Years ago I had a blog on Xanga. I forgot. I just stumbled on it again by accident and decided to import all those posts here, and they simply merged together by post date so I can’t tell which is which, but I may have switched to this blog sometime in 2009. I don’t know what alerts (if any) have gone to subscribers, so I thought I would explain here.
update: Oh it looks like June 20, 2011 is when I switched over. I guess there are a lot more posts from Xanga than I realized.
I just turned 54, “just” as in 40 minutes ago. It is an inconsequential number, unlike 13 or 18 or 65. It marks no life transitions or significant mileposts. If I’m asked my age two weeks from now, I’ll have to stop and think, maybe have to add up the decades–who remembers 54? And yet it is these unremarkable years that slowly add up to make me who I am. A stone is just a stone… until it is carved and shaped into a beautiful statue. For each of us, God has a glorious end. Don’t judge the artwork based on a single stroke of the chisel.
“GIT YER DOG OFF MY MAILBOX!” The angry shout came from 100 yards up the hill, from the shadows of the house, and it slapped me back into awareness from my mental meanderings. He was pissed that my dog had peed on the wooden pole of his mailbox by the gravel road we were traipsing. “Sorry!” I called back, but he was not mollified. “YER LUCKY MY PIT AIN’T LOOSE!” he hollered, a veiled threat to sic his pitbull on us if it happened again. His anger seemed excessive to me. Dogs pee on everything, especially anything vertical, and I’m quite certain the neighborhood dogs, all of which run loose, regularly mark every roadside post within miles. Since my dog Mitts had been piddling for the last 5 miles, his tank was empty, so his lifted leg was entirely for show, but that made no difference to the hothead up the hill.
That was yesterday, and even as I write, the feelings seep back in–fear and defensiveness towards a world where even pastoral, peaceful spots now feel unsafe–and other nameless feelings flow through, shadows that settle in from being unfairly misunderstood, misjudged, belittled, chased off.
Moments before I had been reflecting on my spiritual journey, and many thought streams had unexpectedly merged into a sense of direction for 2015, summed up in the word “courage.” My 2014 focus was “gentleness,” first to myself and then as an overflow to others, and though the visible changes are small, my outlook has started to shift fundamentally. Being gentle with myself has given me some emotional resources for choosing courage.
In our culture, courage is a force marshaled against fears, taking a beachhead at first and then slowly conquering more territory. You bravely take the stage to speak or you ask your overbearing boss for a raise, and gradually you become less fearful and more in control of your life. But I’ve discovered a very different take on bravery–my real fears are not out in the world so much as in my own soul, and I need courage not to conquer my fears but to embrace them. In other words, instead of trying to override my fears and silence them, I try to understand them compassionately. Fears are my friends, not my enemies–they are clamoring to tell me something important about myself which I ignore to my own peril. My journey has been completely in reverse of the norm–starting out fearless as a young man (because I was in denial), then learning to recognize my fears, and finally growing to welcome those fears as helps along the way. We are most controlled by the fears we least recognize.
As I trudged, I pondered. I have been dodging certain fears, leaving them unaddressed until I had enough emotional resources to open myself to feel their punches without crashing my heart, a truce of sorts instead of a lasting peace of mind. I am finally ready, I thought, to address some of those dark shadows within.
Then that loud, angry shout yanked me back to the present and opened a psychological fork in the road–how should I respond to these feelings? As I turned out of sight around the bend, I wondered how to pick my way through the mental debris. Should I try to brush aside his words by changing the subject or argue with him to prove my innocence or castigate myself and resolve to do better? What internal dialogue will protect my heart when it feels under attack? And this odd solution came to me: rather than defend myself, I open myself to feel the sting and understand it with self-compassion. That is the courage I am choosing this year as I support myself with gentleness.
This is the next leg of my journey: to sit with painful and scary feelings, to let them course through my veins and pound in my heart, to let them tell me all they wish to say about my own struggles and wounds and skewed perspectives, about my subconscious self-judgments, crazy expectations, and harsh demands, and to lovingly listen and feel sympathy for a boy that has always tried so desperately hard to find the right way and walk it against all obstacles. I need to gently open myself to feel and understand how this world’s edges cut my soul, to follow the contours of each gash with my fingers and trace its origins from the tender vulnerabilities of my early years. Wounds need the gentle touch of sun and air to heal.
