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Leadership

"[Call] and Augustus had discussed the question of leadership many times. 'It ain't complicated,' Augustus maintained. 'Most men doubt their own abilities. You don't. It's no wonder they want to keep you around. It keeps them from having to worry about failure all the time.'

'They ain't failures, most of them,' Call pointed out. 'They can do perfectly well for themselves.'

Augustus chuckled. 'You work too hard,' he said. 'It puts most men to shame. They figure out they can't keep up, and it's just a step or two from that feeling that they can't do nothing much unless you're around to get them started.'"

-Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it. To look at this place, it's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looked like? You can't tell so much from the appearance of a place.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

ayjay-deactivated20161206

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom.

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (via ayjay)

"The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it."

Hemingway wrote this about catching a fish, but I think it's probably about loving my wife.

The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at the complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.

T.H. White

thrumminginthemixture

The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music ‘except country.’ People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (via thrumminginthemixture)

Data

Five years ago, when I became a man, it struck me as an interesting exercise to keep a record of every book I read and every movie I watched from my 18th birthday* onward. I don't know how the idea occurred to me. I had followed my big brother's lead in keeping movie ticket stubs for most of high school, and that meticulosity had paid off when it helped me win an argument with a girlfriend about who got to pick the movies we went to see. Mostly, I think I just saw the adulthood pivot of the 18th birthday* as significant enough to merit the construction of some kind of monument, and a monument to all the major ideas and stories I consumed as a man seemed as good as any.

Along the way, I also experimented with tracking my attendance at plays and concerts, or my completion of seasons of TV shows. These spurs were all dead-ends, though. I just ended up being uninterested in the results, and I went to too few performances to get in the habit of recording that data consistently.

In the five years since I turned 18, I have finished 146 books and watched 205 movies. This means that, on average, I finish one book every 12.5 days and I watch a movie every 9 days. The only year that I read more books than I watched movies was 2010, which I credit to the "52 in 52" challenge.

2009 (Jul 15 - Dec 31)

19 books. The year of classics: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Plato's Republic, and the Bible.

44 movies.

2010

52 books. In 2010, my sisters and I participated in the "52 in 52" challenge, reading a book each week of the year.

31 movies.

2011

26 books. In 2011, I completed my own "4 in 4" challenge, reading a book of over 1000 pages for each season of the year. My four books were Bone by Jeff Smith, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

29 movies. I also watched ten seasons of TV in 2011—during study abroad, I read a lot of books, but I also OD'd on screen time.

2012

19 books. In 2012, I intended to complete a somewhat ill-defined "12 in 12" challenge, but a brutal January in which I finished no books put that plan to rest with alacrity.

39 movies.

2013

19 books. In 2013, I started using a spreadsheet instead of a word document, and I started tracking start and completion dates of books, along with page counts. The average book in 2013 was 281 pages and took me 44 days to read from start to finish.

48 movies.

2014 (Jan 1 - Jul 15)

11 books. The average book in 2014 was 268 pages and took me 30 days to read from start to finish.

14 movies. Marriage has shifted me away from movie-watching and toward TV series.

My takeaway from all these data is that reading can easily fall through the cracks if I don't have intentional challenges to keep me on pace with it. As I finish up 2014, my goal is to fix my ratio for the first time since 2010: I want to read more books than I watch movies. Fortunately, I'm not that far behind!

*Strictly speaking, it was on my 19th birthday that I turned 18 years old, since on my first birthday I was a newborn of zero years old. Fighting this semantic crusade has never seemed worthwhile enough to alter my own speech and composition, but it's my 24th birthday dangit and I'm going to point it out.

On Easter, Aslan, Spring, and the Atonement

Today, the second Sunday of Lent, is a stormy and cold day in Tulsa, Oklahoma. NPR even gave a nod to our state's thunderstorms on Morning Edition while predicting a blast of wintery weather for the mid-Atlantic states. Dreary weather be damned, spring is coming—the correspondent was insistent on this fact. There will be 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness on Thursday, and there's nothing that a few (more) inches of snow can do about that. Aslan is on the move.

Even though I rail against Daylight Saving Time, it too contributes to that building excitement that winter will die and we will all eventually thaw out. I may feel like a zombie at the pre-dawn 6:00 AM alarm clock, but I can go for a run after school with sunlight aplenty for my hungry, winter-whitened skin. Little buds are popping up on the branches of trees. There is a scent of something other than freezer burn on the air. And so the pagan, sun-worshipping homunculus inside of me gets extraordinarily hungry for vitamin D that is obtained by means other than oral ingestion at the bedside table every morning.

