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By this afternoon the snow had mostly melted at our house, and it didn’t feel that cold, so I pulled on my tattered loafers sans socks and drove to the park with Mazie to walk. The asphalt path was mostly free of snow, but by the time I reached the end, my toes were stinging. When I turned onto the wooded dirt trail, I found half an inch of unmelted snow, and I started waddling with my feet splayed to keep from scooping snow into the gaping holes on the out-sides of my shoes. As I walked, something strange happened–my toes began to warm. I was surprised enough to pull out one foot and check that it wasn’t just going numb. It was cool to the touch, but not icy, in spite of the snow that was clinging to the edge of the open splits. Even on cold days my bare feet in loose shoes rub themselves warm against the leather as I walk, and now the broken trail made my feet slide around even more, increasing the friction. There is an upside to friction… even in relationships.
Berly uses her lunch break to stretch her legs, and since I walk Mazie at the same time, we phone-walk together. Today we chatted about yesterday’s blog post and how grace plays such a big role in our relationship. My sketch was true in its broad strokes, but don’t suppose that Berly is always trusting and I am never selfish. We screw up regularly. But we make room for that in our relationship. Our family values are framed by grace–we structure our lives to make space for one another’s weaknesses, fears, needs and the like. Grace designs the principles by which we live but also the manner in which we live these principles, or rather fail to live these principles. In other words, we give ourselves grace for failing to live by grace.
In my last post I said Berly trusts “that I am doing all that I can within the sphere of my emotional strength.” But sometimes I shortchange Kimberly by doing less than I can, intentionally or not (that is, sometimes I am lazy and at other times I simply underestimate my own energy level). We are deeply committed to one another, to mutual understanding, acceptance, and support and we live this consistently, but not perfectly. We have expectations… our expectations are that we will fall short of our ideals on a fairly regular basis. We trust one another not because we live flawlessly, but because we live in grace towards one another’s flaws.
In other words, we live with friction, and we think that’s good. It’s possible to smooth over all interactions, but the cost of such a tightly controlled “peace” is shallow and inauthentic relationships. Nothing is more lonely than a friendship where we cannot be ourselves. If we are unique individuals with our own histories, views, personalities, and preferences, then doing real life together at any depth is going to bring tension. Real life and growth comes from rubbing up against the rough grain of those we love and discovering that our flaws are the basis for our bonding. It is not fixing faults but embracing grace that strengthens relationships and deepens trust.
My achievement demon was finally beaten (as I posted), but it was a double-team effort, not a solo act. Berly deserves special praise for her unusual trust and courage to stand with me in this battle as she lived out our fundamental commitment to support one another’s personal struggles. It is a long story, a good story, one well worth telling, but too big for a blog. The only way for me to escape my work-driven value system was to resist its demands, which meant choosing a job which was good for my soul but bad for my pocket. I have been employed part-time and seasonally for 40 months as our savings slowly dwindled. I have looked for other employment, but not aggressively, taking it at the pace my spirit has needed.
Imagine how much trust and courage this has required of Kimberly and how badly I needed this trust when struggling with my own self doubt. She has said many times, “we may lose our home, but we must not lose our souls,” and so we have continued to make the hard choice of trusting God to keep us afloat financially while we take the steps we have both needed to make room for our weary hearts. Think how much Kimberly must trust me not to be selfish, not to take the easy way, not to use my struggle as an excuse to slack off, and to instead accept that I am doing all that I can within the sphere of my emotional strength, making the best choices I know how in harmony with my spirit. We have built this mutual trust by sharing honestly, often, about our deepest heart issues. We trust one another not to use our neediness to get an advantage over the other.
My win over this perverse accomplishment-based value system is not full or final. I cannot suddenly begin to live as though I’m now free of its influence. as though this lifelong weight can no longer distort my self perception. Don’t look for miracles here or you will be disappointed. I am in recovery mode, and it will be a long, slow rehabilitation. It will take whatever time it takes, and trying to hurry it would undermine the process. But you can be sure that Kimberly and I will stay faithful to the path before us.
“What do you do?” is the lead-off question when you’re introduced: first your name, then job title, because in this society our work defines us, and our productivity determines our worth. I spent most of my life desperately chasing success to prove my value, and my failure drove me into despair. So for more than a decade I have been reorienting myself, trying to settle into a worth independent of accomplishment. It has been painful and frightening and crushingly hard, but God gave me no choice, thwarting my every attempt at meaningful work. And I think I have finally come to the point that I’m okay with that. He can impact this world through me or not as He thinks best.
Over the last dozen years my ambitions have dropped from saving the world as a missionary to saving a city as a pastor to saving an organization as a social worker to…. putting library books in call number order. Still I was trying to eke out some sense of personal usefulness from my job. When I was furloughed every Christmas and summer break, my depression deepened because I didn’t even have that thumb tack on which to hang my value as a human being–my existence was pointless. Like a drowning man clutching at flotsam, I would gasp in relief when work started back.
