The cul-de-sac where I live with my husband and three children is somewhat of a generational melting pot. We have at least one representative from each of the six living generations in America right here in our North Carolina neighborhood, a quiet cluster of seven homes.

Our house sits nestled among a pair of neighbors who have lived here more than forty-five years. A few doors down from us lives my Generation X brother-in-law with his wife and their two young girls, and a couple of baby boomers live with their millennial daughter at the bottom of the hill. In my own house, I live with John, my Gen X husband, and three members of our country’s youngest generation, our children.

As for me, my entire adolescence was unmarked by social media. Our college campus didn’t get an email service until my sophomore year, and I didn’t have a cell phone until I graduated, using it only for emergencies. Born at the end of the 1970s, I’m technically part of Generation X but don’t always feel like I fit in with its generational stereotypes.

Though I was never a latchkey kid, a defining characteristic of Generation X, I did spend a lot of time gazing at MTV. Music! On television! On one hand, I relate with the Generation X individualistic and entrepreneurial mindset. On the other hand, I deeply connect with the optimistic we-can-make-a-difference-in-the-world attitude for which millennials are known. They value connection and authenticity, carrying a hope for the world even as they may be suspicious of its disingenuous institutions, sometimes including the church. To the people who say they love God, the millennial simply says, “Prove it!” They value faith that has hands, feet, and a compassionate heart.

In addition to the unique characteristics of millennials as a whole, it’s important to note the life stage they are currently walking through. No matter what time in history a person comes of age, the twenties and early thirties seem to bring with them common questions we all ask in one way or another: Who are we? Who is God? Do our work and life matter?

For millennials who are now in the midst of building career and family, establishing a place in society, and in many cases fighting off the constant pressure to compete and be successful, the question becomes this: What does it look like for us to be with and reveal Jesus in today’s fast-moving world? How can we be intentional as millennials and friends of millennials?

I’ve found an unlikely teacher helping me answer that question in the form of a pair of benches in my cul-de-sac.

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01.  Benches of Connections

When we first moved here seven years ago, I didn’t pay much attention to the generational diversity represented among us. I was most concerned with keeping up with our three toddlers who liked to play in the grassy area in the center of the cul-de-sac, a spot that became a meeting place for the neighbors.

One afternoon while John’s mom was visiting, she mentioned how nice it would be to have a couple of benches in the center of the circle, more permanent seating so we wouldn’t always have to drag our lawn chairs out every time we were outside with the kids. Several days later, she showed up with a bench in a box in the back of her car, and a few days after that one of the neighbors bought a second bench to match. Now we have two benches facing each other in front of our houses, like our little community of seven homes finally has a living room.

As I was preparing dinner one afternoon, I glanced out my kitchen window and noticed three of our older neighbors leave their homes at nearly the same time, making their way at various shuffling speeds to meet at the benches in the middle. I’d seen them outside in the past, but they had never stayed out for more than a few minutes, as their aging bodies wouldn’t cooperate with the demands of standing for so long. Now that we had benches, everything was different.

Watching them from a distance through my kitchen window wasn’t enough. I wanted to connect, to intentionally move toward my neighbors and be part of the conversation. Unable to resist the community, I went outside to check the mail and crossed the street to talk with them for a few moments. We spoke of children and grandchildren, aging siblings and friends, the weather. We enjoyed the breeze and waved at the occasional passing car. We lingered.

With dinner still cooking inside, I made my way back to the kitchen but kept my eye on them through my window. They stayed out for nearly an hour. I’d not seen them do that before. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be together, but before it wasn’t so easy. Now they had benches to sit on. And the benches made all the difference.

The benches weren’t fancy, expensive, impressive, or flashy. They weren’t a complicated solution to an unsolvable problem, and they didn’t offer answers to difficult questions. The benches turned a patch of grass into a gathering place. They became an open invitation to anyone willing to come sit, giving neighbors a place to be, a place to rest, and a place to come together on an ordinary day.

As I’ve considered my millennial friends and what they (and I) long for in life, particularly in relationship to God and one another, the benches in my cul-de-sac come to mind. Over the past several years, those benches have become a grounding metaphor for me. Here in my very own neighborhood, among this small representation of the generations in America, the benches offer us all the same thing—a simple place to connect.

