Tag: Conversation

WIFI Prayers and Hugs Withheld

My last post focused on the hopeful tone evident at this year’s US Conference on AIDS in Chicago.  While there is still much work to be done in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the end of the epidemic is actually a realistic possibility.  However, with these consecutive posts, I want to be careful and not overstate my own role in this battle against the epidemic.  I’ve merely attended a conference and worked a booth a couple of times.  I’m NOT a hero here.  But I was fortunate to be in the company of several hundred people who are…people who have dedicated their lives and invested their own love and compassion toward eradicating this devastating disease.

Who am I then? I am a person who claims to be a follower of Jesus.  Vocationally, I am an ordained Christian minister tasked to help others along the path of following God, offering God’s peace (shalom) as I go.  Probably the most formative thing for me personally coming out of my visit to the USCA was how institutional religion has come to be perceived among the HIV/AIDS community.  I was made painfully aware of how badly the community of people who claim to “follow Jesus” have behaved in response to this epidemic and to those who are HIV positive.  I’ll grant on the front end that many of the attacks directed toward institutional religion are based on generalizations and are often unfair.  I’ll also grant that there are MANY religious institutions who are doing GREAT work among this community (My two personal favorites are Samaritan Ministry & The Center For Church and Global AIDS).  So, before we go any further with this post, if you count yourself as part of this group of people called “Christians”, I would like for you to leave your defensiveness at the door.  Go ahead…lay it down…I’ll wait…leave that whole “hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner” thing there too…  Ready?

Samaritan Ministry is always one of the exhibitors at the US Conference on AIDS…the largest conference of its type held in the United States. Until this year, Samaritan Ministry was the ONLY faith based organization who exhibited at this conference.  This year, it was great to have Rev. Donald Messer and the Center for Church and Global AIDS at the conference as well.  (from the CCGA website: “Donald Messer is a 70-year-old writer, United Methodist theologian, and retired college (and seminary) president who tells us here that he believes his career may have begun in earnest only after he retired and began to work full time for the organization he founded, the Center for the Church and Global AIDS.”  His book, Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis was a profound inspiration to Wayne Smith.  He’s also a great guy to hang out with over Chicago style pizza!)

Being a faith based organization attending this meeting always makes for an interesting stream of conversations. Two particular conversations hit me very hard this time.  A young woman came by our booth this year and took our “unofficial USCA IQ test.” This is a simple four-question card that opens easy conversation as well as serving as an entry to our door prize drawing.  After completing the test, Nicole asked what Samaritan ministry was all about. She began to tell us her story. She was HIV positive and worked for an HIV/AIDS service organization (or maybe a department of health…hmmm…can’t remember). One moment she was telling us her story and how her pastor wouldn’t touch her when he found out she was HIV positive.

The next moment Nicole was weeping.

Wayne immediately reached out and hugged her. The conversation continued.  It was deep and moving.  I was honored to have her trust and the opportunity to hear her story.  But I was also struck by the amount of hurt that can me administered by a hug withheld in the name of Jesus.  It was a deep and faith scarring hurt.  I’ll never forget that moment.

About 30 minutes later, an African American man approached our booth. He also took our IQ test.  As we listened to his story, we found out he was a minister who was also HIV positive. He told us about attending a “healing service” at a church. At the front of the church, there was a woman who had cancer and who had gone forward for prayer. The minister and a group of deacons were “laying their hands on her, anointing her with oil, and praying for her” (see James 5:14).

He said, “I wanted me some of THAT!” He went forward, informed the pastor that he was HIV positive and wanted to be anointed with oil and prayed for.  The pastor’s response?

“He looked at me…backed AWAY a step or two…raised his hand in the air in my direction…and began to pray. They laid hands on the woman with cancer…I got the WIFI prayer!“, our friend said with an inviting and friendly laugh.

And we all laughed…except it really wasn’t funny. This pastor’s sanctimonious prayer was an unloving action based on ignorance and poor theology. It was the same action that made one young woman weep in her abandonment and a young man laugh at the unfortunate irony.

