Category Archives: difficulty
Failure
We deal with failure differently.
Some failures we laugh off. An older lady told me yesterday. “I was trying to read in a group recently, and I couldn’t seem to read the page I was on, then I figured out I had my glasses on upside down!” We both laughed.
Some failures can’t be laughed off. A person told me with great pain recently, “I never thought I’d be divorced.” No humor in this moment.
It’s interesting how we process failure. There is actually controversy about this. Some people take an aggressive, positive approach. They fight against things; they pray against things; they refuse to accept defeat. They may say things like, “There aren’t any failures; there are only learning experiences.” They give examples of those who have been healed, who have risen above loss, who have made a come back, who have reinvented themselves. They are believers in power. They speak of post-traumatic growth.
This response has value in that it is positive, it sometimes wins the day, it works well to motivate reform; it preserves self-esteem; it uses failure as nuclear fuel to energize a new future. At its best it is a plucky, hopeful, can-do approach to life. At its worst it is an arrogant triumphalism, fostering a sense of superiority and the over-expectation of ultimate triumph.
Some, on the other hand, take a more accepting, honest-about-loss, humanized approach. They say things like, “It’s important to face the reality of loss. To do that we need to grieve. We need to feel.” This approach embraces loss and failure as deep learning experiences that help us gentlize, become more human, more relational. The interest isn’t in winning something, defeating something or healing something. The response isn’t interested in becoming a dynamo of success fueled by a devastated past.
The interest is in becoming an authentic person, an emotionally intelligent person, a more aware person. This person leans into failure, learns to listen to the rumblings within. This perspective is good in that it clearly identifies a legitimate failure. It often leads to appropriate expressions of grief, to deeper empathy, even perhaps to a few much-needed apologies. It is good; it is emotionally healthy, but taken too far it may become defeatist, overly emotional, giving up on reversing declines, not tapping into the power to heal or reform, not pushing ahead and winning victories that could yet be won.
To see these approaches in action, consider how persons with these two perspectives might respond to terminal illness. The upside-of-life, assertive, go-for-it person says, “We can still beat this,” or prays, “God, we ask you to heal this.” But the more emotionally focused, reality-accepting person might say at a death bed, ”It is time to let her go. We have to now accept this.” And then this person prays, “God, comfort us as we grieve this.” It’s problematic spiritually; both responses can be seen as spiritual. To look to God for healing shows great faith, but to accept reality when it isn’t what you want also shows great faith.
Such responses are a choice in each situation of life, and we many of us probably go back and forth between these. But some of us have one of these two reactions as a default setting. We tend toward either a triumphalist or a more humanize response to failure and loss. Where this is true this may become problematic for us. Being stuck in one kind of response to every situation many keep us from bringing wisdom to the subtlety and complication of life.
For example, being overly optimistic in some situations can stifle legitimate grief. It can also sabotage a needed apology. It can also run over the top of other people involved in the same incident who need time to process and recover. A downright Pollyannaish outlook can even deny reality.
But being overly “in touch” with emotions, and the past and human frailty also has a downside. Self-confidence can be destroyed if in a time of failure as a person turns upon themselves too much, wallowing in feelings, perhaps over-analyzing themselves for what they think they did wrong. Too much introspection can stifle action, prevent us from going on, keep us from believing that with God’s help situations can be reversed, dramatically changed, people healed.
What to do?
Do both. Engage in both the “I’m looking forward” and the “I’m looking inward” approaches. Reality is complex; so must our responses be, nuanced, intricate, bi-functional.
True, we must move beyond failure, but we while doing so we must not deny the losses in the past. It is good to see the best in things, but not to deny the worst. Praying for healing is good. And when it doesn’t happen it is also good to accept that God had something else in mind.
In short, to be wise we must be human, and more than that.
In failure, we must grieve and then move on and finally know when to do one and then the other.
carotenoids
Two October ago, we trekked three thousand miles to see if the carotenoids and anthocyanins might heal us. The days were shortening. The Pacific Ocean was getting colder. Christmas was months away. None of that would have mattered a bit, if life hadn’t just smashed us sideways and flipped us upside down in a multi-person, relational train wreck. We were reeling through the autumnal equinox, staggering from the scene of a social crime and we needed treatment.
Every year people hailing from sunless, rainy climates migrate to Southern California for light therapy; we were reversing the journey, pioneering from San Diego to Maine for the reds and yellows and oranges of northeastern chromotherapy.
