Reading: Chapter 4: Tapestry

Chapter 4

TAPESTRY

Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Psalm  139:16

There I was, a doctoral student, beginning the day as I did each day during the two-week block of classes at Bakke University in Seattle: reading and sipping coffee at Starbucks.

This particular morning I was distracted. The day before, Professor Ray Bakke had taken the class to his home, affectionately known as Bakken, where we walked a path through his backyard forest. It was a Via Dolorosa-type experience. (The Via Dolorosa is the road in Jerusalem that Jesus walked to His crucifixion; today it is marked by “stations” representing significant moments along that journey to the cross.) We paused at markers along the way, reading and reflecting upon stories from key events in Christian history.

In one of his lectures, Dr. Bakke drew two intersecting lines, one horizontal and one vertical, to illustrate different perspectives on God. The vertical line, dominant among Christians in the West, envisions God as one who values expedience: “Win the world for Christ in this generation!” Christians within Eastern orthodox cultures, however, embrace a more horizontal perspective. They envision a God who above all else values faithfulness: “Stay true to the end of time.”

As a Western Christian, my relationship with God leaned vertical. I focused on God’s direct dealings with me. Dr. Bakke had introduced a missing, or at best weak, dimension of my spiritual life. Yes, God loves me directly, but He also loves me eternally. In this sense, He is vast, mysterious, a God who “hovers” (see Genesis 1:2) over my life, and who “in all things works for the good” (see Romans 8:28). This horizontal perspective was new to me.

Pondering the horizontal perspective began to disturb me. That morning, right there in the middle of the coffee shop, it erupted into a Damascus Road-type encounter with God. First I trembled. Then I heard (or thought I heard) a clear, audible voice: “You are Theodore Roosevelt Travis III, son of Theodore Roosevelt Travis Jr. and grandson of Abraham Lincoln Mack!”

I began to fathom—almost feel—the movement of God in my family history. “Poppa,” my grandfather, a Methodist preacher and son of a white employer and black maid, became the patriarch of a large family. When I was a child, he would take me in his arms and say, “This here is my preacher boy!” My father, a bricklayer by trade, died when I was 15 years old from cancer and a bleeding ulcer—a slow and deteriorating death. Yet, a few years before his passing, he underwent a transformation I did not understand until shortly after the same thing happened to me: He became a Christian.

On that day in Seattle, I heard God say, “Stop. Remember. You are the son and grandson of these men. This is your lineage. I am the Lord.” These words shook me to my core.

The dictionary defines missiology as the study of Christian missions, their methods and purposes.1 Missiology is the study of God’s workings through time. It is about connecting the dots of life in order to grasp divine meanings.

Many view their family history with a sense of pride, but not all recognize or appreciate God’s hand in it. Apparently neither had I, until that moment. Suddenly Jesus’ words in John 5:17 (“My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working”), and those of the psalmist (“Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations” [Psalm 90:1]) erupted with new meaning.

Decades into my journey with Jesus, I can now appreciate more deeply those life-changing events—both during and before my own sojourn on Earth—that have shaped me and my transformational discipleship ministry approach.

Lessons from the Journey

In his devotional classic A Diary of Private Prayer, Scottish theologian John Baillie ended a day with this reflection:

Almighty God, in this hour of quiet I seek communion with thee. All day long I have toiled and striven; but now, in stillness of heart and in the clear light of eternity, I would ponder the pattern my life has been weaving.² (emphasis added)

Life weaves a pattern. It tells a story. Reflecting on our personal journeys reveals much about who we are and why we do what we do. I had never really appreciated that until my experience in Seattle. Once I began to consider this perspective, I could clearly see lessons contributing to transformational discipleship that began a long time ago.

A Divine Conspiracy

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:8-9).

It still astounds me that 40 years ago, God’s desire that all “come to repentance” culminated for me, on an October Sunday in Vienna, in my salvation. Truly a life-changing moment! Yet over time I have realized that this event was part of a much larger conspiracy.

