Josiah R. Sprague

I just got back to Ohio after a 10 month stay in the Dominican Republic. I had a great time in the Dominican; learned, accomplished and experienced a lot. Cultural adjustment was expected going in, and though I had difficult moments, overall, the adjustment of learning to engage with a new culture and language was pretty easy for me. But it changed me a lot, and the last few days of travel and reentering US culture have been an interesting view of they ways that I’ve changed.

Going through the airport in Santiago I realized how much Spanish I’ve learned in the last year. When I entered the country, everything sounded like a complete blur, and I could communicate more effectively using hand motions than anything else. On my way through the first security checkpoint, I understood enough to hear a pretty Dominican security guard tell me, “Hey redhead, you can’t take your beautiful blue eyes on the plane, we’re going to have to cut them out and leave them in this country.” I still haven’t gotten very good at responding quickly in Spanish, so I just smiled– she probably thought I didn’t understand.

Watching the Dominican roads weaving through the mountains as we flew away, I felt that I had a much deeper understanding of how life looks along them than I did flying in– it’s nothing like life along US roads. On our decent into Miami, I was impressed with how organized, planned, and orderly the city was. Cars flowing along large highways, all in their own lanes, driving with purpose from one large building to another.

The airports weren’t as shocking to me as I thought they would be, probably because I didn’t have much time to stop as I rushed through them from flight to flight, but was surprised that there was no free WiFi until Columbus. If you don’t have a cellular data plan in this country, you’re pretty much out of luck.

A friend of mine picked me up at the airport and took me to a Five Iron Frenzy show. I can’t tell you how much I love ska, and how much I’ve missed being able to just dance with a crowd of people to music that I actually like. I’m not a big fan of Dominican merengue or bachata, and despite being in the Caribbean, ska isn’t very well known in the country. I wish I could share the experience with some of my more hippy friends from the DR, I know they would love it.

After the Five Iron show, we went to IHOP. I forgot how hard it is to find an item on the menu that doesn’t have eggs here! In the Dominican, you can just ask for things without mayonnaise (which they put on everything!) and you’ll be fine. Allergies are way more convenient there.

The drive to Akron from Columbus was surreal. The highways were so huge, and empty and lonely. No businesses, people, or motorcycles along the side. It’s weird to feel like your home is a foreign country.

I spent a lot of time on the highway the last three days. I drove with my family to Cincinnati for my cousin’s wedding. I hadn’t seen most of the people there since my other cousin’s wedding last year. It was shocking to see how much some people had changed; one cousin was way taller, another family member looked way older, a lot of people had gained a few pounds; or it might have just been my perception. Dominicans are really skinny.

Now I’m headed to Kenmore, and I’m going to stop at the Chapel in Akron for church tonight. It will be interesting to worship in such a large place, with so many fancy lights, and to hear a sermon in English.

I’m looking forward to seeing all of my friends and community. I’ve missed you all. I’m back for the summer. Let’s kick it.

A lot of people talk about wanting to quit Facebook because its a time waster. That’s such a common sentiment, that a lot of people have misunderstood my reasons for quitting to be because I think I spend too much time there. They’ve said that the problem is really my time management and that it’s just as simple as turning off the computer and doing something else.

That has caused me to second guess whether my real reason for quitting is just because I’m terrible at managing my time. I really appreciate my friends who were willing to challenge me, because it got me thinking and refining my ideas about why I’m quitting. Spending too much time on Facebook isn’t the problem. When we spend too much time on Facebook, it’s just a symptom of the real problem.

The real problem is who controls our relationships with other people. Do we control our relationships, or are they controlled by a third party? You’d probably argue that it’s your choice to control your own relationships, and that Facebook isn’t controlling them. But I argue that just by choosing to use it, we’re giving Facebook complete control over how we stay in contact with our friends.  By the way, the problem isn’t just Facebook, it can happen with any online service that we use (Google, Amazon, Apple, etc), and we should be aware of that. But for this post I’m just going to focus on Facebook and how when you give them an inch, they take a mile.

