To IMs and All Friends Scattered (a love letter)

Note #1: This blog has to do with a big change in my life, namely, that today is our last day as IM staff members for me and seventeen of my friends. If this is the first you’re hearing about it, I invite you to call or email for a more in-depth conversation.

Note #2: If you’re uncomfortable with heartfelt, non-ironic admissions of love, sometimes incorporating cheesy LOTR references, you are free not to read this blog. You are also free to read my entry on cynicism.

My dear IM’s (and all friends scattered),

The end of this season of our lives and the start of a new one has prompted me to write a letter to you.

I am not mourning to see the fundraising portion of the IM program end, nor am I lamenting the insecurities and turmoil that change has brought. What I will miss, however—what no words will console—is the joy of working alongside you day by day. I don’t know what to do with the thought that, no matter how many of us stay, we are still in some way a company dispersed.

It’s the same feeling I get when Lucy has to leave her adventures with Aslan and go home. It’s Frodo’s fearful realization that the Fellowship must disband, though they have only just begun their journey.

The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite book of the trilogy, and I think it’s because this ragtag group of friends is still together, facing dangers that, although real, are not quite so weighty or dark as those to come. The tunnels of Moria are not as bleak as those in Shelob’s lair. Frodo still feels the thrill of a new adventure, the companionship of men stronger and wiser than he.

Much like Frodo, I prefer the scent of good tilled earth and the taste of ale to the weight of a sword in my hand. How easy it would be to stay at Rivendell, or even the slightly-eerie Lothlorien. These havens along the road offer a solace that may be the greatest danger to the fulfillment of our quest.

How easy it would be to blame EHC for the shifting that is happening among our little group right now. Yet, this is not the first time I have had to let a friend go, not the first time I have watched as one I loved set sail on a new adventure, while I remained ashore.

Did college not end? Have I somehow kept within arm’s reach every single friend I’ve made through the years?

No, I have seen many go. And most were not stolen by an enemy, but sent by a Friend, just as I have often been sent.

For those of us who are believers, we must live with a suitcase always at the ready. We live as if on a military base, and though we make our requests known, we recognize that we can be called away at a moment not of our choosing.

Working with missionaries, whose positions are often transient, has shown a spotlight on some of my biggest fears. Fears of loneliness and isolation. The fear of being left.

A year ago, already processing through this, I wrote a song. Here’s some of what it said:

There’s a man with eyes of fire

And I am not His equal

There’s a storm in your desire

I could never stand up to

And of all love’s hard confessions

Here’s the one I was loathe to make

Even when I give all

I cannot be all to you

Would that I could hold an umbrella

That could guard you from the storm

Manufacture fiercest weaponry

Keep you safe in every war

But I recognize

That look in your eyes

When you must give yourself away

So I lay down my arms

And speed you on your way

Every season I grow more certain that distance and separation is a consequence of the fall, one we as humans were not built to endure. I see in Revelation 21 that God, too, is longing for a day when He can say, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

I love that this is the climax to our story—a reuniting. Not just worship, although there will be worship. Not just holiness, although we will wear robes of white. But God’s greatest dream is to dwell with us. After all that’s happened, after every war and every sorrow, He’s saying, “I just want to be with you.”

It would be a lie to pretend that there’s no reason to mourn, that the end of a season doesn’t hurt. To hold back tears is to deny ourselves an opportunity to join with God’s longing. The longing to destroy death, which is separation. The longing to be together.

God has shown us the way forward, and it is in the cross. If we lose our lives for His sake, we will ultimately find them. He Himself has testified that there are some things which neither moth nor rust can destroy, and I think that applies as much collectively as individually. What we do together, inasmuch as we do it unto God, even though we are weak, God will keep.

And He knows our need for true friendship. In my experience, He is more in the habit of joining than separating. He loves to lure us into the disarming joy of communion, a sudden unlocking of doors we weren’t anticipating. That has happened over and over again from the days I was young. I am blessed with the best of friends.

So this is a note to all the friends God has given me through the years, and especially to the IMs. You have been a shoulder to cry on, an arm to lean on, a voice that comforts, and eyes that understand. You have been prayer that doesn't give up. There is nothing like those moments when I think that I'm alone, and then I turn my head and find that you're with me. Together we have tasted God's kindness.

The road is long and arduous. Every day will be another death, so that we may experience His resurrection. To follow God is to deny ourselves. And then—blink—and it’s over. Chasing Him means a narrow path. Along the way we will often link arms, but only One will hold our hand. There’s a level of intimacy that only One can attain.

So further up and further in, friends. May all our streams lead to the same ocean. Fearlessly, let us follow in the seasons of His wild will.

