Grocery stores sometimes have this bizarre effect on me. I switch gears. I seem to get especially existential and deeper than usual when I enter into supermarkets.
My wife teases me that I get more romantic when we go to the grocery store together. The frozen food aisle just makes me weird, I guess.
I also seem to brim with emotional fulness in other ways, when stopping in for some coffee and potatoes.
The people are what get me most. I seem to make all of these life connections that I wouldn’t normally make. I’ve learned that if I’m not careful, though, I can easily make the people I observe characters in my story. We have a habit of doing that, don’t we? Creating little stories for people to fit in our documentary-of-a-life. We imagine the lady picking out bananas is unhappy and seems bitter because her mother died when she was young and her father never loved her as he should have. We’d like to think that the nice man making our sandwich behind the counter is waiting for his big break as an actor and this is his part time gig while he wrestles with his craft in the off hours late into the night. We can romanticize things to the point that the focus becomes solely fixated on our little bubble of life and everyone is existing for us and our story. Little do we know, we’re a character in everyone else’s stories.
So I’m in New Seasons, observing people, and this wave of emotion and love capsizes me. It pulls me under and holds me there for awhile, holding me for a few more moments than I was comfortable with while simultaneously reminding me there was nowhere else I needed to be in that moment. I was rushing through the store and was met with an undeniable moment of stillness. You know these moments. Maybe you were watching your little son or daughter playing outside, enjoying the thrill of jumping and laughing and playing carefree. And you thought to yourself, “I could stay here, in this time and space, forever”. We desire to bottle those moments. And the other moments, the ones that cause us pain and confront our insecurities, we want to move past as quickly as possible. It’s the human condition. Replicate and reproduce good-feeling moments and mitigate painful, heart breaking, difficult moments.
I’ll come back to the New Seasons time-standing-still moment but first I want to tell you a story.
See, I moved to Hawaii for 4 months. It wasn’t a long vacation and wasn’t planned. The opportunity came about because I quit my job at one church (okay, I was let go because they didn’t have the money to pay me my less-than-a-barista-wages and I was simultaneously wanting to leave). I was in this liminal space of figuring out what was next. I knew the last thing was over. I couldn’t get it back and I really did desire to move on. Yet, I didn’t know what was next. All I knew was that I felt like I was dying inside and I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing. This feeling reached it’s culmination after I had wrestled in my position at the church and with big life/God questions for just under three years. It turns out it’s hard to completely deconstruct everything you think about church and the bible while still working at a church without completely numbing yourself and being a complete faker or split person. I felt like both, by the way. I was moving in a new direction as it pertained to the way I viewed and thought about the purpose and function and life-giving role of the church, bible, community, and faith. I wanted something bigger, I had tasted something sweeter. I had beheld something grander than what I had been shown. I had seen new thing– in color it seemed– and I could not unseen now. I had a bachelors degree in biblical and theological studies from a private Christian university. All of my friends are pastors. I still really wanted to help people experience their identity in God and to tap into the Reality of what life is all about. I wanted to be in the trenches with people. I wanted to baptize people. I wanted to teach the bible and give sermons. I just couldn’t do it at a mega church anymore. I couldn’t handle the person I was becoming and the ugly tendencies I was beginning to embody and practice all under the guise of being a “pastor”.
So I quit my job. I didn’t get an offer from the few jobs I was looking at/interviewing for. I felt stuck. Then I got a call from a friend who recently moved to Hawaii to take a job at a Presbyterian church as their middle school director. He asked if I wanted to interview for a job as a high school director. I said “hell no”. I had just left a mega church job. Why would I return to the thing that just drove me insane? Because I thought it’d be different. I thought that the differences and pros would outweigh the cons of my last experience. I hoped that things would be different. In many ways it was. The people were amazing and the community was so kind and loving toward Kirsten and I. I miss them daily. But within a month of being there, I knew. I knew that I had run from something deeper by running into the same thing in Hawaii. My problems followed me. My attitude and habits and cynicism and angst about church and people. It all metastasized. I had panic attacks and emotional breakdowns and could not handle it. I was not in a healthy place to be able to get perspective on the matter. I felt like my only solution was to run away and accept that I could not properly lead the young people (the amazing, beautiful young people I got to serve for 4 months) I had been put in charge of leading. I couldn’t do it honestly or with integrity.
But I realized something by quitting that job. I realized that no job was going to fulfill me or fix me or transform me. That God was not more proud or displeased with me by my career as a pastor. I realized that all of life is sacred. That moments — all moments, no matter their beauty or harshness– exist to bring us into a more full and robust experience with God and others. They teach us things about ourselves, especially when we fail. I learned that when we finally give up our best efforts of trying to minimize pain and silence grief, we can find that those painful, disruptive, disorienting moments teach us something… something about where we were and who we were; something about where we can go and who we have the potential to become. I learned you have to follow the peace. That you don’t get a gold star by punishing yourself and staying in something that sucks the life from you. I learned that you can run and hide and switch careers and move states and you can still have the same problems follow you. That this is actually a gift, because God is more concerned with the person you’re becoming than the job you do. Calling and vocation are such loaded words and it’s weighty on my generation. We all want to do meaningful work. But I’m learning that it doesn’t matter what you do if you’re still a greedy, manipulative, passive-aggressive, insecure, scared person.
I had this moment in New Seasons when the Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide” started to play. When the lyrics started to dance around me and intoxicate the atmosphere I was currently in, I was overcome by the presence of pure Love. Not because I was having an isolated transcendent experience in a bubble. But because the words perfectly matched the people I was walking by and looking at. I started to actually look at these people without judgment, fully aware they were image bearers on their own journeys. That my little narrative of quitting my church job and wrestling with church and moving to Hawaii… it was so small in comparison to the simple magic that existed in sharing that space with these people in that moment. That was the only moment all of us had. No one was trying to bottle that moment. We just enjoyed it. Strangers smiled back as I passed by and I began to cry. I realized that I was worrying and fearful about things that might not happen and I could miss this moment and other moments if I wasn’t purposefully aware of the sacred beauty of this moment.
I realized in that store, as I was a sobbing mess, that God is reunifying and repurposing me and them and all of us. The deadlines and timeline and objectives I’ve created are very out of my control in many ways. I’ve become a lot more of a driven and motivated person in these last months but I’ve also recognized the silliness of worrying about if I’m going to ever be a pastor again. What about if I’ll ever be a good husband again? Or an empathetic person? Or if I’ll visit people in hospitals if I’m not paid to by a church? What about those things? Those are the real questions. Will I be who God is creating me to be now or will I continue to wait for the most convenient time when the stars align?
It’s all coming together, even when it looks like a complete mess. That’s the paradoxical gospel. It all belongs. God is using it all. People matter. You matter. You’re not alone and you can still become who you’re supposed to be. So listen to fleetwood mac and look someone in the eyes in the grocery store without judging them and have a little cry while you contemplate that we’re all in this together and God has not forgotten us.
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