A lot of the growth I have experienced this year has come in the pressure cooker of a new marriage. I thought we had worked through most of our issues while dating, but we discovered some very powerful new issues that dragged us through some painful and scary periods. Marriage is like new exercises that stretch muscles you never knew you had.
If you’ve picked up on how we relate, you know we never avoid issues, but face them squarely. It is much safer, easier, and more pleasant to find out what causes sparks and detour your relationship around those bumps and potholes, and perhaps for some folks and to some extent that is necessary, but it’s not our approach. If something hurts or frustrates or upsets me, I tell Berly what I feel. I try to share it in a way that does not blame her or make her responsible for my feelings. She does the same with me.
That goes well enough unless it connects with one of our significant issues, then we struggle for hours as we talk through our pain and fear. We both feel unfairly blamed and can barely stand to hear what the other one has to say. We each try to justify our position and defend ourselves against the strong voices of shame inside our own heads that distort all that we say to and hear from one another. We hate tension in relationships, and have often resolved conflicts by acquiescing to the shame others have attributed to our actions. To escape my own self-loathing, I have also often shamed others into admitting their fault. We both know this self-shaming approach to conflict resolution is ultimately harmful to each of us and our relationship. The answer is in grace, not in shame.
For the first hour of these tense discussions, we feel awful as we explain ourselves to each other and do our best to avoid blaming. We listen as best we can, try to lower our guards slowly, and offer sympathy and understanding as we are able. As we talk, our emotions go from red alert to orange to yellow. We can hear more sympathetically and speak more compassionately. After 4 or 5 hours of talking, we understand ourselves and each other at a new level. We recognize the source of our fears and shame and offer ourselves and one another grace. This particular emotional issue will never have the same degree of stress for either of us. We carry this newly discovered grace into similar conflicts in our other relationships as well.
Sometimes, for one reason or another, we can’t find our way into freedom and some tension will be carried from day to day between us as we make repeated efforts at reaching understanding and embracing grace. We always find a way through. We have made it over so much rough terrain since May with consistent grace offered that we feel much safer with each other and have found substantial healing from our fear and shame. We seem to be in a different place in our relationship. It feels to me like we have scaled the mountains and now only face foothills ahead, though I’m guessing we still have some mountains to face. Our relationship feels better, more stable, more safe, more deep, more supportive than it ever has.
May all of you find a new taste of grace in your life today,
J
My new schedule at work is an evening shift (3-11) followed by a 12 hour day (8a.m.-12 and 3-11). I get Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday off. So far I like the schedule. Lynchburg L’Arche is planning to open up a couple more homes, so I have talked to the director about becoming a home life coordinator (the person responsible for running of the home). I feel strongly about the need to develop community around the L’Arche philosophy, which the present coordinator doesn’t seem to be able to do. If I did take that role, it would probably be a year away. In the meantime I am learning so much about community and grace. It has been a tremendously stretching experience, and with Berly’s encouragement, I have grown personally this last year more than any other year of my life, I think.
More later,
Janathan
p.s. winter at our house
Kimberly and I went to South Carolina for the Christmas season (I actually had to work on Christmas, so we went the weekend before). My dad and I had breakfast together and I was able to ask him a lot of questions about his childhood. We had a good time. I gave all my family members a framed picture of me and Kimberly to update their family picture walls. We celebrated Christmas with my oldest sister, my dad and his wife, two cousins + daughter, Aunt and Uncle. I didn’t know who all would be there, but I always keep a box of gifts handy, so I took a selection along with wrapping paper.
My sister Mardi gave me and Kimberly two wonderful pictures of grace as a “Christening” gift for our new family name. We hung them over our bed. Mardi, could you send us a copy by email so we could post it for everyone to see?
For my birthday (January 23) Kimberly and I went to Mountain Lake Resort. It was really lovely. On the way there the weather swung a couple of times from a completely overcast snow fall to blue skies. It was weird. We got to the Resort with the snowflakes painting everything white, and the next day it was blue skies. Kimberly forgot her boots, so I went on a walk by myself in the beautiful, quiet, soft white and blue. I apparently left my mp3 player in the cabin since I haven’t been able to find it since.
I hope to write more consistently in my blog. I have to be in a good place emotionally to have energy to do it, and also I need the motivation. We’ll see how it goes.
Love to all,
Janathan
I have another blog that is completely private except for my wife and one other person close to me. I share my real heart issues there. Here I usually just post the external events of my life. I have recently been thinking of adding to the scope of this blog with more ruminations, but the idea that this blog is open to everyone on the face of the earth really feels intimidating. I don’t feel I can truly be myself or say freely what I think. I’ll have to ponder it. In the meantime I hope to do more with this blog than I have been doing.
Kimberly and I invited a core member and assistant from L’Arche to our home for Thanksgiving. The core member chose to go to another person’s home, so we had one guest. I cooked a turkey (which is going to last us two quite a while!), sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie… and made potatoes and stuffing from mixes (without even hiding the boxes!). I had bought a good-sized pumpkin for halloween, which we didn’t carve, so I cooked it for Thanksgiving. A LOT of puree. I took half of it to L’Arche for them to use. We used a pretty autumn tablecloth and napkins that my sister gave us.
I had to work in the afternoon, but enjoyed the midday with our guest. We’ve never had someone over for a holiday celebration, but it made things feel festive for me. My extracurricular remodeling and studies have been neglected for three weeks, and I’m trying not to let the potential guilt push me to live out of that motivation. Today feels okay to me… not stressed or sad. I hope I can keep in touch with my soul and live out of a place of health… a thankful spirit that springs from a pleasure for the good in my life rather than forced thanks to a demanding God who gives to us not from joy in our pleasure but to get repaid with eulogies.
