Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

Perhaps the only thing scarier than knowing that your life must change is to start changing.

For the last few weeks, Michelle and I have been seemingly inundated with subtle and not-so-subtle hints that something about our lives needs to change. The veil of smoke that I talk so often about seems to have lifted permanently, and we now look at our lives quite a bit differently.

We’re under 30 and we’re part of the top .0001% richest people in the world. We don’t buy a lot of things, but we get to do whatever we want pretty much whenever we want. We get to go on three week vacations to South America, eat out at fancy restaurants in the city. We can buy Christmas presents for our family and not worry about whether we can cover the bill. We have no credit card debt and save about a third of what we make. By all indications we’re doing well.

We spend time with our family and friends. We work hard at our jobs - she’s become an expert in her field already, and I have the job I was told would take 15 years to attain in college. We go to church and participate in a Bible study. We exercise fairly regularly. We read all the time. We’re basically living the life we talked about when we first started dating.

Up until a month ago I would have considered us to be living the perfect life. But then God messed everything up.

Not everyone believes in God or Christianity, and that’s fine. For them, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the above. But I’ve started to realize that there is something wrong with the above if you are a Christian. Trouble is, almost no one tells you that.

We’re told that we’re supposed to say a prayer and then we get to go to heaven. We’re told that we’re supposed to find nice husbands and wives and have nice, pleasant children together. We’re told that we should give 10% of what we make to the church or some charitable organization, but that the other 90% is all ours to do as we wish, even if that means buying an enormous house and five cars. We’re told that while there are terrible things going on in other parts of the world, there’s nothing we can realistically do other than write checks or pray about it. We’re told that America is God’s country, and when we go and blow people up in God’s name it’s a righteous thing to do.

Again, if you aren’t from my background some or all of that may sound foreign or silly or scary to you. If you did grow up like me, a lot of that sounds familiar.

The problem is that I think it might all be wrong.

I think that there’s a chance that we’ve become “selective hearers”, taking the parts of the Gospel we like, ignoring the parts that we don’t.

I think that there’s a chance Jesus wasn’t speaking in hyperbole when he said that for the rich man to be saved he had to give up everything he had and give it to the poor. I think he might have actually meant it when he said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

I think he might have been serious when he said that the last will be first and the first will be last, which puts me in a pretty bad spot.

I think he might have actually meant it when he said that when you clothed the naked and fed the hungry you were clothing and feeding him….and that by not doing those things you were leaving him hungry and naked.

I think he probably serious when he asked why people call him “Lord, Lord” but then didn’t do what he said.

I think that he would be shocked to see my closet full of clothes when he told us that if we have two coats we should give one to the person who needs it.

I think he meant what he said when he suggested that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t something that happens when you die, but also begins right here on Earth. I also think that, given how he talked and spent his time, that such a kingdom probably isn’t in large church buildings in the suburbs, but rather in homeless shelters, in elderly homes, in the urban areas of America and the destitute places around the world. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur.

I think that Christ would probably have looked at 21st century America and thought it eerily similar to the Roman Empire, with it’s idea that peace is brought by conquest and that loyalty to the state is the most important thing in the world.

I think he would be shocked to see how Christians wave their flags and shout about killing in the name of God. I think he would wonder how we could have taken what he said about peace and love and reconciliation and turned it into war and revenge and retaliation.

I think he would wonder how we could sit in church and watch some video about African children dying because they lack drinking water, produced by an organization desperately hoping to wake us up, only to find us forget immediately as we leave the service and hop back into our SUVs on our way to brunch.

I think he would look at his church and weep. I think he looks at me and weeps. No wonder so many people think Christianity isn’t attractive - who wants to join a bunch of people who ignore what we claim we believe?

For the first time, my wife and I are looking at a world that is truly broken, and wondering if the way we’re living our lives makes sense in that context. We’re wondering what God plan is for us, given our unique skills, occupying this unique place in time. We’re wondering if there aren’t better ways for us to use our money and free time. We’re wondering what all of this means in the context of our work, entertainment, family, friends.

A lot of larger decisions are way too scary to consider right now. But we have made some small decisions that we’re just starting to explore.

