Midweek Musings - October 15, 2025
You're the Problem; Jailhouse Shakespeare; Revolutionary War Reenactments; GenZ Tech Resistance; David Foster Wallace on Screens and Loneliness; New England Apple Tours
We’ve spent the last two weeks building a vision of what friendship could be. We are social creatures, made for one another. We are embodied beings, meant to live in proximity and place. We are gendered persons, called to honor one another as brothers and sisters.
It’s a beautiful vision. And if you’re a leader, it probably feels distant. Maybe even naive. Because we haven’t yet talked about the reality that makes friendship so difficult. Not the external pressures of leadership. Not the transactional or performative dynamics we discussed in week one. But something more fundamental. Something closer to home. The problem, in short, is us.
How could we possibly entertain any thoughts on friendship and theological anthropology and fail to account for the truth that stares us in the mirror every morning? There is no greater corrosive acid to the joys of friendship than the reality of the cosmic curse and the groaning we all know full well of sin and death.
The world, the flesh, and the devil conspire against the kind of friendship we long for and it may very well be that their shared warfare on this front takes a particularly heavy toll on leaders. But the most glaring ways in which that becomes conspicuous is in the heart of the leader themselves. Our temptation might be to rush to lament the ways in which sin has corrupted the cosmos in general, or even all those other billions of depraved wretches we work and live with. But us? Oh right, we’re the problem. As a leader, the greatest obstacle to my ability to form, cultivate, and preserve healthy friendships is... me.
I don’t have to tell you that this truth runs contrary to the spirit of the age and the zeitgeist of self-care. And, frankly, in a lot of leadership discourse, the prevailing assumption seems often to be that leadership is lonely because of realities extra nos—outside of us. The demanding board. The critical stakeholders. The backstabbing colleague. The ungrateful team member.
All of those realities exist, of course. Leadership does bring unique pressures and betrayals. But if we’re honest, our own sinfulness is often the greater barrier to friendship. Maybe it’s pride—the subtle conviction that we’re above needing deep friendship, that our leadership role somehow exempts us from the ordinary human need for connection. Or maybe it’s the inverse: insecurity so deep that we can’t risk being truly known, lest people discover we’re not as competent or confident as we appear.
Maybe it’s envy—the gnawing resentment when a friend succeeds in ways we haven’t, the inability to genuinely rejoice with those who rejoice because their joy feels like commentary on our lack. Maybe it’s self-protection masquerading as wisdom—the choice to keep everyone at arm’s length because we’ve been hurt before and we’re not willing to be hurt again. Maybe it’s simply selfishness—the unwillingness to make time for friendship, to do the slow work of listening and being present, because we’ve convinced ourselves our work is too important, our calling too urgent.
So, as terrifying of a question as it may be, what if we asked our friends, “How can I be a better friend to you?” and actually listened when they answer? What if our capacity to receive and give the gift of friendship is directly tied to our experience of daily friendship with God?
The doctrine of our fallenness is humbling. It strips away our pretensions and excuses. But it also offers something surprisingly hopeful: clarity. If the problem is us, then change is actually possible. We can repent. We can grow. We can, by God’s grace, become better friends.
But our fallenness isn’t the only reality we need to reckon with. There’s another truth about our humanity that has profound implications for friendship, and this one comes as pure gift: we are finite. Here I am especially helped by Kelly Kapic’s wonderful work, You’re Only Human. One of Kapic’s many helpful reminders is that our finitude is actually a gift of grace, given to us before the fall. We were not made to be omni-anything. That means that we have a finite social capacity, for example. It’s actually a liberating reality for many leaders to recognize that love for neighbor will make different demands of different relationships. We love our coworkers, our actual neighbors, our fellow church members, etc. But those relationships cannot all be the same, nor can they all be genuine friendships.
Think about what this means. You are not required to have deep friendship with everyone. You are not failing as a leader if you can’t be close friends with every member of your team, your board, your organization. The person who seems hurt that you’re not closer to them? That’s not necessarily your failure. You are finite. You have limited capacity for the kind of intimacy and investment that true friendship requires.
This is liberating. The pressure to be all things to all people—a pressure leaders feel acutely—runs counter to the way God designed us. We were made with limitations, and those limitations are good.
