christianity taught without asking why because I was so busy asking about theology.

A guy in my English class pushed back pretty hard on one point in general. He and I were assigned to debate one another, and for some reason I let him pick the topic. He wanted to debate homosexuality and the related laws in Oregon. I was laughably unprepared.

His arguments were well thought-out. Mine typically devolved into “um, just because.” He won the debate (obviously), then approached me later after class.

“Why are you so afraid of gay people?”

“Because it’s unnatural. They might want to do something to me. Shouldn’t I be?”

“Even if you think it’s gross to see two guys kissing, there’s no reason to be afraid of it. You’re not interested in them, so they’re not going to try to kiss you if that’s what you’re worried about. How does two strangers living their lives affect you?”

Um …

It opened my eyes into just how one-sided my opinions had been in the past. Recognizing the closed-mindedness I’d embraced for so long helped me break it and begin to move on. As a result of that particular discussion in class, one of my best friends came out to me that year. After other friends saw me not reject him, they started coming out as well.

Juxtaposing my previous fear and hatred of homosexuals with the fact that several of my friends – all good people I cared for and respected – were gay broke my world apart. From that day forward, I’ve questioned every single opinion I’ve formed.

Including the one that drove me to abandon the church of my youth.

Return

The girl I was seeing at the time was a very devout Christian. I felt bad for essentially lying about my beliefs (I still went to church with my parents when forced and publicly labelled myself as a believer because it avoided the awkward “what changed” questions), so I wanted to write down an explanation of what I believed and why.

I started with a single line: “there is no such being as God.”

What followed were 10 pages of detailed analysis of transcription errors in the Bible, lack of historical corroboration, major missteps by the Church ¹ in general, and the political closed-mindedness and coldness towards others perpetuated by the rigid conservatism of Christianity.

I felt it was a good explanation, and I was ready to both give it to her and to my other friends as a final “out” of the facade I’d been wearing.

Then she dumped me. It wasn’t necessary any longer.

But another friend invited me to a concert. It was for a Christian group I’d used to listen to, and he intended it to be an end-of-our-high-school-career celebration. Since this group was the same group who’d performed at my first ever concert, I wanted to go for nothing more than spending time with friends and the nostalgia of seeing the group perform again.

I forgot how edgy their music was.

Their sound was a mix of hip hop, rap, rock, grunge, and threw in a bit of metal every now and then. Their lyrics. For the first time I actually listened and heard the pain and the struggle in their art. How they were setting themselves apart from the world while also blasting through it and playing with a very worldly sound that appealed even to people like me.

For the first time I realized I wasn’t alone in asking questions, and started asking again.

For the first time I recognized that, as I’d been wrong about so many things before, I might have been wrong again for the past three years.

For the first time I understood that not every minister or pastor agreed with the youth pastor who’d condemned me for asking a question.

For the first time I heard an audible voice cutting through the music saying, “I’m here. I’m real.”

Finding Myself

I took this renewed sense of curiosity to college. The same friend who’d invited me to the concert challenged me to seek out Campus Crusade when I made it to school. I did, and was far less than impressed with their approach and the number of superficial people in the organization. I wanted something deeper.

I decided to attend the campus “club day” to see if there were any groups I could meet with to get my questions answered. Unfortunately, I got dates somewhat mixed in my head and showed up at the student union a day early.

Oddly enough, the leader of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship had also gotten dates mixed up and was the only table set up in the union. I helped him load everything back in his van, and we went for coffee. Unlike pastors in my youth, Jack was willing to say “I don’t know” and dig deeper into questions for me.

Had my friend not invited me to that concert, I would have stopped asking questions entirely.

Had Jack not shown up on the wrong day to set up his booth, we’d never have met and I’d never have gotten many of my questions answered.

These two unrelated and unlikely coincidences started stirring something inside me, and I started reevaluating the 10-page denouncement of faith I’d written in high school. I realized that faith isn’t something you just accept. It’s not something that just happens.

Faith is a choice.

I will never have all the answers, and even if I could have all my questions answered I’ll never know all the questions to ask. We look at the world through eyes of imperfect beings with partial information. Making decisions based on that information, and being willing to revisit those decisions when information changes, is the only way we can resist being paralyzed by the sheer amount of information we don’t have.

I choose to follow Christ. I choose to study the Bible. I choose to live my life in such a way as to be an example of Christ in the world.

I don’t have all the answers, and probably never will. I could be wrong, but I choose to walk confidently that I’m not and choose to seek out both knowledge that strengthens and challenges my belief so I can have a fuller picture of the world around me, my faith, and how the two blend together.

If you’re a believer, I’ll invite you to church with me. If you’re not a believer, I’ll invite you all the same. I’ll also invite you to coffee afterwards so we can discuss your thoughts, your questions, my thoughts, my questions, and come to an understanding. I will always continue seeking after truth; doing so from the position of a man following after Christ is the way in which I choose to do so.

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