Facebook has been slowly taking over communication with our friends for profit since 2004. Many of us think that Facebook’s purpose is to give us a better way to connect with our friends, but there’s a subtle but important difference; Facebook’s goal is to become the primary way we communicate with our friends. It’s in Facebook’s interest for us to depend on their service to reach our friends.

When I first decided to quit, I was shocked by how many of my friends I didn’t know how to reach outside of Facebook. I didn’t have contact information for hundreds of friends, family, colleagues, co-workers, donors and other connections. It’s really hard to quit Facebook when you depend on it as the only way to reach others, so I set out to get other forms of contact information and what I discovered is that Facebook is actively preventing people from connecting in other ways.

In 2012 Facebook changed your email address. Most of you probably didn’t even notice, but go look at your profile right now. Your default email address, the one that’s displayed publicly on your profile, is @facebook.com, and your real email address, if you had made it public before, is now hidden without your permission. That means, if you wanted people to be able to contact you by email, unless you caught Facebook’s sneaky change when it happened, those people have been directed to contact you through Facebook instead. Maybe it’s not a big deal to just change your email address back, but Facebook can sneak these subtle tricks in unnoticed at any time.

Another sneaky trick that I mentioned in my last post, is the new Facebook Home feature for Android phones. By convincing people to install a Facebook app as the screensaver on their phones, Facebook is effectively preventing people from connecting via their phone numbers by putting software on our phones that intercepts us before we send a text or make a phone call. We are quickly becoming dependent on Facebook as our primary form of communication because it’s the most available and convenient, but that’s not a good thing.

How many times have you been annoyed because the latest Facebook update changed where or how you find the things that you’re looking for? Facebook doesn’t make those changes because they want the site to look prettier, or because they want to make it easier for us to communicate with our friends freely. They make those changes because they will generate more profit. The more time we spend doing the things that Facebook wants us to do, the more money they make. And that’s the bottom line; you’re not on Facebook because it helps you connect with your friends (were you unable to connect with your friends before?), you’re on Facebook because they’ve attracted you and they’re using you to make a profit.

It’s important to understand this; Facebook isn’t a product we use to keep in touch, we are the product that Facebook uses to make money. We’re selling, or rather giving, ourselves and our friendships to Facebook and that doesn’t come without a cost to the quality of our relationships.

Take the news feed for example;  scrolling through and seeing our friends posts gives us the illusion that we’ve kept in touch with our friends, but we mostly post positive things, so if we’re not doing anything cool or interesting, we look at Facebook and see all the cool things our friends are doing and how interesting their life is and we feel left out and boring. Worse, if we’re down, or going through a hard time, and really need a friend, we usually don’t post it on Facebook for fear of seeming negative or desperate. In the end, it’s not very genuine. It turns friendship into a fair-weather affair; if it’s entertaining, we participate. If not, we ignore it.

Facebook doesn’t own my relationships. I want to be in control of how I engage my friends, and I’m going to choose communication tools that allow be the dignity of doing so. I’m going to use tools that don’t manipulate my relationships for profit, even if they’re less popular or less convenient. In the end, it might not save me any time at all, but I hope it will improve the genuineness of my relationships.

My list of reasons to quit Facebook has been slowly growing, but Facebook’s useful features have kept me hanging on until now. A few weeks ago I watched an advertisement for Facebook Home that put the final nail in the coffin.

The video portrays a girl, about my age, apparently bored at a family gathering. She does what has become an infamous habit in our world; she pulls out her phone for something more entertaining.

The fact that she is more interested in her phone than in the people around her isn’t shocking. We see this happen every day. I even see it here in the Dominican Republic. The thing that is shocking is the extent to which Facebook is celebrating and encouraging the habit. It’s offensive.

The girl in the video is the antithesis of who I want to be, but she is exactly what Facebook wants us to be, and has wanted us to be from the beginning: discontent. Facebook started as a popularity contest web page on the Harvard campus. It fed off of discontent people who were comparing themselves to others. As it has grown, it has always promised to help us connect to our friends. But it’s true driving force has never been hidden too far beneath the surface: capitalizing on our feeling of disconnectedness.

