Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
When we face life honestly, bravely, and resolutely, it slices us with a thousand little deaths: truths we are loathe to admit, securities that have blocked our growth, long-fostered hopes that end with a sudden blowout or gradual leak against every effort to re-inflate them. As Kimberly and I prepare to move to Asheville, NC, we are “downsizing,” a smooth word corporations use to put a positive spin on frantically casting everything overboard to save a sinking ship–more like foundering than streamlining.
I had no trouble giving away excess clothes and unused dishes, but when I sold my weight set, it went out the door with my dreams of a buff body still draped over it. To my wife it was a dust-collecting eye-sore, but when I sold that bench, I gave up on a promise and hope. It was my final concession that this frumpy body is the one I will take to the grave. I finally admitted honestly that it was a wasted dream, sitting idle for so many years because my real values lay elsewhere. And that’s okay… it’s even good. I want to live out my true values and not be distracted by false ones. But the good road often forks away from the desirable one. Being good and being happy are often incommensurable.
Stripping away possessions can be a stripping off of dreams and securities, groundings and trajectories, plans and expectations. This morning as I drove my pickup filled with ministry books to donate to a local college, one phrase pounded through my head: “I hate my life!” Those particular books sat in boxes in my basement for ten years, waiting, full of hope for a revived ministry of preaching or teaching or leading, some role to play in bringing God’s goodness into the world. They hung heavy with past joys long gone: the delight in studying and sharing truth with others, the deep satisfaction of experiencing spiritual usefulness by sharing gifts to benefit others.
I have pursued the truth as relentlessly as I can, and it has brought me so much more insight and freedom, self-knowledge and character. I know now that much of what I did before was streaked through with blindspots and immaturity and ungodliness. I had a deeply flawed understanding of God. I am in a far better place personally and spiritually because of all the breaking, but I had hoped to come to the other side of the struggle, to rediscover joy and peace and fulfillment at a new, fuller, more meaningful level. But I am only tired, deeply tired, and crushed and broken-hearted. I feel as though I am on a death-march, lifting one foot after the other in my hopeless, stubborn faith.
If this rings true for your own experience, may you be encouraged that you are not alone. Let us call out to one another in the dark.
We are moving and selling our house. It takes a great deal of work to get a house ready to sell: fixing, updating, de-cluttering, prepping… on top of working two jobs. It is exhausting. All day long I mutter, “I am SO tired.” And the work never ends. I’ve tried multiple fixes and none have worked. Trying to sleep it off just delays the soul and body ache which jumps me the moment I start my day. Every other search for relief has the same dead-end result.
It occurred to me recently that I may need to accept weariness as my current stage in life, like the parents of a newborn must do. Perhaps resignation is my best move since every failed effort at escape simply increases my sense of entrapment. I can live with exhaustion just as others live with arthritis–with a bit of accommodation and commonsense caution, carry on with life each day as it is given me to live. I’ll let you know how it plays out (if I’m not too tired to blog).
Sometimes I feel truly overwhelmed. Hope drains away and the future becomes dark… and then meaningless… and then too weary to even consider. Days are reduced to a zombie-like stumble, a daily routine on endless repeat like a scratched album.
This fall I faced Mount Everest when I finally agreed with Kimberly to move to Asheville, NC. Relocating is a huge effort, and just getting our house ready to sell formed an insurmountable list: patch and seal the driveway, repair the stone wall, replace the doorbell, finish remodeling the bedroom, paint the deck and porch and windows and basementandbathroomandkitchen… the tasks filled a page, single-spaced and two columns long. I felt myself sinking under it.
But in my desperation God sent a guardian angel, my sister Mardi, who suddenly decided that she would take several days vacation-leave to come help. Driving across three states, she dropped her bags on the floor and said, “Hit me with your list. I’m going to work from 5 in the morning till 10 at night to get this stuff done.” Kimberly and I had to tag team just to keep up with her pace. Her energy flowed into my spirit and lifted me over the shoals so that I could keep going even after she left. There is still a lot to do, but it no longer overwhelms me. The wind she puffed into my sails keeps blowing me forward so that her sacrificial gift did much more for me than finish some tasks.
