Pablo Picasso famously said, “Art washes away the dust of the soul” and I believe him. It happened to me again last week. Months ago, Amy bought me ticket to a Return to Forever concert. Their album Romantic Warrior was the first jazz album I ever purchased. They sent me on a decade long journey of listening almost exclusively to jazz. Their blend of jazz and rock, and virtuosity made it impossible for me to go back and listen to the pop and C.C.M. I was taking in for a long time.

Last Sunday was not an ideal day to sneak in a road trip to Pittsburgh. I’ve been living on a ladder getting home improvement projects done for weeks. Last week our church hosted Willowcreek’s Leadership Summit and I was the onsite event manager. A sixty-plus hour work week loomed ahead. Still, we had tickets. They weren’t cheap. More importantly, this was going to be the date for our 15th wedding anniversary.

The concert was fantastic. Stanley Clarke might be the best bass player alive on the planet. He continues to do things on the bass that no one else can do. Jean-Luc Ponty joined the band for this tour and played most of the guitar leads on the violin. Chick Corea’s voicings and composition never fails to leave me breathless.

It was a long concert. Zappa Plays Zappa opened. I didn’t know their discography, but this was a fun, talented band in their own right. We didn’t leave Pittsburgh till 11:30 PM. This made for a short night of sleep before a long weekend.

Sleep deprivation usually leaves me a bit cranky but not this week. The experience of the concert and all its artistry refreshed me in ways I don’t fully understand. Picasso’s quote captures it: The concert was something like a baptism or a foot washing. Chick Corea’s spirituality takes a different shape than mine, but when I see him in concert or listen to a few particular albums of his I experience something akin to worship. Maybe it is worship. His music is the union of mathematical precision and joy and interplay that makes me think of the bliss each member of the Trinity has knowing each other.

Those are odd thoughts, I know. My bigger point is that great art purifies and restores us. It is sanctification with a small “s.” We don’t become more Christlike morally, but we share in his creativity, if only for a moment.

I also don’t want to post this but I’ve been living on that ladder and am not feeling well read at the moment. I wonder if this post reads like I’m one of the pretentious brothers from the Fraiser sit-com. But I need a reminder to not take the easiest entertainment options when I give myself downtime. I tend to watch the sitcom instead of view the documentary, read the thriller instead of Steinbeck, and listen to the three minute long hit instead of Miles or Coletrane. There’s nothing wrong with vegging. But I’d got picked up some dust along the way that could use a good washing also.

What do you read or listen to when its time for you to loose yourself in great art? 

Last Wednesday Amy and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Here’s a few things I think I know about marriage and relationships. In fifteen more years I might recant some of these and update them. We’re a work in progress:

• Marriage exposes selfishness like nothing else.  I didn’t get married until my late twenties. Prior to that point I truly thought I was a catch. I stopped believing that about two months into the marriage. Nothing exposes self centered attitudes than making room for someone else’s wants, needs, dreams, and wishes.
• Having children exposes selfishness like nothing else, expect maybe marriage. The same principles apply above apply. Once you figure out how to give to your wife, you establish a new comfort level which each child disrupts and will continue to do so as they develop. Each developmental shift is an invitation to re-learn being a servant. Unfortunately, these invitations often go unopened. At least I know I had been slow to open a few.
• In every marriage there will be reoccurring themes of conflict that seem unsolvable. Amy and I have ours and they are related to communication style. There are times we be get so frustrated over finding ourselves in the same  spot that we’re frustrated to tears. It’s okay. We may never crack these puzzles. We’re committed to loving each other through them. We’ve learned to cry over our impasses but hold onto each other.
• It might be more important to play at our marriage than work at our marriage. I picked up this nugget from Len Sweet’s book Soul Salsa. Working on your marriage is about tending to your deficits. Playing at your marriage is adding to your strengths. Having fun together reminds you of why you fell in love to begin with.
• Marriage works best when the servanthood flows both ways. But each partner finds themselves in a stretch, from time to time, when they feel like they are the one doing the work by themselves. It’s just what it is. Just serve. There will come a time in the marriage when you are the weak one and you will need your partner to carry you. You just will.
• You are powerless to change anything but yourself. Other people have written eloquently about this. They are right. However, I think a spouse can see authentic change and become inspired.
• After fifteen years, Amy still has the power to make me want to be a better man. I don’t think this will ever change. She deserves so much better.
• If marriage doesn’t inspire gratitude in you, then you might be doing it wrong. I’m still in disbelief I get to do life with this woman.
• Having someone who loves you enough to tell you the truth about yourself is a gift. 
• Each of partner in a marriage grows and evolves over the years. This gives each partner the opportunity to fall in love with the person their spouse is becoming. 
• Your partner wasn’t put on the planet to meet all your emotional needs.

