Questioning the Answers

When Certainty Ceases to Make Sense

Into the Unknown

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Twelve years ago this month, I was offered a 60-day contract position as a content editor for Expedia. My job was to add SEO keywords to hotel descriptions. Not the most exciting gig, but, thanks to my desperation for any kind of work, I was thrilled. 

I’d spent the previous year in school, eager for a career change on the heels of nearly 15 years in the travel industry where I did mostly corporate travel operations. I’ve always been a writer at heart, and that year of school led me to complete a technical writing and editing program that ultimately helped land the contract position (ironically, right back in the travel industry). 

My days of SEO keywords were limited; I soon transitioned into a different role, still writing and editing hotel descriptions, but in a different context. My contract continued to get extended and somehow I even managed to avoid the mandatory 60-day break required of contractors at the end of 12 months of continual employment. A year and a half in, I was offered a full-time position. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Creating and managing hotel content for the largest online travel company in the world with its host of individual brands has its ups and downs, for sure. From high moments like conceptualizing the design for and leading the creation of a flagship hotel product for a recently acquired brand, to not-so-high moments like making a technical error that caused an obscure policy notice meant for only a handful of hotel properties globally to accidentally start displaying online for every. single. property. worldwide. To painful moments like nauseating days with 8 or 10 meetings on the calendar. 

As the years went by, I did less writing in favor of more administrative things like product, data, and process management (hence the insane number of meetings that could insidiously creep onto the calendar). But, all in all, things were good and stable and I was fortunate enough to work with fantastic people. 

A little over a week ago, I was sitting at home and a Google notification popped up on my phone for a GeekWire article. Mind you, I hardly ever get notifications for news articles and I usually just swipe them away. This one caught my attention: “Expedia cuts 3,000 jobs.” 

“Damn,” I thought, “That’s a lot of jobs.”  

On the heels of recent announcements about the company’s performance, we all knew that layoffs were likely, but I don’t think anyone would’ve expected 3,000 of them. 

I read the article, still surprised by the number of people impacted, but not giving it much thought. My team was continually managing a fairly large amount of important work and we were already stretched thin, so it seemed unlikely that we’d be hit. Plus, as the most senior member on the team, I’d probably be safe in the unlikely event that the layoffs did reach us. 

So, honestly, my feelings mostly revolved around the fact that I was finding this information out from a GeekWire article, and that said article contained the entire text of a “confidential” email announcing the layoffs that had been sent to all employees at 4:30pm that afternoon, 30 minutes after I’d signed off for the day. But, whatever. “Must be a mole inside Expedia,” I mused.

The next morning I signed in from my home office as per usual and promptly saw a new meeting on my calendar. “Important meeting – attendance mandatory.” The only other attendee was my boss’s boss’s boss. 

My heart sunk and tension formed in my chest. Within moments, tears started to well up in my eyes. 

I took a deep breath and stared at the screen as my brain desperately tried to conjure up every potential reason for this meeting other than it being an announcement that I was losing my job. 

A few ideas came to mind, but they were all a stretch. And the reasoning that gave me comfort the previous evening went straight out the window. In my heart, I knew that my Expedia run was over.

For the next 75 minutes, my stomach felt like it was on a roller coaster. Tears came and went, sometimes just a few of them, other times like a geyser and with a force that left me gasping for air.

They were tears of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and grief as I realized that the familiarity and pseudo-security that I’d known for the last 12 years were about to be ripped away.

The meeting came and went rather uneventfully, ending with “Thank you for your professionalism during your time with the company and especially during this difficult meeting.”

I bit at my lower lip and nodded, knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak, the tears that had just started brimming in the corner of my eyes would be unleashed and any attempted words would be unintelligible. So I just gave a “thumbs up” and another nod to the camera before disconnecting. 

The subsequent few hours before my network access was shut off were surreal. 

I was in a daze, intensified by the isolation of being at home and the fact that I’d been asked not to proactively notify my team members at the risk of sparking a firestorm; tensions were already high. Instead, I waited for the conversations to trickle in from my colleagues as they found out, one by one. 

The tears continued to come and go. I didn’t bother trying to hold them back; I’ve learned there’s no benefit in that.

I took comfort in the fact that, in the last several years, life has brought me through a couple of other massive changes where I was forced to let go of things that had provided me with years of familiarity and security. 

