Meet the team

Seeing these men sitting in my backyard is stunning in just 9 months

We are almost 100% male, but we're trying to convince some ladies to get involved



Our team is multi-generational. we start at 1 and end at 81. I'm not sure which of them is the younger at heart

This picture shows tomorrow's leaders discussing the deep things of life. I'm not sure if it was hockey or football

Trivial Pursuits

"It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously" Oscar Wilde 

YLC St. Louis had our annual Trivia night on Saturday night and it was just awesome! My job usually means that I'm meant to be visible and vocal at fundraising events. Ironically, I am a rather shy person, with a big personality who scores really high as an extrovert in personality tests. My natural place at big events or parties is sitting in the kitchen in the middle of some metaphysical conversation about some arcane subject. I'm a natural nerd/dork. But my job often puts me center stage, among large groups of people and I've found the only way for me to do that successfully is to have a role to play that covers my shyness and allows my natural extroverted personality to take charge. The trivial pursuit of playing a role has been my security blanket for years now as I shyly interact with large groups of people. And so it was on Saturday night.....

I fell into a bed after midnight with a few thoughts from the evening.....The first and least surprising was that I may be the least gifted trivia player in the known universe. Perhaps even in the multi-verse. Fortunately no one was depending upon my ability to access the deep recesses of my mind to dredge up random pieces of information that were collected eons ago by accident and dumped in the back of my mind for future reference as I walked through life. At some point in my life the librarian in charge of bringing the information to the front of my mind quit and went to work for a tidier mind than mine. It has left me with a distinct disadvantage when playing trivia. I have to walk all the way into the back of my mind, dig around among the piles of random unreferenced information accumulated over 41 years and try to find that one random fact among so many. I can never find it in the time allotted.

The next awesome fact I allowed to scurry through my exhausted mind in the wee hours of Sunday morning was how much fun it is to just play. I was given the simple task of selling tickets for the Raffle. I had no idea what the prizes were; no clue how we would draw winners, and because I had never been to a trivia night before I had no idea what the night's schedule would look like. So armed with absolutely no sense of importance or competence I spent the evening being utterly trivial. I think I met every one of the 150+ people there and witnessed almost half of the people give $10 for 6 tickets. It is clear that I shine best when asked to do something trivial!


I quoted Oscar Wilde at the start because he is one of my great mentors. He has guided me into the depths, revealing how humanity strives for the shiny baubles of the ludicrous while ignoring the noble and laudable, all the while presenting a mask of seriousness to one another.

Too much of my life is focused seriously on the trivial, while I trivialize the serious things in life.

Hope you and your week are not taken too seriously.....

  

the silence of sickness

I've been ill for the past week after reacting badly to the anesthetic and post-surgery medications I received for a simple surgery to remove two kidney stones. That I didn't actually need the surgery was only discovered during the surgery just added insult to injury.

I can't blame anyone for the fact that my body has a total intolerance to medication and completely collapses after anesthetic. It seems the same body can crush a 5mm kidney stone without skipping a beat, but falls apart at being put to sleep and giving meds to help deal with pain and infection.

I'm sitting up, eating a Saltine cracker to ensure I have something in my stomach before taking the medication for the Stent that is still in my body. Fortunately, it will be removed tomorrow at 1pm. I'm praying fervently that there will be no surprises or complications.

I promise I'll write a real blog next week to fill the silence of this week.....

Hope your week has been less interesting than mine!

what we do......

We had a couple over for dinner last night. We reached a point in the evening where we were discussing Young Life College and it came out that they didn't know what I'd been doing for 6 months as they don't receive our monthly newsletter. When I mentioned the blog Michelle said it didn't talk about what happened with Young Life College but the blog was mostly concerned with what I was thinking about. So I'm on a quest this morning to find who else feels they don't really know what YLC does.....