While the world spins fast around us with flashy ads and empty promises of success, the deepest desire of our soul is to know and to be known, to see and to be seen, to hear and to be heard. We’re tired of programs and pitches. We simply want real faith, real connection, and the real Jesus. One of the most meaningful gifts we can offer one another is to find a way to intentionally build benches of connection in our work and our lives—with God and with each other.

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02.  Building a Bench in our Work

Growing up, I always thought of a bench as a place for the players who aren’t skilled enough to start, the second string, the substitutes, the leftovers, the lazy, the overwhelmed, and the overlooked. It doesn’t sound like a place I would choose to sit. But when I look at the life of Christ and where he chose to focus his own work on earth, the unskilled ordinary men—the kind we might find sitting on the benches of America—these are the ones he chose to not only live his life among but also to carry on the work he started on earth.

If there was ever a generation who wanted their work to mean something, it’s the millennials. But the burden that comes with this desire can be a heavy pressure to succeed and the temptation to discard the small, seemingly unimportant tasks that don’t fulfill us personally. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to do work well and in a healthy way without using my work as a way to define myself.

For a generation who feels a personal responsibility to make a difference in a broken world, it can be over-whelming when it seems like we are constantly pushed to accomplish more, even if those ambitions are for noble causes. Jesus says his load is easy and his burden is light, but he doesn’t say there isn’t a load or a burden. He recognizes there is something to carry, but he invites us into the easy way of carrying it.

I’m discovering that my work feels heavy or light depending on whether or not I’m holding on to the outcome of my work. Instead of trying to control outcomes, Jesus invites us into co-carrying his easy yoke. What makes our work meaningful isn’t the work itself, but the presence of Christ in the midst of it.

In my work, when it seems that what other people do appears more important, impactful, and effective than what I’m doing, I’m tempted to make my platform wider and put brighter lights in the bulbs so that I can dazzle others too. I become determined to make my work the best, the most excellent and meaningful. I want to climb the ladder, but what if instead I tore the ladder apart and used the wood to build a bench?

One person who moved from ladder climbing to bench building was Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. After twenty years of working in the academic world— teaching at Yale, Harvard, and Notre Dame—Nouwen began to sense within himself what he called “a deep inner threat.”

“Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger.” He recognized a deep loneliness and darkness he couldn’t seem to shake, which led him to ask God for direction.

God’s answer came to him in the form of a person. He met Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities for people with intellectual disabilities. Nouwen says God told him to “go and live among the poor in spirit and they will heal you.”

“So I moved from Harvard to L’Arche, from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs of our society. It was a very hard and painful move, and I am still in the process of making it.”

I think about Henri Nouwen’s transition from the large, influential life to a small, hidden one. He said it was the unlikely way God chose to save him from spiritual burnout.Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 10–11. It’s counterintuitive to think that success could be the doorway to burnout. No one sets out to fail. It would have been easy for Nouwen to sink into the trap of comparison, measuring the seemingly unimportant work in front of him with the respectable academic work of his contemporaries.

The road to the kingdom of God is lined with invisible benches where the great work of love, service, listening, community, prayer, change, and transformation will occur. The challenge for a generation valuing meaningful work is that “meaningful” is hard to measure. It can be tempting to resort to numbers in order to quantify success.

Sometimes I feel like I’m walking through a battlefield and my enemy is an army of numbers. How many people showed up to that group we started? How many units of that product sold? How many shares did I get on that photo? How much money did I make last week, month, year?

In my work, it’s difficult to choose bench building when ladder climbing seems so much more attractive. When I spend weeks writing, cutting, pasting, revising, and editing something, I feel discouraged when I receive only a handful of responses. Further discouragement comes when I get on Twitter and see one of my peers launch a product that has twenty-five thousand signups in less than a day. I know these numbers don’t define me and the comparisons don’t help me. But sometimes I feel like I’m fighting my way through an army of numbers and there is no indication they plan to surrender.

I’ve tried to fight numbers with effort. It never works. Instead of focusing on the numerical outcomes of the work I do every day, I’m discovering an important part of my spiritual formation is choosing instead to consider some other numbers.

