I have a wide range of on relationships with peers who, now well into their 30s, seem to have become lost. Sometimes subtly, but sometimes in major life-crisis-inducing kinds of ways. Maybe this is always true of 30somethings (the 80s show of that name seems to indicate yes…).

I am quite literally middle-aged now. I don’t want to live any longer than 70. I honestly don’t. In fact, I’d be happy with a significantly shorter life than that. I feel like I’ve been in mid-life crisis mode since I was a teenager. I grew up in a place and a way in which death was all around: inevitable, quick and unpredictable. Not that it isn’t everywhere, but some places make it more obvious than others. The consequences of now living in a ‘soft’ place where mortality is always kept at arm’s length is that people don’t live with an appropriate sense of urgency, or of maintaining their principles or even priorities.

Halfway there happened in a blink. And it’s been getting faster. I’m not exactly ready, but it’s happening ready or not.

So what’s in you that dying to get out? Those songs, those art pieces, those poems, those conversations, those innovative solutions are your purpose. You are beset on all sides by distractions. But you’ve always deeply known your reason, no matter how atrophied. And sometimes you’re involved in something so close to your calling that it feels like your calling, while your calling lies dying within you. On the other hand, perhaps it would be so easy to bring the core of you into the roles that you’re fulfilling, but there’s some vague darkness holding you back from it. Getting there means you need to practice — even practise examining those things. Getting there means that you need to have the courage to have courage.

It’s time to do inventory. Look into the corners of the backroom of your mind where the lights can’t find the strength to shine. Take the moment, and be real about the non-negotiables in amongst what you find.

I’m going to share one of my takeaways from Kurk Voclain’s WPPI Road Show session in Seattle the other day. He asked audience members to close their eyes and imagine a red circle. Add as much detail as you like – the only guideline is that it must be a circle, and it must be red. He allowed people to mentally construct their own red circle for a moment, and then started asking people to describe theirs.

Some imagined hoops. Some saw discs. Some saw spheres, like basketballs (but that’s silly because everyone knows that the authorised, proper and right colour for basketballs is orange). Some saw very small dots. The trick with advertising and marketing is to get all the imaginary red circles to match. Momentarily laying aside the question “Are you selling what people want?”, the important question here is: “Are you selling what you’re advertising?”

Communication is extremely nuanced. Trying to get everyone to visualise the same red circle isn’t easy. And the stakes for that little exercise are relatively low. How do you get people’s ideas of very abstract, very subjective and very important stuff to sync? Like justice? Or how about grace?

You’ve got to waste (while it is actually an investment, there’s so much investment before there’s a pay-off that waste is a better word) a lot of time on this stuff. It doesn’t happen magically. You need to ask, answer, listen, seek, prod, nudge, state, suggest and clarify all the time. For a long time. And there are no guarantees. In fact, the odds are stacked against successful transfers of meaning and purpose. Which is why it feels so good when it works.

So what’s the red circle you need to tell the world about? How will you describe it?

It has dawned on me that we’ve been sold a ton of answers. There are people who have found that the secret to success is selling books about the secret of success. Pragmatists pour gallons of ink into leveraging purpose. Artists pour gallons of paint (etc.) into refuting it. We have become highly sceptical of people with answers — whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable, but it is certainly a reality. Personally, I think that it’s an opportunity.

We aren’t supposed to live with a lot of pre-fab, one-size-fits-all, as-seen-on-TV kinds of answers, much as advertisers of all stripes (even or perhaps especially faith-based) try to tell you otherwise. I think, and I’ve been pondering this for months, I think the real purpose of our lives is to find one true question. One question that will take you your whole life to solve — one, in fact, that will outlive you. There are many questions, several are similar, but most people don’t ask them. Most people try to ignore what’s important as they chase what’s trivial. I’m fascinated by that.

Someone recently asked the question: what are you doing that’s going to matter in 30 million years? That’s a foolish question. There’s nothing that anyone is doing or creating right now that will last that long. You could shrink that several orders of magnitude down to 3,000 or 300 or even 30 and see the end of lots of what people are pouring their lives into. 30 million is just ridiculous. Unless you believe that there is something essential in people that is eternal. Then priorities flip around pretty quickly.

I think everyone has an important question that they need to ask. I don’t know how you can ask it louder. I’m not going to even advise that you do. What we really need to is to listen, listen, listen to each other’s question. Because from the shabby street person to the suffering wealthy drug addict, from the mourning widow to the high school star athlete, from the pastor to the pornographer, each person’s question is part of our grand narrative. We are on the quest for a quest, and everyone should join.

I’m sort of an automotive nut. I read a lot of magazines, I follow automotive blogs, and talk to people who are wired about cars. I particularly appreciate older models. Somewhere along the line someone said that if you’re going to restore a classic you’d better love that car. If you don’t really love it, you won’t finish it. Craigslist is full of disassembled projects that people lost interest in. It’s easy to get distracted at any stage of the major undertaking, and find something else that’s more appealing, less work, or to simply get disheartened just give up on the whole thing. That same concept applies to a whole lot of things in life.

