Boise Friends

Tonight I hung out with some of my best friends, Larry and Cory. I love these two guys. Larry mentored me from junior to senior year in high school, and Cory was my high school youth pastor. They have had more of an impact upon me than I can even I imagine. Even to this day, the people that know me the best hear me describe Larry and Cory as the men who, more than any other persons in my life, first demonstrated what real love looks like. I can't thank God enough for these dudes, so hanging out with them tonight is a highlight of my time back in Boise.

We talked for over two hours, and our conversation meandered over numerous topics, most of which had the flavor of broad generalizations about how Jesus impacts the way we experience life. After a few choice beverages from Sockeye Grill (my first time there, but when I return to Boise I'll definitely be back. Might take JC there when he stops in), Cory leans over and asks "So, you went to..." I jump in to save him, "University of Pennsylvania." "Right, right, University of Pennsylvania." Cory always starts with this question as a way of moving us from intermixed anecdotal chatter, towards direct inquiry pointed towards me. It's always a question, too; each year during the gap between my biannual visits to Boise he forgets.

The point of clarification made, however, he asks me to elaborate on my past four years at PENN. It's a timely topic, not only because I just graduated, but because of an email thread that my friend Zach initiated a few days ago between Jordan, Josh, Matt and I. "When I first decided to go to PENN," I begin, "I thought it would be fun to meet people form all over the country and the world. Even moreso, however, I highly anticipated the quality of the education that I would receive at the school. But after the fact, I'm confident that the most valuable thing about my college choice wasn't at all the academics. It was the immense diversity - in every sense of the word - of the people with whom I came into contact."

My worldview and my faith has been radically transformed and refined by interacting with people that have vastly different perspectives than I do. I think this is an incredibly positive thing, yet it is something that is nearly impossible to communicate to someone who hasn't had a similar experience in their life. I won't attempt to do so in this post alone, but it will definitely come out the more I write (and speak and live, hopefully). It has, even in the nine days that I've been home in Boise, caused some friction between my parents and I, which is also a good thing.

By the way, listening to Joanna Newsom right now and she is the shnazz.

That diversity that I found so valuable, contrary to what many of my Christian acquaintances might guess, showed up both in communities of non-Jesus-loving and Jesus-loving folk; both groups challenged me immensely. My non-Jesus-loving friends blew my mind again and again as they showed me how well-thought out, rational and cohesive a secular worldview can be. I also saw how this worldview, sans Jesus, played out in their stances in social, economic, political, ethical and vocational choices. Before PENN, I had a pretty clear understanding of some of the surface-level issues that (mainstream) Christians and non-Christian peeps disagreed upon*, but I hadn't realized that these differences can be traced back to very basic assumptions we have about the world. Basic assumptions that are different than mine lead, quite cogently, to different conclusions, which I now respect.

*I'm speaking about these two groups, Christians and non-Christians, from the mindset of pre-PENN Josh. At the time, sadly, the world could be subdivided as such. I now see (hopefully my life shows it!) that such broad strokes aren't very useful. When I refer to (and espcially when I criticize) Christians, I'm often referring to the evangelical Christianity that I grew up with, which fits most of the stereotypes that Americans have about Christians.

From the Jesus-following friends I made I found that Christianity is a far cry from a monolith, and that that's okay! As I told Larry and Cory, I arrived at PENN with a picture in mind of what Christianity looks like - my specific cultural expression of Christianity. I was immediately wary of cultural expressions that deviated from my own, but through a lot of grace and conversation with other Jesus-lovers, I finally became aware that what I called Christianity was only a cultural expression thereof; it wasn't the Gospel or Jesus. Although this realization didn't come all at once, it's now shocking how limiting my perspective used to be. Larry and Cory agreed that, when you finally figure this out, you can start to nail down what the Gospel actually is without all the extra stuff each particular cultural expression piles on top of it.

This is just a start to that topic, but it's getting late so I'm gonna hit the sack for now. I mentioned the email that Zach sent out, which does in fact tie into all of this, and maybe I'll also hit on some of the other stuff that Larry and Cory and I talked about in another post.

I also need to decide how to balance between honesty and censorship in this blog, haha.

Shalom,

- Josh