I never saw the Vasa.

In 1628, Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus commissioned the most glorious ship ever built, the Vasa. The Swedish Empire was at the height of its power, and the king wanted a ship that would reflect that image. So not a single expense was spared, and the ship was loaded up with the finest bronze canons and ornate sculptures, just as the king insisted. Yet no one had the guts to tell the king what all of the engineers so obviously knew – all the stuff he required be on the deck made the ship top-heavy, and the vessel was not seaworthy. The Vasa never made it out of the Stockholm harbor – 200 meters into its maiden voyage, a light breeze caused the ship to sink – and it remained at the bottom of the harbor for over 300 years.

In the 1960’s, they pulled the Vasa out of the water almost completely intact (the frigid Scandinavian waters had apparently preserved it quite well), and today it is the most popular tourist attraction in all of Sweden. At least that’s what Wikipedia tells me – because I’ve never seen it for myself. I may have spent 100 days here in 2011, but I never really had much interest in seeing it – anyone could tell you that a ship built purely for pride’s sake is destined to sink.

Instead, I spent most of my free time in Sweden at Blasieholmens Akvarium o Restaurang, B.A.R. for short, eating the best fish I’ve ever tasted. Ashley and I discovered it on a whim a few years ago, fell in love with the place, and it’s been my home away from home ever since.  Tonight I waddled atop my usual bar stool, like Norm settling in at Cheers, and Dave asked me “So what will it be tonight, Jay – an aviation, or an old fashioned?” He knows me too well. Dave has a pretty cool story – born in Hong Kong, his family immigrated to Manchester, England when he was a kid, and he moved to Sweden a few years ago just for an adventure.

A Superb Aviation Made by Dave

Tonight I told him my role with the company had changed, and that I wouldn’t be traveling to Sweden anymore. I was surprised by how genuine he seemed when he told me how much he was going to miss having me as a customer. He said he appreciated how I always challenged his mixology skills and took the time to learn his story, and he asked me if I minded him adding me as a friend on Facebook because he wanted to keep in touch. I don’t know why, but that meant a lot to me.

Yet the greatest memories I have of Sweden are the times I spent with a Welshman and a Brit - Rhys and Roland. Anyone who has ever enjoyed one of my cocktails has Rhys and Roland to thank – they introduced me to the Pegu Club in New York, bought me my first aviation at Restaurang 1900 in Stockholm, and Rhys made me my very first old fashioned at the house they used to rent on the island of Lindingö.  During our dinner discussions, we solved all of the UK and US political problems, they shared their superb advice on entrepreneurship with me, and they gave me some of the heartiest laughs I’ve ever had. After sometimes tumultuous weeks of working with my Swedish colleagues, they were always a joy to share a meal with.

My Swedish coworker, Fredrik, and I used to have a difficult time getting along. We’re pretty different, and just had trouble seeing eye-to-eye for whatever reason. Yet one night we were having dinner at a traditional Swedish restaurant, and as I was biting into my Lörjom on Raggmunk (imagine bright orange caviar spread on top of a potato pancake), he said “See, this is what I like about you. You don’t come here and order the cheeseburger – you always dive into the most Swedish thing on the menu.” We’ve been friends ever since, and now we joke about how different we are.

Lörjom

Sharing a meal with others is just innately special. Every country I’ve been to and every culture I’ve experienced puts sitting down with others to eat in high regard, and always has unique traditions for celebrating it. When Jesus had some important concept that he needed people to understand, he made an analogy to a feast or a banquet. When Jesus was about to die on the cross and wanted to give his disciples a way to remember his sacrifice, he chose the last supper. Jesus didn’t just talk to “tax collectors and sinners,” he dined with them in order to fully enjoy their company, which was considered an honor. This perplexed the religious leaders of the day – “Whydoes your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

When I think about where I’m investing my time and life, I look at where I’m having my meals. As I look back on my adventure in Sweden, I’m satisfied with how I spent my time here. While I never made it to the Vasa, I had some awesome meals that created some great relationships, and those are the kind of ships that aren’t built on pride and don’t sink in the harbor.

