The Monday After

If there is a door to adulthood, it is harder to find today than in past generations. There has always been a clear break between a child and a man. No civilization has ever tried to run endless adolescence. We are the first.

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One of my pastor friends was told on his first Sunday, "Don't worry. I'll be here when you leave." That wasn't meant cruelly, but it underscored that people saw the pastor as a chapter, not the story. When people expect you to move on soon, relationships can easily become transactional. They call when they need you, but rarely just to check in.

He is not alone in that. Peter DeHaan has cited a claim that only about one in forty people who enter vocational ministry finish their careers there. Josh Reich has passed along another: the average person loses a handful of significant relationships in a lifetime, while a pastor loses several every year. I can't verify those figures, but I don't doubt them.

What gives?


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Last week I sat in the wrong coffee shop for 20 minutes before realizing I was meeting someone else. I rushed to the right one, apologizing on the way in, and still ended up having a great hour of mutual encouragement with a man I admire.

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In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus keeps returning to the same pattern: "You have heard that it was said," and then, "But I tell you." He is not correcting the Old Testament. Jesus is on the hillside correcting what the religious teachers had done with it.

How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth Gordon D. Fee & Douglas Stuart

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It took 99 days to extinguish the fires.

Last week we marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. My parents' generation remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed. I vaguely remember the Challenger exploding on television. But for Generation X and many millennials, 9/11 is the event in American history most seared into our minds. If you are under 25, you were not alive.

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

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A woman in her 20s at your church has an Instagram bio that reads, before her name, before a single photo: ADHD. Anxiety. CPTSD. Not what she loves or enjoys. Just a diagnosis to frame her life.

The rising generation has received more therapy than any generation before it. The results are not subtle. 

Resources:
Resisting Therapy Culture by Matthew Loftus
Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier

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I will never forget Maie Sullivan. 

Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever by Andrew Wilson

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You talk to a friend and walk away from the conversation convinced you heard exactly what they said and meant, only to find out you misunderstood what they were trying to tell you. Has that happened to anyone else?

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Well. I struck a nerve last week. Go back and read it here.

Here's the main thrust, stripped down: you can live a godly life without ever cracking a book, including the Bible. You cannot live a godly life apart from the regular gathering of God's people. Full stop.

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You can read.

You've been able to read since you were a small child, so long that you can't remember what it felt like not to. You can't look at a stop sign and not read it. Literacy has rewired your brain. And because you read in English, you've been shaped by a particular civilization — its categories, its assumptions, its way of organizing the world. You were educated in subjects that make almost no difference to your daily life, and it never occurred to you to ask why. Reading is the water you swim in. 

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