I’m going to resist the rant that is poised on the tip of my tongue.  I would hope those stories might speak for themselves.  I’ll say this however in closing: I want to be a part of a group of people who reach out and give Nicole a hug and then walk with her on her journey.  I want to be a part of a people who will never be accused of WIFI prayers.  I saw God very clearly at the USCA this year (and each of the other times I’ve been fortunate enough to attend.) Frankly, I saw “the Church” there as well…very active and engaged. To bad “organized religion” is missing it.

Peace!

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…I was un-friended the other day

I was “unfriended” the other day…actually twice.  One day my friend count on Facebook was 1001…the next day it was 999!  What to do? Now, I’m fully aware of the superficial nature of the friendship counter on my Facebook profile.  One’s friend number is entirely reflective of your FB friending criteria.  For a long time I held a pretty conservative line on who I would add as a friend on FB…only someone I know very well.  Then it moved to , “do I recognize their face?”  Now, it depends on my mood.  I usually friend anyone I can place somewhere in some iteration of my life.

One thing that Facebook has done is provide some very intriguing perspective on this idea of friendship.  First of all, I can easily begin to place my 999 friends into very specific categories corresponding to different times of my life: growing up on Bayou Lafourche; going away to LSU; seminary in Fort Worth, TX; returning to Louisiana for my first ministry job; moving to Tennessee.  Those can be broken down even more to the individual churches I was a part of, people I met at conferences, friends from other countries met through my travels.  A pleasant surprise has been the “friends of friends” that I’ve never met face to face…we’ve only “talked” on Facebook walls and messages.  I enjoy immensely conversations that spring up among friends of mine who have never met.

It’s interesting how these varied relationships have changed.  There are people who I considered very close friends when we lived near each other and talked regularly who I haven’t really spoken to since we became Facebook friends.  There other relationships that have deepened due to Facebook conversations…conversations that might never have occurred in person.  In several instances, I’m closer now to a few people I’ve never met face to face than I am to people I used to hang out with.

One last observation…I realize that Facebook profiles place some of our personality traits and beliefs out front for people to see…things that either don’t come up in casual conversations or that we don’t necessarily want people to know.  I’m not talking about sinister-loss-of-privacy-TMI kind of stuff.  I now know that a couple of my friends are HUGE Metallica fans…nothing wrong with that at all, just wouldn’t have thought it at first.  I know that I have some artists.  Some political liberals…some political conservatives.  Some theological liberals…some conservative.  Some believe in God.  Some do not.  Gay. Straight. Pro-life. Pro-choice.  yada, yada, yada…  The diversity is simply amazing.  And for me, it’s pretty energizing.

I’m realizing that I value the diversity and the conversations more than I do homogeneity.  Maybe that’s what I truly love about Facebook. We tend to live pretty compartmentalized lives.  The public faces of our offices and churches are pretty mask-like…we don’t want to rock the boat so we hold back important parts of who we are to maintain the social mores.  With Facebook, I’m sitting in a large room with a thousand friends from different parts of my life.  Occasional conversations pop up.  Sometimes I think, “OH #$%, those two are talking politics!!!”   or “I miss seeing those people on a regular basis.” or “That’s really cool!” And countless other things…I love my FB Peeps.

So I was un-friended…not sure why…could be a lot of reasons.  I really don’t mind that much…it’s happened before and will happen again.  Who’s going to be my next 1000th friend?

(If you’re interested, this link is to a good article about online relationships and Facebook: I’m so Digitally Close to You)

…on conversations with friends…

beer-on-table1I met a friend for beers at a local grill last night.  He had endured a rough couple of weeks…the pre-mature and tragic death of a family friend, various faith frustrations.  I’m dealing with my own frustrations at the moment and those were touched on as well in our conversation.  It wasn’t a gripe session, a counseling session, or “ministry” in the sense of a “reportable activity for Mike Young…Ordained Baptist Minister” (billable hours as my attorney friends might put it).  It was simply a couple of friends in conversation about things deeper than college football recruiting classes, steroids in baseball, or Duke/Carolina basketball.  It was not a flash email or text or cell phone call.  It was actual face-to-face friendship.  It was a spontaneous, 2-hour, mutual pause in the busyness of life between two friends.  It was meaningful conversation.  It was “ministry” in the sense that we were followers of Jesus living life together.
Why is this blog worthy?  Maybe it isn’t.  However I follow that question with another:  When was the last time you did that…had a meaningful conversation about real stuff…transparent, open and honest…with a good friend?  Where did it occur?  For you church people…I’m guessing it probably wasn’t at church (An assumption on my part but I feel confident in its accuracy).  Why is that?

