I’ve been going to the THRIVE conference at Bayside for fourteen years.
That’s long enough that some of the experience has become familiar. You arrive and find people greeting friends they haven’t seen since the last conference. Everyone starts making decisions about breakout sessions. Somebody is carrying an ambitious stack of conference materials that will probably still be sitting on a desk six months from now.
Then you walk into the auditorium.
The room fills. The music starts. A few thousand people are suddenly sharing an experience instead of simply occupying the same building, and for a while the noise of ordinary life gets pushed farther away.
I’ve experienced the same thing at Christian music festivals. I’ve seen MercyMe three times. At Spirit West Coast in Northern California, I took a photograph while they were ending their concert with “Happy Dance,” something they like to do when they perform live. Confetti filled the air above us while someone standing in front of me made a heart with their hands.
It’s a joyous photograph.
I remember the song. I remember the confetti. I remember the feeling of being there.
Then, like every concert and every THRIVE conference I’ve ever attended, it ended.
We all went home.
Fourteen years of returning to the same conference has made me increasingly interested in what happens next.
There Is Something About Gathering
This isn’t exclusively a religious phenomenon.
Go to a concert and watch thousands of strangers sing a lyric together. Sit in a stadium when the home team scores. Attend a graduation and watch family after family erupt when one particular name is called. Sit in a theater when an entire audience becomes so quiet you can hear someone several rows away breathe.
Human beings gather.
For a little while, the boundaries around our individual lives become thinner. We’re sharing something with people we may never meet.
Faith has understood the power of gathering for a very long time. We see it every Sunday in churches around the world, but also in the continued popularity of contemporary Christian gatherings such as Passion, Elevation Nights, THRIVE and countless local conferences, retreats and festivals.
People will drive for hours, book hotel rooms, buy tickets and rearrange schedules to be part of them.
I’ve done it.
I suspect part of what we’re looking for isn’t merely information or entertainment. We can get both without leaving the couch.
We’re looking for connection.
Sometimes we need to be reminded that we’re not experiencing life alone.
The Problem With Extraordinary Moments
I’ve had experiences I was certain I would never forget.
I’ve forgotten some of them.
Not entirely, perhaps, but the intensity is gone. That’s what intensity does.
Books that changed my thinking eventually returned to the shelf. Conference notebooks went into drawers. Songs that once stopped me cold eventually played in the background while I answered an email.
For a long time, I think I misunderstood that fading. I treated it as though something valuable had been lost.
I’m less convinced of that now.
Maybe an experience isn’t valuable because we’re able to preserve the emotion attached to it. Maybe its value is revealed by what remains after the emotion has gone.
If I attend something about kindness and come home no kinder, what exactly happened?
If I spend two days thinking about leadership and return to work Monday treating people exactly the way I did Friday, what did I learn?
If I stand among thousands of people singing about grace and become no more gracious toward the person who irritates me Tuesday afternoon, perhaps Tuesday deserves a little more attention.
That’s a considerably harder measurement than whether something moved us.
It may also be a better one.
Ordinary Life Is Where We Spend Our Lives
I love big moments.
I’m not arguing against them. Fourteen years at the same conference would make that argument rather difficult to sustain.
But most of life isn’t lived beneath stage lights.
It’s lived at kitchen tables and desks. In cars. In grocery stores. In meetings. In conversations with people we love and occasional conversations with people who make loving humanity feel like an advanced course.
That’s where the things we claim to value become inconvenient.
Kindness is easy to admire until someone is difficult.
Patience is lovely until we’re late.
Grace sounds beautiful until someone needs ours.
Curiosity seems admirable until somebody disagrees with us.
Faith can feel wonderfully clear while thousands of people around us are singing the same words.
Then somebody cuts us off trying to leave the parking lot.
Human beings have impeccable timing.
The Things We Choose to Carry
I found myself thinking about this recently while working on the Faith Collection for Clothed in Kindness, one of my businesses.
There are plenty of familiar expressions of Christianity in the collection. But as I looked through everything we’ve created, I kept being drawn toward shirts that weren’t simply statements about believing something.
They asked something of the person wearing them.
Cross the Road, Not Your Arms.
Drop the Stones.
I like those phrases because none is particularly difficult while printed on cotton.
Living them is another matter.
Being the neighbor can interrupt your afternoon.
Crossing the road requires noticing who’s on the other side.
Putting down the stone is especially inconvenient when we’re quite certain the other person deserves it.
Perhaps that’s why those words keep finding their way into the things I create. My faith isn’t particularly interested in becoming another reason to divide the world neatly into people who belong on my side and people who don’t.
I’m more interested in what happens when we meet each other.
I’m interested in grace that survives disagreement, kindness with enough backbone to act, curiosity that lasts long enough to understand someone and a faith secure enough that it doesn’t have to be frightened by every question.
I suspect I’m not the only Christian who feels that way.
I wrote about the apparel side of this over at Clothed in Kindness in Faith Doesn’t End When the Worship Music Stops. But the idea I’m interested in here goes beyond Christianity and certainly beyond T-shirts.
It’s about what any meaningful experience leaves behind.
The Parking Lot After the Amen
The next time something moves you—a concert, sermon, conference, book, teacher, conversation or even a moment you didn’t recognize as important until much later—I don’t know that you need to work very hard to preserve exactly how it felt.
You probably can’t.
Instead, it might be worth noticing what it asks of you.
Maybe there’s someone to call.
Something to change.
An apology that’s overdue.
A person you’ve been walking past.
A question you should ask before deciding you already know the answer.
Maybe the experience doesn’t change your life. Most don’t.
Maybe it just changes Tuesday afternoon.
I’m beginning to think that counts for quite a lot.
Eventually the lights come up. The confetti gets swept away. We find our cars and head back toward all the ordinary things waiting for us.
Fourteen years from now, I probably won’t remember every speaker I’ve heard at THRIVE or every song I’ve sung there.
But I’d like to think all those hours left something behind.
Maybe that’s the point.
