PearlS | The Average Pearl

Bread bakers, world makers.

I’m not forty yet but I have been coming up with more stories to tell my kids which makes me think I’m edging in on old. I could’ve sworn I couldn’t remember that much from childhood.

When we walked in the school building this morning, it smelled like warm, delicious hot rolls. We enter through the cafeteria side. I mused aloud that a sweet woman named Carmen used to make all the hot rolls, cinnamon rolls, breadsticks at our school.

I can still remember the taste, even down to the tray, the crusty bits of flaking cinnamon and icing, the buttery garlic of the massive soft breadsticks that were nothing more than elongated hot rolls. How lucky I was to eat in her cafeteria for thirteen years of my childhood! No roll, cinnamon or otherwise, fit squarely in any of the small side dish compartments. The breadsticks—only breadsticks in name—are still a revelation in my mind; fluffy, mouthwatering and golden on top. They always came in pairs, stuck together, as only a pizza wheel had separated the dough prior to rising. Picture two full-size hotdog buns without rounded edges—this breadstick masterpiece was easily the size of the art boxes we kept in our desk. I think I survived on Carmen’s dependable bread through elementary, middle, and high school—and especially on those meager lunch days that boasted Salisbury steak or other vague meat choices.
Opaa!, our out-sourced lunch plan du jour, even with its spunky exclamation point cannot hold a candle next to the meals I grew up on (nixing the beanie weenies, of course).

What’s even more shocking is that Carmen taught me her magic for three years straight. I wasn’t paying full attention—it was 4-H Yeast Breads I, II, and III and I killed my fair share of yeast with hot water out of Carmen’s microwave. I was far more concerned with the weight of disappointing a grown up than watching a master at work.

My mom would pack yeast and a five pound sack of flour in a paper bag for me to store in my locker during the school day. In the afternoon, Carmen would take us to her house to pull out stained recipe books and try our hand at the trade. I remember the heavy responsibly of not killing yeast so as not to disappoint Carmen nor my mom who had paid for it. Carmen would cluck and tsk and try to help fix our (usually un- fixable) mistakes.

(Why didn’t we ask for Carmen’s trustiest recipe? Why did we, week after week, flip through the same recipe book in search of something lighter, fluffier, tastier—when Carmen herself had all the secrets?)

We—my oldest brother and me—would inevitably bring home rock-like lumps of “cranberry wreaths” and “peanut butter bears”—only the fanciest, most complicated delicacies—for our mom to pretend to fawn over and declare, mouth full, “delicious”. Our Parker House/butter fan/knots/pretzels/Sally Lunn—they were all dense and nearly burned on the bottom. No fear, in a couple weeks we would repeat our attempts!

This is what floors me, if I am being honest, about school, and about communities. Good ones persistently seek small victories in small spaces, never looking up to see who is watching.

Carmen, the idol of my youth, was a lunch lady. I looked up to several grownups in my life and none of them probably ever made much more than minimum wage. Yet I used my yeast bread knowledge to secure my first real adult job at the age of twenty, walking into a commercial kitchen and offering to make pizza dough, from scratch, for lunch. Within a year I was managing the place.

Another grownup I loved was a teacher who sang as we marched through the elementary hallways. She smiled constantly, beamed really, at her students, like we had made the sun rise that morning. No lesson was too small. We studied ugly little pollywogs, stanky, murky water in a dirty aquarium. We touched milkweed and watched butterflies be born.
I remember the centers in her classroom. Centers! How in the world did she make first grade interesting enough to be remembered, down to the 4 major food groups (we spread peanut butter on bread cut out into teddy bear shapes)? I love her to this day for loving me.
And now I spend my evenings brainstorming up fun little ways to make my classroom engaging and memorable—digging out an old pair of tap shoes to show the students tomorrow along with a clip of Gene Kelly and Singin’ in the Rain.

The things that seem undoable to the general crowd, like changing the world or molding the future: I learned it from sweet ladies who were genuinely just trying to make the next day’s batch of food or lesson plan for hungry kids who didn’t appreciate what they had until they’d left the nest.

That’s really how simple it is—a willingness to get messy coupled with some deeper satisfaction that doesn’t come from recognition, but a determination to live nobly.

Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde: implications of a pharmakeia life.

