What I wish I would have said when traveling through the airport this weekend…

from xkcd.com

When Peter Pan had to Grow Up: On Favre vs. The Packers

I was an idealist.

When Brett Lorenzo Favre retired, I deemed that my childhood had officially ended.  It was that moment where the man who I had watched quarterback my beloved Green Bay Packers for so many years had rode off into the sunset through a tear-filled press conference that I watched on my laptop with two other grown men who were at the onset of tears as well.

“What a perfect ending to a perfect career,” I thought. I can cherish this in peace.

What has ensued since has been the best real live enactment of “bizzaro world” from Seinfeld that anyone could ever conjure on this planet.  Favre unretires. Drama. Packers say they don’t want him. Drama. Favre demands to be traded. Drama. Packers offer $20 million to be a spokesperson. Drama. Favre gets traded to the anthesis of Green Bay – New York – with a specific stipulation that the Jets would forfeit their first round draft picks for the next three years if they flip Favre to the arch nemesis Vikings.

Drama. Favre plays, almost reaches the playoffs, then retires. Again.

Drama. Favre hints at coming back to – the VIKINGS! He’s in, he’s out, he says no.

Wait – No! With a week of training camp left to play, Favre says he’s in. And in a white bronco, he speeds from the Minneapolis Airport to training camp and then leads his team to a 3-0 start with an unbelievable come-from-behind victory.

Seriously folks – this isn’t scripted.  Just listen to the talking heads for a while.

The most read piece on my blog is what I wrote about Favre a year and a half ago. It was everything I loved about growing up watching #4 play his heart out. I’d been waiting to write it for years. I had a storehouse of memories that I was anticipating to get out of my head and into print as to how a quarterback shaped a boy, who became a man, and who still picks up a football and thinks he can be like Brett.

But that wasn’t the way it was to be. And I can’t help but think how life mirrors what we’ve seen with the Favre drama.

As much as I pulled all the lessons out of Favre’s life, I can’t help but think how the last 18 months have illustrated the dark side as well. And ironically, in the last couple of years, I’ve experienced more of the dark side of life than I’ve ever seen before. When experiencing great disappointment in life in the past, there was always #4 to watch at one point in time to see that life wasn’t going to, as U2 sung in Acrobat, “let the bastards grind you down.” (My second favorite U2 song).  Brett might not have won every game, but he always went down fighting. He wouldn’t let the bastards grind him down.

But for the Packers’ faithful, this week it becomes real. Favre isn’t in some bizarro world. We’re the bastards grinding him down now. It’s real.  And the one constant we would watch to remember to just keep going…is now the opponent. He’s the enemy.

And that goes against every bone in my body. I’ll be cheering against Brett Favre.

I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Are there any happy endings anymore?

The longer I live, the harder it is to be an idealist.  I see so few happy endings. The more experience I get in all areas of life, the more I see how sin has really stained the world. It’s just not as it should be. Ministry teaches you that more than ever. Whoever thought people in ministry are sheltered needs a reality check – if you do your job right, you’ll encounter sin as you’ve never seen it before – even in the holiest of people.

I’ve seen several friends who have abandoned happily ever after to the good ol’ American, “Yankee Pragmatism” where we settle for good ideas to be partially realized and partially fulfilled, and spin the partial failure into success. It’s because our image-conscious society wants winners, and if you don’t win you aren’t worth talking about. If you can’t sum it up in a 10 word pithy statement, it’s not worth saying now, is it?

Question: If all things are being made new, then why is Favre wearing a Vikings uniform?

Question: If all things are being made new, why do we feel pain and brokenness more deeply once we’ve begun following Jesus.

However overly dramatic this might be, the whole bit of this week’s drama for Favre vs. the Packers reminds me of one thing: The world isn’t as it should be.  Peter Pan should never have had to grow up.

How delusional is my solution to the health care crisis?

I was having breakfast today with one of my alumni who is in the MD-Ph.D. program at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and I passed my idea by him. He actually said this made sense, so I figured I’d float it past the crew and see what everyone else thought.

I’m not an expert on this – by any means. I’ll take criticism on my ideas without taking it personally. I would welcome other opinions.

I also choose not to participate in the 24-hour television news craze that sucks in so many. I really think it helps reduce my stress and (ironically) makes me healthier to not sit in front of the boob-tube and go the the repetition news show of repetition.