Arriving in the dark, we drove from Portland down to South Berwick. Our Maine hosts, Ralph and Donna, said they preferred to take the back roads and avoid what they called the “turnpike,” so we did. I leaned against the dark car window on Fox Ridge Drive. In the headlights, I could just see the trees starting to blush. We hadn’t come too early.
The pigments were at work. The same elements that color the bright yellow squashes in our California backyard gardens, the purple lupines along our roads, and the red strawberries in our bowls, color the trees in Maine. They are the pigments, the carotenoids and anthocyanins. When they hang out and mix it up with sunlight and rain, heat and cold, place and genetics — and who knows what else — they saturate the world with color. They are a virtual botanical mixed drink. Leaves tanked up primarily on anthocyanins dress up and go out to party in red or purple. Leaves having downed good shots of both anthocyanins and carotenoids parade about shamelessly in pure orange. Leaves drunk with carotenoids but little or no anthocyanins stagger happily through autumn decked out in yellow.
The postcard Donna wrote said, “Please come visit. Ralph will take off work and we’ll go around with you. We’d love to have you as guests at our home.” It was a gracious, welcoming invitation, carrying a faint sense of a sweet-smelling kitchen, a fire heating up the family room, a tail-whopping dog on the rug and hot chocolate in mugs. We were touched by the genuine gesture of hospitality — and the timing. The things that have just happened in our lives affect how we read our invitations.
I recently ran into a friend, Jean, at a party given by another friend who had just gotten back from a summer in Kenya. Our Kenya trekking friend was showing her travel pictures. I’ve been to South Africa. I have friends there, and the pictures brought back vivid memories for me. While standing in the living room watching the photo journal of the trip, the back of my mind ran silent movies of eating with my own South African friends in a cinder block home in Soweto, touring the Pilanesberg Game Reserve with them and traveling across the veld to visit a rural school in Swaziland. My whole trip to South Africa was so much about people. Perhaps healing is pretty much that too.
While photos of giraffes, AID’s orphans and dancing African teenagers scrolled on a flat screen behind her, Jean asked how I was doing. I paused, an African child squatting over her shoulder. I needed a second. The Africans kept moving as I tried to call up what I told her the last time I saw her. I was also sketching out how to respond to her question about my condition. Whenever someone asks me how it is going, I make up a short story, fast. We all do. Even when we offer only a word, or a few words, we play the raconteur, laying out one plot over another, one point of view over another, our story choices made with split second judgments of the social milieu we spin our narratives into. And it’s complicated, how it comes out and how it is interpreted. The story we tell is always embedded within the story happening in the present moment and both those stories interact with a story about us that already exists within the listener.
I said, “I’m recovering. It was tough to lose my job in the recession. But I really like my new place. We are working on social justice stuff, feeding homeless people here in town, helping Burmese refugees in City Heights, working with foster children. I’m moving on, but it takes time, to get over what happened.”
It is awkward, the thing about moving on. I didn’t really want to talk about it. It was way too painful. I really didn’t feel like ripping into some of my former colleagues at a party with unsuspecting friends present. It’s in such poor taste and can upset the host. It’s also bad for digestion. I avoid it, generally. Besides, I didn’t have to go on. She took up the story and began telling me about the church in town she didn’t go to anymore. Stories beget similar stories. She had just been to a reunion. Certain people were there. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t really know what she was talking about. Her voice quieted as she said, “It brought up some feelings I thought I’d worked through.” As she was talking I was thinking about how the craziness beats in on all of us at times, turning boring, commonplace narratives surreal. Homey places where we put our feet up and sip hot drinks become places we run from scalded. People who were safe become people we fear. Rwanda and Burundi, in 1994, come to mind.
At that moment, I didn’t see the African orphans behind her anymore, just her face near me, looking up at me. Our half-veiled emotions riveted us together. I stood there processing the narrative before us, the story I did know within the story I didn’t know, and then I said to her, “It’s okay.” I paused, formulating more words. “It’s okay to have people you don’t want to see. I have a couple of people like that, from what happened to me. Perhaps, in time…” She nodded, silently, looking straight at me. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking. Then she wiped her eyes with the skin on the tops of her knuckles. “Thank you,” she said with a slight smile.”I needed that.”
Maine was something my wife and I needed. I remember standing in the yard at Ralph and Donna’s home watching the leaves fall. It was just what I’d hoped for. The wind gusted in the big tree in the center of the meadow, and a flurry of yellow leaves wobbled down with papery sounds. They fell in slow flutters and occasional arcs toward the ground. Donna told me that when it is quiet in the woods, on freezing winter nights, that you can hear the leaves snap off the trees. I walked up the road with her dog, to the top of the hill where a red maple was on fire with color. I walked back down in the leaves that lay piled at the edges of the road. When a car came by the leaves gusted up, as if raised from the dead for a few seconds only to sink back to a quiet resting place again.
