Yesterday was a day of union. One of my groups of college friends gathered in Eureka, Illinois for my friend Cathy’s wedding. On the way there, I got a text from my friend Stephanie that another group of our college friends would be in Indianapolis for a wedding.

Cathy’s wedding was evenly split between people from the Shaumburg area (northern Chicago suburbs) and the “downstate crowd,” which is what the Shaumburg natives call anyone south of I-80 (even though part of Orland Park is south of I-80, but that’s another discussion).

At one point during the reception, I grabbed the mic and told the Schaumburg crowd that we would be dancing to “America’s real national anthem.” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” blasted through the speakers.
A few minutes later, “Here’s to the Night” played. I grabbed a pretty girl, and slowly encircled the dance floor.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t just in that room when those songs played. Lynyrd Skynyrd took me back to the farm, a hundred memories crowded my mind. Sweet Home Alabama played in a wedding reception or airport or through my white earbuds as I stare up at the stars in my own backyard, will always take me back home. Four wheelers. Cousins. A place called on the McGee Creek called Wilson’s Fjord.

And “Here’s to the Night.” Senior year. Late May. Just driving with my friend Michael, realizing that everything was about to change. The cool night wind whipping through our open windows, night as darks as the unknown we were walking into. And we didn’t know what was ahead. Sure, we knew that we were going off to school and our friends were all headed in different directions, and we knew graduation was eight days away. But those were just the stats, the bullet points. The real ones were “will I find my place in the world?” “Who am I, really?” “What if I fail?” “Will I Find someone to love?”

We didn’t have any answers, but we had some songs. So we cranked up the speakers and let the our favorite bands say the things we couldn’t get past our lips. “Here’s to the night we felt alive/here’s to tears you knew you’d cry/Here’s to goodbye/tomorrow’s gonna come too soon.”

Eight years later, I’m a different version of myself than 18-year-old-Seth who was looking for the answers. I’ve found a number of them. I’ve traded in my chuck taylors and punk rock t-shirts for a j crew polo and pair of patent leather slip ons. I’ve got a career, world travel experience, six triathlons under my belt. I’m wiser, more experienced, with a few more scars and tattoos (and, dare I say it, wrinkles) than that high school graduate. But I’ve become a little more jaded too, burned a few too many times.

The point is this. Whenever Eve 6 comes on, the song takes me to a pivotal point where I once stood, but will always need. I feel 18-year-old-Seth inside of me. Today, I need him. I need his sense of wonder, his fresh eyes on the world. Every single “Sweet Home Alabama” graces a pair of speakers, I connect with 14-year-old-Seth, the quiet dreamer, the skinny basketball player, with a hungry heart to break away and see what’s out there. And I still need his energy, his boundless enthusiasm for what may lay over behind the next sunrise.

I stayed at my grandmother’s house in Peoria last night (she’s in South Carolina at the moment, so I was there alone). As I was eating breakfast, I flipped on the TV, since the house was so quiet. The final few minutes of the 90’s teen comedy “Can’t Hardly Wait” was playing. Sitting at the breakfast table, I mouthed every single line. “That’s when I realized, there is such a thing as fate. But it only takes you so far, and then it’s up to you to make it happen,” the movie character and I say together.

I turned off the movie and wept. And I don’t mean I wiped away a single tear. Wept. I wept because I watched that movie with my high school friends piled onto couches. I wept because those same people are now spread throughout the country, and we’ll probably never be in the same room again. I wept because they loved me, and we needed each other, because I would have never become me if it wasn’t for them.

This is why I love media. Because media, if it’s truly inspired, will always help us see truth. What’s labeled as mere nostalgia is often a window into something far deeper. Helps us see where we’ve been, or maybe a glimpse of where we’re going. Helps us feel how fragile life really is. Or, as the the wedding program read “This is how you truly love something. As if you could lose it at any moment.”

Songs, and books, and films, and the occasional episode of Scrubs, help me see the different stages of my life. Three minute pop songs remind me of the blessings poured over me, and how quickly the times fade away.

So this is my prayer for you today. As you go through school and try new things, as you weep over the first broken heart that we must all endure, as a date becomes a relationship and then a left handed ring, as you lose your heart to a with a child, don’t forget to take some songs with you. And then share them with your date, fiancee, spouse, blast them late at night with your friends, put them on and explain to your children who and where you were when these songs first played.

I hope have some leaving, and some coming home again. But whichever way the road is pointing right now, crank up the speakers and build a soundscape for your experiences. Because life is crowded, and the human mind will lose some of the details that make us alive. But I’ve often found those precious details, those treasured pieces again, wrapped up in chords and melody.