Becoming a City Slicker, Dawg

When I visit Chicago, a constant track plays through my head. It’s my voice, only a little gruffer, and it sounds like this:

That’s right, suckas, I belong here. I’m a city man just like all of you. See this swagger? I ain’t messin’ ‘round, boys. I may look like I shop at Gap, but this shirt is actually from Goodwill. And it’s concealing a giant tattoo. Of a dragon. Coiled around a switchblade. Yo.

I prepare for a trip to Chicago as if rehearsing lines for a school play—an apt metaphor, since I’m no more convincing in my role than the preppy theater kids you knew in high school.

On a recent trip, I exited the plane at Midway, the more ghetto of the two Chicago airports, right around midnight. I was to take the orange line train from Midway to a downtown transfer, taking the blue line to Logan Square. Explaining this to friends back home, I made it sound as if I were Frodo entering Mordor, only a taller, manlier version—with less foot hair.

To be fair, the situation actually was a bit sketchy. 2012 has been one of the worst years for shootings in Chicago in a long while. And although Logan Square isn’t the worst neighborhood in Chicago, it also isn’t, well… Colorado Springs.

I belong here, fools, I thought as I made my way down a long, dark tunnel to the orange line. I was raised in a dumpster and breast fed on city smog.

I purchased a train pass and tried to feed it into the turnstile. (You know those rotating tri-bar thingies you have to push through to board a rollercoaster? They have a name!) I kept changing the orientation of the card, people passing expertly through other turnstiles as I stood there fiddling. My plight was so obvious that finally a big black lady (there’s black people in Chicago!) came up to me, turned my card vertical instead of horizontal, and fed it through.

“Thanks,” I said.

No prob. I’m still cool. I drink my frappuccinos without whipped cream, dawg! I eat my yogurt with a fork! So dang cool.

My carry-on suddenly caught in the teeth of the turnstile, jamming. I worked at it frantically, jiggling the turnstile, which was now locked. I could feel the eyes of every gangster in Chicago on me, because, as you know, they all hang out at the Midway airport. (Conducting research this morning, I asked my mom what you would call a person in the inner city who was up to no good. She pondered the question and said, “A scoundrel… Or some word that starts with a ‘V.’”)

Finally, I worked the handle loose and lofted my suitcase over.

C-O-O-L, cooool.

Before going to Chicago, my cousin Chris warned me that there have been a lot of flash mobs this year.

"Awesome!" I said, imagining spontaneous musicals surrounding me like I've seen on youtube. "I've actually always wanted to be a part of a flash mob."

He stared at me as if thinking, You can't really be this dumb. Oh yes, Chris, I can.

He said, "Flash mobs are where people suddenly gang up on you, assault you, and steal your money."

Oh. Right... Are you sure there's no singing involved?

The next day, I took the blue line to a greenhouse just outside of Chicago. I was a pro now, no more fumbling with the train pass, no more carry-on. The train was packed with potential muggers and hoodlums, but I had enough street smarts to shift my backpack in front of me.

Ha! Thought I was an easy target, did you? Well guess what? I was raised in the hood. And although I look like I’ve never heard of “Fiddy Cent,” (as the gangbangers say) I actually listen to rap music every day! On my boombox, in fact. Yes, fools, I am what the local thugs refer to as a “dangerous specimen.” My street name is Cosprings.

After being at the greenhouse for half an hour, I felt my back pocket, and my wallet was gone. I’d been stolen from! (Later, a friend would mock my use of the phrase “stolen from.” Not “pick pocketed?” Or even “robbed?”)

Had I put my wallet in my backpack? No. Was my wallet in a different pocket? No, I distinctly remembered having it in my back pocket when I was on the train. There could only be one conclusion: some worthlah thug had ganked me some shady biznat (thank you, urbandictionary.com).

I berated myself for my earlier decision to move my backpack to the front. If only I had kept it in the back, it would have protected my wallet. How could I have been so stupid? I began to doubt whether I could ever show my face in the city again. I was an object of ridicule, unfit to ride the blue line…

“Josh?” I heard a voice call behind me. “Josh Skaggs?”

I turned and saw two young ladies, one of them holding my wallet.

“Did you lose this?”

“Yes!” I hurried over. “Where did you find it?”

“We found it on the twirly slide.”

Of course! The greenhouse happened to have a nice twirly slide, which I would have been a fool to pass up. (And a fool not to, apparently.) Not only had I taken advantage of this attraction, but I had done so upside down.

I received my wallet with a head bowed in shame and beaming red cheeks.

Three days later, returning to Midway and good ol’ Colorado Springs, I had recovered enough from my shame to resume the inner monologue, mentally talking smack as I walked the streets.

