Sadness and pain have been oozing from my heart for a week or more. I don’t know its source, so I can’t seek a cure. Even taking a walk, which usually does me good, has not staunched the ache. Yesterday I shuffled into the kitchen, and it struck me in the gut like a knife… one moment I am thinking about lunch, and the next I am cringing. Something I saw out of the corner of my soul, perhaps the flash of some failure past that stings my feelings but does not register conscious thoughts for me to confront and fight. When the edges of the cut are raw, the slightest touch can shock the nerves. It will eventually lift, but for now I stagger along, looking for any little cubbyhole to tuck my soul into for a brief respite.
Ambushed Leave a comment
Superman Complex 6 comments
I grew up believing that I was superhuman, that I could and should have every quality admired in others. After all, my grandfather’s biography was titled “Always in Triumph,” and I was cut from the same cloth. So I inherited a Supersaint cape, but not the genes, expectations without the abilities. Every attribute in others turned into a goal for me, and every weakness of mine must be muscled into a strength. Without asking how a basketball player would fare in a saddle or why marathoners and sprinters had such different builds, I was determined to be a complete spiritual athlete, equally good at figure skating and weight-lifting.
I did not realize that my qualities as a gift to the church were unique, that my strengths supplied the lack in others’ weaknesses and that their gifts filled in for my inadequacies. None of us were designed to do it all, but rather each is to be a vital member of a team, offering his unique perspectives, abilities, and traits. Someone who is good at sympathizing is shaped differently from someone who is good at challenging. The cheerful and friendly are not usually given to reflection and quiet. Often we assume that maturing makes us all alike, good at all aspects of spirituality. But if each of us is designed uniquely, becoming more mature may well make us more distinct, though each a beautiful aspect of God’s character.
We are God’s orchestra, and the drums are not in competition with the flutes or the trombones fighting the violins. Each has its own music. We can delight in one another’s contributions and seek to find the flow of harmony in concert. I can be inspired by their dedication and enthusiasm, discipline and creativity because we have the same values and shared goals, but my score is my own. May I take satisfaction and pleasure in the instrument God designed me to be.
A Grace-Ruined World 4 comments
Grace is truly a mystery. I understand how justice works to set things back to rights, but how exactly does forgiveness work? Isn’t it bound to set things more out of whack? Fair trade makes great sense–everything adds up at the end of the day in the universe’s great balance sheets–but giving things away willy-nilly is going to ruin the bottom line. How will we know who owes what to whom? If you fling the doors of grace wide open isn’t there going to be a run on the bank? And if grace were as common as pebbles, there’d be no market for it–you’d have to give it away without charge. Imagine that: free grace. Who can predict where that would end: the collapse of the world as we know it.
Naps 1 comment
Today it was overcast with a high of 20F (that “F” would stand for Fahrenheit, though other words come aptly to mind). I decided to take a nap instead of a walk in the afternoon. My soul approved. Naps are highly underrated. Go take one right now and tell me it doesn’t improve your life’s outlook! (Or if you read this at night–go to bed early. same thing.)
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I went walking with Mazie today thinking it might relieve my depression as it sometimes does. After all, it was sunny and not too cold. For the two hour walk all I could think and feel was, “I just want to curl up in a ball and die.” Some days are like that.
Frictionless Marriage 3 comments
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.
Saving Trust 1 comment
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.
Happy Tears 9 comments
“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.
Rethinking Burnt Toast 4 comments
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.”
Introspection II by Helen Burgess
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.
Free Smiles Leave a comment
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/
Janathan Grace Reflections 