It happened again just recently. I was going through one of those new-fangled car washes. Not the kind I grew up with, where you drive onto a track, put the car in neutral and a chain mechanism pulls you along. Oh no. In this car wash there’s no track; you just drive to the middle and put your car in park. Park! So then why does my car start moving? Immediately I slam my foot on the brake. Holy cow, what is happening?! My car is moving and I can’t stop it! Frantic, I look out the little side window in the car wash tunnel and see the gas station sitting there; OK, it’s not moving. I’m getting some perspective. Could it be that I’m going nowhere, but that the car wash machinery is moving around me?
True confessions: This has happened to me more than once in the last couple months. I guess I am a slow learner. And possibly a teensy weensy bit averse to change. And OK, I admit it, slightly given to catastrophizing. But each time it is all so disorienting and unsettling!
The thing is, we’re living in a new-car-wash world today. Change is whirling and whizzing all around us. It’s dizzying, chaotic, discombobulating. How bad is it? In her book “Overwhelmed,” journalist Brigid Schulte shares a shocking fact: “The average high school kid today experiences the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient of the 1950s.” Yikes.
2016 hurled a lot at us, including horrific wars, suicide bombings, fleeing refugees and unwanted immigrants. More Americans are plagued by a growing sense that our political system is rigged in favor of those at the top, while our electorate – and our churches – are as divided and uncivil as ever. People like me continue to grapple with (or deny) white privilege and the monstrous menace of America’s original sin of racism, especially in its latest incarnation of mass incarceration. Indeed, sometimes the anxiety people feel is not because change is coming at us so fast and furious, but because it isn’t coming fast enough.
How bad is it? Sometimes pretty bad. Less car wash-y, more train wreck-ish. Not merely disorienting, but disastrous. We live in a sad, sinful, broken world. And getting perspective is critical. Like the 11-year-old girl who told her grandma, “When I get anxious or afraid, I go and climb a tree and hang upside down – just to get a different view on things.” Even still, there’s that fixed reference point, what some call an organizing center.
Richard Rohr recently helped me get my bearings with these words: “We should not be surprised or scandalized by the sinful and tragic. Do what you can do to be peace and to do justice, but never expect or demand perfection on this earth. It usually leads to a false moral outrage, a negative identity, intolerance, paranoia, and self-serving crusades against ‘the contaminating element,’ instead of ‘becoming a new creation’ ourselves (Galatians 6:1). We must resist all utopian and heroic idealisms that are not tempered by patience and taught by all that is broken, flawed, sinful and poor.” Rohr reminds us that Jesus was “an utter realist” whose job description for his followers included being “the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God can use to transform the world.”
The God who works through our relatively miniscule efforts is always the God of somehow.
In the north end of the county where I live, we’ve got some of the highest rates around of drug abuse, unemployment, broken families, lack of education and mental illness. Chaos reigns. At least that’s one way of looking at it. But maybe there’s another perspective. As my pastor friend in town loves to say to her congregation, “There’s lots of room for God to show off here!”
Heidi Husted Armstrong serves as transitional pastor for First Presbyterian Church in Seattle.