She made the difference for me by giving from her heart, without expectation, which is a pure expression of grace. When I help others, I often expect that they will help me in return when I need it or that they will join with me as I help them or that they will at least be encouraged and feel better. If nothing else, I expect them to be sufficiently grateful. A gift that comes wrapped in expectations is really just a transaction, a trade, and can feel more like a burden than a blessing to those who receive it. But Mardi gave without expectation, freely, and such grace is an artesian spring, filling our hearts and overflowing into others, the gift that keeps on giving.
“Be gentle and kind to yourself” I blogged two weeks ago. “Take full measure of your pain and with compassion find a way to give the help your weary, struggling heart needs.” Great advice, and as it turns out, useless. I was suffering acutely, but didn’t know why. How could I relieve a pain that I could not locate? Loneliness may be remedied with a friend, loss may be resolved with healthy grieving, but the phantom pain of depression is often untraceable to any source. I was completely stuck.
For a long time now I have been struggling to find relief from my pain… or at the very least find the best way to cope with it. Should I follow a plan or be spontaneous, should I read or write, should I sleep in or get up early–what would be best for my soul? I kept taking my emotional temperature, trying to figure out what helped or didn’t help, but the solution was a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing just outside my insight and control.
“And then somehow it came to me,” I journaled the next morning. “What my heart needed was not support to find and apply a solution (friends, good job, insight, etc.), but just support as an end in itself. What my heart needed was simply that gentleness and kindness, for me to have an attitude of constant gentleness and kindness in how I saw myself, thought of myself, felt about myself. I needed self-compassion for my own pain and struggle and fear and confusion and sense of worthlessness—not to find a solution, but to just be on my own side through it all.”
I am a fixer from way back. When I see others in pain, I want to help, give them suggestions, offer them a way to find relief. This often backfires, unintentionally causing more hurt. Kimberly wants me to listen with compassion, understanding, and empathy rather than solutions, but I’m a very slow learner. I keep defaulting back to problem-solving even though I’ve discovered through her how greatly I also need to just be heard and not fixed.
If the best a friend can offer is not to stop my pain, but to hold my hand through it, then why have I never thought to practice this with my own heart, to be my own best friend? What if I walked through each day with a tenderness towards myself, an empathy for my struggle, an awareness and responsiveness to the fluctuations of daily events and how they impact my heart?
I feel as though a new way of being has started to open up in my mind. I’m just learning the initial steps, but it seems to hold real promise for the next leg of my spiritual journey. It does not mean my misery will lighten, but that I will be sensitive and caring about my ongoing pain.
I have little time before work and only 9 usable fingers, having chunked off the flat of my thumb in my belt sander–a story for another day–so this will be quick and rough, but I have thoughts I want to put down. I watched an old episode of Joan of Arcadia recently and remembered why I liked it–the constant reminder that God does not play by our rules and often leaves us in the dark, even (or rather especially) about our own lives. That is, I hate the experience, but I am grateful for the camaraderie of someone who also feels slapped in the face by life… every day… and cannot find a way to duck the swing.
I have been struggling more deeply with depression for the last few months (which is the reason for my absence here–depression reduces life to survival and little more). It feels awful, so much like an actual physical trauma that I find myself catching my breath with the pain, and more recently grasping my head in my hands as I double over. So I dig through my piles of options for some way to reduce the misery, but while I’m looking, my feelings change. How do you address something which is unpredictable, indiscernible, uncontrollable. I don’t mean I don’t have any influence over my feelings, but it is like driving with a knee around mountain curves… in the fog. So my feelings are constantly in the ditch–it is all I can manage to keep from going over the embankment.
Some days I wake up feeling okay… as long as I just lie there in a drowsy stupor. That makes me think that naps might be a way to avoid my misery… which is true, but not helpful since I can’t live the rest of my life in a coma. It just delays the returning blackness, it doesn’t lighten it. So basically any strategy for avoiding life and its attendant feelings–loving on my dogs, watching TV, reading Facebook–is only a distraction from feeling anything deep or meaningful, it doesn’t resolve or heal or soften those bad feelings that come flooding back the moment I come out of the circus show.
