Free Download: 10 Day Prayer Guide

We've been putting in some work over at Reverb Culture. Weekly blog articles by fantastic writers. Lots of new designs.(I showed my wife this picture and she said "That's in the catechism?" Mission accomplished.)

If I haven't told you yet, Reverb Culture is an experiment in young adult community for Catholics. We're big on praying with Scripture and the Catechism. And we love cocktails. And weird t-shirts.

This website and community, Reverb Culture, would not exist if the Catechism of the Catholic Church hadn't changed my life. First my prayer life, then my life, then how I viewed discipleship and the future of the Church.

I've read twenty plus books from authors of the catechism and experts in the field. I've spent countless hours pouring through the catechism, studying it, and eventually began praying with it. I've also been using the catechism and this form of prayer with the catechism in discipleship, catechist training, youth minister training, small groups, young adult groups, and my own life for years.

So I'm finally putting it all down on paper. (Electronic e-book paper. E-paper.) We're calling it Dual Wielding: A Guide to Praying with Scripture and the Catechism.

It will be a full e-book that will show you how to pray with Scripture and the Catechism like a boss, and how to navigate the catechism and not be intimidated by it.

It's going to include printouts you can stick in your catechism, supplemental videos, cocktail recipes for making Reverb Culture official drinks, and a private community to pray for you and support you.

It will also include printable prayer guides like this:

This is a 10 day guided prayer through Scripture and the Catechism. At the end of these reflections, you'll have prayed with both Scripture and the Catechism's exposition of the names of Jesus: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, and Lord. Its an exposition on the part of the Creed where we say "I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord."

I really wanted to share this guide with you. I'd love for you to pray with it and give me any feedback you might have. You can download this prayer guide, which will be included as one of many in the larger study guide, for free by entering your email over at Reverb Culture.

Download the free 10 Day Prayer Guide.

If you're interested in the full guide package we're making, Dual Wielding: Praying with Scripture and the Catechism, you can learn more about it and even pre-order a copy here.

Let me know what you think! If you like it, could you do me a favor? Can you think of a friend or a few friends who would really dig this and share it with them?

Thanks! Talk to you soon.

The Pope, John Boehner, and Zacchaeus

The Pope is in the US! There's plenty of coverage around the web, so I won't pretend to inform you.

However, this morning in prayer (prayer that involved browsing Facebook at one point, I'll admit) I noticed these things. Going back and forth between the news, Scripture, and then dual wielding Scripture with the Catechism, all of these things came together. It all hit me pretty hard and I'm still processing why exactly that is. I'll just leave them here in the order I came across them without any interpretation. Feel free to offer your thoughts.

Luke 19:1-6 He came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he reached the place, Jesus looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” And he came down quickly and received him with joy. 

549 By freeing some individuals from the earthly evils of hunger, injustice, illness and death, Jesus performed messianic signs. Nevertheless he did not come to abolish all evils here below, but to free men from the gravest slavery, sin, which thwarts them in their vocation as God's sons and causes all forms of human bondage.

1443 During his public life Jesus not only forgave sins, but also made plain the effect of this forgiveness: he reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the People of God from which sin had alienated or even excluded them. A remarkable sign of this is the fact that Jesus receives sinners at his table, a gesture that expresses in an astonishing way both God's forgiveness and the return to the bosom of the People of God.

Luke 19:7-10 When they all saw this, they began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.”  And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.” 

2412 In virtue of commutative justice, reparation for injustice committed requires the restitution of stolen goods to their owner: Jesus blesses Zacchaeus for his pledge: "If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold." Those who, directly or indirectly, have taken possession of the goods of another, are obliged to make restitution of them, or to return the equivalent in kind or in money, if the goods have disappeared, as well as the profit or advantages their owner would have legitimately obtained from them. Likewise, all who in some manner have taken part in a theft or who have knowingly benefited from it — for example, those who ordered it, assisted in it, or received the stolen goods — are obliged to make restitution in proportion to their responsibility and to their share of what was stolen.

2712 Contemplative prayer is the prayer of the child of God, of the forgiven sinner who agrees to welcome the love by which he is loved and who wants to respond to it by loving even more. But he knows that the love he is returning is poured out by the Spirit in his heart, for everything is grace from God. Contemplative prayer is the poor and humble surrender to the loving will of the Father in ever deeper union with his beloved Son.

Wu-Tang, Quality, and Scarcity: Two Things We Need (or three?)

