Something Worth Fixing

Relationships gain significance with time and experience. I have this emotional portfolio for everyone I know, filled with all sorts of random memories. Some people have a cover letter, explaining when and where I met them, and how that first encounter went. These are the people I rarely see, or talk to, or hear about. Then there are several dossiers that have so much piled into their slightly ripped and faded manilla casing that there is no way to go through all the information in one sitting. Hundreds of pages serve no memorable purpose, but add their collective weight to the manilla monstrosity, helping show that something about this file is very important.I am fortunate to have more than a couple of these very full dossiers.

Life currently finds me going through some of these files, realizing wrongs done and close friends left behind. There is some bridge repair that needs to be done, probably painful stuff, but these are the sorts of past experiences that have made these relationships worth building. There has been too much history to give up now.

A Way to Community... Maybe.

I'll be up front, I am stealing the foundation of this idea from Don Miller. I'll also admit that I have a man crush on him. But that is beside the point.

There are things that I do that I hate doing. These things always go bad. They are continually uncomfortable, even awkward. A year or so ago Miller wrote a post about making a list of things you will not do in the following year, sort of like an inverted list of resolutions. I made a list.

I won't try to recount my list for you because I don't remember what was on it, with the exception of one item: "I will not watch a movie with a group of people when everyone spends about a half hour deciding what movie we should watch." This always went poorly for me. Everyone would try to think of something, maybe throwing in some movie that they sort of heard about from a friend of a friend, or some obscure movie that took five minutes to explain why it was worth watching. I don't remember one time where I wasn't watching the movie thinking, I hope so and so likes this one, or man this really isn't as good as they said it would be. And so it made my list.

The reason I remember this one is because I have actually stuck to it, rather obnoxiously I might add. On several occasions, before anyone can halfheartedly recommend anything, I interject as if their words could destroy the world, and assign the task of selecting a movie to a specific person (usually the one who suggested we watch a movie). It doesn't matter what movie it is, so long as it isn't porn or something by hallmark. I trust my friends enough to know that they know me and the others in the group and can make mature adult decisions. After several experimental interjections I've found this method to be highly successful. Well, at least for me. Previously few were happy with the outcome anyway, a compromise of everyone's taste resulted in a movie that no one enjoyed.

I think why this works, and I think the point of what I am just now getting to, is that when people resign themselves in advance to the decisions of another person, there is a laying down of personal preference prior to the event. I think there is something beautiful in doing that that makes this process deeper than movies.

Community, real and deep community, happens when tell each other to pick the movie, when we look at someone and say, "Help me understand you and who you are, even if that makes me uncomfortable, or dare I say it, bored." I think when we do this in advance we open up a door in our being that allows us to really listen to someone else, and possibly even enjoy it.

I am guilty of trying to command the situation (e.g. telling someone to pick a movie). Even if I do let someone else drive conversation, I do it by guiding them with questions, instead of just listening what they have to say. When I do this, I'm hindering community. Maybe next time I should watch their life, knowing that someday they've agreed to watch mine.

What Makes Something Meaningful?

Let's cut to the chase. We want something honest.

Now that I answered my question, allow me to elaborate.

The most meaningful, and I would argue life changing, conversations I have taken in were not planned, organized, programized (new word), or taken from an outline in a book about having meaningful conversations. They snuck up on me as if I were an unsuspecting bird bathing under the supervision of some tiger like tabby cat.

These sorts of encounters only started to happen when I learned to be honest, and not in the generic I am human and have problems sense. I used to do that to make myself approachable and likable, and sometimes even 'spiritual', as if my generic issues made me qualified to understand grace. Until I learned to shame myself in front of someone and put myself in the position where they could justifiably wonder why they would want to talk to me, I didn't encounter much in the way of this sort of life changing heart exchange.

These sorts of encounters never happened in Bible studies. I'm not sure this was the fault of the Bible, or God, because most of my meaningful moments came back to Him and His thoughts. I think it has something more to do with what people do when they get in situations like that. You're showing up to this thing where you sit with a bunch of people you somewhat know with the intent of finding some deep spiritual truth that no one in the history of the world has discovered before in the course of about 30 minutes. What usually ends up happening is that someone asks generic questions that the verse just read obviously answers. If not that, then things head off on the most impractical yet divisive theological issues you can think of. I hope to never attend another Bible study again. On the other hand I very much hope to explore life through the thoughts of God, within deep relationships, many more times.

These sorts of encounters didn't always have a singular point. They sort of meandered around whatever God forsaking trouble I, or my co-explorer had got into, asking the whys and hows and how to get back to innocence. I don't apologize to say that not everything in life has to be a coherent, singular, point. Record your focused conversation sometime and see just how thesis like it really is. This doesn't scare me as much as it used to. I don't think this means that life isn't coherent, I think it just means that maybe the unifying theme is something deeper and more relational than a few tidy points. Maybe that's why we can't wait for the Bible study to get over so we can play cards and laugh together.