Stop Watch

I began vacation with three noticeable tan lines on various patches of my skin. The strangest was the pale, zigzagging Z from Chaco straps across my feet. T-shirt sleeves had left a sharp divide between my office paper white shoulders and tanned arms. And then there was the oval marking the top of my left wrist, with a narrow band reaching around to the pale underside.

Most of the past two weeks before vaca had been spent outdoors on youth trips. We hiked in pine forests and did outdoor urban projects. Almost always, I was carefully watching my watch, managing the time of the group, calling out clock-based audibles for the rest of the day ahead: “4 minute bathroom break, then we’re off to high ropes,” or “Let’s try and be in and out of Culver’s in 30 minutes so we can make it home before dark,” or “We all need to shower by 8pm reflection times, so be quick.”

I spend a lot of my work days doing this frequent watch checking exercise. The job of pastor necessitates it. It would be easy for a hospital visit to stretch to over an hour; it would be simple for a lunch with a youth or member to carry on into the afternoon; it would be a gift to nestle in for a morning of reading and journaling and pay attention to nothing else. But the job always demands and invites such a variety of tasks that time must be managed, watches must be glanced at, Google calendars must be tracked with care. This is the life of figuring out how to be a full time intern pastor, a part time graduate student, a newish husband, and a new chocolate lab owner … and of course I also write this as someone who loves shooting hoops, tending my backyard garden, catching a West Wing episode, or exploring a new place in Des Moines. I write this knowing that we all, of course, do our own circus-like juggling acts, but with so many evenings taken by meetings, I find that I schedule most of my days from 7a to 9p.

So I arrived in Maine in early August after the trips and a full year of not taking consistent vacation days. We arrived late, crashed hard, and woke up in the morning to the sun rising at 5:30am on the Kennebec River. I laid in bed wondering about what it was like for centuries of humans who tracked time based on sunlight. I wondered how much truth there is to the tale that our own circadian rhythms function best when aligned with nature.

And so, I took off the watch. I put it in a pocket inside my backpack. It remained there for seven holy days.

It’s amazing what you notice when life is more than “tick, tick, tick…..” Birdsong. Grasshopper mouths chewing sideways. Eating when your body says “I’m hungry” rather than because a certain time says you should put some calories in your mouth.

Better yet, by the time we reached Acadia on Mount Desert Island, we dropped off the grid of cell service and experienced total freedom from distraction. I’m not exaggerating to say that my experience felt like waking from a screen-induced coma of small dopamine hits from email alerts or a new Instagram post or ESPN updates. Instead, we grasped the long lasting pleasure of oxytocin experienced through panoramic views of nature and revitalized relationships and the bonding experiences of a sweaty beautiful hike.

Taking off the watch has become a spiritual practice of off days for me. I plunge into uncharted time, let the ticking fade, and settle into a much more ancient way of living. Maybe that’s the whole point of calling certain days of the week “time off” – as in, literally remove it from your body. I know of no better way to heal in this over-functioning world. 

[Next to] Last Communion

I gave two people their last communion this past week.

For the first person, it was not a surprise. I could write many blogs about the small-scale holiness of communion in a hospice room—the firm grip of hands for the Lord’s Prayer when everything else is so weak, my delicate tipping of the little juice cup into the chapped lips of a dying human, the intensity and irony of the final prayer: “May the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen you, and keep you in God’s grace,” and the gently hushed and holy “amen.”

The second person was in more normal circumstances. I had brought communion to that back pew many times as an extension of the table for a pair who cannot easily do the pew shuffle and take the many quickened steps to come forward for communion. Again, it is such a wonderful and strange promise from Jesus—take my body, and may it strengthen yours. And gain: the soft-spoken, half-chewing-half-swallowing voicing of “amen.”

At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, they inscribed one of the charges leveled against Jesus onto the communion table in the center of their worship space: “This man welcomes sinners! And eats with them!”

It is lines like that and this weekly habit of communion which have built this strong image for me of Jesus as a waiter. If a title for the pope is the servant of servants, then Jesus is the servant of the servant of the servants. He is host and waiter and food all at once. And what is most interesting about him is who he prefers as his dining clientele—not those who will leave behind fat tips, but the hungry, and the meek, and the persecuted, and the lonely, and those who starve after justice, and those who cannot afford healthcare and are stripped of options, and those who suffer human trafficking, and those who are denied entrance to a promise land of opportunity because of the faith they practice... ”Come to me, ye weary,” says our waiter, “And I’ll feed you with my own body.”