The Bilhorn Health Care Plan

1. Primary Care (defined as basic preventative maintenance) is provided for all US Citizens and registered foreign residents.

Ask any medical student where the money is at in the health care system, and it’s in secondary care. That’s not rocket science. We can say our system “is the best in the world” because what it does is provides incredible care to those who can afford it and when you have the means, it is great. Really, it is.

But it’s great because it follows the money trail and when you don’t have money you can’t get on the trail.

Then you can die of dysentery – like in Oregon Trail.

(Or you can die by eating 984 pounds of buffalo meat in a single sitting so none of it goes bad.)

So we need to somehow get primary care back as the overall focus of health care in the US. That is the basic premise of my plan.

Why do this? Two reasons – one obvious and one not so obvious.

The obvious reason: People need to go to the doctor regularly. This is simple. People have at least an annual visit to their physician and find out where they are healthy and not so healthy, and regularly address those issues.  If we really wanted to put some teeth to this, we’d actually revoke health care privileges for people who, year after year, repeatedly do not go to the doctor and do not address their  health issues and simply then receive a substandard plan. It’s a “use it or lose it” philosophy.

But I’m guessing that won’t be popular. At all.

The not-so-obvious reason: We need to create more market opportunities for primary care physicians. They are swamped and overwhelmed. My medical friends tell me that the primary care physicians that are happy tend to be in rural areas and know their patients over a longer period of time. Most everywhere else – not so.

The money is in secondary care, and to pay for medical school you need to make money to pay back your loans. Government spending in this arena could actually create a market that isn’t currently attractive and medical schools would pump out more primary care physicians.

The trick on this is to define primary care very, very precisely.  I don’t know how to do that. Anyone wanna help?

2. Exercise programs are included as preventative care, and funded under primary care. Why are we so unhealthy as a nation? One big reason is we don’t exercise. This would help stimulate another area of health in our country and we’d spend money on more preventative maintenance that would allow for us to actually cut costs long term. This is cost savings that won’t be realized until 20-30 years down the road, but we do need to get substantially healthier as a nation.  We need to create a culture of health in our country – and expecting people to work out would be a great thing for our country.

3. Somehow the healthcare program would create incentives for nutrition. How can we actually eat healthier as a nation? I’ve been convicted of this and am being more intentional to fit 5 fruits and vegetables in my diet every day. It’s a start, right?

But spend any time in a low income area, and nutritious food isn’t nearly as accessible or available to the greater populous.  One of the activities I’ve done with my students when I’ve lived in low income areas is to make observations at the grocery store. They are shocked to see no skim milk, over ripe produce in small quantities, and everything pre-packaged so it can have a long shelf life.

Conversely, taxing unhealthy food enterprises (pub-grub, fast-food, and even my beloved Chicago-style pizza) should probably happen as well. Kinda like how we have certain gas mileage standards for cars? Maybe we should do the same for restaurants. That will NOT be popular at all.

But neither is broccoli.

Businesses won’t start in places like this because there are no incentives for start-up enterprises. The Libertarians will hate me for this, but sometimes government must step in to create a market that will aid the overall public interest.

Take the example of a lighthouse: how in the world is it profitable to run a lighthouse? People will take advantage of it and use it, but will anyone actually go and pay for it? That’s where licensing and other fees go to actually pay for people to run the lighthouse.

In the case of exercise, nutrition, and primary care, we are failing as a nation as we are becoming more sedentary, obese, and getting unhealthier every day.  I never thought we’d come to a day where we had to incentivize personal health, but we are here.

I know I’m oversimplifying the issue, but I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Punnett Biologist Dating

The Story of My IT Support Career

I get asked a lot of questions on technology. I graduated from an institute of technology, so some people just instantly assume I get it all.

I don’t.

But I can fake it.

A friend posted this, and it is SO true.

From www.xkcd.com

Home sweet Home? Reflections on another year of life…

Birthdays are an interesting thing. If you are like me, you get slightly reflective – to the point of being slightly neurotic.

Case in point – my blog last year on my birthday, I wrote from Alexandria Egypt – and it was one of those transformative experiences where I look back and realized it was more impactful in it’s wake than in it’s present. More than anything, I’m grateful that I’ve been able to visit some places in the world that have allowed for me to see, think, and feel differently.

