A Little Perspective

One month post-book launch, and April's final days ...

Hi Readers,

I started out this morning feeling like today was a special, luxurious sort of treat. I didn’t have any appointments on the calendar between dropping off my youngest at school, and then taking him to an appointment at 3 in the afternoon.

I knew today too that it was the last Tuesday of the month, the day when I plan to write a special Substack just between us - without a certain kind of agenda or plan.

When I first began this newsletter, I’d write these every single Tuesday - which became unsustainable once I added two or three other jobs on to this one, and my writing and speaking assignments list got longer.

The truth is, though, that this sort of writing - spirituality combined with everyday life, parenting, social issues, sometimes sports - it has sustained me for many years now, beginning when I first started “blogging” (post-sportswriting career) in 2013. Here’s a little trip down memory lane for longtime readers …

My last post on that blog was in 2016, mid-discernment about our move back to Minneapolis from Southern California.

I started blogging again in the summer of 2017, this time at A Good Christian Woman … Not that One. That site carried me through May of 2022, and it was the place where my writing transitioned from being primarily for me, to a broader audience, including a few pieces that were picked up by larger outlets like the Washington Post and Religion News Service. I also chronicled the story of my first book, Red State Christians, there.

Why am I telling you all of this now?

It’s necessary to revisit the past before truly understanding the present, and looking forward to the future.

I was looking back at those old blog sites last week, as I thought ahead to today and what I might want to share with you approximately a month post-book-launch of Disciples of White Jesus - and at a time in our world that often seems overwhelming and unprecedented.

A little perspective is always a good thing.

In many ways, the first month of Disciples of White Jesus being out in the world was beyond my wildest dreams. I celebrated my 40th birthday along with the launch of my second book here in Minneapolis, and more than 100 people came and joined in - from friends and family to newer readers and people drawn in by the topic and my columns in the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Two days later, I flew to New York City for an event at Madison Avenue’s Corner Bookstore, and then more events the following week back home in Minneapolis, in Laguna Beach, Calif. - followed by Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

So many of you preordered the book, and you’ve left reviews (please keep writing them! thank you!!), and shared it with friends, family, and online platforms. You’ve sent me messages about how the stories in the book have captured your memory, imagination, reality, and hope.

In the middle of it all, we had a rich and full Holy Week. So many important conversations, many via podcasts. And then a book launch event and Sunday preaching followed by book signing at the congregation where I began serving just a year ago as Pastor of Visitation and Public Theology, Lake Nokomis Lutheran Church.

And hey - if you’re local - join me for another really special event tomorrow (Wednesday, 4/30) evening at 6:30 p.m. at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, Minn., where I’ll be sharing more specific comments around masculinity, radicalization, boyhood, Christian Nationalism, parenting - as well as opportunity for conversation and questions.

All of this to say - WOW!

It’s still really easy to play the comparison/not good enough game. I haven’t yet earned out my advance, which means I won’t see any paychecks from the book for at least six months. There hasn’t been much (any?) attention from larger national media outlets, TV, magazines, newspapers - despite the fact that the story of “young men going MAGA” has been one of the largest post-election trend stories across major media.

No New York Times, no Washington Post, no NPR, or even MPR.

Maybe that will still happen. It’s early, especially in the life of a book like this one, which tries to tackle a big topic with nuance, depth, and heart - and not necessarily leaning on the salacious soundbites that tend to come out with a bang but fade quickly.

I still hear almost every single day from readers all around the world who are finding resonance and hope in these pages.

The stuff that means the most: like hearing how groups of dads at local churches are gathering together to read and discuss the book amongst each other; like hearing how teachers and educators see themselves and their students in the pages; like hope busting its way through what seems like a daunting and hopeless narrative of masculinity into manosphere, radicalization, anger, Christian Nationalism, and unchecked power …

All of these moments are the ones that really and truly mean much more to me than the words New York Times bestseller ever could. Because these were the motivations and reasons why I wrote this book. And writing something with the ultimate goal of major commercial success probably would’ve looked a little bit different, much as I want to think we can do everything, everywhere, all at once (I blame my elder millennial status for this trend toward impossible expectations).

Still, if you’re going to make comparisons - maybe it’s a little more helpful to compare at least to yourself, not to others. So I tore my eyes away from the anxiety-prone social media doomscrolling, and I looked back into my old blogs to see where I was at around 5 and a half years ago, one-month-post-launch of Red State Christians, my first book.

Tell me if this analogy resonates with you. I often think we tend to look back at our pasts in much the same way as George Costanza described pretending to be a tourist to get a date on an episode of Seinfeld.