Breaking bread with strangers is my favorite part of church. It’s one of the parts of worship that we really can’t mess up. The preaching may wander aimlessly, the music might be too loud or too slow, but we can’t mess up ripping apart pieces of bread and feeding the hungry masses. We certainly still try often to mess it up, saying someone needs a membership card in order to dine at the common meal. But if Jesus gave Judas communion, then who are we to ever say to anyone that she or he isn’t worthy or doesn’t understand or hasn’t earned it? Following Jesus is never about earning anything—grace, or acceptance, or a place at the table. Following the waiter is an apprenticeship of learning how to love—radically, relentlessly, extravagantly.

During the two funerals over the weekend, I was thinking about those last communion moments. But then I heard the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah read during one of those services:

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
    a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
    of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
⁷ And he will destroy on this mountain
    the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
    the sheet that is spread over all nations;
⁸     he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
    and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
    for the Lord has spoken.

How wrong it would be, I realized, to call those moments ‘last communion.’ We wait together for one more meal, the full communion of Isaiah’s promised mountaintop banquet feast of rich foods and well-aged wines. I look forward so strongly to that next meal which will be so much more than an ounce of juice and bit of stale wafer. These are just the appetizers, just the “foretaste of the feast to come.”

I have to admit—the carb-loving Italian in me loves it so much that this is the image of heaven we are promised: a banquet table with mountain views where bread will be broken and all will have a place. But of course, communion is never about the bread. It’s about the [plural] bodies becoming [singular] body. It’s about the miracle of connection and relationship that occur best through shared meals. It’s about this relationship-focused God who cannot wait to greet us at the restaurant entrance, who leaps forward with smiles and joy and enthusiasm to show us our place at the table, who delights us with divine food straight from the creator’s oven. Jesus is host, waiter, meal, and there’s no tab to cover or split, because God’s abundance reigns forever and ever and ever. Amen!

A picture is worth a thousand words (or, actually, 1,454 words)

“How was your trip?”

I’ve been asked that question over a hundred times since returning from the holy lands of Palestine and Israel. It is hard to describe any travel or vacation, because words sometimes fail us. They fail to describe the aromas of Dead Sea mud and the tastes of za’atar and the ringing sounds of the Muslim call to prayer. They fail to illustrate the emotion that comes with encountering new beauty or new culture.

So for this blog, instead of trying to cover all seventeen days with generalized experiences, I’m going small scale. Out of the 24,480 total minutes of our trip, I want to narrate an experience from a place we stayed for fifteen minutes total. Here was a view facing east from the Mount of Olives (the Old City of Jerusalem would be directly behind you):

Since you, devoted blog reader, do not have the luxury of a local guide talking into an earpiece as you look at this view, I will attempt to narrate!

This is a view of East Jerusalem. All of the land in front of you is East Jerusalem, up until the wall that can be seen going across the far back of the photo. Beyond that wall is the West Bank, also known as Palestine. The name comes from this being the land on the west bank of the Jordan River. Palestinians consider all of this land to be the West Bank and therefore belonging to Palestine; Israelis consider East Jerusalem to be a separate, annexed area outside of the West Bank.

Starting from the left, you will see an Israeli settlement. These have been named as illegal by the UN because they are a violation of international law; the land belongs to Palestine, but Israelis live there in a compound protected by military forces. Israel has the power to overtake these lands because their military (heavily funded by the United States) occupies the West Bank.  

What does the word “occupies” mean? It means that at any checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel, Israeli Defense Force soldiers stand guard. These are typically young Israelis between ages 18-22 (males are required to serve for four years, and females for three). All soldiers are armed with large weapons. This is a source of intimidation and harassment for Palestinians. The occupation also means that Palestinians cannot leave the West Bank. All are assigned ID cards, and Palestinian cars have a white/green license plate (Israelis have yellow). Israelis may drive into the West Bank as they wish. The occupation also means that large areas of rural farmland within the West Bank are controlled by the Israelis. The irrigation for this farmland uses a great deal of water. Meanwhile, Palestinians living inside the West Bank only receive running tap water once per week in the summer. All West Bank homes have black containers on the roof so that when the water is running, they may collect it for the rest of the week.  