We’re trying to take our commitment to preserving God’s creation seriously. We’re turning our computers off when we’re not using them and running them on the lowest brightness setting when we are. We’re turning off lights we aren’t using and buying energy efficient bulbs. We’re not running the heater (or the AC whenever summer actually arrives). We’re trying to figure out whether it makes sense to have Netflix send us a DVD from 1000 miles away when we have the Internet right in front of us. Or a book. We’re looking into carbon offsets.

I’ve started working from home more often rather than traveling to Evanston just so I can be around people. When it gets warmer, I’m thinking about taking the bike out as an alternative.

We’re going through our closets to see what clothing we can get rid of. We’re looking at our bookshelves to see if there are books that we don’t need that others could use.

We’re going to try and break the bottled water habit. We’re starting to buy only fair trade coffee, or organic tea. We’ve started trying to cut down on the amount of meat we eat, and have started cooking vegetarian recipes. We’re thinking about growing herbs in our back porch.

We’re starting to donate to Living Water international to help dig deep water wells. We’re going to start making meals for the local homeless shelter. We’re considering getting involved in the homeless ministry at our church.

Long term, we’re talking about how we can organize our lives around what God truly finds important. We’re talking about how to get involved in our community instead of moving away from it. We’re talking about what our buying habits should be given the heartbreaking need all around us. We’re talking about how we should approach investing and what constitutes responsible saving versus hoarding, keeping in mind Christ’s desire to live on what you need and use the rest to help others.

These are all small changes, and even they feel a little bit ridiculous given the monstrous difference between how we live and how others live, both across the ocean and across the street. But we have to start somewhere. I’ve detected a pattern in my life where I talk about something long before I do anything about it, and I’m desperately hoping to remedy that. I feel like these small steps are definitely in the right direction.

None of this is being shared to pat myself on the back - in fact, it makes me sad how many things we talked about doing we’ve backed down from. I think we’re barely scratching the surface of this thing, and right now we’re too afraid to do anything huge.

We still have a lot more questions than answers, and honestly we’re really nervous about the direction our lives will take in the next few years. There will undoubtedly be plenty of people who will think we’re strange for not living at or above our means. And while we have no plans to grow out dreadlocks or start smelling strange, there’s a chance some of our friends might think we’re too weird and stop hanging out with us.

I hope you’re not one of them.

So it’s been about six months since I made the switch to a Mac. It’s amazing to think about how much better my work life has been because of it. As someone who designed, coded, etc. on PCs for years, I used to bristle hearing that kind of hyperbole. How could a machine possibly make your life that much better?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

But it really does. Apple spent considerable time thinking about how people actually work. From the way the trackpad works to the ease of switching between apps…you actually enjoy the process of working on the machine. Just off the top of my head, I can point to several considerable advantages.

• The fact that it can be opened and closed in a second without having to completely reboot - I move from place to place fairly often and it’s awesome to be able to pick right up where I left off.
• The ability to open PSD files in Preview (or even directly in Mail) without having to load up Photoshop every time.
• Installing/detecting printers - the NY office has 5 printers on the network. Before it would’ve taken our IT guy 20 minutes sitting in front of my machine to get me up and running. The Mac just finds them on its own, looks for the necessary software and it’s done.
• The dock - I thought it looked silly at first, but it really makes a difference for me. I’ve always hated having a cluttered desktop - having the dock gives me all my common programs instantly available without a ton of icons on my desktop as an ever-present distraction.
• The trackpad - the two finger scrolling, etc. makes navigating around pages so easy.
• App crashes are few and far between, and there’s no bulky spyware software to slow things down.
• Finder makes it ridiculously easy to find whatever I need.
• The keyboard shortcuts - I can control Expose, Finder, etc. super fast, without having to use the trackpad or open anything up.
• The Terminal gives you all kinds of power to get under the hood, in a language most developers are at least somewhat familiar with.
• The love and attention on getting the user experience right was wore off on app developers as well. There is so much free or inexpensive software that is a joy to use, and that play really nicely with the OS (and often each other.)