The new and possibly final Wu-Tang album is more than two hours long. It features 31 tracks, all eight living MCs, ... sirens, bombs, samples from kung fu cinema, and original skits. And it took more than two years to produce, mostly because eighty percent of its vocals were re-recorded to capture the intensity of early Wu-Tang records. The album’s title: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Here is some additional info: the CD is housed within two nickel-silver boxes that were hand-carved by a Moroccan artist and his team of ten workers over three months; there is only one physical copy of the album in existence; all digital versions have been destroyed; and bidding starts at $5 million. And we learned yesterday that Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will remain under copyright until 2103 — that’s 88 years.

I came across this article and now the Wu-Tang Clan fascinates me like an itch on the back of my head. I think a lot about making stuff. I really enjoy making stuff.

Creating. Art. Design. Expression. Speaking. Performing. Writing. Evangelizing. Catechizing. MAKING BABIES.

This is a brilliant lesson for all of us that like to make stuff.

--> Drop your expensive pen and listen. <--

There's a saying that in order to survive in a competitive market you are either the first or the best. Quality. There is always room in a market for high quality, because there's virtually no ceiling on it. The Wu-Tang clan spared no expense in making this album.

Hand-cvarved by a Moroccan artist and ten others. Read that again.

Oh, you threw some paint on a square and called it a day? Not the Wu. They took longer and spent more money and crammed more stuff into an album to make it arguably the most valuable, rare, and unique album ever. Do you slave over the stuff you make? Is it high quality?

Quality

How do you know if something is high quality? It kicks a**. People can't not say something about it. People save it. People frame it. People recited it back to you. People share it. People put it on repeat. People lock it in a museum. People are moved by it.

Lots of people. People who don't go to your Church, and people who don't know who you are, and people who aren't the same political party as you. People who are far from you. People who speak a different language. People who disagree with you fundamentally. People who hate you.

Another principal in market economics (that is, selling the crap you make) is scarcity. Scarcity makes something special. Like diamonds. (Or not like diamonds).

There is only one copy of this record. They played it publicly only once. Some people showed up in a room naked without their phones or cameras or recorders or other artificial-experience-validators. And maybe for the first time in years, this album and the weight of its scarcity forced people to shut up and just stand there. It was only going to be played once.

Scarcity

In the search for market penetration, or mass acceptance, or mainstream affirmation, do we forget to make things that are scarce? Scarcity makes something valuable. The most un-scarce things are the least valuable, or at least the least appreciated.

And not just things that are actually, physically, scarce. We often lack a scarcity awareness. The awareness that this minute passing right now is the first and last of its kind. The awareness that this life is only singular. The awareness of the scarcity of good friends. A scarcity awareness.

When making something, the maker must bake scarcity into it. Turn off the camera. Throw away the other copies. Perform it live. Do something singular.

When something can make you feel the weight of scarcity, you see it for the first time. Everything else blurs out of focus. You see it as if it and you are the only things. You really see it.

Does It Have a Scarce Quality?

The Church is calling for a new evangelization. An evangelization "new in its ardor, method, and expression". Its what Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict championed for.

I'm starting to develop a thesis that might somehow connect artists/makers/creators to the future development of evangelization. Maybe its not a big deal. But it sure does help push me further.

"As the 20th century draws to a close, the Church is bidden by God and by events - each of them a call from Him - to renew her trust in catechetical activity as a prime aspect of her mission. She is bidden to offer catechesis her best resources in people and energy, without sparing effort, toil or material means, in order to organize it better and to train qualified personnel." Catechesi Tradendae #15

Are we challenging the borders of this new frontier?

Are we striving constantly to make things that are scarce and high quality?

Or are we racing to repeat things that are popular and unchallenging and that are sure to work?

Do our talks and conferences match up to this? Or are we just repeating THE SAME FREAKING CONFERENCE and the same talks and cute sayings ad infinitum? Does our music challenge us like this? Does our art challenge us? Is it high quality and scarce, sparing no effort or toil or material means?

And here's what is most important to us Christians:

Is our Church's evangelization, catechesis, music, art, culture, writing, [fill in the thing you make] the highest quality and does it weigh heavy in that kind of scarcity that arrests people and holds them still.

Because if the Gospel isn't that, then you aren't sharing the Gospel.

A Place Prepared

A place prepared. A place prepared for me.

If I'm honest, it doesn't sound appealing.

Someone has prepared a room for me? I already prepared my own room. I like my room. My phone is prepared just how I like it. I eat food prepared how I like it. I listen to the music I like. I've spent months collecting all the right bands and albums.

I wear all the clothes I want to wear. I drove 5 miles in my car to a mall. I walked around the mall looking for a shoe store. I passed swaths of gaping store openings. I found a shoe store and stared under a wall of 50 options. I tried on three different shoes. I spent $50 on my shoes. The guy asked if I wanted to donate to charity. I said no.

They're grey because I think grey goes better with most of my wardrobe.

