Archive for the ‘becoming’ Category

Providence

Posted: November 30, 2013 in becoming
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“I’ll drop a pod in your parking lot,” said Andy, “You can fill it up on Saturday, and I’ll pick it up on Monday.”

“It’s free?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “We sell the stuff you put in the pod in our store.”

“Will you take old carpet?” I asked.

“Sure, if it’s in decent shape,” he said.

I was good with that; FB Church needed more purging.

The old carpet we had pulled out of the worship center had been sitting behind the classroom building, and I had a classroom at the church had been full of old furniture since I had come there five years ago, and it needed to go — old desks, chairs, tables, file cabinets, cribs, benches, books.

What’s interesting to me is that I didn’t know about Andy on Wednesday. I did on Thursday, through a friend. He dropped off the truck pod in the church parking lot on Friday night. We filled it Saturday morning. It was gone on Monday. I had been wondering how I would get rid of that junk. It happened.

In retrospect, if someone hadn’t given me Andy’s info, I would have paid $80 to get rid of the carpet, and would have had no way to get rid of the furniture. Our plan was to put all the furniture in the parking lot, mark it free and see if someone would take it. We did that on Saturday morning; no one took it, and so the pod was the ticket to get the junk off the church property.

Chance, circumstance, luck, good fortune, good timing  — I suspect Andy was more to do with providence!

What is providence?

Providence is a timely preparation for future eventualities. It was providential that I came into contact with Andy when I did. Providence is getting a pod the day before you need it, but getting it in a unexpectected, delightful, surprising way, a way you didn’t orchestrate.

The idea behind providence is that the preparation for a good future isn’t done by us. Providence — it is that timely, helpful, progressive, protective care that happens outside of human volition, by nature, circumstance or say, by God.

Things happen, that aren’t planned by us. How do they happen? We can think of them as random, chance or naturally caused, or we can think of them as guided, by the divine.

What are the proofs of divine providence? To the some, there are none. “Stuff happens,” they might say, “and sometimes it’s just what we want to happen, or need to happen, but that it happens by chance or cause and effect.”

I don’t think so.

There is something curious about the universe to me, an intentional, elegant simplicity, a particularly gorgeous continuity, a quirky dalliance, an unexpected helpfulness, a proclivity for connection that goes some place. And it is my observation that this helpfulness is not vague, Hegelian or mystical, but that this outside movement, this timely provision, this directed motion is personal and intentional. The belief in providence isn’t, for me, a leap of faith off a cliff of rationality. It is the clear and obvious presence of God himself.

Providence isn’t freaky, paranormal or weirdly supernatural at all  — it’s rational, normal, commonplace, visible, discernible, practical. It’s a pod driven into your parking lot on a truck by a driver that you did little to arrange and feel extremely grateful for when it is plopped down in front of you.

Take FB Church. When I arrived five years ago the place was in disarray. I remember my first Sunday. I went and found a broom and swept the front porch — too much dirt and leaves and trash for a self-respecting place of worship. “It shouldn’t be this way,” I thought. “It can’t be this way.” One of the leaders in the church saw me doing this and he came and took the broom from me and helped. He is still there, helping. His name is Mike Shaw.

The next week I went around collecting the pots with dead plants in them from the front yard of the church and throwing them away. Why would someone leave out front, empty, broken pots with dead plants in them. Were we advertizing this as a place to come and die, or come and live? Ever since then,  with a motivated passion, I’ve led a purging at the church, a house cleaning, a temple cleansing, a comprehensive renewal, and I have been helped, by people, and by more than that.

The professionals, friends with skills, have shown up in droves. On one particular church work day an electrician showed up and replaced the timers that ran the parking lot lights. He just appeared on the work day, invited by someone in the church, and asked if he could do any electrical work. Providence.

Another electrician, Tom Roach, came when asked and over several months put up eight thousand dollars in new decorative and canned lighting in the worship center. Tom brought a lift from his company, at no cost to us, and did all the labor, at no cost. We only paid for parts. I asked, he responded. So how is this providence? It is providential that I knew him, and that he had time right then, and that he was willing. Willingness is providential. So is passion.

I believe that God works through people, that God is the mover inside the people to bring them to the skill level, the place, the time and the willingness to help. God put me there, with an extreme passion to lead a renewal, and he has brought many other people since “for such a time as this.”