Jazz & Freedom

This morning, my friend Jared sent me a link to a superb folk song – Hymn #101 by Joe Pug. Yesterday, he had heard a sermon on the perplexing verses of James 5:1-3, and as he wrestled with the question of “What is the testimony of my stuff?” he couldn’t seem to get this song out of his head. I clicked on the link again and again – and with each listen, I too began to wrestle. “Oh they say I come with less / than I should rightfully possess / Isay the more I buy the more I’m bought.” Certainly music has the power to convict.

In 1964, the city of Berlin, Germany, held its very first Jazz Days, and the organizer of the concert asked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to write the forward for the program. As expected, Dr. King had some brilliant words to share about jazz and its ability to help man overcome. “Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down." 

The Berlin Wall was constructed just a few years before Dr. King wrote these words, and I believe MLK knew that the power of jazz wasn’t limited to fighting for civil rights in America. Surely, God intended music to comfort all of the oppressed, from those suffering under the thumb of Jim Crow to those clawing desperately to tear open the Iron Curtain.

For me, 2011 was the year of Otis Redding. I simply couldn’t get enough of the King of Soul – I must have listened to “Cigarettes& Coffee” at least 130 times. “Try a Little Tenderness” was probably the best piece of marriage advice I received all year. I spouted out Otis Redding trivia at every opportunity: did you know that Aretha Franklin’s hit “Respect” is actually an Otis Redding cover? She never would have been crowned the Queen of Soul if it wasn’t first for the King.

As I was shaving this morning, Redding’s cover of Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change Is Gonna Come” randomly played on my iPod. Already reflecting on the MLK holiday, I paused and prayed for those who are oppressed yet continue to cry out with hope “It’s been a long time coming, but I know, a change is gonna come.”

Tonight, I had dinner with a colleague at a little Italian joint in Stockholm called Ciao Ciao. I had a bourbon straight while he drank wine, and we joked about the differences between Swedish and American cultures. “How much fun would it be to hold our next team meeting in the States?” I proposed. He agreed that he’d love to try all the fun things the US has to offer that are outlawed in Sweden – handguns, low taxes, and beer that costs less than $20 a pint – but that he didn’t think it would be possible.

You see, one of the colleagues on our team is based in a country that has its own Berlin Wall of sorts. There, unless you’re related to some sort of dignitary, it takes a miracle for one of its male citizens under the age of 40 to get a visa to the USA. Even if the US granted him one, his country wouldn’t let him use it – they’re afraid that if he tastes just a bit of freedom, he wouldn’t come back.

“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” Dr. King wrote in that Berlin jazz program, continuing: “Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all these.”

I’m still wrestling with that Joe Pug song. But I know this – I want my stuff to shout a testimony of freedom. Perhaps I’ll start by sending my colleague a CD of Otis Redding tunes. It’s been a long time coming, but I know, a change is gonna come.

Lessons in baseball history in Sweden.

Some of my friends and I are going through a book together called The Tangible Kingdom Primer. The premise of the primer is that when communion with God, community with others, and mission all come together in our lives, that’s when we’re able to see God’s glory most visibly – right there in front of us. Each day, the primer challenges us to think and act a little differently in order to make the kingdom more tangible.

Today’s challenge was to “cross a social, political, or ethnic barrier,” and considering I’m currently in a foreign country, I figured this would be quite easy for me to do. After some googling, I found a church here in Stockholm that held a service in English, and off I went. When I walked into the small basement auditorium, I immediately noticed that the majority of the congregants were black (I apologize if that’s not a politically correct term, but I don’t know what else to say – “African-Americans” isn’t exactly accurate. Afro-Swedes perhaps?). Before this point, I had seen maybe a total of 3 black people in Sweden throughout my 15 or so trips here and never did I think it possible for a white, blonde hair, blue-eyed male to be in Sweden and be in a minority.  Yet there I was, and it was beautiful. They welcomed me with open arms and warm smiles, offered me coffee, and together we sang old gospel-hour hymns that I hadn’t heard in years. I praised God for giving me the opportunity to worship there, and for showing me a wonderful community of brothers and sisters in Christ in a country I thought had completely turned its back on God.

