A Time to Mourn…

The other day, someone in the GMA Discord mentioned this verse:

4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
Ecclesiastes 3:4 ESV

I have been ruminating on this verse as the school year comes to an end. Ask any teacher; this school year has been a particularly difficult one. Teaching during a pandemic involved several adjustments because of the various precautions school districts rightfully put in place to protect staff and students. I will admit that my streaming experience helped with teaching online classes while teaching in-person students simultaneously; however, I found myself exhausted by the time the last day of school came and went. We’ve officially moved on to looking forward to next year now that the Class of 2021 graduated last Saturday, and I am relieved that this next year will look more like your normal school year.

But, as I rest and reflect going into the summer, I am also mourning the end of this school year. I don’t think the author of Ecclesiastes mistakenly juxtaposed weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing. Often, there’s a bit of both in any given situation.

So Much Grief Is Hard

There has been much to mourn, to grieve, in the last year. At the time of writing this post, almost 600,000 people in the USA have lost their lives to COVID, which is a horrible tragic loss. I can say with almost complete certainty that we all know someone who has passed from COVID or at least know someone who knows someone. Yet, the losses of the year were not only the lives we’ve lost to this disease. Looking back to the end of the 2019–20 school year, seniors lost their final term at school, their proms, their final seasons of sports, etc. My daughter’s first year of life was lived at home without much social interaction. Businesses have closed all around the USA. We just lost our favorite small coffee shop in the downtown area of our town.

So much has gone and changed over the last year that a lot of us are becoming fatigued by so much grief. COVID fatigue has been on the radar for mental health professionals for months. Grief on its own is known to produce fatigue in general, but grief after grief can be like wave after wave pulling you down, so much so that the natural reaction might be to develop a “thick skin” to grief and loss because we just cannot even with one more loss or change. I know I have been there, particularly with the end of the school year. I just couldn’t interface with the fact that the year was ending because I had already jumped through so many hoops to survive the year. So I walked out of the school when I could and didn’t look back. We celebrated big and loud in the following days.

Grief is a Part of Life

In the days since then, I have found myself feeling the typical grief that accompanies the end of every school year. I had to say goodbye to students, many of whom will not ever step foot into my classroom again. Gone are the conversations had before or after class about their lives. These conversations are why I became a teacher if I’m honest. Don’t get me wrong; I like teaching. But I love getting to know my students, getting to hear about their lives: the good and the bad. Tea Time with Mr. C is a daily occurrence in some of my periods. I live for it, and I mourn the change in these relationships at the end of every school year.

A glimpse of some of the kiddos I’ll miss: my D&D campaign from this year.

Except, this year I didn’t think I should mourn anything about this school year. It was a hard one. We all went through a lot, so we should celebrate that it’s over. I have celebrated, but I also feel the grief that so normally accompanies any kind of ending. This is why I find verses like Ecclesiastes 3:4 so poignant: the juxtaposition of grief and joy is not meant to be an either-or situation. No, these two emotions can happen side-by-side. I say that because I believe the author of Ecclesiastes is employing a feature of Hebrew poetry called synthetic parallelism]—where the first line states an idea and the subsequent lines add to that idea. The author of Ecclesiastes does not see these times as distinct or disparate. There’s no compartmentalization of the human experience. Instead, these are (as E. Carson Brisson put it in “Ecclesiastes 3:1–8” in Interpretation, vol 55, no 3) all spokes of the same wheel that constitutes the entirety of the human experience. The wheel spins offering ordered grief and joy, so we have an invitation to experience both!

No Shame in Complex Emotions

So, as shouldn’t surprise anyone, I have complex emotions: happiness that I am on summer break after this COVID year but also sadness that my students will move on from my classroom. I am thankful though that I can look to Scripture and see affirmation that such complexity is how it should be. The world is a complex place, and humans are complex beings. I hope that as you wrestle with your own complex emotions in this new, somewhat post-COVID world that you give yourself room to feel everything that is coming your way. Don’t try and tell yourself that you should feel one way or another about a certain situation; instead, grasp that you can feel two things at the same time and live in that tension. It’s a weird place to be, but it’s good.

My prayer for you this season is this:

Oh gracious Father, thank You for Your steadfast love and grace through this difficult year. Give to us, your children, the time to see You in the good and the bad. May we lean into your gifts of joy and grief, knowing that this season will eventually pass and a new time will come. Be with those who are mourning, Father. Comfort them as You said through Your Son. In Christ’s name, Amen.

For more on grief in these crazy COVID times, I would recommend my pastor’s sermon series: “Amidst the Chaos” which you can find here.

What’s Your Why?

One of the big questions at my school district is “What’s your why?” They asked me my “why” for becoming a teacher at my orientation when I started here years ago. The practice has stuck with me. So, as I took a step towards streaming on Twitch on a regular basis last fall, I asked myself “Why?” I ask myself the same question routinely to help me become a better streamer. My answers have changed a bit over the last 10 months, but the root of why I stream has stayed constant for the most part.

I stream because I want to connect with others—to build friendships with people online.