So let me begin by saying that if you don't get an email the first week of each month that is from YLC St. Louis and you want to know what we're doing send me an email @ robert.millar74@gmail.com or befriend me on Twitter, Facebook or Googgle +. Each of these has a link to our newsletter.

Next, after last night I've decided that this blog needs to include more of the daily aspects of what is happening in our infant college ministry.

So let me start by introducing the team.

Myself, Ed Bowin, Drew Berson, Ben Harmon, Andrew Wilson, Aaron Adams, Ed Dubberke, Sito Sasieta, and Liz Phillips.

We range in age from 21 to 81 and vocationally from students to a retiree.

When people think of college ministry in general or discover what I do for a living I get a lot of divergent reactions. But the most common reaction is a version of the cartoon at the top of the blog. A kind of sleazy door-to-door salesman trying to offload a particularly difficult product. It is even worse in some aspects for my team-mates who volunteer their time to do this. "You do this for free!?!"

I love the caricatures of what we do.... the one below relfects what people imagine when they decide we're the "cooler" type of Christians. We'll be in a bar with a beer before we tell you that you're immoral!

But the truth is even more humorous at times than the cartoon version of what we do. The next cartoon captures the heart of what we actually aim for, which is being a part of the group who are helping students find their true self and then often helping them come to terms with the shock of that real person.

And as we are Christian there are always those deeply theological questions we get asked....

and finally one of the favorite aspects of my work.... the much quoted desire Christians have for a need for tolerance....

So if you ever wondered what a college ministry aspires to be..... now you know.....

if you are not connected to our many channels of communication pick one or all of them and find out more of our funny world....

Sacred Cows and burgers

“Sacred cows make the best hamburger” Mark Twain

“Christian Faith and Reason are Mutually exclusive.” This was the first premise that I saw refuted using clearly defined critical thinking. My friend Ed Bowen took Comparative and Contrastive thinking and refuted the premise that Reason excluded the Christian Faith and vice-versa. It gave names to how I already thought and also called me out on my dominant way of thinking.

I’m a naturally combative Contrastive thinker.  I’ll test the validity of someone’s beliefs and assertions by first seeking to find a weak spot that can be falsified. I’m considered and self-nominate as an open minded person only because I am unconditionally willing to embrace any new idea that can be proven to be reasonably sound, through repeated stress testing, even if that means a full 180 degree conversion to how I used to think or what I once held sacred. The downside for anyone trying to get me to embrace a new idea is that they must endure an intense battering of their idea.

 

I think one of the great gifts of being a high school drop-out is that formal education and the educational tools that follow in its wake came into my life at a comparatively late date. So as a 41 year old discovering the names Comparative and Contrastive Thinking, for the well worn tools within my intellectual toolkit, I relish the subtle nuances that are held within such delicate and delicious identities. It’s as if two old comfortable work colleagues unexpectedly decided to formally introduce themselves and their lineage.

In the next 4 weeks Ed will explain how these two darling thinking tools use Coherent Consistency; Corresponding Consistency, Compatible Consistency and Comprehensive Consistency in evaluating ideas.

The reason for the Mark Twain quote (that came to me via White Collar) at the start is that accepting Reason and it’s rather tawdry bedfellow Apologetics as a interwoven part of my Christian faith has sent a well loved sacred cow to the butcher. While I feel a lingering sense of nostalgic loyalty for the beast, I’m finding my intellect’s saliva-gland unusually stimulated by the idea of the new type of burger being prepared for lunch!

So my poorly used teachers of Apologetics finally have a new convert. I'm willing to accept their right to be part of the discussion on what constitutes a compelling world view or spiritual idea.

What sacred cows have you sent to the butcher lately?

Triple-braided Cord



Ecclesiastes 4:12 A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is
not easily broken.

