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!
I’m wanting to reach out, share, connect with you tonight, but I have nothing in particular to say. I have stacks of thoughts… quite literally, but none of them inspire me tonight. I feel quiet, ready, in tune, but no thoughts come. Perhaps it is your turn to share with me. Is anything on your heart–any grief or challenge, any joy or hope, any insight or doubt? I welcome with open heart your thoughts.
Sometimes I scribble thoughts as I walk my dogs, juggling pen and paper with two retractable leashes in hand, jerked around by the dogs straining for the next bush. The writing is barely decipherable, and when I get home the little scraps of paper drift around from pocket to desk to bag… or laundry… or trashcan where the burning insight is lost. I’m looking at my pile of scraps now: dentist appointment, a grocery list, a receipt and rebate form, a sticky note with two items scratched through and the third reading, “fix dome light.” My whole life is like that, bits and pieces shuffled around and often dropped or misplaced in spite of my best intentions. I try to keep the most important or urgent things on top of the stack. I lost our backup hard-drive somewhere and having looked everywhere more than once, have presumed it’s gone, along with my electric razor that I haven’t seen in two weeks. I used to be so disciplined, had my life planned out on a grid, kept my ducks marching in step. My life was organized, but my heart was crushed. I’d rather be a mess than a machine. Perhaps one day I will get back enough energy to set my life a little more in step and find enough rhythm to give direction to my confused soul, but for now I just want to learn to be at peace with my own shortcomings, learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
–Jesus (Matthew 11:28-30 from The Message)
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.
Janathan Grace Reflections 