And this is where I think that Christianity (or at least, her calendar) must have the slightest bias in favor of the global north, because up here the theological celebration of resurrection and new life coincides with the deliverance that spring offers from winter's clutches. My doctrinally orthodox head sings in harmony with my primal, sun-starved heart, and the resultant chorus enthrones Easter as the queen of all holidays in my affections.

And as I wait expectantly for the celebration of the Resurrection, my soteriology undergoes a temporary scramble of priorities. Although I, as a Theologically Circumspect and Proper Reformed Evangelical Protestant, hold to penal substitutionary atonement (in brief: Jesus becomes a juridical sacrifice and receives the sentence and punishment we deserve so that we criminals can be declared not guilty in God's heavenly courtroom) as my primary understanding of Christ's work on the cross, Easter the past few years has pushed other theories of the atonement to the forefront of my thinking. Around Easter, my soul is quickened by thoughts of Christus Victor and Jesus my Ransom.

The ransom theory of the atonement is probably most familiar to English-speaking Evangelicals through the allegory of the Stone Table in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In that story, young Edmund has, through his own folly, become the legal captive of the White Witch, and his release is only secured by Aslan offering himself as a ransom in the boy's place. Ransom theory imagines us, not as the accused criminals of God's courtroom so much as the enslaved property of sin/death/Satan—the only ransom that will be accepted for us hostages is the even greater prize of Jesus himself. In Mark 10 and Matthew 20, Jesus lays the foundation for this idea, saying that the Son of Man came to serve and "to give his life as a ransom for many." In 1 Timothy, Paul reiterates that Jesus gave his life "as a ransom for all."

Christus Victor, as an understanding of the atonement, is a little different, but it pairs well with ransom theory. The Latin phrase communicates the idea as Jesus the warrior with the two-edged sword coming out of his mouth, the triumphant King who slays our sin, destroys death, and annihilates the devil and his armies. This is Aslan whose roar scatters the forces of the White Witch after cracking the Stone Table and returning to life. Christus Victor is he whose might "breaks the pow'r of cancelled sin" and "sets the prisoner free."

The one hymn that I think every member of my family most associates with Easter is "Up From The Grave He Arose"; during homeschool mid-morning Bible class, we would crouch down and murmur the somber verses in a hushed sotto voce only to spring up and bellow "UP FROM THE GRAVE HE AROSE" each time the chorus came around. The lines that follow that one are very much Christus Victor:

Up from the grave he arose, With a mighty triumph o'er his foes! He arose the victor of the dark domain, And he lives forever with his saints to reign! He arose! He arose! Hallelujah, Christ arose!

The other major influence on my Easter atonement sentiments comes from my affinity for the maybe-but-probably-not-Biblical idea of the "Harrowing of Hell," the notion that in between his crucifixion and his resurrection, Jesus descended into hell, kicked some ---, and took some names. "Therefore it says, 'When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and gave gifts to men.' In saying, 'He ascended,' what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?" (Ephesians 4:8-9). I was so taken with this idea at fourteen that I wrote a poem about it, and if the doodles that I draw in my Field Notes during sermons are any indication, the way that I still imagine (stick-figure) Jesus is wearing a crown and wielding a sword, maybe kicking down the door of a dungeon where, "Long my imprison'd spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night."

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations; his rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of he blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double. Zechariah 9:9-12

Aslan is on the move.

The King is coming.

#tl;dr #easter #atonement

A year ago she said, "WHAT?!? YES!"

A year ago today was the last time I visited Grandma Criss before she died. I was back in Little Rock, ostensibly for a recruiting trip aimed at potential TU students, but principally because I was solicitous to see Grandma as much as I could before her failing health finally resigned. Making the visit more pressing was a small item of jewelry ensconced in my pocket, a white gold band inset with a diamond. A year ago today, I got to tell Grandma that a year ago tomorrow I was going to ask that nice girl who had visited at Christmas to be my wife.

Grandma relished telling the story of the time that she gave me her gold PT Cruiser for my 16th birthday (gold, because dirt and dust would be less noticeable and she’d have to wash it less, she would shrewdly confide). “It was the only time I ever saw him speechless!” the story always went, her delivery a perfect, twinkly-eyed crow. Well, the time I showed Grandma that little diamond ring was the only time I ever saw HER speechless, I could now retort. But that day, true to form, her silence didn’t last too long.

