Why I came to YWAM Lausanne

            School wasn’t ever too great for me. For most of my teenage years, I held firmly to the belief that school wouldn’t ever help me to get anywhere. When I was 13, I started playing bass guitar because I wanted to be a rock star, and I didn’t need school for that. When I was 14, I started playing rugby, and I decided that here was a second thing I’d like to do professionally that didn’t require an education. When I was 15, I thought maybe I’d just buy a chemistry set and screw around with it for a living. Once I started my junior year of high school, it seemed equally plausible that I’d like to just think and talk about formative events in human history for the rest of my life.

            There was a girl I dated through most of high school, and her view was that I was too smart not to go to college. As it happens, we broke up in the spring of my senior year, about when I needed to finalize all of my college applications. Firstly, this made moot the point of looking at schools where we could be near each other, which included all the schools I’d bothered to visit. Secondly, it put me in an emotional state where I didn’t really have interest in pushing through the mundane and stressful portions of the application process. Thirdly, I was concurrently enrolled through PSEO in a college literature course during my final semester of high school classes, and suffice it to say that I wasn’t faring well. This all came together as a pretty strong case for not bothering to complete any of my applications.

            Once June rolled around, I was free at last from the tyranny of compulsory education, but was also far from realizing any of my above-education dreams. I hadn’t been disciplined in practicing my instruments to anywhere near virtuosity and had only had short stints in a couple musical collaborations without writing an original song. Since the beginning of my rugby career, I had sprained both ankles pretty seriously as well as one knee, and I didn’t even play the sport during my final year. I was nowhere close to becoming a mad scientist, and Historian is the biggest, most daunting archive binge of a career conceivable. So, I kept working at Davanni’s Pizza and Hot Hoagies and went Frisbee golfing in my spare time, as well as occasionally sledding down a ski hill at 3 a.m.

            By the Fall of 2008, I was jobless and ready to maybe try school again because working in pizza shops sucks. I enrolled at the local community college and took Music Theory and Jazz History classes. I was late to class pretty much every day and didn’t do half the homework. I didn’t take any classes in the spring. In the summer of ’09, I thought I’d take a whack at a full-semester-in-5-weeks Spanish course, and that went alright, so I shifted my focus of study and took Spanish in the Fall along with choir, logic, and a class about mythology and world religions. At some point, I took Middle East Politics, which was essentially a class about the history of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and turned out to be much more intensive and less oriented towards political theory than I’d either anticipated or desired. Finally, I spent most of one semester on 3 different Psychology classes at once before deciding that school still wasn’t the way for me to do anything interesting or useful in the world.

            That second Fall semester, when I was studying Spanish, logic, and mythology, I attended the Missions Festival at Grace Church in Eden Prairie. There, I met a couple of people whose names and faces I forget who were, at the time, staff at YWAM Lausanne. When they told me about the Snowboarding DTS in French-speaking Switzerland, I was immediately on board… except that I was already committed to a short-term missions trip to Kenya the second and third weeks of January. A year later, as I was giving up on the case study I was supposed to be writing for Psychology of Lifespan Development, I again thought of how nice it would be to go to Switzerland in January, and then I thought about how much money was not in my bank account. Nope.

            However, I did go somewhere in January: Minneapolis. I had negotiated a somewhat reliable stream of income for myself working as a valet the last few months of 2010, and felt confident enough to move out of my parents’ house to live in a house full of guys in January 2011. I made a budget and stuck to it. I was paying rent and buying food and setting aside a pile of savings for future expenses.

            During my residency there, I once again changed employers. The transitional period and an impromptu Spring Break snowboard trip left me having to rebuild my savings pile near the middle of the year. Comparing income to expenses and checking the skyrocketing midyear CHF exchange rates, it seemed completely out of the question that I could finance the trip this year, either. I stopped thinking about it, and thought maybe in my new place with my new job and my new church, I could just settle in for a while until I decide what to do next.
            A few months later, I got a raise. Following not too far behind that, the Central Bank of Switzerland made a decision to link their currency’s value to that of the plummeting Euro in order to maintain a semblance of order in international trade. Suddenly, a much smaller stretch was needed to have all the money required by January.

            It still required a stretch, though, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go for it. There’s always next year, right? After all, if I had an extra year to save, I could set aside a much bigger pile of cash to have some left over at the end of my trip. I could add some value to my Roth IRA for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 instead of spending all my available investment capital. I could get more job experience learning useful things about home repair and have more time to settle in to my new relationships with my new church community.
            I sat on the fence for months. It seemed more prudent to wait. Proverbs is all about being prudent, isn’t it? It was hard to be sure, but I didn’t think God would want me to lunge recklessly towards something I’d wanted for a few years just because I was getting impatient with the “perfect timing.” I could handle waiting and saving for another year; life was going well. Well, it was going alright. I mean, it was good until I started thinking about too many obligations and responsibilities at one time and became petrified in anxiety.

            I intend to fully engage things. I’m not always good at it, and sometimes there are too many things competing for my full engagement, but I am always theoretically in favor of fully engaging worthy pursuits. Here’s the thing, though: “worthy pursuit” has to be narrowed down further every time I have two competing interests. It’s natural selection applied to life decisions, with the end result hopefully yielding a perfect set of criteria so that I’m sure that I’m making the perfect set of decisions. After all, the word “decision” is just the word “incision” with a different prefix: it means “to cut off” rather than “to cut in.” Fully severing possibilities is like amputating body parts: you’d better be sure, ‘cuz they don’t grow back.

            So, Jesus is a worthy pursuit. Jesus and wisdom and maturity and security. Yeah, that’s a good list. So what else needs to be cut out? Everything. Feeding myself and going to bed on time and enjoying friendships and being invited to things and having to be ready to work the next day. Remaining functional was taking up all the time I wanted to spend on being alive.

Remaining functional isn’t something I would call a worthy pursuit, but I would call it necessary. Therein lies the problem. Do I decise my own means of providing for myself because it prevents me from relying on provision from above, or do I consider that the means I’ve been given to attend to myself are in fact my provision from above? Do I do what is necessary or what is essential?

I think the essential holds more weight than the necessary. The essential is a need, while the necessary is a comfort. Thirst kills a lot more quickly than hunger.

At the end of it, I don’t think I was prudent about my decision. I was frustrated, and I wanted to abandon everything ineffective and distracting and time-consuming and just leave. I didn’t evaluate a perfect set of criteria as such when I decided to come to Switzerland; I just acted out of desperation and suffocation. I wasn’t sure if my malcontentness and the seeming exact response to it on the YWAM Lausanne brochure was significant or not, so I prayed that Jesus wouldn’t let me come here if I was being stupid. But He did.