The next day, Donna and Ralph drove us over to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. There is a photo album on the end table in my home where I read that has pictures of that trip to New Hampshire in it, one of a blue stream full of yellow leaves, one of a smooth lake mirrored with vermilion, gold and lime colored trees, one of hill after hued hill, piled up to the horizon with a dusting of orange, brown, green, red and yellow. They strike me as some of the softest and most therapeutic color tones I have ever seen. There is something about the miles and miles of celebrating colors, something festive, party-fun, good. I remember now, looking at these pictures, that the days Ralph and Donna escorted us through the wonders, every turn in the road made me reel one way or another with delight. I was drinking with the leaves, inebriated with color, happy to be alive.
Back at their house, after our day in the White Mountains, I remember sitting at their kitchen table. Donna put a big casserole of shepherd’s pie in front of us. Fluffy mashed potatoes crowned the dish in a flurry of peaks, paprika accenting them with a dusting of red. Tall glasses of white milk sat in front of the plates. We ate and talked.
Ralph and Donna talked about the accident. I had heard them speak about this before. But it was sacred, listening to them again. Their feelings, thoughts and words arced down deep inside of me. As they took turns talking, I listened with the intensity of a soldier with a deep unsown gash, hanging onto every movement and word from the field doctors bent over him.
Their son Josh died in a motorcycle accident. It happened when he was on a trip with their church. He got on a bike in a parking lot for fun, zoomed off down the street, and then they didn’t have their son to hug anymore. His room was upstairs, across the hall from the room where we were sleeping. Some of his things were still there. There were stars on the ceiling.
There isn’t simply one thing that gets at it. The leaves don’t change colors simply because the days get shorter. There aren’t any certain lines on which all leaves fall, neither are there any perfect lines that end our discussions of things. Ralph talked about questions that lead to more questions. He offered me no formula to write in my journal, carry back home, mix up in my kitchen lab and apply to my wounds and bandages.
But of course, I didn’t want that. I have had the privilege and burden of teaching writing at the college. I have sat at home reading papers that only a teacher could, should or would read. Over time I have come to see that a formulaic interpretation of psychologically painful events is much like an amateurish freshman paper critiquing a novel only partly read. It is a thing awkwardly cobbled together late, under the disabling influence of a deadline — a hodgepodge of unsupported quotes, blown transitions and an unproven thesis.
But that is not what Donna and Ralph offered. As I listened to them story their life, I was struck by a scenic beauty that acted as a backdrop to everything they said. There was a soft shade of gentleness behind every question and commentary. In all their thinking, in their psychology of loss, in their sociology of survival, in their theology of pain, ran a dusted hue of kindness. I noticed that Sunday, when they took us to their church, as they spoke to friends there, they were as tender with them as they were with us. And in these interactions something unexpected began to happen to our stories. Ralph and Donna’s story began to intersect and merge with my story and the stories of all my friends and their friends. A kind of narrative fusion began to take place — all our terrifying experiences, our tragically lost relationships, our agonizingly arranged interpretations blew from the road to the air again, to lift and turn and arc down, to settle and to rest where the pigments cover the rising mountains to the horizon.
People think of the Jewish story teller, Jesus as primarily a great teacher; he is known for his sayings, parables, stories, but he was as much a healer as teacher. The accunt of Jesus reports that once when Jesus saw a man with leprosy, he was “filled with compassion.” I think his compassion was not justfor the physical problem, although I believe he must have cared much about that, but also for the man’s damaged sence of self, his lost connections, his broken relationships with family and friends. To be a leper was to be a pariah, to be separated from hugs and kisses and sexuality and love. It was brutal and agonizing, the distancing factor of having scary skin. And we are told that Jesus had compassion. In other words, Jesus felt the deep pain of the man, the loss of his identity, the loneliness of his existence, the anger he had inside, the stunned confusion, the cry of injustice. “I am left out,” cried the leper and Jesus said, “Be in.” The account reports that Jesus healed him.
Make what you might of it, not much beats compassion when you are suffering. A daughter rubs her father’s feet on his death-bed, saying by touching him, you are still a person, worthy of attention, deserving to be touched. Touch, compassion, psyche healing even when the physical deterioration cannot be stopped, is eloquent to a watching universe, a shout int the dark, “I love you!” When I was so sick after a surgery, lying in the bathroom alone one night on the floor, one of our small kitten came and lay down with me. The gesture, from an animal, the soft warmth close — I haven’t forgotten it. Not being alone in that isolating moment of suffering — significant! The color of compassion is shifted toward the warm, fallish end of the light spectrum.