Recently we added up the young people, youth and children in the church, in our effort to adopt children for Christmas. When I first came to the church we had only a handful of children, almost none. Now there are 10 times a handful, enough for children’s choirs, a children’s church, children’s events. The children, have been provided — providentially. People are God’s primary forms of providence, because he can move and motivate and act through people of all sizes. Some of our best stories in the church are stories of children bringing their parents to church.

There are more stories, many more best stories, people stories. Tasia Copeland and Brenda Smith led our beautification team. Gary Redmond came and painted our worship center. Hugo created new banner holders for us. Tasia designed them. Tom sprayed ceiling texture on our balcony. Martin helped finish our wood floors. Donna was the first to lead our food ministy. Jeanie came at just the right time to keep it going. Aryn and Delfina got our children’s ministry started. Aryn joined our youth ministry staff. Glee became our first female elder and board chair. Debi Mauricio started a children’s choir for us. Danielle Levy joined us from the Center For Enriching Relationiships as our onsite therapist. Tim McConnell became one of elders and a kind of social-guru in the church. Samantha became our key worship leader. Nate teamed with her to make it happen.

Providence exists in people.

A family I once did a funeral for has an awning business. When asked, they replaced the huge awnings on the front of the church, giving us the best deal in town. This is providential, in my mind because it is part of a pattern that is very obvious at the church. The church has a need; something that had been overlooked for several years, a relationship comes about, a person meets the need.

A room in one of our church buildings developed a leak four years ago.  I got an estimate from a roofer, $5,000. The whole roof needed replacing. A short time later, after a Sunday service, a woman handed my a check, $5,000. She didn’t really attend  much, but she had recently come into some money as a result of a retirement package, and she wanted to give that. She didn’t know about the roof, or the estimate.

We use the phrase sometimes, “on a roll.” We’ve been on a five-year roll at the church, one good, unexpected financial gift and helpful relationship after another.

Is it coincidence or providence? Well, we now have five years of crazy-good, future-making “coincidences” under our belts.

We took on a pastoral intern, Summer. She turned out to be exactly the kind of person we needed to added to our staff, and we eventually permanently hired her as one of our pastors. She is making a huge difference.

We had a house on the property we decided we wanted to sell, but we would need the seller to move it off the property. I consulted a realtor friend. She introduced my to a house mover, but he had no investors interested in moving small, run-down properties. Nothing happened. People told me that it would be tough, getting someone to haul off an old, two-bedroom California bungalow during the recession. We prayed about it.  It happened, a year later. The house mover stopped by, seeing me out front watering our new bushes. “I think I might have a developer interested in the house,” he said. He did, and only a short time later we pocketed cash for the house, and it flew off down the street on a truck, and we are now building a beautiful courtyard where it sat.

And that the courtyard has a story too, several of them.  I needed a courtyard plan. An architect friend, Janet Ward, donated it free. I needed a safety exit plan. A man began attending the church who had significant skill in construction. His name is Josh Kottas. He came to me saying he would work on this, and use architects he knew to guide him. He did just that, it worked, and a beautiful exit plan took shape.

We went to the city about this. They were not very helpful. We went back. We met a fire inspector who was just the opposite. He laid out in perfect detail the final things needed in our plan. We walked out smiling. We had hit the city planning office on the right day this time.

We aren’t done with the courtyard, just getting started. One thing that has given me some stress on this project is the awareness of how much this will cost, a bunch! A few months ago a family who doesn’t attend our church called me to their house. They presented me with a check for $18,000. “For whatever you need,” they said.

Phone calls, people stopping by, referrals, friends, financial gifts, donated labor, a site renewal, a bevy of children, a new vision, renewed passion, inspired direction, a pattern of being helped, a forward tendency toward something better — something more than coincidence is at work in me and others.  Many of the 50 plus rooms at the church have been repurposed, remodeled or re-beautified. And beautiful, old, oak floors that lay under old, stained carpet for years, have seen the light of day. And people, discouraged, beaten-down, hurting people have found a safe place for themselves and their children.

And this is the most providential thing of all. People and their children, who were ready for something new, have shown up and become new. Eighty percent of the people who now attend are new to the church, and a good deal of them are new Christians. A church that didn’t grow, for years and years, has grown. It has grown by at least four hundred per cent!

