If you follow me on Twitter, then you probably figured out that I was at this thing last week called Q LA.
A lot of people have asked me in the weeks leading up to my trip and the days following it exactly what Q is and, to be honest, it's a little hard to explain to someone who hasn't been before. (I know, great...right?) In any event, I shall do my best to help you somewhat understand what Q is and what its goal is.
To start with, this is how the Q Ideas website explains the Q Conference:
"Our culture is in a desperate place. 34% of our youngest adults deny any interest in religion (Pew 2012). The Christian faith is losing ground as a credible option for the spiritually curious. For too long, the church has emphasized what's wrong with culture. The Q Conference curates a forward-looking conversation that celebrates what's right, imagines what's possible and educates Christians on how they are meant to play a central role in God's work to renew all things."Before I went to Q, my friends who had been before told me that my brain would go into overdrive, I'd have a lot to think about and process, and it was essentially like drinking from a fire hydrant.
They weren't kidding.
The format of Q is a bit different than many conferences in that, for the good majority of it, you don't choose one of four or five different hour-long workshops going on simultaneously.
Everyone is in one central location (in this case, the Club Nokia in downtown LA) and the sessions are done with a mix of 18-, 9-, and 3-minute talks on a huge variety of topics ranging from living lives of excess, what Christian women really want, modesty, and the structure of story to homosexuality and gay marriage, sex trafficking, poverty, and homelessness.
Coming out of Q, I felt a little bit like I'd been run over by a mac truck.
I've found that it takes a couple of days to effectively peel yourself off the road and re-inflate before you can really begin processing the huge amounts of information thrown at you at breakneck speed during the 2 1/2 days of Q.
Sitting down and talking with my mom last night, I felt overwhelmed. I heard so many inspiring stories from wonderful people; beautiful words that broke my heart, fired me up, and made me want to make changes, get up, go somewhere, do something!
It's hard when you come back from something like that and all that's waiting for you is real life.
I've been given a lot to think about, both personally and professionally, so I've come back from this trip feeling like I have hundreds of balls up in the air and I'm not sure which one to catch and run with first.
Where do I start professionally? Where do I start personally?
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I've mentioned before that I tend to be an all-or-nothing kind of person, and so, in situations like this, I come home and I want to make all the changes right away.
I want to immediately begin loving my gay friends better, being more generous, living less excessively, being more infectious about my presentation of the Gospel, helping advocate for the less fortunate, doing my part in ending horrible things like poverty and sex trafficking and homelessness, and on and on...but I can only do so much.
I may, one day, reach a point where I'm actively doing all those things. But I can't make all of those changes right away without burning myself out, and then none of those changes would do any good.
For many people, Q is primarily a personal challenge. They hear a lot of things about living the Christian life that they can be doing better and it challenges them to learn to love Christ and love the Gospel and love the world in a better and different way.
But for a lot of other people, like me, Q was a challenge both personally and professionally.
As an aspiring writer, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet several people who work with magazines or are published authors themselves and talk with them about my dreams, my goals, and what I'm currently working on. I got to ask them questions and pick their brains about publishers and agents and magazine articles and breaking into the freelance world. On Wednesday morning, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop with Jonathan Merritt and Christopher Ferebee on How to Write a Book that gave me so much practical, inside information I couldn't have gotten many other places.
The information was all wonderful and incredibly helpful, but, much like all of the talks, I left feeling a bit overwhelmed. Excited and energized, yes, but also overwhelmed, because when so much information and so many options are thrown at you all at one time, it can be difficult to know where to start.
And that's where I am right now.
I'm beginning to review and process through what talks impacted me the most, what ideas and key phrases and statements stuck out to me.
What changes in my life and my faith do I want to start with, recognizing that, realistically, I can only begin to make one or two changes at a time or I'm going to epic fail? What steps do I want to focus on in order to move my career forward so that I can gain momentum and progress at a good pace without stressing and burning myself out too soon?
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All of that being said, you're probably wondering...so what exactly did people talk about? What kind of water came out of this fire hydrant of information?
As I said, I'm still processing a lot of this, and you can be sure that there will probably be many forthcoming blog posts in the coming weeks and months inspired by several of the talks I heard at Q.
One of the major ideas discussed often by many different speakers was that of story. Various people discussed the structure of story, how to create a story that engages and draws people in, the power of a well-told story, how stories have the ability to change hearts, how stories can enrapture and enlighten an audience.
If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you know that I love story.
It's why I became a writer. I am captivated by the beauty of a well-crafted story. A beautifully written story affects me in a way that nothing in this world can. And so one of the things I've been contemplating coming out of Q is my own story.
How do I best share my story with the world in a way that effectively communicates the love I have for my Savior and the love He has for me and for the world? And how do I translate my ability to write and my love for story into beautifully crafted, well-written, well-developed stories that engage and enrapture the reader and inspire them to look beyond the story and back to the Savior?
The idea of telling our story well translates into another talk that really impacted me, which was given by Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision U.S. He spoke on the Gospel as a virus, addressing the question "How can the Church become more infectious?"
Based on the knowledge that a vaccination is a weakened version of a virus, designed to make a body immune to the virus itself, he posed a question that really struck me and I've been mulling over since I heard it a week ago: Have we given the culture such a weakened version of Christianity that we've vaccinated it against the real, authentic thing?
It's convicting to think about that possibility, and in light of that, I've been thinking a lot about how I live and share my story.
Have I personally been a representative of a weakened, vaccine version of Christianity? Or have I done a good job of representing the infectious nature of the actual Gospel? And if I've been more like a vaccine than a virus, how do I change that?
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Those are just a few of the thoughts running around in my brain after Q, a few of the balls I'm tossing and trying to keep hold of. As I begin to gain control of one after another, blog posts will be sure to come in abundance.
Some of these things I'll be thinking about are wonderful opportunities for discussion, collaboration and debate. As I begin to explore some of these topics here on the blog, I'd love for you to take part and join in, so please, leave your comments and thoughts and let's get a conversation going in the weeks to come!
But for now, I need to decompress. And by that, I mean I'm going to make some cupcakes.
Photo Credit: Brian Liao. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. Design by Sarah Hayes.
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The post Thoughts on Q appeared first on Shades of Shayes.