My first Facebook Election…

Facebook launched in February 2004, 9 months before the Bush/Kerry Presidential elections.  Unless you were attending Harvard or one of the other Ivy League schools at that time, you probably had never heard of Facebook.  Fast-forward 4 years and Facebook boasts 110 millions users worldwide and has become a fascinating new element to POTUS ’08.  Status updates become running (sometimes hilarious) commentary on the debates.  Wall posts become mini-debates in themselves.  Shared articles and web links broaden our perceptions of the issues on the table.

One of the more interesting things for me has been the exchanges between “friends”.  On the good/fun side, I’ve had friends from completely different periods of my life kicking around opinions and issues (their only connection being my Facebook wall or a blog note). Some of these exchanges are substantive, some merely joking around.  One of the things I’ve noticed as well is the occasional lack of civility fueled by a passionate opinion.  Sometimes, even though an opinion might be directed at a candidate, comments thrown around in the heat of typing would never be uttered aloud in public.  Slurs like terrorist, baby-killer, warmonger, all come spewing forth.  Assumptions about the ignorance or blind loyalty of those holding opposing loyalties are frequent.  LOTS of false information is exchanged, positions are bludgeoned and faith is questioned.

Andrew Sullivan, an Atlantic Senior Editor wrote an interesting article in the current issue about his dive into the blogging pool (Why I Blog, Nov. 2008 issue).  He says that some of the best advice he received was from Matt Drudge who said the key to understanding a blog is to realize it is a broadcast, not a publication…a blog at its best is a conversation rather than a production.”  I think most folk on Facebook recognize it to be something similar but different.  Facebook is a facilitator of conversations and at an even deeper level, a conveyor of thoughts, moods, etc.; ambient awareness is what this is called by social scientists. (check out Clive Thompson’s article in the NYTimes Magazine).    When logged in, we are present with our friend lists, not unlike being in the room with them.  We become aware of their presence.  (At this moment, I have friends from Tennessee, Louisiana, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Bosnia online…in my room so to speak).

Next time you sit down in a room with someone, call them a “baby-killer” (if they happen to be Democrat) or remind them of how “they enjoy killing Iraqi civilians” (if they happen to be a Republican).  …and let the fun begin!!!  The thing with Facebook is that it is a conversation…except the words linger…in print…for a long time…on hundreds of people’s computer screens…all over the world!  I guess I’m not really saying this is necessarily a bad thing.  To the extent it gets up past the BS of much normal, polite conversation and we talk about issues at a deeper more substantive level, its great.  To the point we are verbally abusing friends, acquaintances, and absolute strangers…probably not so good.

Ultimately, we have a week or so before we know who will be replacing W.  If we don’t beat each other do death online, we might agree that at the very least, a new president will be a good thing… (uh oh…here comes the W retaliation comments…)

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Kornheiser on Spirituality

(listen to excerpt) Tony Kornheiser on Spirituality

I’m a pretty big Kornheiser fan (I DVR PTI, I subscribe to the podcast of the radio show, etc.). I like him because he’s funny, intelligent, and his show is about much more than sports. In this clip, Tony and the gang talk about spirituality. I found it to be a fun/smart discussion. My goal for the coming year is to start a group that looks/feels like Tony’s Yom Kippur golf outing (click the title link above or here for the excerpt). I think at one level, what was so meaningful about that outing and what draws most of us toward that kind of experience is the community that allows such a conversation to occur. I want that. I know the dangers of trying to “program” something like that. However, the best church planting advice I ever heard was , “start something you need.” So…we’ll see what happens.