Category: Personal

Making things makes us human

Once upon a time, we humans mostly did work that fit into discreet time periods. Land was measured by the amount a man could plow in a day. Craftspeople worked on one piece at a time – if you were a furniture maker, you made a table, and you worked on it until you were done, and then you might build a chest of drawers or a cabinet. Days had rhythms to them that were dependent upon the amount of daylight available to you, and at the end of the day the sun went to bed, and then shortly after that, you did too.

We don’t really live in that sort of world anymore. With the advent of electricity, we can work around the clock, and sleep is a biological necessity rather than part of the rhythm of the day. Because of technology, I can work for a person in another state, interact with her daily, and never have seen her in person, or know anything personal about her. We have close friends who live all over the world, and yet we do not know what shoes they prefer, whether they have bad breath, or if they have dandruff. I am emotionally close to people whose legs I have never seen.

And our work has changed as well. Many of us work on projects that, if they have endings, are long in scope, and when they are done, there is nothing tangible to show someone. If you make soap for a living, you can show your mother the bar of soap you made yesterday. Not so much with a database. For those of us in the helping professions, there is all of this, but more so. Jim was an addict yesterday, and will be an addict at the end of the day today when I go home, and will probably be an addict tomorrow. It’s hard to point at a finished product and say, ‘I am done.”

It all feels like a treadmill, endlessly turning, and because it feels like one could hop on or off at any point without changing the outcome, it is easy to feel disconnected from the world around you, and to feel as if you are not needed, and would not be missed. Because who the hell understands what you actually do, anyway?

Which is why I like making things in my spare time. When I set out to make something like a cutting board, I know it will take me a few hours, and then I will be done. I make one of them at a time, and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I can finish one before I go to sleep at night. Even if it is a bigger thing like a table, a thing that will take more than one day, I still can look at the work I have done and it has obvious progress – I can point to the pile of materials that is smaller than it was at the beginning, and the table carcass that now has turned legs and a glued up top waiting me to plane it.

I get the same feeling from gardening, which ties me to the seasons and the environment, or cooking, which ties me to people and pleasure, and which allows me to make low-risk bets that teach you something, usually in less than 30 minutes.

So if you feel disconnected from the world right now, I encourage you to carve out time to make something. Maybe a table, or whittle a piece of wood, or maybe just an omelet for yourself or someone you love. Something that has a beginning and an end, something that when you are done, you can point to it and say, ‘I did that” and that you can know would not have come into being apart from your work.

7 things for 2021

New year, new journal notebook in Evernote

In the last 12 months, I wrote exactly 2 blog posts on this website, so, if nothing else, 2020 taught me that lack of time to write is not my biggest barrier to writing. However, I did write many sermons and more than 90 newsletters, so it wasn’t a total loss. But still, long form writing is something I want to be better at, so I need to do more of it.

I learned some other things about myself in 2020 as well, some of which I talk about below. The way I have it set up is the thing I learned is in bold, and the action I want to take as a result is in italics.

As I plan what 2021 will look like, I am trying to optimize around these seven things:

I crave variety

I like to mix things up. I like to have a week where I fly to a different city to give a talk, then come home and work in my garden, then have a meeting with city leaders, then write my newsletter, then work with my interns, then go watch a movie with my wife and eat in a nice restaurant.

Instead, for most of last year I stayed home, had some zoom meetings, cooked almost every meal I ate, and sat at my computer. Every day felt the same. I hated that.

I crave variety, and have always felt a bit ashamed of that. Seeking variety is a typical ADHD symptom, and people (like me) who have lots of interests appear flighty to the rest of the world. But now I know it isn’t just that I like variety, I need it. So, expect Hugh’s public life to look a lot less focused. 

I need a schedule

A friend once said that ADHD is the craving of structure and the inability to create it. I feel this in my soul. If I don’t have a schedule, I can literally sit on the couch all day, lost in a book on whatever my current interest is, or doom scrolling on Facebook, or pursuing whatever current passion project I am curious about rather than doing work people actually pay me to do.

So I need a schedule. But a loose one, because I crave variety, and if the structure is too rigorous, I will rebel and abandon it.

I do my best work when there are ways I can integrate it into a routine. I think this is one reason I like newsletter writing so much – Every Monday and Friday, I have to hit send on that day’s letter. That deadline, and that it happens every week, brings a routine with it. In 2021, I will try to work to schedule more. 

