Cheering you on
A happy New Year to you, dear readers! Should you fancy a contemplative duck away from festivities, read on for a contoured survey of my last two months, culminating as usual with an adjacent reflection on life and faith—which may, I dare to hope, furnish some modest fodder for your own contemplation as you tread into another year.
Across the Atlantic
In late November, I was among the throngs of biblical scholars from around the globe who descended on San Antonio, Texas, for the annual Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference. The sheer scale of the conference (thousands of people in attendance), coupled with the maxim that ‘everything is bigger in Texas,’ made for a mild, amusing form of reverse culture-shock for my UK-accustomed self. The paper I presented went well enough, but what stands out in my memory is that the conference experience was entirely worthwhile and life-giving because I made it about friendship, which I pray characterises my life in general. As grateful as I am to join the scholarly community, one of my chief reservations associated with any ‘guild’ pertains to the stereotypical ladder-climbing mentality of networking culture. I simply am not interested in angling for strategic connections for the sake of personal advantage, but I can always get on board with making friends and celebrating people I love. What will constitute ‘success’ for me as an academic is not prestige of position or number of publications (though certainly I hope to teach and write meaningful things) but if I wholeheartedly champion and elevate the people around me so they may be well and conduits of blessing. So at a conference, I am most content to cheer on my friends as they present, reconnect with old friends, and make new ones. Such a delight.
…and back
Hurling back into Cambridge life, I finished off the first of three Cambridge terms for the academic year. Despite my body’s rebellion (i.e., I got fairly sick) against the accumulated rigours of an 8-week sprint in Cambridge and travels for a 5-day Stateside venture, I was grateful to savour many walks, teas, and meals with dear people before leaving again. Student ministry at church wrapped up before a holiday hiatus, we threw a big Christmas tea party at Lyn’s House, and I had the opportunity to participate in admissions interviews for prospective Cambridge theology undergraduates. Two weeks later, off to the US!
…and back again
My return to the States in early December was prompted by being a bridesmaid in the wedding of a close friend from seminary. How precious to participate in this microcosmic drama of a heavenly reality (God as Bridegroom, Church as Bride) playing out in the lives of these friends celebrating their commitment to each other in marriage. Since the wedding was north of Boston in the area where I lived for six years prior to Cambridge, I packed my 5-day visit with an array of sweet reunions, seeing friends from church, college/uni, seminary, even the gym and elsewhere, whom I had not seen for almost two years. Needless to say, my already overflowing cup was cascading with torrents of gratitude as I boarded the plane from Boston to Chicago.
Continuing the trend of quality time with quality people, I arrived in the Chicago area to be with family for a couple of weeks over the Christmas holiday. My parents moved to Bangkok over the summer, and my brother was mid-move from Florida to North Carolina, so we had the fascinating experience of converging in a place laden with memories from childhood where none of us live any longer. Other family members are in the vicinity or travelled to us for Christmas, making for an appropriately boisterous (I definitely share culpability on that front), joyous time as an extended Wiener clan. Being in Chicago also allowed me to revel in three-dimensional time with more dear friends. It turns out that an overflowing cup often feels like Ezekiel’s vision of a river in chapter 47 (apologies—obscure OT references are irresistible for me).
And beyond
To be honest, the 1st of January does not itself trigger for me any particularly recharged motivation or concentrated reflection, likely because a life dominated by the academic year finds the calendar year of nominal significance and because I am already, well, compulsively contemplative. However, capitalising on the occasion of New Year’s resolutions, the musings that follow border on exhortative as many consider their resolve for 2024.
The (relatively) slowed pace and relational thickness of the last two months have underscored for me that being with and being for people are chiefly significant. God’s variety of ‘order’ is imago Dei-centred, so in seeking to live a well-ordered life, I must direct my desires and decisions towards my neighbour’s good at every turn. Even resting is not fundamentally about me. And when a season of quickened pace leaves me feeling that I am ‘doing’ more than ‘being,’ all of my ‘doing’ must be telic, aimed towards the good of the other. For instance, I have chosen to work hard on a PhD simply because I consider it to be one expression of what loving God and loving people happens to look like in my life right now. Whether you consider yourself introverted or extroverted, whether you are studying or raising kids or heading into the office or washing dishes, what glory that such a high calling charges our every moment with eternal significance as we seek to give ourselves away to the people God has given us to love!
Relatedly, I have been thinking about ‘self-care’ branding lately, and I actually find it quite sad: it registers a very real problem but then tries to solve that problem unrealistically and insufficiently. Yes, people are profoundly fragile creatures, liable to feeling achingly lonely and inadequate and tired as we scurry around trying to secure our identities by competing against the very (also existentially insecure) people we hope will validate us with approval and admiration. Fragile people need care, soul-shaping care. However, care confined to the closed loop of the individual (‘self-care’) is deficient. I am not capable of caring for myself in the ways I most need it. Our inherently vulnerable predicament as human beings is that we are necessarily dependent. I need God and you to care for me.
A chorus of cultural voices calls out with exhortations to seize upon a new year as a propulsion to self-improve and self-actualise. Is personal growth wrong? Absolutely not! But why do we want to grow? Are we compelled by the supposition that just making ourselves a little bit better would make us a little bit happier and a little bit more likeable? Or are we compelled to change because we desperately long to be holy as God is holy? Because we are better able to love people like he does when we strenuously work by the Spirit to overcome the inward bent of our hearts?
If a new year gives us an excuse to think together about lives well-lived, perhaps you will permit me to add one more voice to the opining chorus: let us consider what it looks like to participate in ‘actualising’ others in the coming year. What if we were most proactive and persevering about prayerfully championing the flourishing of those around us in the context of community? What if we wove our lives with renewed vision and vigour into frayed souls and families? What if we looked on our fragile neighbours with eyes of compassion and drew near? Who will care for your neighbour if not you?
I realise you may be thinking that this kind of growth sounds even more doomed to failure than the traditional variety of New Year’s resolution. How can my broken self make it past tomorrow, let alone February, trying to care well for you? Though indeed a more demanding aspiration, and though the steps forward are often faltering, I am convinced that success in this regard just comes down to beholding. Let us lift our gaze to behold the God we can trust to exercise consummate care for his people with perfect consistency. And he will commission his children to incarnate his care for us. Then from a place of freedom, we get to throw ourselves into loving others. Think of it: what an extraordinary gift to exist in the same time and space with the people around us! I would also venture to say that along the way, we will find ourselves utterly thriving as a happy consequence we were not directly pursuing. After all, we are most fully human when we self-give after the pattern of our self-giving God.
I leave you with a portion of a prayer that I journaled this past summer and recently reread. Maybe it will be helpful in some way for you to pray as you peer towards the unknown in the year ahead:
Only you, O God, know the end from the beginning, and I ask you to help me to sit quietly at your feet while I wait for you. I ask you to help me to trust your tender will to bless, being assured that whatever the situational outcome, you will be unmixedly, unimaginably good in your making me more fit for your presence and service. I ask you to forgive me for any extent to which I have attached my affections unduly to a particular vision of a future in a desperate effort to seize control apart from you. I ask you to remind me that you see me and know me, to overwhelm me again and again at the wonder of being yours. I ask that you would make me lovingly attentive to the needs and hurts and anxieties of the people around me. I ask that you would grant my presence in others’ lives to be one of blessing, in selfless pursuit of their flourishing in relation to you, transformation into your likeness, readiness for glory.