Grateful as I was to be able to draw on this comfort, it doesn’t make the pain in the moment any less real. It doesn’t take away the fear that starts pulsating in the chest. 

But it does provide hope.

Am I angry about being laid off? No. Bitter? No. Sad? Well, I think anytime we lose something that’s been an integral part of our lives, there’s a grieving period. 

Am I scared? At times. And I’m sure fear will continue to present itself.

Largely, I’m grateful for the experiences, opportunities, and relationships that the previous 12 years provided (I think I just gave myself some journaling material for the next week).

And, more than anything, I’m hopeful. Because one thing I’ve learned from life is that opportunity presents itself on the heels of going through the very things we may think we’d never make it through. 

But we have to surrender to the unknown.

Death, Resurrection, and April Fools’

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Recently at a local brewery, a friend and I were discussing the Enneagram. I’ve known bits and pieces about it for a while now, but I knew nothing about its history, so I asked him long it’s been around.He said there are claims that it reaches back to the early centuries of the common era, but it’s debatable how true that is.

Finally, he said he could really care less because he finds value in it. And if he finds it valuable or helpful, who cares whether the historical claims are true or not.

Sipping my stout, I nodded.  “Kind of like the Bible.”

A brief moment of silence before he responded. “Exactly.”

We both smiled.

This got me thinking about the irony of how Easter Sunday falls on April Fools’ Day this year.

I spent most of my life as a Bible literalist and the thought that Jesus didn’t actually walk out of the tomb was equal parts terrifying, preposterous, and blasphemous.

Because if Jesus didn’t walk out of the tomb, what would we be left with?

A difficult question to answer in the circles I spent many years in.

I once heard a well-known theologian or Bible scholar or someone – I wish I remembered who it was – say that a literal reading of the scriptures is the most surface way to read the Bible.

And then there’s mythologist Joseph Campbell, who spent his share of time treading in the waters of comparative religion. His thoughts can offer an interesting perspective if we’re willing to apply them to scripture. They might also remove some of the fear that a statement like the one above might induce.

In The Power of Myth, Campbell said “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well-said that mythology is the penultimate truth – penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words… Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

These days, when I consider what we’re left with if Jesus didn’t actually walk out of the tomb in the literal sense, I’d say we’re left with a powerful metaphor in a story that we can actually all relate to at some point in our lives.

Because eventually, we all find ourselves in a situation we never thought we’d be in, or having to face circumstances we wouldn’t have chosen or realities that we’ve tried to ignore.

Sometimes life begins to crumble around us. Something happens and we realize that things are changing, or maybe they have changed, and there’s not a thing we can do to stop it.

And when this happens, it’s horrific. Sometimes even paralyzing. And we can wonder how the hell we’re going to survive.

And this is where I think Campbell’s “penultimate truth” can be found relative to the empty tomb.

Because when it comes to Jesus’ death and resurrection, I don’t need a story that only has meaning if a man actually died and came back to life.  Especially if the meaning of the story is wrapped in atonement theology and the payoff is largely limited to getting to spend eternity in paradise after we die.

As a “literal” story, that’s not helpful for me. Maybe it was helpful as a twenty-something, but it’s not anymore. And I’d venture to say that lots of other people would say the same thing if it was safe to actually admit it out loud.

No, as someone in the middle of a very difficult season of life that sometimes has me wondering if I’m going to make it, I need a story with deeply symbolic messages of hope.

I need a story that says the worst scenario imaginable ultimately has an unbelievably good outcome, but…

It’s on the other side of a tortuous experience.

On the other side of a long, difficult road that must be traveled.

On the other side of excruciating pain.

On the other side of having comforts and securities ripped away.

On the other side of feeling alone and maybe even completely abandoned.

On the other side of something needing to die – metaphorically, of course.

Maybe there really is an April Fools’ element and the joke’s on us for clutching with white knuckles to an interpretation of a story that’s meant to be so much more than what centuries of evolving theology and the post-modern need for biblical literalism have reduced it to.

The story I need? I think it’s exactly what we have with the Easter story, which encompasses the most difficult scenario that any of us could possibly face. And it says there’s hope. There’s a fantastic outcome.

On the other side of pain and discomfort and darkness – on the other side of whatever looks and feels like it may very well kill us – there’s life.

That’s the story I need.

 







The Voice of God

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Since last fall, I’ve been volunteering in a theology class at a local university. As one of several people facilitating small groups for the class of about 70 freshmen, I was asked this past week to share something that struck me from the current text we’re reading, a book called Dangerous Wonder by Michael Yaconelli.