Call it what you want, timely preparation for future eventualities, proclivity for connection, a set of quirky surprises, a happy tilting in a good direction, unexpected gifts, success building on success, a surprising network of growing relationships, you can call it these things, but you have to call it one more thing, and you would call it this if you were there to see it.

You have to call it good.

I call it God.

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Pruned!

Posted: November 5, 2013 in becoming
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In my back yard I have a tree. It’s a Ficus Benjamina, commonly known as the weeping fig or Benjamin’s Fig.

It has gracefully drooping branchlets and glossy leaves, and grows really fast and has really big roots and provides lots of shade. But it is not a safe tree. The United States Forest Service states about Ficus Benjamina, “Roots grow rapidly invading gardens, growing under and lifting sidewalks, patios, and driveways.”

A plumber once told me about a Ficus the knew that had gotten quite rowdy. It’s owners left their home for a few months, and when they came back, the tree had found it’s way into the drainage system and had sent up root into the toilet!

Yikes! What do you do with crazy, wild, destructive fig tree like that?

Well you could cut it down, but then you wouldn’t have that beautiful, glossy, green shade. To keep and manage my Ficus, I dug down in the ground and sawed through the roots that were headed for my house. And then I paid  a tree trimmer to have the top trimmed so that it wouldn’t get too big. I’m not sure this is good for my neighbors. My Ficus is now sending out roots in other directions. I noticed the other day that now my neighbor’s house seems to be tilting.

We humans are like Ficus. We get on with life, we get our acts together, we flourish, kind of, and yet no matter how much we sprout branches of forgiveness, redemption or respectability, our roots are often still wild, unruly, even  destructive. We all, at times, send out  damaging roots that get into sewer lines. Thirsty ever, we all, at times, sip from polluted sources.

Jesus talked about this kind of thing at length, teaching his followers that God pays attention to humanity’s arboreal diseases, and that as a result, God as earth’s gardener, is in the pruning business. Jesus explained this clearly saying, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful …” John 15:1-2.

Fascinating! God hacks away at us —  to make us better! God  has in mind that we flourish, bloom, fruit. God has in mind that we be even more productive than we have in mind for ourselves. God, the grand gardener, wants to make us healthier, more beautiful and more useful than we ever imagined.

How? How does God prune? What tool does he use to cut? Through what means does he trim?

It seems to me that God prunes us, that he cuts the bad out of us, that he whacks off worthless branches, using other people.  People are his pruning shears. And I think that anyone can be used for this!

My doctor recently told me to stop drinking coffee and soda. I did. I feel better, and the symptoms I complained to him about, they are now gone. As a result, I am more productive. Doctors? Pruners!

My staff, over the last few years, have reminded and taught me to trust them, to work through them, to listen to their ideas, to not do it all myself. Good. Pruning! I am a better team player because of them.

My wife recently asked everyone in our family to take one hour on Saturday morning to help clean the house. She was tired of doing it alone. It is working! We are a better team because of it, a better family. Spouses? Pruners!

If we are open to truth, from other people, then we allow them to be God’s instruments to prune us!

To be beautiful, to flourish, we must come near to other people, serve alongside them, listen to their advice, come face-to-face with the issues we create, let our rowdy roots be trimmed back, let other people speak into our lives

This makes perfect sense. We need other people, to improve, excel, sprout, fruit!

Branches, you can’t thrive alone, you can’t prune yourselves, you can’t act as branch and lopper at the same time. You can’t see all your own faults; you don’t experience yourself as others do, and in truth, you can’t mature, bloom and fig alone.

Isolationism, hiding, aloneness, defensiveness, self-protectionism, egotism, arrogance — those don’t lead to bearing fruit. Of course we all hide, at times, and lick our cuts, and this can be healing, and we can at times self-correct and self-affirm, but eventually we get well, healthy and mature with the other branches, connected to the vine, not alone, but in community.

What to do?

Take advice. Invite advice. Go hunting for advice, for what other people think about you, what God thinks about you, your issues, the solutions. If you have a problem, if you are creating problems, if you are a problem, go looking for someone to trim you back. Go so far as to invite input, to invite feedback, to invite correction, to even invite a conflict if needed, so that you can invite a solution, a negotiation, a reconciliation. Do this, without delay, so that you can invite health back into yourself.

