Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy, and Orthoscript

Training Ground rests on three pillars of Work, Wilderness, and Worship. Work seemed to hammer its way into our consciousness every morning at 5 am when our alarms would begin to squeal one by one around the darkened room. Wilderness also seemed to demand our attention with every fishing trip and hiking excursion the enormity of the natural world onto our tiny retinas. Worship interjected its way into our lives in a very different mode. We attended the equivalent of a weekly course on hermeneutics with Dr. Paul Penley, but much of our spiritual growth came through the zeitgeist of the program.

Paul had appointed our only pre-program homework and through his assignments revealed the direction of his class for the entire summer. Our reading list included the dry Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and the more engaging The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren. Grasping God’s Word, written as a textbook for Bible college hermeneutics classes, set the serious academic tone for the class. The author focuses on the importance of learning how to break down and understand the Bible as one would break down and understand a John Donne poem. The focus of McLaren’s book, however, is more personal than intellectual. His goal is to introduce the reader to the person and personality of Jesus. His description of Jesus as a revolutionary leader conducting a guerilla war of love behind enemy lines introduced me to an enthusiasm that previous iterations of Christianity could never conjure for me.

Paul is the kind of person that you meet and immediately understand functions on a higher intellectual plane than we young padawans. Reading his resume of precocious academic achievements only lends greater credence to his Biblical apologetics. Coming from a largely secular background, I was slightly concerned that I would begin this aspect of the program hopelessly discombobulated and only get lost from there. In some ways I did start at a disadvantage as sly comments about different pastors’ preaching styles never failed to sail ten feet over my head, but I had a steep learning curve and everyone was more than happy to catch me up to speed on any prescient concepts I may have missed by not being immersed in the Christian culture. Paul introduced me to the Emergent movement, carefully outlining the limitations as well as the radical Biblicality of some of the tenets.

I was introduced to the ideas of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthoscript. Many conservative churches focus exclusively on the idea of orthodoxy or right ideas. Ostensibly having the right ideas will lead to the right actions, but sole focus on right ideas can often lock Christians into a struggle about being correct rather than being Christlike. Orthopraxy or right practice, on the other hand, can often gloss over important Biblical truths to focus solely on corporeal rather than spiritual realms. Paul then introduced his own Greek and Latin portmanteau of orthoscript or right story. His contention is that the Bible is that the Bible is trying to do something to us and that through study of the context we can apply its teachings with faithfulness and creativity. The Bible is trying to show us the story that God is creating on Earth and that we have been invited to become an integral part of that story. Too often we try to fit God into what we’re trying to do with our lives and instead we should be focusing on what God is doing and how we can be a part of it.

Worship was not confined to Wednesday nights, however. An affable young man named Toast that I met on one of the jobsites explained to me that everything we do should be an expression of our gratitude to God, our commitment to God’s plan, and a form of praise. I often wrestled with the spiritual concepts the most in the days and weeks later when work or wilderness would give me the physical and emotional space to process my own thoughts and emotions. One concept that would not let me go was the idea of the three stages of faith. The first stage of faith is ‘notitia’ or understanding: understanding the existence of God or the fact of sin. The second stage of faith is ‘assenus’ or mental assent: agreeing intellectually with the veracity of Biblical doctrine. These first two stages had never been an issue for me. I felt as if I was born with such an understanding and assent. The third stage was the edge of a cliff for me. The third stage is ‘fiducia’ or trust: an emotional connection with the truth previously only understood and assented to. My greatest struggle was my deficiency in personal relationship with God. I felt that God was a distant being that had little involvement in my life. Over the course of the summer I realized that one of the pillars of a real relationship is just showing up. When you have a real relationship with someone, you show up again and again even when it’s hard, even when you don’t feel like it, even when you’re upset with the other person: persistence. I learned this summer that if I keep showing up then so will God.