Would you believe I’d never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until this, my thirty-ninth year of life?
In the name of Halloween and literacy (and in-class read-aloud-ability, although I quickly determined this not to pass muster) and my kids who willingly swap around books with their mother, I picked up an abridged version of Stevenson’s classic.

It went the way I expected, with Dr. Jekyll drinking green bubbly formulas to turn him into the coarse, reproachful other self of Mr. Hyde and then vice-versa. I guess I didn’t know that the Jekyll part of him was his original identity and that he began transitioning to Hyde as a way to live out his lustful, sinful nature as a separate self so it “might not harm anyone”.

The surprise isn’t that he killed himself in the end as Mr. Hyde, his self-medicating ways no longer effective (do spoiler alerts count 140 years after a book was written?), but that my kids who read the book asked, quite innocently, if something like that could happen in this day.
Could a person really take drugs to make themself turn into a different person?

How fascinating, I point out to them, that Stevenson probably knew little of medicine but could conjure up a story where it was possible to live two contradicting lives thanks to pharmaceuticals. The old live-by-the -Spirit-and-you-won’t-gratify-the-sins-of-the-flesh loophole. He was a man ahead of his time.
Yes, I tell my kids. Yes—a person can and does take drugs today to become a different person.

What is the moral implication? Where does willful behavior turn into shame, fear, or guilt that turns into mental illness that changes the brain’s chemistry and is, eventually, medicated? Why do we toe the line of instability?
We Christ-followers recognize this truth:

…each person is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.
James 1:14,15

So what about adding medication to the mix makes it seem so next-level? As someone who formerly took pills for anxiety as a young person (and thankfully got off them*), I think it boils down to drug dependence. Jekyll relied on drugs to turn him into Hyde, but he relied more on the drugs that turned him back into the respectable version of himself. Sin, he admitted, was present in both versions of himself, but he felt it manageable and worth the expense—not fully considering that death was part of the equation. When they no longer worked, he was more helpless and hopeless than he’d started out. It was no longer a physical death he faced, but a slow, agonizing spiritual death of hiding his true self.

In the book, The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks write about the benefits of metabolizing shame. We are in a culture today that cringes at the mention of shame, but shame has a very specific, healthy, wonderful purpose. Shame** serves as a signal to the brain that behavior needs to be corrected, not to be ignored or defended.

This is something we need to think about when we start looking at medication for relief in mental health situations. Should excessive worrying, anxiety, fear be part of a believer’s life, one who trusts that “God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, and love and discipline” (2 Tim.1:7)?
Even more compelling is the prophetic words of John in Revelation where he describes “the rest of mankind” in the end of the age who “did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts” (Rev.9:20-21)—sorceries translated from the Greek word, pharmakeia—in other words, medicine, or drugs.
When I think of our culture of abortionists, sexual deviants and scammers—repenting of pharmaceuticals—drugs, even—this is certainly something to consider, familiar as it is. They did not repent of their…pharmakeia… Why should they repent of it unless it were something shameful? Something character-altering, replacing, as it were, the Spirit inside us?

In 1906 Dr. J.A. Seiss wrote,
“We have only to think of the use of alcohol stimulants, of opium, of tobacco, of the range of cosmetics and medicaments to increase love attractions, of resorts to the pharmacopoeia in connection with sensuality—of the magical agents and treatments alleged to come from the spirit-world for the benefit of people in this—of the thousand impositions in the way of medicines and remedial agents, encouraging mankind to reckless transgression with the hope of easily repairing the damages of nature’s penalties—of the growing prevalence of crime induced by these things, setting loose and stimulating to activity the vilest passions, which are eating out the moral sense of society…”

Has your shame caused you to repent? Does your sin, hidden or drugged, harm other people? Jekyll thought it could be managed, and he, though fiction, ended his life as a miserable shell of a man. It affected everyone around him and they ended up having to clean up the mess he’d made.
Our sin has long term consequences—death, to be frank. It reeks and lingers long after we’re gone.

…do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.
But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.
Ephesians 5:11-13

*I am not anti-medicine by any means. But clinical anxiety and other such issues are much better dealt with through long-term healthy relationships instead of chemicals.