Pruning shears?  Loppers? Trimmers? Saws? Cutters?

You likely find them everywhere, living in your own home, working in your office, or studying with you at school. And they’ll likely be more than happy to chop away at you, gently I think, if politely invited.

And if you can take the prunning, and you can, you’ll be better for it.

The Latter Is Better

Posted: October 29, 2013 in becoming
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The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part.

Job 42:12

I hear some whining from older people about getting old. Maybe it’s bragging. Whatever it is, it isn’t enlightened. Job’s second season was better than his first, and the same is true for many people as they age.

Older bodies may ache more, but older, mature, seasoned, calmed, wise, tough — it’s good!

Today I worked out, relaxed at home, read, reflected, ate mostly veggies and whole grains, sent out writings for publication, hung out with my wife, fluffed my fluffy cats, shopped for healthy food and was mostly at peace with myself. I honored my body, my mind and my soul —  better than I did when I was younger.

Older is good for me.

Why? It is more, in so many ways. Old has more memories, knows more people, has more wisdom, can be more generous and has the potential to live inside a stream-polished, storm-calmed, well-seasoned self.

Old has some less in it, of course, less physical strength, less beauty, perhaps less opportunity to contribute, but it has a lot of more in it too.

Consider Job; he ended his days with more sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys, sons, daughters and grandchildren, and with more awareness the value of God, health, good friends and of a humbled self.

Job was given the gift of old age. It was the gift of having lost, and gained, been lonely, then loved, of having known, and then not known.

Seasoned, for Job, was knowing what he didn’t know and knowing what he did know and of being at peace with both. The same for us.

Seasoned, like Job, tossed a bit by life, we too can make friends with our ignorance and come to peace with what we do know.

The years — they can carry us up high.

For it is aging, that brings us, like Moses, to the top of the sacred mountain, where we can see. Having been sick, we can look out and see the glory of well, having lost friends and investments, we can apprehend the value of our lasting gains, having been lonely, we can gaze from the mountain on the stunning beauty of remaining friends and family.

The latter part of life, for many of us — it is better.

 

Being Me

Posted: September 11, 2013 in becoming
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How does a person come to the point where they can act out their trademark self?

How do they come into their meant-to-be persona, their uniquely DNA-ed presence, their most salutary, nurse-like, philanthropic, 501-C identity? How do they come, to hit life’s home run, with the sweetest spot of their best self?

No one is completely sure. No formula finely fits everyone. But some elements seem common to arriving at who we are or want to be or can be.

First, there is a kind of ache, a longing, perhaps an infatuation, an obsession, an attraction which is a focus for the self and what it wants to be. One just loves baseball or painting or puzzles or therapy or math or children. We want to be, something, and the wanting is in us, wants, whether we want it to want or not.

Then there is the milieu, the environment, a kind of necessary medium for becoming the ache inside. It may be a school, a coach, a failure, a success. It may be familiarity, foreignism or family. It may be a routine, that provides a needed stability; it may be a dislocation, that provides the point of comparison. But whatever it is, this background, this surround sound, this solid ground becomes a place-within-a-place in which we can begin.

When who-we-are-that-we-might-better-be finds a soil, an ocean, an outer space, a whiteboard, an Internet connection, a desk, a stage of life, a psychic tent, an emotional lean-to, a barren field of loss even, something that can contain it, that can nurture it, then it can begin to incrudesce.

Finally, there is the trigger, pulled, that fires us into who we want to be. What is that? The trigger is a specific opportunity. We get a chance to get on stage, and we come off dazzled saying, “I love those lights!”

We get a chance, to hold a child who is crying, and we never want to stop stopping them from crying until they stop. Then we go pick up another one.

And when these things come together, ache, medium and opportunity, then we can begin to begin to begin with us.

It is not a given that this will happen for everyone. If it doesn’t, the only appropriate response is grief, and adaptation, finished off with a frosted topping of gratitude.

If it does, if we get to star as us, the only appropriate response is joy —  and adaptation, topped with that sweet, delicious sugary frosting we know as gratitude.

Old Masters

Posted: September 4, 2013 in becoming
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What you leave, will try to drag you back.

If you leave wise living, foolishness will drag you back.

If you boldly leave drugs, drugs will boldly come after you. If you leave alcohol, alcohol will find you. If you leave sexual addiction, that will hunt you down.  If you leave old party friends, they will come try to get you to party with them again.

