Trapped in an Empire State of Mind

I love New York City. This isn’t the “I bought the $5 “I Love NY” T-Shirt in Time’s Square” type of love either; this is the “I’ve tried to transfer to the Big Apple every semester of my college career” type of love. Yet, God’s divine sense of humor has kept me in the rolling hills of southern Virginia. More “city forever asleep” than “city that never sleeps” I’ve spent the last three years in a town that can’t even count as a suburb because the closest major city is four hours away.

I have a lot of friends in Manhattan, so often, I’ll see a status update about how they’re eating a falafel at midnight while I’m munching a McDouble or how they went for a run and met Joseph Gordon-Levitt; while I’m feeling lucky if I run into Jerry Falwell at Starbucks. Some of my closest friends go to churches like Hillsong NYC or Redeemer with Tim Keller. They have titles with cool names and work in skyscrapers for fashion designers, think tanks and Broadway producers. I’m not naïve and I know them well enough to realize their lives are not all glitz and glamour but nonetheless I see what they have and I want it too.  I get anxious. My stomach gets all agitated and I think to myself “what could have been.” How could my life have been different had I transferred to King’s or NYU? Was attending Liberty really the right choice? I end up following this destructive trail of comparative thinking until I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Those thoughts vex my very soul. The lies that sing softly, “the grass is greener on the other side” steal my joy and rob me of my peace. I get so worked up worrying about what could have been, or becoming destructively enamored with what lies ahead I become oblivious to what Christ is doing now in my midst. I compare myself to others, and my obsessive look at them ultimately wastes my present and compromises my future.

When I allow regretful comparison to become a defining piece of my life, it leads to depression, anxiety, spiritual paralysis and despair. Because, you see, in comparing myself to other people, I’m not believing what God says about me. Truth like, I am His and He is mine! A unique, beloved, talented son created individually by the God of the universe! It’s a trust issue; in the words of a friend, “my life is supposed to be a living sacrifice but I keep walking off the altar!” Comparison takes me from the throne room of His peaceful presence and into an anxious downward spiral of attempted self-sufficiency. If I’m the paper and He’s the pen, by juxtaposing my life with someone else’s, I’m yanking the ballpoint right out of His hands!

In order to get envy out, I’ve got to let more of Him back in. When my heart starts racing and I begin to think about all I wish I had, He reminds me of what He’s already given me. Bringing to mind Psalm 139, that I’m completely and utterly unique. There hasn't ever been a story like mine and there won’t ever be one the same! The highs and lows of my life are as special as fingerprints. I’m realizing it’s time to start concentrating on who God made me to be, instead of, in the words of Steven Furtick, constantly comparing my “behind the scenes” to everyone else’s “highlight reel.” 

If the little green monster within has taught me anything it's that comparison is the thief of joy and the most surefire way to ensure a miserable existence is to measure your own life against those around you. So as I climb back up on the altar for another go around and hand back the pen to its rightful owner, I don’t know if I’ll ever get to cross the Hudson River and call the Empire City my home and for the first time in my entire life… I’m okay with that.  

What's in a Name?

I don’t like kids. Or at least, that’s what I thought. I’ll sit and talk to you for hours about theology or why my man crush is Soren Kierkegaard, but ask me to babysit or hang out at a playground with first graders and I loose my mind. Also, I’m not the biggest fan of hot places. I spent most of my life in Atlanta, so now when I travel, I prefer Alaska to the humidity of the equator. Yet God and His divine sense of humor had other plans for my last week of summer than for me to wear flannel in the mountains and discuss existentialist philosophy. He sent me to Nicaragua to play with small children (and in case you didn’t know- the equator PASSES THROUGH Nicaragua).

As our 737 glided down over volcanoes and touched down in Managua, I thought about the absurdity of the situation. There were just three of us going on this little adventure, two close friends and myself, none of us spoke Spanish. We weren’t going with a nonprofit or organization, we had no plan. All I knew is we were going to a remote village north of the capital. If “excited” is synonymous with “anxious” then yes, I was excited.

After clearing customs, three hours later, nearly to the border of Honduras, our taxi pulls off the side of the highway and announces our arrival to the village of El Chonco (it should be noted that there was not, in fact, a village anywhere in the visible vicinity of where we had stopped). Confused, I soon learned El Chonco doesn’t have a road… so the last ten miles or so is via a dirt trail (it wasn’t actually ten miles, but you come lug a 50lb duffle-bag down it and see how you feel). Down this rocky path into the darkness of the jungle we march, soon arriving to El Chonco, a village of about 300 families that rests precariously at the base of an active volcano.