Five thousand. To sit on a bench with my work means to keep company with a small boy who had a small lunch that fed five thousand men and their families. My part is not feeding five thousand men. My part is giving my lunch to Jesus.

Twenty-one. To sit on a bench means to keep company with David, who was anointed by Samuel twenty-one years before he was appointed king over all of Israel. My part is not to rush to vocational outcomes. My part is to wait in the presence of God.

One. To sit on a bench means to keep company with one young girl before a glorious angel, sent by God to invite her into the greatest mystery of all time. “You will bear a child and call his name ‘Immanuel’” (Luke 1:31, author’s paraphrase). And her one small yes became the holy gateway from heaven to earth. Our part is not to usher heaven to earth. Our part is to offer one small yes.

Too many to count. To sit on a bench is to keep company with Abraham who, along with Sarah, tried to control the promise God made of an heir. But God told him it wouldn’t happen by Abraham’s own effort or planning. Instead, he “took him outside and said, ‘Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (Genesis 15:5, NASBScripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.lockman.org)). Our part is not to make the promise come true. Our part is to count the stars.

With our work, we get to build benches that line the road to the kingdom of God. But we don’t get to say how many will sit on them.

For those who feel the pressure of producing results and managing outcomes, it might help to remember that small things don’t always turn into big things. But all things begin small, especially in the kingdom of God. Acorns become oak trees. Embryos become president. Life starts with a breath. Love starts with hello.

The benches remind me to accept the beauty of smallness, hiddenness, and the secret work of Christ in my spirit, the deepest part of who I am. I want to let him come out of me in any way he wants, no matter how it may seem to me—whether that is in one big way or in a million little ways.

Who would “despise the days of small things”? (Zechariah 4:10, NIVScripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™). Who am I to try to measure kingdom results with worldly systems?

As citizens of an invisible kingdom, we refuse to take our living cues from the world that says to build, grow, measure, and rush to keep up. Instead we take our cues from the new hope alive within us, from the life of Christ, who has made our hearts his home. We’ll stop trying to keep up with the fast-moving world and, instead, we’ll settle down and keep company with the small moments of our lives.

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03.  Finding a Bench for Our Soul

Recently I went through a period of deep loneliness. Unlike many of my Gen X and millennial peers, I haven’t lived through a notable loss and rediscovery of faith or a deep doubt spiraling into angst or frustration with God and/or the church. I was not angry. I just felt alone. Perhaps this is more common than I know.

The newness of a writing career was beginning to wear off. After several years of writing books and speaking engagements, I was becoming more private, less comfortable among strangers, more suspicious of people, less inclined to move toward longtime friends. I was less aware of God’s presence and his peace.

All these mores and lesses began to terrify me.

I felt like I needed to talk with someone about all this foggy loneliness, but I wasn’t sure where to turn. After all, I hadn’t survived a tragedy or faced a life-threatening illness, and neither was anyone in my family. But this deep loneliness crept into every small moment, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

I had gone to counseling before and that was helpful at different times in my life. But this particular need didn’t feel like a counseling type of need. It felt more serious than simply talking with a friend and more intentional than a conversation with my husband.

The words of Jesus came to mind here, when he said, “For what does it benefit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36, NASB). I was doing well, mildly successful in some circles, wildly successful in others. I loved Jesus and believed his words, but my pace of life was threatening my soul. It didn’t feel right, in a way, to admit trouble or loneliness when everything seemed to be going so well.

This seems common among many of us my age. We are tired of competing and longing for connection, but we aren’t always sure where to turn. Church is often more programed than personal, and mentors are hard to find. By that time, I had read a lot about spiritual direction, but the evangelical environment I am in doesn’t have a regular practice for spiritual direction, so I didn’t have a lot of people who could advise me on finding someone to meet with.

I didn’t trust anyone young, famous, or on the Internet for this. I didn’t want to risk meeting someone who might be easily impressed by me. I needed to find someone I couldn’t trick, fool, or manipulate. I longed to feel small in the presence of someone else.