It always astonishes me, how close truth hovers in the backdrop of life. On the day that we went driving in the White Mountains we came to where the “old man” had fallen down above Profile Lake. The old man had been a series of five granite ledges, that when viewed from the right angle, looked like a man’s face. He was a state emblem, but a fragile one at best. During much of the 20th Century he was held in place by cables and spikes. Between midnight and 2 am on May 3, 2003, with a rocky roar, the old man just slid down the mountain. People were so dismayed they left flowers at the bottom of the cliff.
The time goes so quickly. We are back from Maine. Southern California, along the coast, is such a beautiful thing. The palms here stay green and bright all year long. One of the many lantanas in my yard is always in bloom — purple, yellow or orange. But I don’t need seasonal reminders that things change because I know they do. And when that change is for not for the better, I am of the opinion that the carotenoids and anthocyanins are among the things that heal, and love.
When I go shopping at the grocery store, I pick out the small orange and red and yellow peppers. At lunch, I sometimes edge my plate with them. And when I make smoothies in my blender, I dump in the bluest blueberries and darkest red strawberries. They are rich with the pigments I love. They sooth me, but I know what they are and what they aren’t. I know that they aren’t a spike or a cable, certain to hold me up forever. It’s not a dark perspective, just true: the bottom of the cliff waits.
But so do other things — friends yet to travel to, places yet to surprise, narratives yet to be shared. We have been through a few things that have changed us very much, my African friends, Donna and Ralph, Jean, my wife and I. And for some of us, there may be places that we are not quite ready to visit and people who for now are perhaps best not seen. But we know that in the fall, the hills change. They brighten with the therapeutic pigments. And lately, I have been hearing more and more stories of loss that sound, at the emotional core of the narrative, similar to mine.
I lean toward the voices that tell them and hope to grow more gentle, like other story tellers I know.
We Are Hungry
Everybody is hungry.
Some are simple hungry, some twice hungry, some triple hungry — brain and heart and stomach simultaneously starving to death. There are the physically hungry people and the psychologically needy and the spiritually hungry and the love hungry and the hate hungry too.
Our world is not cleanly divided up into rich and poor. It’s mixed up. There are poor people with rich people’s surfeit and rich people who are hungrier than poor people.
I’ve met homeless people who were profoundly selfish, self-centered and isolated, like some of the rich. Some poor experience the poverty of pride, thinking inaccurately, “I am not like the greedy rich.” We are more alike than we will admit. Everybody tends toward looking down on someone. In this way, being poor can make you more poor – relationally poor. A poor person may be angry at everyone else, angry at the universe, angry at God or whatever might be god.
And some people who are rich are so pathetically poor; they are the rich-poor. The Bank of America took 46 billion dollars in bail out money from the government in 2009. And it gave out 3.6 billion in bonuses to it’s Merrill Lynch executives. This is a form of emptiness, taking and giving lavish benefits while people are losing their homes. There is an unsatisfied hunger in evidence when we take too large a serving for ourselves from the community pot. Such grabbing betrays unmitigated hunger.
The hungry, empty rich? Many people would like to be this kind of empty.
How does this emptiness make sense?
Personal wealth may be accompanied by and even contribute to all kinds of poverty: love poverty, good-sense poverty, spiritual poverty, moral poverty, relational poverty. If we prop ourselves up with bank accounts and houses and food and savings and retirements and accomplishments and reputation and insurances and neglect our inner persons, our sense of right and wrong in relating to others, some kind of relationship with something bigger than self, we can experience a radical, hidden form of soul thinness, of spiritual deprivation, of divine starvation.
Recently, I went to out to lunch. I had delicious, gourmet fish tacos. I ate fast. Why? I ate alone. I hate to eat alone. A great meal is meant to be eaten with someone. A great meal is a relationship. A great meal is made to be shared.
But the raw and stunning truth of life is that not everyone shares in the meal, and furthermore, it is shocking who gets left out. Mary, the mother of Jesus, said about God, “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.”
What a kick in the stomach! God sends the rich away empty. How empty? Well, obviously empty of a relationship with God, if he sends them away, and empty of good relationship the poor who stay and eat. So is God prejudiced against the rich?
That can’t be right. Just because you are rich, doesn’t mean you can’t know God and receive from God. If God made everything, then everything we have is from God, so even the rich’s riches are from God and so rich and poor are similar in being dependent on a common source of wealth.
