“This world values money, power, and sex appeal.”- James Bryan Smith
I came across this quote in some casual lunch reading today and it struck me to the core. It put into perspective a lot of the feelings I’ve been having in the last 6 months, right up to some in-explainable feelings from last night. I’ll share about the past months first and then get to last night.
Important pre-story information: every reader should know that I am a Christian. It is frankly one of the only things I can say about myself with any confidence. The story can now continue. At any rate, a little over a year ago I heard God speak as clear as day that I should move to a small neighborhood in Shreveport. I went ahead and did that, life happened, I worked as a server, kept plugging at an online degree, and started hanging out with my neighbors. It really isn’t too glamorous of a life, but God was with me.
Fast forward to a semi-diagnosis of lyme’s disease, and I found out that I needed to leave Shreveport to come back to my parents house outside of Washington D.C until I could finish a long treatment course and get healthy. This brought me to an interesting place where I no longer had the consolations of being in the spot where I saw God acting in and around me. Moreover, moving brought me to the capital of America, a phenomenal cluster of 6 million people fighting to prove they have some combination of money, power, and sex-appeal. Stick around and just maybe you’ll start fighting for those things too!
As people have asked me about my life since I moved back it has become abundantly clear to me that my last 6 months have produced no money (“part time server” if you recall), nor is my life really on a track to produce a lot of money. As for power, I don’t have much of that either. I equate modern day power with the ability to convince people that what you are doing is of worth and worthy of their backing. Normally doing something like moving to a poor city gives you a different sort of “power” that the world values, but it turns out that people have standards for what it looks like to do something charitable as well, and if you don’t meet those standards then you don’t really have their support. I don’t work full-time for the neighborhood school, I think that one of the best things I’ve done with my time is drink beer with my cross-the-street neighbor on his porch, and I don’t meet the D.C standard for what it would look like to use my time worthily in Shreveport. Support gone, and power gone.
These things really haven’t troubled me too much, though. Due to some heart level scripture understanding over the years, I have come to not care about making money at all. God has never let me down in the way of providing, and frankly I have aspirations of being lower class and watching him provide even more often. In the same way, slowly but surely God has also been convincing me that I don’t need to have any sort of “respectable” career or job title; I am coming to a place where I truly understand the joyful janitor concept.
That said, “This world values money, power, and sex appeal”.
Last night at the climbing gym I was growing incredibly frustrated as I kept falling off of routes which I felt I should be able to finish. No thought to the fact that I might be fatigued from the most successful outdoor climbing day of my life 4 days earlier, just frustration. No value for the fact that I climbed the first 4 routes I tried with smooth perfection, just frustration. There was no enjoyment and I had no idea why. Reading the Smith quote made me reflect on the climbing experience and then everything clicked: I totally still value having sex-appeal. I probably have been too much of a wimp to name it that strongly, but attention to fashion and fitness have all indicated as much. This is vulnerable territory, but I will explicate.
Climbing gyms are like temples to the body. Think Da-Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” or Michelangelo’s “David”. There are probably some people who would like to prove me wrong on this statement, but it is exceedingly hard to be a top level rock-climber if you are not in exceptionally good shape; this applies to every single muscle group. Best believe if you want to climb V-10 you better have a 6-pack, jacked fore-arms, pinky-fingers which you can do pull-ups with, strong quads, but all of that on an incredibly lean frame that you probably have to run and maintain an excellent diet to keep. Essentially, if you are an amazing rock climber then you probably have the kind of body which totally meets the American standard for physical beauty. Adding onto this, climbing gyms are more interactive than other gyms since everyone is working on the same routes and has the same metric for success and improvement. The climbing community is easy-going and wonderful at its best, but in my experience everyone is conscious of the fact that there are a bunch of gorgeous bodies around them and want to be a part of the club.
So every time I fell off a route my sub-conscious was telling me, “you’re not a part of the sex-appeal club”. No wonder I was experiencing so much frustration. The only thing which the world values that I remotely have any access to is sex-appeal. As I said, I definitely don’t have money, nor do I really have much power, so every time I fell off the wall it represented hitting the ground with nothing. That is a tough spot, but it also isn’t where things end.
The important thing here is naming that I don’t want to be a part of that club. I repeat, the sex-appeal club sucks (just as the money and power clubs suck too). As I said before, pretty much the only part of my identity which I am confident in is being a Christian. This inherently claims the truth that God loves me even if I hit the ground with nothing. This truth will continue to require reminders over and over again, but I do believe it. Staking that in the ground leaves me freedom to climb, to fall, to be poor, to be powerless, and to be butt ugly all on top of it. But also to be fine with that, seriously, deep down in the heart. Jesus wants to be friends with that guy who hits the ground with nothing. What a good place to find oneself.
Jail To The Palace 