For a helpful view of just how much land within the West Bank belongs to Israel, watch this two minute video (and keep in mind that settlement expansion has continued since 2008, and is currently booming. Obama did little to assist the Palestinians, donating billions to Israel – including a record $38,000,000,000 in military aid just this past September.  Trump’s ambassador pick to Israel is extremely pro-Zionist, meaning pro-settlement expansion) (also sorry for the dramatic “DO YOU???!!!” at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewF7AXn3dg

Okay, back to the left of the photo…

 Settlements are easily recognized because the construction is modern and typically highly symmetrical. Imagine highly manicured lawns in the middle of arid desert. They tend to be upscale areas. Again, the cost to build all this new construction and walls around the homes is certainly less of a challenge because of the great amount of the money pouring in from the United States every year.

There are currently an estimated 130 settlements – many are functioning cities – and the total Israeli population within these is above 400,000. Not included in this number are the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem. This area of the city was annexed by Israel in 1967, but it was totally a Palestinian-owned area before that year. The settlement in this picture is an example of these East Jerusalem settlements.

To the right of the settlement, you will see some high towers beyond the wall. Here is a closer look –

These are living units for Palestinian refugees. We were informed that these were built without any construction inspection and will not survive a major earthquake, which are fairly common in Israel/Palestine.

Across the entire middle of the photo you will see a wall. Israel built this structure, which they call a security fence, around the entire West Bank. That is a deceiving statement, however, because the wall is twice as long as the actual border between Israel and the West Bank. Often the wall curves and dips into Palestine at places where the Israelis wanted to isolate Palestinian cities or reach natural water resources to claim on their side of the structure. The city of Bethlehem, for example, feels much like a prison because the wall surrounds multiple sides of the city, and settlements (communities surrounded by their own separate walls) are on the other borders of the city. Once inside Bethlehem, it is easy to feel surrounded by walls on all sides. The wall is nine meters (29.5 feet) high and topped with barbed wire. The cost of the wall is estimated to be between $2-4 billion dollars. It is not yet finished. The Palestinians call this the apartheid wall or annexation wall or colonization wall. 

The actual borders between Israel and the West Bank are meant to follow the 1949 “green line” or armistice line. In reality, the wall is built by Israel where Israel wants. To see a map illustrating the green line compared the actual wall route, go here: http://www.btselem.org/download/separation_barrier_map_eng.pdf. The map also shows how much land within the West Bank is controlled by Israel (Palestinian-controlled land is in tan, Israeli land in blue).

On the far right of the photo is a Palestinian village in East Jerusalem. This is not easily seen in this photo, but from the view we could see rubble where houses used to be in this village. Here is another magnified shot of the panoramic:

We were informed that Israel has standing orders on many Palestinian homes to destroy them whenever they want. Often, if a Palestinian is arrested for an act of violence or protest, Israel will respond by destroying the home of his/her family in addition to the punishment for the individual.

“So how was your trip?”

Well, this was fifteen minutes of seventeen days. It was an experience of so many superlatives – the deepest freshwater lake in the world, the lowest city on earth, the lowest point on earth, the location of the oldest city gate (5,000 years) in the world, the locations where Jesus taught and healed and rose again. But witnessing views like this makes it impossible to separate the spiritual pilgrimage from the injustice reality.

This is a conflict between oppressor and oppressed. This is a conflict between military machinery of tanks and automatic weapons vs ten-year-olds throwing rocks.

We learned during the trip that Jesus lived in areas that would have surprised many people who were expecting a messiah to come with great power. He grew up in Nazareth, a tiny town of 400 next to a rising glitzy metropolis called Sepphoris build by Herod Antipas. When he moved to Galilee, he made his home in Capernaum, known for being the Vegas of Galilee, with a Roman legion, prostitutes, working class folks, and for the record, Peter’s mom-in-law. He often visited Bethany, an area just outside Jerusalem which literally translates as “house of the poor." It was the home for all the lepers banished from Jerusalem. 

This is Jesus' style - to walk with the oppressed, the lost, the searching, the underdogs. He walks with the poor on the other side of the West Bank “security fence.” He suffers with the thirsty Palestinians on a hot summer day when the tap is dry. He organizes communities in despair with a message of hope.

And we must also remember this: Emmanuel, God-with-us, always means that God is also with “them,” no matter how we draw the boundaries or who we favor. God is at work promoting peace on both sides of the wall. 

There's a new cry for a wall in my own country - a new "security fence" that has intentions of intimidation and oppression. How many examples will we need before we stop building more walls? Was Berlin not enough? Is the West Bank not enough?

Walls fail. Love wins. 