If we are used to doing other things on Sunday besides going to church, those other things will jump on chariots and run over you as you even think about getting ready for church.

As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up,
and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and
cried out to the Lord. 11 They said to Moses, “Was it because there
were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you
done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Didn’t we say to you in
Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better
for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”  

  Exodus 14:10-12

We have a tendency to want to go back to what is familiar. Our human tendency is to make a base, battered, beaten, bitter, bottomed-out, cry, “Let me serve old masters.” 

Eating French fries was better than eating Brussel sprouts.

My old party friends were better than my new hearty friends.

My old job was better than my new school.

Running and hiding was easier than facing and working through conflict.

The way we used to do church is better than the way we do church now.

Working was better than retirement.

Drinking alcohol was easier than drinking responsibility.

All a cop out — but God doesn’t want us to drop out.

13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

One thing the fighting, overcoming, forward-moving people of God know and must rely on when God is leading us to new places that only he know the way to:

The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.

personality

Posted: November 5, 2012 in becoming, people
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“Don’t do anything for your kids,” he said with a mischievous look in his eyes, “and then they won’t expect anything from you.”

Pat laughed, as he did after so many things he said, then I laughed too. His personality filled the space between us, like an air bag, as it did often, and not just with me. He was easy to be with, and safe. He often quipped about his profession, the noble art of house painting, by saying, “Women like a man in uniform.”

Personality can be hard to define, but when you are up close to a unique one, you know it. With Pat there was this casual, relaxed honesty that included a keen wit, a self-effacing humor and a willingness to let the “somebody slot” be filled by somebody besides him. The “somebody slot” is that opening which occurs when people talk,  an opening for one of the parties to be important. Pat gave other people room to be the star around him — he even invited it. This invitation, this ease, this opportunity —  it rubbed off on you, like fresh paint, a kind of fluid sociality, with no rules.

I told Pat once, “I’m my worst self around you.” We laughed. It was a compliment.

Everybody has one, a personality,  but not everyone lets it out to play. It would be nice if they did, and not just the extroverts. Personality is fun to experience, in ourselves and others. Shy is good, when we to see it peek out, a subtle, beautiful demeanor, lovely in the same way as deer.  And loud is good too. Loud is like a sunflower shouting its bright yellow.  And there are so many fun personalities! I  love gentle, sincere, kind selves.  I especially like droll, sarcastic or wry personalities.

I also like sass, sometimes. “If you don’t like me, there is something wrong with you,” one of my young friends quipped to me recently. I like her.

What is personality? Personality is the tuxedo of the soul.

Personality is our inner self showing up in our outer clothing. Personality dresses itself in gestures, postures, animations, idiosyncrasies and vocalizations. My cat, Shanaynay, has more personality that most three people combined. She yowls, huffs, purrs, begs, greets and deftly inserts herself into any possible opportunity given to play, eat, snuggle or snooze with anyone!

Personality is the expression of the unique self that arrises out of the distinctive core — like magna oozing from the earth. When we encounter it in others, it leaves us with a whiff of them, their cachet, their mark, their social signature. This is deep; it is spiritual; it is residue of the image of God in us.

When I left one of my older friends recently I could still smell her social perfume in the air after she was gone. It was the  fragrance “graciousness,” with sweet, woody notes of gentleness and non-judgment.

But in any one person, we must be careful not to constrain or warp their personality by labels and categories. Personality is a complex kind of thing, made up out of traits and states that swirl together and separate again like the Northern lights. Traits in us persist, but states (as in “I’m in such a state”) come and go. This morning, for a moment, I was grouchy. It left me shortly. The moment of grouch is normal for all of us, and so is the moment of temporary insanity, but these moments do not and should not define us.

But say they do, the dark moods, begin to define us. It’s possible. Something caustic, cynical, critical, mean and dark may overtake us. Then we should get help, and change, as a form of mercy, for the rest of the living, or if we cannot, we should at least remain at home — and not post on Facebook.

Personality can change, heal as it were. Mine has. Thirty years ago, “cautiously reserved” might have fit me. Now, at times, ” wild and crazy” might be much more suitable.  The wall flower may one day climb the wall. I have a friend who is basically shy, but she is getting good at speech making. Out of her shy person she is learning to bring a new, public persona of confidence.