Sometimes it’s amazing how much energy it takes to make one incremental difference. And just because you achieved one step, that doesn’t mean that the next increment is going to be easier. Perhaps eventually they will, but not necessarily. You have to be realistic about that investment. Don’t look too far in the future or you will become overwhelmed. You need to establish small goals and celebrate their achievement.

You can only do this if you’re doing something that’s connected with the core of who you are. (Of course, that means you need to know that about yourself which is an investment in and of itself.) And you need to surround yourself with people that will keep you honest, humble, and driven. Using those people to help establish and celebrate the increments is a really good idea.

The revolution that you’re trying to start, lead or shape is worth the investment. Line it all up, and make it happen. When you’re done, you’ll end up with something that will appeal to a whole lot more people than it does now. Even if it’s a weird-looking, quirky contraption, it’ll be better with no rips in the seats, a fresh coat of paint and it’s running smoothly.

One of the ways that I define maturity is being able to see from someone else’s perspective. But I’m not sure that ever happens. In communications, there’s this truism that you can’t experience a feeling that you don’t have a vocabulary to describe. I don’t quite buy that – I think there’s a lot that we live through that is beyond our words. However, I do think it’s virtually impossible to share that experience, and have others participate in a meaningful way in it if you can’t describe it. (Take that as a challenge to grow your vocabulary, not permission to give up the effort!)

Egocentrism is a developmental stage in children. It describes a period when a child is unable to comprehend anything beyond the self. It’s the young age where if a child can’t see a toy, it just ceases to exist. I kind of think that we never quite grow out of that. I’ve heard college professors argue for their chosen discipline to be the centre of existence: “Economics is everything!” I see it reinforced time and again with the people that I rub shoulders with. Each at some level views their own personalities and expectations as universal – whether saliently or subtly. We need to constantly, consistently and deeply question these assumptions. We do great violence in the world when we don’t. Even our most generous and noble actions are motivated in a way that is in a word, selfish. No matter how hard you try on your own, you just can’t escape it.

In his otherwise light-hearted song, People Should Smile More, Newton Faulkner sings the jarring lyric: “I can’t change the world / ‘Cause tryin’ to make a difference makes things worse.” I’ve mulled over that. It rings true. Because I don’t think we’re supposed to have the grandiose desire to change the world. If that is our desire, it can’t help but to be in effort make it match our own personalities. If the whole world looked like me, it would be running off in all directions and it’d be really bad at economics. (Wait, maybe it does look like me!)

No two people desire the exact same goal(s). And that’s okay. Honestly! Even in a company full of paid employees, or a church, or a social group, or an online community, or a marriage or whatever. It’s totally okay. Of course we need to manage how diverse we allow the end goals to be, and define the shape and scope of them together. If they’re totally incompatible, that will become pretty obvious, pretty quick. But a multiplicity of goals can co-exist coherently surprisingly well. That is, if they’re openly discussed, submitted to the greater good, and simply allowed to. You just need to know that you can’t see them right away, and can’t fully understand them, so you need to keep asking the important questions.

Your unique perspective is critically important. Just like everyone else’s.

In the Bible, when God asked something of someone, how many responded: “Well that makes perfect sense! I’m fully qualified for this, I’m eloquent, I’m a born leader – I’m your natural selection!”?

I can’t think of one. Lots of people followed through on stuff (the Bible would be pretty boring if they didn’t!), but rarely if ever was it done eagerly, simplistically and without question.

“You want me to build an ark!?” “You want me to preach to Nineveh!?” “You want me to give birth to your son!?” The first instinct was to flee – every time!

When God makes a God-sized request, we start to feel very human. We see our abundant weaknesses and shortcomings so very clearly. We start to plainly see how ‘other’ God is. That is appropriately humbling.

Recently someone expressed disquiet at “weird” stuff surrounding faith. Sorry, all of this stuff is weird, and perhaps among it, God is most especially so. We can know God in a meaningful sense, but not in a comprehensive sense. When God reveals something new about himself to us, he is most certainly other. (Don’t kid yourself, you’re not prepared for that. Really.) We however are his creation, and he knows us completely. He knows the motivations behind our motivations. And he is the only being that promises to give us the desires of our hearts if we trust him first. (Curiously, trusting an omnipotent being that knows the desires behind the desires, and who promises to fulfil them is not, for some reason, as easy as it would seem.)

It’s humbling and awe-striking when God acts and invites our participation. How that’s expressed, and how it turns out is unique to each situation. But instigator-God tends to allow us our free will. In the conversation that he initiates, God generally allows no to be an option. It’s just a sadder, poorer option – especially compared to the intricate, life-giving possibilities that a yes brings. And of course, there’s the odd time when a no has landed someone in the belly of a whale…

Check out this great podcast on hip-hop (I love the Kindlings’ Muse!). It’s interesting to take in something from a culture that I have very little familiarity with. I was surrounded by hip-hop growing up, but I didn’t own it, didn’t invest or investigate enough. Now I kinda regret that — though I still think I’m too white to pull it off. :-)

Hip-hop is the voice of the shtreet (and you gotta say shtreet, or it ain’t hip-hop, y’all). I never gave credence to what that actually means. It always felt like it was counter-cultural, in a sort of brash and pointless way. Like have you seen Airheads? (This isn’t an endorsement — it’s very low-brow, if you get what I’m saying.) These guys take over a radio studio, and finally the DJ says okay, you’ve got the mic — what is so important that you need to tell the world. And the guy says “Rock and roll!” That’s it. It’s loud and empty.

