Fireworks, Inland Empire Style

A couple of days ago our neighbor invited us out to the parking lot of our apartment complex for fireworks. We had to balance that against an earlier invitation, one from the ladies at Calvary church to go to their church parking lot. That's what people in Riverside do: gather in parking lots and watch the fireworks display atop Mount Rubidoux.

We decided to stay home and join our neighbors. Well, a few of our neighbors and about twenty relatives of a specific neighbor. Somebody made a bowl of popcorn to pass around, and people sat in their lawn chairs, "oohing" and "aahing" at the display. It was all very neighborly and almost, even, communal.

Then the display ended with a grand finale and people started setting off their own fireworks. In our parking lot. Feet from our car. Even now, preparing to go to bed, Black Cats and Bottle Rockets are popping and screeching outside our door.

As of 9:52 pm, though, no fires have been reported. We'll sleep with our fingers crossed.

Read more ...

The Bottom of A Black, Black Hole

The guy I handed my application to was white and pot-bellied, not unlike the pigs his restaurant smokes. His grey hair stood in a ridiculous two-inch spike pattern, and his thick wire-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his nose from the sweat. It was 110 degrees in the Inland Empire today, and I had walked all over downtown Riverside, ducking into coffeeshops and restaurants with the standard inquiry.

But I'm done with all that now. I'm done because this manager, in his striped short-sleeved shirt, looked over my application and suggested I could start as a busser. He looked at the front and the back of his restaurant's poorly copied application, saw my masters degree, saw the salary of my last job, and suggested that I could work for him bussing tables.

I offered that I had waiter experience, grandly overstating what it is to work in Princeton Seminary's private dining room. "Yeah," he said. "But we're high volume." The six people presently patronizing his establishment cast no little doubt on that assertion, but to point that out would have been foolish. So I thanked him for his time and stepped outside.

I think I'm done with this. I'm still waiting to hear from a handful of places, but this is a very bad use of my time, and it's making me miserable.

Next plan of attack: get a copy of Writer's Market 2007 and start working on my freelance writing career.

Read more ...

On Self-Marketing

Driving back from the Santa Monica Pier on Friday, Meredith and I listened to a This American Life piece, an excerpt from a memoir about growing up in California during the aerospace industry boom. The theme running through the piece was reinvention: California is a place where people come to reinvent themselves, to make up something about themselves that was not true before they arrived and to live into that something as if it had always been true.

I'm pestered by the thought that perhaps I should take that approach to my present vocational fecklessness. Maybe I need to market myself as something I've never been before, something I'm really not, but something that I could convince others I am and so maybe become.

A church consultant? An expert on some topic related to religion, the church, or society? A master teacher?

A good friend talked with me the day before our move about possibly creating a training or a retreat for churches around media literacy. He suggested assembling an audience of friendly faces and videotaping a run through of that presentation, then burning to do a DVD for marketing purposes. He had actually done this himself once.

I might try to do that (if I ever find some friendly faces). It may be the only viable response to the reality that I'm only now seeing, even though I'd read and talked about it for years: the culture is changing and the position of the church is becoming marginal. That's for the good. But it was a lot easier to say when I had a secure position and role as a professional within the church. Now that marginality demands of me some creativity and a bit of enterprising gumption to figure out how to use my gifts and exercise my ordination.

Read more ...

Notes on A Job Search

"Incontinence."
"Feminine Hygiene."

These are the words occupying my attention while Becki, the very friendly HR manager at Vons grocery store in Riverside, is explaining to me that the position in the store's Starbucks kiosk has already been filled. She's more detailed and courteous than she needs to be, because all the while I keep looking over her shoulder at the labels protruding from the shelves of aisle 3.

"It's over. This is stupid. Why did I even come in here? Why have I gone any of these places? What am I doing?"

I can't quite decide if this is a needed serving of humble pie or it actually is the humiliation it feels like. To have a Masters of Divinity degree and to be an ordained minister are not credentials that mean much outside of certain ecclesial or academic contexts; as my friend has put it, "We're uniquely unqualified" for anything but ministry. So I don't expect that the people at these restaurants and coffeeshops where I'm looking for quick part-time work will be impressed, it's still very hard to take.

Because I thought this part of my life was over. I thought I was done asking complete strangers, "Are you guys doing any hiring right now?" And what's worse is that these strangers are now uniformly my juniors by five, even 10, years. They are cordial and polite, but all the while I know they're thinking, "God, I hope I'm not that guy when I'm old."

Meanwhile I'm waiting for the phone to ring, and for church people to be on the other end. But I've been waiting for that since well before we moved. But it's not happening. It's funny, because as I left the church I was serving in Kansas City it was amidst a chorus of positivity, with friends and congregants affirming gifts and saying things like, "Some church in California is going to be lucky to have you." I knew what was really going on, though, how this place is full of people just like me and so every church out here is lucky to have somebody else. I smiled politely and was genuinely thankful for the compliments then. Now they echo like a taunt.

Read more ...

Rising To The Surface

It's Tuesday of the first week in Southern California. Today marks exactly one week since we arrived. It's a new place, a new challenge, and a new set of opportunities, all of which calls for a new approach.

I haven't known what to blog about these past seven days. They've been an avalanche of events and tasks, and I haven't had the confidence or the energy to sort them out. But amidst the unpacking, the applying for restaurant jobs, and the phone calls to denominational personnel, there have been a couple of beautiful experiences.

There was lunch on Friday with a good friend at a great Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills. It's an oft-patronized spot for our friend, so the owner knows him well and treats his accordingly. He sat us outside and personally took care of us, bringing us free appetizers we didn't order, cracking jokes, and treating us to a dessert that wasn't on the menu but that they were "cooking up just for-a you." It was the proverbial red carpet treatment, and we are very grateful to our friend for it. We couldn't have felt more welcomed to California if the Governor himself had met us at the state line.

Then on Sunday we worshiped at one of three Presbyterian churches in Riverside, the one closest to our apartment. We went to their "contemporary" service, which was only contemporary in that they served coffee, used a projector, and played a guitar; most of the roughly 20 worshipers were over 50. But the three women who sat at our table (the room was arranged into circular tables) greeted us warmly. They were all lifelong friends and lifelong residents of Riverside, except for the short stint when they all went to Park College in Parkville, MO. It's little coincidences like that that make you say, "This place isn't so different. We can handle this."

By the end of our hour with them they had invited us to the church's 4th of July picnic and had drawn us a map to the best deli in town.

This is going to be tough, I have no doubt. But I'm hopeful.

Read more ...