When it began I cannot say. But in hindsight I find God to be as crafty as He is patient. Life in North Bellport, a father’s death, an identity crisis, a decision to study overseas, pondering life on Corfu, meeting a Christian girl, inviting myself to an international chapel—I cannot prove it, but I sense that these events were all pieces of a larger tapestry. They were not as random as they first appeared. Somehow God orchestrated this. He set me up!

Talk about conspiracy! I later discovered that when that Christian girl saw my interest in Christianity, she alerted Pastor Mathews. He, in turn, mailed a letter to a group he called “Serious Ones,” telling them about me and asking them to pray. Unbeknownst to me, when I asked Jesus into my heart that Sunday, there were strangers back in the States praying, in solidarity with God’s expressed desire, on my behalf!

It was a divine conspiracy. I never had a chance. For that, I am profoundly grateful.

You have a story. We all do. We all have unique threads to contribute to the tapestry God is weaving; we are all a part of the divine conspiracy.

When I first moved into Five Points to work with kids, I knew I was returning to the kind of place I had once escaped. Although the neighborhood was located in a different city, it had all the elements I had long feared. The youth I would meet there experienced challenges very similar to those I had faced as a teenager in my neighborhood.

But one thing was different. I knew something they did not know—something that gave me a strategic edge. I knew that God was either in them or on them—either He resided in them, because they had given their lives to Christ, or He was influencing them, using people and circumstances to draw their attention to Himself.

To be sure, youth ministry engages in evangelism and advocacy and relief. But all those things happen within a much bigger context. When you enter youth ministry or otherwise get involved in the lives of youth, you become part of a divine conspiracy. You are now part of a young person’s story and God’s agenda within that story. It is important to see our interactions with the youth we love and serve from this perspective.

Image Matters

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27).

In 1990, tennis star Andre Agassi was part of an ad campaign promoting Canon’s EOS Rebel camera. In the ad he famously declared: “Image is everything.”

He (or the advertising company, anyway) was right. Those three words struck a chord with viewers, making the campaign one of the most successful in the history of modern-day advertising. Image, as an expression of identity, is “everything.”

Why is image everything? Because God made it everything. “So God created mankind in his own image.” Every living, breathing person is an image bearer—of God!

When, during my racial identity crisis, I said, “God made me in His image, and He made me black. . . . I need to find out what that means,” I had instinctively linked together two powerful definers of self: the image of God and self-identity. In the camera commercials, Agassi presented image as an impression—the persona one shows to the world. But image is more than that.

Image is a reflection—it mirrors its source. There is only one image that truly matters, and that is the image of God. That image reveals itself in a blend of characteristics unique to every person—a combination of traits that shapes identity. Things like race and culture are part of the identity equation, but the core of who we are comes from the divine image—or to apply it more personally, the divine imprint.

It is the divine imprint that allows all other matters pertaining to identity to fall into place. I discovered that “blackness,” as a racial and cultural distinctive, was an expression of God’s creation; however, it was not the core of my identity. God’s imprint is the core of my identity. This reality freed me to appreciate the richness and beauty of my cultural heritage, and simultaneously to silence the self-loathing and conflicting messages that had tormented me from my adolescent years.

In our highly racialized world, at a time in life when the pressing issue is a quest for identity (answering the question “Who am I?”), youth desperately need to discover their divine imprint.

Leave Nothing Behind

Shortly after entering urban youth ministry, I was asked to participate in a workshop at a suburban church missions conference. My co-facilitator was one of the few black members of that church. As we talked prior to the workshop, it became clear that he was deeply conflicted. He talked about his childhood. “My father kept a shotgun by the front door. . . . It was a dangerous place. I could never go back to a neighborhood like that. Never!” He became so agitated that he left. I led the workshop on my own.

For many blacks, a return to the inner city would be something like a Jew returning to life in a concentration camp. A generation of blacks fled the city never to return, except possibly for a few nostalgic hours on Sunday morning for church. That could easily have been me. But once I accepted that the inner city might be God’s calling upon my life, I knew I had to deal with some unresolved issues—the scars born out of growing up urban.