The irony is that Facebook is making us more disconnected. A quick Google search reveals countless studies which have observed a correlation between the amount we use Facebook, and how discontent we are with our lives.

I have a lot of reasons for quitting, which I explain below, but my desire to quit comes down to this;

Facebook lies. Facebook tells us that friendship should be easy and convenient, but friendship is not easy. Relationships take work, intentionality and sacrifice.

I’m not saying that Facebook is evil, or that it isn’t useful for communicating with friends. For someone like me who lives internationally, Facebook is an easy and effortless way to stay in touch. I’ve just realized that, for me, Facebook isn’t the most conducive medium for building the genuine relationships that I want in my life.

I no longer want my social life to be defined by passive scrolling through a “News Feed” and liking anything I find interesting while ignoring everything else. I want to connect with my friends via more intentional mediums; face to face, phone calls, email and blogs. It might be more inconvenient, more lonely or less popular, but it will be more real, and that’s what I want.

If you’re reading this, I’d like to invite you to connect with me through one of those mediums;

• US Phone: (330000) 962000-3620000
• DR Phone: (829000) 404000-7535000
• Email: josiah000.sprague000@gmail000.000com
• Subscribe to my blog: RSS Feed, Via Email

List of Reasons To Quit Facebook

1. Real friendships take real effort.
   Nothing worth anything is cheap.The more we have to invest in a relationship, the more meaningful is becomes to us. The timeless truth is that “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I want my friendships to be treasured, and to be built on two-way investment.
2. Facebook is compulsive.
   I don’t think I suffer from Facebook addiction, nor am I even sure that it’s possible to be addicted to Facebook. What I do know is that Facebook creates compulsive behavior. They have a financial interest in using social science to compel people to spend more time on Facebook. I don’t want to be compelled by the financial interests of a corporation.
3. Facebook isn’t important.
   Millions of people are already leaving Facebook, and it is becoming increasingly less relevant to a younger audience. Personally, I wouldn’t invest my money in Facebook stock, because I think it’s on it’s way out. But even if it does stick around for awhile, “those who use [Facebook], [should do so] as if not engrossed in [it]. For this world in its present form is passing away” (Source). That has made me ask myself; What do you have to show for the time you’ve spent on Facebook? When was the last time you spent a meaningful hour on Facebook? How many hours have you wasted?

My conclusion is that Facebook is not a meaningful addition to my life. But I still find it useful, and had a lot of objections to quitting. In order to overcome those objections and cut Facebook out of my life, I made a list and addressed each objection individually. I’m sharing the list here for anyone else who has wanted to cut the Facebook cord, but found too many things holding them back.