For my religiously minded friends with the easy and certain solution–yes, I keep trying prayer and Bible reading as I am able, I keep looking for a church that doesn’t make me feel even worse afterwards. These have not brought any fundamental relief or changed my experience of life. And for my friends who have found some relief in medicine–I’ve tried several iterations, no luck so far.
Honestly it is not my staggering emotions that are the fundamental soul problem so much as the lack of control and confusion. If I believed that my depression were God-ordained and inescapable, it would relieve me of desperately seeking solutions (which puts a great deal of pressure on myself, and temptation to self-blame). I could settle for learning how to manage the life I am given. But since I have small influences on my emotions, it keeps me actively engaged. Were I to conclude that I had no real control and that my emotional experience of life was wholly in the hands of God, I could accept my lack of control, but that would exacerbate my confusion, not only over why this was God’s choice for me, but how I am to respond to it.
Regarding the first, the very values God promotes are undermined by my depression, not simply because of the inherent self-focus needed and the sapping of all motivation, but because of its intense draining of energy: I don’t have the normal resources from which to draw to be generous-minded, hard-working, other-oriented. Patience looks more like resignation, hope seems more like stubbornness. Wisdom seems to be stymied–if I have too little insight for my own life, what do I have to give to others? And to find any joy present in this mess would require a complete re-definition.
Regarding the second, my response to intractable emotions, it is hard enough to find a rhythm for the dance of life when one’s emotions are consistent, even consistently miserable. A strategy, plan, step-by-step approach can be developed when the playing field is stable, but when it constantly changes, it throws off all efforts to establish patterns, learn dynamics, and create a workable approach.
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That was yesterday. I ran out of time before I could post. But the gears started to spin as I wrote. To suppose that patience as resignation or hope as stubbornness is somehow a poorer, weaker form of the real virtue is to undermine the very breadth and variegated beauty of each virtue, to stereotype, slot, and truncate the vast panoply of experience and expression of each facet of goodness. We have often tried to distill attributes into some pure or regnant form, a person that most exemplifies some particular value, say of courage or discipline. So the essence of real love is seen as mother love, as though there is only one kind of love and everyone should emulate it. But what if there are many unique and invaluable forms of love that are missed by this reduction, that look different from mother love but have their own irreplaceable value: what of the simplicity and humility of a child’s love, the equality and intentionality of a friend’s love, the intensity and intertwining of a spouse’s love… and so even those of us under the heavy weight of depression have a unique offering of love, one of deep understanding and empathy and acceptance. Perhaps depression does not inherently limit, sap, or dull our virtues, but instead refines, strengthens, sharpens them with a special coloring. Our virtues have their own beauty and power, unique role and expression, a glory all their own.
Living with depression changes one’s whole experience of life, making every engagement with the world a hard struggle as though one is tasked with fixing the pedestal fan after the lights are turned off. But supposedly, although difficult, one would expect that with daily practice one might get slowly better at fixing fans in the dark, figure out work-arounds, develop new skills, develop new expectations of how long a given task will take. This never happens with depression. Each day is just as hard as the day before, just as stressful and dark and hopeless of any real change. There is no new normal to which to adjust, so perhaps a better analogy would be someone who has severe arthritis and each twist of the screw-driver shocks the hand with pain, and yet the task cannot be laid aside, there is no hope for pain relief, and it does not seem to be directed at some greater good, as it would if, for instance, all the energy were directed at escaping a sinking ship or creating heaters for the indigent in freezing climates. It is simply a way to make money so as to stay alive to experience more pain the next day–the reward for faithfulness and perseverance is continuing suffering. It is as though someone lost in the middle of the ocean has been treading water for days, swallowing and choking on water, face burned by the sun and throat burned by dehydration, and with no hope of rescue. I send out my sympathy for those of you struggling one more day in this dark place.
