The Who You Are With
Who chooses you matters
It’s gym class in junior high school. Not my favorite time of the day, but I’m there, in my uniform, sitting on the bleachers with the rest of the students. Today, we’re all going to be playing full court basketball. The teacher calls down two of us to the floor. They will be opposing team captains. They are considered the best basketball players in the class. Before we can play each captain must select their team. Each captain takes a turn. One by one, they call out names. One by one, kids on the bleachers go down to the floor and stand by their respective captain.
In junior high school I wasn’t the most athletic kid in the room. I was short for my age, chubby, and generally unskilled in sports. Outside of tap dancing, I wouldn’t have been seen as talented, especially alongside some of my classmates. Being selected for a team in gym class was one of those awkward junior high school moments. Of course, I wanted to be on the winning team. I thought I knew which captain had the best chance, so I had hopes they would pick me. I would do my best to contribute to the win, but knew that I wouldn’t be seen as an asset. So, all I had was hopes.
My name was called. By the other captain. As I walked down the bleachers and toward my team, the captain said to me, “I bet you thought you wouldn’t get picked until the end.” Awkward.
While I’ve forgotten the names, I remember the context and specific feelings from this moment nearly 30 years later. It was a formative moment. Not the game, mind you, the selection process. My response to the captain that chose me was one of confusion. He thought he was doing me a favor, even making me feel special by picking me. I felt I should have been thankful. Instead, I felt in that moment, he had taken away my chance at being picked by the winning captain. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t care about being picked last, I cared about who chose me.
The Who We are With
As we journey towards who we become, the relationships that we are given and those we cultivate play a significant role. We begin with relationships in our families. We are children of our parents. We may or may not have siblings. The predisposition of these relationships (or the lack of them) might be set for good or evil. Regardless, because of their closeness, we are tasked with contending with them. Our relationships with friends, work colleagues, neighbors, and more will play their roles as we live together, share our stories, and affect one another.
As we live in relationship to one another there seem to be two frameworks to think about our relating. On one extreme, each of us are individuals made to be special in our own way and each with a unique combination of physical, mental, spiritual, and contextual attributes. In this view we will never be fully known by another human being, and our uniqueness is our most prized possession. Our identity is in our individuality. On the other extreme we are all part of a singular collective humanity. In this view we are all made of the same stuff, image bearers of only one God, and unavoidably connected to one another through relationship and action. Here, it is our connectedness that is our most prized possession, and our own identity comes from the larger identity of the collective.
These frameworks help me navigate my own formation sometimes. At a basic level I must address the parts of me that are mine. The formation of these parts are mine as well. I must make choices regarding my formation from my individual perspective and make choices for the good of my life. However, intertwined in my parts are the voices of others, habits I’ve picked up from my community, and ideas that I’ve learned by living with the people I’m around. Because of this, I also have to contend with the relationships that have contributed to my formation. Among the choices I have here is the curation of those relationships, the voices I allow in and listen to, and the impact those relationships have on me.
If we have tried to navigate this, or have been involved with someone else trying to navigate this, we may have an opinion as to how hard or easy this process of curation is. The range of difficulty here is not as pressing an issue as the importance of the choices we can make – the navigation of the relationships. Our individuality is interwoven with the people with whom we share our lives. The people with whom we share our lives are in turn impacted by who we are and are becoming. As I mentioned last week, one of the greatest joys and challenges of relationships is that we are changed by them.
So, as much as I dislike cliché’s, who our friends are matters. I’m not talking about the “show me your friends and I’ll show you your future,” triteness, but rather the underlying truth in that statement. Who we have in our lives, the proximity, depth, and consistency of relationship, the ideas of life they have and act on, and the relational dynamics we share, all impact us. They impact who we are becoming, and by extension how we then show up in relationship. It is important that as we think about these ideas – how we are affected in relationship – we also take time to look at them from another perspective. That is, from the point of view of those who have chosen us as friends.
The Who with God
There are two aspects of this thinking that I carry over into my relationship with God. To describe the first, I need to go back to the idea that I wanted to be on the winning team. Even if I say I believe in God, there is a way that I can keep Him at arm’s length. I can make choices to prevent the change that comes from having a life with Him. I will make these choices unless I think being in intimate relationship with God is the best thing for me. That it will change me for the best possible good. This brings up an interesting question: Who do I have to believe God is, for me to want to be in intimate relationship with God?