My house is prepared the way I want. I like the walls cluttered, the book shelves full, and the counters clean. My friends are who I want. I talk to them when I want. They read updates from me, sometimes when they don't want. My computer. My job. My aspirations. My three year plan and ten year dreams.

I'm still working on my kids. They're a work in progress. I want to see them grow and reach. I want to be with them through love and ache and graduation and grandchildren. I don't want my oldest son to be left-handed. He's determined to prove me wrong. I don't want my sons to ever work for a large corporation. I want one of my sons to be an artist. I want them to learn how to run and to use running as an outlet for their emotions. I want them to grow to have big heavy hands that work with wood under a square jaw. I want them to grow to drink beer and have compassionate, listening eyes. I want them to frustrate me with their well-read opinions and I want to argue about Steinbeck over dinner and laugh heartily.

Someone prepared a room for me?

If I'm honest, I don't think anyone could prepare a room as well as I could.

Heaven? Heaven is a room prepared?

Where is my control? Who knows what safety blankets to include in this eternal dorm? Who knows what moderate self-medicating vices to adorm MY room with?

A room prepared for me? Who knows what walls to build to keep secret fears out? Who knows what painful memories should be left off the wall? Who knows what memories are the most true I've ever had, and to freeze them in frame prominently, or near the door, or under a window? Who knows which faces I want eternally enshrined and which eternally vanquished?

Who has walked with me enough to know? Who has suffered with me?

Who has suffered me?

If I'm honest, my first reaction is disgust.

Jesus has prepared a room for me? What sort of room could fulfill me for eternity? Who does He think He is?

And after this pile of thought came a blushing awareness: the extent that Jesus' prepared room excites me is directly related to my honest closeness and trust in Him.

My satisfaction in those words betrays my level of trust and closeness.

If those words feel more condemning than liberating, am I just a foolish pilgrim who's fallen in love with the hotel?

Am I just a foolish man with my own room prepared? Do these words not make sense to me because the world soaks my ears and eyes with comfort and the intoxication and allure of false-freedoms anchored to vices? So much so that I can't see or hear what He really means? I can't see the world for what it is? I can't see that the room I have prepared here is smoke and mirrors?

If I were to only believe in Him, and know Him, and leave my own prepared and safe room behind, He would show me something more real.

"I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may also be. And you know where I am going."

But I'm afraid, if I'm honest, a big part of me would rather have $50 shoes.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

"Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may also be. And you know where I am going.

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?"

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. If you had known me, you would know my Father also, henceforth you know and have seen him."

John 14:1-7

Update: The Saga of Wood Laminate

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I haven’t written much in a few weeks, for lots of good reasons I would like to catalogue here. Prepare yourself for the mega update post.

The biggest news is that, after 6+ months of looking and looking, and looking, and commuting an hour and a half to work one way each day, and looking more…. we finally bought a house!

We're first time home owners. Buying a home is a harrowing experience. Especially when that total price of the home shows up in your bank account as a big fat red number… So I guess we grew up a little more on Dec. 4th of last year.

So we were blessed to be able to afford a modest home, within 20 minutes of work, with over half an acre lot. We’re really pumped about the lot size for a few reasons:

1. We have crazy boys.
2. We want to have chickens.
3. My wife wants a goat. (I’m not down with this one yet…)

The small downside is that the house was built in the 60’s and has been rented out for the past 10+ years. We decided to replace carpet in the boy’s bedrooms and the office (YESSSS!!!! I GET A OFFICE!!!!!) with wood laminate.

And Thus Begins the Saga of the Wood Laminate

Act 1: The Naivete

So as the wife and I were looking at what needed to be fixed or replaced in the house and talking about wood laminate, an insidious idea crept into our heads:

Well, if we install the laminate ourselves (Me. Myself.) we could save like… $1,000 or more…

So the deal was, if I could buy a super nice dual bevel compound DeWalt mitre saw with some of the hypothetical future money we’d save, I’d do the job. We looked up some Youtube videos on installing wood laminate. Seemed easy enough. Tear up the carpet. Make sure everything’s level. Put down some padding. Install the laminate by tapping it together and interlocking it. Cut some pieces. Drink some beer. Finish in a day or two. Have friends over to marvel at your rich mahogany-looking floors and drink fine wine while listening to Christmas music and laughing.

Act 2: Preparing for Preparing

So on Dec. 4, after a hectic time closing on our house (my driver’s license was expired so we had to drive 1.5 hours back to the in-laws and look for my passport in a trailer we packed up with all our stuff 6 months ago) we closed and I got to pick up the key to our first house. It was pretty surreal.