A wise proverb says, “Rich and poor have this in common: The LORD is the Maker of them all.”
Godly people have been rich. Abraham was rich. Esther the, Jewish Queen, was rich. King David was rich. Solomon was rich. All knew God, were favored by God.
Jesus identified with the poor, but he too accepted moneyed people, tax collectors like his follower Matthew, business owners like Peter. But they did leave their businesses to follow him. And Jesus told one rich person to sell everything he had and give the money to the poor and to follow him. The obvious issue with this person was that his wealth would be a barrier to becoming God-rich and need would be part of a life of following God.
So here is something a little problematic. If being hungry can bring you good things, then a lot of people are now up for good things, but they don’t seem to be getting the good things they need, and their poverty doesn’t seem to be uplifting. A billion people go to bed hungry each night. In the recession, as many as 200 million people are now unemployed worldwide.
50 million Americans live in food insecure households. Roughly 16 million people are unemployed in the United States. There have been over 200,000 home foreclosures in the United States since the recession began.
He has filled the hungry with good things – but are all unemployed, homeless, hungry people filled? No, that isn’t true.
Hunger isn’t a virtue, it isn’t ennobling, and yet, it can open you to God. How? Hungry, you may realize, you need him. I met a man named William last week. He is HIV positive. William is homeless. He told me, “I could not have made it without God.” What did he mean? He meant he could not have made it without feeling God’s comfort, strength, provision of food, provision of love.
To receive from God, the rich and the poor must both be hungry for God. They must hunger to know God, to encounter God, to encounter Jesus as the bread of life.
They must admit their psychic poverty, admit their spiritual poverty, admit their weakness, and open both hands.
To be fed by God, we must all come to see that we are impoverished in some way. It is our choice, to recognize our poverty or not, admit our hunger, or not.
The spiritually fed, the emotionally healed, will be those who see they are poor and hungry, who suffer over their lack, no matter what they have physically, and who open their souls to God to fill them with good things – all the amazingly good that comes from a close relationship with him.
It’s complicated, but simple. We are all alike in one way. We are all hungry. And if we are triple filled, we will all be filled from one entrée – God.
Discipline Thy Self
Self-discipline
I grew up reading. I read over one hundred books in the 4th grade. I loved to read.
One day in my high schoo English class, my teacher asked me to read out loud a section of the literature we were studying. I remember it well. I was sitting on the right side, along the wall trying to blend into the paint.
I was a reader, but when she said my name, my mouth went into a draught. My heart began to protrude through the veins in my neck. I forgot my mother’s maiden name. I lost control of my lips. I had to read so I began. On one particular aspirated consonant I think I spit on the girl in front of me. I died twice in the next three minutes.
I have never told anyone how afraid I felt that day until writing this. But I’m in good company. More than 90 percent of Americans say they have been shy at some time in their lives. Almost half say they’re shy now. Many feel weak, not powerful, shy not confident.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
It wasn’t until half way through my eleventh grade I realized high school was not going to last forever. I also came to the awareness that my teachers were keeping records. It came as a shock. Grades matter? They will follow me into the next stage of life?
I had invited Jesus to be my savior when I was eight. I wasn’t living my life for God in high-school, but now I know that I that is when I heard a whisper inside. It was as if someone said, “Get ready.” Someone was moving an awareness in me. I Began to sense that I had a spirit of power and self-discipline inside me.
I decided to aim high. I took typing. I learned the keyboard.
To be disciplined means to adhere to a certain order. Discipline refers to systematic, orderly instruction given to a disciple. Self-discipline refers to the regular training that one gives one’s self to accomplish a certain task. Hit those keys without looking. Memorize that keyboard.
Self-discipline isn’t one choice, it’s a million choices in the same direction. In late high school, I began to make that choice again and again, the choice to try.
Ben Franklin was the master of self-discipline. But his self-discipline was different than Christian self-discipline. The beginning point for Ben was self and the motivation was self-improvement. “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
But for us God followers, the beginning point of all order and discipline in our lives is not “early” but it is God, his voice, his plan, not ours.
Before you know it, after high school, I landed in college. I majored in English. Over the next five years I read hundreds of books and papers, almost every one at the last minute. I took a credential in teaching, and an MA in literature. I began a life of scholarly discipline.
I remember a moment of few years ago of exquisite beauty. It was a moment of identity, of fulfillment. I got a phone call. It was from one of the editors at Leadership Journal, Christianity Today’s magazine for pastors. They wanted to publish the article I wrote and sent them on reading groups. It was entitled, ”It’s Not Ophra’s Book Club.”