On the recommendation of a friend, I ended up contacting Marion, an older woman living only a few miles from my house. In the email, I told her I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for but I would like to meet with someone to help me sort that out. She explained that spiritual direction is simply an ongoing process of opening to God’s presence in your life with someone who holds open a prayerful space for you to do that. Considering that the one-sentence description alone brought tears to my eyes, I figured this was something I needed to do.

This longing for a deeper connection with God presented itself like the benches in my cul-de-sac. Instead of ignoring that longing—which is often the easier, default option in a fast-moving world—I saw it as an open invitation to come sit, but I had to decide to take that intentional first step.

On the morning I went to see Marion for the first time, she welcomed me into her sunroom, shadowed by clouds but warm with her presence. The relational bench she offered me was a quiet one. She introduced our time with silence and invited me to close it by saying Amen. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, and I did the same. Ten seconds in, I was immediately stressed out. How long did people usually wait? I could have sat in silence the entire hour, but that’s probably not what people did. Or was it?

I knew I needed this intentional space for my soul. I valued being quiet and still in the deepest part of who I am. But in the moments of silence, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. This fast-moving world supports a language the soul doesn’t speak, and it takes courage to emerge in a land that isn’t home. My soul had been held hostage by hustle, and now it was time to practice creating a safe space for my soul to come out.

Parker Palmer says the soul

 

speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge.Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 7–8.

 

I’m not sure Marion was prepared for me to sit on her sunroom sofa for an hour or two waiting for my soul to come out. But in that moment, I felt like I might need that kind of time.

It’s true that our souls are like wild animals. It is also true that our souls are like little children. If the soul senses judgment, criticism, or rejection, she won’t feel safe enough to emerge. The problem is that one of her harshest critics is me. As I enter into this thoughtful place, my soul is already too intimidated by expectations to come out. So I caught myself trying to figure out the right way to breathe, to pray, to listen. I didn’t want to mess this up. The very reason I came to meet with Marion showed up, right there in the beginning. I needed a place of connection free of expectation, yet I was putting these expectations on myself. That’s one reason we may often avoid sitting on benches of connection in favor of something that feels more important— because we’re afraid of what might emerge from within if we give our souls space to come out, especially in the presence of someone else.

After several minutes rolled by with me fumbling through silence, I finally said amen. It wasn’t a perfect silence, but I didn’t think that was the point.

What happened next would seem almost insignificant if it weren’t for the impact it left on my soul. I told Marion that fall is my favorite season, but it always felt full: the twins have their final volleyball games, many weekends I travel, first-quarter report cards come home, school projects are in full swing, and end-of-the-year deadlines start creeping up. I shared how I didn’t want to move through life so fast that I missed this season.

The day before I had I made soup after church. I had put on music, chopped carrots and celery, boiled chicken, and minced garlic. I warmed bread, added heavy dollops of butter on top, opened windows so I could hear the kids playing in the driveway while I worked in the kitchen, their laughter piercing the sound of the wind through the coloring leaves in the yard.

I did all of that, but all I told Marion was, “I made soup.” And just when I realized how dumb that sounded and caught myself wanting to explain why making soup was important, she said something that surprised me.

“That’s beautiful.” And I began to cry.

To me, the simple act of making soup means that I’m here in this moment engaging in something I love. The day before, making soup was a spiritual act of worship, and Marion seemed to understand that. Even better, she understood without my having to explain it. In the power of the Spirit, Marion and I connected.

In my relationships, when I see a need I think that requires fixing, a conversation I don’t know how to tackle, or a grief I have no words for, I’m tempted to make things complicated and try to take control. But people don’t need what is fancy and flashy, they want what is just regular. Millennials don’t need a fixer; they need a fellow journeyer. In times of need and loneliness, they long to sit on a bench with someone else so they know they’re not alone.

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04.  The Bench, Our Kind Companion

The benches are still there in the center of our cul-de-sac. The wood is chipping and the hardware needs tightening, but they’re sturdy enough to hold five generations of neighbors seeking connection with one another.

The benches remain kind companions for me, reminding me I have something to offer, but that doesn’t mean I have to offer it in the ways the fast-moving world tells me I must.

As we sit on our own benches in various areas of our lives, may they remind us that our job isn’t to measure or manufacture success, but rather it’s to release our obsession with building a life and to trust in the life Christ is building within us, one small moment at a time.