I’m sitting in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, waiting for my 50-minute flight back to Fort Wayne. I’ve been in Phoenix attending the MinistryCOM conference, a really wonderful event. I haven’t flown since November 2002, just after the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) took over all airport security. My, a lot has changed in that time. Here are some of my observations and experiences from this trip.

• I used etickets for the first time. Booked everything through Orbitz by myself. Very nice. Orbitz sent voicemail to my cellphone with each leg of the flight. For instance, after arriving in Chicago, an Orbitz voicemail informed me that the Fort Wayne flight was on schedule, and told me the gate number and time of departure. I never had to produce tickets anywhere. Nice.
• I loved the self-checkin stations. Swipe a credit card, and the machine identifies you. Put in your flight number, and it calls up your itinerary. Indicate how many bags need to be checked, and then the machine prints out your boarding passes for each leg of your trip.
• In Fort Wayne, I set off the alarm several times, and the TSA guy waved me over to a section for wanding and frisking. At that point I was in my socks, cargo shorts, and polo shirt. No watch. No cell phone. Nothing metal in my pockets. The guy asked me if I had a prosthetic implant, like a fake knee. I said no. A few seconds later, he asked again, “Are you sure you haven’t had a surgical implant of some kind?” I think I might remember something like that. Anyways, a guy came and explained exactly what he would do, and said that when he frisked me, he would only use the back of his hand. Which, of course, made it perfectly okay for a guy to run his hands over my body. The problem turned out to be the multiple snaps in my cargo shorts. Fortunately, I didn’t need to remove my shorts.
• The TSA employees were very professional and friendly. In Phoenix, the guy in front of me handed his boarding pass and a photo ID to the TSA guy at the head of the line. It wasn’t a good photo. The TSA guy asked if he could provide his driver’s license. The man pulled it from his wallet and said, “The photo doesn’t look anything like me.” The TSA official looked at the driver’s license, looked at the man, and then said, “Now I know why you gave me the other photo.” We all chuckled.
• The boarding passes have a group number on them. Instead of boarding by aisles, as they once did–“Now boarding aisles 23 through 35”–we board by groups. Group one is always frirst class, and they board first, the snooty elites. On the last flight, I was group two, and we were the rows in the back. So they don’t go in order, from front to back of the plane.
• On the flight to Phoenix from Chicago, a three-hour flight, all of the flight attendants were guys. One, if he colored his hair entirely gray (it was already partially gray), would have looked like Taylor Hicks from Americdan Idol. And I would have asked him to show us a dance move.
• I had no trouble finding bin space for my carry-on laptop bag. In the past, people lugged aboard massive garment bags and anything else they could carry. I would get aboard early, lest all bin space be taken. But now that they’ve clamped down on carry-ons, I can board last and still have no trouble.

I’ll turn 50 next month, and I’m giving myself a gift. Actually, I’ve been working on this gift since early May, and I’m hoping that by the time I actually cross the Great 50 Divide, I’ll have a good sense of what the gift looks and acts like.

The gift is authenticity.

At this point in my life, I feel confident enough about my place in the universe that I don’t feel the need to impress, to protect, to defend, to spout the party line. No longer do I want to play games, trying to seem better at this or that than I really am, whether it’s an issue of occupational competence or spiritual vitality or intellectual knowledge. It’s not like I’ve been a big fake, a phony, a political games-player. Over the years I’ve been pretty open and honest. And yet, streaks of embedded inauthenticity run through my daily life, which I’ve discovered (with dismay) during the past few months as I’ve been trying to excise falsity from my deeply-ingrained habits and tendencies.

I want to grow in being honest, transparent, vulnerable, genuine, open. I don’t want to tell people what they want to hear, or what they expect to hear from me as a denominational suit. I don’t want to only voice sentiments that are safe, whether at work or church or in general relationships. I don’t want to play the part of an all-knowing, all-spiritual church elder, when my knowledge and spirituality fall way below allness. I want to stop playing Christian one-upmanship games, end the reign of pretense in so many nooks and crannies of my Christian character, and slay the remaining dragons of insecurity which give rise to self-justification, defensiveness, and excuses. I want to have no inhibitions about saying, “Wow, I really goofed that one up,” or “I was wrong, and you were right.”

Authenticity doesn’t require that I turn into a blunt jerk who dumps critical crap on people and says things like, “You know, you’ve got really ugly ears. Hey, I’m just trying to be honest.” There is still a matter of appropriateness and discretion. But you get the idea. Writing regularly in this blog is actually very good practice in being authentic.

So that’s my birthday present to myself. I’m working on it every day, trying to flesh out what it means, though I keep encountering bastions where genuineness remains locked out. But that’s where I’m headed. And so far, I’ve found it quite liberating.

I’m an advocate for taking care of the poor, underprivileged, and dispossessed in our midst. Or am I?

These people are definitely on my conscience. Have been since 1981, when I heard former UPI reporter Wes Pippert speak at a press convention. Pippert, in addition to being an ace reporter at the top of his profession, was also an Old Testament scholar. A brilliant guy whom I first heard speak when I was a student at Huntington College. At this convention, he explained how, throughout the Old Testament, God’s judgment or blessing on a nation was usually tied to how well it took care of its poor people.

Pippert’s words planted a seed in me which has grown, slowly, ever since. Until then (I was two years out of college), despite having grown up in wonderful evangelical churches, the poor were not on my radar. Which makes me wonder why the heck we United Brethren have this huge blindspot regarding something central to God’s heart. Whatever the case, during the past 25 years the poor have been on my radar with ever-increasing pings, and Pippert’s words have been repeatedly reinforced. It’s now something I believe strongly.

But has it made any difference in my life, beyond self-righteous, idealistic sniveling about the need to care for the poor? Mark Driscoll writes in Radical Reformission, “Ideals become values only if they are lived out.” Well, it would be fashionably humble to beat up on myself, but the truth is, my behavior and attitude have come a long way. Yes, I live in a nice house and blow a lot of discretionary income. And yet, there are things I do and don’t do that demonstrate a change from ten years ago.

Through my current church, I hang out with people on the lower end of the economic scale. They are my friends, and I care about them in a hands-on way. I’ve gone beyond just writing checks to someone else who works around poor people. What started when Pippert plucked my conscience has blossomed into something that really matters. But not nearly as much as I’d like it to matter. And as much as it will matter, I hope, next year, and the year after that. I’m still more of a talker than a doer. But I’m glad to be more than an idealist, too.

Many fundamental attitudinal changes take years. Wes Pippert’s message wasn’t a Damascus Road experience for me, where I suddenly turned 180 degrees. Rather, it started me on a really long journey. And now, after 25 years, I find myself way way down that road. And I should take some pleasure in that. I can look at other areas in which change has come not through a crisis experience, but through a steady progression. Like my thinking regarding how Christians should view the environment, gays, politics, spending habits, war and peace, and much more. I’m also learning to be patient with people who are also on a journey of attitude-change, and not expect any amount of harping on my part to transport them to the place it took me 20 years to reach.