Objections to Quitting Facebook

1. I chat with a lot of people on Facebook.
   Facebook is a really convenient way to chat. This is one of the things I’m going to miss the most, but there are other options for chatting. After leaving Facebook, I plan to chat via Google Talk, texting and Twitter.
2. I get a lot of blog traffic through Facebook.
   I’ve been relying on Facebook to let friends and family know when I have a new blog post. Without Facebook people won’t know when I’ve posted something new to my blog, so I’ve set my blog up so that friends and family can subscribe via email or RSS feed. If you’re not subscribed already, please subscribe now.
3. I log into a lot of other websites with my Facebook account.
   This is a dependency on Facebook that I developed without realizing it. I’ve signed up for so many websites using Facebook, and once I delete my Facebook, many of those accounts will be deleted as well. This was easy to solve. A few weeks ago I turned off Facebook platform which disabled all apps, games, and other websites connected to my Facebook account, and I’ve been using Twitter instead as my login for third party websites.
4. I use Facebook for work.
   Every job I’ve had since college, including my job at Doulos, has required me to use Facebook to administrate company pages or develop Facebook apps. I can’t fulfill those responsibilities without a Facebook account, so I created a new account without my full name, and with no friend connections or personal information so that I can login to do my job. This has an added benefit of having a lot less social distractions at work.
5. I can contact anyone through Facebook.
   This is my fault, for being lazy and not bother to get people’s other contact information. Once I realized this, I spent some time getting other contact information from my Facebook friends and adding it to my address book. In the process I’ve realized that it’s never a good idea to trust one company with your contacts. Facebook has that stuff locked down, and it took a lot of work to get my information out. I used Google Contacts to export my address book to a open CSV file that I can store on my own computer.
6. Facebook is how other people share photos with me.
   This was my original excuse for not quitting Facebook years ago. Facebook is a really convenient place to share photos with friends and family, and for them to share photos with you. There are definitely other options for photo sharing, and though they may not be convenient, maybe sharing less photos online will mean more opportunities to sit down side by side with someone and share photos. I think I’ve also got a narcissistic desire to see the photos that others have taken of me. I’ll miss that, but it’s probably a healthy thing to lose.
7. You never know when you’ll need your Facebook network.
   Facebook has allowed people to take advantage of their relational networks in amazing ways. A few months ago, a friend of mine was able to raise tens of thousands of dollars overnight to save the life of his newborn daughter, and his Facebook connections played a large part in that effort. While stories like that are really moving examples of the power that a social network can have, the real human connections that made that happen exist apart from Facebook. If something happens that my network needs to know about, it will be shared by those people on whatever websites they spend their time on. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Facebook, and the number of human connections that I have with others will never be determined by a friend or follower count.
8. Facebook is how person X communicates.
   Many of my Facebook friends are students that I’ve worked with as an RA, doing urban youth ministry, and working at a school in the Dominican Republic. Facebook is the primary way that many of them communicate online – they don’t use email, Twitter, etc. A friend of mine suggested that the reason he doesn’t quit Facebook is because we wants to be able to connect with those students “on their level”. I think we need mentors who are willing to connect with people wherever they are. I deeply respect those that have made the decision to be on Facebook for that reason, and I wouldn’t argue with them to change. But my perspective is that very few people connect with others on Facebook exclusively, and many students on Facebook are there to connect with their friends, not their mentors.

The real question is not whether to quit Facebook, but which medium will allow me to best connect and build relationships with the people I am trying to reach?

How Do I Quit Facebook?

If this post has got you thinking about how you can quit Facebook, You can permanently delete your Facebook account here. That requires you to wait for two whole weeks and be careful to to use any website that you signed up for with Facebook. That’s plenty of time to second guess your decision. If you want a little bit more control over your information being deleted, you can try this tool, but Facebook is trying to block it, so it might not work. Personally, I used the Facebook Platform kill switch, spent a couple of weeks reaching out to people letting them know that I was planning to quit, used the official form to close down my account, and then blocked Facebook using my hosts file for two weeks.

In light of recent events that have illustrated that our society has a broken moral compass (really not something new), The Fresh Ten Commandments have been suggested as a form of general guidance that we could use as a culture.

The original ten commandments were certainly incomplete and difficult to apply (both in modern times and when they were originally written). A modern rewrite is a great exercise to get us thinking about moral standards. Moral issues are deep and complex, so a list could never cover every situation, but as a society we might be better off morally if we kept these two rules of thumb in mind;

The Two Timeless Commandments;

1. You shall love God before everything else. God is completely independent of our broken world. He is the perfect model of love that we are meant to reflect with our lives. He is the source from which all morality comes.
2. You shall love others with the same care with which you love yourself. All people regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, poverty, worldview or weakness are made with inherent dignity. You shall not undermine the dignity of others by disrespecting, murdering, raping, lying, deceiving  cheating, betraying, or otherwise taking advantage of others or of the world that you share with them.

If we got these two things right as a culture, we’d be a lot better off. Take these moral standards, make them your own, and then share them with others. Maybe, person by person, we can become the people we are supposed to be by loving our neighbors.