I made a conscious decision when I began this blog to work hard to ensure it was not incomprehensible to those outside my own world-view of Christianity. I eschewed Christian insider language and the temptation to assume the beliefs and behaviors I hold dear are universally held. I have other venues and platforms to speak in the insider's language of Christianity and have places where those of my own world-view congregate to read or hear what I believe and how I behave because of my deeply held convictions stemming from my world-view.

But in writing in that other place I sent out an idea that I feel belongs here as well despite the danger it may be incomprehensible to those outside Christianity. So if this sounds like gibberish to you, please excuse the lapse, but I hope I can transcend the sub-cultural linguistic and intellectual barriers between world-views and communicate a concept that I believe exists in many places under many guises.

I spend my life devoted to helping late adolescents become inter dependant adults. Many feel the largest challenge is helping them see that their spiritual identity in this journey to adulthood is as essential as the physical or emotional aspects of their growth. But in many ways I believe the greater challenge is the belief that their goal in becoming adults is to become independent not inter dependant.  Among those who believe my world-view there is a growing sense of individualism that is reaching pandemic proportions.

Ecclesiastes is one of the wisdom books in the Christian Bible and in the text I quoted it speaks of the benefits of community, of accepting the burden and the advantages of being inter dependent on others. It brings safety in numbers but also the constraining aspects of being responsible for others.

I confess it isn’t only the younger generation who reach for independence in our new age of self-orientation. I see in myself and my peers a growing trend to be self-reliant; to be wearied of waiting for others to catch up or to find myself unhealthily straining beyond my capacity rather than admit weakness or vulnerability by calling out for help from those beside me. I’m 41 and in that time I’ve too often accepted the need to look after me and mine rather than binding myself to community that may limit my own dreams or desires. Then I bemoan the fact that the young men and women I walk with are reluctant to tie themselves to communities of inter dependent adults!

 The sacred texts that I follow in my Christian world-view demand an approach of inter dependence and self-denial for the common good. Yet I find myself to be far too independent and far from willing to accept the limitations and vulnerabilities of being tied to other adults in a constraining community of diverse ideas and goals.

 I’m certain other world-views extoll the virtues of selfless giving to the communal good of humanity and the other inhabitants of this planet. But despite the many exhortations from a multitude of divergent world-views I’m shocked by the reluctance we in the western world have to give ourselves to others in inter dependent commitment.

 My old mentor and leader back in Northern Ireland repeatedly reminded me that a person can only lead and teach others to the limit of their own reach and place. Before I can extoll the virtues of inter dependence to young men and women perhaps I should revisit my own willingness to be tied by a triple braided cord!

don't just do something, stand there!

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
  little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop
  their job when they dam'-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark
  and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's
  day may be long in the land. Rudyard Kipling

 This is an excerpt from Kipling's poem Sons of Martha. It normally reflects my personal philosophy of life. If something important needs done, then doing it is usually the best response, while sitting around staring at your navel means some other poor soul will need to actively pull your sorry self out of whatever hot water your inaction got you into.


But this morning I had my "son of Martha" mentality challenged by an unusual source. Normally credited to the white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland, the stupefying line, "don't just do something, stand there!" has been challenging me since I heard it quoted this morning on NPR.

I'm feeling a sense of white rabbit syndrome coming on.... "Late! Late!" Time and Task orientated solutions espoused by Mr. Rabbit and myself may not be the best response to some of the things that are in my life's inbox. But perhaps his confounding and confusing drivel of standing still is the most productive thing I can do to produce the desired outcomes for the issues at hand.....


Used by everyone who ever wanted to suggest that inaction can be as productive as action and that sometimes it is the only solution to vexing problems, it is also utterly frustrating advice for someone when they have several things in life that need done yesterday that normally should be solved by simply doing something about them, but seem to defy active solutions.

So I've decided that in response to NPR's subliminal messaging; Lewis' White Rabbit's "no steps to success" model of life management, and my own confounding inner voices I'm taking a whole day to practice inactivity.

I'll let you know how it went....
feel free to tell me what you thin of this weird experiment....