**Wilder and Michel explain the difference between toxic shame (condemnation) and corrective shame—the former should be rejected, the latter is formative.
The friend that kindly gave me this book was helping me understand some mutual past relationships with a narcissist.
The book says, “Narcissists use condemnation skillfully as a strategy for success. If your community has a narcissist in a position of influence, you must train yourself to reject his or her toxic shame. Condemnation should roll off of you like water off a duck’s back. A firm rejection of condemnation also is a way of loving a narcissist. You are giving them a window into a life free of toxic shame. Who knows, maybe God will use you. Your refusal to accept condemnation may be their first step toward healing.” (Pg.137, The Other Half of Church, Wilder and Hendricks. Moody Publishers, 2020.)

The lower room: non-experts in basement education.

Public school is a great teacher. I think grownups forget just how microcosmic it is: a tiny, identical reproduction of real life.

The quote I admire so much from Francis Shaffer about how “Christians should always actively seek the lower room”—I am quite literally in the basement of our school, boarded in by windowless walls. I couldn’t get any lower. I’ve gone and done it, made a fool of myself—making a fool of myself every single day. Like every job I’ve ever had before, I’m making it up as I go.

What does it take to become an expert on something, anyway? More schooling? Life? I’ve always wondered, never quite reaching the expert level at anything.
I have a parks and rec degree—this is the truth. It’s what I told the visiting cooperative learning coach when he popped in my room earlier in the week.
“I didn’t know you could play guitar,” he commended me warmly.
I don’t, not really, I’d thought. I know five or six chords. I just happen to be in the basement with children who also don’t know any better.

I don’t know how to explain music theory, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The last teacher made the rookie mistake of asking the kids what they liked and didn’t like about the previous music teacher. It rapidly turned into a free-for-all, as things do when you let the kids boss you instead of the other way around. So I’m working my way out of a situation where kids have not had to sing or even study music theory for the past couple years.
I’m more of a music room archeologist, digging through decades of leftover materials and broken instruments to scrape up something useful. There are millions of worksheets and outdated transparencies and vinyl records.
My best resource is YouTube, where creative music teachers with boundless energy have posted ideas and original songs with which I can teach.

I use a Sharpie to write up an original worksheet and copy them to pass out to students. The quarter note is a pear, the half note is apple, watermelon for the four-count whole note, and cherry for a pair of eighth notes. I draw pictures of smiling cartoon fruit on the whiteboard for the kids to copy onto their paper.
My own children have benefited not from fancy worksheets but from intentional, experiential learning. This means we read a lot and do millions of projects. It’s messy and loud-ish and caters to a smaller class size. So how do I translate real learning into real life public school?

Fortunately I discovered a stash of 20 ukuleles in the cabinets.
I listened to a podcast, a conversation between two music teachers who marveled at how engaging kids actually called for less passive screen-staring activities. They settled on ukuleles as the perfect non-Orff instrument for engaging screen-weary kids.
But making music—which should never be less than joyous—is the least of my worries. I’ve got students who handle an instrument with the same care they handle a Snickers bar.
We spend the first ten minutes of class talking about showing respect, having a good attitude, following directions. By the time we finished tuning and got to fretting chords, most were already checked out.

I’ve worked on building blocks of learning—stamina, for one: learning how to sit still and listen. My kindergarten students can now listen to (almost) a whole book without interrupting me (once or twice). I’ve got them to where they’ll sing a call-and-response song—my crowning achievement so far.
There are so, SO many behavior situations that ruin every third direction I give. The fatigue that comes with classroom management and handling whiners, gripers, meanies, and needies of every shape and size—it really is a wonder we cannot send these kids home to stop ruining the learning atmosphere. Positive reinforcement on the whole doesn’t do a lick of good unless the child is already behaving. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s an inch at a time and I might be one of the only responsible adults in their life.
If no one reads to them at home, if no one sings with them at home—why should they think it a natural thing when I do it in front of their eyes at school?

Basically I have no idea how this is going to fare long-term, but I never promised a long-term solution. All I knew is the situation could be better and it looked like if anyone cared at all, it must be me. The old camping motto, “pack in, pack out” and the general attitude from my mom, “leave things better than when you arrived” have both been fairly applicable, if not downright inspirational.