When I first became a Twitch Affiliate back in June 2019, I was streaming because I thought I’d make it big. I wanted to strive to be a Twitch Partner. I wanted to be the Ninja of the MMO scene on Twitch. I wanted to be able to quit my job and stream full-time. I wanted a lot of things, but I didn’t realize the amount of work that goes into doing what these big-time streamers do. I saw streaming as a quick way to make it rich, but it’s anything but that. Plus, it just didn’t happen. There are SO many channels on Twitch, each trying to promote the same types of content. My stream was/is mediocre. I met some folks and grew enough to become an Affiliate, but the fame I was searching for did not come. So, streaming went on the back burner, and I didn’t think much about it.

Then, 2020 hit. I started the year with back surgery and had to miss my trip with Love Thy Nerd to PAX South. Then, we welcomed little AllenRose to our family. Then, the pandemic hit, and I spent months at home only really seeing my wife, my newborn daughter, and the occasional relative via Zoom. I started taking Zoloft midway through the year because my depression symptoms became overwhelming. I just could not cope with all that happened at the beginning of the year. It was just too much.

So, when August rolled around and I began preparing for the 2020-2021 school year, I knew I needed to add something to my life to help me cope/destress/relax. Gaming came to mind, as I have been an avid gamer since kindergarten when I broke my arm and my dad got us a SNES. And I thought, if I was going to spend hours gaming, I might as well stream it. So, I spoke with WhiteRose, set a schedule, and went live again for the first time in months. I enjoyed it, but I felt like something was missing.

It was my “why.”

So, I thought about it, and I found the answer: connection. With the world in a state of isolation, as we all stayed 6+ feet away from folks or hid our faces behind masks, I knew that connecting with people would make my streaming more impactful to me and to others. “It is not good for man to be alone,” after all. We were created for connection. And honestly, I have found my gaming habits to be the healthiest when I am gaming with other people.

So, as I pondered writing my “why” down for my blog, I dug into my ministry training and decided to write a mission statement:

AllentionTV strives to connect online and to promote community with all who interact with created content on various platforms.

What this means for you, my followers:

I am committing to community with you. If you wanna hang out in my discord server, come on down. Let’s chat about whatever’s on your mind. DM me on socials. However, you want to communicate.

If you want to play a game with me or watch me play a game on stream, I’m down, assuming I own the game or can easily obtain it. (I’m not Ninja, y’all. I can’t just buy the latest hotness as much as I want to.)

I am going to spend time over the summer to increase my video presence on YouTube because I know there are folks who would rather watch my videos there or can’t catch my live stream and would rather watch a highlights video.

As the one-year anniversary of my revived channel draws near, I hope to get to know you all better and continue creating content you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

So, Why a Blog?

Well, to be frank, I am firstmost a writer. I know I play games on Twitch and have dabbled in digital art (like stuck my toe into the water but I’m trying). Yet I ultimately care more about the words I say, write, read than the games I play or the masterpieces I see in a museum or on a stream. If all of us are cameras, replicating the world around us from our viewpoints, mine comes out as 1000 words or more, usually more.

Then, let’s think about how crazy the last year has been. On top of a global pandemic and racial unrest, I had back surgery in January, became a father in February, and then spent six months in quarantine. Come August, I went back into the classroom, teaching a subject that is becoming more and more a matter of opinion rather than a search for objective facts. I feel like a lot of what I was raised to think and hold onto has slowly eroded over the last decade, and I doubt I am alone.

My streaming setup when I got my new desk before adding the third monitor and managing the cables. I promise it’s better now.

So this brings me to the blog.

In my journey to process the wake of this crazy storm of a year, I realized that I didn’t really have much to hang my hat on creatively. So, in the interests of my own mental and emotional health, I decided to do something about it.

My therapist would be so proud, and I would care more about his opinion if he wasn’t kind of the worst. ~~[Definitely will unpack that in a later post, probably… depends on how vulnerable I feel like getting.]~~

You see, I am in my early thirties—right around the age Jesus is thought to have been crucified, the age when He changed the world.

Even if you don’t believe “in Jesus” in the Christian sense, the historical reality is that a man named Jesus, whom people called the Christ, was crucified outside Jerusalem in the early first century CE. His death sparked radical change around the Mediterranean and even further around the world.

Still, for me and others like me who believe Jesus died and rose again, this world-changing event has changed my life personally as well as shaped my worldview. Everything hangs on this moment, which Christ completed in his early thirties, right around the age I’m at now.

So, like any good millennial, I keep asking myself why I haven’t changed the world yet. I mean, my teachers all said that I could change the world. I just had to go to college, get good grades, get a good job, and make a difference. While I’ve done all that, I don’t think the world has changed or is changing because of my 30+ years as a contributing member of society. And as I pondered this fact the other day, it hit me that Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s will is what changed the world. After all, it was “Not my will but yours be done” in Gethsemane, so I figured I’d follow suit (Luke 22:42).

And so that is what I seek to do with this blog.

I may not start a worldwide movement with followers in nearly every people group around the globe; in fact, I most definitely won’t. I can, however, be faithful to the words God places on my heart to write or to say, for better or for worse. It’s hard. It’s terrifying. It keeps me from getting a good night’s rest most nights. But it’s right and worthwhile.

So, what should you expect from this blog? I promise that you will get me, my voice, my perspective, and I promise that I will write what I feel God putting on my heart. Sometimes, that will be about Twitch. Other times, I will talk theology, books, ministry, education, etc. It really just depends. I am a man of many interests these days. I hope you’ll stick around and read what I have to say.