Someone else would read what I wrote. Other leaders and pastors would benefit from these ideas. It wasn’t something everybody cares about, strives for. But for me it was a beautifully satisfying moment. It was a moment I had been looking forward to for a long time. The high school kid who didn’t study and who was afraid to read, who took typing, had finally typed what others would read.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
I remember sitting in Starbucks in Eastlake in the spring of 2006. I sat with my coffee looked out window at the tall, ornamental grass glowing in the sun. A friend of mine had just told me that he wanted to go back to South Africa. And then he said something surprising. He wanted to know if I wanted to go with him.
He had taught school their in the 1980’s and worked for Campus Crusade for Christ. He wanted to go to Johannesburg and Soweto and to Swaziland. There was much need there to train and encourage pastors.
I have never really wanted to go to South Africa. I looked out over pampas grass growing outside Starbucks. It was beautiful in the sun. I thought of the veld, of the beauty I had seen in pictures of Africa. Every so faintly, not a voice, but in my mind, God whispered again, “Get ready. I have people for you.”
Over the next few months I got shots, bought malaria medicine, had my passport renewed, prepared sermons, bought clothes, read books on Africa, prayed, went to planning meetings, spoke to pastors in Africa on the phone to see what they needed, wrote letters to raise money. And I went to a lawyer and had my estate put in a trust.
With much self-discipline, I prepared myself. And then we flew, for two days.
I’ll never forget one Sunday morning in Soweto. I stood in a tent on a dirt floor in a suit. My wife and my fellow travelers and I were the only whites in the tent church. In front of me was the pain of AIDS and death and loss of children and loss of dreams. I looked out at the pain of Africa, at the people God was sharing with me, and I remembered the pain in my own family and my own heart and all the hard things God had taken me through.
I preached a message called “Pain Gain,” translated into Swahili. It was as if my whole life led up to that moment, all the pain of loss and all the study and all the risks of coming to Africa met. At the end, half of the church came forward, crying, praying, seeking healing. Then they prayed for me and my team. I cried. It was a moment.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
When I was little, my parents moved to Missouri where my dad took the job of running a Christian campground. We built a home there, for economy we put in a wood burning furnace in the basement. It was a fire breathing dragon; it ate big logs and kept us toasty warm.
My job, as a small boy, was to split and haul wood into the basement. I had to bring the stacked wood up to the red line my dad had marked on the wall. I spent many afternoons in the winter snow and cold, splitting big logs with an ax and a chisel. I remember so clearly the “thunk” as the wood I threw it up hit and it the wall. It was the sound was the sound of self-discipline, and in this manner I learned to work with my hands, and with tools. It was regular, it was systematic, it was required – by my dad. And God whispered, although I didn’t hear it then. “You may be headed out into life to be a brain worker, but I am going to need you to know how to use your hands.”
After I married and had first daughter my wife and I bought a house. We bought work. It had been built in the 1940’s. Again I took up tools. I tore off old dark wood paneling and I sheet rocked the kitchen. I took out an old sink in the bathroom and put in a new one. I peeled back a flat roof and repaired it.
In the last few weeks I have had a lot to do. I have counseled people; I have studied, I have written, I have taught classes. I have done brain work, and people work.
But also, in my spare time, I have gone about my church, and I have gotten down on my knees on the floor in the preschool room and scrapped dirt off the floor with a razor blade. I have fixed door handles. I have climbed up on the roof of one of the buildings and checked it out for repairs. I have worked on bids to replace the awnings. I know how to work and I have worked like l learned to work throwing up wood against a wall.
And I have had some moments, while working, when God whispered again. He has said, although I didn’t hear an audible voice: ”I taught you years ago how to work, how to work hard. I taught you how to use your hands in a disciplined way. Now may passion for my house consume you. You’ve fixed your own houses. Now renew my house. And I don’t want you to do it alone.”
2 Timothy 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
1 Cor. 9:26-27 says this in the Message version, “I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. No sloppy living for me! I’m staying alert and in top condition. “
God has put in us the ability to control ourrselves, to discipline ourselves. We Christians are not by our new nature lazy, afraid, or uncaring. God has put his spirit in us, he has given us power and control over our impulses, our bodies and our thoughts.
If you open to his voice, God is currently speaking to you, whispering your next adventure to you, gently telling you, “Get ready. Get self-disciplined. ” And if you listen to his prompting something new will begin. Within your bordered self, a you, a unique personality will begin to be formed by the work you discipline yourself to do. A being will be freed and personage empowered. We change through self-discipline, initiated by God.