My friends had been to Nicaragua before, and I had the opportunity to meet their friends Abraham and Erica. Abraham works for a nonprofit and Erica stays home with their three children. I’ve been to thirty-five countries across five continents and I have never seen poverty like I witnessed in El Chonco. Yet, the tin-roofed home of Abraham and Erica was full of more love, joy and hope than most of the ostentatious brick homes that sat in the gated communities where I grew up. They are two of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

As the week continued, we had the opportunity to spread joy, share hope and show love to a community that has been wrecked by poverty and disease. It was liberating to wake up each morning in my hammock with no agenda but to live, love and pray our new friends would get to glimpse the goodness of Christ through us. I don’t think nonprofits are bad, but in the words of Bob Goff, “Organizations have programs. People have friends and friends trump programs every time.” I may destroy the Spanish language when I speak it, but the beautiful thing about friendship and love is it’s an action, more of a sign language than something spoken outright.

One particular afternoon, I went to catch up with my friend, who had left to take the kids to play on the soccer field. As I ran to catch up, I saw one of the littlest kids had fallen behind the group, a five-year-old boy named Andres. Andres is one of six, he doesn’t know his father and his mother is a prostitute in the village. They live beneath a tarp not far from where Abraham and Erica live.

Andres is covered in dirt from head to toe, has lice crawling through his hair, snot and tears running down his face, and, to top it off, couldn’t get his overalls off and wasn’t wearing a diaper. Confession: I didn’t want to pick up this child. However, I bent down and tried to pick him up in spite of my reservations. To my surprise, he didn’t want to be picked up. A minute later though, the crying got harder and he lifted his arms in surrender. I took his hands in mine, and put him on my back and in that moment, I felt God say… “That little boy is YOU, JohnMark… ” I began to weep. He’s so right. I may not have lice, but I’m covered in my own dirt and often don’t want to be picked up. My prideful heart doesn’t want me to raise my arms in surrender. Yet the most beautiful thing about Jesus is I don’t have to wash my hands before I come back to Him. I just lift my dirty palms in surrender and He’s there, sweeping me off my feet and washing me in His everlasting ocean of amazing grace.

As I travel and experience grace in new ways, I’ve concluded God isn’t going to directly tell me where my life is headed. One day He might, but more often than not, He just leaves me clues, puzzle pieces. Taking what I know about Jesus, what He says about Himself and what He says about me, I can begin to string together the pieces and get a rough outline of where He’s leading. Additionally, discovering my passions; the things that break my heart, can be hints as to what makes me feel whole. Poverty and injustice have always broken my heart… but it goes deeper than that. It’s about people, not programs. Jesus knows my name. If I want to be more like Christ, I need to stop trying so hard to fix people and start learning their names. Names like Abraham. Erica. Andres. Maria. Sarita. Alesandro.

One of my favorite things about love is it multiplies. When love is genuine, people want to be a part of it. If you want to be a part of what God’s doing in Nicaragua, email me at conklin.jm@gmail.com or comment below. Pray. Donate. Come. I used to think you needed to be special for God to use you… Now I know you just need to say yes.

All I Learned About Life I Learned from Green Eggs & Ham

The older I get, the more I’m convinced everything you ever need to know about life they teach you in first grade. Things like, your day will be a whole lot better if you take a twenty minute nap, you should probably eat animal crackers and Oreos at least twice a day, and one of the best investments you’ll ever make in life is a 64 pack of Crayola crayons. My favorite things though, as a child, were stories. I was a voracious reader growing up, and one night, out of melancholic nostalgia for those days, I began to re-read some of my most beloved childhood tales. As I went along, I was struck by a profundity from the one-and-only Dr. Seuss:

“All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you’ll be quite a lot. And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.”

Whoa. I think I was too focused on protecting my share of the goldfish from my classmates than actually listening to Mrs. Jones during story time to grasp the sagacity of that statement.

I believe Dr. Seuss was onto something in Oh, the Places You’ll Go. I’ve never enjoyed being alone very much, or sitting still in one place very long for that matter. I would spend my holiday’s deep-sea fishing in Alaska, hunting big game in South Africa or hiking the Great Wall to avoid spending several months in suburbia. Yet, God, in His infinite wisdom (or divine sense-of-humor), called me to spend the summer months in sleepy southern Virginia. I don’t know if you have ever been to southern Virginia, but there’s not a lot here, unless you’re a coal-mining aficionado or like watching trains go by. Far from the city lights of Atlanta, away from the stimulation found in exotic places, removed from most of my collegiate community, I’ve been terribly lonely.

Nobody likes to be alone. Even introverts have their limits. Why is it, of all the verses in the Bible, one of the hardest for me to live out is Psalm 46:10, “be still and know that I am God?” I’ve concluded it’s because in solitude and silence we’re forced to face who we really are, it’s in those moments of stillness where we begin to realize the depth of our own depravity. I think the author of How The Grinch Stole Christmas would agree one’s own degeneracy falls into the category of something that “scares you right out of your pants.”