In the last several years I’ve witnessed poverty in many different forms and contexts ranging from poverty in urban areas of Akron, Ohio to poverty in rural areas of the Dominican Republic. Poverty takes on so many different forms that it is often hard to recognize what poverty really means. I’ve seen the poverty of a man who gets $10,000 a year by begging on a street corner and is homeless because spends it all on a heroine addiction. I’ve seen the poverty of a teenager who has a Playstation 3 and unlimited supply of Mountain Dew, but who has absent parents and struggles to succeed in school. And I’ve seen the poverty of a loving family who does everything together, but eats rice and beans and lives in a wooden shack next to a sewage filled river.

I’ve struggled with trying to make sense of all of these different experiences. How can a poor child from a developing country who can’t even afford a computer do so much better in school than a kid who’s got access to high speed internet and a school full of educational technology? How can a family that lives in a tiny shack with a dirt floor be more satisfied with their lives than a man that makes $75,000 a year and drives a new sports car? How can we say we have poverty in America, when compared with the developing world, we don’t even know what it means to lack material resources? How can we say that the developing world is poor, when they’re among the happiest countries in the world?

Recently, I’ve been reading When Helping Hurts, a book about helping the poor in a way that doesn’t do more harm than good. The book challenges the common idea that poverty means a lack of material resources. The book quotes several people talking about their own experience of being poor. They described how they felt using words like; shame, unwanted, uncomfortable, depressed, unhappy, alone, powerless, unheard, stuck.

As I read their definitions of poverty, I was struck by how much these words resonated with me; They are all things I have experienced first hand. While I was thinking about their words, someone said to me, “All of us are poor because we all have a disconnect from God”. Boom. Everything suddenly clicked for me. Poverty is not a lack of stuff. Poverty is a disconnect; a broken relationship with ourselves, with other people, with creation and with God.

“All of us are poor because we all have a disconnect from God”

Jesus said that there will always be poor people in the world. The word that is translated as poor in our Bible is the Greek word ptōchos (πτωχός) which is also translated as broken, or lowly. We have all experienced poverty in one form or another. We have all felt broken. We all know what it feels like to be powerless and how much it hurts to be unwanted. But Jesus also said another interesting thing about ptōchos. In the beatitudes, he says “Blessed are the ptōchos, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven“.

Jesus says that the broken, unwanted and powerless are not just permitted to be a part of his family, but they have actually been given part ownership of it. They’re no longer lacking wealth, but they’re shareholders in the most important business of the universe. They’re not alone, powerless or unheard, but connected, empowered, loved and valued. In our world, being poor is a curse, but in his world, in his kingdom, it is a blessing.

We know that poverty will always be with us, but Jesus also tells us, and we can tell others with our words and with our lives, that poverty is not permanent; our brokenness will be healed, and in fact, is already being healed. We are all poor. Because true poverty isn’t a lack of stuff, but broken relationships. And we are all blessed. Because the truth is that God’s kingdom has been given to us.

Poverty is a lie. The truth is that we are created in the image of God with dignity, worth and the ability to help ourselves, our families and our entire communities.

 

Lately I’ve been feeling discouraged, feeling like its impossible to stay in the loop about what is happening at Doulos, so that I can do my job of telling the story of the school. Some of it touches on personal insecurity and fears of not being included by others, and other parts of it stem from finding too much of my identity in work. In other words, it’s been a deep soul-level discouragement.

My roommate, Eric, has also been discouraged, after a string of frustrating events with his job at Students International and with our housing situation. So both of us decided that this weekend would be a good time to escape to the beach for a day for some R&R. We may have been more rested and recovered without it.

As I should have learned by now, Eric’s car is not so reliable. About half way to the beach, on our way up a mountain, the car started to overheat. We stopped for awhile, opened the hood to check things out, and let the car cool down. While we waited, Eric told me how the radiator had exploded for the previous owner, splattering boiling coolant fluid all over the hood and windshield. We both agreed it would be good to take it easy driving up the mountains.

