The Office: Finding Comedy In the Midst of Tragedy

The Office: My Favorite

This week a natural disaster devastated a community. I know what that feels like. It feels absolutely horrible. This week I was going to write an entry about what The Office meant to me during my long recovery from Hurricane Rita. When I saw the devastation in Oklahoma, I reconsidered.

Then scrolling through twitter I saw a tweet from Patton Oswalt, presumably in response to someone telling him he was being insensitive:

So after seeing this I thought, “I will indeed write about The Office because in tragedy we need comedy. Otherwise, why go on?” So here I go:

My hometown was ravaged by Hurricane Rita in the fall of 2005. During the initial aftermath, my mornings and evenings were spent in phone calls to loved ones in Louisiana: locating family and friends, assessing damage to various homes, churches, schools and businesses, and creating plans of action.

Two months later those plans were being executed, only, without me. I was 3,000 miles away spending my days at my new job in Human Resources in a bustling metropolis that had all but forgotten what occurred on September 24. I was trying to understand how to be a part of this seemingly normal office/city life while the many of the people I loved were standing in FEMA food lines, shifting through the debris piles of their former homes, and having discussions with insurance companies.  

It was about this time that I discovered the television show The Office. Turns out, I really needed a laugh. The Office delivered. Over and over and over again. 

The Office was in its second season and my friend Erin and I would call each other during commercial breaks to discuss the hilarity of the previous scene. At the end of each episode we would recount all of our favorite parts, laughing hysterically and craving longer episodes.  Sometime later the network execs somehow heard our cries and delivered. Erin and I were overjoyed.

Over the last 8 years, I have had some seriously trying times. Much about my young life has been unstable and insecure, but for me, The Office has always been a place of certainty. It has had the same expertly designed set, with the same well written and well performed characters, delivering the same high caliber commentary on a reality that in many ways is shockingly similar to mine. It was always there when I needed a lighthearted respite from my reality and, for that, I am extremely grateful.

Thank you, good people of The Office, for providing laughter in my life; for helping me go on.

Making Peace with Psalm 23

Green Grass & Quiet Water ~ May 2013 ~ Portland, Oregon

Where I grew up most, kids learned the 23rd Psalm. I think they had to in catechism. Where I grew up, all the school buses altered their routes to include a stop at the Catholic Church on Mondays for catechism classes. Because of where I grew up, I heard that Psalm recited as rote and therefore I didn’t much care for that Psalm. Also it talked about valleys of death and rods and staffs, and hearing that over and over and over again sorta creeped me out.

Where I live now, I do full time ministry through my church by encouraging and supporting university students and other transients of my downtown Portland neighborhood in a variety of ways. To do this work, I raise my own support. I sorta suck at this aspect, but that’s another story for another time. And now I have an agent for my book so I’m retooling my book proposal which means an enormous amount of research and writing and editing and feelings of inadequacy. Again, another story for another time. And I also have a life full of relationships with people not connected to anything mentioned above that I try to maintain. I guess you could say I've got some stuff going on.

I try to be diligent about maintaining a Sabbath. Because of what I do, it happens to be on a Wednesday. What I mean when I say 'Sabbath', is a day where I truly try to stop and rest and spend some time focusing on God, believing that my to-do list will get taken care of…eventually…in God’s perfect timing. Sometimes this involves a lot of deep breaths and verbal reminders that it WILL all be OK.

On one of those Sabbaths God reintroduced me to Psalm 23.

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.

The message and God haven’t changed, but I have. I now hear them more fully. I now know that life is better when I take a moment or a day to lie down, to be still, to let God’s truth, wisdom, love and life pour into me, to have my soul feel all shiny and new.

Today was the last Sunny honestly warm day Portland will see for a while. I spent most of it inside working. That was up until the last hour and a half of daylight when, due to a variety circumstances, including locking myself out of my apartment, the Lord herded me down to the green grass beside the quiet waters of Willamette River and, there, the Lord refreshed my soul.

Sometimes we just need to take a moment to pause, breathe and remember that it WILL all be OK.

I'm Scared of the Nothing

From the good folks at IMDB

I use to get crazy anxiety when I came to the end of a plan. Mostly because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I like plans. I used to be kind of obsessed with them, actually. Emotionally, I don’t do super well with the nothing. I feel like I'm shouting along with the Empress in The NeverEnding Story when she is about to get swallowed up by the nothing, “Say my name, Sebastian! SAY MY NAME!”

I’m scared of the nothing.

It’s kinda like when a new born baby endures her first bath. That baby has no idea what she’s getting into and, frankly, it’s scary. I mean she’s just recently gone through some fairly traumatic stuff so understandably she kicks and screams and cries. This is the unknown, this is the nothing. Soon she learns that she will survive this ordeal. Going forward, each bath time gets a little less scary. Sometimes when the air is cold and she has to get marker scrubbed off her arm she cries a bit more than usual, she may not know why this has to happen, but she knows she will survive.

She believes she will survive because she is becoming dependent. She is learning to trust.

I went to the Faith & Culture Writers Conference a month ago and heard William Paul Young, the author of The Shack speak. A good deal of what he said resonated with me, but in particular he said that God is healing us so we can be children.

Healthy, safe, and well cared for children aren’t obsessed with plans. They are unaware of the nothing.

When I live my life in fear of the nothing, I make some really desperate choices that are not for the best. So, I am choosing to live my life as a child of God, as a child of love, not of fear.  I am learning to trust. I am becoming dependent. I will survive.