Fellowshipping vs Friendship

I did some hometeaching earlier this week among a couple of "less-active" folks on my roster.  I put "less-active" in scare quotes there, because it turns out they have been intermittently sitting in on some sacrament meetings elsewhere in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area.  One guy on my list prefers the quiet anonymity of personal worship that comes from arriving a couple minutes late to a large ward where no one knows you, to then bounce a couple minutes early before anyone tries to "introduce" themselves.  He even got married recently, to a non-LDS gal who, though she's actually expressed interest in the Church, is hesitant to attend services, because of all the attention she'd surely get from well-meaning people tripping over each other to "fellowship" her.

Another gal I hometeach said something similar--she's been away from the Branch all summer long due to some job commitments as a Social Worker; but though she finally has Sundays free again, she's been hesitant to return to her home-branch, since it would inevitably entail a bunch of unwanted attention from an entire congregation rushing forward to "fellowship" her--ironically to make her feel "welcome."

And I can't say I blame them, either.

This is a tricky balance to strike, because the grand focus of most of our missionary and "reactivation" efforts have been predicated on the assumption that our great stumbling block right now is that we aren't friendly enough, that we have been insufficiently inclusive, that people shaky in the faith don't feel fully "welcome" to our services.  "Every new member needs a friend" declared President Hinckley a few years back, and indeed, it is vitally important that everyone who comes to Church feels like they have a friend there.

But the key word here is friend.  Not "fellowship."  And I have of late increasingly come to conclude that the two are not synonymous.

"Friend" implies a kindred spirit of sorts, someone you feel comfortable around, with whom you can be yourself.  You can let your guard down around your friends.  "Fellowship" however implies a duty, a performance, an act, one that, although it may be entirely well-intentioned, still has a subtle flavor of artificiality about it, as though we were just going through our good-member-check-list in vigorously shaking hands with every bewildered new face that seats itself among us.  These are the sorts of behaviors that cause visitors to instinctively put their guards up, not down--that is, "fellowshipping" does not necessarily lead naturally to friendship at all.

Even if we're not fully conscious of it, we can all tell when someone's being insincere, I've found, when we are saying hi merely because everyone else is too, not necessarily because we're genuinely happy to see them.  Salesmen do the same thing, and the last thing we need in this church is more salesmen.

But even if our fellowshipping efforts are wholly sincere and genuine (as indeed they often are), there is still the fact that large swaths of humanity swarming about your person really only works if the newbie in question is highly-extroverted, and derives energy from being around fellow humans.  The introverted, for whom constant social interaction is a drain, are similarly drained by all these "fellowshippers"--indeed, few things could be better calculated to keep them away.

Again, this is a tricky balance, one with no clean solution: some visitors really do need to know that everyone will help them feel welcome, while others really do need to know that they can just sneak in the back and commune quietly in the solace of their soul.  Some folks we make a space for them by scooting over and giving them a place to seat next to us; others we make a space by literally giving them as much space as possible, allowing them to be able to approach the gospel at their own pace, on their own terms.

I guess all I'm really calling for is for us to cease the one-size-fits-all approach to "fellowshipping," wherein we march up to every fresh face, shake their hands, and ask them a series of invasive personal questions as though we were all on a first date.  Avoiding that means learning to read people, to pick up on their body language, dress, and behavior; if someone looks wide-eyed and uncomfortable, shuffling along unsure of themselves, then in all likelihood what they really do need is a friendly smile and a warm welcome; but if they are keeping their head down, avoiding all eye contact and making every effort to sit down as inconspicuously as possible, then perhaps leave them alone for now, and maybe wait to quietly introduce yourself till after the meeting.

This approach to "fellowshipping" requires much more careful attention, empathy, and respect for boundaries; that is, it requires us to actually think about them, rather than about us.  In other words, it requires us to behave like a friend, not a fellowshipper, which is not the same thing.

"Back in Time..."

Dude, this old guy in a DeLorean just cut me off while I was flying over Hill Valley in a rain storm on my way to see Jaws 19.  Here, I got a pic of him, can anyone read the license plate??

Spilled my PepsiPerfect all over my new smart-coat and sports almanac and everything.  I mean, yes, the former is self-cleaning, but the latter was supposed to celebrate my Cubs' World Series win!  Get a hover board and show some courtesy, you maniac!

On Late-90s Classic Rock

Couple months ago, a friend and I were reminiscing about our teenage years in the late-90s--specifically, how much they sucked.  Yeah, yeah, the American economy was decent(er) and the horrors of 9/11, Iraq, the PATRIOT ACT, and mass shootings galore were still beyond the horizon, and the worst example of Executive abuse we knew of was the President having an affair in the Oval Office; but that was just it, things were too good, we were all too complacent, too cartoonishly cocky and so jaunt-filled with unearned swagger that it never even occurred to us we'd ever have to pay for.

Case in point?  The biggest "rock" band on Earth at the time was Limp Bizkit.  Oh my, remember them?  The middle-school locker-room joke that combined the worst parts of rap and rock into something even dumber?  The corporate-bros that co-opted teenage rebellion for the bullies and the frat boys?  The multi-platinum monstrosity fronted by a sentient date-rape and backed by the musical equivalent of downloading dirty pics on dial-up?

No?  No?  Not ringing any bells?

Thank heaven for small favors.