But whether it morphs or not, personality, in all its diverse forms, is something to savor, like a good wine, in ourselves and others. It is also something to learn to give, as a gift, to ourselves and others.

If I could do anything for the many fearful people whom I know, it would be to set them free to be all that God originally designed them to be — unique personalities. Their personalities might yet be the secret sauces of their success.

i am responsible for my own story

Posted: October 10, 2012 in becoming
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Randy Hasper“Men lie in their lovers’ arms, but when they tell the truth, they stand up and deliver it from ten feet away.”

That storyline came to me a few weeks ago as I was drafting some thoughts about lying. The sentence might be classified as a truism, as axiomatic, or as proverbial truth housed in a mini-story. It is a story proverb.

The story is about a word man and a word woman who live in a word sentence. They are inauthentic lovers. One night they speak their endearments to each other and stroke each others’ hair and hold each other close. The two are together in that magically exquisite way in which humans who collide may also merge. But, after the “but,” in the sentence, the mood changes. He gets up, because he has kept something from her. He can no longer lie and lie. And then he tells her the truth. He knew she would be hurt and upset, so when he says it, he stands away from her, about ten feet away. It is a relative safe distance from which to wage conflict.

Perhaps he is afraid. Maybe she cries. He paces the room. There is now a moment of expanding distance and pain between them. Then what happens next?

I don’t know what happens next. It’s not in the line. The line is a fiction, an imagined narrative, unfinished so to speak, two acts, not three: love and then conflict, with no resolution. The story is frozen in print, unresolved, but for a purpose, so that it might aptly carry it’s content and no more than that. The content is something like this: Men lie while they lie, and the lie, once exposed, turns close lovers into distant enemies.

That’s life, or life similar.  Life includes lies and the story lines that follow those lies and a lot of pouting and crying and throwing things. But that’s not all life offers us. The narrative of  real life, a life still being lived, is different from a frozen, proverbial  narrative. A real, ongoing, present-tense story, like each of us is living, is not frozen or stuck in a sentence with a limited meaning and freighted with unresolvable conflict. Life, thankfully, is still malleable, and pregnant with a multi-stranded hope for more.  The life we are each currently living, while it is made up out of the multiple narratives of the past, loosely braided together in our minds, that life is yet still  capable of being further braided into something new.  We aren’t done, like a sentence penned.

Each one of us have options to live past our former storylines, to write a new sentence, to write new pages and even volumes if we will. What I am saying is that life includes redemption. Life includes second chances. Life offers us opportunities for rewritten endings. This is what God gave us when he made us like himself and gave us life — the power to story something good, even after something bad.

I believe that, because I’ve seen it and lived it. And I take from this, that it is my responsibility and yours to take the current pieces of our narrative and make some sense of them, to bring some kind of resolution to our conflicts where we can, even if it is only within ourselves, and to carry on with us our frayed and broken strands if we will, and weave them into something else. We can yet take up a thread of the old and braid it into the pattern of the new.  We can yet make choices to act out where we want the story of our lives to go. We are not frozen in words that do not resolve.

If there is a secret it can be told. If that creates conflict, that can be talked about. If there is pain, and brokeness, that can be healed, or learned and recovered from, even redeemed in perhaps another relationship. For instance, real people, who have “lied” in their lover’s arms, may eventually come to say, “I have learned from secrets kept in one relationship, not to keep them in another.”

I spoke to a woman this morning who said to me: “I am blessed that I have a mental illness and that I have been so physically sick. I am not happy about it, but I am blessed, because without it I would never have known God.  I know that if I had been rich and healthy, I would not have known God. ” This is shocking language, sure to unnerve some people, and yet look at how she is telling her story, making sense of it, stranding it into something good even in the center of something terrible. She is bipolar, and yet she is unipolar, focused when possible on a good narrative that she is struggling so bravely to write.

We are, each one of us, with God’s help, the novelists of our own lives. It is our responsibility and privilege to write a good story that moves toward order and understanding, to exert strength, to be human, to embrace the whole of it, loss, pain, sickness — health, gain and pleasure. All of it, taken as a whole,  makes sense, says something, defines what it means for us to be alive.

Story on.

You aren’t done.

There is no sentence in your past that you can’t rewrite in the future.

You are responsible for the ending of your own story.