Wolverine was fun, Star Trek was flashy, and Terminator was philosophical. But Adventureland was hands down the best movie I’ve seen this year. Set in the recession of 1982, the film follows a recent college grad who must forgo his trip to Europe in order to work at a local theme park in hopes of raising money for grad school.

Money is only one of his problems. The other problem is that whenever he gets a date, he rambles on about books (“Dickens was a travel writer. He just traveled to insane asylums and slums”) until the girl loses all interest in him.
I sat there, and realized that I spent most of my time between the ages of 16 and 22 as that guy. Cash strapped, and burning through stacks of books each summer.

These days, I’m less broke, but I still burn through stacks of books. If you’re looking for a summer reading list, here’s what I’ve read so far in 2009.

The Catcher in the Rye-This is considered a classic, and something you may have been assigned to read in high school. I hated it. One problem was that I thought the book was about baseball (as in, a baseball catcher who chases a foul ball into the rye). It’s not. It’s about a rich kid at boarding school in New York. He brags about a lot of things. The end.

One Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible-A.J. Jacobs. The agnositc editor of Esquire Magazine decides to follow every rule in the Bible. Hilarious, and insightful read. There are things I learned about the Old Testament that I've never learned in church. Highly reccomended.

Love is a Mixtape-Rob Sheffield. The memoir of a Rolling Stone writer who loses his wife suddenly to a blood clot...and looks back on their relationship through a series of mix cassette tapes, and later CDs, that they made for each other. This is the 2nd time I've read it in six months. One of my top 10 books of all time. Just read it.

Lessons From San Quentin: Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned in Priosn-Bill Dallas. Bigwig lawyer goes away for a white collar crime, and gets stuck in America's worst prison. While he's there, he meets Jesus, and learns to cut away the all the useless garbage our society values.

The Everlasting Stream-Walt Harrington. A white man’s touching memoir about hunting rabbits with his black relatives in Kentucky. One of the best books I’ve read.

Crossings: A White Man’s Journey into Black America. Walt Harrington. An award-winning book about a white man who’s married to a black woman and the father of two bi-racial children who takes off on a road trip across America to understand race, hatred, forgiveness, and reconciliation. I only finished half of it, because it was already drastically overdue to the library.

Nick Hornby’s Long Way Down-Written by guy behind the book/films High Fidelity and How to Be Good, this novel focuses on four people who meet on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve. All are planning to jump. They make an anti-suicide pact for 90 days. Musings on the human condition ensue.

Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good-A fortysomething dr. is cheating on her husband. But instead of leaving her, he decides to stay, and actually live out his beliefs. Since homelessness is terrible and wrong, he brings a homeless teen home to live with them.

Surprised by Joy: The Redemption of a Cynic. Steven W. Simpson. As far as spiritual memoirs go, this one ranks just below Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz and far above most of the other attempts at the genre. If one book has changed my thinking this year, it’s this one.

Making the Climb-John Bowling. The reflections of the President of Olivet Nazarene University, my parent company, on climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in his late 50’s. A very good, concise read on trying hard, leaning on God, and finding beauty in everything. It’s the only climb in the world that takes you through every climate on planet earth-from the tropics to Arctic temperatures. One day, I hope to follow in his footsteps, all the way to the top of the roof of Africa.

The Beat Generation. An anthology of Jack Kerouac (most famous for the novel On the Road) and his motley band of beat poets. Sick of the white picket fence life of the 1950’s, Kerouac quit college and left behind his football scholarship for life on the open road, hitchhiking, taking odd jobs, and always writing. This collection puts together some of his lesser known writings, as well as the poems of his crew. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but it’s a surprisingly stark commentary on the countercultural worldview at the time. Some of the concepts are decades ahead of their time (early rejection of consumerism), and some don’t make much sense to our modern situation (reflections on just how much the average person feared a Russian Invasion/nuclear war).

The Singlehood Phenomenon. Drs. Tom & Bev. Rogers-These two spoke at an event I was at for work a couple of weeks ago, and we really hit it off. Right now, more women are living in America without a husband than with one. This is a great breakdown of why people aren’t getting married. More than anything, it touched on a topic that I really want to write more about…the immaturity and narcissism of the younger American male. I’m absolutely sick of seeing so many of my peers have moved back in with their parents after college, and continue to receive financial and “life help” (like laundry and cooking). This is inexcusable, and we’re going to pay for a it as a society. Great read, fascinating topic, and two authors I hope to collaborate with in the future.