People of Walmart

After two weeks of day labor, we were despairing of ever having steady work over the summer. Strategic Staffing, the temp agency we had been relying on, had thus far proven uninformed, unreliable, and incompetent. When we finally were informed of jobs remodeling a Walmart, we were told to report for work at 5am on Sunday, as our jobs were supposed to run from 5am to 2pm Sunday through Thursday. Grant, Dave, Matt, and I shuffled to the back of the largely deserted Walmart and began our search for a manager. After ten minutes, we were finally informed by the manager that our jobs were actually scheduled for 5am to 2pm Monday through Friday. Although excited by the slightly more amenable schedule, we were all exasperated at being misinformed and at our unnecessary 4am wakeup call.

Chris, who was also supposed to be working with us at Walmart, was somehow overlooked by Strategic Staffing and so continued day labor for another week. Before his eventual integration into the Walmart crew, he expressed his concern that he was sinking into the comfort of rhythm and complacency. I often feel the same way and fear that I’ll fall into a comfortable but ultimately unchallenging and unrewarding life. In The Departed, Matt Damon’s character says to his girlfriend, “If we're not gonna make it, it's gotta be you that gets out, cause I'm not capable. I'm fucking Irish, I'll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.” I know I have this tendency so I have to be constantly vigilant.

Our first few days were mostly silent drudgery, tearing down, building, and stocking shelves. We would communicate only to receive commands. Breakthrough came in the form of conversation. Working alongside our manager, Bunny, I got the opportunity to strike up conversation and begin asking questions about her life. I began to realize that, far from my low expectations of a Walmart employee, Bunny was an exceptional woman. Beyond being a single mother of three and a full-time Assistant Manager at Walmart, she played three club sports, coached youth basketball, and was a voracious reader. Over the next few weeks we developed a rapport that led to mutual respect. She quickly realized that, far from her low expectations of temporary workers, we were intelligent and could handle increased responsibility. Surprisingly, we began to take pride in our work and take ownership of projects. Did I just spend three hours laughing while working at the “Evil Empire”? Weird.

Perhaps it’s the social equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion, but life seems to work in dichotomies. After a few weeks of work, we completed the remodel and were assigned to the Platte Walmart to work on a much larger project. Rather than a manageable group, 50 temp workers were corralled, cajoled, and coerced in an attempt to completely overhaul a store that had not been remodeled since Clinton’s first presidency. Our task masters fostered disempowerment through what seemed to be a carefully concocted mixture of a lack of communication, trust, or respect. Our motivation was daily drained by the incompetence of our superiors. It became almost a daily occurrence that we would receive an order, protest that the assignment should either be done another way or not done at all for any number of valid reasons, be rebuffed, and then 30 minutes later be proven prescient as we would inevitably be tasked with redoing or undoing our previous action. One of the most difficult moments for me was when one of our bosses, a 23-year-old with a GED and three children, reprimanded me as “an idiot” for not putting in a shelf correctly. It was much more difficult than I had imagined not to snap a reply about how I must have missed shelf-building 101 while I was getting my MBA.

Morale slowly dripped from our bodies leaving little puddles of broken spirit whenever we congregated for too long. We all struggled in vein to remain awake and alive, but Dave alone seemed to excel at remaining in high spirits. Although he didn’t always succeed, he always asked himself, “How can I have a positive attitude today?” He had set the goal for himself that, by the end of our time at Walmart, he would be offered full-time employment. Dave understood the importance of motivation and taught me that you can give your best no matter the circumstances.

Working at Walmart was awful. Doing awful things can be great. Climbing the educational ladder often puts distance between me and large swaths of people and experiences. I’m very certain that the average MBA graduate doesn’t challenge themselves in the ways that I was challenged working at Walmart. Spending so much time working with others every day gave me a lot of time to be myself. Spending a lot of time also working by myself, I was also able to analyze what being myself was. Where do I find fulfillment? How do I motivate myself? What are my goals? What is my attitude towards work? What is my attitude towards my bosses? I struggled with so many questions, but as with most of the summer I think that the struggle is just the first victory.

