The Risk of Following

I’m in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, near Kerrville, Texas. I’m here for a retreat, with a cross-discipline group of people who have come together to talk about work, faith, leadership, mental health, art, music, and digital media. An eclectic mix, to be sure, but there is a common thread: we share the thread of faith and a desire to live it in the world.

The bookstore is small, a quiet place. There are some fiction and poetry on the shelves – which my eye seeks first – but most of the books are about faith, devotions, prayer, theology and philosophy – matched to the themes that the lodge and the rugged Texas Hill Country inspire. You see names like C.S. Lewis, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Madeleine L’Engle.

And the poet Luci Shaw. I pull a slim volume with her name on it from the shelf; I’ve read her poetry, and enjoyed it, but this isn’t about poetry. The title is The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure. At first I think it’s about leadership, but it turns out to be about how to live a life of faith.

Indirectly, though, it is about leading and following – following Christ and following the leading of Christ. Shaw uses the prism of her own outdoor adventures to examine why she considers living cautiously a crime. And her experiences include bungee jumping, a rowing expedition, a week’s sailing with a woman friend. She enjoys adventures with excitement and a thrill of fear and risk.

Without explicitly saying so, Shaw seems to say we tend to follow Jesus in a rather safe, orderly and secure way, but that we should be following him in order to dare, to risk, in order to truly live. Her physical risks stand as a kind of statement of faith and exhilarating test of self.

Physical outdoor risk (like bungee jumping) are less important to me; here at Laity Lodge, the closest I will get to risk are a hike (mostly upward) and the two scorpion traps in my guest room (for the record, I never see a scorpion on this visit; I’ve seen them before, however).

But I understand what Shaw says; my own sense of exhilaration comes (tinged with risk and fear) have come from taking career risks – risking everything to do something new, something important, something that changes the status quo, something that leaves people (especially me) never the same again.

I’ve taken career risks in two large areas. One is writing a series of corporate speeches that branded me inside the company as a “radical” but which permanently changed the company and the industry. The second is the area that I represent at this retreat – digital media. Interestingly enough, I’m not here to represent what I do at The High Calling (part of the same organization as Laity Lodge); I’m here because of what I do at work, and what I’ve done.

I look back and some of these career risks and smile, but I remind myself that, in their time and context, they threatened and upended the status quo, and there was always opposition, sometimes rather ferocious. An email newsletter for employees (it sound quaint in 2013 but in 1993 it was a revolution that I fought people for months to do and then realized I could do it without permission). Another battle: a corporate web site (“Waste your money if you want to, the web is like 8-track tapes. The future is Lotus Notes”). Then blogs. And then social media.

Did I succeed every time? Yes. And no. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, a cost was paid. When people have a vested interest in the status quo, they don’t take change lightly.

But this is what happens trying to live a life of faith. Jesus is not status quo; what was status quo was sin, and he came to upend it as only he could do. To follow him, as Shaw explains in her book, is to live a life of risk, daring and adventure.

I buy The Crime of Living Cautiously. It turns out to be well-paired with another book I’m reading, David Platt’s Follow Me. It also turns out that Shaw wrote a considerable portion of the book right here at Laity Lodge.

Follow him and change the human heart, starting with your own. And then change the world.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is writing about “follow.” To see her post and those of others, please visit her site.

Letting Go

“Fullness of life in arenas of art and spirituality demands that we let go,” writes Luci Shaw in Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, “that we relinquish control – something that goes against the human grain, particularly in a culture obsessed with empowerment. Here we are, trying to bring order and beauty out of chaos, gaining a kind of discipline and control, exercising the authority of experience and hard-won wisdom, and we have to let it go?”

I’ve been reading Breath for the Bones with the rather determined belief that it applies just as much to work and the work place as it does to art, writing and creativity. The chapter entitled “Risk” confirms my belief, and that statement on letting go punctuates the entire discussion for me.

Businesses, and especially large ones like corporations, have historically been designed to control and manage their environments: minimize risk, reduce occurrences of the unexpected, manage across the supply and production chain, maximize shareowner returns. That model began breaking down in the 1970s, with the extended periods of inflation and disruptions in energy supplies (two oil embargoes – 1973-74 and 1979). The 1980s witnessed massive restructurings and reorganizations, which have essentially become institutionalized. At the same time, the electronic communication revolution has changed everything.

But perhaps the most profound change is the one most often overlooked: it is virtually impossible for any organization, private or public, to control its environment. Organizations who believe they still can exercise control have to distort reality, and keep distorting it, to maintain that belief. (Interestingly enough, this also can happen with individuals – when people have to invent and maintain elaborate conspiracy theories to explain facts that conflict with their worldview.)

Within organizations desperately trying to hold on to control, creative individuals within the organization can often find themselves in a strange position. Their creativity is desperately needed and simultaneously rejected. They can find themselves tagged as “not a team player.” It can get worse if they’re proven right by external events, which they often are.

Over the years, I’ve seen this happen, many times. I’ve experienced this happening. I’ve seen it happen to others.

“The creative impulse is essentially innovative,” Shaw writes. “It’s always discovering new areas to explore. It experiments. It breaks down old barriers and ventures into new territory. That implies a kind of risk…”

As Shaw says, letting go is counterintuitive. After spending enormous amounts of time and resources, not to mention those thousands of college degrees and all those billions of man-years of experience, that it may be in the organization’s best interests to let it go.

It may sound bizarre, but I’ve often found myself in the position of telling experienced communication people that the creation of social media has changed their world forever. They don’t believe it, and they don’t want to believe it. At best, they consider social media to be “new communication tools and channels.” They are far more profound than that, and they demonstrate every day that what we all knew and grew up with – and the way we do things – has changed forever.


Led by Laura Boggess, we’re discussing Breath for the Bones over at The High Calling. Check today’s post there, on writing journals and taking risks, for more posts on the book.