I ain’t lookin’ for trouble, but if trouble should find me, be warned—I got a piece, and I know how to use it. I could pump yo chest fulla lead, homeboy! Thas right. J Wack in the hizzouse!

My carry-on snagged on a crack in the sidewalk, and I almost dropped the ice cream cone I had been licking.

One-Eyed Prophet

One-Eyed Prophet

This is a continuation of the past two weeks’ posts on cynicism, which you can read here and here, but not here.

“I met a man who’s looking for perfection

Said he’s never met a girl who’s good enough

His eyes are getting old, like they’d love to love again

Such a lonely man.”

-Jon Foreman, “A Mirror is Harder to Hold”

We’ve established that cynicism has some flaws, but is there any alternative?

Like a guy who’s afraid of his ex-girlfriend, I jump into the arms of her opposite. “Why hello there, sentimentality!”

If pessimism fails me, then the answer must be optimism.

Flannery—God rest her blessed soul—addresses this issue in her (Insightful! Life-changing!) essay, “The Church and the Fiction Writer”:

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption, which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence.

If I indulge in sentimentality, I skip death and thus never find resurrection. Cynicism mocks the disease, while sentiment covers it with a Band-Aid, a kiss on the head, and an “all better.” Neither offers a cure.

So what now? Like the college grad I am, I’m tempted to say we need a “richer understanding,” a compromise—in other words, “Can’t we just mix the two and call it even?”

A good slap to the face from GK Chesterton stops me from being such a pansy.

“What we need is not the cold acceptance of this world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.” He then asks if there is someone who can “hate [the world] enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?... Is he enough of a Pagan to die for the world and enough of a Christian to die to it?”

Love and hate the world? This is a greater demand than I expected!

So often, I can only uphold love by blinding myself to the truth. Here I am doing my darndest to love, when I’m suddenly confronted by an obstacle in the form of a rude or selfish or arrogant person, someone I just can’t handle right now. Instead of asking God to grow my love, to make it better than it is, I avoid the situation altogether by one of two detours.

I can choose cynicism, putting up defenses against this unlovable person, shutting the door so quietly that they will never realized they’re outside. Or I can choose sentimentality, pretending they “aren’t so bad” and glossing over their more distasteful qualities—a path that ultimately leads back to cynicism because I’m really not so good at pretending.

At the foundation, cynicism and sentimentality are both malfunctioning love, a sign that my love is a lot weaker than I thought.

A parable that has consistently encouraged me in the past months is that of the wheat and the tares. Basically, a farmer plants seeds in his field, only to find later that weeds are growing up among the harvest. His servants’ response is similar to my own: “Should we get rid of the weeds?” They’ve seen the problem, and now they have a diagnosis.

The farmer’s answer is unexpected, at least to me: “No, lest as we gather up the tares, the wheat be pulled up with it.”

This is true wisdom. I consider myself perceptive to notice the weeds among the wheat, not knowing that as I reach to eradicate evil I am also uprooting good along with it. When I turn my eye against the ills of this world, I always end up destroying more than I intend. I’m a bumbling surgeon, unable to remove a tumor without cutting the heart.

Earlier this year I finished writing a song called “One-Eyed Prophet.” Like so many things I’ve written, I didn’t realize when I wrote it how much I would need it later. It tells the story of a prophet who is “always honest but never tells the truth.” Here’s the last stanza:

You’ll admit that you don’t know a cure

But you sure love playing doctor

You love the part where we take off our shirts

And uncover all our sores

Oh, what a great relief to see we’re all the same

But lately I’ve been wondering why

There’s no healing in your house

This song was inspired by a cynic I observed, but in the end I found it is actually about me. I’m the one-eyed prophet. I’m the one who is able to see the problem but lacks a cure.

The very end of the song offers a plea: “Your justice and mercy never kissed, so turn your good eye to the things you’ve missed.”

Each of us is constantly vacillating between two goods, justice and mercy. Only one man has ever held both equally, not in a dirty brown hue of compromise, but each in full strength.

Jesus is startlingly blunt about the wickedness man perpetrates. But then he turns around and lavishes love on those wicked people. He sees the most clearly, and He loves best. His love is not accomplished by a smearing of the facts. No, it’s stronger than that. He looks us in the face, and He loves.

His mercy and truth meet; His righteousness and peace kiss.

Somehow, I must do the same.

I’ve been a cynic, a man who’s so afraid of getting hurt that he locks himself in his own house. Now it’s time to try something different, something that requires more bravery than I possess, and more love. I go out as a lamb among wolves, and sometimes as a wolf myself. I think I may have only one eye, but I’m training it to look at God.