I went to Lowes and got a load of supplies and headed to the house. Tearing up the old carpet was pretty easy. Nic helped me tear up carpet. (Nic from the increasingly popular website ngutierrez.com)

Now, the crucial step in laying wood laminate, or flooring of any type, is prepping the subfloor. That’s the stuff that is under everything. For us that means making sure the concrete slab of this house from 1960 with major foundation repairs is as level and flat as possible.

Hmm….

So I took a really really long time figuring out ways to survey the three rooms, finding low and high spots, checking the levelness of every 6 inches or so. I finally gave up on trying to get our bedrooms level. The whole house slants and slopes so that would be pretty near impossible. All the walls and doors and everything is crooked and there are very few right angles.

Ok.

So it turns out, through some internet research, that what is actually more important than levelness is flatness. Which makes sense. The thing we want to avoid is low or high spots and bumps because these will be felt as you’re walking across the floor and the laminate is buckling and bending.

So we need things to be flat.

Ok.

So after a few more trips to Lowes I buy a bag of this patching material for concrete subfloors to use in small areas where you find a low spot. I was pretty intimidated by the idea of pouring self leveling crap all over the entire room, so I thought I’d pick the easy way out with this stuff. I started with a low spot in the office. I prepped and planned for way too long and one night after work while by myself I went for it, which is where things began to get real interesting…

Act 3: The First Foibles

I’ve been staying by myself at the house working at Church in the day and going home to the house in the evenings and working on the floors. Working a lot.

The first incidence happened one of these nights. It could have been a Saturday night. Late at night. I’m by myself. I may or may not have by now responsibly consumed an adult beverage or two. I’m ready to pour some concrete.

I’m nervous. And excited. I just made the biggest most intense purchase of my life and I’m about to pour a large bucket of liquid into one of the rooms of this huge debt-building and I can practically feel the testosterone increasing my total body hair count.

I mixed up some of the patch stuff with water outside in a huge bucket.

Now the important thing to note that explains what follows is that the bag clearly states that you have like 10 minutes to use this stuff before it starts hardening. I now have a huge bucket full of cement that is starting a 10 minute clock ticking in my head.

I rush into the office and pour a tiny bit way in the back near the wall on the low spot. It doesn’t look like that much so I pour a bit more. I stare blankly at this glob of liquid I guess expecting it to do something. Then I get a trowel and start spreading it.

CRAP.

CRAAAAAAAAAP.

Its spreading a lot further then I thought I would be able to spread it. And its THICK. Panic suddenly hits me. I have a 4 inch thick glob of cement in my office that is quickly drying and when I try to spread it out….there is A LOT of it. I’m about to have a concrete bowling ball permanently attached to the back of this office floor.

I frantically get on my knees and start pulling as much of the glob back towards the rest of the room. With the trowel I’m scraping this stuff around me on both sides trying to spread as much of it out as possible.

“aaaahhhhhh……”

I’m literally groaning out loud in frustration and anxiety. I keep saying things out loud like: “$#@! #%$@! @#####$$%%$#@JFDSAF” and “WHAT WAS I THINKINGGGGGGGGG…….” and “ITS TOOOOOOO MUUUUCCCCCHHHHH…..”

I’m spreading. And spreading. My knee goes into some of the concrete mud. The first casualty. Then my shoe gets in some. Great. I’m on my knees trying to get as much of the concrete away from the back of the room as possible. Pulling it towards me and spreading it all around. Its flinging onto the walls. I don’t care if its level at this point, I just care that its not a huge dried glob of permanent cement on the floor. I get a lot of cement on my arm. I scream like a girl and run to the bathroom because I don’t want my arm to be a statue for the rest of my life. I remember I have cement on my shoe and scream again. I remove that dirty shoe and go to the bathroom. I run back into the room and continue with concrete triage.

Then I realize there is now so much concrete on the floor that I can’t reach the back of the room with my trowel anymore. And there are still big lumps.

You devil cement.

Caught in an impossible situation and feeling like I can relate to being slowly crushed by a stupid glacier or something I do some weird combonation of falling and leaning against one of the walls with my arm and reaching down with the other arm to trowel and spread.

I’m out of time. And I can’t reach this big spot right near the back wall. And I NEED to get to that spot. Its so super thick.

I still can’t reach the back of the room.

Desperate times require sacrafices. I decide to step into the concrete mud, getting me closer to the back of the room where I need to spread.

Now a quick lesson about concrete cement stuff. Essentially its very fine powdery sand suspended in liquid. Now right before I stepped in this devil liquid I thought I would gush and stick a bit. Not so. Imagine stepping onto a thin sheet of ice laying on top of a floor of ice. It felt something like that.