Many times I’ve wondered how I’d be different if I never left home and ventured out into something different.  I like who I am because of it – I’ve learned how to be “at home” most anywhere – urban, rural, domestic, international – I truly like that I can find the beauty of another culture and embrace it and love it and do my best to call it “home.”

But there is something that I’ve never really put into words before that is a darker side of experiencing so much of the world. It’s about not having a sense of home.

If you’ve met me and my family, home has a very strong geographical sense. My family has dwelled in the same town, and occupied the same home for nearly 50 years. Home is primarily geographical.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself asking a question of myself that I have a hard time answering – where is home? What is home?

When you are a child, home is the place that you know you will be when you return from going somewhere. After church, we go…home. After school, we go…home. After work, we go…home.  It’s the center of existence – an unchanging place in a changing world.

This past week I spent three days hiking miles and miles into the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains, and stopped and camped at a different site each night. I had great conversations with backpackers along the way. One couple I met with we enjoyed a meal together and talked.  They were honestly glad to see me because they had only talked with each other in the past week. I was welcome company…we shared a bottle of wine together around a campfire and talked about life.

We were strangers in life enjoying a chance encounter on the journey, trying to create some sense of home in a place that isn’t very conducive to home. Isn’t that a metaphor for life?

One of my best friends and I had a lot of talk time when I was in Colorado – we discussed the usual – careers, family, romance (or lack thereof), sports, business, politics, etc. Then we talked about how the longest he’s been in one place in the last nine years has been fifteen months. And that was Iraq.

When you are single and mobile, and not necessarily attached, home is hard to make.  We’ve both reflected on this – He far more than I – and realized that living in an interim state is difficult.  Home is meant to convey a sense of permanence, but when it isn’t there there is a sense of lacking.

A scene from the film Garden State haunted me when I first watched it years ago. It’s between the two main characters – Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. They are talking about the idea of “home.”

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew Largeman: You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Ever feel this way?  When home was once a place, and is now just an idea?  What made it change?

Mountains, Gandalf, I want to see mountains again!

I’m sitting in what might be one of the coolest coffee shops I’ve ever been in in Boulder, CO – The Cup. Best of several different worlds converge here: good fair trade coffee, sassy service, awesome music, great fun atmosphere, university students gallore, and…mountains.

I mean, here’s what happened today that just validated why this place is awesome: I came in all disheveled from spending three days backcountry camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, looking all Colorado & all, and I grab a cup and the cashier says, “if you want to sink shower here, no one will be worried dude.”

Nice.

If you are ever looking for an amazing vacation to see all of the beauty and wonder of creation, just one word: Colorado. I got in late on Friday to visit my long-time friend from college, and we crashed Pikes Peak on Saturday and then climbed Mount Rosa on Sunday.  Monday I tooled around Old Colorado City and found another great haunt to perch in and read for a little while.

Then I caught the tram to Denver, rented a car, and headed to Boulder to catch up with two friends from college who have been here for the last five (!) years.

Boulder is a great town…think Madison or Austin but a little more chill and a lot healthier. And more tatts. Seriously – this place is wonderful. When Drew and Kim told me about it, I didn’t believe it at first…but it’s gorgeous.

Other interesting thing about Colorado: Most people who live here aren’t from here.

After three days of being in Rocky Mountain National Park, camping and sitting and just taking in beautiful vista after vista, I feel restored. I forget this about myself sometimes, but getting out in seeing the beauty of creation just brings something to my soul that I can’t put into words. I breathe deeply, gaze out into the horizon, and am in awe of how amazing this planet is.

My mom said once my eyes turn bluer when I’m outside.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting back to what gives me life.

Bilbo was right – “Mountains, Galdalf, I want to see mountains again!”

I think I’m already ready for another adventure.

Cougars? Manthers? and D.I.N.K.U.M? Oh sigh.

I was looking at a friend’s tweet about the National Single Cougars Convention in San Francisco.  I then paused and thought about the proliferation of all of these semi-new terms that describe relationships. Cougars. Manthers. My new favorite? D.I.N.K.U.M. Double Income No Kids Unbelievable Mortgage.

Oh my.