Let me suggest an additional implication of our finitude for leaders and friendship. It’s unclear to me whether a prelapsarian experience of memory had any room for forgetting. I tend to think it did, that our creatureliness means that our knowledge is incomplete and that it very well could be that memory is slippery. After all, Eve’s vulnerability to the serpent’s temptation and deception seemed predicated upon some faulty memory of God’s actual commands.
But if our finitude is a gift, including the realities of memory and forgetfulness, it may have possibilities for friendship. After all, don’t our most meaningful friendships demand a level not only of forgiveness, but also of forgetfulness? A transactional relationship keeps records of wrongs and in self-defense impulses insists on retaining memory of those wrongs so as to try to guard against future hurt or betrayal. But friendship is enjoyed and strengthened when rhythms of repentance and forgiveness create space for forgetting.
This is where our fallenness and our finitude meet in surprisingly hopeful ways. Yes, we will hurt our friends. Yes, they will hurt us. But we are also capable of forgiveness. And we are finite enough that we can actually let things go, can choose not to rehearse every slight and disappointment. We can forget—not in the sense of denying what happened, but in the sense of refusing to let it define the relationship going forward.
So here we are, fallen and finite. Not omni-anything. Prone to sin and selfishness. Limited in capacity and memory. And yet, somehow, this is good news. Because it means friendship doesn’t require perfection—from us or from others. It doesn’t require unlimited capacity. It doesn’t require never being hurt or never hurting others. It requires honesty about our limitations, humility about our failures, and grace—both received and extended—for the inevitable ways we fall short.
Our finitude is a gift, not a curse. We weren’t made to be omni-anything. But there’s one more reality we need to reckon with—perhaps the most challenging one for leaders in our mobile, modern world. What happens when you finally invest in friendship, when you let roots go deep, when you risk being known—and then time and distance threaten to tear it all apart?
Next week: Friendship across time and space, and why the hardest goodbyes aren’t the end of the story.
Shakespeare in Prison
Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Stephen Humphries tells a beautiful story of Jerry Guenther, a convicted murderer whose life was changed through a Shakespeare company during his incarceration. I’ll admit that some of my interest in this story was its location in my Old Kentucky Home. But you don’t have to be familiar with the 502 area code to appreciate it all.
In fact, Humphries does not shy away from some of the especially dark and painful stories that accompany these men and their lives. What does stand out is how they discover in Shakespeare a way of thinking about what it means to be human that profoundly changes them. Here’s how Curt Tofteland, the director of the program, puts it:
“Prisons are repositories for shame and guilt, Mr. Tofteland would say. But shame and guilt doesn’t change behavior.
“The only way that you change behavior is to change thinking,” Mr. Tofteland says. “So, what you begin to introduce is a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world, a different way of seeing each of themselves in the world.
“You can’t say, ‘Tell us about the time you were raped,’ or ‘Tell us the time that you saw your father murdered,’” he says. “You don’t have language for that. But Shakespeare has language for it. ... So, I can find any event that’s happened in your life. I can find parallel events that happen in Shakespeare’s characters.””
Maybe we all need a bit more Shakespeare in our lives after all.
Get Your Musket Ready
As a red-blooded American patriot, I am all in for the upcoming 250th anniversary of our national independence. So you better believe I was intrigued by Caity Weaver’s long feature in The Atlantic on Revolutionary War re-enactors. It’s not to be missed and the photographs are just as good as the article.
“Who exactly does this kind of thing? (Revolutionary War reenacting, I mean!) I met a former punk rocker who now works in marketing, a Delta pilot, a nurse, a priest, an attorney, every kind of teacher, an admin guy from MIT, a park ranger, someone who works on historical sailing vessels, a woman who retired from a software company, a guy who had a gun pulled on him during sex by his then-girlfriend, and a man who’d driven from Arizona with his wife. Many of the reenactors I met were from Massachusetts, with accents so vehement, they can be transcribed only with symbols that evolved in the lacunae of standard English orthography (“Bunkà Hill”).”
My favorite extended treatment of the sociological phenomenon of war reenactment is still Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. But, as Weaver notes, folks who love reliving Bunker Hill tend to have a different approach than those that love reliving Vicksburg.