In case you haven’t noticed, my wife and I are different. She prefers being nice and I prefer being blunt. She likes the familiar, I like the novel. I like competition, she likes cooperation. She wants to plan ahead with lots of cushion for mishaps, I want to postpone decisions way past their due date. We aren’t completely different: we both like eating on the sofa instead of at the kitchen table, me with a pile of spicy, fruity, sweet and salty foods and her with bland food groups neatly separated into equal shares on her plate and eaten proportionally throughout, washed down with water… her with a dainty napkin and me with a protective towel (from her) which ends up scrunching down between the seat and arm while food spills on my shirt and pants. and sometimes on the couch. The dogs follow her back into the kitchen for the fat and gristle they won’t find left on my plate. While she’s on her second bite, I’ve finished my dinner, burning my mouth on food I can’t wait to cool… unless I’m in the middle of a project and eat dinner 3 hours late, in which case we don’t eat together (given all her promptitude), but we both eat on the sofa (which was my point).
… unless I eat without a plate while leaning over the sink. Hey, it prevents food stains!
So like most couples we have our similarities and differences, and the differences tend to cause problems, like when we went phone shopping this week. We finally caved to the pressure of buying smart phones since Kimberly’s work situation seems to require it. We’ve been talking about it for a few months and Kimberly had marked her mental calendar with a personal deadline, mentioning the expectation now and again so we would be on the same page. Same page, different books. Finally the time had come and I wasn’t ready–I was still in volume 1 “Thinking About Being Ready to Start to Plan for New Phones” and she was finished with volume 2 “Making a Decision About Which Phone to Buy” and was now on the last page of volume 3 “Buying a Phone.”
You know the whole thing about my postponing decisions for the greater good? Well this goes into overdrive when it involves spending money. The longer you can hobble along without spending cash, the better off you are–the lazy man’s savings account. I’m all for quality of life improvements as long as they’re free–who needs to fix a leaky roof as long as you have pots to catch the trickles? Being a default foot-dragger for any decision, I become a butt-dragger over money, a sit-down protester with placards shouting “Just Say No!” As I explained the conflicting viewpoints to my wife, “Every day delayed is a victory for me but a defeat for you.” She came home with a smart phone. I’m sticking with my same dumb phone, even though I’ve hated it for two years. How can you argue with free?
Procrastination requires no thought. Thoughtlessness is actually rewarded because you win the game effortlessly, avoiding the stress of decision-making while accumulating points for not spending resources needlessly. But it has finally dawned on me after eight years of marriage that what works under sole proprietorship does not work in a partnership. Now when I leave a matter undecided, it does not prolong my freedom to choose, but forfeits that choice to Kimberly. She is going to cure me of my procrastination without even trying, by just being herself in this relationship. And that life lesson is free–who can argue with that?
The intensity of my feeling does not prove the truth of my viewpoint. It says more about me than the reality around me. But even should I look more closely into my own heart, I may still misunderstand my emotions. If the culture and family in which we are raised do not train us to accept and understand our feelings, if they in fact encourage us to ignore and misread them, then we have a long, tortuous, and dimly lit path ahead of us as we seek to understand ourselves. Don’t give up. That search yields some of life’s richest treasures in yourself and in your relationships.
Strong feelings seem to legitimate our positions in our own minds, and if we link those to our spiritual beliefs, we end up assuming that God feels the same way we do. But the intensity of our feelings is more likely to signal a personal issue than a theological one, even in cases where our moral judgment is accurate. If those strong feelings push us to speak or act without adequate personal reflection, we can make things worse in our unbalanced response, and those who recognize our emotional entanglement will either be dismissive or reactive.
When I feel much more strongly about a matter than others do, it makes me stop and consider why and invites me to draw conclusions about myself rather than others. Differences and conflicts always call us deeper into our own hearts, and if we begin with that discovery, we are more likely to also understand others more fully.
Last Christmas, casting about for what to put in Kimberly’s stocking, I fell on a plan my mother devised for us penniless kids in an eight-member family. She suggested we give one another slips of paper as “tokens” for doing things for our siblings, offering to do their chores or clean their room. So I printed off some tokens for Kimberly, and she used a few of them last winter, but she’s always felt uncomfortable asking others to do things, and so she left them largely unused. But Friday, in preparation for a trip, she handed me two tokens, for scrubbing the kitchen floor and cleaning the guest bathroom. I joked that I should have put expiration dates on the tickets, but I still spent two hours Saturday cleaning.
