Come On
On the Romance of a Life Given Away
There is a record I keep playing.
It’s music is grooved into my soul, and I when I spin the table, put the needle down, and listen I hear John’s Gospel begin to play. Every time I listen, it’s like a key that opens the door to the small citadel of myself, and launches me into a large and expansive geography. I cannot fully see it, but I can feel, the way you feel a room change temperature before you understand why.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
I have recited these verses thousands of times. And I will tell you honestly: they unlock me. Every single time. I am not being pious when I say that. Every time I feel an invitation into both a life giving adventure and romance.
All things. In the Greek, John means what he says. He is not hedging. He is not carving out exceptions for the boring parts of Tuesday or the awkward parts of a life in progress. All things came into being through the Word. Which means everything you can see, touch, taste, smell, or love has a correspondence back to this Word - who we learn later - becomes flesh. The chair you’re sitting in. The coffee going cold. The face of the person you’re worried about. The grief you haven’t told anyone. The thing you made with your hands last week that turned out better than you expected.
All of it. All the way down.
I have spent my adult life in ministry. People ask me sometimes what that means — what it’s actually like, underneath the sermons and the meetings and the institutional machinery. And the truest answer I know is this: it is a participation in a kind of life where everything corresponds back to God. That is the adventure. And that is the romance.
I should say what I mean by romance, because I don’t mean the greeting-card version. I don’t mean candlelight and violins and someone reading you poetry under a convenient moon. I mean the older thing — the thing that pulled knights out of comfortable halls and into the dark forest because something out there was worth the risk. The thing that makes your heart lean toward a horizon you cannot quite see. Romance, in this older sense, is what happens when your life gets pulled into something larger than itself, and you discover — to your own surprise — that you are glad.
That is what ministry has been for me. Not always easy. Not always beautiful. But almost always larger than I thought it would be. It is in the particular - in the local - that we find the eternal fingerprints of divine life in the land of the living. Ministry - when seen through the lenses of the Word - is a life where you can see all of the entire world from your front porch.
Here is what I did not understand when I started: ministry is, at its core, an argument with scarcity.
Most of us — and I include myself in this, on most mornings before I’ve had enough coffee — live inside a scarcity economy. There is never quite enough. Enough time, enough money, enough energy, enough recognition, enough love. The world is a zero-sum game, and the wise move is to protect what you have, because what you have can be taken. This is not stupidity. It’s experience. Scarcity is real. The world does, in fact, take things from you.
But the Word John is talking about — the one through whom all things came to be — is not operating inside a scarcity economy. He is, in some sense, the argument against it. He made a world and called it good. He made it out of abundance, not fear. He created because he is, in his very nature, a giver.
Ministry is the daily practice of staking your life on that claim. It is the work of helping people — and yourself, because you need it just as badly — to reimagine the world from within abundance rather than scarcity. To see the hand of a generous God underneath the ordinary mess of ordinary life. To notice that even here, even now, even in this — something is being given.
This is not naivety. I want to be clear about that, because naivety is an occupational hazard in religious life, and I have met enough of it to find it irritating. Sincerity is not competance. The danger comes when sincerity assumes it knows what its doing, which creates a kind of leadership blindness. I am not surprised by darkness. I have sat with enough grief, and enough loss, and enough of the particular human capacity for cruelty, that I have no illusions. The darkness is real.
What surprises me — still, after all these years — is the light.
The light is the scandal. The light is the thing you can’t explain. The light is the woman who forgives something that should be unforgivable, and the friendship that survives what should have ended it, and the person who finds their way back from somewhere very far away. The darkness makes sense to me. It is coherent. The light is the interruption. And ministry is the dogged insistence that the interruption is not random — that the light has a source, and that source is not done.
Here is another thing people don’t tell you about ministry: it is an education in wealth.
Not the kind you’d recognize at first glance. When most of us hear the word economy, we think of sectors and markets and the quarterly reports of things we own small pieces of. And that is a real economy. I have libertarian instincts; I believe free markets have done more to lift people from poverty than most of the alternatives we’ve tried. I am not dismissive of the money economy.
But God’s economy is wider. It includes all the forms of wealth that markets have trouble pricing: the wealth of community, of friendship forged over decades, of worship that opens something in you that was shut, of meaning carried through a life like a thread that holds the whole thing together. In ministry, you get to help people discover and tend that kind of wealth. You get to be present when someone realizes that their life has more in it than they thought.
And this happens across the whole span of a life. That is something I did not expect when I was young — the gift of being trusted at both ends. You are there when a child arrives, blinking into the light. You are there when someone old and tired finally sets down what they’ve been carrying. You overhear the stories in between: the marriages and the divorces, the seasons of faith and the seasons of doubt, the things people say at 2am that they would never say at noon. None of it is yours to fix. That was a long lesson for me to learn — that my job is not to make people into projects, to manage them toward my preferred outcome. People do not want to be projects. They want to be known. They simply need to be loved.
My job, as best I understand it, is not to help people know more. It is to help them become more. To see a larger reality in the dailiness of their lives. To catch a glimpse — even a small one — of what Kuyper meant when he said there is not one square inch of all creation over which Christ does not say, “Mine.”
But here is the thing I keep coming back to. The thing that makes this an adventure rather than a job.
Hope.
Not optimism. Optimism is a temperament, a disposition toward the glass-half-full. Some people have it and some people don’t, and it doesn’t have much to do with the truth of things. Hope is different. Hope is a choice made in the presence of evidence to the contrary. Hope is what you do when the darkness is real and you still — still — believe the light has not lost.
The most important currency in the human condition is hope. More important than information, more important than strategy, more important than any program any institution has ever run. And ministry — at its most fundamental — is the work of tending that hope. Not hope in ourselves, not hope in our programs or our leaders or our preferred political arrangements. Hope that God is not done. Hope that the light that came into the world — and the darkness did not overcome it — is still coming, still shining, still finding its way into the places where we have given up.
That is what I signed up for. It is still what gets me out of bed.
I know this may sound, to some ears, like a recruitment pitch. And I suppose it is, though I have tried to be honest about the difficulty of it. Ministry is not for everyone, and it should not be. The full-time, ordained, vocational version of it is a particular calling, and if it isn’t yours, you should not pretend it is.
But the adventure — the romance - that part is for everyone.
To be a Christian is to be invited into the same story. You don’t have to have a title or a church budget or a seminary degree to be a person who bets their life on abundance over scarcity, on light over darkness, on hope as the most realistic thing available to us. That is not a professional option. It is what baptism is about.
The light shines in the darkness. It has been doing so since the beginning. And the darkness — I want to say this with everything I have — the darkness has not, does not, and will not overcome it.
That is not a hope I hold lightly. It is the ground I stand on.
Come on. Let’s stand together. Let’s enter life today with a sense of adventure, and a heart that has been caught up in the romance of a God who makes all things, redeems all things, and — against all reasonable odds — is still at it.
So: what is your square inch? What is the particular corner of the world that has been given to you — your family, your work, your neighborhood, the specific face of the specific person who is right in front of you — where you could choose, today, to look for the light instead of cataloguing the dark?
Trygve Johnson
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