Daily practices are good, but I hate to meditate

One thing I added in 2020 was the habit of going for a 2 mile walk every day. It’s a brisk walk – a bit above leisure, but not a race-walk pace, either. I usually use that time to listen to an audio book that I only listen to during the walk, as a reward for doing it. I refuse to beat myself up if I miss a day, and so I get my walk in perhaps 95% of the time, which is good enough for me.

I tried really hard to pick up meditating this year, and tried all the methods I could find – apps, guided meditation, breath, lovingkindness, and so on, and while I liked some of them better than others, and see the value, I just can’t manage to keep it as a practice.

I like practices other than daily, too. Church on Sundays is a practice, as is the practice of my writing on Mondays and Fridays for the newsletters. I have high rates of compliance with those as well.  In 2021, I will try to tie things that I find meaningful to regular practices.

Everybody is too many

My projects I worked on this past year that meant the most to me were my newsletters. I have tried to think of why that is and I have come to understand it is because of the intimacy of the medium – I am writing directly to you, and you can reply directly to me, and nobody is looking on, like they would be in a Facebook post.

But also, I just like the idea that I am doing a project for a select group of people. This is the same reason I like having my work supported via Patreon. Less than 80 people finance all my creative work, and so I don’t have to make everyone happy – I just have to make things that appeal to those 80 people.

But the freeing thing is that the converse of this is also true – I don’t have to make everyone happy. Some folks are gonna get pissed off. Some folks won’t like me, or what I write. That’s fine. If I had 250 folks that supported my creative work at the levels those 80 do, I could literally accomplish every financial goal I have.

So I don’t need to make all of the 7.8 billion people on the planet happy – I only need to find 250 of them that my work resonates with enough for them to support it. In 2021, I will try to pander less, and find more ways to make my audience narrower. 

I like parenting

We had four different foster kids in our house in 2020, and one of them stayed with us for nine months. I loved all of it.

I like the routine of it all. I like the stolen moments with the kid while you are in the car together, the conversations you get when you hear how they view the world, the opportunities to pass along what you know, the chance to shape another life, the whole new perspective they give you. I like it all.

I would love it if we could adopt a kid. Or two. But adoption is hella expensive. So at the least, fostering another kid long-term is important to me in 2021.

I am a maker

My dad died in 2020, due to COVID. I will have more to say about that later, but among everything else he was, Dad was someone who made things. He liked woodworking, metal working, auto mechanics, computers, electronics. He was truly gifted in his ability to figure things out.

I was a clumsy kid, and as a result, felt like the “making” gene had missed me. But some introspection last year has shown me that this is not true. After all, last year I made a workbench, a chicken coop (two of them, actually), added flower beds to the house, built a swing and arbor for the yard, a deck, and a fence for the side yard. And that is just the “big” stuff.

I like making things. I’m decent at it. In 2021, I will embrace my identity as a maker more. 

I’m OK not being a big deal

Let’s get one thing straight – I was never a big deal. But over the last 10 years, I turned down book contracts, traveled around the country lecturing, wrote for national publications, and was interviewed by national media. I was a subject matter expert in my field, and was paid to consult with organizations, colleges, and churches.

None of that is true right now, and wasn’t true for all of 2020. and hasn’t been true really since 2018. I have spent a lot of time and ink wondering who I was if I wasn’t all of that. But while 2020 was a dumpster fire in so many ways, it was also a year I began to feel comfortable in my own current reality as a pastor, director of a tiny non-profit, publisher, home owner, organizer, and parent. I don’t have big goals. I’m not a “thought leader” anymore. I’m just Hugh. And in 2021, that will be enough.

* * *

2020 was horrible, and I am happy to be shot of it. But if I can take things I learned from it and make 2021 better, at least it won’t be a total loss.

You need a website

One advantage of being older is that you see ebbs and flows – you remember Friendster, MySpace, Twitter back when it was fun, and Google Reader.

Social media sites come and go. Websites come and go. It is popular to tell young folks that, before they post all their business online, to remember that the internet is forever.

But it isn’t. Not really.

I spent a few years in the middle of the last decade making websites for folks who wanted to maximize their appearance in search results. I can’t find any of those sites now. I can’t find any of the phrases I wrote, that I invested hours and hours of labor to craft. It is as if they never happened.

This is why you need a spot on the internet that you control.

And no, I don’t mean a Facebook page.