Grandma was a great giver of advice, and meritoriously so, as an eventual nonagenarian. She was a great giver of many things (see, for example, my aforementioned birthday speechlessness), but telling stories and giving advice were her first and favorite ways to show you love. In out final face-to-face conversation, I know we talked at length about love, marriage, and family. I don’t remember everything she said: that weekend is a blur of good memories. But I remember the last thing she said, and I remember talking with Katie about it at Grandma’s funeral three weeks later. “Be good to each other,” she told me. I trust we have. She was always so good to us.

heyluchie

My comic; “Introversion” is finished! Please go to the main page of my blog to read it in full size (the text is kinda small)

I really hope you’ll like it!

lukescommonplacebook

“I start my class explaining that learning to write is their moral duty. I told them they had access to more information that 99 percent of all humans who have ever lived. It is a moral duty to learn how to communicate that information, clearly and compellingly. I think everyone should own their education.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Even though I didn't listen to as many 2012 albums as I normally would, I still listened to a lot of music in 2012. These are 25 songs, in roughly chronological order, that meant a lot to me this year.

#music #2012

MMXII.3

[An aside: over a quarter of the books I read in 2012 were about love, relationships, and friendship, so there's that.] Shortly before the fall semester began, I was journaling about how tired I was of wrestling with God over my singleness. I wrote out the lyrics to "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah." I wanted to trust God's timing and provision, to not be disconsolate by the three rejections I'd received in the past year or so, to not desire, like the Israelites had, for the "melons of Egypt" that God had taken away from me to give me something better. After my brother's rehearsal dinner, I had been taken by a sudden and powerful sorrow over a relationship that by then nine months cold. I didn't understand why something that I was "over," that I had long since put to rest in my brain, that no longer had a grip on my heart, could still overwhelm me with a self-pitying grief, and why I seemed incapable of living without nursing a crush for some girl or other. It was not a month later that we were singing "Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Jehovah" in my church back at Tulsa that I realized that the past two nights I had journaled to God about how free I felt in my singleness, how grateful I was for it, how much I understood why it was good for me right then and there. I was floored and happy. And then, of course, my eyes lighted upon another girl. The summer weather lasted forever. I wore shorts and sandals a lot. I ran barefoot around campus multiple times a week. I found the "homework zone" in my new SA President office. I liked all three of my classes, and I put off my senior project until the last month of school, and it somehow all worked out anyway. I wanted more adventure. We slept out under the stars on "The U" three times; it was magical. We took a road trip to Ames to see TU lose its first football game to Iowa State. We drove to Fayetteville to see TU lose another game to Arkansas. We drove to Houston to see TU curb-stomp its old rival. We drove to Edmond to see a high school band concert and The Hobbit. We sang and danced in the car a lot. I wound up giving a paper at a Philosophy of Education conference at Columbia. I was younger than everyone and my paper was a lot more concrete and I felt out of place but I got to see Newsies on Broadway and eat well with my sister and brothers, so it was yet another adventure. The semester's motto was "Work hard, play hard." It was hard. I felt a lot of stress and by the end of the semester I was just desperately trying to finish everything and not mess up or let anyone (myself included) down. But I head-banged at the Mountain Goats concert and danced for hours at the cheesy, poorly-attended "Magical Winter's Eve" ball and at the best Jay-Z's birthday party thrown by someone other than Jay-Z. I found out I was accepted to the Teach For America (Oklahoma Corps) about an hour before our CMA Awards watch party (we like parties dedicated to odd themes). My sweet friends had bought champagne. All my summertime dreams of moving to Denver had been scrapped in favor of a desire to stay in Tulsa. Little Rock felt less like home than ever, even though I still loved to see my parents and climb Pinnacle Mountain. TU won the conference championship in football (which Tim and I painted ourselves completely blue for, and made the paper), so a gang of us made the trip to the Liberty Bowl and cheered like crazy for the revenge we dealt to Iowa State. For the first time in nine years, I didn't host a new year's eve party. There were only a few high school friends that it was still important for me to see, so I stayed in Memphis with college friends and rang in the new year on Beale's Street in the rain and cold. I didn't pay a single thought to resolutions, and I was mostly surprised that 2013 had stolen in so quickly. For the first time in five years I didn't publish a "Top Ten Albums of 20XX" list, either. I hadn't listened to enough new music. I got exhausted just thinking about trying to keep up with music this year. I still enjoyed a lot of music, though, so don't worry about that. Over the course of 2012, I learned what I would spend the next two years doing, and I got over some heartaches, and I kept struggling with legalism and perfectionism. I felt very loved by my friends and family. I went on a lot of road trips. I went for a lot of runs. I danced more than I had expected to. My plans were no match for God's sovereign surprises. I was caught off guard by new friendships, by adventures that presented themselves suddenly, by a very quick answer to the question, "What am I doing after I graduate?" I still don't think I'm doing enough as SA President. I have a stack of unread books that I'm meaning to get to. I don't feel ready to teach at an inner-city school. What I need to remember is how much God took care of me in 2012—with that as my witness, the prescription for 2013 should be more trust, and not more scheming. It was a good year.