Yesterday my forced holiday ended, but for the first time in four years I was not flailing for some scrap of self respect from a dead-end job. I am grateful for work, I enjoy my colleagues, and I prefer a set schedule, but I no longer feel worthless when I’m jobless. I seem to have finally crossed a watershed in emotional freedom from this lifelong compulsion to find purpose in work. This is huge for me. This has been my most fundamental personal issue, and I’m sure it still has plenty of kick left, but its emotional grip has been loosened. The arc of this healing has been so gradual that I didn’t even realize it was a benchmark until I wrote this paragraph, and as I read it back to my wife just now, I got all choked up.
I burned my bagel in the toaster this morning, but I ate it anyway. “Waste not, want not” as my mother used to say. She was constantly tossing out snippets of received wisdom from the past, shaping her life by principles she never stopped to evaluate. “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Like Tigger, she bounced through her days with little self-reflection, driven to stay busy without knowing why, making up her mind and changing it again in a flash: “Don’t let the grass grow between your toes!” Her hands never stopped or paused. “Make hay while the sun shines,” she’d declare with gusto, and she pulled us into her vortex: “Many hands make light work.”
Whether or not we use ready proverbs to frame our worldview, it is still a cliche we’ve settled into, the unseen backdrop of our lives, relationships, and decisions… unless dissonance interrupts. So my introspective personality, as it found no footing in my family, was forced to forge itself a different path, but my mother’s frugality stuck fast to me, unnoticed, and it is very tenacious even now that I’ve spied it. It makes me scrimp, snap judge those my mother would consider wasteful, and economize to a silly extent. I don’t realize how it undermines other far more important values, robs my time and thoughts, and hurts my relationships. It seems we are all in the salvage business with a lifetime of self-discovery and recovery, of unlearning our many false or skewed or damaging assumptions. As a start, maybe I should toss my burnt toast.
I started a 2014 adventure of a daily short list of the “good stuff,” the things that make me smile, warm my heart, or otherwise give off good vibes. Here it is: http://joyspotting.wordpress.com/
As I wrote yesterday, I intend to chronicle my daily smiles, but let’s not confuse that with thanksgiving. My focus is joie de vivre for me and those who share life with me, while thanksgiving, by contrast, is often seen as moral obligation. So it is driven by duty rather than delight, aimed at someone else’s benefit rather than my own (except to exercise my virtue). As a default response, giving thanks will actually weaken relationships rather than enhance them if it pulls us from gracious into legalistic connections.
At a human level, when I share my joy with the one who gifts me, she is drawn into my life and experience. She connects with me and delights in my joy. The focus is on a shared enjoyment of the gift rather than a shared esteem of the giver and her virtue. When I approach thanks as duty, it distances me from the generous one and devalues her generosity down to a trade. Then my gratitude becomes her due, even though paying it doesn’t reduce my debt for her favors. And with big favors, she becomes the benefactor, and I turn into the charity case. Her virtue and strength is showcased, but only my lack and dependence. Mutuality devolves into hierarchy.
Even when God is the munificent one, I think it far better to share with Him my joy and invite Him into it rather than try to pay Him with gratitude, as though His presents come with price tags. Of course, I can be self-absorbed, focused only on the gift and ignoring the one who gave it, a childish mistake (although God is not offended or hurt by this as we are). The real misfortune in such a response is not the unfairness of it, but the loneliness that results. We were created for community, for connection, for sharing our hearts, so isolating our attention on the gift desiccates our relationships. The greatest good and core purpose of giving and receiving is to draw us into close communion through mutual care.
For a perfect illustration of the joy of shared celebration, see Susan’s comment.
HERE BE DRAGONS
So it does not trouble me that I don’t know the shape 2014 will take. Wait, did I just write that? What poppycock. I’m not okay with this at all. One of my coping mechanisms is to be in control of my life, and I can’t steer blind. 2013 ran out of road a week ago, and there are no more leaves to unfold on my map… the journey ahead simply wanders off the edge of the page. But the road carries me along still, without my leave. So, since I can’t see or direct my destination or route, I’ve settled on coloring in the shapes of each day.
My red crayon found this to highlight: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen.” I like it! And after opening that daily treat, I want to jot down the experience in order to remind myself, to expand the pleasure, and to share it with others… not just for the treats I find, but for those that find me or ones I stumble upon. Someone even suggested keeping a photo journal, which I’ve been doing, and I think I’m kind of hooked.
o o o o o
Here’s my “gift to self” from 2 days ago 
Mocha with a marshmallow. I haven’t put a marshmallow in hot chocolate for as long as I can remember. It brings back good memories of snow-frozen fingers wrapped around a hot cup and icy toes warming on a toasty hearth, watching the flames dance and sizzle.