Once the car was cooled down and we were ready to get back on the road, we found that the hood wouldn’t latch securely. As we were trying to fix the latch, a Dominican driving by on his motorcycle stopped and helped us tie down the hood with a rubber strap. Definitely a hack, but it seemed like it would hold and soon we were back on our way, driving slowly up the mountain.

Once we were over the mountain, and coming back down the other side, we were able to drive faster again, since the engine wasn’t being pushed so hard and the airflow was keeping things cool. We were cruising along, happily approaching the beach at 50mph when suddenly, BOOM! The hood of the car flew up, shattering the windshield in our faces and blocking our vision! Thankfully, no glass actually cut our faces or got in our eyes, and we were on a straight road and Eric was able to safely stop the car before we hit anything or ended up off-road in a huge ditch or down the side of a mountain.

Though public infrastructure and assistance isn’t so common, Dominicans are very eager to help a stranger. Within 30 seconds, another Dominican stopped to help. He was the manager of a garage about five minutes away, so he helped us get the car there, where they removed the windshield and used an air compressor to blow all of the glass fragments off of the dashboard and seats. A couple of hours later, we were back on our way to the beach.

We had left at 9:30 in the morning to go to a beach less than two hours away. By the time we got there, it was 3:30 in the afternoon. We got to swim in a beautiful crystal clear ocean, and read in our SoCo Hammocks for a few hours. We had a nice Dominican-style dinner, and then drove three hours slowly back to Jarabacoa without a windshield, and nervously watching the temperature gauge to make sure that the radiator wouldn’t overheat and explode.

Neither of us has any idea why we’ve experienced such a string of crazy events. But we both agree that living in the Dominican Republic is teaching us to go with the flow and realize that not everything is always under our control, but that’s ok. We’re learning to be more patient and to accept things for how the are. And to be thankful for what we have, because it really is a lot, even when we hit a rough patch or lose something valuable.

A weekly update and how you can join me in prayer; 

I had my first experience of being evicted this week. My roommates and I moved into a new house, only to find out that there was a family conflict with the landlord which called into question who owns the house. Long story short, the justice system in the DR is nowhere near as respected as that in the States, and we have to move out of the house.

• I am thankful that God’s justice is far above any human justice system. Our earthly dwelling is insecure, but our home with God is eternally secure.

Yesterday I attempted to drive to visit a Reservoir an hour away in Santiago, but the car I borrowed broke down in the middle of nowhere (on a Sunday, with only Spanish-speakers around). We were able to get a tow truck, and I was amazed at the unruffled attitude of the Dominicans. A few months ago, with an American mindset, I would have been angry. The experience was a good example for me that sometimes we allow unimportant things to bend us out of shape.

• I am thankful for frustrating days as well as smooth days, and reminded that thanking God and letting go of things that don’t really matter can turn big frustrations into “light and momentary trouble”.

Overall, at an age in life where people are supposed to start having their world view figured out, mine is continually being wrecked. Witnessing poverty, culture and opinions that I have never even imagined before has me seriously reconsidering what it means to share the love of Christ cross-culturally, and even inter-personally within the same culture. As Christians, we so often confuse sharing opinion, culture, wealth and morals with sharing Christ.

But we do damage to the Gospel if we claim that it means anything other than God Himself giving His life for sinners; for poor, messed up, wrong people like ourselves.

• Ultimately, I am thankful for the Gospel, and that my illusions about what the Gospel is are being wrecked.

Thank you for joining me weekly in prayer. If you’d like to get these weekly updates in your email, you can subscribe here.

Yesterday several of the Christian ministries around Jarabacoa got together to tour each other’s sites. We visited the Pico Escondido Young Life Camp, Caribbean Mountain Academy, Students International, Kids Alive and Doulos. It was encouraging to see the number of people that are here, each working in separate areas, with separate focus, but all working with the same vision.

Toward the end of the day, a German friend of mine, who works on a coffee farm near Jarabacoa said, in his basic English, “We are all here working for Jesus. The devil tries to keep us apart and he doesn’t like when we work together. But Jesus is our boss, and we all work for him, so let’s keep working together for Jesus.”