Love is all around

People find it funny to see someone become such a convert so fast, but it really is such a wonderful machine. But it’s not just the Mac itself that’s made a difference, but the amazing software that is available as well. For anyone who’s a web developer or designer, having a Mac is such an improvement it’s hard to put into words. It’s amazing, but half of the work I do these days is on software I’d never heard of months ago. The ease of use, the gentle learning curve and the feature sets make learning and adopting new software painless.

For both people interested, my current setup includes the following:

• Entourage (I was using Mail.app until last week, when we got set up with an Exchange server at work. Oh well…)
• Photoshop (and lots of paper) for mockup work
• Powerpoint for the frequent presentations (I learned my lesson the hard way after designing three presentations in Keynote only to have to port them over so others could use them.
• Transmit for FTP - haven’t made the switch yet to Coda. For some reason, the integration of all the tools doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement to me. Keep in mind I’m generally wrong.
• Textmate for coding - can’t even begin to express how much I love this.
• Twitterific for keeping tabs on people’s updates
• Journler for writing meeting notes, drafting blog posts, etc.
• Skitch for giving people feedback on mockups or sharing ideas
• Fluid to run stand-alone versions of GMail and Basecamp
• Snapz Pro - this program is one of two that have done the most for me. I use it to record user testing to improve our interfaces, and recently started using it to make screencasts of anything I need to show people. It literally takes less time for me to record a screencast on how to use Wordpress or our Admin at work and send it to someone than it does to call them and explain it over the phone. An absolute life-saver.
• OmniFocus - I would try to explain to you how much I love this application, but you wouldn’t believe me. Let’s just say that if you’ve ever read Getting Things Done, this application will make implementing your trusted system ridiculously easy. I literally have everything I need to do personally or professionally, next week or 6 months from now, in this program. David Allen is right - you have no idea how much less stress you feel when your mind knows where to go to find your list of to-dos and action items.

There are plenty of others that people swear by, like Coda, Adium, Growl, etc. I still don’t get why Quicksilver is the greatest thing in the world, but people love it. But even with the small set of tools I use above, my working days have been transformed.

Needless to say, I’d recommend a Mac to anyone who will listen. It really, truly is that much of a difference.

After spending the past few weeks talking about my life and the direction I want to go in long-term, and after a number of intense, heartfelt conversations with my wife about our goals as a family, I made a decision to change careers and become a clown.

Anyone who’s known me for a while knows of my consistent efforts to try to make people laugh (some of you have even been unfortunate enough to witness my old days as a stand-up comedian during and shortly after college.) I feel like this is an opportunity to channel that energy trying to make people happy in a direction that I can actually be paid for. It’ll also represent a new challenge, as slapstick has not historically been a strong suit of mine (although it can’t be any less funny than my usual material.)

It obviously will be a huge change for me, not just in terms of my income and the type of work I’ll be doing, but in a philosophical way as well. As one can imagine, there isn’t exactly a career path for clowns - a few make it to traveling circuses (circi?) and the like, but the majority of them stay in their communities locally and perform gigs on a contract basis.
The biggest challenge through all this has been me overcoming my natural drive to want to achieve and move up - it will hopefully teach me some necessary humility and teach me to approach my work more like a craftsman or artisan, less like a businessperson. Although who knows - maybe I’ll eventually leverage my contacts in the industry and create a clown-finder directory site. Not a bad idea…

Thankfully I have the support of my loving wife on this - I was shocked but she was actually really enthusiastic about it. I think she’s secretly excited about being able to use the extra makeup, but she seems really sincere.

So yeah, I’m super nervous, excited, and scared all at once. I’ll continue of course to post my progress through clown school here as I complete the curriculum. I imagine it’ll be pretty interesting…

I had a long conversation with my old friend Courtney last night. She’s heading down to Tanzania for six months, her second trip to the country. This time she’s helping an organization that trains rats to a) find and detonate land mines, and b) identify tuberculosis (apparently by smelling a petri dish with a saliva sample they can correctly identify TB with a higher success rate than doctors.)

I’ve been friends with this girl for 10 years, and the entire time her life has been a shining example of someone making a difference. Whether it was working with rape victims in college or helping AIDS patients or teaching African communities about gender equality or planning events to raise money supporting ecotourism and sustainable development or working with Make-A-Wish or genius rats…everything has been about helping others and trying to address some of the largest problems in society today.

