Disruption - One Year Later

Eagle Street Plaza, Saint Paul - Sept 2014

I was on an Air Asia flight from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu a year ago today. I remember listening to Krista Tippet’s interview with Nadia Bolz-Webber as I was heading home across the South China Sea. One section in particular, on the theme of death and resurrection, gave me pause. 

Little did I know that I’d land smack-dab in the middle of my own impolite disruption an hour and a half later. About of the third of the way into the interview, Nadia says, 

. . . I feel like the Christian life is a life of continual death and resurrection. Also, I think some sectors of Christianity think, well, you're saved and then you're good, right? And then you just lead a really nice life and you're a good person and you're redeemed and you sort of climbed this spiritual ladder so that you're close to God. And that's just not been my experience. 

My experience is of that disruption, over and over again, of going along and tripping upon something that I think I know or that I think I'm certain about, and realizing I'm wrong. Or maybe fighting to think I'm right about something over and over and over again until I experience what I call the sort of divine heart transplant. You know, it's like God reaches in and, you know, the prophets speak of this. It's not a polite experience, you know?  

Its always death and resurrection . . . something has to die so that something new can live. Its spiritual physics.

Whether you call it ‘the chop’ or the day when I was ‘Final-ed,’ September 28, 2013 was a day of disruption. It marked the end (or the beginning of the end) of a job that I found incredibly meaningful, of frequent feasts and dive trips with fast friends, of a relationship that caused me to grow in ways I never knew possible. Everything I thought I knew about me and about my future was wrong. Near-certain dreams of calling Southeast Asia home for decades were dashed. It was a day of death.

As beautifully-brutal and soul-searingly-holy as the following months were, the intervening year been one of resurrection. From that death, something new now lives. I’ve returned to my roots in the Upper Midwest, Northern Europe, and even East Africa, marked and utterly changed by my sojourn in Southeast Asia and with a renewed sense of self. I’ve landed in a position that gives me an even greater ability to act, linking communities and transforming lives across continents. 

What’s more, I’ve reconnected with WW — my constant. After more than a decade of friendship and on-again-off-again-interest, we are finally in sync. Solo journeys have become shared ventures across the frozen tundra of Saint Paul in January, the North Shore in June, and Tanzania in August. . . Two moving towards one.

Its always death and resurrection. Always. 

And, now, I couldn’t be more grateful.