Think Like A Fish, Act Like A Fly

Fly fishing is more than a sport and more than an art. Fly fishing brings people together. Fly fishing brought Ron Smith and Timm Tews into our lives. Our whole group convened for our first lesson in a local fly shop called Angler’s Covey after closing. My first contact with fly fishing didn’t involve a rod or a reel. We learned about preparation, entomology, flies, knots, casting, and how fly fishing brought Ron and Timm closer to each other, closer to other men, and closer to God.

Our first foray into the water came at Rosemont Reservoir. On the way we picked up Vernon, a man with the presence and sagacity of a Native American chief. His years of experience have brought him to the conclusion that the proper way to approach the water is a three step process. First, examine your surroundings and appreciate the beauty of God’s creation. Second, read the water, examine the flow, and find the holes. Third, examine yourself, your intentions, and your place within God’s creation. Vernon taught me to respect the process and respect the fish. Under his tutelage I was able to hook my first fish, a beautiful 14-inch cutthroat trout. Perhaps it was beginners luck, but it gave me a small appreciation for the triumph of a successful day on the water.

My second experience with fishing would foreshadow much of what was to be my fate over the remainder of the summer. I bought an unlimited pass for the full year because I didn’t want to miss any of the action. I soon discovered, however, that my brief tast of action at Rosemont was not to be the norm. On a free Saturday morning, I decided to tag along with Chris and Grant up to Eleven Mile Canyon. While others slept, we scrambled down to the water’s edge and began trolling in earnest. My earnestness quickly evaporated with the mist in the morning sun, however, and I dropped my pole for a sketch pad and pencil. Although I may never be a great fisherman, I will always enjoy the process if only for the opportunity to commune with God in nature.

We would fish many more times over the summer and many times I would return to that sketch book and that same awe with the beauty of nature. What always brought me back to the fishing was the encouragement of the guides. Jeff Seltzner fancies himself a simple man, but when he’s put in front of a fly-tying station, he can create a nymph that could fool an entomologist. We were actually invited to take a riverside class in entomology and began learning about the intricacies of the lotic environment we were seeking to enter. One of my favorite guides, Ron Smith, is a gregarious social worker with a penchant for cigars and making comments that put the listener off balance. After comparing fishing to both hunting and sex, he final told me that, in order to catch a fish, one had to think like a fish and act like a fly. The beauty of fly fishing is this removal from self and empathy with the environment.

Sisyphus to Sand Mandala

Following our sojourn in the woods, we were exhausted. Our next two days were to be our only days off for the next two weeks. We spent them turning a kindergarten into a man cave replete with hatchets, racks of antlers, and a full caribou bust that we affectionately named Miranda after a girl we’d briefly met on our way up to the Powderhorns. A few of us got a chance to check out Old Colorado City during Territory Days, a huge festival celebrating Colorado’s pioneer past. We naively lamented our lack of work.

My first experience with day labor was almost exactly two years earlier. The summer before I began graduate school was the first break in my employment history since high school. I had decided to move into Fort Chestnut for the summer, but had no way of supporting myself. I felt like I had hit rock bottom when I went in to Labor Ready at 5am and spent four hours answering questions like “How often do you come to work under the influence of drugs/alcohol?” with the lowest answer being “Sometimes/Never”, but circumstances allowed that I never had to return after that day. I found that when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you’re often thrown a shovel and told to continue digging.

Corey and Brandon had each spent years working construction and so were assigned jobs guiding bike tours down nearby Pike’s Peak. The rest of us were remanded to Labor Finders until our permanent summer jobs began. The woman behind the desk called my name and offered me what she called a “boring job”. I told her that I was willing to do anything. I would soon find out what that meant.

I was assigned to the Fountain Dump. My job was to pick up bits of garbage that had blown off of the top of the trash heap, bag them up, and return the bags to the heap. I was eager to work, but at the same time I was severely humbled. I was performing the type of task you see state prisoners performing on the side of the road with two men whom I would later find to be ex-felons. The younger man, Jimmy, is 28 years old, on parole, and still had a poor attitude about the work we were doing. It seemed to me that his life had stagnated in a place of survival and not much else. Facing this dark possibility is facing some of my greatest fears: failure, desperation, and being alone.