When we were in high school together we were often lumped together when people would talk about overachieving students - we were in the same organizations, went to the same functions, were offered the same scholarships.

And then our paths diverged. I decided to go into business and she went into non-profit work. Which would be fine, if we had both held onto the ideals that drove us. But one of us forgot about most of what he cared about. One of us forgot that his life and talents and abilities aren’t ultimately for the benefit of himself but for the world around him.

One of us abandoned service while the other came to epitomize it.

It’s hard realizing how far off that track I went. It’s not just a matter of the organizations you choose to work for - helping kids find a college and then stay in school is a noble enterprise. It’s more about motive - what drives me to do what I do. And if I’m honest with myself, it’s almost entirely about doing work that I enjoy personally and being rewarded for it - no more, no less.

My wife and I talk often about our goals - what we think we want to be doing in 5 years, 10 years. And until recently, those conversations centered around where we wanted to live, what kind of house we wanted, the places we wanted to visit, when the right time would be to have little ones, etc. When work came up, I’d talk about the entrepreneurial venture I’d start that’d bring me excitement and challenges (and if I’m honest, rewards for my bank account and my ego.)

I recently heard a sermon talking about this couple that followed a similar path. They worked hard and saved and were able to retire early, and spend the rest of their lives traveling around the world, gathering photos and seashells and memories of wonderful food and activities. And when they died and got to Heaven, God asked them what they did with their lives, with the time granted them. All they could offer him was a handful of pretty seashells. The pastor’s conclusion - “What a colossal waste of life.”

Thankfully, those conversations in my house have started to change. I’m realizing (or more accurately remembering) that my life is supposed to be about more. I ache with sadness at the countless opportunities passed by over the last 10 years, but am starting to be encouraged about what I can do with my life in the future.

Though it will certainly manifest itself differently, I’m hopeful I will have the courage to follow in Courtney’s footsteps. I know there are no shortage of sedatives lurking around every corner, aiming to knock me back into a stupor of comfort and safety and self-centeredness until I wake up an old, greedy, miserable man. They’re opiates I’ve fallen for hundreds of times in these 10 short years, and it will certainly take effort to force my brain off the well-established track it’s found itself on.

It will require substantial changes in habits, in my choices about how I spend my time, what I read, what I dream about. It will require a lot of learning and re-learning - It’s been so long since I focused on things outside of my own needs and wants that I haven’t the faintest idea what directions I should start directing my energy and free time.

Luckily I’m not alone - I have a small group of people that can serve as my inspiration and sounding board, my muse and my source for accountability. And in my wife I have the most concentrated ball of energy and support and love anyone has ever been fortunate enough to be around. And ultimately I have a God that has probably been waiting for me to wake up for a long time, and that wants more than anything to take the special gifts he’s given me and use them to make the amazing creation that is his world a little better.

Make yourself a cup of coffee and spend the next 17 minutes watching this - it’s worth it:

One of my favorite words for years has been discipline. I love the idea of someone being so passionate about something that they’re willing to spend hours every day working on it. A skill or talent that takes years to develop. Overcoming one’s urges or addictions little by little and prevailing. Chasing a dream that to many seems foolish and finally attaining it by working harder than everyone else.

But recently, I started thinking about a similar word - disciple. I’m not sure which one came first, but I found it odd that while I always considered myself a person of discipline, I never considered myself a disciple. Truthfully, I never wanted to be.

I bet that people in the first century would have found that odd. I bet that back then, if you were a follower of Christ it was assumed that you would be a disciple. After all, to be a disciple means to, slowly and over time, become the kind of person who thinks and acts like the person they are following. And if you believed that Christ was who he said he was and took seriously his command to put down your nets, pick up your cross and follow him, it would seem that becoming a disciple was not the exception but the rule.

But somewhere along the way that changed. Perhaps it happened hundreds of years ago after Christians stopped being nailed to crosses or stoned to death or fed to lions in front of angry crowds. Perhaps it happened in the 20th century as humanism (and man’s happiness and comfort) became the objective of mankind. Who knows. But at some point it became not just accepted but normal to be a believer but not be a disciple.

To think one way but do (or not do) another.