#2012 #singleness

MMXII.2

The two semesters of 2012 bookended my third—and probably final—summer working at New Life Ranch. My mom worked at NLR in the 1970s. Most of my siblings and I went as campers, my sister worked there, and I felt called to be a counselor in 2010 as early as March of 2009. It's always been a special place for me, and God protected me from the temptation of internships and "real" jobs to keep me right where I needed to be each summer: playing in the sun, teaching kids about Jesus, growing close to fellow Christians, learning about leadership and passion and my identity. I was an SAL—a Summer Activity Leader—this summer, meaning that Abbie and I supervised the whole Jr. Camp (3rd-6th graders), and along with Jessica and David, emceed and organized all the other all-camp activities. I had wanted to do this job since I started working at camp. It meant that I got to write skits for the Morning Camp Party. It meant that I got to use my role as an organizer to tweak little things that had bothered me as a staffer. It meant that I got to take care of things behind the scenes and run things in front of the scenes. I was fond of the homesick and irascible campers that got taken to me to help. There were easily a dozen times when I was doing my job—running an errand on the Gator or something—and the feeling "I have the best job on earth" whelmed up inside me unbidden. I got up early for the Summer Solstice and went for a walk with a friend and saw the sunrise. I'd be a sun-worshipping pagan if I didn't believe that Jesus created the sun and was greater than it. There was one night—after the stress of Family Camp, after a fun Small Group date that had fallen apart in its final hours, with a huge group of campers arriving the following afternoon—that I finally didn't want to be in charge of things anymore. My nature tends to leadership; I feel comfortable with authority (having authority, that is—not the concept of authority in general). But I just didn't want things to fail and didn't want everything relying on me all the time and resented God for getting the credit ("glory") when things went well while I took all the blame when my sinfulness ruined things. I thought that the whole world depended on me, but it doesn't. I thought that God was a harsh taskmaster, but he isn't. My small group (Team X) prayed for me and encouraged me. I started to feel better. My grandma got a feeding tube put in and I cried bitterly. My brother got married and I cried joyfully. I sat around a few nights and mourned unrequited love with a girl friend whose crush was as insensible to her affections as my crush was to mine. We were sad, but it was good for me to extend and receive compassion that wasn't just trying to fix things. Impotent sympathy is not my instinct, I'd rather root out the problem, but this was pure and powerless commiseration. Tim worked at camp for the first time, and I don't know how I ever worked there without him. Late one night I learned—sort of—how to drive stick shift on the housekeepers' cart. I drank a lot of milkshakes. I started shaving with a safety razor. I danced my heart out to "Take A Walk" and went for a weekly run in the blazing hot afternoon with "Love Lifted Me" turning my exhausted suffering into an unlikely quiet time and refreshment. Summer wound up and on the last day of camp we had "The Reckoning" (my idea) and used up all our water balloons and shaving cream attacking the campers at the waterfront. I drove back to Little Rock in silence—no music, no podcasts—after the SAL end-of-summer retreat. I thanked God for how much he used New Life Ranch to bless me and teach me things and cause me to grow. I thought about what this summer had meant to me, and how sad I was that it was over, but how fittingly it was done, how fully it had run its course.