Clothes are like mud flaps to me: functional, not decorative. Each morning, without thought, I pull out the slacks that happen to be closest to hand and grab a shirt that doesn’t clash. I wear stuff till it gets holes and then I throw it out, buying more from the frumpy racks of pants and polos at the local Goodwill for $3 a piece. Everything in my closet and drawers is relatively meaningless and disposable except a pair of purple swim trunks. The color is garish and the pockets are ridiculous–not made of mesh, but solid cloth, scooping air as I dive and ballooning up around my waist like two neon jellyfish. But the trunks are irreplaceable, bought as a gift for me ten years ago on a Florida vacation by a dear friend who was my last hope in the world. He offered not only true friendship, but life purpose in an organization that mirrored my own core values of the shared grace of God embracing our mutual brokenness. And then he died suddenly of a heart attack. I miss him.
The organization wandered away from his vision and I found no one else in town with those core values, so it was quite literally my last hope. For a decade I have been treading water, without any speck on the horizon of meaningful friendship or life focus. Kimberly is with me here, so I am not alone, but we feel adrift in a sea of disconnection and pointlessness. My life before was rich with friends and fruitfulness, so Vince and his organization were not unique in that sense, except in being the last on a journey that has since seemed remarkably barren.
A loud swimsuit speaks to me not only of absence, but of presence, for Vince represents to me all those of good heart still in the world and my hope of finding a few more on the long journey home. When I grow weary in waiting, I remember the past winds on which God blew fellow travelers my way.
Those whose voice once sang love, courage or patience into our hearts sing still to this day, renewing us by their memory. And lest we forget and the echoes of their refrain grow distant, we have been given this special day of the year on the church’s calendar to call us to reach back into this treasure chest of our past and run our thoughts over the contours of their impact, tracing in our minds those deep and abiding impressions that continue to shape our lives for the better.
For weeks I have been trying to fight off the soul-sucking depression that envelopes me. When I can work through the darkness–uncover the reasons and respond with healthy steps–my depression turns into an instrument of growth, but for now my insight is deaf and blind, and so, blocked from any resolution, I try to distract myself with work or entertainment, naps or walks or cuddling with my pooches, just to keep the misery at bay. That fixes nothing, simply postpones the falling night, but at least it makes life manageable for a while longer. Still somewhere underneath, the darkness gathers strength pushing more often and irresistibly passed my efforts to block it. The muddled mutterings of discouragement and hopelessness become louder, more insistent, and having nothing to counter the assault, I find each day a little more of my emotional footing crumbling.
Caroline came to me at work yesterday with an apology, “I’m sorry I was hard on you yesterday. I was slammed with a lot of issues I had to sort through and was feeling stressed.” I said that I understood. But she was not finished with her apology which rather quickly worked around to her frustration at me, still evident in her look and tone of voice, because I was apparently inadequate at my job. Tears had started pooling in my eyes when she finally finished her lecture and turned to leave.
Having no customers to attend, I had some space to reflect. Why did this exchange feel so bad to me? I was better than most at handling displeased customers and angry colleagues, able to be courteous and sympathetic without taking it personally. I felt the powerful emotional tug and followed the shame back to my childhood fears. This dynamic was very familiar, the sense that I was fundamentally flawed because I was too slow or stupid or inattentive. It was not simply that I had failed in this one thing as everyone does, but that I had failed in a way that others did not, at least not responsible ones. As a boy I figured dad would be patient with average mistakes, the kind he too made, so his frustration proved some deeper flaw in me. Children who paid more attention, who got it on the first explanation, who didn’t repeat the same mistake earned approval. I just had to try harder… but I could never quite overcome that achievement deficit. I was stuck in a permanent sense of inadequacy.
Now whether my dad was too impatient or I was too sensitive is beside the point… or rather it completely leads us down the wrong trail. The point is not to identify blame, but to identify dynamics–this is what happened and this is how it made me feel. And seeing that dynamic clearly, and being the melancholic that I am (tending to self-blame), I immediately noticed how I treat others in a similar way, especially those I supervise. My mind flashed back to the previous night when I had given an exasperated look and tone to a new student I was training because she wasn’t getting it. I could see her face fall, and realizing what I had done, I quickly changed into a non-judgmental re-explanation. But it passed through my mind as a common interaction, not something that called for further examination, one of those things I see as a flaw in myself that I need to work on, but with such a minimal focus that I make only incremental changes.