We are a people following a voice. We are a people living within God, infused with God, a God who himself puts a spirit of self-discipline in us. It is a God directed, God empowered self-discipline.
It changes us: it changes the world.
Experience
Experience is one of the great gifts of life, if we we grab on to the value that we can take from it. We can experience life and carry it into the future with us when we see what it gives us.
I kayaked today and took away a soothing rhythm of arms moving. I claimed the value of simple motion, of the ability to move, to glide through water, to feel progress forward. What simple thing did you do today? What did you take from it?
I cared for my disabled daughter today. She asked me, “Why do people make fun of people with disabilities?”
”People make fun of everything,” I told her, “but they especially make fun of what they haven’t experienced.”
I prayed for her at bedtime and told her, “No matter what happens I want you to know that God holds you up with his strong right hand.”
“What does he do with his left hand?” she asked. “Holds other people up,” I said.
We can only possess what we experience. What are you experiencing? What are you carrying away from it into tomorrow?
Stress
Stress comes from not knowing, from worry, from fear. We worry about money, we worry about our success, we worry about our health, we worry about other people. Worry is no fun! It takes our energy. It takes our time. It doesn’t add anything to us; it fact, worry subtracts from us.
What can we do to worry less? We can think about the birds. That’s what Jesus said. Birds don’t do anything to provide for their own food. They don’t plant seeds, they don’t water gardens, they don’t take in crops, they don’t store up food for winter. Birds are really irresponsible. They just count on what they need being there. And for the most part, it is.
Why? Because God provides for them. God takes care of birds. If God provides for birds, don’t you think he will also take care of you?
does God care?
I think about God a lot. Sometimes I feel like I’m connected to him, sometimes I don’t feel it, but I know he is still there.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people who have issues that make them feel far off from God. I don’t like that – people feeling like God doesn’t care about them. It’s not true. God cares.
If a person’s issues have social shame, then that person may be transferring society’s judgement of their problem to God. They may think that God sees them in the same way society does.
If a person attends religious services, that person may look around, and seeing a bunch of “together” people, think, ”I don’t fit here. I bet no one here has my issue.” It’s so easy to get isolated, from other people and God.
But the New Testament says that God has so much love for us that even when we were all messed up, God sent Jesus to give his life for us. That a wildly different and attractive kind of love.
I believe that. And I believe that God totally adores you right now and wants to be a part of your life, even if you don’t have it together. What do you think?
just start
If you don’t start you’ll never finish.
What should you go start as soon as you get off the computer.
You are so gifted, you have been given so much. The question is what will you do with that today?
If I knew you and loved you, I think I’d tell you to start now.
One of Life’s Tough Questions
In the 90′s, K.D. Lang sang : “Craving, constant craving.” They got it right. Most of us crave stuff, love, something. What do you crave?
What do you want? How do you get what you want? The truth, of course, is that we don’t get everything we want. Even the “Rolling Stones” knew that.
The truth is, of course, that it is not even good for a person to get everything they want. Disappointment can shape us to understand other people, loss and pain can give us the opportunity to learn and adapt and experience new things.
Question: Do you think God cares about what people want? Do you think he cares when when people don’t get what they want, when they suffer disappointment, loss, pain, stigma? Read the next article, “Pain Gain” and tell me what you think.
Pain
Pain Gain
By Randy Hasper
If you are acquainted with pain, trouble, and loss you are in good company. So are most people. Even great spiritual heroes like Moses, Esther, Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa — all ached and burned with pain and disappointment. Pain is the norm.
The jab and ache of pain, our whole species knows it well. We open the morning newspaper to kidnapped children, disease, terrorism, and war. We live in families aching with accidents, disabilities, conflicts, illnesses and stigmatized issues.
We humans know “ouch!” So does God. Think about it. Perhaps we need to formulate an ouch theology.
Apparently, God already has one. When God created us, he obviously hard wired us to respond to pain. The hand jerking back from the thorn, that ability to feel pain is God’s brilliant biological safety gear. Fragile bodies warn of harm through the nerves. Pain is protective and preventative. It keeps the hand from the fire. Safety pain was built into the creation. But it is also built into God. God has experienced pain.
The prophet Isaiah, exploring the profound connection between God and pain wrote, “In all their distress, [Israel] he [God] was distressed.” (Isaiah 63:9) This is an amazing claim. God, chose to feel distress. God entered in, by his own choice, to “all” the distress of his people. “All” of it says Isaiah. His people were distressed for centuries. They still are. God feels it.