So this is the lower room. I actively sought it, I suppose. At thirty-eight years old, I haven’t even built up two days of sick leave in my short career. An expert would’ve stuck it out in this field for longer than me, would’ve racked up 17 years in this business by the time they got to my age. Maybe they would’ve earned their masters and be one of the school administrators by now.
There are no answers to the standard, pervasive issues, only the pledge to have a good attitude and take it day by day. It helps when I remember that they are all just kids. Kids who need directions, need someone to encourage them, need someone to give them hope.

And as Gretty reminds me, “you can always write a book about it someday.”

Turn on the Light: smuggling Jesus into the public school.

There are times I think I’d like to have a snarky Twitter account so I could spit out pithy one-liners. I resist this urge because one, social media has never done me any favors, and two, the anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God (i.e. the pithiness of Pearl does not make for justice in the world). Rather, it makes for a slow-to-listen, quick-to-speak, know-it-all smart aleck.

The blog forces me to think it out, spell it out, work it out. But I have had some 140 (and 280, thanks Twitter for upping the limit) character-limit thoughts that have been boiled down over the first month of school with hours of car-ride time to junior high basketball games.
Like, interesting how church people get excited about stories of smuggling Bibles into forbidden countries but won’t set foot in a public school.

It’s too pithy, I know, but it must be admitted: it’s easier to stand in a booth at the fall festival handing out free water bottles, or volunteer to bring snacks to VBS and hoping that’s as far as Jesus expects me to “let my light shine before men”.

I recently sent a thank you note to a local church for providing lunch to the district during one of our professional development days. I asked them to also pray the Lord would call more folks of character (Christians, I meant real Christians) to the public school missionary field…not because children need to be better institutionalized but because people are bumping around in the dark just waiting for someone to turn on a flashlight.

Just ask the kid who doesn’t own a pair of matching shoes, the one who accidentally squirts ketchup right onto his cigarette-burned shirt but doesn’t even stop to wipe it off because he’s always dirty anyway. Ask the single parent who doesn’t know why her middle-schooler is suicidal even though she spends every off hour scrolling Tik Tok and comparing herself to other girls.
Ask the teachers who are overwhelmed with IEPs, behavior issues, state standards, curriculum, make-up work, parent concerns and complaints and the constant emails asking them to add more to their plate.
The problems are already too big to be solved, but it’s not too late for the Jesus-following crowd to let their light shine.

I myself never wanted to be a school teacher. It was familiarity with the public school scene and out of a sense of duty I felt compelled to become one. But I can tell you with confidence that whatever short-term “missionary” role I play (as it seems awfully doubtful I can sustain it full-time and long-term)—it has been far and above effective in amplifying this little light of mine.
The love of learning—curiosity—is a substantial component of Christian faith—seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened! Is it too big a stretch to reimagine Christian adults setting healthy examples and boundaries for children and other grownups? Teaching them how to be curious? How to succeed, how to fail, how to treat one another?
If one wanted to initiate change, wouldn’t it benefit them to begin building rapport amongst a circle of educators and pupils? To challenge one another to excellence in academics and civil duty? To engage with some of the 49.9 million public school attending youth in America who make up the next generation?

Here’s another limited-character thought:
What if all middle-age Americans (post-children) or young adults (pre-children) were drafted into a mandatory teaching service for two years? Would it promote a sense of duty? Would it make public education patriotic?

If big government wanted to solve this problem, I believe they’d be on it. But they have never really cared about children, only power. This is why sweeping changes to education these days are agenda-driven, not child-focused. If flaws are revealed in education (and there are many), voters would bail.
Truth is, you wouldn’t be so worried about the “indoctrination” of your kids if you saw the bigger picture—that as a parent, you have the biggest influence. Your kids are actually looking at you to learn how to listen, how to react, how to live.
They are waiting on you to lead them, to teach them.

What if parents who say they truly care showed up as classrooms reinforcement? What if dads came on campus to make sure no one was smoking pot in the bathroom or messing around on lunch break? What if you took a day off every month to volunteer? What if you taught for a year? It’s happening to me, and I’m not sorry about it.

I want to think Christians could see and seize this opportunity to show up in our American schools as light-bearers—taking turns to lessen the burden. But I get the feeling it costs far less to pass out water bottles and listen to the heroic tales of Bible-smugglers.