Hail to the Chief

Take me out to the ballgame,

take me out to the crowd.

Buy me some peanuts and a racist mascot hat,

I don’t care about Standing Rock’s pipeline spat.

For its root, root, root for manifest destiny;

If they aren’t treated fair, who cares?

For its one, two, ten thousand treaties we’ve broken

At the old political game.

Outside of family, baseball is my oldest love.  Growing up, I loved hustling out the bunt or tasting dirt after a headfirst slide. I loved Omar Vizquel enough to name a cat after him. I loved The Natural, Field of Dreams, Major League, and later on loved 42 and Moneyball. I loved mowing grass because it reminded me of outfield landscape designs at major league ballparks. 

I loved baseball so much that I went against my cardiologist’s orders and played as a senior in high school, strapping a protective plate over my defibrillator for one more summer in the sun. I loved my team, the Cleveland Indians, more than any amateur or professional sports assembly. 

This past week, Chief Wahoo has been featured for hours and hours of live television and post-game interviews. The red-faced mascot of the Cleveland Indians is everywhere, paraded through Ohio cities on t-shirts and flags and carved pumpkins. 

At the same time as this World Series, a tiny community of Standing Rock Sioux fight to retain confidence that they will be able to drink clean water and therefore live. 

23.6 million people watched game five between the Indians and Cubs on Sunday night. 

8,250 residents live on the Standing Rock Reservation. 

What image of Native Americans do you think prevailed this past weekend? A blatantly racist Chief Wahoo patched onto hats and arm sleeves, or a courageous group fighting for the environment and for their own human dignity against a country that treats them as if they were expendable? 

I grew up ninety miles south of Cleveland, in an area rich with Native American history. A local musical, Trumpet in the Land, annually tells the story of a brutal massacre of 96 peaceful members of the Lenape (Delaware) tribe. But this isn’t the history that filled my life. Instead, I often saw the mascots of other local teams we played in sports—mascots like the red-faced Indian Valley Braves, or the similar mascot of the Coshocton Redskins. 

“We are what we eat,” I was so often told as a child those days. I consumed endless images of racist depictions of Native Americans, from local and professional sports media markets. Such great consumption of these images allowed me to very easily label Native Americans in dehumanizing ways. 

A college summer spent building relationships with the Ojibwe people in Red Lake, MN helped me to vomit up all those consumed images. Yet it is so hard to reject Wahoo when the mascot is everywhere. 

Regardless of whether or not Cleveland wins this series, the world will win if Paul Dolan chooses this winter to rid the team of the chief and to consider an alternative team name. More than that, wouldn’t it be amazing if the front office was able to imagine not just a reactive response to criticism, but instead took steps to stand with Native American communities after years of affirming a racist profile picture for millions to see. 

Cleveland, you have the world’s attention right now after back-to-back seasons of major sports success. The microphone is there, right in front of you, with tens of millions listening. 

You can be a prophet of equality; you can lead the way. 

Seize the moment. 

Speak. Act.

Do it for the next generation of kids who otherwise will experience racism as normal behavior.

We are the Young / Our Lives are a Mystery

My youthfulness is ever apparent to me. This is particularly amplified because the ELCA is getting older, with the average member age now over 60. The math of my specific church setting is eye-popping: there is a 43 year gap between my age and average age of a churchgoing member of this metropolitan church located just a state away from the Lutheran Meccas of Chicago and the Twin Cities.

I will never believe that the Gospel has gone stale or had an expiration date of 2000 years. We have failed in reaching my age group with an authentic evangelistic message.

This September, I was delighted to be asked to proclaim a message at a wedding of my hometown best friends. Yet mixed into that delight was a degree of discomfort. It was not challenging because Babylon was on my people’s doorstep with plans for annihilation. It was challenging because I needed to overcome all these things in the room: church is boring, or church is hypocritical, or church is an exclusive bunch, or church is pro-Trump, or church is a crutch of hope in a sleeping/absent/non-existent God, or church is just part of the wedding day to please grandma and grandpa, or church is home to a white male God.  

Against these images of the irrelevant or harmful church, I see Jesus as radical, wild, unpredictable, and ever-inviting the marginalized – he is poet and outlaw and community organizer and healer all at once. I see the bold promises of a genderless God who longs to be in relationship with us. I see the expressive stories of our canon, rich tales that have been shared for millennia to build the narratives of communities around the world. Faith feels dangerously alive and inviting enough to ignite ongoing revolution in human lives, both my own and certainly others of my generation.  The religion I claim is not in hospice care but is still growing and speaking and feeding the body of Christ.

