Joshua Longbrake

You get dropped off in kindergarden, bookbag on your back, unzipped, flap dangling, setting you up for a lifetime of your lunch falling off your back like Pizza the Hut. You hold hands with Angie Romines because you think she is cute. You don’t know what cute means. 1st grade/2nd grade you are in reading groups. You get put into the slow reading group, introducing you to socioeconomics and classism and jealousy and hate and Lunchables. 3rd grade you tell a joke about a penis and a vagina that you heard from Tyler Radcliff and you get in trouble. Your teacher doesn’t believe you even though you’re telling the truth that you don’t know what a vagina is. Nothing changes for 20 years. 5th grade you are the captain of a kickball team called Kixx. You wanted to call it Cap’n Crunch and the Funky Bunch, but Miss Waltz’s strong arm of teacher justice vetoed your brilliance. Your team loses in round 2 of the tournament. Stan Griswald’s team, Griswald’s Grizzly Bears, wins. You think that your team would have won the tournament if you had the Cap’n Crunch name. Nothing changes for 17 years. Junior High is mostly about girls and those great days when you see your teacher wheel in the giant tube tv strapped to the big black cart. Also, there’s a no facial hair rule in your school and, unlike most seniors, you have to shave every day or else you get in trouble by your father, the principal. 5 o’clock shadows are for 40 year old businessmen and one 13 year old boy in Indiana. You also start watching MST3K and read The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, odd and beautiful seeds planted that will shape the way you see for the rest of your life. High school is mostly about girls. You get a job as a janitor (hey baby want to go up to the roof *jingles keys*), which you hold from 9th to 12th grade, as well as working at 4 different gas stations. You also star as The Scarecrow in the (what felt like) Broadway production of The Wizard of Oz. Roses are hurled onstage. College is a surreal and all-too-real experiment in fundamentalist Christianity. You make lots of good friends, get addicted to running ultra-marathons, and go to Sheetz every day. You date three girls, Deb, Mel, and Britt, cementing that you’re into single-syllabically-named women. You apologize to every Amanda you meet. You sit in your apartment window and read books that do not bow philosophically and theologically at the same altar as your academic institution.

And then I went to graduate school to study theology, where I swallowed the Hot Tamale red pill and dove head first down the rabbit hole. I had determined by this time that I wanted to be a pastor, and I had also determined that I thought that the role of pastor, if I was going to fill it, needed some personal redefining. I read the theological texts and studied the sacred texts. I spent hours with Dillard and Nietzsche, Derrida and Brueggemann. I barely understood any of it, which was such a thrill. I studied Avedon and Duchamp and Rothko and Warhol and Baldessarri and Frank and Neutra and had professors that saw the value in evaluating them in my theology papers. I went to class and I sat on my porch with my housemates, where we’d smoke cigarettes and drink cheap whisky, talking about transference and transcendence and why we got dumped our girlfriends. I hiked and camped and traveled around the world through dozens of countries. I went to a baptist church and a catholic church and an episcopal church, mostly at the same time. I met the best people on the planet, and it only cost me $60,000. I wanted experience and I got it and I loved it.

And I will tell you this: graduating from 20 or so years of academia, and specifically seminary, is like leaving the warm womb of your mother’s belly and discovering that there’s no one there to catch you. You end up lying on the floor next to your placenta, searching for the milk of career aspirations, only to find endless pages of Craigslist job search pages. I do not fault my alma mater in any way. I chose to go to a school that was not affiliated with any denomination and I knew it was a risk. I do not regret it. And I understood, or at least I was told, that finding a church to work in that aligned with the ways of thinking of our wonderful graduate school would be difficult. This has proven to be true.

A year or so into my time there I had lunch with one of my professors, who was also the president of the school at that time, and I asked him what he thought I should do with my M.Div. after graduating from our school. I told him that I was worried about not being able to find a church that wanted someone like me as their pastor.

“Yes. That is probable and likely. My guess is you’ll have to make something new.”

Now I’m in the in-between. I haven’t found a church to work at and I haven’t started a church. I recently interviewed for a job as a pastor, but it turns out that the search committee for that job read this blog and had a few issues with some nudity in my photography and my language. There were also differences in theological opinions that they found alarming. My father, always caring and never scolding, has told me that that was going to happen. He is a sage. My hope for writing and making photographs on this blog has always been to tell the good story of who I am, and so it’s a good thing that there was discord with that particular church. They would have been frustrated with me, a great thing to know up front. I have no doubt that they’ll find someone who better fits their ethos.

It turns out that the post-womb play is patience and hope. At 28 I already feel like I’m at the end of my life, and if I don’t do something now then I’ll be stuck in this state forever. That is not true. What is true is faith and hope and love and believing that there is purpose. I went through a brief Cartesian period where I thought that I made my own reality, but thank God it was brief. One day a plan will unfold (and it will be illuminated that it has been unfolding all along) and a purpose will for this period of life will be revealed. I believe I will at some point pastor a wonderful group of people who are curious and kind and who are interested in both the questions and the actions that are produced from the questions. And so, I’ll do my best to have patience and hope, taking pictures along the way.