Because as both my buddy and I remembered it, the sheer omnipresence of the Bizkit at the tale-end of the Clinton administration meant not only there was nothing good on Modern Rock radio, but that they would in all likelihood become the signifier for our era. "Ah man, I don't want Limp Bizkit to represent my High School years!" my friend remembers groaning.  We could see it now: Forest Gump-style nostalgia films about the late-90s featuring "Nookie" in the trailer; Classic Rock radio blasting "Break Things" in between Springsteen and the Who; kids dressed up as Fred Durst for Homecoming week Decade-Days.  These clowns would define our generation till we died.  Things looked pretty bleak.

But today?  I teach 18-year-olds right now, and if they have any memories of late-90s music at all, the worst they remember is, say, Third Eye Blind or Blink-182.  The hipster kids remember the era most fondly for Radiohead.  Nowadays, Bizkit isn't even a historical footnote, a blip on the nostalgic radar; they feature on no retro T-shirts at Urban Outfitters alongside Joy Division and Nirvana; no copies of Chocolate Starfish sit wedged in the backseat of some 16-year-old's first car beside Queen's Greatest Hits and Led Zeppelin IV; there are no "nü-metal" retrospectives on PBS or NPR; no one pines for the "good ol' days" when they still made "real music" like they did back in the late-90s.

And thank goodness! Sweet heavens, even '80s Hair Metal wasn't culturally disowned as completely as the Bizkit has been!  Sometimes folks really do go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public; sometimes our culture's worst mistakes really are mercifully forgotten, and that far quicker than we hope or deserve.  Take heart!

A Spring Break Miracle!

 Sometimes miracles do happen.

It was near midnight, the end of Spring Break.  We had made it out of Puerto Rico, and as far as Chicago, but no further.  There were no other flights going out to Cedar Rapids that night, and the flights next morning were all over-sold.  We hemmed and hawed what to do; do we check onto a bus?  Try and fly red-eye standbys through other airports into Iowa?  But none of those left till the morrow either.  Sleep at the airport again?  Check into a spendy hotel? 

Things were looking grim.  Finally we couldn't put it off anymore, it was getting way too late, and it was time we bite the bullet and face the music: we had to rent a car, pay the exorbitant one-way fee, and drive it till 4am.  There was no way around it.

So we hopped on the Midway Airport Shuttle to the car rental...at the exact same moment as this older gentleman all decked out in Hawkeye gear, along with his teenage son.  Ladies and gentlemen, I have never been so excited to see Iowa colors in my whole life.

We chatted!  Our fellow Hawkeye fan was a retired lawyer living in the Des Moines area.  Turns out he was returning from Spring Break as well, chaperoning his son and some other teenagers down in Cabo.  They, too, arrived in Midway, only to find that only the father had a ticket to Des Moines, while the son (whose name was even Kevin McCallister!) had to be left behind in Chicago! 

Naturally, this didn't sit well with him, so he decided to rent a car back to Iowa, too!  I asked if he'd like to split one, and he readily said of course!  Suddenly this drive looked a lot more feasible.

My gf and I had a brief panic attack when he started asking the rental-place about mid-size sedans, and so we asked if we could maybe drive a different size...so he started asking about full-size sedans!  Once we explained we were students and were thinking of something maybe smaller, he just laughed and waved his hand, saying he would take care of it.  When I calculated that between us, we owed him close to $200 for our half of the rental, he insisted he would accept no more than $150.  "Besides, you're only going to Cedar Rapids, we're driving clear to Des Moines!" he said with a wink.

I drove the first leg, sailing out of Chicago (turns out there's not a lot of traffic at 1 in the morning); I had been nodding off in the airport, but now that we were on the road our conversation roared to life.  While his son and my gf fell asleep in the back, I told him about my graduate studies and Puerto Rican mission service; learning of my Mormonism, he launched into an extended diatribe against his first wife's family of Jehova's Witnesses.  We cracked jokes, traded stories, and sped through Illinois under a full moon.

As we crossed the Mississippi, he insisted on buying us all breakfast, so we stopped at the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Truckstop."  My gf was hilariously delirious as she woke up  in confusion and asked where on earth we were.  "Why, we're at the World's Largest Truckstop!" I crooned, "Can't you tell?" It was at least 10 minutes before she realized she wasn't dreaming the whole thing.

So there we sat, at 3am, eating bacon and eggs in an empty diner, chatting with the waitress, when I slid him the $150 we owed him...only for him to slide me back 100 of it.  "For your wedding!" he said with a smile.  When I warned him that, as a poor grad student, I would take full advantage of his generosity, he just hand-waived again and said if he had known he'd have this much fun driving out of Chicago tonight, he wouldn't have even worried when Southwest over-sold their flight!

He drove the next leg, dropped us off at Cedar Rapid airport, we exchanged addresses, and then I picked up my van (the Gypsy-Cab) and returned to Iowa City.  I need to remember to send him a wedding announcement!

And that's the story of how my gf and I spent a grand total of $50 together to make it from Chicago Midway to Iowa City!  If we had settled on getting a rental just a few minutes earlier or later, we would have been out hundreds of dollars, and what's more, missed out on ton of fun.  These are the moments in life that you can't plan on, that you can't budget for--sometimes the universe syncs up at just the right moment in ways you can never predict, when you least expect it.  It's a great reminder that in our world that is at once so programmed and so chaotic, that so many wonderful things far beyond our control can still work together for our good.

THIS IS HALLOWEEN!!!