So when I took the floor at the wedding, this was the message in my head: “God has something to say to these people of all ages right now, and this is real life.”

Yet at the same moment, I felt too (as I often do) that this major gap exists between my identity as Christian and the identity I am assigned as a Christian. How I long for people of faith to be liberated from the restrictions of assumptions about who we are. Following Jesus and going to church isn’t about earning merit marks or punching a ticket to heaven; it is about tasting the rich hope of “the life that really is life” right now in a community of humans that hold each other up. The church wasn’t built to lag behind cultural social change in areas of human rights and inclusion; we are meant to be the prophets at the forefront of the cry and initiation of justice and wholeness around the globe.  

I stepped up to speak. I wondered about friends in my age group who spent time before the ceremony making jokes about church.  I prayed for words that would offer a vision of how God’s love gently pulls the human heart toward justice and peace, toward wholeness and inclusion, toward generosity for neighbor, toward peace and moments of divine communion…I prayed for words that would combat the images of church listed above.

There are many biblical figures lacking self-confidence, but the examples of Moses and Jeremiah help me understand that inspiration does not come for perfect rhetorical speeches. It comes from settling into your single identity—not the one you are assigned, but the one you are. In Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, he laments how most humans have “a well-rehearsed habit of holding their own knowledge and beliefs at a great remove from the living of their lives.” When the wedding began, I was living as a divided self; I was the groom’s friend and I was a candidate for pastor. One side of me had unlimited baseball knowledge and swore alongside my friends, and the other side of me had deep curiosity about God and human stories and felt the urge to speak of the love that flows from God to us, and then overflows to serve the world. When I filled the leadership void in the room, my two selves united. I never want to live divided again, because it was only as my authentic whole self that I could speak to humans and see transformation.

I have no idea what evangelism means most days for my generation. Usually it feels limited to the cross and equality stickers side-by-side on the back of my car. But that day, evangelism felt like being a leader as my undivided self, both faithful and flawed, both sinner and saint. It was this realism that actually caught the attention of my peers.

This was my takeaway: authentic truth cuts through centuries of assumptions about what Church is. All people of faith are given moments to witness and express this truth. If we have the courage to speak, we may just shock the world with a relevant message after all.

When I Grow Up

In the movie Matilda, the character Bruce is only known for his Augustus Gloop-esque gift of devouring chocolate cake.

But in the musical Matilda (which I must say moved me so deeply that I am still pondering it over a month after seeing it in London), Bruce Bogtrotter does much more than pound back pastry.

The first half closes with him escorted to “chokey,” which is not so much a funny closet of bent nails but rather a place where children are abused psychologically to be governed by fear.  

When the second half opens, it is Bruce who takes the stage alone. Exhibiting PTSD symptoms, he sings in a faint voice of the dreams he has about growing up. Lyrics that would sound silly anywhere else instead hit with intense pain. “When I grow up,” Bruce sings, he will be tall enough to climb trees, and smart enough to answer life’s questions, and strong enough to carry all the things “grown-ups” carry.

More children join him. Boldly they promise together, “when I grow up, I will be brave enough to fight the creatures that you have to fight beneath the bed each night to be a grown-up.”

The song grows in strength, swelling into this cry for courage among youth.

Then the sound quiets; the stage lights dim.

Miss Honey walks on, fully grown-up, and fully lacking the courage the children have named as their goal for adulthood. She meekly repeats the same line as the children, convincing herself that she can be brave…she can be brave enough to fight the monsters of life—an abusive Trunchbull and the selfish parents of a neglected child.

What becomes clear in Matilda is that a gap exists between the dreams of children and the reality of the grown-up life. It is the children who are the heroes of this story, and it is the adults who look like young humans needing development. The children dream of strength and brave; the adults act as immature bullies or timid cowards.

“Mind the gap,” the British say everywhere, concerning themselves with spaces between trains and platforms. Two years ago, I watched my wife write “mind the gap” when she was asked to describe her vocation. I never asked but always wondered what she meant by playing with that word choice—mind the gap between economic classes? Mind the gap between God’s dreams for the world and our own intentions?

Since seeing Matilda in July, I’ve been thinking about a new gap to mind: the gap between what we dream for our futures as children and the actual life we lead as adults.

