Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category
Monday I was hiking with my doggies in the Blue Ridge Mountains and noticed my neck cramping on one side. To stretch out the kinks I started rolling and rotating my head, wondering what I’d done to my neck. And then it dawned on me. instead of pulling ahead as usual, Mazie and Mitts had fallen in behind me, and as the path was narrow, I held both leashes in one hand. My right arm swung freely, but my left arm was pulled back by the leads, and over a couple of miles that tension worked its way up to my neck.
I spent decades paying little attention to my body, and so harming it. I have only learned in the last few years to listen to this complex, integrated structure–I would never have guessed that a sore neck could come from an arm slightly skewed. When an injury’s throb is felt in a separate body part, it is called “referred pain.” Those are the trickiest to self-diagnose and so misleading that the real problem often escapes us.
During those years I listened no better to my psyche than my body. I shouted down my feelings and became emotionally deaf, unable to decipher its most rudimentary language. Emotions were to be embraced, vanquished or transmuted according to an accepted moral code. I thought every feeling was a straightforward response to external stimuli. My anger was incited by “stupid” drivers. My anxiety was the result of critical bosses. My shame was the direct product of my tardiness. Emotional “referred pain” was not even a speck of consideration… until the conventional interpretations became so convoluted in the telling that even I recognized something was fishy. They rang false, though I couldn’t detect the crack in the bell. It was my indecipherable, unrelenting depression that forced me to finally admit my emotional cluelessness and rethink my psychological map.
I discovered that my pride was tangled up with fear, my affection enmeshed with insecurity, and a seeming calm and patience was simply an emotional disconnect to protect myself. I realized that my anger ignited from inside, not outside, that it was a cover-up for shame, and my shame was grounded in a legalistic denial of grace. It was all so much more complex than I realized, but this self-reflection, softened by grace, opened me to a remarkable level of integrity and clarity and personal growth. My whole sense of spirituality and relationships was reorganized. I finally had the tools I needed for fundamental transformation instead of the spiritual strictures of a flawed system.
I have been working for years to learn my emotional ABCs. Slowly I untangled the knots so that patterns stood out in relief and dynamics materialized. What is the real reason for these feelings? What leads me to freedom and understanding rather than fear and blindness? What does my soul need in the way of support? What pulls it down or picks it up? I wonder–do any cultures teach their children to be heart-interpreters rather than heart-controllers?
I have always been a highly disciplined person. This has been unfortunate from so many angles. It has made me arrogant and judgmental towards those with less “will-power” or commitment. It has made me focus excessively on behavior and choice and see them as the foundations for goodness rather than its fruit. It has made me self-abusive, both in driving myself past any reasonable limits, resulting in self harm, and in condemning myself for my shortcomings (because of the unbridgeable gap between highly disciplined and perfectly disciplined). Like all coping mechanisms, it played to my natural strengths and inclinations and offered me protection from the fears that snarled and snapped inside, but like a protection racket it kept me permanently bound to those same fears.
So here is the wretched conundrum of every coping mechanism: the very thing that protects us blocks us from a real resolution. We cannot give up suddenly and entirely on our coping mechanisms or we will be unable to cope, trampled by our fears and dragged away from the grace that comes to save us. Except for miracles–and by definition those happen rarely–we must grow into grace, beginning with small steps. We speak of a “leap of faith,” but that is best seen as a change in direction rather than a sudden and complete transformation of our psyche. We make a deliberate commitment to a new vision, a new allegiance, a new God of grace instead of the old god of legalism, but learning to live out that commitment is a long, slow process, full of missteps, confusion, and doubt–ask any newlyweds… or oldy-weds. Trust is a tree that matures from a sapling, not a full-grown log dropped at our feet.
Coping mechanisms are both necessary and limiting, helpful and ensnaring. They cannot be shaken off in one go, cold-turkey, like one might give up alcohol or drugs, because they sustain us in a vital way. The struggle for health is more aptly compared to an eating disorder, since we all must eat daily, so the solution cannot lie in abandonment (which seems much simpler and easier to me), but in rehabilitation. That is, I cannot simply chuck discipline, since some discipline is necessary for life and growth. I can certainly moderate self-discipline, but that does not resolve the root of the problem, which is not the amount of the discipline, but its role and purpose. “Why?” is the all important question to snag our inner gremlins. “Why is self-discipline so important to me?” Because it is the gauge by which I measure my worth, it is my source of validation. As long as I do the right thing, I think, I am in good standing with God… which is the quintessence of legalism.
