How To Be Great

My 14-year-old daughter Hannah and my husband Gary went to the Chicago auditions for America’s Got Talent this past weekend. I was there with them for the first three hours of their 10-hour wait to sing for 90 seconds for two unknown judges and a cameraperson. And they had quite a day…meeting Elvis impersonators, a troupe of singing Draculas, a Taylor Swift wannabe whose name actually happened to be Taylor and whose mother looked like Carrie Underwood. They spent time with an unfunny comedian and a couple of “fire dancers” with their “fire dancer”–in-training child. They talked to people who had driven for miles and stayed in cheap hotels, gotten up at the crack of dawn, just to have their shot at fame and fortune.

I talked to a few of these America’s Got Talent auditioners too, while I stood in line with Hannah and Gary, and after each conversation I just felt like saying, “Well, bless your heart…”  I felt so tender toward each of them, because each of them came dressed in all their dreams, their sweet hopes of a lucky break, their desire for someone important to tell them they were good enough, they were worthy, they were great.

It made me think of that story in Mark 9 about the disciples getting caught by Jesus arguing over who is greatest. Remember that one?

Jesus asks them what they were discussing on the road and, as The Message translation puts it: “The silence was deafening…” because they’d basically been having a pissing contest, our dear sweet holy disciples. What were they, 2^nd graders? I mean honestly, I don’t think I’ve argued with anyone about who was greatest since…well since I stopped saying stuff like, “I can jump farther than you, poopy face, na na na na na.”

Grown ups just don’t say that kind of stuff. Out loud, at least. They don’t even say it out loud at the America’s Got Talent auditions.

We are always checking each other out, though, you can be sure of that. Checking to see who is the greatest among us—is it him? Is it me? I really, really want it to be me, we’re all thinking. But no one is saying it out loud. Out loud everyone is relatively polite and supportive and pretty kind overall.

Oh…but in secret. Inside our crazy little monkey minds…that’s another story.

Like a couple weeks ago at work we were doing this big presentation to a room full of clients. I work in advertising and we were presenting a bunch of new ad campaigns. So the first guy got up to show his campaign–his name is Dom and and I have to tell you, I think Dom is brilliant. He’s funny and clever and quick, and his campaign was fairly good, but he is such a good presenter and he’s so likable that whatever he does always seems even better. In contrast I always feel stiff and like, even if my ideas are good, I’m terrible at presenting them, I’m trying too hard and I’m boring and nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I’m gonna eat some worms. But this day Dom got up and presented his stuff and he wasn’t in top form, and the room wasn’t with him. Their body language, their lack of laughter, I could just tell, he wasn’t going over like gangbusters. He was maybe even slightly semi-bombing.

And you know what?

I was glad. I was relieved and happy, outwardly calm and zen-like, sure, but inside leaping for joy, doing little cartwheels in my mind, full of glee and hope, because now maybe I had a chance, if not to be the greatest in the room, to be at least great-er.

So, yeah, I really wish I could tell you I am not like those disciples, those big babies arguing about who’s greatest. But I am ashamed to say, in my heart of hearts, I really am. And maybe the fact that I do it secretly, maybe that even makes it worse, meaner, nastier, deadlier. There’s that famous saying in recovery circles, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” And my secret desire for greatness, my constant comparisons of myself with others, I’ve been coming to see, that is not only sick, it’s making me sicker. It makes me anxious, and sad and fills me with shame and makes me want to eat 3 lbs of chocolate and keeps me up at night and leaves me feeling very lonely.

Now, I’ve read this passage from Mark before and the answer I thought Jesus was giving in this story to all this insanity was simple “Stop trying to be great, and put yourself last, be a servant, be humble and be small, like a child…”

But looking at this story again, I realized that actually isn’t what Jesus is saying at all. First he doesn’t tell you to stop wanting to be the greatest.  In Mark 9:35 it says “He sat down and called the Twelve and said ‘So you want first place?’” See he doesn’t say not to feel what we feel, he asks us just to claim it, admit it, stop hiding it. To say, yes, I may look like I’m Miss Zen-like Calm 2009, but inside I’m a little rat in a maze desperately wanting first place. “Yes, I do, I do want first place.”

So that’s the first step…to tell the truth, to let go of the secret.

And then Jesus uses a couple metaphors to explain how to deal with our insanity around trying to be great. One of them is that of holding a child.

“He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.” (Mark 9:37)

You want to be great? Jesus essentially says, then embrace the children. As I do. When you do you will be embracing me and the God who sent me.

One day soon after we had our big client presentation, Gary and I met for lunch one day. Our waitress was in her late 20s and cute and kind of funny and joking around with us and we got started talking—she found out we had kids and she was saying how she didn’t know if she was ready for kids yet, but she didn’t want to wait too long either. And I told we’d waited until we were older and we were happy we did, I basically told her not to worry. And then she said something, kind of off-handedly, about how what she really needed to do was quit partying so much and get her life more together, and she laughed, but beneath the laughter there was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, shining like a tiny gold nugget, small, but hard to miss…a glimpse of her brokenness and need and fear…and it got to me. She walked away to keep doing her job and I almost cried. I thought about trying to say something to her—have you thought about going to church, or joining a recovery group, for example…but I didn’t know if I should, I didn’t want to be weird or preachy or shaming. Anyway, after we were all paid up and we stood to leave she was just standing there and so I went over and…hugged her. I embraced her, I held her like she was my own child, or at the very least, like a favorite niece or something. And that hug, in that moment, felt like a prayer, it felt like me embracing her not just with my arms, but with God’s arms too. I have no idea what she took from that hug—when it was over she kind of laughed and said, “Oh, you’re so sweet…” But I know what I took from it. In that moment I felt…great. Great, not as in brilliant or funny or the best at something. But deep down great, connected to God, filled with love.

I think I might be starting to get it.  At least a little. You want to be greatest? Sure you do. I do. And It’s OK. We’re all big babies around here. You want to feel great? Embrace the big babies all around you and the big baby that lives inside you. Embrace them like Jesus does. Just crawl into that lap and let yourself be loved.

When Hannah and Gary walked out of their 90- second audition for America’s Got Talent I asked them how it went. “Great,” Hannah said. But for the next hour she talked very little about the judges and their assessment of their talent. Instead, she talked about all the people they’d met along the way, the fire dancers and country music star wannabes, about the singing quartet of doctors, about all the people wearing their crazy dreams on their sleeves. She talked about how by the end of the day they had become a tribe, a kind of sweet, broken, needy and hopeful little family, and how it was a day she’ll never forget.

I hope I never forget it either.

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Lenora Rand is a freelance writer, retreat leader and a Creative Director at a big ad agency. She attends LaSalle Street Church in Chicago and you can read her exploits leading LaSalle’s Confirmation Group at http://stalkingholiness.blogspot.com She recently had an article on The Church and Facebook published by Christian Century magazine.