Johnny is a middle-aged Mexican man from Los Angeles. A former truck driver and former state prisoner, Johnny has a wife and daughter that he is willing to do anything to support. He maintained a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, and a good relationship with his employers throughout the entire process. What surprised me was that he almost immediately took me under his wing. I quickly found that picking up trash has many more nuances than I had at first realized. When I became bogged down picking up the thousands of minute shards of garbage, Johnny assured me that most of the trash was insignificant and that I should focus on the more readily noticeable pieces that would cause the dump to fail an inspection.

The most frustrating part of the job was that, on a windy day, the job was basically futile. My second day on the job, a wind storm with 70 mph gusts and 50 mph sustained winds hit the dump. A series of fences were set up to catch the blowing trash and we would often work our way up the hill filling up bag after bag with this arrested debris. One of the few pleasures of the job was to finish a section of fence and look back at the fruit of my labor, a clean section of fence-line. In addition to the massive amounts of dust kicked up by the storm, these small victories were stolen from me. Often, during that day, the wind would not only replace the garbage as soon as I picked it up, but would actually replace it more quickly than I could work and so would more than negate my efforts. At this point, I began to despair that my task was akin to Sisyphus, condemned to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it fall back every time and be forced to begin again. I felt helpless to accomplish anything of value.

Over the next two weeks I would work as a road flagger, trailer gutter, and other menial positions. I valued the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the other guys in the program and also to meet some of the other people who were in a position of working day labor. I met ex-felons, drug addicts, and homeless people and found that each person had a fascinating, unique story. Although most people wouldn’t reciprocate, I would often probe my co-workers with questions about their current lives and how they arrived at this place.

The last week before beginning our permanent jobs, I had the opportunity to work for one of our guides, Jeff Stelzner, in his general contracting business. I was assigned to help a young guy named Toast work on a house flip. I would soon realize that Toast, although similar to me in age, had accumulated much more wisdom than I. He bought me lunch and quickly began opening up to me about his personal story along with his hopes and ambitions for the future. What impressed me most was his genuine interest in my life and his outlook on work. Toast explained to me that, in his life, work is worship. He glorifies God with his positive attitude and his attention to quality and detail.

There is a practice among Buddhist monks called sand mandala. Groups of monks will carefully form swirls of sand of every hue and tint into intricate works of art. These sand paintings will sometimes grow as large as a room and consume hundreds of man-hours. Invariably, upon completion, the monks will pour the sand back to the earth, wiping their slate clean. The fact that their work will ultimately be destroyed does not deter the monks from creating beauty and joy. Perhaps all work is the same way.

Wide Open Spaces

When I’m preparing for a trip, people often ask me if I’m excited. I usually tell them, “No,” because excitement is too close to nervousness. I try to keep the trip in abstract terms and put off the emotions until I’m on the airplane with no turning back. I staved off nervousness for my trip west until the night before leaving. Sleep largely eluded me, which would become a pattern.

I was picked up by Brett Causey at the airport and whisked to Cory Smith’s house for a pre-program video interview. I tried to avoid expectations as much as possible before embarking upon this adventure. I wanted to let the experience change me in whatever way it would.