So my one foot goes down and I just begin slowly sliding, on one foot, towards the back of the room. Off balance and surprised by the liquid sand demon’s tormentings, I flail my arms and spaz out, which then forces my other foot to have to go down into the mud. I’m now sliding on two feet and taking a few more steps to try to slow my approach to the back of the stupid wall.

I get the back spread out thin and get to some other problem areas and then start fearing that my poor toes have seconds to live before they are forever Han Solo-ed into mishaped blocks of cement. The familiar stomach-dropping and fear coupled with anxiety and defeat washes over me. I run to the bathroom - oh crap I can’t because my feet are covered in cement mud - I crawl to the bathroom and start washing off my feet, hoping that two days from now we aren’t having a conversation with a plumber that sounds like: “Yeah your bathtub pipe is packed solid with cement. Did someone fill your bathtub with cement? It’d be pretty stupid to put lots of cement in your bathtub and down your drains…or to put cement in your bathtub at all…”

Somewhere in North Texas that night a nice woman from our bank who handled our martgage crapped her pants. She did not know why.

These were the amazing results of my FIUY project.

But wait, there’s more!

The next morning or so my wife drove down to the house, the kids were with a babysitter, and we were going to work all day on the house. We are looking at a windowsill and there is a soft spot. I poke it. Hmm… looks like termite damage. I poke around more and find a lot more soft spots. Hmm… I poke into a pretty big spot AND SEE LOTS OF LIVING TERMITES SCRAMBLE.

“F$#@!!#%^&”

I was not aware that my stomach could travel all the way down to my cemented feet.

We were destroyed. I was convinced that the entire house was filled with termites and at any moment the roof could collapse in on us and that our house just depreciated $100,000. I started wondering how long all five of us could survive on a jar of peanut butter. Maybe the crunchy kind would provide more nutritional value. Plus it would boost morale during the winter months.

My wife and I went out into the living room to wallow in self-pity for a few silent moments. I tried to flip on a light in the hallway, but it didn’t work. “Great, something else broken.” I tried another light in the house. Nothing.

Our house suddenly had no electricity. Danielle calls the electric company and they thought we wanted the electricty to start on the 11th of December, not the 4th. It was the 6th. I needed electricity to run the shop vac and other power tools. Looks like we aren’t working on the house for a few days…

Act 4: The Kübler-Ross Period

To make this long story less long, the termite damage isn’t as bad as we thought. There was a lot of cosmetic termite damage in the past, but it had been treated. We got the whole house treated and will keep an eye out. Not that big of a problem. The electricty got turned back on and it was nice to have a break away from the house and it also made us realize that this wasn’t just a weekend job, this was going to take some time and love and care.

So the following week I buy more supplies, the people at Lowes are suspicious that I’m sleeping in the kitchen department at night, and other supplies ahem (beer), and get back to work. To make a long story short, the rest of this Saga, and just moving into and fixing up the house in general, is summed up in the Kübler-Ross’ description of the stages of grief.

Lots of denial coupled with ignorance.

“It couldn’t be that hard. Just pour self levling stuff in the entire room and watch it become perfectly level!” “We can fix this!”

Anger.

“WHY IS EVERYTHING COVERED IN CAULK??????????” “MOLD IS GROWING THERE AND I FREAKING HATE NATURE.” “Termites are the spawn of Satan.” “A BLIND MAN ON FIRE COULD PLASTER BETTER THAN THIS”

Lots of bargaining.

“If we put down trim maybe we won’t notice the huge hole.” “It only caves in a little when you walk on it.” “We’ll just put a rug over that.”

Depression.

“We’ll never get this done.” “We’re going to go broke and starve and they’ll find our bodies covered in plaster and termites. I hate termites.”

And lastly, acceptance.

But we’ve finally made a lot of progress. We painted three rooms, put wood flooring and trim in two of them, unpacked the majority of our stuff, and fixed a lot of broken things.

Lots of friends came and helped at different points throughout the whole process, and we couldn’t have gotten this far without them. (Thanks Jon, Kathleen, Nic, Ryan, Cindy, Jim, Randy, Toni, James, Andy, Josh, that guy at Lowes, and everyone else!)

I even built a standing desk in the office out of some scrap wood. The office is really coming along nicely…

What this all really means

For the last 6 months, our lives have felt pretty transitory. Living with the in-laws, commuting constantly, not having all our stuff, new job, looking for a new house, and everything else that came with this huge transition.

We’re really starting to settle in. It feels great.

So…with all that being said. I’m excited to have a few small slivers of extra time to work on some projects that I’ve been neglecting. The biggest being…

REVERB CULTURE!

If this is the first time you’ve heard about Reverb Culture, get your butt over to ReverbCulture.com right now.