Hero-Fred Stoeker. While I haven’t read much of Fred, I highly respect him the guy behind the Every Man’s Battle Series. The book, which deals with raising sons who are coming of age, is a little tired in it’s ideas for the first half (borrowing a little too much from John Elderidge…if you’ve read Wild at Heart, you’ve read this), and is absolute garbage on the tail end. The book ends with Fred’s oldest son, who’s never dated, or kissed a girl, meeting a girl at his college. They get married in seven months. He then tells all young guys to go do this, as it is surely God’s plan.

The problem here is that I did the exact same thing, and it fell apart at the seams. I may have “kissed dating goodbye” between my high school relationship and my engagement, but it was unintentional. A number of factors came into play. A rough break up at a young age, my parents divorce, a threefold career (radio, TV, writing) that quickly pulled me in over my head. Sometimes I hurt too much to let girls in, most of the time I was flying through life at a lightening pace, and simply wouldn’t, or couldn’t, slow down.

I met a girl. We got engaged after about 5 months. We were engaged for three weeks.

The theological point here is that just because ONE person did something a certain way and became successful doesn’t mean that it’s God’s universal plan for the rest of us. The “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” phenomenon within the church in the late 1990’s flies in the face of what 90% of research, and the opinions of most Christian counselors, will tell you is reasonable.

If I took the Hero/I Kissed… model and applied to writing a book about God’s plan for your career, this is what the thesis might be.

“Go get an internship in what you love. Within three months, God will promote you to your dream job.”

In reality, this IS what happened to me at the age of 19. It’s a truly beautiful story of how God took an inexperienced teenager from overnights on country radio in Iowa to a major market Christian station. Whatever happens with my career (and any of us, in any field, could be out of work in 6 months in this financial climate), I’ll always be thankful for His hand on me at that critical age.

While it’s my story, there’s no part of the Bible that would support this as being God’s plan for ALL believers. I fact, it wouldn’t even make sense. And in trying to apply it like that, I would rob the beauty from the story of how God worked in my life.

Derek Webb sings “Should I read between the lines/to become handsome, rich and wise/is that really want you want from me?”

I’m not saying that some of the principals in the Bible can’t be applied to having a successful business, marriage, sports team, etc. But that’s not the point of the book. The point is that Jesus was actually God, and that he died. And then he came back. And he loves you and wants you rescue you.

All that to say, be watchful of who’s theology you buy into (if you’re a Christian). If you’re not a Christian, my apologies for some of the terrible ideas that people have wrapped a bit of Jesus around and sold as a product.
Wow, I didn’t mean to get that heated. But anger often shows where our passions are. Expect to hear more on this subject…

It was well over 100 degrees, and the heat radiated back up off the tar. The row of men carrying shovels and pushing wheelbarrows wear sun-scorched skin, beads of sweat dripping down sinewy arms.

A man wobbles, and then falls. He doesn’t get up.  Another one jumps up out of the ditch, and grabs his tool.  There are twenty more men waiting in the shade, hoping another one will fall. 

This is how Illinois Rt. 104 was built through the west-central part of the state.  Two crews of men, desperate for work during the depression. For hours of work per crew.  No breaks, or water.  If a man passed out from the heat, they drug him to the side of the road, and left him. There was always another desperate soul quick to take his place. 

This is not a scene from a movie.  This is what “work” looked like for my Great Uncle Gerald during the depression.  This is one way he the rent got paid and food found it’s way to the table. 

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I know that there have been thousands of magazine articles and several books dedicated to our current financial status, and this doesn’t even take into account the hours upon hours of coverage of people yelling at each other over it on CNN and Fox News.  They all have complicated theories of what went wrong and how to fix it. 

Let me simplify things a bit.  This is where this recession came from:

Too many people, buying too much stuff they couldn’t afford, for far too long. 

Seriously, that’s it. 

Now, I’m not saying you lived this way, and I certainly didn’t either.  But the course of nations are not decided by what you and I choose, but by the habits, beliefs, and actions of the majority….of millions. 

And millions borrowed lots of money to buy stuff they couldn’t afford, and thought that just because they had been doing it for 10 years, they could do it forever.  And that’s why the bottom fell out. 

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I know a guy who I call “the 1979 Yugo.”  He earned this nickname because you just can’t make him work. 

He’s in graduate school, studying to be a pastor.  It’s not that he can’t work, that he’ injured or has some other limitation, but simply that he refuses to.  Says working fast food would be “below him,” even though he has a wife and a daughter to support.

This is pretty foreign for me, because I was brought up to work.  I broke up concrete by hand one summer, picked up hay bales, built fence, burned brush, sold shoes, made a poor attempt at selling knives door to door, cleaned a church, and did various other jobs to get through college.  Fortunately, none of that was “beneath me,” or I would have never gone to college, and would not be in radio today.