Does God have to be kind, strong, protective, loving, fierce, a disciplinarian, jealous, comforting, accepting, powerful, or honest? Or does He have to be something else? Do I have to think of Him as a winner? Do I have to think of Him as smart? I have used these questions as I’ve considered my relationship to the person of Jesus, as well. As I am called and express my desire to follow Jesus, I must be convinced that He is trustworthy to follow. That He is the best possible leader, mentor, teacher, coach, and older brother. That following Jesus is the best possible thing for me. What makes Jesus trustworthy? Something profound shifted for me when I began to see Jesus as the smartest person in the world…ever. That His life was one of intentional choice, every step of the way. That no one could blindside Him or pull one over on Him. That He would be the best tap dancer ever, and in all aspects of that pursuit, if He had pursued it. That shift in thinking was important to me. What might be important to you?
A Quick Note
The questions posed above are meant to unveil our personal needs in our growing relationship with God. Things we can identity and work out with God. There is a danger though. In asking questions in the way they are posed above we run the risk of worshiping a false god. Someone we just made up. Taken to a logical conclusion, we can begin to think that we can create our own god, or gods for that matter. This is counter to a life with God – a life spent in communion and revelation. To avoid that pitfall, we must compare our need in our relationship with God to the testimonies of who God and Jesus have been unveiled and experienced to be in the past. These testimonies are more clearly found in the holy scriptures of the Bible and, for Jesus specifically, the four gospels of the New Testament. They may also be found in the lives of disciples of Jesus through the ages.
Our Response to Who
The other aspect of thinking that seems applicable here is our response to being in the relationship. When I was chosen for the other team in junior high school it didn’t feel good. I still tried to play my best, but my own inner landscape was working against me. I didn’t trust my team captain to lead me to victory. I felt defeated before I even began.
The proposition of Jesus is different. The testimony of His life proposes that victory in the ultimate sense has already been accomplished, and that it is possible in the particular and personal sense as well. He showed the way to overcome every temptation of life – those things that defeat our spirit. He made His choice – He showed up. He showed Himself to be trustworthy – He did what He said and what He said would happen did happen. We then have choices. We can make choices to follow Him. The way of following Jesus prioritizes who we are becoming (good people) over, and not instead of, what we do (right things). The idea here is that the way to truly transform into being good people, especially in a world organized against such transformation, is to follow Jesus – His ways, His character, His personality, His relationship with the Father. Jesus takes us on as apprentices. As we learn from Him, we begin to transform. As our characters transform, we begin to choose differently. Our actions begin to reflect our newly transformed character. We begin to do good things more consistently, not because of any direct effort put toward that end, but because of an inner transformation. This inner transformation is toward becoming the kind of people for whom doing good is the easy and natural overflow of their character.
How?
Much of the how is found in writings and examples of what are called spiritual disciplines. My personal references are the writings of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and Eugene Peterson. If you’re familiar with them, you’ll recognize their ideas echoed here. Spiritual disciplines are activities – things we can do – that assist in accomplishing the kind of inner transformation that cannot be accomplished through direct effort. The big three that are often mentioned are silence, solitude, and fasting. Less dramatic activities can be practiced as spiritual disciplines, too. Loaning out possessions that we feel particularly attached to, for example. Taking some time to do nothing in the middle of a busy day or week. The wisdom of spiritual disciplines is that they are designed to disrupt the habits of thought and action that have been built to deal with the world around us and not from a vision of life in the Kingdom of God. In that disruption we can focus our attention and thoughts on our relationship with God, our life with Him, and in His Kingdom. We can stop and listen. We can reorient ourselves. We can grow.
The spiritual disciplines are not achievement oriented. They are also not an individual practice – even the practice of solitude. They are wisdom – wise things to do – and are meant to be done with God. Which brings us back to the question of who. Imagine for a moment having a conception of God that makes Him unenjoyable to be with. With that conception, there would be little motivation to spend time with Him in a practice like solitude. There would be no desire to share our lives and be affected, let alone change. Our relationship might feel like an obligation – drudgery. It doesn’t have to be that way. The questions we ask of God regarding His character will be answered in ways that resonate personally with us. They will continue to draw us toward Him. They will reconcile our individual need with the truth of who He is (and who He made us to be). Ultimately, who we know God to be makes a world of difference.
The discovery of who God is, is a journey. One filled with asking questions, testing answers, and asking more questions. In my life, as with all relationships, what has been unveiled to me of God has been fundamentally true (true in essence and over time), and individually crafted (resonating with my individual personality and context). I have been affected and changed by His presence, and by the process. Particularly in this season, our culture of plurality, and competing voices, my hope is that we all may encounter and come to know the God who is love.
A Word of Thanks
This is my last note for 2021. I’m taking the next two weeks to rest from writing and recording these notes. Before I go, I want to thank each and every one of you for taking an interest in this work and your financial support. It is a humbling experience to see these notes gain some traction in a world full of better writers. Wishing you and your loved ones many blessings in this time and in the year to come.