My commitment to Reverb Culture isn’t waning anytime soon, and even with 6 months of nothing happening on the site, there has been a small and steady stream of activity behind the scenes. People kept buying catechisms, the Facebook page hit 939 likes as of this post, I still get lots of positive emails and comments from people, and a few other behind the scenes things I can’t really mention now.

Anyways, I’m pumped to get back into the swing of things and get Reverb Culture back up and running. God hasn’t stopped tugging my heart toward it and its going to be a wild ride seeing what God does with it.

This site

I’m going to start back up my weekly Tuesday posts on all sorts of random strange topics. I haven’t yet been able to nail down a specific topic or niche or even a set of topics for this site, but I think that’s just fine. The catechism, coffee, and hipsters. And some occasional youth ministry posts.

In Conclusion

If you read this far, I caught my hair on fire once when I was a kid (accident). Stay tuned for more excitement. Whew.

That’ll do pig. That’ll do.

"Yes, and..."

Joan Rivers ruins everything. The fundamental principle in the art of improv on stage is the "Yes, and..." Principle. In order for any improv game or scene to work, all the actors need to be able to trust their partners to leap with them into made-up territory. And not just leap, but leap and add.

They use this rule of "Yes, and..." to do this.

If someone says "Its great to be in Spain," then you comment on the weather in Spain. If someone then says "Look at that bull," you yell stampede and run away. You agree and add more information. Yes, and...

Del Close was an improv master and pioneer from Chicago who taught students like Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert, John Candy, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, and Mike Myers. In the book "Truth in Comedy" Del recounts the night Joan Rivers screwed it all up.

Del and Joan are playing a married couple in the middle of an argument.

"I want a divorce." Joan said. "Honey, what about the children!" Del said. "We don't have any children!" Joan replies.

Del explains that what followed was cheap laughter and a breakdown of the scene. Apparently this incidence angered him for years. He would often bring it up in classes as an example of what not to do.

"She would break the reality of a scene in order to get a laugh. Someone would say, 'What about our children?' and Joan would say, 'We don't have any.' Okay, you get a quick, easy laugh, but you've also punched a big hole in the scene. All the actors have on stage is each other's belief and faith and if that's gone, then you've just got cheap wit."

Joan got laughter from a cheap joke, at the expense of the scene and Del's trust. Del was giving himself to the scene and going out on a limb, providing more information. "What about the children!" He was giving Joan an easy pitch.

He was improvising.

As Del explains in the book, everything falls apart when there is no trust and no willingness to take whatever your partner is giving you - no matter how dumb or off topic - and not only say "Yes," but to say "Yes, and...". Agreement is the one rule that can never be broken.

Yes is better than a no. "Ok sure, what about the children?"

But a "Yes, and..." drives a scene and two actors into interesting territory. "The children can take care of themselves, its been years since we adopted them from the circus."

When improv actors constantly trust each other and continually say "Yes, and..." the scene takes flight.

The Obvious

There are some obvious areas we could apply the "Yes, and..." Principle: conflict resolution, negotiating, dealing with insane toddlers... marriage...

I believe the best leaders are good at improvisation and the "Yes, and..." Principle. Good leaders take the input and energy of a team, no matter how dumb or off base, and are able to say "Yes, and..." They find what is good in the team members and their views and opinions and are able to affirm while also using their expertise and foresight to push the group forward towards something better and bigger than anything one individual, even the leader, could have accomplished.

If you want to start increasing the motivation, energy, and creativity of a group start saying more "Yes, and..." and less "No. That won't work. That's not right. We can't."

Here's the Deep...

Life can suck at times.

Sometimes it doesn't suck and its more like that time you overdosed on double chocolate cake chocolate ice cream at your 5th chocolate birthday party and your mom had to chocolate induce a sugar coma with horse tranquilizers to get you chocolate down from the top of the Dallas football stadium chasing chocolate squirrels.

But a lot of times life can suck. People die. Friends move away. Jobs are hard. Your wife never folds her clothes and leaves her boxers on the floor. (Wait...)

One of the hardest things to grasp as a Christian is man's free in stark contrast to God's all-knowing, all-forseeing, all-powerful, and all-everything-ness. If God already knows what will happen, do we really have free will? What about all the suck in the world?

God's providential care and ability to direct and steer everything towards goodness and love and truth, even when people are making the wrong decisions or life sucks, is hard to wrap the brain matter around.

The Improv

But maybe the way life works, and the way we should dance with God, is a lot like improv on a stage with two actors.

There are things we can't control: genetics, other people, cancer, Michael Voris, weather, our upbringing, mistakes. These things are handed to us. And they don't make sense most of the time and they seem unfair.

And we could spend a lot of time stomping our feet and giving a "No!" Or maybe we get a cheap laugh out of our NO by resorting to things like drinking, depression, complacency, porn, anger, resentfulness, envy, gluttony, sloth, and the like. Its a quick fix that doesn't last.