Scripture records God as having feelings. It records anger, love, compassion, and jealousy. Each of these emotions contains some psychological pain. The painful feelings are in God and from God. Yet we hear people say, “You can’t trust your feelings.” Actually we can trust them to tell us a lot about what is going on with us. It’s true that our feelings can lead us into bad choices. And yet, so can our thoughts lead us the wrong way. This hasn’t caused most of us to abandon thinking. We should not stigmatize our strongest feelings. They are a gift, a divine richness.
The life of Jesus is most eloquent of God’s willingness to feel. Matthew records the events of the crucifixion writing, “Again and again they struck him [Jesus] on the head with a staff.” (Matthew 15:19) This is our experience too. “Again and again,” life serves up the stunning “again and again.” Pain stutters, and God allows the terrible repetition. Allows? For Christ, we are told that He even intended it. It fit his purpose. “Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.”
We would rather not hear this. His will to crush? A crushing we don’t want, for Christ, our friends, our selves, our children, no one. And yet, a crushing we will have. This is recorded in the Bible. “In this world you will have trouble,” claimed Jesus. It is affirmed in our experience. One of my close friends, an excellent musician, is experiencing hearing loss. Another has MS. Another a bipolar disorder. Another has a painfully failed marriage.
We sometimes want to pull away from such difficult experiences. We manage our lives to insulate ourselves from pain. We touch but we don’t embrace such trying times in others. We all jerk back at some point, from of our world’s pain – the AIDS sufferers, the mentally ill, those who have divorced, the addicts, this dispossessed, the poor, the socially stigmatized. It is not easy for a human to readily or willingly put out a hand to chronic suffering. We recoil. The jerk-back response rules. We may even mildly despise the suffering one. “The poor thing,” we sympathize, “not realizing the “thing” may be more enriched than us, in our sanitized encapsulated insulation.
We work hard to sanitize our responses to people with “issues.” We may ask God to heal them. Nothing wrong with that. We may tell people, “I hope you are feeling better.” Shared hope is excellent, and yet, when the “stricken” ones don’t heal, haven’t healed, can’t change, then what? At times, do our ongoing prayers and our euphemisms of wishful health become screens that we construct to distance ourselves from the suffering person, polite ways of putting our hands over our noses, of holding off their unpleasant reality?
If so we should bravely ask ourselves, why are we praying? To avoid reality? To avoid empathy? Are we praying and yet not calling them, emailing, visiting them? Are we praying for healing and not accepting the reality of a loss? If so, then we must mature in response. We must enter more deeply into the person’s experience. At some point we must accept the condition and refocus on supporting them. Acceptance is crucial. It can even lessen pain. We must move with our friend, seeing more than a “sick” person, engage the rest of the experience. We must get beyond looking at the wheel chair, the walker, the diagnosis, the label. We must see the rest of the person.
Surely God doesn’t move closer or further from us depending on if he heals us or changes us or not. Even when he doesn’t heal or change, he doesn’t jerk back. His silence doesn’t mean he pulls himself away. We may be most comfortable with recovery, but in this world God obvious sees it differently. God looks the most brutal distress of the world in the eye and doesn’t blink. Instead, God steps into our pain. God’s face is seen in the sick person’s face, in the distressed face. His eyes are present in the hurt child’s fearful eyes. He is close to the grimace of the lonely. Christ must have grimaced on the cross. It is not a sin to grimace.
The apostle Paul felt overwhelmed. And he felt no shame in writing it down, penning his darkest moments as if writing in his private journal, “we despaired even of life.” 2 Corinthians 1:8 And what posture did God take toward this admission of despair? Paul himself says God was allowing the suffering so that he, Paul, would look to God for deliverance. It is true. God hovered over Paul’s worst moments – to help. Psalm 22:24 records just such a hover, declaring, “For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”
I believe that God always crosses the skin barrier to participate in, to make himself known in our experiences. David writes,” When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul.” Psalm 94:19 Note that the psalmist does not write, “When anxiety was great within me, you filled me with conviction of sin.” No, we don’t see God condemning. Instead we see God tending to the anxiety attack, consoling the person, helping. How did God do this? Not by removing the source of anxiety, but by bringing consolation in the thick of it.
The Bible is a catalogue of God’s gentleness with our emotions. God is the father of gentleness. His gentleness is the essence of his love, and he wants us to become like him in this. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 2 Corinthians 1:3.
“Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine,” wrote William Blake. And God is the master clothier. God knows your “ouch.”