All that to say that I find cleaning a serious waste of time. Whatever you clean is simply going to get dirty again. I have the same problem with cooking, washing, and life-maintenance of every form. I am all for spending time on things that enhance life, that make things better, so I enjoy remodeling projects, but I get quickly frustrated by repair projects when the end result is simply a return to the status quo. Unfortunately, a majority of life tasks, including most occupations, are the do-it-over-again variety. I put library books back on the shelves… the same books over and over and over. I write emails about repetitive issues and follow checklists for completing the same tasks every night. What is the point of this assembly-line life? Why would God design the world as a place we spend our lives uselessly, going in circles until we die?
I was raised to maximize my time on earth for God, to “live with eternity’s values in view,” which meant I was to focus all my life on things that would make an eternal difference, building up myself and others spiritually–read the Bible and teach it, pray together and talk about spiritual things, evangelize, exercise my spiritual gifts. Everything else was just so much distraction from the important stuff. Only, life on this planet seems to be constructed mostly from this seemingly superfluous stuff, the stuff that “doesn’t matter.”
So maybe I’ve had it wrong all along. Maybe what we do is not nearly as important as how we do it. Perhaps the particular tasks don’t matter so much, but like a paint brush or charcoal pencil are the tools to shape the work of art–the ones who we become individually and together. Perhaps the fundamental importance is not what we do, but how we do it, living out the life of God in those daily mundane tasks. Perhaps it is not so much about my trying to change eternity, but allowing eternity to change me, more about being the work of God than doing the work of God, meeting him in the ordinary rather than expecting him only in the “spiritual” parts of life. Maybe being present in the task is the better alternative to getting through the task so I can get to “more important” things, and so end up living only in life’s peripheries.
The year has passed. Each day has died with the setting sun never to rise again, but the steps we took each day have brought us to this place. The New Year may be fresh with potential, calling us to look back on the road we have come and consider re-directing our steps, but we rose today at the same spot we left off last night. Flipping the page of our calendars does not create some magic door to Narnia. We may renew our resolve, but we rose today with the same mental and physical and emotional energy that we had yesterday. Be gentle with yourself. Each year is a marathon, not a sprint, and coming too quickly out of the gate is sure to backfire, leaving you exhausted, discouraged, and shamed.
If this is your time for an annual audit, and you find you have come short of your own expectations and goals, perhaps the fault lies with unrealistic goals, not weak efforts. Perhaps the voices inside your head demanded too much of you. In that case, rather than redoubling your efforts, you might consider trimming down your goals. But even if you did lose your way last year, you cannot “make up for it” now without straining your soul. Leave those failings in the gracious hands of God to redeem, to re-touch with His masterful skills. You cannot get back in God’s favor by redoubling your efforts because you never lost His favor, for His grace is unshaken by our failings. Use those failings to call you back to His grace, to stop trusting in your own goodness and to trust more fully in the goodness of God, who loves you regardless of your shortcomings. Perhaps this year resolve to settle more deeply into God’s grace, to be more accepted rather than more acceptable.
Let grace set the course ahead for this year. Resolve to live more fully in the consciousness of God’s love. Instead of harnessing your spirit to unwanted demands like a bull dragging a sledge, pursue those things that will lighten your journey, give you wings instead of weights, release your spirit to truly live. What puts a smile on your face, bounce in your step, peace in your soul? Perhaps those are the new year’s plans that will energize you to find delight in God. Perhaps it is not resolutions you need–a call to the will to override your desires–so much as New Year’s Joys–a call to the heart to fulfill your deepest desires. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”
When I pull on my tennis shoes, my two dogs begin to dance, spinning and hopping backwards down the hallway in front of me in anticipation of our walk. I love their joy and it’s good exercise for me, but I mostly take to the road for the sake of my soul. In 3 to 4 miles the calm of woods and field settles into my spirit, and I always come back more at peace than when I set out. Why is nature so deeply healing for us? That has always been a mystery to me.
Then I read these words last week: “True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.” A single incisive sentence can silhouette a truth that otherwise blends into the commonness of life. The idea had been niggling at the edges of my thoughts this year as I felt my spirit relax around each graveled curve and then suddenly cramp again at the sight of a dilapidated house, reminding me of my own languishing projects, or a solid stone wall that scolded me for my broken one. Every touch with others, or even thought of it, brings some weight of obligation, especially for those of us who are duty sponges. Certainly there is joy and comfort, insight and stimulation in our friendships, but there is always a trade-off, a compromise, a curtailing of ourselves and our desires. Relationships are both pleasure and obligation.