When You Walk By the Way

Last year I began writing a few chapters about one of the best habits I’ve ever happened upon. I initially thought I could turn it into a little series or book read-aloud, kind of like In the Closet. When I began teaching at school, I put down my notes, but I still maintain the habit—which I am now going to share with you.

It’s one of those life-disciplines that changes everything—but you have to be turned on to the idea before it occurs to you how important it is—like eating healthy food, or exercising regularly, or keeping a budget. Immensely beneficial, but sometimes you need a kick in the pants to get going.

I was driving my kids to school every morning, a fifteen minute drive on a good morning. They would fuss over who got to sit where, then they’d gripe about someone’s hand crossing the line on the seat, or a water bottle touching someone else’s backpack and I’d have to threaten to pull over and set them straight.

I’ve been convicted for a few years with a verse from Hebrews (5:12), “now, at the time you ought to be teachers, you are still infants”—in other words, believers need to grow past the point of gnawing on teething biscuits to sooth our gums. The concern Paul had for his friends was that they’d become complacent. He didn’t want them to be satisfied with just fellowship and the swag bag that brought them into the church in the first place—he wanted them to grow up and teach.

This is a still a problem, isn’t it? Many issues would be solved it the goal were to mature beyond spiritual teething biscuits. And why is teaching so important, anyway? Because it’s the natural next step in passing on a way of life. It is what grownups are supposed to do with the wisdom that distinguishes them from children.

So as my kids bickered in the back seat, I decided to pop in my audio Bible CDs. They immediately fell silent, absorbed in story.
We began in the fall; Acts. It turns out fifteen minutes is more than enough to cover two or three chapters, depending on the book. We’ve since read through Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, skipping in and out of the letters of Paul and breezing through Revelation. (“It’s an allegory, right Mom?”)
In the Old Testament we’ve made it to 2 Samuel before flipping back to the New Testament. Jesus keeps blowing our minds.
Now the ride to school is silent.

GK, first grader, said on the way home from school last week,
“Mama? You know how Jesus said not to ever swear, no matter what? Well, Miss Polly made us raise our right hands today and swear to be kind. Can you believe it?”
We have inside jokes, like when I got an eyelash stuck in my eye and Luke said, “if your right eyelash causes your right eyeball to sin, cut it out—it’d be better to enter heaven with one eyeball!”
Or when kids get out of the shower at night and huddle on the bathroom floor in their towels, procrastinating at putting on their jammies—a kid will joke, “Is _______ also among the prophets?!” (Gotta love a good King Saul juke)

Obviously there are folks who think it irreverent, but I can promise this: the Word is hidden in their heart. It’s common language and a familiar reference point in our family. Countless times my kids have asked me questions and I’ve referred them to what we listened to in the car that morning. Turns out the teaching part isn’t so hard when Jesus does the talking. All we have to do is keep pointing at Him.

It is not beyond the sea, so that you need to ask, “who will cross the sea and get it and proclaim it to us, that we may obey it?” But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may obey it. Deuteronomy 30:14

Here is the thing: parents have been handed the task of when you walk by the way. I think sometimes we get the idea we’ve got to sit down and really spill our guts for a conversation to count—not so. I have felt pressure to dedicate them as babies in the church and pray a sinner’s prayer to “get” them “saved”. These are not failproof for salvation, nor are they even biblical. Your children aren’t a checklist to mark off. Your job isn’t to save them; your job is to get them to the point where they have ears to listen. God can handle the heavy lifting.

Teach them diligently. Talk about things when you lie down and when you arise. When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way (Deut. 6, 11). This was the template God established for teaching kids: spackling paste in the cracks of life. When you fold clothes, when you pick them up from practice. As you go get the mail, on your trip down the grocery aisle. In traffic. After bedtime stories. Sitting on the edge of the tub as they play in the bubbles.
Apply generously and often.

God’s Word acknowledges the fact that you as a parent will be parenting as you work, as you earn a paycheck, as you pursue grownup endeavors. You, as a parent, will likely be doing things that often prioritize earning a living or completing daily chores above explicitly evangelizing your children. The intentionality is not misplaced—rather, it is delicately woven in to the fabric of your everyday life.

Think critically about the in-between moments: how are you spending them? How many minutes in the car on the way to where you’re going? How many moments are happening in the bedtime and morning hours? Have you set down your phone, turned off the game, removed your earbuds long enough to teach them diligently?