The sermon was about friendship, and how having strong friendships with fellow believers is crucial to having a relationship with God. The pastor told a story about Jackie Robinson’s first error. It was at a game in Boston, and a ball went right through his legs. The crowd must’ve taken that as some kind of confirmation of their racist views, because they began to chant in unison “White. Man’s. Game. White. Man’s. Game” – their taunts echoing off the Green Monster and piercing Jackie Robinson’s heart. At that moment, one of Robinson’s white teammates, Pee Wee Reese, walked up to Jackie, put his arm around him, and stared down the crowd. Robinson would later say that was one of the greatest moments of his career. It’s amazing how friendship can turn a time of dire agony into a memorable highlight, even amongst a stellar career filled with great moments.

Later this afternoon, I read the book of 1 John, and it sounded like the tape at an Ashlee Simpson concert – it just kept repeating. Over and over again, John harps on how important it is to love our brothers and sisters. He goes so far as to say that it is impossible to be in community with God while hating a brother or a sister. God simply refuses to associate Himself with those who hate. John doesn’t mince words: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or a sister is a liar.” Whoa.

I think The Tangible Kingdom Primer is right. If we really want to see God’s glory be tangible here on Earth, and live the kind of lives worth making movies about, we can’t do it alone. Life is meant to be lived in community, with relationships that cross all barriers, and with friendships that sharpen iron with iron.

There have been times when I needed to be a Pee Wee Reese for a brother or a sister, yet instead I was in the crowd at Fenway, hurling obscenities. I regret that with every fiber of my being, and I humbly ask you to forgive me. There have also been times when I have been hurt by a brother or a sister, but all has been forgiven, and I love you.

My plans turn into train wrecks.

I used to roll my eyes every time I heard someone mention “God’s will.” 90% of the time, it was said in conjunction with something stupid, and it just made me cynical. All the “Please let it be God’s will for me to get an A on this test” and “Tebow threw for 316 yards, it must’ve been God’s will for him to win” made the term “God’s will” sound cheap and petty to me. I may not know all that much about God, but I certainly don’t think He’s cheap and petty.

Yet lately I’ve been learning that perhaps submitting to God’s will is more complex than I thought, and maybe it does extend beyond the realm of being a magic 8 ball for football games and calculus exams. On New Year’s Day, my friend Rob Irvine preached about submitting to God’s will in 2012, which he described as trading your plans for God’s plans. The plans I make tend to turn into train wrecks, so I loved the thought of trading them in for something more grand.

I’m in the middle of reading a biography of one of my all-time heroes – Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor in the 1930’s who fought against the Nazi takeover of the German church, and who started underground, illegal churches that continued to preach the Gospel after the Nazis made the German church a puppet for Hitler. Bonhoeffer later joined the Abwehr (the German military intelligence agency) as a double agent, used his position to smuggle Jews into Switzerland, and also got involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Eventually, the assassination plot was discovered, and Bonhoeffer was sent to a concentration camp, where he was hanged naked with a thin metal wire - just 2 weeks before the Americans liberated the camp. The camp’s staff doctor witnessed Bonhoeffer’s execution, and said this about it: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling on the floor, praying fervently to God…so certain that God heard his prayer…I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” Bonhoeffer’s complete submission to the will of God gave him a wild, adventurous, and dangerous life that utterly frightens me. Yet at the same time, something deep inside of me desires it.

Recently, my company went through a restructuring that left the future of my career in question. For four months, I was in an agonizing state of limbo. During the height of my worrying, I met up with my friend Matt for a beer. I told him how I was frustrated with God for not telling me what to do. I was fine with anything – if God wanted us to foreclose on our house, sell all our possessions, and live as missionaries in Africa, I was willing to go – I just wanted to know. Matt told me that’s not how God works. He said that submitting to God’s will is a daily act – to ask Him “how can I best serve you today?” I was disappointed that God wasn’t going to give me the life-long roadmap I wanted, but I started taking Matt’s advice anyway.