Amy Shallenberger,

I love you.

Your dreams are my dreams.

God forgive me when they are not.

-Love, Larry

I wish I had the time to give this post the attention it deserves. Help me out. What do you know to be true about marriage? 

I’ve been through some seasons of doubt and wondering, but at the end of the day I can’t call myself a skeptic. Personality-wise, I’m more of a Don Quixote, a true believer, evidence-be-damned. I know this isn’t fashionable in some circles.  But, if I’m honest with myself, this is who I am.

I’m a pastor and pastor and faith communities tend to attract people with a propensity to believe. In fact, churches tend to be filled with people prone to accept things by faith to the point that things can get downright lazy, intellectually speaking. I know that seems harsh, but there’s research to back it up. In the book UnChristian, Kinnaman and Lyons, discovered that people between the ages of 16-29 view the church as being intellectually sheltered. They don’t see the church as a place where it’s safe to ask the hard questions. The authors pointed out that many of the survey respondents were those who had experienced church and then gave up on it due to their dissatisfaction.

Don’t believe me? Think about the last Sunday School class or small group when someone questioned or challenged a bedrock doctrine of the church. What happens when someone mentions that they have a hard time reconciling God’s mercy and the church’s on Hell? What happens in a most churches when a youth asks why homosexuality is considered a sin?

In many churches, judgmental stares and trite answers are marshaled in the same manner that a body creates white blood cells to swarm bacteria. The skeptic learns to keep his or her questions to themselves or to quietly disappear, having decided that church is not a place where hard questions can be debated or resolved. (more…)

Last night I was reminded of some wise words from Craig Jutila. Years ago I listened to a leadership tape (yes, “tape”) where he explained the etymology of the words “amusement” and “recreation.”

“Amuse” literally means “without inspiration.” It’s the act of mentally checking out. For me, that means sitting on the couch and watching a sit-com or a football game or reading a light book. When I’m done I feel more rested but not necessarily inspired.

“Recreation”, on the other hand, literally means “to create again.” There’s a piece of renewal that happens during the process of giving yourself some down time.

I experienced that last night when we took the family to see Johnny Winter perform. Winters is a 67-year-old blues guitarman who still has great chops. Amy and I noticed that some of his most challenging solos were delegated to the rhythm guitarist, but Johnny still deftly worked his instrument.

I found myself inspired. When I’m sixty-seven what will I be brilliant at? When’s my next appointment with my laptop to write? The concert renewed the creative within me.

I think we need both things, amusement and recreation. But I suspect that we tend to bias toward the former, since its less demanding on us. Amusement is the potato chip of the soul and it might be time to push the bowl away and get about the relaxing business of renewal. Perhaps so many of our creative blocks occur because we aren’t nourishing our muses properly. We gorge them on starchy slop and expect marathons from them.

Here’s a clip of a young Johnny Winter working his magic.

What do you do to re-create?

It’s no secret that the Internet has changed how our minds process information. We’ve become more twitchy and have difficulty attending to one thing for any length of time. Our brains, quite literally, are adapting to the medium we set in front of our eyes. Our minds are conforming to our web browsers and we hop from website to website in a non-linear fashion, making shorter and shorter stays at each point.

The challenge with this is that our day jobs and creative endeavors require long, uninterrupted acres of time in which to work. Years ago, Fast Company shared research that the average middle manager has enough interruptions to his or her day that it diminishes their cognitive level to the same point as smoking marijuana would.

So in a sense, the repository of information we call the Internet can make us dumber.

Here’s two tools I’ve discovered that are helping me.

Stayfocusd. Stayfocusd is an add-on for the Chrome browser. You can block specific sites or use the nuclear option to block your access to the Internet for a certain length of time.

WordPress’ full screen mode. WordPress users can select the “full screen mode” and lose sight of all the distracting bells and whistles of the blogging platform. John Saddleton compiled a list of twenty “distraction free” applications for writing.  Check it out.

And here’s one non-digital strategy. Go to coffee shops that don’t have wi-fi. 

