On a Boat in the Middle of the Sea

The breakdown of Christian friendships these last few years

When I was a child and asked to do simple chores like clean my room or put away the dishes, I would often be found hours later not having done that which I was asked, but instead curled up somewhere with a book. Other kids I knew were grounded from playdates with friends and movies on the weekend; I was grounded from reading. My imagination was a healthy one then, and it didn’t take much to center myself in the story I was reading, to become the character. It could have been the boy in The Hachett or the girl in The Borrowers or the whole family of children in The Nickel-Plated Beauty, it didn’t matter the story, just the world in which it unfolded.

I came to believe, probably subconsciously, that life was a story in which there was a single problem we all rallied around, a single climax we all participated in, and a happy ending we all shared. In middle school or so, I began to read more series of books like The Austin Family by L’Engle or the Little House stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I could see how some characters engaged different problems throughout their life. Stories were giving me a rubric for how to live. This is one reason I have always loved novels.

But stories, in most cases, still almost always contain one single problem, a single climax, and a (sometimes) happy ending. As adults, we know now, as Kierkegaard wrote, that “Life can only be lived forward but can only be understood backwards,” but sometimes we still struggle with the complexity and multiplicity of problems that happen all at once. It takes mental, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional flexibility to live lives that don’t remain in a constant state of orientation (where we know where we’re headed and how long it will take to get there), but to sometimes willingly engage in disorientation to see what we might discover there.

Walter Bruggemann in his book, The Spirituality of the Psalms, describes three different spaces in which we will sometimes exist as Christians:

Orientation: Where everything is in order and makes sense in our lives.

Disorientation: Where we are thrown off course by a situation, usually out of our control, and land in somewhat of a pit.

Reorientation: Where we are lifted from the pit or set on course again, though perhaps a different course than we were first on, and we are full of gratitude to the Lord and grace for others.

Breezing Up A Fair Wind, Winslow Homer

This weekend, Nate and I listened to David French and Curtis Chang talk together about what we mean when we use the words progressive and conservative. I’ve written about this before and won’t rehash it here, but one thing I found really helpful was Chang’s illustration of sailing (listen here at the 22:30 mark). I suggest you listen to the whole podcast to get the whole context of the conversation, but briefly, Chang says,

“How I do theology has both a progressive and conservative feel to it and the way I differentiate it is that I am conservative in how I navigate the world, but my itinerary? The actual course I travel? It could be quite progressive. . . In sailing you are very conservative in your method of sailing, you navigate by the sun or by certain stars at night. . . you’re given a sextant. . . that’s like the Bible, it points to Jesus, we don’t use driftwood to use as a sextant. . . traditional sailing was very progressive in its itinerary. . . because these methods of navigation left you very open to the winds, left you open to the currents, and that’s how human beings discovered new lands because they were blown off course. . . and that’s how I view my Christian life.”

I loved this description because it very much mirrors how I’ve seen my own theology unfolding as I grow. Almost nothing remains the same after more than forty years of being in some form of the church and after more than a decade of following Jesus seriously. Jesus remains unchanged, but the ways I see him? The routes I take to find more facets of him? The things I discover about him? They have all changed and I have come to expect them to change.

But this way of navigation means becoming very comfortable with Bruggemann’s three orientations. It means becoming comfortable with the dips that disorient me and the lifts that reorient me and the times when the orientation feels very right and easy. It means being, as I often quote Rilke saying, “patient with all that is unresolved.” It means not rushing to wrap up happy endings or resolve grief prematurely or allow relationships to return to what they always were before.

This is harder than it seems, though, and so I was really grateful to have also listened to Russell Moore’s recent podcast with writer Peter Wehner, where they discuss how the disorientation of the past decade in the church and in politics has led to a slew of reorganized or broken friendships. The real money in this episode comes in the last ten minutes when Wehner talks about the hierarchy of values and shaping influences. He says,

“When we are dealing with people who have views that are different than ours, it’s the sense that if a person holds views that are different than mine, it must be evidence of a deep character flaw or that they themselves are wicked, and that’s a challenge that we all have, and it’s a challenge in politics, a challenge in theology, a challenge in different arenas of life, and I think the mistake we make is that we assume other people have the same hierarchy of values we do and often the same life experience or shaping influences we do, and so if somebody arrives as a position that’s different than ours, we often think, ‘How could they arrive at a different position?’”

I appreciate this because, to be candid and personal here, the past eight years have been some of the most disorienting of my life in terms of relationships. Not with Jesus, he has remained steadily and only more centered and sure in my life, but my relationships have shifted into sometimes unrecognizable shapes. I wonder, “Is it me? Is it them? Is it us? The culture? What changed?”

And what I think I am coming to learn is that it is all of the above. We are all in different stages of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. And sometimes my stage of disorientation is going to look like a character flaw or even, as Wehner said, “wicked” to someone who is in a state of orientation or a different stage of disorientation. And their state of orientation is going to look suspiciously like grounded in mire in comparison to my reorientation. And the aim isn’t to all be sailing in the same seas, in the same wind, and discovering the same new lands at the same time, but instead to be set on the same course, and no matter how long it takes to get there or the route we take to get there, to meet together, finally with One Mind in Christ.

This is going to take a willingness for each of us to act generously to someone who is, in a sense, reading a different novel than us, envisioning themselves in a different story than us. It’s going to take a willingness for each of us to accept that there isn’t just One Big Climax in our lives and then a gentle resolution, but that life is like a complex book series we love but that hasn’t been finished being written yet. The end is inaccessible to us except in the sense that it will be good and we will be together.

I hope this isn’t too obscure and that the lack of personal illustrations don’t turn you off. I can’t bring myself to write about the hurt and heartbreak, the disappointment, sadness, anger, and tears that have been eked from us these last years. Not just because the stories aren’t all mine to tell, but also because I still find myself in a complete state of disorientation that someone isn’t in my life anymore and another thinks I’m a heretic and yet another couldn’t be patient with my somewhat slow process.

I feel I have quoted Norman Wirzba’s definition of hospitality ad nauseam, but it sits scrawled on a notecard above our sink and so I read it every day:

Making room for the other.
Welcoming the other into your life.
Nurturing the life of the other.
Liberating the other into their life.

I have written before about how I thought these words were going to help orient me toward a more hospitable outlook toward others, but the surprising gift has been seeing it as the posture of Jesus toward me. And I think the more I enter into the hospitality of Jesus, the more willing I am to accept that being “liberated into my life” looks a lot more like disorientation than it does like some happy-clappy ending.

Andy Crouch said to Tim Keel (in his book Shrink) that human flourishing is to be “magnificently oneself.” And if you take anything from this piece, I hope it is not that you see flourishing as you being yourself and everyone around you reflecting the you you are or the you you want to be back to yourself, but human flourishing is the willingness to give hospitality to people as they are, where they are in their story, shaped by the story they’ve lived and are living, and the glorious messy work of pointing our collective sextants at the Son and letting the Spirit blow where it will (John 3:8).

If this resonates with you, consider sharing it with a friend who may need it too.

Rembrandt, Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Have you ordered my newest book? A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and Wish Someone Would Ask Us. Available now, wherever books are sold: Amazon | Baker Book House | Bookshop

Also available: Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

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