To talk the talk but not walk the walk.

To call Christ your master but ignore his desire for your life.

I know this has been the case for me, and it has been the case for just about everyone I’ve ever met. The arguments against discipleship almost immediately bubble up - that not everyone is called to do that, that I don’t feel God leading me in that direction, etc etc etc.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more wrong I think that is. The more wrong I think I’ve been my entire life.

You see, Christ rarely talks about heaven, about a life after death. He spends the majority of his time talking about how to bring heaven here to earth - about how by loving each other and caring for the poor and seeking peace and avoiding anger and sharing our gifts and talents with each other we can bring God’s kingdom to our world now.

But very few Christians (myself included) don’t live this way. For us, Christianity is about saying “the prayer” so we don’t go to hell, and then living our lives pretty much the same way we would have otherwise. Only with less cursing. Out loud at least.

Some go further and talk about “growing in their walk with God”, but that doesn’t really mean much other than going to church and praying more often and reading the Bible some more. And when we’re not doing that we’re still ignoring the homeless guy en route to our fancy cars with the bags of fancy clothes in the back that we’ll try on when we get back to our fancy house, careful not to brake too fast lest we spill our fancy coffee drink in our laps and ruin our fancy pants.

No wonder so many people think God is dead. Our lives are no different than they would be if we believed in the tooth fairy. We’re not disciples, we’re just believers. And we sit here, watching Season One of 30 Rock for the third time after another long week at work, waiting to die.

I think there’s another way.

A way that starts with a decision to actually take God up on his offer. A decision to actively learn to walk and talk and act and think the way that Christ did. A decision to become a disciple.

It’s a very recent realization, and I haven’t the slightest idea what a life like that would be like in modern America. But I imagine it involves constructing my days quite differently than I currently do.

I imagine it means not sleeping in until 11 on Saturday, or spending three hours getting my butt kicked by a 9 year-old in Madden football on a Sunday afternoon.

I imagine it means centering my life around the same disciplines of study, prayer, solitude, fasting, simplicity, and the like that hundreds of Christians before us have used to draw closer to God.

I imagine it means working my tail off at work, not for a promotion or money or equity or bragging rights but because God gave me breath and and a brain and the ability to make things look pretty and words sound compelling.

I imagine it means being much slower to anger, not allowing myself the demented joy that comes from holding a grudge.

I imagine it means sitting down with my wife and honestly assessing how we spend our money, and determining how much we’d need to give away in order to truly be stewards instead of misers.

Most importantly, I imagine it means asking God what he really wants me to do with my life - what my part to play is in this grand plan to bring heaven to earth.

I imagine it means to stop sitting on the sidelines.

Belief is easy. Following is much more difficult.

So I’ve been playing basketball for about 9 months now, and have come to a startling realization.

I’ve become a ball-hog. And a terrible defender.

Somewhere after junior high, when I was known for being the most turnover-prone point guard in Colorado Springs sports history, I became a pretty good shooter. In college intramurals I was able to put up some pretty solid numbers, but I still had a mentality of passing first and shooting second.

I also taught myself eventually to hustle on defense. I took pride in trying to man up on one of the better guys on the other team to see if I could slow them down. Sometimes it worked and sometimes I humiliated myself, but by the time I had graduated I could handle myself.

My how time has changed things. Part of the bad defense can be explained by the fact that I’m in terrible shape, made progressively worse with what must be shin splints. But the shooting - it’s a tough thing to realize that the more times you shoot the more points your team loses by. Sure, some go in - I actually had my best scoring game ever in my fall league. But I’m in the middle of a 14 game losing streak dating back to October and the one constant has been that I shoot more than anyone else on the team.

If your team is going to lose every game, they might as well have fun. And playing with someone like myself in my current form isn’t that much fun. You don’t get to take shots because he’s heaving up anything that comes his way. You’re having to help cover the guy that just blew by him on the other end of the court. And you have to watch the other team’s score constantly tick up in the process.

I have a few games left in the season, and I’m hoping it’s a trend I can turn around. Because as long as I play like this it doesn’t matter whether I put up 25 points or 4. Two things will remain the same - my team will lose and my teammates will want to shoot me.