A Reckoning With the Road Less Taken

“Are you going to the reunion?” my friend asked me.

I sensed my whole body tightening. In recent weeks, my college friends had begun asking me if I planned on attending our 25th reunion. Each time, I noticed a knot in my stomach.

I don’t think I am alone in feeling anxious about reunions. For many, previous loves and crushes alone make the whole thing awkward. Do I ask my wife to suffer attending so that I can get a free “get out of jail” card and avoid uncomfortable conversations with yesteryear’s unrequited love?

For me though, the complexities of running into a previous paramour are not what makes me nervous. Rather, I have a fear that I will not have lived up to the expectations of my peers.

In college, I did very well academically. All sorts of doors opened to me by my senior year. I was in the cohort of folks getting interviewed by the top investment banking firms and consultancies. I was not only a tutor for economics, I was also even an undergrad TA. The people whose problem sets I solved “with” them and whose thesis data sets I mined and cleaned up today lead all sorts of influential legal, financial, and governmental agencies.

I do not.

The Road Less Taken

I chose a very different path than most of my college peers: mainline Protestant ministry. You know, the kind that has seen an avalanche of decline this century. The kind that used to matter in culture but now exhausts itself in bizarre fights that make no sense to the rest of the world.

In the world of metric-derived status, I come out pretty close to the bottom:

• Is your church a megachurch? Well, I mean, for a Lutheran church, especially on the East Coast, it is really big. But no, it is not a megachurch.
• Do you have a big internet following? No, but one time someone made a TikTok of a video that I had made about Peeps and the atonement, and that went churchy viral.
• Have you been published? Ever heard of this thingy called Mockingbird? I also have a blog on preaching and ancient Greek, which I have upgraded to an Instagram account. I am happy to tell you about the etymology of kimono.
• Are you on the vanguard of social, political, and economic issues that would build on your degree? Hmm, I did orchestrate the ouster of a superintendent; but generally, no, I want the church to be less overtly political.

Perhaps others who went into different professions than their high school or college peers can relate here. I do not think that most of my friends, much less the generic person I would meet at a reunion, have any idea what my job actually entails. Do I sit in my office and think about my sermon all day? No. Do I rush off to the hospital to provide pastoral care at the exact right moment? Rarely. Instead, I spend most of my day building relationships and building community. As it turns out, my job is disappointingly unheroic, a constant labor of sowing seeds, building bridges, and engaging in surgical conflict, always being humbled by my own idol-making capabilities.

But the bigger issue is that I chose a different lifestyle, not simply a different career. I did not choose the path of climbing the church ladder (which surprisingly does exist). I generally eschewed such opportunities, focusing intensely on my family and my community. I relearned how to play piano to accompany my daughter’s Suzuki string ensemble. I coached rec basketball for years because I felt that travel should not be the only option for kids in sports. I train — which means a lot of time stretching these days — so I can continue to help coach with the high school cross country team. I watch YouTube videos so I can do home projects instead of paying for them, saving money for summer family vacations.

To summarize, returning to my college reunion is to encounter people who stayed on the trajectory that I left, people who forged ahead with their careers of worldly success and large-scale impact. I am confronted with the choice I made, namely, to pour my heart and life into a community, a congregation, and a family.

The Law Lingers

I have to laugh about how I cope with my insecurities and consider options for validation within the framework of success and worth:

• Make my ministry awesome: I find myself trying to make my ministry sound impressive, either in scope or scale. My mind constructs word salads like: “Leveraging community-based assets to mobilize for repositioning in this liminal epoch, benchmarking with post-metric narrative tools.”
• Make my family relationship better than others: I find myself also assuring myself that actually my family relationships are better than others. I mean, they can’t have it all, and chasing their careers must have negatively impacted their relationship with their spouse or kids, right? Because evaluating my life based on what my teenagers think of me at any given moment is definitely the key to self-actualization, right?
• Fortunately, I have not succumbed to assessing my own relative holiness to theirs, but hey, the reunion is still three months away. I will settle for now by assuring myself that my heart rate is lower than theirs. By at least 10 bpm.

In short, I discover that I lean heavily into my own self-justifications when presented with the assessment and judgment that the reunion brings. This is an encounter with the law, not the law of the Ten Commandments but the law of achievement, a twisted cousin of the former. Like the true law, it inherited the cruel family trait: it always accuses.

I realize for others, they may experience the judgment of the law less about their career and more about their health or their family situation. No one looks as good at 47 as they did at 22, and so everyone is confronted with the gap between what we looked like then and what we look like now. Actually, it happens like this, where we look at someone else and say, “Wow, my friend has really aged …” and then realize this happened to us too. This is why reunion is spelled p-i-l-a-t-e-s. The law offers us a daily reminder that we are mortal; 25 years later, a reunion feels like 10,000 doses at once.

All sorts of other anxieties arise as well, especially as it relates to our families. When we look at our own marriages and families compared to the mythical families our friends appear to have on social media, we can easily feel like somehow we don’t measure up. Perhaps what is even more daunting is the mythical family that at 22 we thought we would have at 47. In short, a reunion is a confrontation with all of the decisions we have made the past X years. We assess how we did against both our one-time peers and the hoped-for version of ourselves.

This is going to be fun, right?

May Grace Abound

Maybe I am crazy and others don’t experience this anxiety. But my gut is that most people heading into a reunion also experience the law and its inevitable capacity to turn us inward instead of outward. For some, the solution is obvious: get drunk, ignore the present, and rehash stories of glory days. For others, the solution is equally as obvious: win the game and prove we actually have lived a life worth living, one that is virtuous, wealthy and good looking too. If it turns out that the reunion dissolves into a game of life competition, I might be very busy at the reunion, a weird person who bowed out of the achievement game, a “base” in tag, if you will, where people can catch a breather and be real.

But I sense that there will be a number of conversations that move out of the past and beyond the superficial resume contests. I actually grow excited about the times when classmates will exhibit curiosity about how life has unfolded for each other. For a number of folks, I have found myself asking: “I wonder what ever happened to …” Now we get to find out! Something tells me a lot of us come to a reunion longing to hear from others and to tell someone our story of how life unfolded, to share with people what really happened since we last met. Most of us have lived life a bit on the road less traveled, or at least the road we didn’t think we would take. And on such a road, grace can be offered in many ways; it can come in the form of a religious absolution: “You are forgiven.” But it can also come in the form of an old friend who earnestly takes an interest in your child’s eating disorder, your wife’s big career move, or your dad’s death.

To put it another way, I don’t think the reunion needs a pastor, but my friends deserve nothing less than for me to be who I have become at this point — a middle-aged pastor whose skill set has little to do with solving math problems anymore and way more of walking with people through the inevitably unsolvable dilemmas of life. If I need to prove anything, perhaps it is that life actually did humble me. I wonder how people would respond if I answered the question “What have you done with your life the past 25 years” like this: “I have learned that this life is beautiful and tragic, people need community and myths, and that I am only alive because God intervenes with daily grace.” That might start some conversations, conversations in which we don’t simply have a reckoning with the law but a celebration of the streams of mercy on the road less traveled.