I’ve been at this for years, rethinking my knee-jerk criticisms of the “lazy and irresponsible” and trying to be a little more “lazy and irresponsible” myself as a means of practicing grace towards others and myself. I’ve worked hard for over a decade to recognize my real reasons for doing good and avoiding evil and to realign those with the gracious God I serve. I’ve been focused on this, disciplined. Oh, snap! Yes, it’s true, I can even drive myself to grace or shame my lack of it, trying to force grace to grow but ending up frustrated and impatient, which helps neither me nor my relationships. Old habits die hard, and often rise up in new guises. But I recognize it, take apart my viewpoint and reorganize it. Wash, rinse, repeat. By God’s grace I am not who I once was, and by God’s grace I will not be who I am now.
Good Friday was the triumph of grace over law. Law was unmasked, over-ruled, dethroned. Forgiveness triumphed over judgment, love and mercy over just desserts. Do your worst to God, torture and kill his own son, and he will love you still, he will reach out to you, offer you a way out of your lostness, bitterness, hatred, and misery. God will never stop loving you with all his heart… or your neighbor… or your enemy, which is the hard part for us. He does not love us more than them… he does not even see them as more wicked and deserving of damnation than he sees us. That is the tough news of grace–it embraces everyone or it succumbs to the law, loses its whole nature of undeserved love. Once any small degree of deserving enters, grace disappears. The amazing, wonderful news is that grace is not partial, it covers every evil we have done or will do without flinching. No act, no person is beyond its reach… which is also the hard news. It means the world is not divided between a good us and a bad them. There is no them, just us fallen human beings. We’re all in this together, broken and in desperate need of grace.
But the tough news is the good news, because we finally have a solution to our fractured and destructive relationships. Our resolution to the anger, hatred and aggression of others is not to overpower it with our own righteous judgment and coercive power–for when we try to stand on our own righteousness, we ultimately judge ourselves. The law condemns all equally. The only resolution to hatred, whether self-directed or other-directed, is more love. In other words the true solution, the only solution, the only possible way out of our lostness, is grace. And that grace is ultimately, finally, completely poured out in the life and death of God’s only Son. Grace has come and triumphed over all, breathing life into death, flashing hope into despair, filling our crushed hearts with love unconquerable.
So, yes, I did sort of blandly confess yesterday that my life is a useless dead-end. If my dispassion came from fatalism or apathy, it would likely be a sign of spiritual stagnation, but instead, my sharing it with such ease and openness (not stuffed with caveats or apologies or explanations) is a very real sign of spiritual growth for me. It has taken years for me to slowly come out of the closet as a failure, a nobody, and grow into the faith that God is in control and loves me with an unfettered grace. He is famous for using asses (both the donkey variety and the human kind) to accomplish good on this earth, even those totally resistant to his purposes, like Jonah at Ninevah and Peter with the Ethiopian eunuch, so he can surely use someone like me who, though deeply flawed, is eager to be his instrument.
I no longer cower under the withering suspicion that my flaws keep me on the bench, but It is not easy to feel useless, to feel as though my gifts fall to the ground like rotting apples in a starving country. It requires faith and patience in the mystery of God’s will and work in the world. I’m getting better at that… I have to get better at it because the longer I live, the more clearly I see the wreckage around me. As I told Kimberly yesterday, this wretched world gives no rational proof of a good God. The balance sheets of justice (let alone beauty and goodness) cannot be reconciled on earth. As Paul said, “If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable.” Forget the world around me, the world inside my chest is so slow in growing towards God that death will catch me long before I’ve lived into half the truth I’ve come to see.
God has a lot of explaining to do to justify his creating this muck-up since he knew the disaster that would come, but I expect one glimpse of his beauty will obliterate all our questions and doubts and captivate our hearts. Until then, we live by faith in a beauty we cannot see, in a grace we cannot well absorb, and in a love that guides us through the dark and home to his heart. May we all find our way by grace and en-courage one another with compassion.
Patience was a virtue before the industrial revolution, but we’ve developed beyond that to aim rather for efficiency. Waiting is passe. In the old days we had to gather wood and build a fire to boil water, but then we invented electric stoves, followed by microwaves, and now (since we can’t wait 90 seconds) we have steaming water on tap. We’ve discovered that frustration breeds progress–impatience is the new virtue. All the important people are doing it. I know I felt important–and righteous–when I was hurrying to do God’s work, but I think I missed a turn somewhere, because I seem to be stuck in the slow lane in God’s Kingdom… although, since I’m not even inching forward, maybe I’m in the back parking lot.
As I shared in my last post, I have never been good at waiting. When God scheduled practice sessions, I played hooky, so I finally got sent to Waiting Boot Camp where I’ve been for a long time now because, apparently, I’m a slow learner. How ironic. Waiting well is an art, and no one advances in it without first understanding its value. What good does waiting offer? Let me start by pointing out problems that come from not waiting.
