On Bars

I'm not quite sure what this post is about. Maybe it's about how last night, I met a girl who might, maybe, be me in a few years. She's the same age but somehow managed to hit the end while she was still living at home (an unthinkable feat in my mind). She was able to witness that, yes, it sucks, it destroys your world. And she was able to look at me and say—you can do it. You can put your life back together. You'll be ok.

Maybe this post is about how we then went to a bar with a group of friends. It was my first time in a bar, though of course I didn't drink. So maybe that's what this post is about—that over the last month, I've embraced the fact that I will never be able to just leave the traditions; that it's something I love too much and that has had too profound of an influence upon me to be able to walk away. Is it possible to participate in the church without advocating? It's been deeply instilled in me that no, this is inherently impossible. There are so many places I don't belong…

Like that bar, for example. So why, sitting there with friends from all over the world and a rainbow of backgrounds, did I feel so deeply at peace in a way I haven't known for months? It might have been all the hooka smoke blowing around. But somehow I think it was something more. I don't know quite what I expected out of a bar—grime, immorality, sin in every corner, prostitutes and strippers and lots of drinking. Certainly not a glass of lemonade with Janga and 60s music. Certainly not good friends and profound philosophy. So maybe that's what this post is about.

Or maybe I'm writing this post about how, by posting a brief statement mocking my prior good-little-Christian bar expectations, I managed to offend and disappoint my family all over again. How I'm contemptuous, naive, insulting, immature, a deeply disappointing and embarrassing reflection of my parents and Olivet. How I'm jeopardizing my job and reputation with my pointed insinuation that maybe, our church's stereotypes of the world are a bit ridiculous and laughable.



"While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?' On hearing this, Jesus said to them, 'It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.' " (Mark 2)