Okay, that is unfair to myself. I have actually grown a lot in this area. I just have a lot farther to go. If I’d had a little boy when I was my father’s age, I might have been much harder on him than my father was on me. It is nearly impossible to break out of family dynamics without a great deal of reflection and understanding… and grace to myself, not just to others. Given my temperament, I could easily turn this insight into self-blame, castigating myself for being hard on others and trying to scold myself into being more patient. But shaming myself just makes me feel even more inadequate, leading to further dysfunction in my life.
For me, this is where reflecting on my childhood becomes so powerful. When I find a reason for a deep-rooted unhealthy tendency in myself, when I can locate the pain I felt that I’m passing on to others, I can see myself with compassionate eyes, as the wounded one. I can grace myself into healthier interactions instead of criticizing myself into being better, a stick I used my whole life that simply drove me into deep, unremitting depression. I find that grace must begin with myself before I can pass it on. We live in a fallen world, we have all been wounded deeply, and tracing that injury back to its roots can give us the insight and self-compassion we need to finally begin healing under the gentle touch of God’s grace.
The world we each inhabit is a menagerie of differing perspectives without a guide to help us sort through the issues. If one is a feeler and the other a fixer or if one is an optimist and the other a pessimist, conflicts arise. One may push for action while the other pushes for patience; one inclines to critique and the other to acceptance; one wants to plan and the other likes spontaneity. Instead of welcoming and finding a place for alternative views, we often react out of fear or pride. We lack the imagination or guidance to show us how to make room for ideas that don’t fit our outlook, yet how we respond to conflicting perspectives makes a huge difference in our personal development and relationships (as you can see in my previous post), and the family is most formative in this process.
Cholerics like my dad are the engines of the world. Far less would be accomplished here without their initiative, decisiveness, can-do spirits, diligence and strong-willed personalities, and as with other temperaments, the various elements of their personality are mutually strengthening, consolidating their outlook. Dad addresses a problem or issue by acting decisively to resolve it. This initiative is grounded in his confidence about his own diagnosis, solution, planning, and ability to control the outcome. His self-confidence not only motivates him to act, but also brings results because others, inspired by his confidence, buy into his plan (cholerics are natural leaders). If there is resistance, his confidence prompts him to vigorously argue his case, become more firm in his position, and inspire others to action. And so his goals are met, which is especially validating of his outlook, not only pragmatically in seeing the results but especially emotionally because a choleric gets the most sense of satisfaction from a job well done. These are all good, valuable traits, and rightly admired in our society with its can-do attitude.
Melancholics like myself do not receive the same accolades or appreciation by American society. We often find ourselves overlooked and our contributions devalued. We are “a voice in the wilderness.” Interestingly enough, this also meshes with and validates our worldview. We expect the world to be this way because we tend to be more aware of the dark side of life–the suffering, antagonism, fear, despair, and brokenness–and we need space to slowly find our equilibrium among these crashing cross-currents. When a choleric is faced with brokenness, his first response is to fix it, while the melancholic’s first response is to sit with it, understand it, and grow by it. To the choleric, this response is wrong-headed or weak-willed, it looks like giving up and acquiescing to the dark. Of course, there is a danger that we melancholics may slide into despair, but there is also beauty of soul that comes from listening to sadness and an ability to empathize with and comfort the broken-hearted. Sitting with those who cannot be fixed but can only weep and sigh may demoralize a choleric but profoundly encourages the melancholic. We feel that we are finally being real and truly connecting at a deep heart level, and that soul-bonding is what we value most in life.
So the choleric is good at fixing, the melancholic at comforting; the choleric is good at action, the melancholic at contemplating; the choleric has good solutions, the melancholic has good questions; the choleric sees neat and clean distinctions, simple blacks and whites, while the melancholic sees a vast spectrum of slightly differing detail, complex grey-scale; the choleric sees opportunities, the melancholic sees concerns. In a hundred other ways my father and I fundamentally differ from one another and it has a very big impact on what we feel, how we act, what solutions work for us, what we identify as problems, how we approach relationships, and basically each thread that makes up our fabric of life. We see and interact with the world in very different ways, even in how we relate to God himself, even in how we understand who God is. So these differences go to the roots of who we are and what we believe and how we relate to each other. How profoundly important, then, to ponder these things and seek for self and other understanding.
Janathan Grace Reflections 