I mean, there’s truly a Seinfeld for everything!

Anyway, after being roped into watching a man’s suitcase, and stealing his clothes when the man never returns for his bag, George finds himself cosplaying a tourist to New York City. He begins dating a woman who works for the visitor’s bureau, and he tells her he’s going to move to New York in order to continue their relationship.

He pretends to find a job and an apartment all in the span of a few days.

“You know if you take everything I’ve accomplished in my entire life and condense it down to one day, it looks decent!” George tells Jerry.

This is funny. It’s also kind of indicative of the way many of us look back at our past, comparing it in a rosy sense to the present or to our worries about the future.

When I look back at my first book launch, I remember the seeming comparative ease of youth, of playing with two sons who were much younger and maybe easier to amuse. I remember joy-filled days of playgrounds and going to the zoo and learning to ride bikes. Of first grade and pre-school, and the naive bliss of pre-pandemic American life.

I remember some national media coverage that came with my first book launch, appearances on NPR, the BBC, CNN. I remember a center-page spread in the Dallas Morning News, and a few well-placed tweets (back when Twitter was Twitter) that helped the book spread.

But when I looked back to the (then-Mailchimp) newsletter I sent out just a month-post-book-launch, I was humbled. My recipients list was only 150-or-so people. I hadn’t yet received most of the national media coverage that would come to my book; most of it didn’t happen until the 2020 Presidential Election, and certainly not until a few months after its release.

I was excited about everything that had happened, but it was much more modest than I remembered now. I was pulling a tourist George: condensing the entire life of a book into one month. It was unrealistic.

I was even more humbled when I read my blog entry from about one-month-post-book-launch on my then-Blogger site. It was a poem. I used to write poems, and I’m hoping to again soon. This one was clearly written from a place of some angst and sadness, wistfulness about a life not quite yet realized.

I wrote about laundry, vacuuming, and unmade beds. Funny - I hadn’t had those high on my list of rosy remembrances of raising younger boys. Funny - those daily parts of life still exist today. And I bet 5 years from now they also won’t be high on my memories list!

In the everyday moments of life, sometimes the mundane overwhelms the extraordinary. And the truth is both are real, valid, true. Every single day holds mundanity and terror and hatred and hope and straining and miracles.

It would be exhausting, maybe, if we truly took it all in - so we muddle along from one day to the next, and sometimes we save the stock-taking for later, only to remember incorrectly and torture ourselves with the sense that it was so much better before if only it could be that way again I will never be able to do it …

In the end, George Costanza’s attempt at recasting his life ends badly. His girlfriend comments to Yankee owner George Steinbrenner that George had worked as a “hen supervisor” at Tyler Chicken in Arkansas, and then Steinbrenner “trades” George back to Tyler Chicken in exchange for fermented chicken beer. George is passing on his laments to a bartender at the end of the episode, when a man comes up to him angrily, saying he’s the one who’d asked George to watch his bag - and now George is still wearing his clothes!

If only George had been OK with just being himself?

I am taking today: this book, this experience, this very community which is truly beyond anything I could have imagined when I started writing on Substack, this moment of getting to write to you in the absence of other responsibilities or strictures - I am taking today for the gift that it is.

When we structure our lives and ourselves to fit someone else’s vision of success, fulfillment, or impressiveness - we often end up embarrassed, alone, and vaguely guilty about our disingenuousness. We can only be who we are; we can only see and experience our lives through our own filters of truth and meaning.

In the months ahead, as I continue to speak about Disciples of White Jesus, continue to write and to pastor and to mother and to live - I hope to do so holding on to these critical truths, and the beauty they hold right underneath the surface.

Something I’ve been doing lately to try and maintain connection to the reality of the natural world is get out for daily walks down to the lakeshore, where I can “visit” the neighborhood ducks. Occasionally, I’ve been treated to visions of unusual waterfowl: outside the frequent inhabitants of Canada geese and mallard ducks. This past weekend I saw a pair of black and white loons diving again and again, snatching food out of the cold, clear lake water.

And today - for the second time this chilly Minnesota April - I was treated to a gathering of Northern shovelers, common in Northern Europe, and in North America known for breeding along the shores of Canada’s Hudson Bay, making it down occasionally to the Great Lakes and further West.

I don’t remember seeing them before this spring, but maybe I wasn’t really looking. Now, every time I see them, I stop and watch awhile. I know the male courtship displays of wild affectation aren’t really for me, but nature has a way of sharing its abundance, a trait we humans really ought to embrace.

P.S. …

A Few Notes:

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