Are you the person they are asking questions? Let it be you they come to first.
I marvel when I listen to the Bible audio in my minivan on the way to school. In our ears this morning Jesus told the pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors were entering the kingdom of God ahead of them.
So we talked about prostitutes (people who sell their bodies to be abused by other people). And tax collectors (people who use their use their job description as a license to steal money). And Pharisees, people who talk a lot and judge a lot but are straining gnats while eating camel soup (Matt. 23:24).

I’ve never had to bring up an awkward topic before to my kids. All I’ve got to do is listen along with them and then answer questions. For some reason, God made it so every bit of the Bible can be chewed, swallowed, and digested by children.

What an awesome foundation.
What a cool job it is to be a parent, cracking open the spackle and applying liberally.

See to it that you don’t despise one of these little ones, because I tell you their angels are always looking into the face of my Father in heaven.
Matthew 18:10

Rhett and Link and the key to Undeconstructionable Faith

One of the Average Pearl posts that gets the most traffic to this day is a summary I made of Rhett and Link (Good Mythical Morning) a couple years ago. I’d listened to their podcast about why they’d “left the faith” or “deconstructed”—the more edgy way of saying the same thing—and I retold their history and what most likely led them down that particular path.

As a quick review, Rhett and Link are well-known worldwide as a comedy duo on Youtube. They do ridiculous but usually PG-rated music videos, short series, silly challenges, etc. My twelve year old begs to watch them eat things while blindfolded or debate the merits of Nerds versus Snickers.
We were introduced to these guys via Buck Denver, a Christian children’s DVD series created by the same guy who created Veggietales, Phil Vischer. Since then, they have abandoned Christianity and detailed it publicly on their podcast, Ear Biscuits.

When I check my website stats, it is a constant reminder that folks are searching the internet for Truth. They look at friendly guys like Rhett and Link and are curious over the details of their breakup with Jesus. I have a hunch most are genuinely seeking meaning in their own life but coming up dry.

It seems like along with a thirst to know more about “deconstruction” seekers tend to be on the hunt for real spiritual meat. If this original Christianity wasn’t the real thing, or at least not real enough for PG super YouTube stars like Rhett and Link—what, exactly, is real enough?

I’m a thirty-eight year old woman with half-grown kids. I’m younger than Rhett and Link, but definitely in the same cohort that grew up in the nineties with a serious Baptist influence. I know about burning bad CDs and purity culture and WWJD everything. I remember camps where teenagers were “called to the ministry” and promised, as a fourteen year old, to become preachers and missionaries. I know concerts and long van rides, confessions and crying and altar calls and everyone close your eyes and raise your hand if right now in this very moment if you were to die tonight, you don’t know where you would go.

The thing is, however sincere it felt at the time, it wasn’t the real deal. Emotionally-charged ultimatums have never been what Christianity was about. Following Jesus is a daily act of joy-inspired self-denial— for the joy before Him he endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2).
I recognized smoke and mirrors when I saw them as a teenager.
Many, many people did not.

It is all thanks in large part to uncool people, the ones who get the least credit—now this truly is the way of Christ, having no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Isaiah 53).
The unattractive, true Jesus-following examples in my case were my folks. Unattractive, because they were older, wiser, anti-idiocy advocates with an ultra practical lifestyle. Nothing in their appearance that I might want to emulate them because what teenager wants their peers to think of them as a forty year old?
My own parents (brilliant and loving and supremely attractive in hindsight) never bought into a youth group culture where we had to go along with twenty-something Brads who made us all draw straws to eat packets of mayonnaise and relish in an attempt to bond with other teenagers on Wednesday nights. They knew the battle was more real than that, and they made sure we were aware of it. There were no late night, soul-baring conversations at my house. We didn’t stay up until midnight and watch X-Files with cool parents. They were too tired for all of that and firmly believed it wasn’t in their job description to makes us happy or keep us entertained. Our family didn’t go to church to make friends; we went to worship and study the Bible, and if the church didn’t do those things, we went somewhere else.

My parents paid their bills on minimal funds. Mom wrote checks in the name of Jesus just like the Macedonian churches (2 Cor. 8), “giving out of their poverty” and “beyond their ability.”
Coincidentally, we didn’t have the money or influence to show up looking like groupies at youth group. It wasn’t intentional, it was just an unvoiced understanding that some of our values didn’t align with the church, or at least their methods of attracting youth. As a teenager and after years of not fitting in, you sort of start to give up.