I know several activists who have been put in Facebook Jail – where they wrote content that offended someone, and as a result, were blocked from posting to Facebook for 30 days and in some cases, banned all together. In addition, multiple times this decade Facebook has changed its algorithms for how posts show up, especially posts from pages that represent businesses or organizations. Posts from pages like that get a fraction of the regular reach, in an attempt to get you to purchase ads to promote your page.

This, of course, privileges organizations that have the budget to do that, and not small nonprofits, activists, and bloggers.

The answer is the same as it has been for at least 30 years – you need your own website, and your own mailing list. Another day I will talk about your mailing list, but today, I want to focus on why you need a website.

You need your own website because you need a place where you control the images, the text, and most importantly, a place where you own the content.  All the hours you have spent writing Facebook posts, all the contacts you have made, all the emotional labor you have invested in that platform can disappear anytime they decide.

So you need your own website. This is your permanent home on the internet. It doesn’t mean that Facebook or snapchat or Instagram are bad – they aren’t, per se. They are just tools you use to point people to your permanent website. Tools change. But your website is your space. You have control over what it looks like, how minimal (or maximal) it is, and, for the most part, you can write whatever you want.

The other thing about having your own website is it is platform agnostic. Have you ever written something on Facebook, and wished you could have shared it with your friend who isn’t on Facebook? By writing it on your own website, you get a permalink, and anyone in the world can link to it and share it on any platform they want.

I know it’s easier to post directly to Facebook, but the price for that is that now you gave up control. One way I have combined the informality of Facebook with the permanency of my own site is what I call backposting. When I write something I think I want to keep and be able to share later, I cut and paste it to my blog on my website, thus preserving it and making it shareable, should I so desire.

So you need a website. The bad news is that it will cost you something – but the good news is that it is less than you spend right now for an Amazon Prime subscription.

You need a domain name, and a blog hosted using WordPress software.  You can do all that at a place like name.com for less than $50 for the year. I think it’s worth that to control your own space.

A New Chapter

I remember it perfectly. It was October 25th, 2015. Renee and I were on a bench overlooking the French Broad River. I was wearing a black hoody against the chill, and the leaves were changing colors in a way that only happens in the North Carolina mountains. It was the day after our seventh anniversary, and we were having a conversation we had never had before.

Renee was just three months out of the hospital. The story is long, but she had been born with a genetic heart condition that, at age 35, had her in heart failure. She was first diagnosed at 13. Her mother had the same heart condition and died at 45. We could not have children because the strain would be too much for her body, and the meds she depended on to survive would preclude it anyway. And while we never said it out loud, we fully expected her to die from this condition.

And then things changed. In August of 2015 we got a call at 10 AM that there was a heart available at Duke for Renee – could we be there in an hour? We could and did, and the following two weeks are their own long story.

But now, all that was behind us. We were celebrating our seventh anniversary and for the first time, we realized that we could have a conversation about the future that did not take as a given that she would die before age 50.

We had never had a conversation about retirement. About long-term goals. About what we wanted the future to look like. When you aren’t sure your wife will be with you when you are 50, you don’t waste a lot of energy planning that far ahead.

So, we sat on the bench and watched the water go by and talked about where we wanted to live, where we wanted to do, what we wanted growing old to look like. And the more we talked, the more it took shape.

We wanted a community of people. We wanted to live in a small city. We wanted children in our life.  I wanted to do meaningful work. Renee wanted to shoot photographs. We both wanted to be near our families.

It began to fill out.

* * *

Every founder stays too long. It is what we do. We build organizations by scratching and surviving, and then we convince ourselves the organization cannot survive without us. We over-inflate our egos and tell ourselves that we are the key ingredient. It is easier to do this when the people who started this work with you have moved on, and so you are the only connection to the beginning of the organization.

I began Love Wins Ministries in 2007. It didn’t even have a name then – it was just me and some friends sharing food in the park. But it evolved and grew and one day you look up and we had a staff and a blog and a community center and how did all that happen?

And then the city tries to stop you from sharing food with hungry people, and you decide to fight back. And you win, which gives you some profile and legitimacy. So like all successes, you grow and move to a bigger facility and… then your wife has a heart transplant and all your priorities change.

* * *

In the fall of 2015, sitting on that bench, for the first time since Love Wins began I thought about what leaving it would look like.