It is said that the world will know that we are Christians by the way we love one another. Sometimes when I come face to face with conflict between missionaries I seriously question what that means. A group made up of conservatives and liberals, protestants and catholics, charismatics and stoics, lawless and legalistic seems so unlikely to have unity of heart and spirit. But yesterday I got a glimpse of it;

Our love for one another is seen in the fact that we all came from different places, to do different things, without knowing each other beforehand and having very different ideas and theologies, but we’ve got a simple and powerful unity based on one thing; the love that Jesus had for us that motivates us and drives us in everything that we do.

It’s cool to be a part of the global community that even when we disagree or fight or have totally different ideas, we’re all united together in the application of the self-sacrificing love that Christ has shown to us.

Lately I’ve had time to dig into a lot of books on my Kindle. I really enjoy the time I spend exploring the ideas of great authors. This week I finished reading a book called “What’s Wrong with the World” which got me thinking a lot about what I can do to benefit the small slice of the world that I have the opportunity to interact with.

A chapter in the book that really grabbed my attention was about what it means to educate others, and how clearly establishing our own personal beliefs is essential to educating others with a clear conscience. Teaching others, especially children, is not something to be taken lightly. The book says “Education is violent… it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth.” In light of the influence I have on others, my usual habit of carelessly sharing with others what “I think” or what “I feel” is irresponsible.

This got me thinking (like a huge nerd) about clarifying my own beliefs about the world, and establishing my own creed (or statement of what I believe to be true), before I dare to influence others. As I’ve begun evaluating and clarifying my beliefs, I was asking myself; “What do I accept as the core of reality?”

There are a lot of reasons behind my conclusion that I won’t take the time to go into here, but as I was thinking about the question, I came across a line in another book, “Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals” that describes one key aspect of the answer;

God has “lived in community” from eternity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God as Trinity is the core reality of the universe, and that means that the core of reality is community.

The core of reality has to do with relationships. It’s not abstract, distant, or meaningless. It is more significant than any event in history, and any human suffering. It’s something that we have all heard echoes of, but something none of us can reach or deserve. To participate in it is painful, but to be cut off from it is hell. It is something to which we long to be restored, and which longs to be restored to us. It is something that all are welcome to participate in but none are forced. It is not something that anyone owns or controls. It is love, it is a family, it is a body.

The implications of that are huge.

Have you caught a glimpse of that reality? Have you tested it to see whether it can serve as the foundation for all that you know? Have you considered the invitation to enter into a restored relationship with reality?

Last night a group of men were at my house catching up around a bowl of guacamole that I nearly sacrificed my left index finger to make. A major topic of conversation was an “identity crisis” of sorts that many of us our facing as new Doulos staff.

At one point, a friend visiting from out of town said, “It amazes me that you guys can pick up and move out of the country. But you can’t move away from you”. Knowing who you are is important. Who you are defines your life; your value, your purpose, what you do everyday and how you relate to others.

For the first time since college, my life has finally slowed down enough that I’ve been able to reflect on who I am, and who I am becoming. It is good to remember.

I remember a friend reading out loud at Woodfest a few years ago what the Bible says about her identity. It was deeply moving to hear, and in that same book, I’ve found my identity, which I wrote about last week. I would sum it up as; “I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great savior”, but it fills so much more of my life than just a simple quote.

People who know who they are are powerful. They’re attractive (seriously, ladies!). That’s the kind of person I want to be, and the kind of person I want to be around. But, there are a lot of people who don’t know their identity, and many who have been hurt by the false identity they hear given to them from their friends, families and culture.

I want to be a person who reminds others of their true identity. A man who mentors younger men and teaches them how to turn to Christ. A man who treats women with gentleness and respect and reminds them of their dignity in Christ. A man who encourages others to find their identity in Christ by finding my own identity in Him. I’m beginning to pray about what that will look like played out.

What about you? Who are you? Who are you becoming? What identity are you causing others to believe about themselves? Let me know in the comments.