The High Line Hotel

OFTEN WE USE the word amateur to describe someone who makes a mistake or handles something incorrectly. Like when I get on the wrong subway in New York City and start heading in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go, I roll my eyes at myself and think, Amateur hour FOR SURE. Because, honestly, what a dumb mistake to make. Or I’ll bake a cake and it totally flops because I’m trying to make something dairy- and gluten-free, so it’s not like a box of mix I can just dump into a bowl with an egg and some oil. It’s a pile of unfamiliar ingredients from an incredible recipe created by Danielle Walker. But when the cake turns out more like a biscuit or a pudding—100 percent because of me, not because of the recipe—it’s an amateur move. Because I don’t know what I’m doing.

The actual definition of amateur is so much better than the meaning we give it.

Amateur (noun):

a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons

an athlete who has never competed for payment or for a monetary prize

a person inexperienced or unskilled in a particular activity

a person who admires something; devotee; fan1

Doing something for pleasure rather than for professional reasons. Admiring something and being devoted. It’s like we’ve taken that ONE meaning of the word—someone who is unskilled—and made it the ONLY meaning of the word and slapped on a negative connotation. When we hear someone use that term, we automatically assume they have screwed up. We don’t even consider that maybe they were just doing something for fun.

When did we stop doing things just for fun? I’m not talking about we as a culture; I’m talking about we as in you and me. When did we stop? And why? If our guts are always speaking to us about a way we are looking for Eden, then was there a point when we stopped doing things for fun and started requiring everything to be for profit or benefit? When did we decide being an amateur was such a bad thing?

Yes, that word means all the definitions you see above. It is an inexperienced person. For sure it is. But don’t you just love the other definitions? The permission the others offer feels so good to me.

Dropping in to a new yoga class can feel so intimidating if you think everyone else is a regular and knows right where to put their mat or how many blocks of foam this teacher is going to want you to have. Going on a third date can feel incredibly scary if you think the person you are dating knows more than you do about where this thing is going. When pulling up to a church for the first time, it’s hard to even know where to park your car. Do I blink my emergency lights if I’m new here? YEAH, ABSOLUTELY NOT! I’d rather park nine hundred miles away and walk barefoot to the door on a hot July day than park in the first spot and have all eyes on me as the “guest.”

I hate being new at something because everyone is aware of my newness. Maybe you hate it too. Somewhere along the way we all decided we had to be professionals. That was the only option. It has totally stunted growth and squelched conversations and stopped us from being brave. If I think I can only do something I’m great at, or something I can fake greatness in, I will live a very limited life.

I think of this a lot when I think of Twitch streams, where professional video gamers teach the rest of us how to play certain games or get to certain levels. We watch the pros so when we play, we aren’t amateurs. But we aren’t playing at all, actually. We’re just trying to get to the end with all the tricks we have learned from the pros who showed us all the moves. Or we watch eleven tutorials on creating the same eye makeup look and practice it multiple times at home alone before we’d ever just put on makeup and walk out the door.

Of course, learning and growing are important—and having teachers and mentors matters. But at the root of so many things, we don’t want to look like we don’t know what we are doing.

I worry about this a lot—the lack of joy associated with being an amateur. So many people in my direct circle of friends feel the pressure to be a professional. From new moms to first-time authors to singles moving to a new city, it’s easy to think you have to do all the research and know all the things before you start. And then what? You should have done enough research about where to park or what food to feed the puppy or what neighborhood to move into that you don’t make any mistakes. You’re a pro.

But you’re not. And neither am I. And it legitimately kills some degree of fun when we aren’t allowed to be amateurs, by opportunity or by choice.

I’ve struggled hard with this concept, especially regarding social media. Thanks to the apps we all use, it is very difficult to live your daily life in public while learning and growing and making mistakes. A buzz phrase going around right now is “cancel culture.” The idea is that when someone is found doing something wrong, their influence or popularity is immediately canceled. All the good they have done is erased and what is left is a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

There are times when the mistakes and sins are so massive and destructive and vast and habitual that the person should be removed from their position. But there are other times when it’s just a tweet-sized mistake. But because we expect everyone to be pros, we have no space for anyone to be an amateur.