From the book:

"What kind of improvisor goes for the quick joke at the expense of his partner and the scene? Usually someone who is weak, insecure, or egotistical. It is an act of desperation, done to control the scene or to try and look better."

Maybe a better response is a constant "Yes, and..." to God. We don't have to just sit back and passively accept things. But we don't have to spend our life boxing air either.

Sometimes an actor won't know where his partner is going until later in the sketch. I sure as pants don't always know where God is going with things. I tend to think in timeframes like the next hour, the next week, the next year. God thinks in much longer timelines.

Some People who lived the "Yes, and..."

• St. Patrick, captured into a slave trade, effectively makes Ireland Catholic.
• St. Ignaitus takes an cannonball to the leg, then becomes the founder of a religious order.
• St. Jerome, plagued by lust, translates the Hebrew Bible into Latin as a form of distraction. (Hebrew is frustrating.)
• Chaira Badano gets bone cancer, inspires thousands, becomes one of my favorite recent almost-saints.

(Comment at the end of this post with a Saint or person of faith who took an obstacle thrown into their lives and made the best of it. I'll add it to the list.)

The genius of the best improv actors is they can take any situation, however bad or good, and run with it.  The most beautiful and insightful works of art come from the exposure to conflict, pain, and suffering faced bravely and honestly. There is a truth to be learned in the emptying of self into suffering. The greatest artist once said "Take up your cross and follow me."

So maybe today you can start trusting and leaping into the unknown. Trust God a little more on the stage and start saying "Yes, and..." to those unclear and hard parts of life. That's way more interesting. That's way more fulfilling.

Don't be a Joan Rivers.

Yuck.

---

The book Truth in Comedy: A Manual for Improvisation(recommended by @ChaseWReeves)  is well worth a few bucks. Why would you read an improv book if you don't do improv? A lot of the ideas in this book are transferrable. They apply to writing, speaking, working with people, enjoying people, and art of making art. If you get in front of lots of people to speak on a regular basis, this book helped me and it will help you.

Full Discolure: When I link to books on my site they are normally affiliate links.  I get a few cents if you order something from Amazon after clicking through a link on my site. This goes to help pay for the expenses of maintaining this website. Thanks a bunches and bunches.

God Plays the Lottery

So I asked God to tell me he loves me. Sappy I know but I needed a hug ya feel? So I randomly flipped to Isaiah 43 and then proceeded to cry a bit. Trivial? Chance? Easy for you to say, until it happens to you.

It's a cognitive bias to constantly assume cognitive bias. The God of chance will always give you a way to explain Him away, an easy out, so you remain free. But what if, just for today, you lived as if everything happened because He willed it?

Sure it sounds like over-optimistically pushing purpose onto the purposelessness of time + matter + chance. But faced daily with chance and free-will as simultaneously part of the human condition, we don't blink.

Or at least we would rather not.

Is it too much to ask to believe God freely wills chance to work for his and your good?

God is eternally drawing lottery numbers, like an ecstatic three year old with too much money to give away, and showering winners with divine providence.

Chekov's Guns

In 4th grade we lived in Biloxi Mississippi on the military base so it was safe enough for me to walk 8-10 houses down from ours to get my friends Robbie, who was a little older than me and had a wicked mean sister, and a hispanic kid who's name I don't remember. I do remember that his house smelled weird and he was missing the first two knuckles of his pointer finger and he limped when he ran because "my legs are not the same length." All the cookie-cutter stucco houses looked the same and it was hot no matter who's 20 sq. ft. front yard you were in. But we knew to stay away from the girl's house across the street from me because she had a mean Dalmatian that was big and going blind and only my driveway had a basketball hoop so we played basketball at my house most days anyway.

A welcome addition to our crew was Sara who was a skinny tom-boy with a bowl-cut of short blonde hair. I liked Sara because she had a quiet cuteness and was funny and could hit like a 5th grader. She lived one block of houses over, across a more busy main street, so I always prayed that she would come play with us because I wasn't allowed to walk that far. Before I moved away to New Hampshire she gave me a gorilla beanie baby that I didn't get rid of until a few years ago.

Our weird community of friends ran the neighborhood and other kids would join our adventures and elaborate games/dramas. For some reason I was always the mediator. Not necessarily always in the sense of being the peace-maker (though this happened a lot) but also being morale-booster and visionary adventure-brainstormer. And I really put a lot of myself into being the mouthpiece of our group. I wasn't the strongest, Robbie could beat me up if I got too cocky, but I definitely could sway the group one way or another most days.