Relationships are confusing enough already. Adding other terms to describe them now seems to make an already confusing situation even more difficult.  The thing with most of these terms (check out urbandictionary.com…but make sure your kids aren’t in the room) that strikes me is that so many are animal in nature. It saddens me that in the present relational state of America, we are comparing ourselves and our relationships to the mating practices of animals.

“You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel.” It’s sad that The Bloodhound Gang put out these lyrics with their unexpected hit Discovery Channel that was intended to be satirical.  Ten years later, we now define ourselves and our relationship practices in terms of…mammals looking to go out and get lucky.

Sigh.

Is there a better alternative?

A new piece from Christianity Today is making the rounds in my circles of friends advocating for young marriage. While I don’t exactly qualify for this anymore, but it does make me think a lot as I serve students who often do not get married until, at earliest, their late twenties. Advocating for early marriage is even less popular than several of the Evangelical Christian causes – there is lots of data against it – but Mark Regnerus asks good questions that help us understand the real issues.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

In the state of our culture today, what does it look like for Christians to redeem the culture of dysfunctional relationships?

Getting naked with the stakes never higher.

How’s that for a title?

News flash – the entry is just slightly more boring than the title…I’m just prepping to preach at my church this Sunday.

I’m procrastinating by blogging.

Can you relate?

I speak in front of students pretty regularly, but it is different speaking in front of my church. Students I can be a little more off the cuff and informal.

Not at my church.

It was nearly 20 months ago when I last preached at my church. The experience was memorable to say the least.

Imagine the leader and figure that meant the most to a church for 26 years leaving the congregation after things didn’t end as everyone dreamed. The one person who was the constant; the person who was there for baptisms, confirmations, weddings, funerals, and most every Sunday preaching from the pulpit.

Imagine the departure – the final sermon, the tears, the good-byes, the hugs, the kind words.

Now imagine being the guy preaching the next week after he leaves.

I was that guy.

Big shoes to fill? That’s an understatement.

I chose to bring my students with me to share about our experience living in a garbage village in Cairo, and how God met us in the midst of what many would consider the one of the most hopeless places on earth.

Hope was what we needed that day. I tried my best to share hope through the gospel that rainy November day. With tears, the pastors wife greeted me afterwards and thanked me. Even if it was just for her, it was a good day.

This week, 20 months later, I find myself in a very different place in the life of my church. I’m an elder. I’m helping search for our new pastor. I’m having conversations about diversity and missional church and everywhere I go I feel like something is on the brink of exploding – either as an outpouring of love or an imploding of frustration.

They don’t write dramas this good on TV. Except LOST. And 24.

(P.S. I am Jack Bauer)

Twenty months ago, I was on the fringe of the church. Now I feel like I’m in the center of a tornado. Now I’m about to speak about it.

Whenever a preacher steps up to the pulpit, the stakes are high. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Beuchner, says it this way:

So the sermon hymn comes to a close with a somewhat unsteady amen, and the organist gestures the choir to sit down. Fresh from breakfast with his wife and children and a quick runthrough of the Sunday papers, the preacher climbs the steps to his pulpit with his sermon in his hand. He hikes his black robe up at the knee so he will not trip over it on his way up. His mouth is a little dray. He has cut himself shaving. He feels as if he has swallowed an anchor. If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon be somewhere else.

In the front pews the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young lady slips her six year old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker. A college sophomore home for vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand. The vice-president  of a bank who twice that week seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack. A pregnant girl feels the life stir inside her. A high-school math teacher, who for twenty years has managed to to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee…

…and Henry Ward Beecher is there. It is a busman’s holiday for him. The vestry has urged him to take a week off for a badly needed rest, and he has come to hear how someone else does it for a change. It is not that he doesn’t love his wife, but just that, pushing sixty, he has been caught preposterously off-guard by someone who lets him open his heart to her, someone willing in her beauty to hear out the old spell binder, who as a minister has never had anybody much to minister to him…

…The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a river boat gambler. The stakes have never been higher.

I wonder sometimes why in the world anyone would ever have the audacity to step into a pulpit and preach. Seriously.  I talked with one of my professors in this, and here’s how he described preaching:

“Next to love-making with one’s spouse, preaching is the most self-revealing activity you do.  It leaves you naked.”