We sense others’ expectations and shape ourselves to meet them, tempering our words and ideas, hiding what feels unsafe to share. Even with those closest to us we are inhibited because we don’t want to hurt or anger or sadden them or be hurt by them as they respond to our true selves. Every human interaction comes with a large or small box of “shoulds”. Even if we have enjoyed the evening with you, our guests, we feel ourselves relax when you leave and give a sigh of relief as we settle back, kick off our shoes, and flick on a mindless sit-com. When I am by myself, I am most free to be myself, understand myself, drop the self-defenses and peer deep into the pool of my being. And in becoming truer to myself, more self-accepting, I am able to offer myself more genuinely to others.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible.
One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature,
the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
–Wendell Berry
The tensions we feel in connection to others are natural, a part of being imperfect humans in relationship. If we respond to them in healthy ways, they become resources for insight and growth, both personally and relationally. However, part of a healthy response includes the solitude that offers duty-free reflection, and for those like me with an over-wrought sense of should, that’s best done “in the wild,” far from human detritus. When we take time away from being who we should be, we discover who we are. It is only as we know ourselves that we can share ourselves.
For those interested, I have added a page titled Grace Books with a list of the best books on the topic for those who would benefit from further reading (or to pass along to friends).
The day before Christmas, having slept 4 hours because of pushy dogs, I stood on a cement floor all day at work, feeling upset by a conflict with a fellow employee. When I got home I was greeted by a mess of chicken grease that had overflowed the crockpot, pooled on the counter, and spilled down the cabinets, the footstool, and across the floor. I cleaned it up and flopped down exhausted, ready to veg out in front of the TV for a while before dragging myself to our Christmas eve communion service. Kimberly had a different plan.
She wanted to have family prayer with singing, reading, and sharing before we went to church. I was okay with religion at our house or God’s house, but was too tired for both. I needed some down time, but she needed to prepare her soul for the service. What kind of man would block his wife’s spiritual needs? So I yielded. After supper, she lit the candles, turned off the lights, and cued up the music, and like a good husband, I sat and pouted. After the music and reading, Kimberly shared personally while I tried to stay awake in the dark, which was the least I could do… I mean, it was literally the least I could do (huffing would have taken extra effort).
I was very generous with my silence during prayer and on the way to church, rounding off the corners of quiet with a few words to keep her at bay so I could stew in peace. Nothing messes up a good case of resentment so much as having to explain it to someone else, especially someone reasonable. In the pew I quietly complained my way through the boring homily, the artless choruses, and the tiresome liturgy. Then communion. Go meet God, ready or not. Suddenly the sermon and songs seemed to complain about me–the question after all is not about a sophisticated form, but a sincere heart–and by that measure, the artless always win.
God does not force Himself on us–He comes as a suckling baby and ends up nailed to a cross, living his life as a penniless wanderer. He does not wow us with splendor or scare us into submission, but opens His heart to us with gentleness and vulnerability. Instead of overriding our weakness, He comes to share our weakness, to be one of us, to understand and empathize and breath grace into our brokenness.
Most of my life I used the Lord’s Supper to torment my soul into compliance, using the death of Jesus as a bludgeon rather than a salve, as though communion were a celebration of the giving of the law rather than the giving of His life. But tonight, instead of telling me, “Your resentment is bad, stop it!” God says, “your resentment is a sign of pain, let’s try to love and listen to that hurting heart of yours.”
Together we rewind the evening’s tape. I am tired. I need rest. Kimberly needs prayer.
“Stop right there,” He says. “What happens next?”
“My needs are less important, so I have to deny my own needs,” I answer. I think about it for a minute. “Actually, that is the cruel message I have heard all my life–that my needs are not important enough to matter, and if my needs don’t matter, then I don’t matter. No wonder I feel hurt when I’m forced to deny my needs.”
“Were you actually forced?” He asked.
“No, but I know it’s what you want, so I have to do it.”
“So you feel that I care more about Kimberly’s needs than yours? Actually, you feel as though I consider everyone’s needs as more important than yours, that you are last in line, and that I therefore care least about you and your feelings. That is heart-breaking! I want you to know that I care more about you and your needs than you could ever imagine. You are precious to me, uncountably precious. The resentment you feel right now is just your heart standing up for you against those lies that say you don’t matter. And I’m here to tell you that you do matter, that you matter supremely to me. That is what the cross really means which you celebrate now in communion. I welcome you, resentment and all. Come, Let me hold you!”
After that it was easy to slip my arm around Kimberly as we knelt together at the communion rail. In the deep affirmation of God’s love, peace flows into our hearts and relationships. We are loved. That is all that matters.
Janathan Grace Reflections 