Humans of New York and The Death of a Dream

If you ever want to learn more about people, I highly recommend Humans of New York, a project where a photographer takes a picture of various people on the streets of NYC and then asks them an interview question like, “If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?”

The results are sometimes humorous, often profound, occasionally a bit off-color, and always fascinating.

A few days ago, I saw this picture.

This is the caption that went with it: “I had a whole vision. I wasn’t a pro, but I could film from different angles and stuff. I was going to have a whole YouTube channel with different kids doing rap battles. I worked really hard at it, but nobody except my friends ever looked at it. And all the adults in my life told me that I was wasting my time. So one day I got mad at life, and started deleting, deleting, deleting, until it was all gone.”

One commenter wrote, “This is one of the saddest things I’ve seen here.”

Other responded to this comment with disbelief and anger, and I could understand why. Sometimes people on Humans of New York talk about their five-year-old child’s death or about a family situation full of abuse or about the hardships of moving to the US from another country with no friends or family. All of these things are incredibly sad, and have a much deeper impact than a few deleted YouTube videos.

In my head, I know this. But my heart agreed with the original commenter.

You know why? Because in that man’s words, you can hear the death of a dream.

Be Nice

In my time at college, I listened to probably a hundred chapel speakers and seminar lecturers and special guests of all kinds, all of whom seemed to have a book to sell afterward.

I only bought one: Andy Crouch’s Creating Culture. (It’s really good, by the way, and challenged me a lot as a Christian artist to rise above mediocrity.)

You know why I bought that one book? I enjoyed his topic, sure, and I liked the way he presented his information when he spoke (engaging speakers are often good writers). But what set this guy apart was something that happened over sandwiches.

A group of about twenty students were meeting in a small Q and A session after Mr. Crouch’s lecture on culture. “Let’s go around and say our names, major, and something interesting about us,” the host of the session said, “so Mr. Crouch has a chance to eat.”

He dutifully shoved down a Subway veggie offering while we all did a rapid-fire round of names and other information that we all pretend to care about but forget seconds later. Then we moved on to the real purpose of the session: picking this guy’s brain.

At one point, I asked a question of some kind—I don’t remember what it was, just that it was kind of impertinent and challenged one of the ideas Mr. Crouch had just raised. He nodded and wiped a bit of mayo off his mouth. “That’s a great question…Amy, wasn’t it?”

I nodded blankly. He actually answered the question after that, but I was just staring. He said my name. The guy got shoved into a group of two-dozen and he actually knew who I was! We all knew that the name thing was a stall tactic so he could actually eat lunch. No one expected him to be paying attention, least of all me.

And that’s the reason I bought his book. Because a guy who cares enough to remember my name (and can talk articulately and passionately about what monastic chants and African-American spirituals have in common) is worth reading.

God Does Not Need Me

Have you ever noticed that sometimes we race past the familiar?

For me, this especially happens with Bible stories. I was zipping through John 11 this morning, skimming the story of Lazarus—“Oh, quit blubbering Mary and Martha, he’s going to be alive again in about three paragraphs”—when I was stopped by something surprising: a new observation.

Here are the verses I read, part of the wrap-up of the story where the Sadducees and Pharisees get really angry and start planning to kill Jesus: “Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.’” (John 11:49-50)

I’ve read these verses before. I’ve even thought about how ironic it was for Caiaphas to say this, since Jesus really did die to save the whole nation from perishing—just in a different way than Caiaphas was thinking. It’s not a very original thought, since John goes on to explain that little plot twist in the next two verses.

But what I never thought about was this: God doesn’t need Christians to say really profound things about Him.

Gerig is a Scary Place

(Note: this was supposed to be a point in Saturday's entry, but it just kept wanting to be its own post. So I let it. Seriously, I lost a fight to a blog post. How's that for humiliating?)

For you non-Taylor people out there, Les Gerig Hall is a delightful little dorm right next to my own, one that I’d never spent any significant amount of time in before a few months ago. Even though it was probably twenty yards from my door, and I had several friends who lived there. Which really doesn’t make any sense.

That started to change when I got a little scolding from Psalm 1. (Don’t you hate it when dead Scripture writers do that to you? You can’t even argue with them, especially if they’re included in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11. Or called “a man after God’s own heart.”) Here it is, in the ESV, which is apparently more inspired than the average Bible, by the way. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.”

The point of the verse is simple: be righteous. To get that point across, the psalmist makes an overstatement: not only should you not be a sinner, but you shouldn’t even walk in the same places that they do. They can’t influence you in any way if you don’t even associate with the paths they walk on.

For some reason, my backward mind took this and reversed it. I asked myself, “What paths should I be walking that I don’t?”

And right away, I thought of the sidewalk outside of the library.

Sabbath Reflections: Coincidence? I Think Not!

You know those stories that span years and have two people's lives intersect in a strange, coincidental ways and sound like they should have an epic score behind them in their dramatic conclusions? This is one of those stories from my life that I wanted to share.

Dialogue is my favorite part of writing. This makes sense – I love talking, I love listening, I love eavesdropping on random strangers. And I love drama (inside the theatre, not anywhere else).

These are a few of the reasons that I wrote a lot of scripts in high school, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Back then, my reasoning went something like this: some of the skits we’re doing for youth group (taken from badly-designed freebie websites) are terrible. Even I could do better than that.

So I did. My sophomore year in high school, I wrote a flurry of scripts for our youth group to perform at different events. It was a lot of fun.

But then, just like I usually do when I start a new project, I got burnt out. I didn’t feel “in the mood” to write any more scripts. So, spring of my junior year, I just stopped.

A few months later, I went to the Kids’ Action Club talent show. (That’s what our church calls our children’s ministry. Although the name might lead you to think so, it is not, in fact, a league of young spies, which is a little disappointing.) The talent show was an annual event, crammed with plunked-out piano solos and badly off-key singing and proud parents who didn’t care.