IVP - Strangely Dim

The Winter of Our Disconnect

by David Zimmerman

I get to know my neighbors in six-month installments. They’re within walking distance, so there’s doesn’t seem to be any point in calling them on the phone; e-mailing them likewise seems too . . . distant. Nevertheless, come winter they might as well drop off the face of the earth. We lose all contact. Blame the weather, blame network television programming schedules, speculate about a human hibernation impulse—however you slice it, I know that the last time I saw my neighbors is likely the last time I’ll see my neighbors till the leaves start growing back on the trees.

I suppose that’s not always a bad thing. If familiarity breeds contempt, then a built-in check against familiarity goes a long way toward keeping us civil toward one another. But that would be nothing more than a side-effect; unfamiliarity does its own breeding.

We have imaginations of what people are really like, and I don’t know about you, but my imaginations keep people at a pretty subhuman level. Neighbors who are soft-spoken in my presence make hardly a peep all winter; I imagine them shuffling around in a zombielike state, waiting for me—their fair-weather messiah—to breathe some type of life into their semiconscious bones. Neighbors who like to have parties, I imagine, spend all winter alone in a drunken stupor, waiting for me to give them some reason for temperance.

It’s hard to recall that our seasonal friends and neighbors continue to exist once we close the door on them, mostly because we have our own lives to live, and our transition from summer to winter is seamless to our own eyes. But my neighbors do go on living, and even thriving, without my regular intervention. I said goodbye to one neighbor last fall, and hello to her newborn when spring came along. Next time I see the baby, she’ll probably be picking all my flowers and tramping on all my plants.

It’s a good thing my neighbors don’t count on me for their existence, and it’s good that I don’t have to count on them. If God were given to hibernation, would we ever see the light of day again?

Halloween, Schmalloween

by Dave Zimmerman

I thought it might make for a good, timely column to look at the history of Halloween, but then I realized that I don’t care about the history of Halloween.

When I was a kid, I cared. The tradition surrounding Halloween in my community was that candy would be exchanged for jokes or riddles. We would dress up and approach our neighbors with a hearty “Trick or Treat!” They would open the door and admire our costumes, and the barter would begin.

I would wait my turn as my brother told his joke and received his candy. Then I would tell my joke and receive precisely the same amount of candy, and my sister would follow in turn. Then we’d move to the next house and tell the same jokes. My dad, who was following us around, protecting us from fearsome creatures of the late afternoon, would occasionally be rewarded for his diligence with a can of beer.

But these days, I don’t care. You might expect someone who works at a Christian company to get exercised over Halloween. After all, the hype connects it to the occult, to satanism, to evil. And countercultural Christians link it to All Saints Day, a celebration of the people of God. The whole climate of Halloween invites passionately held opinions—Halloween is virtually a battle between good and evil.

Perhaps I should establish that I vehemently disagree with evil and Satan, but Halloween itself is so . . . so lame. Really, what is so celebratory or even threatening about grade-school kids dressing up like witches or ballerinas and hitting people up for candy? At least at Easter kids have to hunt for their food; at Halloween kids are rewarded simply for being cute. If I were to ask any of the endless stream of children who this year will be eating all my bite-sized Twix bars “What keeps us celebrating Halloween?” I would be met with as glazed an expression as a mummy on a sugar-buzz can offer.

Holidays such as Christmas and Easter are given weight by the Christian faith—these dates mark nothing less than the birth and the resurrection of the Savior of the world. National holidays such as Independence Day and Martin Luther King Day are guarded by the U.S. government as memorials to key events and figures in national history. But then there’s Halloween, which every year shows more and tells less.

The Scriptures commissioned the Israelites to not lose sight of important events. Israelite children would learn the significance of the Passover because their parents were given the words to say: “When your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians’ ” (Exodus 12:26-27).

Halloween doesn’t even compare to the Passover. But the kids look so darned cute in their costumes, and a neighborhood gets closer by the simple act of handing bite-sized Twix bars to one another. I suppose some moments can be enjoyed simply for the temporary happiness they afford us, and the sugar coma that follows Halloween as inevitably as All Saints Day affords us the chance to clear our minds and prepare our hearts for the Advent that lies ahead.

Discipleship of the Wit

by Dave Zimmerman

Sometimes I’m so funny that I feel guilty about it. Other times I’m so unfunny that I feel the need to be forgiven.

I take humor seriously, perhaps too seriously. For example, how can I be funny without being mean-spirited? Is there a greater purpose to an off-hand humorous remark, or am I wasting my breath when I go for a quick laugh? Do we hide our true beliefs in humor, and if so, should we confront people when they are joking around?

But humor is necessarily fast-paced, action-packed. We prize the quick-witted, who draw humor out of a comment or situation without delay. How many of us have reflected on a conversation only to come up with a potentially classic but now-useless one-liner? One character on the television show Seinfeld spent an entire episode orchestrating events so that he could use his one-liner-come-lately on his rival, only to be one-upped barely a breath mark after he finally made his play. Timing is everything to humor; there’s no time to reflect on it.

Fundamentally, humor is a means to an end. “A cheerful heart has a continual feast,” says the writer of Proverbs 15:15, and what could be wrong about a continual feast? Only gluttony, perhaps, or maybe feasting while others are being starved. Oops—it seems even a cheerful heart is an ethical matter. A morally responsible person must come to terms with how humor can be used without being abused.