I understand this is a nuanced conversation to be having from where I am sitting and where you are sitting. But it is still true. How different would your life be tomorrow if you just gave everyone permission to not be professionals? It feels particularly close to me because I’m publicly navigating learning a few things I am not a pro at: how to be a female on a stage on a Sunday morning in a church, how to be a public-facing woman dating men who don’t always want a public-facing relationship, and how to be a part of racial reconciliation and an ally for all sorts of people who are different from me. I want to be a professional at all of these things, but I’m not. What I am—what I can embrace—is holding all of these in the true spirit of an amateur who admires and enjoys and wants to engage in all of it.

So I’m learning. I’m trying to navigate dating well, with hopes of marriage and children in the future, but I’ve never dated with so much of my life public, instead of private. And there is no safety net. Whether he has a public life or not, I can’t very easily hide when my heart is broken or when there are just a billion butterflies in my stomach because I’m so excited. There’s a level of wisdom when I share what I share, but there’s a difference in waiting to be wise and kind to my partner and waiting because I’m scared I’m going to do this wrong. I’ve tried it both ways, and they feel very, very different. (Also aren’t you SO GLAD we don’t use those labels on Facebook anymore like “It’s complicated”? Gracious, I’m grateful we don’t have to use labels on social media. DTRs, conversations where you Determine the Relationship, are hard enough without the added layer of “So what will our new status be on Facebook?” Yikes.)

Conversations where we are amateurs are still important to have. For example, let’s talk about what it looks like to make sure friends of color feel welcomed in every space. Let’s talk about how that has been done wrong and right in the past and talk about how each of us, no matter our color, wants to make it right, in and out of the church. But there is a problem. And that problem is fear. The voice of fear says it is better to say nothing at all than to speak up and risk saying something unprofessional or offensive. Just this week, one of my African American friends said to me, “I can’t imagine what it is like to be learning all of this publicly—about the racial disunity and unlearning old ways of thinking.” But what choice do I have? So much of my life is public that I can’t imagine not sharing what I’m reading and learning. Does that mean I’m always doing it right or doing it well? Absolutely not. But gracious, what else can I do but try?

Actually, I know the answer. When you are an amateur, and a new opportunity comes along, you get to either try or not try. That’s the other option. That’s what else you can do. You can not try. You get to decide whether the thing in front of you is worth being new at, and maybe being an amateur at, in front of other people.

I wasn’t an active part of the racial reconciliation conversation until I got a tweet from Kelli, an African American woman I didn’t know. In her tweet, Kelli kindly asked if I would consider having more diverse voices on my podcast so that she could hear from some people who were more like her. I was here in New York City, right where I’m writing today, when the tweet came through and stopped me on the sidewalk.

Because she was right. I wasn’t being thoughtful when it came to ensuring that my guest list reflects the varied faces of the kingdom of God. Not because I didn’t want to or because I was purposefully being negligent, but I was passively negligent and unfortunately, passively racist. So I decided to change, and I started talking about it that day. In the next few weeks, I brought Kelli, the stranger-turned-friend, on my podcast and asked her to keep an eye out as I work to be more intentional moving forward. I privately and publicly apologized and repented. I began to follow a variety of voices on social media who don’t look like me or think like me. I began to read pieces about racism and racial reconciliation. (I personally have found the work of Latasha Morrison and her book, Be the Bridge, incredibly helpful.) My team and I started being more thoughtful about the guests on the show, and we made a real point to give the microphone to people of different races who I was friends with or wanted to be friends with.

All of this is well and good, but I’ve made mistakes along the way, even just in my attempt to learn and share my learning. I am so late to this conversation and so new to talking about it publicly and sharing my opinions publicly that I feel it deeply when people are cruel to me online. I get super mad when people leave comments that question my motives or the reasons behind these new conversations. It is all hard. And it’s all public. And I’m an amateur. I’m inexperienced and unskilled, but I’m trying. And, gracious, any conflict I feel from engaging in these conversations, for people of other races or the disabled or the underprivileged, is felt exponentially by those living those stories.