But here’s what caught my ears in the above discussion: in hip-hop culture, the standard that everything is judged by is how much it inspires others to create. A song could inspire graffiti. Or grafitti could inspire a DJ.

The ideal of perpetuation has been constantly eroded from within most of our current cultural dialogue(s). Most people’s cultural interaction drops off at the consumption stage. There are tons of important reasons for this (it’s the system, man!), but none of them concentrate on the tools. The tools are easier, more accessible and more global than ever before. I think we’ve got to grapple with that, to get perpetuation to work — because imagine if that became reality! Imagine a local group of people that simply inspired each other by creating. A group of people that got really interested in the issues. That got fired up to make a difference in the places they live, and with the people they live with. Hey, it’s a lofty, gilded goal. But one that we’re always getting closer to realising. It just needs a catalyst and a leader.

I don’t know who said it, where, or why (I saw it on fffound which is where every meme eventually ends up). I just like it.

Thinking it through, I think this sort of the foundation of a burgeoning new philosophy. (I’ve posted about psuedo-modernism recently.) When thinking fails you, feel. There are massive pitfalls to employing that as an ideal, so let’s build in some safeguards. Because there is incredible power in it, too.

Pointed to it from several directions, I recently checked out a well-known company’s newest release video. It announced the new iteration of a product that has become impressively more versatile, faster and simpler. But what has stuck with me is that there are several corporate positions with the job title “Evangelist”. I get the cute, winking reference. On one level I think it’s flattering. However, there is also a dark side. Let’s get into it, shall we?

Are Christians just sales people hawking a message? Are we trying to get someone to buy the next upgrade? To initiate some kind of monetary transaction? No. We’re about a whole different thing. We’d better be clear enough about that with ourselves, that we can clearly reflect it to the world.

Seriously, we’d better get our act together. I want us to deeply, deeply own the whole concept of evangelism. (On the other hand, televangelists can keep televangelism — ick!) I want us to embrace this concept so thoroughly that if it was used in a commercial, corporate context it would be jarring. That it currently isn’t says something both significant and sinister.

The world has taken the concept of evangelism from the church. It’s time to steal it back. And breathe into it the depth and richness that sticking it on a snappy salesman’s business card has sapped.

I was thinking the other day how disenfranchised I am with all the “fall in love with Jesus” talk. Church songs carry that flavour, truisms in books hold it dear, and I just don’t. (I know I’m not alone in this!)

I need to make this point first: there are nearly 7 billion unique people in the world. Each one of those people can have a different but valid take on the nature of God. Put another way, God is so complex that he can reveal himself in 7 billion different shades simultaneously. So for some people the romantic thing with God may be legit, and there are Biblical metaphors that clearly lean that way. It just doesn’t do it for me. And truthfully, a lot of guys are going to face this issue. So I was imagining a new way to conceive this ‘love’ thing. I landed on the idea of a buddy movie. (Did I just use “buddy” to refer to Christ? Stick with me: I’ll fix this!)

Think of the epitome of the genre. It’s never the driver who instigates; the guy in the driver seat is always far too responsible for that (and the car is usually someone else’s so messing with it is pretty high stakes). It seems like it’s always the slightly off-kilter guy sitting in the passenger seat that suggests all the crazy stuff. (Did I just suggest that Christ is the co-pilot? And off-kilter too? Am I just digging myself into a hole here!?)

Check it out: in the Bible, Christ walks up to these regular schmoes who are going about their daily routine, and he says “Follow me.” Who does that? Who walks up to somebody obviously immersed in the stuff of life and says “Let’s have an adventure together!” Could you do that to your mechanic? To your plumber? I’m almost sure that that wouldn’t go well. (It would be kinda fun to try!) However in those stories, it seems like the disciples just go with it. (Now who’s crazy, amiright?)

Check what they got up to. They drew huge crowds. They witnessed (and even performed!) miracles. They saw Jesus face off with the most influential leaders of their day. It was like a 3yr road trip, and they got up to all kinds of shenanigans. A few times, they had to run for their lives! It all ended with the big showdown: Jesus vs. the religious institution, the legal system and the military weight of the government. Jesus was executed. And he still won!

I work with someone who doesn’t want me to present missions as an adventure. I sometimes wonder what his beef is. Because it really is! It really, really is! Jesus is still the instigator. He’s still stirring dissent, wreaking havoc on assumptions, and working to illuminate truth in hearts and minds. He is the perfect counter to evil, however you define it, in every form that it exists. He constantly invites people to follow him into all kinds of far-out, zany stuff to build their communities and change people’s hearts. He’s in it the thickest when the stakes are highest. When I see it that way, I think: man, I love this guy!