#camp #2012 #unrequited love #suffering

MMXII.1

I started 2012 at the eighth annual Lepine new year's eve party with my old high school chums. As per tradition, we went down the park in our neighborhood to drink sparkling grape juice and pray and talk. It was not long after that I joined my new camp chums at a farm in Green Country, OK to chop wood and think about the future and pray and talk. I was still very sad about my girlfriend breaking up with me in October, but I was talking about it less and with fewer people; I had used up all the sympathy I thought was fitting for such a short relationship that had ended many months ago. I went back to school early to spend time with other camp chums. I hosted a dinner party. I got more excited for summer. Spring 2012 was not the most academically inspiring. I cut class at an all-time high. There was one Education class—a night class taught by my favorite professor—that I enjoyed and did most of the reading for. My two economics classes were unchallenging and dull and repetitive and scattered, their only saving grace that I was taking them with good friends. My Geology class was easy and I was above the curve by almost always managing to stay awake in it. My calculus class was laborious and uninteresting, a timesuck not necessary for my degree. A book told me once to Do Hard Things, but in this case the hard thing that I had to do was let myself put a W on my transcript and give my time to things I cared about more. The night I closed my calculus textbook for good is pictured my dictionary next to "relief." I traveled a fair bit. I went to Texas with some acquaintances to awkwardly lead a small group for high schoolers at a Presbyterian youth conference. There was a Team X reunion, an SAL training weekend for camp, and roadtrip to Auburn, AL for the Austrian Scholars Conference that I had wanted to attend for years. There was the camp work weekend, immediately followed by an RUF strategic retreat that I slipped away from early to cheer my brother on in his last high school play. There was also the spring break, which was spent in Little Rock, and most memorably at a little TV-tray desk that I set up in the garage so I could sit shirtless in the sunshine and read and write a term paper. It was there that I processed the sudden and unexpected healing from the long winter of the broken heart. I realized how desperately I had been trying to control everything in my last relationship, how much I was blaming God, or Emily, or my own failure to do everything exactly right for my great disappointment, how unbearable my perfectionism must have been to someone dating me. It was perhaps the most liberating realization I ever had. People qua people became more important to me. I took a long lunch twice a week with economics friends that I hadn't prioritized for a long time. I didn't try to convert or re-convert any of them, I just tried to love them. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to convert anyone, but I figured that that shouldn't be my motive for hanging out with them because they would smell a rat. I watched Hamlet with Lindsay and spent a lot of the last half of semester being in love with and very worried about and considerate to "Amie." The love affair with country music only got worse. I danced to "Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher" by Otis Redding as an Easter song. I clung to "Two Hands" by Townes Van Zandt when I was sad over Amie. Tim & I left our apartment for "The Hostel," a townhouse on campus that has been functioning as a tiny, tiny frat house since 2008. The semester ended and I stayed in town for the Board of Trustees meeting (because oh yeah I was elected SA President—without opposition), but Housing did not acknowledge my request for an extension on spring residency, so I hid in my townhouse without a key and with the doors unlocked, hoping desperately that the Gestapo wouldn't come inspect and find me squatting and kick me out. I threw out duplicate tupperware and foodstuffs that expired in 2009. That was the first third of 2012.

On Reading Challenges and Google Docs

I started keeping track of what books I read, what movies I watched, and what performances (concerts, plays, &c.) I attended when I turned 18. In 2010, I did the 52 in 52 challenge with my sisters. I read 52 books that year; I only watched 31 films. In 2011, I picked another reading challenge that I called 4 in 4: four books of over 1,000 pages in four seasons. I did not actually read a book per season—I studied abroad in the spring semester and read three of my four books in Europe. The last one I devoured over Thanksgiving break to finish the challenge up. All told, I read fewer books and watched fewer movies that year, 26 and 29 respectively. I might have actually read more pages that year than in 2010, but I didn't start tracking pages counts until 2011, so I can't compare the numbers. In 2012, I tried to do a 12 in 12 challenge, but I didn't finish a single book in January. It was a small failure of a legalistic, defeating winter. I read just 19 books over the course of the whole year (and watched a record 39! movies), and I realized in December that aside from three Batman anthologies, they were entirely non-fiction. Now, I like non-fiction, be it exposition or narrative, but I don't like the idea of completely eschewing fiction, so I borrowed David's copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and gobbled it up in about 25 hours. I wonder if the lack of a reading challenge let me get away from fiction, and so I only could justify to myself spending time on reading non-fiction. I also didn't have any campers to read stories to in 2012, and C.S. Lewis was a big help in completing 52 in 52 the summer that I had a lot of younger cabins. I'm currently munching on The Fountainhead (and reading it as a filter, not a sponge, just like Charlie's teacher tells him in Perks), trying to get in some more fiction before the scholarly reading of the semester begins again. I don't think I'll do a reading challenge this year. I'm not against them; I don't think they make me read legalistically, even though goal-setting can sometimes turn me into a rule-worshipping, performance-driven machine. But I'm glad that I've started keeping Google Docs of my reading and movie-watching habits. They help me remember what the year was like. They alert me to imbalances like my accidental fiction fast in 2012. They encourage me to not leave books half-finished. If I have any readings goals for 2012, they are these: Don't stop reading. Read different kinds of books about different kinds of subjects. Read the assigned texts for my last college classes; get the reading done before class. Read the Bible more. Read joyfully and not guiltily.

#52 in 52 #4 in 4 #12 in 12 #reading challenge #reading #Google Docs #legalism #2012

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