And none of it was that hard, comparatively.  It was my grandparents, my great aunts and uncles, who worked 16 hours days to save their farms from foreclosure.  If any of them got a “break” from the labor, it was a 6 week stint known as “basic training” before getting shipped out with the other draftees to fight Germans.

And when they got home, cows still needed to be fed, fences mended, fields seeded.  So they got back to work.

And not once do I ever recall someone refusing to drive a post or carry a 90lb. bale or look for a lost cow in a rainstorm because it was it was “beneath them.”  Life requires things like food, clothing, soap, medicine, and heat in the winter.  And work was how you got those things.

I hope “1979 Yugo” who’s too good to don an apron and fry burgers alongside the people whose souls he will one day try and win, doesn’t spend too much time reading the Bible.  Too much stuff in there to make him uncomfortable, like how a man who doesn’t first provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever, or how God uses the tasks we are given to grow us (see: the parable of the talents). 

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The root problem of the recession is not inheratantly political.

The real problem is that we have an entire generation of people who believe that they deserve a hug and a trophy just for existing.  They expect the world to revolve around them, and they don’t then there is a grown-up temper tantrum coming (to see one of these, go to a local car dealership and watch as a man whines to his wife about why he “needs” a new truck). 

In her brilliant book “Generation Me,” sociologist Judith Twinge warns of the dangers of self-esteem for the sake of self-esteem.  In most generations and societies, self-esteem is something that develops in children naturally, as they learn, grow, and move forward in the world.  They feel good about themselves when they learn an instrument, take on a paper route, or participate in a sport.

Back in the 1980’s we began to try to give kids self-esteem without them doing anything to earn it.  Those kids grew up. And once they were out in the workforce, nobody cared that making this particular spreadsheet didn’t make them feel empowered.  So they (we) pouted. A lot.

It is the same “I am so special” mentality that drove the banks and auto industries into places of desperation.  If you look at the decisions made, like GM telling the federal government that they “didn’t have enough money to stay open for 30 more days,” it’s pretty clear to see how this same outlook on the world is still in place.   “Who cares that the company I’m in charge of is in the red, and this has been coming at us for ten years.  I am a super-duper special person, and I DESERVE to be bailed out of my mess with other people’s money. I want my trophy and my hug, and I want them NOW before I have to feel bad about something.” 

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Please understand, that I know many people are out of work, and feel terrible each morning because they can’t go out and support their families. This last year has been very, very hard for so many families, and so many good men and women who were working hard and got laid off would like a job but can’t find one. And you and I that are doing ok through all of this need to share with them, love on them, insist on generosity even if they first refuse. 

But this recession is a great time to examine our weakness as a culture, as a people.  We have the opportunity to see the world and realize that the sun doesn’t rise and set around our individual happiness. 

Right now, we have a chance to break away from the model of “amuse me, make me feel special, and do it right now” worldview.  This way of living has made us fat from eating takeout, lonely from staying in and watching cable, and, in general, very narcissistic (see: the stuff we twitter. Please note…no one needs to be alerted that you just ordered a milkshake).

Two months ago, I started dancing.  Ballet, to be specific, and my class is the best hour of my week.  I signed up for lessons after re-watching the Brad Pitt film Troy, and pondering how the ancient Greeks desired to be masters of all things: public speaking, physical fitness, philosophy, math, dance, cooking, warfare, love.  These were a people who worked at being great, invested in their children and communities. 

And that’s why I dance.  Because it’s not something I’m naturally good at, and I needed to be faced with the option that I might fail, and be forced  to choke down my ego and humbly try again. 

You see, too much leisure, too much mindless amusement, makes the soul sick.  If I am not out there working, trying new things, taking risks, then I have no reason to depend on God.  I become stale, like water in a pond with no drainage, scum growing on top.  I need risk. I need pain, to step out in faith, to truly be alive and growing.  I need resistance, because struggle is the only way to become stronger.

So, I believe the recession is a message to you and me: WAKE UP!  Quit loafing through life hoping everything will be entertaining.  Accept that some things are not fun, hurt for awhile, and are completely necessary.  Work hard, even if you hate your job at the moment. Put your heart into it, and use your time outside of work to start looking for something else.  Take a risk, sign up for a class, start dancing. Volunteer. Give money and stuff away. 

Do whatever it is you will do once you realize that life is short, and most definitely not all about you. 

We may be in a recession, but that’s only a bad thing if you and I don’t walk out of it better. 

If you need to, work fast food for awhile.  But also, dance.