GenZ Tech Resistance
The Wall Street Journal has a story that might surprise you: young Americans who are proactively rejecting their digital technology in favor of older options:
“Teens and twenty-somethings may have grown up consuming media on their phones, ordering food on apps and using rideshares, but some have had enough.
Driven by a desire to escape screens and reclaim a sense of control, they are resurrecting digital cameras, flip phones and CDs. It’s not unusual to see them roaming the aisles of a record store or doing sidewalk photo shoots with digital cameras, as if they had traveled back to the early 2000s.”
I’ve had more than a few conversations with colleagues in higher education who sense a growing desire on the part of students to push back on the zeitgeist. It’s not that these students are innately opposed to technological innovation. Far from it. However, they are coming to recognize the very real ways in which the realities of constant connection to the digital world has shaped them, mostly in unhealthy and dehumanizing ways.
Pray for Math Teachers
If you have teenagers anywhere near your orbit, you’ve likely been bewildered by the ubiquitous “six seven” meme. Turns out it’s making life miserable for math teachers. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal reports it:
“If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” says [Cara] Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas. “It’s like throwing catnip at cats.”
Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.
A bit more, if you’re still confused:
“The meme is a prime example of brain rot, the internet junk food consumed by people of all ages to suck away time, productivity and the living of life. Kids have been saying “six seven” for about—sorry—six or seven months since the spring, but the recent return to school has supercharged the trend.”
If you really want to try to source the cultural anthropology of all this and the origins of the “six seven” meme, the Journal article gives some of those elements. Needless to say, there have also been a number of cringe-worthy videos of pastors using it in their sermons. If having it covered in the Journal is not the death knell of cool, then I’m pretty sure having your pastor use it in a sermon is.
David Foster Wallace and Loneliness
In The Free Press, Ted Gioia has a thoughtful reflection on the ways David Foster Wallace seemed to anticipate what few else did back in the mid 1990s.
Wallace told [David] Lipsky—and this is worth remembering:
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”
I remind you, again, that Wallace said this back in 1996. He had no experience with the internet or social media. But his sense of their future impact is uncanny. As he predicted, the problem has only metastasized since then—because the technology has gotten much better at control and manipulation.
Then he continues:
“Each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War II. You know? For us . . . we’re either gonna have to put away childish things or discipline ourselves about how much time do I spend being passively entertained?”
Then he adds: “If we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.”
As usual, Gioia—himself something of a polymath—offers a helpful insight into some of Wallace’s own reflections on these themes of technology, commerce, and loneliness.
How You Like Them Apples?
If daily headlines weigh heavy on you, then take a few minutes to read Jen Rose Smith’s recent feature in the Wall Street Journal on the renewed interest in some heirloom apples across New England. Yes, I’m serious.
“Walking past the Galas and Fujis at McDougal Orchards in Springvale, Maine, I slipped past a fence to find the apples I’d come for: Black Oxfords glossy as new shoes, yellow-fleshed Esopus Spitzenburgs and Blue Pearmains stippled with green dots. The orchard’s 16 heirloom varieties, older cultivars passed down by generations of farmers, are fenced to keep out the crowd. Sold only in the farm store, they star at annual tastings that draw aficionados.
“People come looking for their favorite varieties,” said Polly McAdam, 33, a fourth-generation orchardist who grows apples on land her family’s owned since 1779. She handed me a teensy, pink-and-green Lady Apple that looked like a toy and tasted like Smarties. Once, American farmers cultivated many varieties like it. In the mid-19th century, there were more than 15,000 named apple varieties across the country. But by the early 20th century, orchardists were largely transitioning to a handful of more commercially viable fruit.
In recent years, Maine has entered what Todd Little-Siebold, a historian at the College of the Atlantic, calls an “apple renaissance.” Now, each fall, as leaf-peepers flood the state, apple-obsessives also fan out to find oddball specimens that range from rare heirlooms to never-before-tasted seedlings.”
The photography accompanying the article is just as wonderful. I’m not saying it’s merely escapism via heirloom apples. But it is all a wonderful reminder that in a world gone crazy there are those who do good, beautiful, and hard work to bring beauty from the earth. God bless you apple farmers.
What I’m Reading
Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life (Paul Dry Books)
Jamin Goggin, Pastoral Confessions: The Healing Path to Faithful Ministry (Baker)