Layoffs, etc.

Last week my company laid off several people in its workforce. The number was comparatively low, less than 10 percent of the total. But for those let go, the percentage was much higher, 100.

I've concluded that there is no way that such a large body of humans can sync up their recovery process from such an event. Some teams were hard hit, losing half of their players, others were not impacted at all (like mine). Varying degrees of pain on the front end equal varying rates of healing on the back end.

Or do they? This morning while reading Anne LaMott's Traveling Mercies, I found myself thinking intently on the layoffs and the pain they caused. The challenge, I think, is becoming a bit more porous to life, internalizing the experience in a way that authenticates the human experience. It's so easy to place the perpetrator of pain far from yourself in order to deal with it safely. And in this case, those perpetrators are things like "the economy," "the state of the industry," and "myself."

When pain hits, it's a bit like deep-sea diving except totally unexpected. You're humming along with the rhythmic thwump all boats have and the surface tension of the water breaks, physics goes haywire, and you're forced to go under. Pain is what happens when life won't let you gloss over a thing. And there's something noble and beautiful about going under, even finding the ocean floor. Me, I have a primal fear of the water. If I were sitting in a dingy on the open water, I'd be more concerned about the statistical probability that something murderous lurks within killing distance--and is hungry--than the beauty of a horizon or the sound of schwapping waves. When life forces you to go under, you're instantly put in a place of factual crisis.

But it's what you do with the crisis, the descending, and hopefully the ascension that shapes you. Some people are excellent, perhaps too good, at the deep dive. In fact, they seem to have continual reasons for staying underwater, not the least of which is their new found friendship with the crabs. Than there are others, and I am of this group, who see the briny deep, the darkness, the unknown, and decide to stay where the sunlight still penetrates close to the surface.

The layoffs caused considerable sadness at our company. It's been revealing to see how people process an experience like this. Some head so fast for the ocean floor you would have thought they performed a pencil dive from an orbiting satellite. Others up the throttle on the boat to keep moving toward a distant and seemingly imaginary shore, unwilling to get wet. It seems to me that a middle way is best, taking my cue from my rudimentary knowledge of deep-sea diving. You have to descend slowly and ascend slowly so as to not get the bends.

On Smoking Cigarettes

This morning I found the bravery to admit that I like smoking cigarettes. I know that there is an entire cultural conversation about why I like smoking cigarettes, the nicotine, and why I shouldn't like smoking cigarettes, the cancer. I agree that both exist in every pack and puff.

But I've watched a lighted cigarette whisper and wind its way around my fingers. I imagine it, beautiful, winding its sinister way through my lungs like a dark Russian novel. There's something about the act of smoking, the way it accompanies my pensiveness and my coffee.

I have discovered that you can smoke and still successfully train for a half-marathon. This past fall, I answered a company-wide challenge at the publishing house where I work to run my city's half-marathon. Since leaving college, I've been singing a gradual lament about my sagging ability to burn calories without exercising. I thought the half-marathon would be a perfect double whammy. I'll kick smoking and get in shape. I even signed a pledge to this effect.

For months things were fine. But you walk through some second-hand smoke, you hang out at a bar with friends, you grab coffee with some smokers. My life, it seemed, was never more than one or two degrees removed from bumming. It did me in; my self-discipline is very selective.

This morning, after months of training and resistance, I've decided that I can't keep my pledge. I'll be emailing HR in a moment to tell them.

It's not that I'm throwing in the towel on better life habits. But when there's an institutional expectation, I live with more guilt than I care to. I need to get my own institution in order rather than bullying myself with another. I know I'll keep training--the half-marathon is next weekend. And I know I'll continue to struggle with not smoking. I say "not smoking" rather than "smoking" because I'm still on the "not" track, but I need to go at my own pace.

Pulling Weeds

I’m white, middle class, and work in a cubicle. Put this way, some would say my life is part of the problem. I’m propelling this thing we call “the man.” I’m a perfectly well-intentioned guy, but the façade of my life could be reduced to a carbon copy of so many other lives, a window on a condo high rise gentrifying the grittiness and goodness of life.

That’s why, whenever I get the chance, I find reasons to sweat and get dirty with manual labor. I don’t do this as a character building activity but for the sake of joy. I love a day of hard work, soreness, something accomplished when dusk comes. So, this past weekend, when my grandfather asked me to help him in the garden, I gladly accepted.

It would be sloppy if I tried to capture all the complexes and issues this man has passed down the generations to me and others in my family. He singularly makes me believe in the concept of generational sin and the desperate need of Christ’s power for redemption from the things encoded in our genealogy.

Here’s a quick look at his more amazing accomplishments.He has completely shattered his wife’s sense of self through a lifetime of verbal abuse. He bosses her around in every task, menial or otherwise. Then he berates her for not having any gumption to do a damn thing on her own. He sends soft porn to me and other men as jokes, objectifying women mercilessly. (Seriously, think about your grandfather sending you soft porn.) He tries to lasso me into his misogynistic, women-bashing jokes in front of my wife. A dandy yesterday in front of her, my grandmother, and my niece: “Women are a necessary evil, hey Bry?” To add insult to injury, my niece’s mom, my sister, is going through a divorce. I wonder how that comment mixed with my niece’s utter confusion about why she’s moving, why her dad hasn’t been around for weeks, why her world is falling apart. Am I the necessary evil that made this happen? I imagine her young psyche synthesizing from that comment and her life’s circumstance. God have mercy.

If you have a sensible picture of this man, now imagine this: my brief paragraph is a snapshot from last Saturday only.

