There was some kind of strange thing that happened in the Summer of 2018. Being in it felt like a dream. Describing it feels like a weak attempt to articulate this other world we had found in our attic. There was an oddness about every person I met during that time. We were all sort of trying to play it cool in the beginning. But on late nights and long road trips, we each slowly began to confess how crazy we all really were. We were an obsessive, radical, fire-breathing bunch. We’d collect in small rooms and enter other worlds. I don’t know how else to put it. I remember standing on chairs and making wild proclamations about the present and the future. I remember friends singing spontaneous songs that we rode on like clouds to see colors we had never known.
I fell in love with Jesus during that time the way that little girls fall in love with Peter Pan. You know that He is there but sooner or later you give up trying to explain it. You just go. You see Neverland for yourself.
And we did. We went there fully and completely and we made pacts with each other to never go back. I think we knew that once we had seen what we had seen, there would always be a thirst in us that the ordinary would never be able to quench. This was the First Year of Ministry School and it was unbelievably romantic.
Little did we know what was to come.
I dreaded second year of ministry school the way college students dread being pushed into the workforce. Second-year was where they would teach us how to be Full-Time. Full-time ministry was the dread of my existence. I went from laying in the floor all night in a spin of wild imaginations to sitting in a prayer line all night prophesying over person after person. I didn’t dare say it out loud, but I absolutely hated ministry. To my great relief, Covid-19 came and rescued my introverted self into lovely isolation. The rules were stricter in second year. I guess they thought after a year of ministry school, we’d have our shit together enough to be honorable front-line Christians. Unfortunately, I had been an honorable front-line Christian my whole life and the only thing first year taught me was how to let the wild loose and be the kind of free that terrified even me. But oh how alive I felt.
By third year I knew I was not cut out to join the likes of my peers in a mentorship. The rumor had just about fully circled of the girl who dropped the f-bomb in a fury-filled mini sermon. And to be fair, I hadn’t planned on joining the Christians-Who-Cuss rebel cause, but getting swept up in that Spirit Wind was the only thing I could actually feel anymore. I was so tired of apologizing for my sins. I needed the fire that swallowed me whole. Unfortunately, that was the same fire always getting me in a whirlwind of trouble.
Recently, writing these blogs, I’ve learned how important caveats are, even though I hate them. Lol. But a caveat here is much deserved and I can’t go on without noting that the leaders in my life could not have handled me or the situation any better. They knew how to preserve a flame and they always prioritized the wind of the spirit over any kind of particular way of doing things. I owe an immense thank you to them for that. Thank you my beautiful fearless leaders for your grace with my humanity.
Anyways, I think it’s time we got to the Wild Wild West. One of the strangest things to me about my experience in this bio-dome was that as the light in me and around me grew, the greater I craved darkness. There’s something of the light that daydreams of the night. As one might daydream of a life on a tropical island, I spent my imaginations in the Middle East, in war zones, and of rescuing women and children in human trafficking. I craved the darkest parts of the earth like it was chocolate cake. Eventually my heart began to narrow in on one specific event. I was told this event was about as far as you could get from capital G God and the closest you could come to the heart of humanism. That event was Burning Man.
At first, I dreamed of going there to minister, but as I began to realize what I really wanted, I knew I wanted to experience it as they did. I wanted to see and feel life on this big blue the way that burners feel it. I had become so detached from people who saw life differently than I did that I could not even conceive of what it must be like for them. I began to let go of the idea of making the world more and more like me and became fascinated by how atheists, agnostics, and raging creatives saw the world. There was a time where I downloaded Tinder and only swiped on atheists as a sort of social experiment. I was so bored of talking to people who saw everything the same way I did. These dates were what I looked forward to every week. These poor horny guys had no idea they were in for an hour of pressing questions on their worldview and outlook on life. I collected an enormous amount of data for my mind to devour. I found that many of these people actually really wanted to believe in God, but for one reason or another could not bring themselves to do so. This fascinated me.
After I had my fill of discovery, I switched over to Hinge, a much more “appropriate” dating platform, and found a lovely human to fall in love with.
I told Zack all about my fascinations with this place called Burning Man and how badly I needed to experience it for myself. He was delighted by the idea and we (he) fixed up his old bus so that we could make the trek to the Black Rock Desert.
If Bethel Supernatural School of Ministry was drinking God out of a firehose, then Burning Man was shooting up the kaleidoscope of humanistic experience directly into your veins. It was a trip.
What I saw, what I experienced on the playa was nothing short of breathtaking. I honest to God, have never seen anything like it in my life. I was in awe once again.
Awe was nothing new to me. I had become a native to it in many ways. I had stood in the presence of God many times and felt things there are no words for. And now here I was witnessing the inexorable glory of Man. A wild dichotomy.
It’s always at this point that I realize that I am a lousy writer as I never know how to end or where to leave you once I have coughed up all the things Ive needed to say. I like to tell stories and endings are where you are supposed to infuse meaning.
There are a few more things I feel compelled to tell you before we part ways here. The first is that, the cave of emptiness available to the human to experience is a horror so awful that I now know why Christians stand so fiercely behind their hell. Though I don’t believe in the typical Christian understanding of hell, I can say that there is a place in the human psyche that you do not want to go, not even for the learning experience.
Secondly, there is something in me that needs something that I can’t fully articulate yet, but I know that it has to do with making peace once and for all with those I do not align with. It’s as though there is a longing in me to hold hands with the atheist, to call them friend rather than damned. It feels like something ancient, like there are generations of Christians that have gone before me whispering a secret they learned on the other side: “we are all on the same team.”
Yes, I think that’s it. I can feel it in my chest even now, this age-old saying echoing through me, from brother to brother,
“I am with you. Even to the end of the age.”
