Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

The Twitter Cleanup

This essay published

In one of her Lord Peter Whimsy books, Dorothy Sayers has Whimsy talk about books in a person’s library. He says that they mark a person’s history and are markers of their journey – that we move from book to book like a hermit crab outgrowing its shell, leaving the old husk behind.

That is how I felt Thursday, when I reviewed my list of people I follow on Twitter.

There were the nerds from back in 2007 and 2008. The people who work in homelessness I found in 2008 and 2009. The theology people came next, followed by the activists.

They were all markers of the journey I have been on the last ten years.

When I moved to Raleigh in August of 2007, Twitter was my jam. It was all new and we were all trying to learn how to live in this social media world.

Twitter was just over a year old at that point, and had blown up in March of ‘07, after it was profiled at South by Southwest that year. Because that is where we heard about it, most of us in those days were nerds.

But over time it grew, and I would follow people with reckless abandon. And the more people I followed, the less I enjoyed it. What had once been fun became a chore, and all the incoming data filled me with anxiety. By the time Ferguson hit in 2014, I was done.

Once a year or so, I would miss it enough to go check in, change my profile pic, update my bio – but we both knew it was over.

I recently have been trying to be intentional with the place Social Media sits in my life. I cleaned up Facebook, and after siting with that a while felt like I might have the energy to reexamine Twitter.

As a result, I unfollowed more than 500 folks, most of whom were talking heads or people I had no relationship with whatsoever. Many of them I had just automatically followed when they followed me. (I never recommend you do this.)

I don’t know that this is the answer to my rejoining Twitter in an active way, but it already feels calmer over there. If you want, you can follow me there at @hughlh. I might even follow you back.

Dave Comes Home

This essay published

A story from within the life of my community. 

The first time Dave came to church, he was pretty tentative.

Frank, a regular attendee, had pretty much drug him there, and Dave was looking a lot like someone who had been drug there.

He was fine before the service started, but when the prelude music started, he bolted for the door and sat outside, chain smoking cigarettes. Frank offered up Dave during prayer request time, saying Dave had a long history of drug abuse, and that while he is sober now, his family had pretty much disowned him. And because his family is heavily involved in the church, Dave does not do church well.

When Frank said that Dave did not do church well, there were three or four “Me eithers!” shouted from the rest of the congregation. One of them may have been me.

In any event, after the benediction, Dave wandered back in and joined us for the potluck dinner we had scheduled for that day.

I figured we would never see him again.

The next week, in come Frank and Dave, five minutes before the service starts. Dave sits down, opens a hymnal and manages to stick with us through the first song, at which point he heads for the door and chain smokes the rest of the service.

The following week, Dave makes it until after prayers of the people, but when I start in on the ancient words of institution that begin communion (“On the night he was arrested, the Lord Jesus took the bread…”), Dave is gone.

The fourth week, he sits all the way through the words of institution. Then I say what I always say:

There are a lot of different theories in the church about who is allowed to take part in communion. But here, we take the position that this table isn’t my table, or even the church’s table, but that this table belongs to Jesus. And at Jesus’ table, everyone gets to eat.

So here, we don’t care what you have done, or what your past is like, or if you’ve been baptized or not. All that matters here is that you want to eat at Jesus’ table. If you do, then you can take communion with us.

The line forms in the middle, and one by one, folks line up to accept the bread and dip it in the cup. Dave is the last in line.

“Can I really take communion?” he whispers as he approaches me.

“Of course,” I say, as I hand him the bread.

Dave takes it and dips it in the cup, smacking his lips as he devours the juice soaked bread. Then he wanders back to his seat and weeps silently as I pronounce the benediction. And before we’re done saying amen, Dave is out the door.

On Monday, Dave pops by the office.

“You know what I did last night,” he asks. “I wrote my mom.”

“Really? How long has it been since you talked to her?,” I ask.

“A long time. Maybe 20 years. Anyway, I told her that for the first time in years and years, I had been to a church and had taken communion. I thought she would want to know.”

I bet she did. And I thought you might want to know, too.

The difference between your job and your calling

This essay published

I don’t understand why it happens, but it does.

People ask me for career advice. All the time. Even people who make a lot more money than I do. Especially, it seems, people who make a lot more money than I do.

Which, I think, is why they are drawn to me. I am obviously not making a lot of money, yet seem to like my job and career, despite it being very hard. So several times a month, I am sitting across the table at a coffee shop, talking to someone about vocation. Their future. What they want to be when they grow up.

They tell me about their dreams of changing the world. How they don’t feel they are being useful in their current situation. How they just go through the motions, and feel like they are committing suicide on the installment plan.

Or they are still in college or grad school, and the job offers they are getting don’t look like what they envisioned when they picked this major, and they don’t want to give up their dreams.

So they read something I wrote, or I speak at their church or college or a friend recommends they call me, and we end up in that coffee shop. It turns out,  I know a little bit about deciding to change.

