Waste of Time

  LAUP was different than I thought. Perhaps you imagined it how I initially did: austere living conditions, miserable nutrition, and daily pangs of guilt towards the selfish consumerist lifestyle I live back in the real world. A summer of misery and painful convictions straight from the accusing pointer finger of Jonathan Edward's angry God. Ha. LAUP was exhausting on a daily basis and frequently convicting, sure, but it didn't feel like miserable drudgery. Instead, it was far more life-giving than emptying. I will be posting my thoughts in sections at a time, so stay tuned for more updates(for reals this time!)

                                                   

   During my six week stay in East Hollywood, I spent a good deal of time investing in people and things that conventional wisdom would suggest aren't a good use of my time. I spent four weeks of my summer just talking to random students at Los Angeles Community College about their spiritual background, about the issues in their personal lives, about Jesus, and whatever else they wanted to talk about. I invited dozens of them to hangouts and barbecues, and most never showed up. I drew portraits for families in the park as a way of getting to know the community better, and tried to hold conversations with kids or moms that only spoke Spanish­­­. I helped a small church plan and run a kid's camp for the kids in my neighborhood, planning the curriculum and teaching bible stories and writing skits with esoteric pop culture references that were mostly just for me and supervising crafts and playing games with the kids. At the end of the six weeks I bade my farewells to the students and children and the household that hosted us, and returned home.  

  These disparate interactions with people don't really have any teachable resolution or payoff. They happened, and I don't think I can ever know how much of it mattered to a lot of the people I interacted with. The people I met aren't really the influential movers and shakers that folks are clamoring to network with, they're just normal folks from the neighborhood, a neighborhood of old Armenian families and multigenerational Latino families who are being squeezed out of their apartments by the rising rent rate as the wealthy hipster population continues to gentrify farther south of Los Feliz. There's no obvious reason to be investing in these kids or their families or these community college students at LACC during my summer. Conventional wisdom would say I should have done that animation summer camp at CSU Monterey, where I could have worked with a Nickelodeon studio exec to develop an animated pilot pitch on a team of the best and brightest artists from across the state. That has obvious purpose and payoff. Conventional wisdom might even venture to say that what I did choose to do this summer didn't matter, the statistics show that most of those families trapped in cycles of poverty will stay where they are, and it is futile to think anything I did will make any difference. Both these arguments may even seem fair, that working on my portfolio and career would yield more results for me than a starry-eyed attempt to change the world in that span of time. 

     But that "Kingdom of God" that Jesus is always talking about isn't really dictated by conventional wisdom. I didn't do LAUP to change the world, I did it because I felt the apathy in my heart towards systems of poverty, and that wasn't a feeling I was content to continue to have as someone who claims to follow Jesus. I did it to try to understand why Jesus' insistence on being "good news to the poor" was so important. I did LAUP so Jesus could change my heart. 

   After those six weeks, my heart doesn't feel that different, to be frank. I waited for six weeks for the epiphany, that moment where my heart breaks for some person or moment that reveals this is poverty, and this is my calling now. I didn't have that epiphany. I didn't slide my Meyers-Briggs alignment from a T to a F because of all that I saw, learned and experienced. I didn't gain a perfect, holistic understanding of all the issues so I can educate all my friends of the most just and beneficial ways of alleviating poverty or systemic racism or whatever. If anything, I learned more issues to have more questions about, and few hard answers. My heart still often waffles between feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the issues, and the blind comfort of saying whatever to all of it.

   But what I did begin to learn is to just show up and be teachable. If God is calling me to do something, my job is to show up and let Him lead me through whatever it is I'm supposed to do. God was calling me to do LAUP and have my lens of the world widened, so I showed up to learn. The folks at LAUP had my team do campus outreach at a community college, and also run a kid's camp. So I showed up and did my best to be teachable. Neither the work at LACC or for the kid's camp was particularly glamorous, or as I pointed out earlier, objectively a game changer. I had plenty of anxieties about doing these things and about trying to do them perfectly. I quickly had to concede, though, to the fact that I didn't have skills in either inner city campus outreach or writing and executing curriculum for a kid's camp, and the only thing I could do was show up to both and be open to whatever God was asking of me. When I conceded that I was powerless to execute whatever task was at hand on my own anyway, and that it was the Holy Spirit doing the work and not me, suddenly the anxiety started to lessen. The outcome was never going to look how I imagined it to, and the payoff and resolution wasn't mine to claim anyway. God was going to work how He was going to work, and he had already equipped me with the things I needed to say and do, not just the things I thought I should say and do. So I began to let go. I began to worry less about being able to relate to people perfectly or saying all the right things, and began to learn to be content with what I could contribute. Maybe I'm making this sound a tad more fatalistic than it actually is. But the God I know is the concert master of this ridiculous, magnificent orchestra, and if my job is to only play the triangle or the sleigh bells for the whole piece, I need to learn to be content with that. 

   I spent a lot of my day doing things that seemed like they didn't matter, but I gained so much life along the way. I met so many people unlike I've never met before--students who were street musicians, gang members with vast conspiracy theories about the government but also a stronger knowledge of the bible than you or I combined, queer folks who were shunned by the LGBTQ community and church alike who were still pursuing Jesus, Scientologists, guerilla gardeners, and everything else under the sun. The more people I met, the more my paradigm shifted. It became less of how can I learn as much as I can about the issues of the city through these people and have my heart changed so I'm not such a rotten unfeeling person all the time, and a little more of I want to know this person because I'm actually interested in who they are and where they come from, and I care about what they're going through.  The people became less manifestations of issues I was supposed to be learning about at this program and then say the right Jesus keywords to in order to fix them, and more like people who I wanted to learn more about and understand the pains they'd experienced and see the unique shard of Imago Dei in each of them, and not feel the need to fix their existence based on the few facts I knew about them. As I've listened to other peoples' stories and hurts, my self-centered worldview and thought process has ever so slightly begin to flip to face outwards, and I think I've begun to see people a tiny bit more like how Jesus sees them.   

   So LAUP wasn't a waste of time. I don't feel too awful about not crying enough while I was at LAUP, and I don't feel too bad that my LAUP experience didn't follow Joseph Campbell's hero's journey story arc, or even that my heart wasn't broken. I still got dunked on by Jesus pretty hard, but I think he did it in a way so it wasn't a one-time dunkening. It's been less of an epiphany, and more of an invitation--what will I do with this new insight? I can shrug it off and try to stay unaffected by it, or I can stay unsettled and continue to gain new refractions of who God is through the shards of Imago Dei I encounter each day. My heart's being broken and repaired a little at a time, Boat of Theseus-style. I just need to continue to show up and be teachable. 

"Teach me your ways, O LORD, that I may live according to your truth! Grant me purity of heart, so that I may honor you." Psalm 86:11