I remember a few summer days of continuous 4th grade melodrama causing tense division in our hood group and waking up one morning in bed wishing we could all play together again like the good old days (last week). I woke up and tried clenching my fist as tight as I could and, as you know if you've ever tried this, it was really hard to do.

All I remember is that somehow I used this phenomenon as an anecdote during a rousing speech to my sweaty peers in front of Robbie's house that somehow reconciled all our friendships and made everything better again.

I'm not sure I honestly understand how the guts of vocation really works. To me it seems like it involves two impenetrable mysteries: our free will and God's omniscience. But now that I'm three years into being a husband, father, youth minister, and catechist, I'm getting more and more Chekov's Gun kind of moments. Every time I prepare a catechesis, or walk on a stage to speak to a large audience, or get excited about explaining things I'm passionate about to my kids, I remember how hard it is to clench your fist in the morning and how our neighborhood's order was restored by a kid preaching to seven other elementary school kids standing in the grass.

Maybe when we die and are standing next to God looking back on every single moment of our lives, all those flickers will seem like an infinite number of Chekov guns. Every moment, regardless of how banal and boring sitting in your room when you are ten with nothing to do is, returns in the third act to show its latent significance.

I think I could spend an eternity laughing and crying with God as He explains all the elaborate work He put into writing my life. And realizing all the clenched fists and lost friends and words I yelled and really meant deep down in my gut all came from and sent me to the only Person who could pull any of this off, I think I could spend an eternity right there.

Criminals and Jesus

For Lent I've been trying to pray everyday with the Passion parts of the Gospels. Today was Luke 23:39-43. Jesus is crucified with two criminals. One who is repentant and one unrepentant.

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Luke 23:39-43

Sometimes us Christians are plagued by the curse of familiarity. Its tempting with this part of the passion to just gloss over and simplify it because we've heard it so many times. One criminal is angry and one repents. Jesus rewards the repentant criminal with "today you will be with me in Paradise."

Today in prayer I was wondering what the repentant criminal was thinking. His words seem odd.

He's saying his fear of God comes from the fact that He is condemned to die next to a man he strongly believes is innocent. It seems like Jesus and the criminals spent a good amount of time with each other. All three were "led away to be put to death" (Luke 23:32) and this makes me imagine all three of them making the journey from Jerusalem to the outer walls and hill of Golgotha. For some reason the repentant criminal knows Jesus is innocent. And this knowledge makes him feel his own guilt all the more.

I imagined myself, covered in guilt and being sent to my just punishment for my sins, like a criminal. How intense would I feel my guilt as I walked beside innocence himself? If I was forced to carry the instrument of my just death-sentence alongside an innocent man doing the same, how would that affect me? Would my cross seem a little lighter, my fear a little absurd, and my suffering a little small? Would I feel the pain of Jesus more than my own pain?

Crucifixion was reserved only for the worst criminals. Obviously these two guilty criminals did something so heinous and inhumane that the only acceptable punishment was a death that matched the perverseness of the crime.

The repentant criminal clearly believes on some level that Jesus is more than a man when he says "Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power."

The words that kept ringing in my head as I put myself in the place of the repentant sinner are: "I deserve this. You don't deserve this."

Walking next to a bloodied and beaten innocent man to our execution.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

Walking in guilt next to the Son of God innocent and totally rejected.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

Being crucified to my own cross. I who caused evil, hurt, pain, deception, suffering, destruction.

Watching nails go through the hands and feet of the one who did nothing but love, heal, forgive, accept, build, and purify.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

I found myself screaming from the cross of my own sin:

I deserve this! You are all mad men! God is a madman! Take this innocent man's pain and give it to me! My hands deserve nails and His deserve adoration. I deserve this. Crucify me twice, but don't let me watch his blood spill and mix with mine. I can't bare to watch it. It is a scandal for the martyred man to die for the the one who makes him a martyr. The executed is dying for the executioner. Surely a graver sin is heaped on my guilt by condemning me to hang next to love's hanging? Does not this act of God make the depths of your soul shudder? God is a madman! Justice is being wretched apart in my soul by a mercy that will surely break me.

The just sentence is hard. But who could survive this sentence of mercy? Who could accept it easily?

Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.

Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.

Jesus, remember me.

things I'm scared of

drowning

being hit by an oncoming truck swerving out of its lane

failing

my son dying

my dad dying

giving everything i've got and still failing

death

giving everything i've got and failing people who i love and respect

the things i do that aren't who i want to be

jesus

the way i act when i'm on the phone with my bank's automated system with speech recognition

being misunderstood

loving people too little

being loved too much

knives

the sound my back makes sometimes

how much i care about appearances

being sappy

alcoholism

writing this list

confrontation

not facing what im scared of

what are you scared of?