Tension and Perspective

Perspective seems more like an earned thing than a known thing, the difference between having facts or summaries of the multiple sides of something versus wrestling with those things, fighting with and for each of them to really see what they're about. I don't know why I was thinking about that today, probably a song on the radio put me in a contemplating kind of mood. But for whatever reason it got kicked off, it made me think of a couple things that I am almost always wrestling with: the desire to count, measure, and organize all the things and the desire to do absolutely none of that and simplify everything around me.

From my current chair, this is most likely to hit me when it comes to thinking about strategy, prioritization, understanding value, efficiency, capabilities, domains, and things like that. If you catch me at the right time on any given afternoon I am likely of the mind that we should wrangle every wild pony in the pasture and get it roped into a stall so that we can measure how many flies are on its tail, get the name of the guy who packed its feed from the factory in Santa Fe, heat map its emotional well-being over the past 3 to 6 months (correlated with its resting heart rate), and affirm it has consistent eye gaps with the brand of the ranch.

But it's also very possible that if you caught me earlier that morning, I might think it unwise to do any of those things and instead just have a little faith in all the humans that are part of this horse training business and let them do their thing. I might also espouse that we run a very significant risk of measuring the wrong things and coming to errant conclusions because we know way more than we should. Knowledge is not always power, sometimes it's confusion and distraction. Sometimes your data lies to you, often because it's not of quality, but way more likely because you asked questions that it's not intended to or capable of answering.

I've been a pastor for over a decade now and this particular tension has been persistent in that world for me as well. In some ways, our modern religious structures are often set up like large businesses, designed and organized to try to reach and serve and inform people in an organized and efficient manner, to make sure no one falls outside of the system lest they miss out on the goodness of the services and realities that we're attempting to share. Eight years ago this month I left that kind of a church structure and started a house church. It carries with it no implicit infrastructure, no property to manage, no bank accounts to keep or maintain. All we have are the simplest expression of what's important, teaching things I believe to be true, serving the world not as an entity but as individual people in the things that are local, that matter to each of us, using the resources and skills that we have been provided, and often blessed with, to do so.

There is an absurdity, sometimes, to our ability to rescue complication from the hands of simplicity. Conversely, we are poorly served by squinting our eyes enough to make the mountain seem like it's a mole hill when it really isn't. (As an aside, I don't know where that expression came from but a mole, along with what appears to be his extended family, has recently taken up residence in the subterranean spaces of my property and these mole hills I keep finding are closer to mountains than not.) Thus the tension, and with it, perspective. In my soul I yearn for simplicity and believe the world should bend towards it. In my bones I know that humans, and the problems they are trying to solve, are rarely simple, and our perceptions, ambitions, and emotions can lead us not to take in our realities quite correctly. So you measure and categorize and interrogate to see if we can get to really knowing what is what. And that's a good thing.

Having been driven by both sides, even daily still, and having sat and discussed and counseled with businesses and people who cover the hundred shades of gray between them, I've come to the conclusion that it takes all kinds, in all different ways, for a multitude of reasons. And that the tension between the two is righteous. Sometimes we need to reminded and driven towards how a thing ought to be. Other times we need to focus on understanding things as they are. Sometimes we miss the forest for the trees and other times we forget that we live our lives as we live our days, it doesn't get to dictate the other way.

So, to whatever singer-songwriter got me down this path today, thank you for making me thankful for perspective and here's to the continued value of righteous tension.