There were several things from the first few chapters that resonated, from the idea of Jesus being a rule breaker to a whole discussion about the necessity of having a faith that dares to ask questions. For sure, the idea that our questions can make others uncomfortable to the point of silencing the one asking the questions hits very close to home.

But what struck me the most was actually in the introduction, where the author says “There is, deep within all of us, a voice. It speaks to us continuously, knocking on the door of our consciousness. When we are children, the voice is very loud, shattering our awareness with overwhelming clarity… It shouts to us with a whisper… This voice of our childhood is the voice of wonder and amazement, the voice of God…”

It’s a beautiful idea; one that I believe is powerfully true.

He continues, “One sad day, we are aware of an absence. We can no longer hear the God-voice, and we are left with only silence – not a quiet silence but a roaring silence. We did not want to stop hearing God’s voice. Indeed, God kept on speaking. But our lives became louder. The increasing crescendo of our possessions, the ear-piercing noise of busyness, and the soul-smothering volume of our endless activity drowned out the still, small voice of God.”

So we go from living in a space of beautiful and mysterious clarity to an unfortunate pseudo-reality, reeling in a sea of deafening noise and being drowned by life itself.

And finally, “Most of us cannot say when it happened, we only know that it happened. When we became aware of the absence of God’s voice, there were a thousand deaths within us.”

A thousand deaths within us.

A haunting statement.  It lingered with me.

As I pondered the notion of God’s voice being drowned out, I realized that for most of my life, it wasn’t busyness, possessions, the noise of life, or endless activity that were my problems, even though I’ve been steamrolled by those things at various times.

For me, religion had drowned out the still, small voice of God.

I didn’t realize it when it was happening, of course, but I can look back and see that I allowed doctrine, dogma, revered or respected spiritual leaders, and even scripture to drown out the voice of God in my life.

The idea of scripture taking precedence over the voice of God in one’s life can be a tricky thing in evangelical America, where the Bible isn’t merely affirmed as critical, but is often revered as the ultimate authority.

For example, a few years ago, I was sitting in church and the pastor was talking about the need for us to be more in touch with the Spirit, but he promptly insisted that the Spirit will never lead us to do something that isn’t “biblical.”

He then urged the importance of relying on the counsel of others to decipher whether the voice of God that we’re hearing is actually the voice of God.

On the surface, that might sound reasonable. I actually adhered to such logic for years, but it’s problematic.

And this kind of thinking has the potential to lead to a thousand deaths within us.

I suspect the reason we can be leery of the voice of God – particularly when others are hearing it – is because we want control.  We want to uphold the status quo.  We want things to be simple and tidy and to fit into our understanding of what’s true and right and acceptable.

But God doesn’t work that way.  If anything is biblical, that is.

Seriously.  If we learn anything from the Bible, it should be that the Bible was never meant to be the thing.

Five times in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus starts a teaching with “You have heard that it was said…”  In other words, “You have heard that it was biblical…”

And then he goes on to explain how the people had missed the mark and it was time for them to move to a new place of understanding.

Huh?  But how can the divinely authoritative Word of God miss the mark?

I love the story in Acts 10 when Peter falls into a trance and has a vision about animals that are impure and unclean. A voice tells Peter to kill and eat, but Peter – being the good, devout Jew that he is – responds with righteous indignation, “Surely not, Lord!”

Peter was responding the way his religion had used scripture to say he should respond.  How God expected him to respond.

In modern Christian terms, we could say that he responded biblically to something that was unbiblical. Good for him. Peter/God: one. Satan: zero.

But the story doesn’t end with Peter’s righteous indignation. It ends with a transformation of Peter’s thinking and understanding.

It’s a fantastic representation of our desire to cling to what’s familiar – all the while using the Bible to insist we’re doing what God expects – even though we’re clearly being called to let go of an old way of thinking and move in a new direction.

If anything represents the falsity of the notion that God won’t ever lead us in a direction that’s not “biblical,” it’s the Bible itself.

I encouraged the class of impressionable and good-hearted prospective leaders to always listen for the voice of God and to take great care not to let it get drowned out by anything around them… especially religion.

As I write this, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes, which is attributed to thirteenth-century poet and Sufi mystic Rumi. “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”

Great advice, Rumi.

Great advice.