Doesn’t that sound exciting?  Getting naked with the stakes never higher.

Why do I do this again?

The Enigma of Failure: Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall – 1

I enjoy business books.

Even though I’ve been in campus ministry and out of the for profit sector for six years now, I still think much about my time spent at Intergrated Project Management Company as hugely formative, and realized the power a great company can have on both individuals and communities. The Wall Street Journal seems to agree as well, naming IPM as one of the top 15 small workplaces in the country last year.

It was there when I was first introduced to Jim Collins, and his two business classics: Built to Last, a book primarily based on how enduring companies are built, and Good to Great, a response born out of a question from Collins’ friend who didn’t know how to take his good company and help it become great.  Jim Collins has spent a lot of time talking about success.

Until now.  In How the Mighty Fall, Collins turns to the dark side and analyzes how those companies that had all the advantages fell from the top.  And it isn’t pretty – it’s like analyzing a train wreck.

How the Mighty Fall is going to be criticized pretty heavily by several folks. People will likely talk about how it doesn’t have the same rigor as the other books, and they may be right.  They’ll probably say that Collins had an idea and sought to prooftext under the guise of research in order to align with his works in Good to Great and Built to Last.

Whatever.  They may be right, but I think there is something else that is deeper than people’s criticism that underlies their motivation: America has an aversion to failure.

We are scared of it.  We love winners – when the US Olympic Basketball Team lost for the first time, which was inevitable, the players felt like they let the country down.

How the Mighty Fall is an analysis of tragedy. Perhaps it’s just the dark side of me, but I kinda like looking and analyzing failure.  I remember my freshman year of college having dinner with one of the lead engineers in the Challenger Shuttle explosion, and hearing his seething anger combined with intense sorrow over what had happened. It shook him to the core. It shook me, a 17 year old freshman, in a way that I’m still not sure if I understand.

Even (and especially) in my own life, I’ve learned more from my failures than any of my successes. An old high school friend that I’d lost track of long ago facebook messaged me and asked me about being successful. I laughed out loud when I read the message.

I think several people can look at me on the outside and think I’m successful – and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wanted to be considered successful. But I truly think I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded. I hide failure well – but I can point to at least one epic fail I’ve had in school, in business, in ministry, in relationships, in family, in church, etc.

It’s so much so that when I speak openly about failure, people have this strong need to correct me that I didn’t fail because I learned from it. That’s true – but it’s like saying that you prefer to buy a pre-owned car rather than a used car.  A subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that someone else used the car before you. Similarly, a subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that I really screwed up.

Failure used to scare me – a lot. I still don’t like it, but more than ever I believe failure has been the genesis of my growth. Why? To quote Rich Lamb, “Grace is only possible past the limits of our success.”  And our limits of success are discovered only through experience. Experiencing failure. We can only experience epic grace when we’ve epically failed – or, as Jesus said, “she has loved much because she has been forgiven much.”

I only really understand grace through entering failure.

The biblical characters who haunt me most are Saul (the tragic Old Testament King) and Judas (the disciple who betrayed Jesus). Both were filled with the presence of God, either being filled with the Holy Spirit or being with Jesus. Why did they fail? They were more preoccupied with the perception of others view of their success and managing their images than true obedience to what God called them.

I’m going to be looking at each of Jim Collins stages of destruction of a company – both looking at what Collins says regarding business, but apply it to other areas – in ministry, and in our own lives with God.

From How the Mighty Fall, by Jim Collins

Why? Because the exposing the dark side for what it truly is allows for us to strip it of it’s power. Evil that presents itself clearly as evil is so easy to detect. We watch films and hear the darker musical score and know evil’s coming. Life isn’t the movies – real evil doesn’t have a soundtrack.

The power of evil comes through masquerading as goodness. The best lies aren’t the bold face ones – it’s subtle deceit that twists the truth and leaves us in a place that we never wanted to be, wondering how we got there.

We are afraid of failure because we’re afraid of being exposed – that what we be seen for what we really are.  Shame and failure are linked. Fear of failure is a lie that keeps us from really knowing that we can be loved unconditionally. Exposing failure for what it is allows us to see more than we could ever dream – but it requires a rigorous assessment of what’s really there without dressing it up.

So, let the failure stripshow begin.