What tools are you using to stay focused? 

I recently read Deuteronomy and was struck by chapter nine. Moses had to invest a lot of breath warning the children of Israel not to become proud over their conquest of the Promised Land. The land was filled with stout enemies and it would take much military prowess to drive out the inhabitants of the land. Moses didn’t want series of victories to go to the people’s heads. So he said things like…

“Do not say in your heart, after the your Lord your God had thrust them out before you, “It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me into possess the land..” v. 4

“Not because of your uprightness or the uprightness of your heart are you going to possess the land.” v. 5

“Know, therefore that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people.” v. 6

Moses then goes on to outline the history of Israel’s stubbornness and disobedience before God.  It’s a long list: The Golden Calf, grumbling, mutiny, refusal to enter the Promised Land to name a few. Moses goes on for paragraphs outlining their history spiritual failure. It’s not that Moses was trying to be unforgiving or cruel or spiritually abusive. He just knew a cruel reality: People mistake achievement for “righteousness.”

It would be a mistake to limit righteousness to it’s religious uses. People who perform well at church mistake themselves for being right before God. And their secular counterparts see themselves as righteous before society. Achievement equals worth in our eyes.

Moses knew that the people would forget their spiritual flaws and mislabel God’s gift as their own accomplishment. Moses isn’t hammering a sense of guilt into the people. He’s trying to help them remember that God is being generous with them even though they didn’t deserve it.

I was struck  by this passage because I’m just like Israel. A few years ago I had a streak of wins– professionally and in my writing. A series of promotions and book contracts. Then the book contracts dried up with the economy. And the wins have been harder to come by in work for a stretch. I went into an emotional funk that I’m just coming out of.

…

Why?

Part of the reason is that I believed that I made those wins happen. So when the wins didn’t keep coming, I took that to be a measure of my personal worth.

…

I was talking with my wife the other day about how young children tend to be egocentric. If  parents split, a preschooler will assume its his fault. He had the power to keep them together with good behavior. He reasons he must be have been bad to split them up. The child is incapable of understanding that he had nothing to do with the good years or the bad year of his parents’ marriage.

…

Back in the day, Moses preached Deuteronomy 9 to break God’s kids of their ego-centrism. And now, God seems to doing the same thing with me. Hopefully, I’ll begin to understand God’s generous and grace have nothing to do with my ability to produce

“Leaders are readers.” It’s a leadership truism. I’ve noticed in my leadership circles that many pastors and business leaders feel guilty of they are reading something other than leadership literature. Somehow reading anything else feels impractical or even an inefficient use of time.

It’s time to challenge that line of thinking. Here’s three reasons why it might be time for leaders to branch out and read some good fiction:

Good stories reveal the human condition. By the time I finished my degree in Biblical Studies I was burnt out on Greek, Hebrew, and Systematic Theology. For a diversion I picked up Crime and Punishment and then The Brother’s Karamazov and then virtually everything Dostoevsky wrote. I was enthralled by this artist would painted the human condition so well. His saints had flaws. His sinners had a noble streak. He told stories that captured simultaneous depravity and nobility of humanity. His pictures were more powerful than any theology book I’d ever read. A leadership or theology book can help us know the parameters of human behavior. A story empowers us to feel them.

Good stories provide analogies for counseling. The next time I meet a man going through a mid-life crisis I’m handing him How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional World by Charles Yu. Yu used the fictional device of a time machine to explain how we tend to get stuck in the past whether its a regret, a moment that defies repeating, or the instant a dream is about to bloom. This novel tells truth with more speed, beauty, and truth than 20 hours of counseling ever could.

Good stories are “wasteful.” There’s nothing wrong with a Sabbath from the mantle of leadership. It’s healthy to not think about the office. The work of good literature is hidden. Story by story a moral compass wired into the grey matter. Good literature, as we discussed, reveals truth about humanity, illuminates morality, and reminds us all that meaning is found in the struggle.

So leaders, every third or fourth book, do yourself a favor and download a novel and let it work on you.

What “impractical” books are you reading now?  

I’m halfway through a brilliant book, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction World’, by Charles Yu. I haven’t read sci-fi since high school. I needed a change of pace in my reading and I stumbled upon this book. I’m glad I did. Without giving away too much the book tells the story of a society filled with people who avoid living real life with the aid of time machines. In Universe 31, many people escape reality by living out the same loop of time, again and again. Or, they pass their time traveling through alternate versions of their realities.