Over the next year, we would begin to work on it. We took our list of things we wanted and realized we couldn’t have the life we wanted here in Raleigh. It was getting more and more expensive to live here. Our parents were getting older, and they live 12 and 18 hours away, respectively. I had a nephew who was 10 that I had last seen when he was 2.

And if I am honest, I felt like I had accomplished here what I intended to do. We did demonstrate that a relational approach to homelessness works. We did change the City and how it approached homelessness. The attitude now in Raleigh vs when I got here in 2007 around homelessness? Miles apart. Anything I could do now was going to be incremental, and I am not an incrementalist.

So we looked around. Wilmington was nice. So was Charleston. Chattanooga would have been a definite yes were it not so far to the ocean. Last spring, we began to think about Jackson, MS. It is less than 3 hours to my parents’ house. The cost of living is low there. Two hours to the Gulf of Mexico. Two hours to New Orleans. Three hours to Memphis. An economically depressed city, so I would have plenty of meaningful work to keep me occupied. A new government in place that wants to change things for the better.

It ticked off all our boxes.

* * *

Last summer we went down to check it out. I met with some community leaders. I met some folks at a small church that wanted to change their neighborhood and their city, but they had no money and didn’t have the skills.

We agreed to stay in touch because I have the skills. And while I don’t have any money, I have raised money to make the world better for 11 years now – the prospect does not frighten me.

For the next six months, we would share ideas back and forth. Renee and I would look at houses on Zillow, and marvel that a house that would sell for $400,000 here could be had there for $120,000. We began to contemplate a cross-country move with three cats and a thousand or so books.

By the end of the year, I had a proposal sketched out for them of what I thought was possible. In January we went back down to visit, meet with the leadership team and work out the details. They are a small multiracial Mennonite church. They are in one of the poorest areas of Jackson, and because of the tension in my denomination over LGBT rights, all the conservative folks left a few years ago, threatening the church’s survival.

I told them that none of that scared me. Because to quote a bad movie, while I don’t have any money, what I do have is a unique set of skills, acquired over a long career…

Two weeks ago I got a letter in the mail saying to come on down.

We’re going to Jackson.

* * *

In June, we are closing Love Wins Ministries. The Community Engagement Center will continue operations with MaRanda Kiser as its Executive Director. I will remain on the board of the Community Engagement Center for at least another year to provide continuity and institutional memory. I plan to begin work in Jackson on July 1.

The truth is, I have outlived my usefulness here. I am a starter by nature and have tons of energy around the creation of a thing, and not much around the maintenance of that thing. I have done good work here. I feel good about the work I did helping Raleigh change how it addresses homelessness. I feel good about the thousands of lives I have impacted here, and the way I have done it. But my role here is over. It’s time to hand it off to someone else.

MaRanda will do a fantastic job. In her first six months, she has added a peer support specialist position that is filled by a person who was formerly homeless, increased the meals we serve here from one a week to 10 a week, drastically increased our volunteer engagement and amount of in-kind donations. In short, she is taking what I built and is making it better, and the best thing I can do is get out of her way.

As we wrap things up here, I am astounded by all the good that was done here the last 11 years. My feelings around all of this are complicated – excitement about what is to come, and sadness about what I am leaving behind. I hope you will continue to hold us in your prayers as I take the “Love Wins approach” to another southern city.

* * *

So that’s the story. We are in the process of selling our house (we have a buyer already!) and beginning to contemplate packing, figuring out what to take and what to lay down.

I am excited about the future. It is close enough to what I do to be competent at it, while different enough I will grow and learn. I am excited to be near my family again for the first time in 11 years. We are excited at the prospect of buying a nicer house than we ever dreamed possible and having a nice backyard to plant vegetables and flowers. Renee is already plotting out potential photo shoot locations.

And I am sad to leave here. But it’s time. Past time, if I am honest.

I will have a lot more to say over the coming weeks and months – it will be great to be able to talk about this thing that is consuming all of my energy. But right now, I am just grateful, and hopeful, and tired just thinking about moving three cats.

I am a Christian Humanist

This is something I wrote last year in response to a question I received on Facebook. It got lost in the website redesign, so I republished it here.   – HH

Christian y Carina

Him: I was reading your posts, and I wondered what you are exactly? Are you a Christian?

Me: Well, I am not sure what you read, but it doesn’t bother me if you want to call me a Christian. I generally use the label “Christian Humanist” myself, but whatever.

Him: What does that even mean? Are you Christian? Do you believe that Jesus is the only way for people to get into heaven?