I write this at age 24. To the outside world I have cleared some of the normative hurdles that signify I am now in the class of “adulthood”—I am married…I have a full-time job…I have a home with a yard to care for and trash to roll to the street.

But I watched Bruce dream boldly of always becoming, and I find my own youth roaring to life within me. I want to hold on to my childish ability to imagine the impossible. I want to be in constant evolution, to continue to molt even when my body stops growing taller.

I want to recognize that the bravery it takes to fight the monsters of life—fear, or bullies, or loneliness, or selfishness—this bravery never just happens but is a daily decision to do something that scares you, to take the leap of faith, and then watch the magic unfold.

This is true magic of Matilda—not her ability to make newts move or chalk write, but her ability to convince her community to yearn toward bravery.

In seminary and especially now as an intern pastor, I am often standing in places where I feel too young and not grown-up enough. I am 43 years younger than the median age of the members of the congregation where I serve. I am the called person standing in hospital rooms, or helping to lead marriage ceremonies, or proclaiming God’s unconditional grace and love for the world….and I feel so young sometimes.

But I look to Bruce and Matilda and the other brave children who are everywhere, and the anxiety about my age turns into a joy. As I navigate the gap between the fictional, created worlds of child and adulthood, I am no longer seeing the world as split between young and old.

Instead, I am thinking about the Mary Oliver question: what is it I want to do with this one wild and precious life, and how can I always be becoming toward that? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tRDhEmdO4 

The Great Toaster Race

Gloria Dei Vivens Homo. The glory of God is the human being fully alive. So spoke my college English professor; so spoke St. Irenaeus, long ago (4^th century!) bishop in southern France.  

Last week in my “Care of Souls” class, we were asked what it meant to be a human fully alive. The responses unfortunately did what often happens in seminary classrooms. Voices slipped into attempting to respond to the question with more philosophical questions; others looked to negate or avoid the question through some language loophole. But my heart yearned for someone to speak truth to a question that felt so real and vital to me. What does it mean to be fully alive?

I didn’t speak in class that day. But if I would have, this was my answer:

When I worked for YouthWorks! in Red Lake, MN, every Tuesday morning was my turn at breakfast duty. This meant that at 6am, a random assortment of high schoolers would shuffle into the kitchen to prepare breakfast (at my instruction) for eighty people. Tuesday, however, was not your typical “just throw out those giant store brand cereal bags and some milk” mornings. Tuesday was magic. Tuesday was messy. Tuesday was marvelous. Tuesday was…..waffle day. 

On a time and money budget, however, we could not afford a fleet of Belgium waffle irons. Instead, our Tuesday morning mission was to take knockoff Eggo frozen discs and toast hundreds of them. At my first Tuesday, I was ready with every toaster of that pre-school kitchen ready to go. One hour and many blown circuits later, we served generic cereal, milk, and frowns to our diners. 

Yet out of the circuit ashes that morning rose an idea: the great toaster race.

One week later, to prep for my fresh recruits of sleepy-eyed adolescents, I leaped off the half-filled air mattress. Dashing through the pre-school halls, I placed toasters throughout the whole building. Youth were split into teams; some monitored the toasters, while others were carrier pigeons equipped with tin foil to keep freshly toasted waffles insulated for their journey to the warm kitchen ovens. 

The great toaster race, a wild human invention, is the best image I can offer for a human community that lived into joy and spontaneity and shared meals and service and wildly fun worship and storytelling. That is my picture of a summer where my humanity was fully alive.

At school, I am enrolled in five classes. So often I voice or hear about the feeling of tiredness from these days of occasional lecture and evening reading. How strange that I claim “tiredness” here, while at Red Lake we worked crazy long days and I loved every second of it. Every morning started with a leap off the deflated mattress, as I was hungry for that day’s toaster race creative adventures. I am convinced that the human being fully alive only happens in communities of love, in places where purpose and mission are clear, in homes where playfulness and care for the self and other come first. 

The great toaster race was psychotic. Imagine telling a high school sophomore at 6am after the night was just spent sleeping on a tile classroom floor that she or he is going to run the halls with toasted waffles wrapped in tin foil. Madness. Maybe this is the idea behind the statement that the only people to change the world are the ones crazy enough to think they can. We need a little loco in our normal. We needed the great toaster race.  

Places like camp or YouthWorks trips are not an escape from the “real world”—they are perhaps the most real world, the most fully alive world, where humans can be their best selves and live courageously together. They are places where even frozen waffles become banquet feasts.