I listen to them. I’m good at listening. I hear their stories, their desires, their aches. I hear their frustrations and fears. I hear them give voice to the desire to change the world, while also having to pay bills and feed their families. I listen to all of that.

And then I tell them: You need to find a job, a calling and a passion. 

First, some definitions:

A job is something you do for which you get money in return. The sole purpose of a job is to pay your bills. You may derive other benefits from a job, but that just means you are lucky.

A calling is what you feel moved to do in the world. Your concern for homelessness, or inner-city children, or the urban family, or native plants or ecological restoration. A calling is, to paraphrase Buechner, the intersection of your yearning and the world’s need.

A passion, for our purposes, is something not related to the first two things that fills you, that moves you, that you can work on to replenish your emptiness and that you look forward to. Maybe it’s painting, or kayaking, or running, or stamp collecting. Whatever. It should be something you can lose yourself in that brings you happiness.

Sitting in that coffee shop, I tell them about getting a job, a calling and a passion. I tell them that their unhappiness comes from wanting to get all three of those things from the same place. That rarely happens. In fact, I argue, it probably shouldn’t happen.

I am one of the fortunate folks that, at this exact point in time, I have a job that intersects my calling. But that is very rare – both in the world and in my life. For most of the last nine years I have been doing this work, I have had at least one other job to help pay the bills.

I worked as a freelance writer. I sat at the desk overnight at a 24 hour gym. I sold hot dogs outside a gay bar and across the street from a hardcore porn video shop. I built websites. I speak to groups. All of those were jobs. The only thing I asked from them was that they provide income.

Meanwhile, I have worked tirelessly to build communities where people who were experiencing homelessness could be welcomed, loved and engaged. Places where the stranger could enter and become a friend, where people could just be, where people who were very different from each other could sit across from each other and see those differences become less important.  That is my calling. It is what I feel like I was born to do, and I am really good at it, and it is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

It also pays for crap.

When I am not doing either of those two things, I am either reading or working in my garden. Both of those things are things that replenish me, that I derive great joy from, that I look forward to. They are more than hobbies, they are passions. 

Or, to use another example, I have a friend who is an associate pastor for a huge church in the deep south, where one of her duties is to be in charge of the high school ministry. That is her job – it pays her bills. She has devoted her life to helping teenagers connect with each other, God and their communities. That is her calling – what she feels she was meant to do in the world. And she runs marathons. That is her passion – it keeps her motivated and feeling alive.

Breaking it down to those three categories has several immediate benefits.

  • It takes a lot of pressure off of you to find that perfect job. Just go make some money, yo.
  • It gives you time to flesh out your calling and to find your passion. I was 35 before I figured out what my calling even was.
  • It increases the odds you can do your calling for a lifetime. People in full-time callings burn out at super-high rates. If you burn out, the world isn’t going to get better. It needs to get better.
  • You may, like my friend above, find a job that allows you to focus on your calling. But if you don’t, it isn’t the end of the world.
  • Jobs change. Your identity probably shouldn’t be tied up in your job. Better it be tied up in your calling.
  • By accepting that your passion is a support system for your life, it makes you feel less guilty about losing yourself in it.

If you ask me to coffee because you have vocation concerns, that is what I am going to tell you. Get a job, a calling and a passion.

But you can still ask me out for coffee. Especially if you are paying for it.

Kill Your Darlings

This essay published

“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” – Samuel Johnson

Most of what I write never gets published anywhere. Most of it gets deleted, gone forever.

But sometimes I will like a passage a bit too much, and so I will kill it, but stick it in a drawer, to savor later.

I nearly never open that drawer.

Here is something I wrote a while back and just discovered. I don’t remember the context, or the project I was writing it for.

# # #

I am a redneck.

I grew up in the hills of North Mississippi, a land not quite fit for cotton or soybeans, although both were grown in a middling sort of way. Our neighbors were dairy farmers who grew corn for feed.

My family is working stock. My mother took kids in for money, and my father worked all of my childhood as a serviceman for the propane company.

I remember wearing second-hand clothes to school, and remember the pain of the bullying I got from the “town” kids because my clothes were not the latest fashion. I am the only person in my line to attend college, and did not even consider it until my senior year of high school.

When I am comfortable with you, I will slip into non-standard English, complete with y’alls, peckerwoods and am then more apt to say I am “studyin” something than I am to be thinking about it.

It is a complex fate to be a child of the Southland. The elderly people who loved me, who taught me about the love of Jesus and what it means to be in community, also taught me the words “n**ger” and “coon”.

The small library in the town 7 miles away filled my hours with adventure and excitement. It was there I discovered dinosaurs, knights and chivalry.

It was also there I was told books about witches, earth religions and atheism were not allowed in the library, and so were unavailable to me.

It felt much less magical after that.