In the backyard, I found an old garage converted into a man cave and the seven other guys with whom I would be living and working. I was first introduced to James Herr. A tall, lanky guy, his glasses and business casual attire gave him the appearance of someone older. His unique situation of having lived in Colorado Springs for the preceding year and having a full-time job as well as a new girlfriend made integration into the group more difficult, but within a few weeks his exuberant personality overcame these obstacles. Corey Woosley seemed to me to be the consummate surfer dude with the bleach blonde hair and the chill attitude. What I would find out over the next few weeks was how much reckless abandon this chill dude had for finding God and finding his purpose. Brandon Campbell, along with Corey, had spent most of his life boating, surfing, and fishing along the Sarasota coastline. As the oldest two group members, Brandon and Corey came in with a sense of urgency which translated into a refreshing willingness to question everything. Matt Guthrie, our youngest member, came to us via the University of Tennesee with an unending well of entertaining stories of childhood pranks and youthful escapades. He would use his humor to both entertain and share about himself. “Big Wave” Dave Lantz is the most conservative of us all. His unique position as a teetotaling Bible Studies major has given him a great opportunity to challenge himself and others. Grant Williams tends to keep his emotions and sharing on a low, even keel, but he has some great stories if you can pull them out. Chris Fedyschyn is a new Christian with the wisdom of one of our guides. He has been able to connect the most with each member of our motley crew and often organizes our disparate jumble of personalities and ideas. Chris and I decided to take our sleeping bags up on top of the roof of Cory’s garage, but the cold kept me awake most of the night.

At 6 AM we awoke to load up for the drive out to the Powderhorn. After a two hour drive we made it to the Flying W ranch. The staff helped us repack our packs and gave us lunch before driving us another 5 miles into the mountains. Miranda, one of the young staff members, gave us a bag of granola to celebrate our summit on the second day. Her idea of granola as some sort of orgasmic reward has earned her a place in our communal lore. Her eponymous caribou bust hangs over us as we learn about God. The remainder of the afternoon was spent hiking the road up to the trail head. Although the altitude and gradient were challenging, the most time consuming portions of the hike were the frequent wardrobe changes in and out of our snowshoes. We made camp at the trail head after an exhausting two and a half mile tramp. The wind whipped up and began buffeting our tents and our camp fire. The question of the night revolved around Jesus’ invitation to a band of poor fishermen to drop everything and come with him. What did they leave behind them to follow him and what did we want to leave behind as we embarked on a similar journey?

Our second day in the wilderness began much in the same way as the first. A 6 AM wakeup call followed a night largely devoid of sleep. We broke camp and quickly got on the trail before just as quickly losing said trail in six to eight foot snow drifts. I quickly fell to the back to quietly struggle with the altitude and exertion for most of the day. The silent beauty and breathtaking vistas faded in and out of my consciousness in between tumbles down snow banks and upended forest floors that demanded my undivided attention. My mind wandered through the graveyard of reasons for coming out here. Past relationships, past mistakes, and a past life invaded my thoughts. “Mama always said, ‘You’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.’ I think maybe that’s what my running was all about.” As progress ground to a halt with no sign of our destination, we made camp for the night on a snow pack.

Another sun rose over another sleepless night. The problem with camping on top of the snow, as I found out, is that when you have to relieve yourself a 2 AM you will most likely fall through. My solace from a frozen right leg was the beauty of the stars. In our first two days, we had managed only two and a half miles per day. The third day was our long march. We skimmed above the still-frozen snow and fell into a steady rhythm as soon as we stumbled upon the trail. The way down the mountain took us through shivering aspen groves and stands of ancient pines. On the far side of seven and a half miles, I was struggling with the exhaustion of three nights without sleep and the pain of humping a fifty pound pack over twelve miles. Cory pushed us to finish the fourth day’s itinerary as well and, as we slumped down waiting to be extracted, he asked us the question, “What do you want to get out of this experience?”

In Green Street Hooligans, Elijah Woods’ character muses, “Once you’ve taken a few punches and realized that you’re not made of glass, you’re not comfortable unless you’re pushing your limits.” I’m here to take some punches and push my limits. When we arrived at our new home on West Cucharras, I dumped my gear and collapsed into bed. I usually spend my time before bed decompressing after the day, but my brain was overwhelmed by how comfortable I was as I melted into a deep sleep.

Go West, Young Man

In the ten years that I've spent in Winter Park, I've made great memories and great friends. In many ways I am sad to leave Rollins, my home for so many years and the cradle of my adulthood. It is here that I have learned the meaning of love and friendship.

Now I continue my learning. Now I leave comfort behind. Now I debouch upon a newer mightier world.