James is one of the most direct and blunt of all the apostles. The opening line of his letter can feel at once like a joyful command and a jarring slap across the face:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1:2-4).

Most Christians spend so much time reflecting (or agonizing) over the first part of this passage that they fail to consider the last part. The phrase “not lacking anything” literally means: “leaving nothing behind.” In order to grow to maturity in Christ, nothing— no unresolved issue, lingering anger, or confusion regarding one’s identity—can be left behind.

God has an ingenious method for addressing unresolved issues: trials. There is something about trials that bring to light the things we have tried to leave behind. It is a sobering truth: We take our problems with us.

Whatever personal issues you brought to bear on your last job, if they remain unresolved, will show up and contribute to disruption at your next job. James says that’s a good thing: God’s goal for us is maturity and completeness, and He will use trials to give us as many opportunities as it takes to straighten us out.

Now, I’m not saying that we should try to create trials for one another so that we all have more opportunities to deal with our issues. But I do believe that youth ministry can and should create an environment in which adolescents can begin to address those areas that might hold them back in life. Most urban youth I meet have already spent significant time surviving the harshness of the city. They carry with them the baggage of street ideas, survival tactics, suspicions and fears regarding life. A youth ministry should be a place where Jesus can heal those deep, life-shaping wounds.

Discerning Truth

Jesus put a high premium on truth when He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). Perhaps you recall my fellow seminarian John Peyton. John’s gift to me was that of honest, truthful confrontation. Here were two people, coming from different perspectives, each possessing a deep love for Jesus. That bond of love allowed us to enter into rich debate: He challenged the socks off of me, and I did the same for him. The experience was life giving and life changing.

Pastor and theologian Haddon Robinson has said, “If you’re going to compete for the minds of men and women”—and adolescents, I would add—“you must do so in the realm of ideas.” Our society has become increasingly partisan. People now entrench themselves on differing sides of issues. Assertion has become the dominant posture; winning arguments has become more important than discerning truth. Now more than ever, young people need places where honest questions can dare to be spoken and honest answers can be pursued with loving integrity. Because knowing Jesus leads to truth, the pursuit of truth can also lead back to Jesus. This should characterize youth ministry: a safe environment where, as Francis Schaeffer put it, honest answers can be given to honest questions.

A Purposeful Journey

I sometimes challenge youth workers with the question, “When you look at young people, what do you see?” Their responses often highlight the hardening of urban youths’ lives and the seemingly insurmountable task of breaking through that hardness with the gospel. I listen to their impressions, and then I share with them this story. One day a construction foreman decided to take a walk through the building site. He would stop periodically and ask his men what they were doing.

One replied, “I’m breaking rocks.”

Another said, “I’m earning a living to take care of my family.”

Then he posed the question to a third worker. With a glint in his eyes, this man responded, “I’m building a cathedral.”

At this point, I repeat the question, “When you look at youth, what do you see? Rocks? Employment? Or do you see cathedrals in the making?” Then I add, “Which one do you suppose God wants you to see?”

My three-plus decades of ministry among urban youth were not entered into by happenstance. They were the outflow of an ongoing story. The events of my life seemed ordinary and disconnected until I saw them from God’s perspective. Once I began to do that, they formed a bigger picture—a more purposeful tapestry. From other vantage points, an operatically trained kid who fled the city and was later converted to Christianity in a European cultural center would be a poor choice for an urban youth leader. But then again, perhaps a person like that might see things others would tend to miss, bringing to the table a new perspective on the urban youth challenge and the role the church can play in meeting it.

I certainly hope so.

Notes

1. New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer (New York: Touchstone, 2010), Kindle edition.

Questions for Thought

1. How has the hand of God worked in your life? How would you describe the pattern your life has been weaving?
2.  Are you prepared to enter into the life experience of the urban young person?
3.  Are there unresolved issues in your life related to identity? (Young people can spot phoniness almost immediately. They will know if you are asking Jesus to do something in their lives you have not allowed Him to do in yours.)
4. When you look at young people, what do you see? Rocks? Employment? Cathedrals? How do you think God wants you to view the youth in your community?