What makes God’s will simultaneously beautiful and frustrating is that it doesn’t fit a formula. The last community group I led was an absolute disaster. I had led a few groups before and they had all gone quite well, so I thought I was pretty good at it and had figured out the formula for what makes a good community group – the right study materials, the right meeting length, the right questions to start discussions. Yet this time my plans just didn’t work for some reason, and our group was a complete failure. At one meeting, I asked the group to pray for a close friend of mine whose dad had just been killed by a car that ran him over while he was riding his bicycle. Before I had even finished, one of the women in the group cut me off, “That’s why I always say bikes should not be on the road.” Another chimed in “and that new law that says cars have to give bikes at least 3 feet of space is stupid.” I was livid. The father of one of my best friends has just died - leaving behind a wife, 5 kids (including a toddler he and his wife had just recently adopted), and 4 beautiful grandchildren – and you want to make this a political discussion?! All I wanted to do was scream “Get the hell out of my house – I never want to see you again!” I pulled the plug on the group after that night, and we left that church with a disgusted taste in our mouth.

I swore I would never lead a group again. Obviously, I was a terrible community group leader, and my methods sucked – there was no sense in putting people through that again. Yet now I find myself leading another group – and it is flourishing. This community group is thriving like SEC football, and it’s all because I traded my plans for God’s plans. Perhaps it’s because I’m so aware of my past failings, but I don’t so much as send out an e-mail to this group without praying and seeking wise counsel on it first. I have no idea what the group will look like in 2 months nor am I basing what we do together on my narrow formula for community, I just follow Matt’s advice by daily asking God how we can best serve Him.

So what is God’s will for my life? I still haven’t the faintest idea. For now it must be sitting in my hotel room in Stockholm eating a Daim bar, because that’s what I’m doing. But as I continue reading about Bonhoeffer, I quiver at the thought of how God may answer my daily question tomorrow.

I want a better story.

I just finished reading a book by Donald Miller called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and it was all about how to live a better story – to live the kind of story that people want to make a movie about. Apparently after his book Blue Like Jazz sold millions of copies, some filmmakers approached Miller about turning his memoir into a movie, but once they started working on it, they realized his life wasn’t an interesting enough of a story for a feature film. So Miller set out to discover what made a truly great story, and came to the conclusion that a story is “a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”

I’m sure many people believe I’m living a great story. I drive the car that won the Le Mans GT championship for the past 2 years. I throw parties that Jay Gatsby would envy. I smoke hand-carved pipes and wear cufflinks on a daily basis. My passport is stamped more times in a month than what most people get their entire lives. Yet even amidst these trappings of a supposedly romantic life, I’m still not convinced that I’m living a particularly interesting story.

A few weeks ago, my friend Katie had a brilliant idea. She started a Google Doc where our group of friends wrote what they were praying for so that we could be praying for each other, and also add updates in order to see how God had answered our pleas. Immediately, one of my friends asked for us to pray for a young girl she had been spending time with who had been molested before she had even turned 10. Every week, my friend would add updates to the prayer journal so that we could pray for specific needs – pray for her going to a rough part of the city to meet the girl’s family, pray for her to have the wisdom needed to help the girl, pray for her to get more opportunities to love the girl and her family, and pray for the girl to accept my friend’s offer to get her professional counseling.

On Tuesday, I arrived in the small town of Leoben, Austria, after 24 hours of travel. Still suffering from jetlag and tired from a long day of work, I opened the prayer journal Google Doc so that I could read the most recent updates and pray for my dear friends. There it was – the update was in bold blue print – the girl and her family had accepted my friend’s offer of getting her professional counseling. As I read those words, I wept. I sat alone in my hotel room and I wept. That morning I had driven two hours through the snow-covered Alps of Austria, witnessing some of the greatest beauty in all of creation, yet somehow I didn’t see the fullness of God’s glory until I read those words.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus tells us “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” I can’t even imagine the weariness and burden that my friend’s friend must be bearing – but to know that she is seeking rest from the One who is “gentle and humble in heart,” whose “yoke is easy and burden is light” is a story worth remembering.

If Donald Miller’s definition of a good story is true, then what the character wants must be integral to the story. Miller states “The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.”

Too often, what I want is stupid – just a 5L keg of Austrian beer or a Roomba vacuum cleaner, if you will. But I know what my friends want. They want the poor to be able to say “I am rich.” They want the weak to say “I am strong.” And I know they are living some of the greatest stories ever told.