Me: Well, that opens up a lot of conversation. If you are asking, “Do you, Hugh, believe that apart from someone explicitly praying a prayer, asking Jesus to be their personal Lord and Savior, they will burn in hellfire for all eternity?

Because if that is what you are asking, the answer is no. I do not believe any of that. I do not believe that people who grew up Hindu, who faithfully lived as Hindus and tried to live good lives and raise their families and make their world better are abhorrent in the eyes of God and will burn in fire because they did not say the magic words only revealed to a small colony of the Roman Empire in the Middle East some 600 years after Hinduism was even formed.  

I do not believe that my friend Tim, who was sexually abused by a priest and is now an atheist who gets physically ill if he sets foot in a church is damned forever because he cannot believe in God anymore.

If there is a God, I cannot believe that God would be so capricious and ego bound that people who do not praise the name of that God would be eternally punished. And if God were like that, I would have no use for that God, and whatever spot I have in heaven could be given to someone else, because I can imagine nothing worse than to spend eternity praising such a monster.

When I say Christian Humanist, what I mean is this:

I am part of the Christian story. It is my story – I was born into it, and its ethical teachings permeated me and formed me. The teachings of Jesus captivate me, and I have willingly submitted myself to them. If you ask me who do I aspire to be like, well, I want to be like Jesus. I want to love that way, I want to see the world that way, I want to be captivated by creation that way. So I follow Jesus.

But I also recognize that were I born in India, I would have a different story, with different examples. Or had I been born in a Buddhist family, or a Wiccan family. I can’t speak to that – because that isn’t my story. Mine is the Christian story.

I am humanist because I am human-centric. I think people matter. I think people have inherent dignity and worth, and I think that we are responsible to each other.

So, in short, I am a humanist who loves and finds himself within the Christian story, and who has decided they are not incompatible. Or a Christian Humanist.

As a Christian Humanist, I believe that people have inherent worth, and they are made (as the Christian scriptures tell us) in the image of God, only a little lower than the celestial beings. I do not discount the possibility of supernatural miracles, but I do not have any experience with them myself. I believe it is not we who wait on God to act – rather, it is God who is waiting on us.

I believe the God who heard the cries of the slave in Egypt and sent Moses to liberate them still hears the cry of the oppressed and still sends people. I believe God hears the cries of the oppressed, and God hears the belly rumblings of the hungry and feels the tears of the abandoned and sees the devastation we wreck on the environment, and I believe God has a plan to deal with all of that: To right the wrongs, to comfort the afflicted, to humble the mighty, to fill the bellies of the hungry.

I believe that God has a plan. God’s plan is us.

And that is what I mean by Christian Humanist.

By now, if you are still with me, you might have some questions.

What about the divinity of Jesus? Did Jesus rise from the dead on the third day? What happens after we die? Do we go to heaven? Is there a hell? Do you believe in predestination?

Sigh.

I am an ordained minister, in an historic denomination. As such, I can tell you what the church has historically believed about all of those things. Or rather, I can tell you what churches have believed, because there have been a wide variety of beliefs about all those things, many of which clash with and contradict each other.

The simple truth is, there is no such thing as historic Christianity. There have been many manifestations of Christianities that sought to provide the answers those particular people in those particular places wanted answers to.

But me? Those questions aren’t questions I have or need answered. Those questions are in response to the bigger question, “How can I make God not be angry with me?”  I don’t have that question, because I don’t think God is angry at me.

Rather, the question I want answered and have devoted my life to finding the answer to is, “How do I find healing for myself and the world?”

So, I don’t know (I mean, really know) what happens when I die. I don’t really know what happened on that first Easter, thousands of years ago. No one knows, and anyone who says they do is trying to sell you something. 

But I know exactly what happens to me and the world when I forgive someone who has wronged me. I know exactly what happens when I make the table I sit at more open and inclusive, and I know what happens when I offer a hungry man some food or a homeless man housing.

Those are the things that answer the questions I have, so those are the things I spend my time worrying about. And as for the afterlife and the rest of it?

Well, as I said earlier, if there is a God, either that God is way more loving and accepting than I am, or that God can give my spot in eternity to someone else. Because while I do not get to decide what God is like, I do get to decide what sort of God I deem worthy of worship. And if that God isn’t more loving than me, more generous than me, more open than me, more accepting than me, then that God isn’t worth my time or my devotion.