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Yesterday, on my daily walk it was the unexpected beauty in winter’s deadness, nature’s ice sculpture
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Today’s pleasure was sitting in a quaint local coffee house to write this blog and then listen to a friend share heart issues.
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May you discover for yourself simple daily pleasures to add a little color to the dark days of winter.
New Year’s resolutions feel more like chains than wings to me. I want freedom to become rather than strictures to conform. I would follow my heart’s inclinations rather than set a behavioral agenda, unsaddle my soul from demands and expectations and deadlines. I hope to be open and welcoming of each day, to receive what it brings, rather than insist that it yield rewards for my labors. May I rather grow like a tree: when the rain falls, suck it up; when the spring pushes up sap, sprout leaves; when obstacles crowd me, shape myself around them. Our backyard black walnut has no limb-growing, root-digging schedule, but it blossoms out well into its true self.
I think we have less control over our journey, our growth process, than we realize, and if relationship is foundational to our development, then growth is necessarily interactive and intertwined and cannot be a simple matter of my own choosing and acting. An organic, inter-relational spirituality looks more like a tree than a construction project: much more vulnerable to change, but also much more adaptive; much less structured and predictable, but much more expansive and potent. Both methods of development have set principles, but a plant has far more freedom of expression in living out those principles.
So I welcome 2014 and whatever it might bring, not because ours is a safe and good world, but because I have a loving and gentle God who promises to be with me in all the coming uncertainty.
Today is epiphany, when the Eastern church once originally celebrated Jesus’ birth. So we might say it is second Christmas. Our lights are still up inside and out. And our tree’s up. We are still munching seasonal chocolates. I continue to play Christmas music in my car. I’m not ready yet to bid these days adieu, especially in place of the dark, cold months of winter that stifle the year’s last hurrah. I want to hold onto some of the good this holiday brings: a cheerfulness and warmth toward strangers, a celebratory cadence in my steps, a lift in my heart’s song above the daily drudge.
Why does the mundane always drag us back from our festivals, tugging like gravity till our balloons lie all deflated and cheerless. How might I bring some of this rhythm and light, some of this forgetfulness and memory back with me into the daily round of chores and schedules? I don’t want or need more obligation by adding to my diligence an imposed cheerfulness, a forced smile, and so make my grinding tasks even more burdensome. No, I rather want to lighten the driving duties of the day, bring some sunlight into the shadowed spaces. Any thoughts my friends?
Before realizing what I had done, I started a post with the title “Holding onto the Good,” and the good referred to Christmas spirits. I was falling into the American error of confusing the good with good feelings, when truly the good often comes with the worst feelings possible. One of my fundamental life commitments is this: embrace the hard to gain the good, regardless of how it feels. But culture sucks me back into assuming that good feelings are the reward for good choices, that I can measure my spiritual pulse by how positive I feel, and negative feelings are a mark that I’ve slipped up somewhere. No wonder I want to leave up the tinsel and lights and stretch out this season to push back the bleak winter. That, and it just feels better. Who doesn’t want to feel good?!
For my LOTR friends
I affirm that desire: feeling good is not all bad. A sense of well-being gives me more energy to make the world a better place. It is a great blessing and resource. Like all resources, however, it can be turned to self interest. It can make me balk at choosing the hard or painful or costly. It can make me less patient, understanding, and sympathetic towards those who are struggling… even wanting to shove them away to insulate and save my positive vibes. Good feelings are emotional cash, which can be spent well or poorly. I’d like to have a big stash, but that’s not necessarily what’s best for my soul. In my experience, suffering has much more potential power in shaping me for good, true good.
Still I instinctively avoid it and wish it away. Pushing ahead through pain is like walking up to my knees in mud–it takes all my energy, gives no pleasure, and progress seems dismally slow. Perhaps my New Year’s resolution should be: learn to slog, which no doubt means adjusting my goals, expectations, and evaluations. Sometimes the measure of triumph is simply taking one more step.
By this afternoon the snow had mostly melted at our house, and it didn’t feel that cold, so I pulled on my tattered loafers sans socks and drove to the park with Mazie to walk. The asphalt path was mostly free of snow, but by the time I reached the end, my toes were stinging. When I turned onto the wooded dirt trail, I found half an inch of unmelted snow, and I started waddling with my feet splayed to keep from scooping snow into the gaping holes on the out-sides of my shoes. As I walked, something strange happened–my toes began to warm. I was surprised enough to pull out one foot and check that it wasn’t just going numb. It was cool to the touch, but not icy, in spite of the snow that was clinging to the edge of the open splits. Even on cold days my bare feet in loose shoes rub themselves warm against the leather as I walk, and now the broken trail made my feet slide around even more, increasing the friction. There is an upside to friction… even in relationships.
Janathan Grace Reflections 