What strikes you as funny? What’s so funny about these things? We need to look deeper than “such-and-such makes me laugh” to understand what’s happening to us and around us when we pursue humor. Humor is prophetic in its own way; whether we want it to or not, our humor has an impact on our community that must be measured against our own self-interest. There is a time for laughter, most certainly, but there is a time for no laughter.

Humor properly understood gives us insight into who we are and who we ought to be, and points us to a middle ground between delusional arrogance and debilitating self-deprecation. When we can identify what is silly in and around us, we can begin to address such absurdities without defensiveness and continue to grow into the person and people God made us to be. Humor also makes us laugh, by the way, which makes for a nice side-effect.

I’ll close with my wife’s favorite joke. You’ll probably groan, but you’ll also probably grin.

Q: What should you say when the Statue of Liberty sneezes?
A: God bless America!

Is the Employee of My Employer My Friend?

by David Zimmerman
Let’s say you sleep eight hours per day. (It’s OK, we can say it, at least.) Now let’s say that you are employed in full-time work—another eight hours per day. Then let’s say that you spend two hours alone (driving to and from work or school, or waiting for other people to get home, or dressing or undressing), one hour eating, three hours entertaining yourself or your loved ones, and two hours doing chores or homework. Quibble all you like about the breakdown, and you’ll still wind up with sleep and work filling the overwhelming majority of your time.

Given the fact that precious little relational activity takes place during sleep (except perhaps the territorial elbow poking and blanket swiping that accompanies bedmate politics—which would be a good topic for some other article), the associations you have during your working hours dominate your relational life. You may live with your kids or your parents or your roommates, but you say goodbye to them after eight hours of sleep and touch base with them for about two hours per diem if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, you work alongside particular people of a particular setting in a predictable pattern much more than that, and you’re supposed to be awake for pretty much all of it. And yet, workplace relationships are often our most superficial.

I can sympathize with the fear of deep friendships at work. Office hierarchy may get in the way of authentic friendship, such that employers might even be tempted to lay off employees just to get some quality time with them. Some jobs are transient—we work while we shop for a better offer. Some workplaces are politically volatile—coworkers wait for you to say the wrong thing, then pounce and feed on your failure. Some working environments are even sexually charged—fast-paced collaborations turn into intense emotional attachments, or coworkers use power as flirtation or flirtation as power.

No one appears more two-dimensional than a coworker. We have our jobs to do, our agendas to pursue, and if our coworkers are not for us, they are against us. End of discussion. But presume for a moment that your coworkers are fully formed human beings with histories and destinies, created by a personal God, infused with life by a personal Holy Spirit, suffered and died for by a personal Savior. Suddenly the coworkers seem more important than the work.

Obviously the work remains, and you shouldn’t expect a big bonus at the end of the year if you can name every coworker’s favorite color but can’t name a single task you’ve completed. Still, a place and occupation that occupies so much of our lives ought to be a place that nourishes our spirits and channels our calling as a royal priesthood. That, ultimately, is our real job, and we all report to the same boss.

Pools, People and Other Works in Progress

by Dave Zimmerman

A friend of mine called to tell me about an argument he had with his wife. He was refreshingly contrite, aware of his own failings that contributed to the conflict, but also aware of the problem he was trying to address. He became increasingly upset as he watched his character flaws frustrate an overdue discussion.

I was glad for the call; I had been fighting a losing battle with my above-ground pool. If you own one, you understand: you scrub its walls, scoop out the leaves that fall constantly from surrounding trees, pour in chemicals and filter out toxins, skim the floating dandelion fluffs and water bugs off the surface, and occasionally wonder what you would do with more square footage of lawn in your backyard. Meanwhile the pool continues to be uninhabitable (unless you are a water bug) until the moment when the water comes clear and the chemicals balance out. Congratulations: your pool is now usable for the next forty-five minutes. Hope the water’s warm.

Pools and people have this in common: the whole is affected by the presence of corruption. Chemically speaking, pool water is corrupted by decaying leaves, breeding algae and flaking skin cells. Theologically speaking, people are corrupted by a sinful nature.

Not every choice is foolish and not every act bad, but every aspect of our personhood must contend with the fact that linked to our nature, leeching our virtue, is the perpetual stain of original sin. We were created good but infected early, and we are continually frustrated by its intrusion into our noble pursuits. It affects how I write this article: Do I write out of sheer benevolence, the desire to share what I’ve learned with a needy audience? Or do I write out of arrogance, thinking I have something worth sharing with people who in reality are likely better than I? Do I write out of a need to prove something to my boss, my parents, my spouse, myself, my God? And what I write may have its good points, but do I even want to know its bad points?

I am an editor, and I respect the editorial task, which is not to say I enjoy it. An editor commits to scrubbing and scooping and skimming and priming and filtering the writer’s work for what is valuable. Of course, the editor is no less sinful than the writer, which I remind myself occasionally as I edit and more frequently as I write. But a second perspective has a different set of failings and foibles to contend with, and four semi-blind eyes are better than two.

People, like pools and manuscripts, are works in progress vulnerable to error and misjudgment. That being the case, people benefit from having at least one editor, one person committed to their success who will draw out their best and confront their worst. I crave editing like I crave dental work, but I need editing perhaps even more than a good drill in the mouth. So does everyone. My friend had the courage to submit his life to an editorial eye. May he have the clarity to filter my failings out of my perspective and bring the best out of his own life.