Yet, one of the things I love most about God is his uncanny ability to make order out of chaos; to transform ugliness into beauty. He demonstrated this ability most vividly on the cross where He took something that killed and transposed it into something that saved! In the same way, loneliness doesn’t have to stop at the realization of my own inequity, but can become an opportunity to enter into the throne room of the Almighty. Loneliness is, in a way, a call from God to draw close to Him. It’s a chance to remind us what happened with a handful of nails and two wooden beams over two thousand years ago on a hill called Calvary. Loneliness is an invitation to look into the eyes of Jesus, the “luminous Nazarene”; to proclaim the truth of who He is, who you are and Whose you are, and declare those things until they ring true in the deepest parts of your soul.

The great irony is we can’t do it alone, on our own we will never push through loneliness; to quote The Cat in the Hat, “this mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” Yet Christ, defying all human logic, comes in and plucks us from the muck and the mire and walks beside us into the radiant gates of eternity. Meeting us in the mess, He takes the abhorrent cacophony of our human existence and replaces it with a majestic symphony of unconditional love and grace. He is more than capable of transforming our depression-filled loneliness into an intimate companionship. So, embrace the gift of isolation! Remind yourself of truth. Realize that feelings don’t dictate fact. Finally, never, ever, get to old to “be still” and sit like a child at the feet of the Jesus, rapt and enamored with the lavish story of redemption He’s written.

Lessons from Rhonda

I remember being five years old, living in sunny Phoenix, Arizona sitting in Ms. Piano’s kindergarten class when I first heard one of life’s quintessential questions, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Fast forward nearly two decades and the question I faced, as a little boy, is the same one that echoes in my mind today, this time as a bearded man.

Trading the hot and arid southwest for the just as hot but significantly more humid southeast, I moved to an affluent suburb of Atlanta for the remainder of my years at home. The majority of my peers aspired to attend the ivory towers of academia, striving to become lawyers, doctors and executives. And I was one of them, in fact, I came to believe everyone’s list of life goals involved becoming a partner at a law firm, operating a medical practice or having a corner office somewhere above Wall Street. People took blue-collar jobs out of necessity- not inclination.

This summer has radically changed that perspective. I have an internship with one of the most recognizable beverage brands on the planet; it’s my first “real look” at the inner workings of a colossal corporation. Specializing in supply chain management and operations, this seasonal position exposes me to the many logistical facets of a multi-billion dollar organization. One of my first days on the job, I walked out on the factory floor and met an older woman named Rhonda*. Rhonda has been working the same machine in manufacturing for twenty-eight years. An expert operator, she had been around long enough to know every aspect of the beverage business. Yet, Rhonda didn’t match my idea of what a protalitarian worker would be- college-educated, smart and articulate, it didn’t add up that a woman like that would still clock-in and-out after nearly thirty years on the job. More fit for management than manual labor in my mind, I inquired if she had ever looked into “climbing the ladder.” To my surprise, she had in fact been asked several times to move up- to trade in her smock and leather shoes for a blouse and heels- to give up labeling bottles to start signing paychecks, but she turned it down… every time. In beautiful simplicity she stated, “This is what I’m called to, I love the job I have, why would I want to change?”

I haven’t been able to shake Rhonda from my mind. In my arrogance I had, in a way, “felt bad” for the working class. I couldn’t imagine someone could actually be “called” to hourly labor. I think we as millennials and Christian millennials in particular- have lost sight of what it truly means to be successful, the true definition of what ‘work’ is. We’ve begun to believe if we’re not working at a trendy non-profit by the time we’re twenty-five we’ve somehow failed; if we’re not involved in changing the landscape of leadership, culture and the arts, we’re somehow “less than” everyone else. We so easily place things in the the boxes of “sacred” or “secular”, giving more value to one or the other based upon the environment in which we were raised.

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, challenges these ideas by defining work as anything that “brings order out of chaos […] and rearranges the raw material of God’s creation for the purpose of human flourishing.” Work isn’t about whether you write legal briefs in an office or preach sermons in a pulpit beneath a steeple, it has nothing to do with being a blue-collar foreman or a white collar executive- all honest work has inherent dignity and worth because, “it’s something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his representatives.”

So, as I continue on my quest to answer one of humanity’s fundamental questions- it’s beginning to sink in, as an agent of the Almighty, I have direct access to the unwarranted gift of value and honor in my work. So does Rhonda. And so do you. Culture will tell you to trade in your smock and your shoes, but if you’re where you’re supposed to be, there is so much more joy in being marked by God than being marketed by man.

*name has been changed