The guide to living in this sci-fi reality divides people into two categories, “protagonists” and “back office.” There are people who get to live out their lives as main characters and those do the necessary chores to keep things humming.

There’s a formula to determine who fit to be a protagonist and who is fit to oil the wheels of the machinery.  The list doesn’t include thick biceps or bankrolls. In fact the criteria is quite surprising:

• The ability to believe
• Fervency in that belief
• Humility
• Willingness to look stupid
• Willingness to have heart broken
• Willingness to see Universe 31 as nonboring or, even better yet, to see it as interesting, and maybe even important, and despite its deeply defective nature possibly even worth saving.

I stopped after reading this list with the realization the criterion works in non-science-fiction worlds also.

Amy just shared the first recording from her blues band. Take a listen by clicking on the link. Sean, you did a brilliant job. Amy, love your voice on the blues:    I’d Rather Go Blind Master

If the blogo-sphere does one thing well, it it’s capacity to demand our moral outrage. This year alone, bloggers have demanded that we become incensed over Rob Bell’s book on hell, Mark Driscoll’s inability to get his foot out of his mouth, Lady Gaga’s release of the lack-luster song Judas during Passion Week, a potty-mouth parody of a child’s book, Wiener’s wiener, The NFL lockout, and a host of other issues that I can’t recall.

It seems that bloggers have learned an invaluable lesson from their better coiffed counter-parts in the newsroom: Conflict sells. Want to drive traffic on your blog? Weigh in on whatever brouhaha that’s frothed its way to the top. Grab an iced-tea and log into Google Analytics and watch your numbers grow.

There are problems with this approach, blog traffic not withstanding:

We reserve moral outrage for outsiders:I have a good friend who blogs for large liberal website. He scans the morning news each day for Republican shortcomings and moral failure. He seldom fails to find a gem or two to rant about. He’s an excellent writer and is pitch-perfect in finding the proper levels of moral indignation. Of course, he never seems to notice similar offenses from those in his own camp. He’s not alone (and the political right is equally guilty). This phenomena transcends Left vs. Right, Reformed vs. Emergent, and Coke vs. Pepsi. In  Solzhenitsyn’s words:

 ”If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Volf reminded us that we label others as evil in order to manufacture an artificial sense of innocence within ourselves. We need moral outrage to keep from having to look in the mirror.

Moral outrage gives PR to the wrong people: Celebrities really should have a better system for scheduling their “provocative” outbursts. Ricky Gervais and Lady Gaga both tried to leverage Holy Week to incite Christians and to generate some PR. Gervais declared he was a better Christian than most Christians while Gaga continued her progress through the Stations of  Madonna with Judas. Both hoped Christians would take the bait and get people talking. Lady Gaga needed to generate anticipation for her upcoming album and Ricky needed people to forget how caustic he seemed at the awards show. They shrewdly knew that by stirring the pot, they might get a little attention. Yawn. Neither seems to generate the heat they were looking for, did they?

Faux moral outrage crowds out real offenses: The biggest problem with our addiction to venting and being offended is that when some actually does come along that deserves our true moral outrage, we’ve already used it on politicians and parody books. In our misguided efforts to entertain ourselves by being offended, we’ve diminished our capacity to get angry when it counts.

Edit: (Sigh) I put my foot in it. I linked to Karen Spears Zacharias’ CNN.com editorial about the book “Go the F&#% to Sleep” and inadvertently created the impression that she (and others who’ve made similar posts) only did so to move web traffic. Karen tweeted me w/ concern so let me get this straight. I don’t believe Karen to be cynical person who’d be churn the waters to drive traffic. I don’t see eye-to-eye with her evaluation of the book, but that’s beside the point. For Karen, she is being “angry when it counts.” For her perspective, the book constitutes a wink and a nod at child abuse. It would be akin to a sin for her to believe this an NOT get outspoken about it.

Karen, I, in no way meant to disparage your motives. Truth: I was attempting to catalog a list of offenses I’ve recently read about online. I wasn’t attempting to critique their validity. (For the record, I don’t think Rachel Held Evan’s concerns were minor either). I was simply personifying the blogosphere and its constant invitations to be offended. I didn’t mean to marginalize you or your perspective. For that, I truly apologize.

If we cross paths again at a conference, I owe you dinner.