My old laptop started going into terminal shock. I had already lost the forward slash and back arrow keys, and had managed fine without them, but then the shift key started randomly switching on and off. That not only meant that I was sometimes typing in caps and sometimes in all lower case and the period was replaced by a bracket, but I could not choose one file from a list–it would select all of them (thinking the shift key was deployed). It is surprising how many features are linked to the shift key. So I bought a new laptop a few days ago. I charged it up, but have yet to turn it on.
Partly that is from getting used to pen and paper in the lag time between computers. Partly from the fear that I will have to learn a bunch of new features, and that seems like an unwanted chore. Partly because it feels like a very big thing, and I want the proper occasion to celebrate its initiation into my life instead of just starting it up and typing out study notes like I’ve been doing.
I am really missing Kimberly badly. My social life is so nonexistent in Lynchburg, that I have no one to turn to when she is gone. I don’t mean no one would get together with me, but there’s nobody I really want to get together with. I could get rid of the loneliness by just going to L’Arche, but that feels like an escape rather than a healthy choice… I want to be drawn into relationship with someone, not be driven to it by loneliness (or take it on as a task, even for my health).
I enjoy spending time with some folks in Lynchburg, but only mild enjoyment, not enough to inspire me to overcome my present inertia to make it happen. I’m not sure why loneliness actually makes me less inclined to connect socially with others. Any thoughts on that?
Hey, Bridgeway folks, you guys seem to be posting less and less. Lets hear from Ben and Eddie and Jes and Michael and Karen and John! Jen still posts now and again. I miss hearing about you guys.
Kimberly is gone this week to Maryland until Friday. I agreed to work mostly overnights this week so another worker here at L’Arche could go to this retreat. I originally started working overnights last winter/spring so I could study during the shift, but I discovered psychologically it was very difficult to study through the night. It brings back very wretched memories of pulling all-nighters… besides night time is for sleeping, not working, especially not thinking. I will see how this week goes. I am in a better place emotionally than I was.
The hill behind our house is completely covered in trees, so we have full privacy, but when winter comes and the leaves fall, the houses on the ridge appear through the trunks. Winter is harder for Kimberly than for me, I think. I love cool crisp weather if it is clear. I enjoy the winter look of nature… if it is sunny. The sun is the single most important factor (at least physical factor) to my sense of well-being.
I love this time of year… the cool weather, the gorgeous leaves, thinking about the coming holidays without the stress it brings. I’m kind of sad we didn’t take more opportunity to enjoy our deck while the sun was warm enough to coddle us. I wish we had a real fireplace instead of a gas one. I love to stoke fires and watch the flames dance and run along the logs, and there is enough wood lying around these parts to keep us fully supplied for a long time.
I am now on a schedule of working 40 hours in 3 days. I get off Saturday 7 a.m. and don’t have to go back to work till Wednesday 2:30 p.m. But Kimberly wants me to be on a day schedule (and I prefer it too), so after a few hours sleep on Saturday, I have to get up so I can sleep Saturday night. I see Kimberly only a couple of hours Wednesday through Saturday morning, and this week she left for Chicago on Saturday. She won’t be back till Wednesday (when I start my work marathon), and then she leaves on Sunday for another 6 day trip, so we won’t see each other for two weeks.
Whenever she’s getting ready to leave town I think about all the things I can do with her not here… watch CSI as much as I like, leave dirty dishes in the sink, have complete control of the house, watch action movies. Then she leaves, and I can’t enjoy anything because I miss her so much! This isn’t fair!
She’s on a L’Arche national spirituality commission (her trip to Chicago) and she’s coordinating a retreat for new L’Arche members in Maryland the following week. I am at the bottom of the hierarchy ladder, but she has a leadership position and makes better money. For some reason that doesn’t bother me, not even when she was directly over me (which she no longer is). I respect her for her insight, experience, and ability in this field. I don’t see myself working here long term, but it works for me during this time of reorientation in my life–especially regarding marriage and spiritual/emotional health. But I feel a very significant lack of good friends in the area (especially when Kimberly is gone).
I need friends who have my perspective on spiritual/emotional growth to encourage me and stimulate me. I can’t imagine being able to grow as I have if it weren’t for Berly, but we both feel we need others with whom to bond on this journey. Of course some folks may have our perspective without being a match in personality. Maybe E-harmony needs to come up with a match-making service for friends!
Okay, so I took some time to figure out why my blog was displaying so wide and fixed it by deleting a URL from a post, and that was enough to make my post the one most recently updated in the Bridgeway webring, which isn’t really fair to others (if, like me, you read posts based on the most recently posted). So I thought I should add a post though I can’t think of anything very significant to write (which is why there usually is such a gap between my postings)
My D.Min. program director contacted me to let me know that I had passed my deadline for completion of the dissertation, and if I planned to do it, I should get it moving quickly, so I have started back on that in earnest. My intention is to write about a certain school of thought regarding sanctification (spiritual growth) with which I have struggled from an early age. It is called the “Victorious Christian Life.” I have struggled with it because the goal of spiritual victory (living with no known sin) was one which I felt obligated to meet in order to be an acceptable Christian, but which I consistently failed to do. Of course, it is more complex than how I have abbreviated it here.
Our house project goes on apace, but each step takes more time than I expect. Grace to all, Janathan
Janathan Grace Reflections 