I’m not willing to be absent from the racial reconciliation conversation anymore—as a learner and listener first but also as a voice. It doesn’t mean I know exactly how to handle every nuanced conversation that begins, but that is true in dating and in friendship and in work opportunities as well. Every day is the first day we’ve ever done today, so maybe there just needs to be a little more acknowledgment of the amateur who lives and actually thrives in each of us. I wonder if that’s where the real return to Eden is, where the real world-changing stuff lives—in our amateur hearts.

THERE IS ANOTHER thing that can happen when you start something new—a relationship or a craft or a job or a conversation or a hobby. It’s that thing where you try something new and you’re actually great at it, like from very near to the start. You pick a handful of flowers from the yard and make a bouquet for the middle of the table before dinner and your guests are legitimately mesmerized by the beauty of what you made. You eat the most divine French onion soup at a restaurant and when you try to make it at home, adding the secret ingredient learned from Instagram (those ground up, dried mushrooms), it tastes exactly the same and the person you love across the table is blown away. You pick up an instrument and can play it. You watch one YouTube video on how to knit and by the end of a weekend, you’ve made a scarf.

Maybe your community is different from mine, but these days it just seems as soon as that happens, people quickly go from “Wow, that’s good” to “Have you thought about selling that?” “You should arrange flowers for weddings.” “You should sell that soup at the farmers market.” “You should be in a band.” You should, you should, you should.

People have lots of should ideas for those they think are professionals, or those they think SHOULD be professionals.

And when you listen to their advice and turn your fun into profit, suddenly you have a business, not a hobby. There’s a demand that drives you to promote your product or idea, instead of just doing it—say it with me—for fun.

I’M CURRENTLY SITTING in the lobby of the High Line Hotel in New York City with one of my best friends, Jonathan Merritt. (He’s an excellent author and a better man, and there is no one I prefer seeing obscure Broadway shows with than him.) It’s almost 10:00 p.m., but my fingers are still moving across this keyboard, so I’m trusting them. People keep walking through the lobby, chatting with friends, heading to the bar, and meeting up with others. But the thing that keeps distracting me and making me laugh is the number of people who come through with their dogs.

One little pup, a French bulldog, is hanging out in the lobby with his leash dragging behind him. The valet, with whom the dog is clearly familiar, keeps messing with the bulldog. He is doing that thing that humans do to dogs: riling him up, messing with his legs and face, and rubbing his back and belly. The valet keeps making the dog growl then bark, and then the valet breaks into the biggest smile and looks around at all of us in the lobby to see who is laughing along with him.

His smile is so genuine, I almost can’t look away.

As the bulldog follows the valet around the lobby, his leash dragging between those four short little legs, you can tell he wants more. And so does the valet. It’s just so fun. There’s something so pure about their friendship. The valet is currently standing over the dog, rubbing his back, and saying “good boy” over and over again.

(Also, I just learned the dog’s name is George. Of course it is. That’s perfect. Maybe he’s a local hotel dog? Everyone who walks by, I’m hearing now, is speaking to George. Wait, is this dog famous?)

What I love about this interaction is that no one is making money off of it. It’s just pure. It is a good reminder to me (and probably the valet, though I can’t catch his attention to ask) of a time other than this. Other than here. No one is rushing up to the valet to say, “Dude, you are SO GOOD at petting that dog. Just look at how much you’re smiling. Have you thought about changing jobs and becoming a dog petter?” Right, of course they aren’t. And this is a silly example, but it matters, because George is adorable but also because some things are just meant to be fun. Some things are meant to stay amateur level for us. Some things are meant to teach us and grow us and bring us joy, not income.

But there are other times when being an amateur is the first step in walking toward the thing that brings us joy AND income, brings God honor, changes lives, and feels like we’re suddenly 100 percent right where we are supposed to be.