Snippet: Palpable Longing

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Professor Beth Feller Jones in a recent Christianity Today article. In a sense, the title itself is a snippet: “Barbie and Taylor Swift Are Bringing Us Together: Beyond hot pink and bejeweled outfits, they showcase a deeper desire for community and collective joy.” But here’s the snippet (really, some highlights from the article and one reflection):

“Both my 18-year-old son and my 16-year-old daughter—despite never having played with Barbies as children and being on the younger end of the age spectrum for Taylor Swift fans—are all in.

“…The pandemic interrupted my kids’ lives at a crucial developmental point. For them, there’s almost no ‘before’ the pandemic in their teen years—there’s only the newly opening of the after. And in that wake, what if what my kids want is communal meaning—the kind that is supposed to mark our local churches?

“…As Justine McDaniel pointed out, the ‘Barbie-Taylor-Beyoncé summer offers a release of pandemic emotions’—exposing a hunger, Goldberg said, that is ‘a palpable longing for both communal delight and catharsis.’

“…that’s what church is. It’s life in the body together, the people gathered around the one who is the truth, who gives life meaning, who knows our embodied longings because he took on flesh for our sake. The kids want communal meaning. So I’m going to keep hoping—hoping that, maybe, what they want is the body of Christ.”

This made me think of one of my greatest memories from the early days of the pandemic.

It was the spring of 2020. Lois and I dropped in on the church backyard prom planned by some of the junior and senior girls from our youth group. I still choke up every single time I watch the video and remember that night.

I know our church was and continues to be a place of deep communal meaning (and so much more) for so many of our students.

You can watch the highlight video from the prom above (or here), captured from the Student Ministry Instagram account.