I love G. K. Chesterton’s thought about the family, that they’re the only people in life we don’t choose. I have relished the thought of a grandpa swap. It could be a nationwide, flea market affair. But I wonder who wouldn’t offer their family members in the transaction? It would be one crowded event.

Because of all this, I’m always looking for redemptive bonding moments with my grandpa, something to offset the lifelong narrative of his asshole-ness. Gardening seemed like it had potential. In side-by-side silence, with the occasional faint humming of songs that clearly shows our age-influenced preference for music, I get to share his love of this plot of ground, the arrangements of this garden he loves, that he built from scratch. It's quite extensive, his green-thumbed venture. Beds all around the house with fruit-bearing trees, annuals, perennials, creeping vines, steeple-like miniature pines, fallen palm fronds, and a few pieces of garden art. And weeds. A helluva lot of weeds. For two hours we pulled them, sweated together, and drank beer.

Sometimes it takes something simple and physical to sweep you away from the historical and internal. I could fill a very sad book with all the things I wish were different about my grandfather and myself, with wonder about how life would be different, how happy my grandmother could’ve been. But for now, we’re just pulling weeds, getting our hands dirty with life, together.

Anne LaMott's Traveling Mercies

I bought Radioheads’s OK Computer in 1999, three years after it was released. I traded my white trainers for hip Steve Maddens in 2004. In so many words, my habit: to arrive fashionably late to fashionable trends. At least three years late.

So, in good form, I’m just now reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, nearly a decade after her copyright. Her message: God’s pursuit of humans is in the muck of living. Anne’s story shows that there’s nothing laudable in us to prompt God’s interest. And that’s not to say she’s despicable. Her writing is so beautiful, you could only imagine she is the same. The way you’d imagine Tom Hanks if you met him, consistent. Or Don Miller.

I’m chewing on the ideas of her coming to faith, wrestling with the messiness of it, finding myself more willing to admit my own addictions and favorite sins because she’s so unconcerned with my thoughts of her life. Maybe I should be less concerned too. She knows who she is—or is okay with not knowing—and I’m just a spectator invited to engage in, as the subtitle says, her thoughts on faith. Through the first hundred pages, her emotive power has been the most moving part of my experience. There are lines where I felt so strong a desire to weep, my chest would tighten and my lungs draw close to each other. I felt short of breath and inwardly convulsing, like what I suspect would happen if you applied a heart defibrillator to someone in no need of it. I wouldn’t be upset if everyone on the planet read the scene where the black woman held the AIDS victim like a crow, sang, and wept, this after a year of lifelong stereotypes about gay people. But don’t skip to it. Let her take you there. So beautiful.

After Word

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Closure

I packed some caregiver kits this morning. You know, the soap I mentioned as I started this blog? World Vision, as it turns out, has partnered with Lister and her group to provide the tangibles they need. It didn’t happen this weekend, but has been in motion for a little while, I discovered. As an act of solidarity, I worked my tail off packing those boxes. I was almost maniacal. Box after box, stuffing: I notepad, 9 bars of soap, 1 jar of Vaseline, 4 washcloths, 1 bottle of anti-diarrhea medicine, 1 of aspirin, 1 of anti-biotic ointment, 4 pens, and a handwritten note of encouragement.

The box-packers wrote the notes, and I was getting antsy while people were writing five, six sentences. Keep it simple! I thought Let’s keep the line moving! My note said, “May God bless your kingdom work. Your brother, Bryan.”

In all I packed about thirty boxes. (I hope there not in contiguous villages and can’t compare their notes since they're all the same.) I perspired a little bit. I thought about the human act of caregiving. But here’s what I can’t do: Allow any energy I gave to abate a guilty conscious. Or even allow guilt to enter the picture.

To answer my own question from the beginning, I value hand soap very little. But I cherish the comfortable opportunities to serve—at a distance—those in need. Q showed me there are unique and God-tailored ways to enter the service of humankind for His name’s sake. I doubt I’ll be a Chris, a Lister. But I am a Jesus. Or, at least, that’s how God sees me. My response for His unmerited grace should be obedience, in whatever manifestation he deems. I’m excited to calibrate my radar a bit to discern what those acts of obedience might be. I’m also excited to have met so many whose radar bleeps of Christian service, people with whom Thomas Nelson might have the opportunity to empower to share their message more broadly.

Shane Hipps :: The Power of Electronic Culture

Shane Hipps is positing an interesting social theory based on his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. He opens with the notion that the linear construction of the printed word in mass-produced books ratified the nature of the human imagination. Assembly lines, symmetric city blocks, and even church pews, he argues (though somewhat loosely), are the results of the ability to mass produce books. And his resulting question is, what happens in the digital age with content? Coupled with this question, Shane folds in the proliferation in our culture of the image, which usurps the power of the word.

The sentence "The boy is sad" is usurped by an image of a crying, malnourished African child. "The reason this image is more powerful than the sentence is the same dynamic that my presentation can't be done with smoke signals." The sentence, for anything powerful to occur, requires the abstract thought of the reader to extrapolate. But the image appeals to the right brain. This reduces, Hipps argues, the need for abstract thought, whether you think it's a tragedy or not. Because image is driving culture primarily through our advertising and media, it's fundamentally changing the expression of our religion. Linear has been replaced by circular. Big institutions have been replaced by organic communities. In other words, the medium becomes the message.

As Christians, Hipps calls, we need to be more nuanced about our medium as we clarify our message. They are one, and culture expects them to be one.