First of all, there is the bad alternative solution, the shortcut that ends in a mess (ask Abraham about Hagar). If the best solution requires more time, then every quicker solution is going to be defective. It turns out that God’s not in a rush because he has all the time in the world (literally), and he’s savvy to the best rhythm. being both the composer and conductor of the symphony we call history. In fact he IS the rhythm of history, so it’s kind of important that we get in sync with him. The point is to experience the music, not get to the end as quickly as possible. To play his music well, we must be as faithful to the musical rest as to the beat. Timing is fundamental, good waiting is as crucial as good working.
Second, there is our own arrested development, the shortchanging of our own experience and growth, missing what God wishes to do in us and for us by having us wait. When God has us wait, it is always for our benefit, never for our deprivation. God does not have to bilk us in order to bless others, because his resources are limitless. His one unwavering motivation for delay is expressed in his Son: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.” We cheat ourselves when we rush ahead because our growth and fulness depend as much on our stillness as on our striving. The first is just as active in shaping and satisfying us as the second.
Finally, there is the impaired relationship, because when two are out of step, their dance suffers. Our motives for pushing ahead of God hurt our bond with him, whether that comes from doubt in his wisdom and love or from being too willful and inattentive or from fear or pride. All of those pull us away from a trusting relationship. The motives erode our connection and then the actions we take widen that fissure. That is to say, capitulating to our fear is relationally harmful, and so are the actions we take in living out that fear. When Abraham bedded Hagar to get a son, he not only side-tracked God’s plan and undercut his own faith, but he also distanced himself from God. He was less able to hear him, to trust him, to receive from him, to delight in his presence.
So failure to wait hurts the objective, the person, and the relationship.
But if you are like me, God doesn’t speak clearly and audibly to give specific directions, so how can we know if we are missing his timing? It is a dance. Dance partners don’t have a running monologue, “Step to your left… step back… on the count of three, dip.” Through a lot of practice and experience they learn to feel one another’s rhythms, patterns, and tells, and it is always more about moving together than getting the steps precise, more about trust and response than about rules and conformity. But if we do not embrace the pause, the waiting, as well as the stride, we will likely miss our partner’s gentle guidance and stumble in the dance. Waiting seems like doing nothing, but it is pregnant with power. Doing and waiting are the inhaling and exhaling of life’s rhythmic progress.
I hate waiting.
I hate it on the telephone, I hate it at the traffic cone;
I hate it at the DMV–I’m what? two hundred eighty three?!
I hate it now, I’ll hate it then. You say I have to wait till WHEN?!
I hate it here, I hate it there; it chafes me like wool underwear.
Waiting is worse than death. When you’re dead you don’t know you’re stuck in the universe’s time-out corner, suffocating on your current meaninglessness, accomplishing squat. Time squandered at least brings pleasure, but time waiting, minute by minute, is a complete loss, like setting fire to money… slowly… one bill at a time. If you tolerate delays, you clearly don’t value time. Unless you have the silly notion that waiting is itself a benefit, which is as crazy as valuing an empty wallet! I’m sure you’ll get a lot of people buying into that motto. What would your bumper sticker say, something cockamamie like “Blessed are the Poor”? Next you’ll tell me that being comfortable with waiting is not a vice of the lazy but a virtue of the wise, and that pre-moderns called it “patience.” Well, patience will get you nowhere, and it will get you there late. If you want results, try yelling.
Is there any benefit to me for being patient, or is it just to benefit God because he’s tired of hearing me whine? Is God losing his cool with me, telling me to shut up, impatiently demanding I be patient? Does calm waiting do more than give me brownie points with God? If virtue is its own reward, what reward does patience give?
For instance, as a hypothetical, suppose there is a lady in front of me in the fast lane at Food Lion and she waits until all her groceries are sacked and each sack placed in her cart before she thinks about her payment. She opens her pocketbook and rummages around, shoving things this way and that until she pulls out one crumpled bill, straightens it out, and hands it to the store clerk. She dives back in looking for another bill. After she passes that over, she re-checks the total on the display, and goes looking for her change purse. There must be a dime in there somewhere, she’s sure of it. A quarter will not do. She pulls each coin out of her purse to get a closer look before putting it back to scrummage for another. Then the receipt must be carefully folded and the right spot found for it in the pocketbook and a place for the pocketbook in the cart. Pretend that my smile slowly turns into a clenched jaw, my friendliness grows sullen, and my thoughts uncharitable. Can waiting really be beneficial? How is postponing good ever a positive? Patience is simply an unwanted chore if I cannot find a reason to value delays. I have some thoughts to share, but you’ll have to wait 😉
My memory is like cellphone reception in the sticks–very iffy. I am a full-spectrum forgetter, from the trivial pen to the crucial time sheet submission, and everything in-between. I’m so good at misplacing things that I’m surprised to find them where they belong–the cupboard is the last place I look for my coffee cup. I have a whole strategy for dealing with my incompetence–jotting myself reminders and propping them in key places (my computer keyboard, my Honda dashboard) or leaning things against the door so I can’t leave without them. I am totally prepped for the onset of Alzheimer’s!