My mom and dad fostered joy and an absolute reliance on God’s provision. Our close-knit family dynamics weren’t cultivated by vacations, sports teams, hobbies, or “making memories”—rather, the opposite. We were on the same team because we were all facing the same giants. We each took on the world and returned at night to the safety of a home where Jesus was alive and present.
Under these circumstances I think the inability to fake it helped me spot the real fakers and ultimately avoid becoming one.

It’s really no wonder Rhett, Link, and their like-minded friends have abandoned faith. It wasn’t real to begin with, and jerry-rigging Christianity to be more Saturday-night-live-ish is a headache. It’s far easier to abandon ship than keep up the carnival games under the pretense that this is how we win people to Jesus, guys.

But there are people out there still doing it, micro-celebrities and YouTubers and influencers who water down Jesus until he’s hardly Living Water. People who have become so tolerant of and comfortable in the world that they enjoy life in a gray zone, full of incongruities and misnomers—the very trap Paul warned believers not to fall into: you were called to freedom, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh! (Gal.5:13)
Until very recently I listened regularly to Knox and Jamie, two southern-Baptist pop culture experts, on their podcasts, The Popcast and The Bible Binge. They get some things right. But they sow a lot of confusion by wading into today’s culture and cherry-picking what supports their liberal worldview. They want to be the type of Christian who can watch and recommend violent, explicit movies and also teach 1 Samuel while doubting the historical validity of the Bible.
(If everything is so up for debate, I’d wager they are on Rhett and Link’s path of “deconstruction.”)

I’ve seen other grown-ups my age who are trying to right the ship by steering modern Christianity in another direction—the direction of reformation. It is well-intentioned, and I applaud the energy that is directed. Lots of books are written and purchased, plenty of social media and podcasts. It’s the kind of Christianity you can get on board with, where parents want to be parents and the family is the focus. There’s quite a bit of banter over schooling and raising up the right people into the proper political positions. Unfortunately, it seems to be a faux-Puritanism that avoids any and all reality. Martin Luther also did some reforming and came to the realization that sitting on the bench wasn’t spreading his light very far. The facts are this—a dumpster-fire world exists: “in this world you will have trouble,” Jesus promised (John 16:33), and we’ve been put smack into the mess of it.
With purpose—we are put into this world with purpose. Just probably not the kind that sees believers changing the world through politics and Charlotte Mason.

Where do you lean? This is my question. Are you playing carnival games, having abandoned Christianity completely? Are you toying with grace as a ticket to do whatever you like, the Knox and Jamie-type teetering on the brink? Are you a Christian soldier, marching solidly in the opposite direction, hell-bent on keeping your nose clean but conveniently ignoring the mess we’re in? Are you a Puritan who won’t touch sinners with a ten-foot pole but preach your how-to-save-the-world convictions regularly on Twitter?
It would be nice to identify your type, at least so the younger generation can have a better shot figuring out how to construct a faith that won’t implode someday.

There are people still looking for real meat. They see hints of it in those nice guy types, pretty pictures of happy families on Instagram, news headlines that mention kindness, generosity or any hint of self-denial. These are all poor substitutes, but seekers like the flavor. They’re looking for more. Some are even hungry for a full meal.

Jesus told his disciples that He was the real meat.
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them…the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” (John 6:56,57)

When He said this, many people left.
Many of his disciples said, “This is very hard to understand. Who can accept it?” (John 6:60)

Friends, people leave Christianity because either they never tasted the real meat or they did but the “worries of this life, the deceitful news of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word” (Mark 4:19).
Following Jesus isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not for people who are full, but people who are hungering and thirsting (Matt.5:6), hanging onto Jesus’s words. It’s a life of dying to self—putting off the old, putting on the new—but the death feels right because the former life was all gross little packets of mayo and relish. There’s no room in this life for worthless endeavors or even worthwhile self-focused endeavors. It is for those who want to be sober, want to straighten up, want to be delivered—but admit they can’t do it on their own. It isn’t for the righteous, but for the forgiven.
This is a faith that cannot be deconstructed because it’s firmly built on the Rock.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.
Revelation 12:11