Along with my other inveterate shortcomings, It is my wild forgetfulness that wakens my memory, that keeps me aware of my own inadequacy. Some folks are so successful or competent or busy or distracted that their memory needs to be elbowed into recalling their own failings. They get good grades at work and church and family and pick up extra credit volunteering at the mission downtown. Their lives, unlike mine, constantly point to their virtues and accomplishments, and it is their failings that they forget. They need reminders, blacked out calendar days, time set aside to reflect on the noxious embers that still smolder in their bones. They need Ash Wednesday.
But I need Resurrection Sunday. I live in the ash heap of my own failures, reflecting back on them not for 40 days, but 40 years. I don’t need reminding, I need rescuing. What I need to remember, always remember, is Easter, the joy of forgiveness. My hope cannot be in outgrowing my faults or in forgetting them, but in living my present messy life in the full embrace of God, the God who not only accepts me in spite of my past failures, but also in expectation of my future ones, who is not put off by my need, but is drawn to me because of it. We all fall down, constantly fall down, but may we land in His grace, not in our own self-loathing. And may the ashes on our foreheads be the sign of our mutual poverty as we hold one another’s hands and dance together in the glorious light of His redemptive love.
Assumptions, like fire, are dangerous necessities. I assume the sun will rise, my wife will speak English, my car will start, my office will still be standing, my digestion will work, my dogs will not tear up our furniture, and I will be paid at the end of the month. It’s not possible to live on a contingency basis, always second-guessing, third-guessing, infinity-guessing. I need assumptions, but they can destroy me.
Some false assumptions are self-correcting, whacking me with reality till I admit I’m wrong: if it stinks don’t eat it; get it wet and it will break. But some wrong assumptions are self-perpetuating because they’re in a groove of constant and unchallenged repetition, winning legitimacy by default, like squatter’s rights. These free-loading assumptions can blindside a marriage undetected, and I’ve caught one of the traitors on my own lips: the condemning adverb “just“: “Can’t it just wait till tomorrow?” “I wish you’d just finish it.” “It’s just one phone call!” That 4-letter word assumes that my expectations of Kimberly are simple and easy and so her refusal would be uncaring, irresponsible, or even contemptible. I’m asking so little that denying me is shameful.
But what an arrogant assumption! By what scale can I possibly measure the emotional cost to another person. It seems simple enough–I imagine myself in her position and tally how much it would cost me: a trifling. The obvious failure in this method is that, after walking a mile in her shoes (or rather imagining it), I still end up measuring myself, not her. Every person reacts very differently to a given situation based on their history, perception, experience, energy level, knowledge, calculations, vulnerabilities and strengths (to name only a handful of factors). Guessing how I would respond to a scolding from my boss or my father’s sickness has little to do with how she would respond. In fact, my own responses change from day to day. What is easy or hard for me is no prediction of what is easy or hard for her. I think, “the average person would feel…” but where is this average person, this stereotypical amalgamation of median scores from across the spectrum of society? In fact the “average” person is strikingly unique. My imagination will always fail me. I can only understand her as I hear and accept her self revelations.
Pushing her to ignore her inner voice in order to bend to my will is insensitive, selfish, and destructive, and those hens will come home to roost. That “just” trigger can target me as well. I’m equally vulnerable to the heavy sighs or raised eyebrows or the hundred other ways this attitude can leak out. Kimberly could easily shoot down my failings to meet her expectations… only she doesn’t because she is more understanding and accepting of others’ limitations than I am. She suffers under my judgments without striking back, kind of like Jesus.
“Just do it” is the motto of those who wish to simply override objections rather than understand our hesitations and accommodate our limitations, usually assuming that finishing the job is more important than hearing the heart. But in Jesus’ mind, the person always comes first, the task can wait. Sometimes we must choose to act in spite of conflicted, unresolved, or resistant feelings, but we do so while we acknowledge, validate, and support those feelings, not by belittling and ignoring them. “This is hard, this is really hard, but I am going to do it anyway” is a sentiment that refuses the insinuations of “just.” Such acts are brave and selfless and should be acknowledged as such, they should be admired and appreciated, not dismissed and forgotten. If I could just remember 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.
Janathan Grace Reflections 