Just write it.

i am responsibile

Posted: October 7, 2012 in becoming
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Freedom is being responsible for nothing — plus every single choice we make.

If you and I were to slip into a crack and fall to the center of the earth, at the center of the precise center of the earth, we would be weightless. With nothing between us and the middle, there would be no gravitational pull on us, so we would weigh nothing, which of course we wouldn’t realize nor would we even remark on to each other. It would be too hot for chattiness — over 5,000 degrees — about as hot at the surface of the roiling, roasting, egg-frying sun, and so we would just bake together — weightless.

Cool! In a warm, high-pressure, floaty kind of way.

This postulated, in other words, say you and I do fall into a chute that leads to the earth’s core, lets agree to something. Let’s agree that if you don’t want to go there, it is your option to snag a root on the way down, or fall on your ice axe, if you have one. I want to experience 5,000 degrees and weightlessness and view the molten core within the core, but if you don’t then that is your choice.

Here is the thing in life. The places we go, the weightlessness we experience, the temperatures we allow ourselves, the self-arrestments we pull off, the times we choose to fall into a new landscape — these are up to each of us individually.

I’m thinking more and more these days: I am responsible, and you are too, for what we choose, and for where we are.

I am responsible, we are responsible, they are responsible and everyone else is responsible too! We are, the whole lot of us, choosers, travelers, Voortrekkers. Like the Afrikaan Voortrekkering pioneers, we choose to voyage toward the interior, to be “those who pull ahead,” or not.

I’m thinking of staying home less. I am crazed for the interior. I am wild for the core of things.

This summer I trekked to the beach. I hauled along some books and food; I ate the food; I ignored the books; I stared blankly at the ocean. I needed that big, bright blue expanse of liquid to leach from me a couple of pseudo-defamations, one or two persistent self-incriminations, a baker’s dozen addictive infatuations and a handful of snarled and tangled minor intimidations–and such.

Why? Why go there? Because I am responsible. I am responsible for the health of my psyche. I am responsible for where I go and what it does to my soul. I know this, and these days I am prepared to fight for every, freakin’, psychologically healthy moment possible.

I am going to the gym this afternoon to run until my heart pounds so hard I know I am alive. I am going to do this because I accept the premise that I become a very slightly different person with every choice I make, with every place I go, with everything I allow my soul to experience.

I am looking for opportunities these days to fall into deep, exhilarating, life-changing cracks of personal responsibility — cracks like God, love, justice, pain.

Recently I put myself up close to a person in extreme psychological pain. Why? They needed me, and mostly, I needed them, to remind me that life is full of extreme pain that must be attended to, that must be acknowledged, that must be endured, that must be experienced. Extreme pain is certain to make us temporarily insane, but afterwards, we may be able to move into a different future, knowing what we can only know after living in 5,000 degrees of mental anguish. What we know, after such heat, is the loss of weight, perhaps even the heavy fear and anxiety and selfishness that have kept us from rising up, and floating.

On the other side of responsibility, of our responsibility for engaging extreme experiences, experiences like meeting God, doing justice, choosing to love, being healthy, embracing other people’s pain — there is a strange and wonderful landscape with a super-animated kind of beauty — it’s weightlessness.

I’m Voortrekking toward it.

Why?

I am taking responsibility for the health of my own soul and of others.

Do you want to go with me?

interiority

Posted: September 24, 2012 in becoming
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When Africa crashed into Europe, the Alps jutted up from the earth

When India crashed into Asia, 40 to 50 million years ago, the Himalayas thrust into the sky. Marine fossils came to rest on the top of Mt. Everest, at over 29,000 feet! A crash put limestone sea beds on the roof of the world.

Modern geology has discovered powerful interior forces that have shaped the earth.

Yellowstone National Park, the unique steaming, hissing spouting world like-no-other is the result of an ancient super-volcano. Looking at the current landscape, ones sees nothing left poking up that resembles a volcano. Only the bubbling remains of Old Faithful tell of the tremendous heat that once blew this landscape apart.

4,000 years worth of supercomputer simulations of weather are now revealing an association between periodic changes in stratospheric wind patterns (the polar vortex) and similar rhythmic changes in deep-sea circulation.

The sky controls the sea!

Wow and superwow!

Interestingly, it is the same inside of our souls. We are beginning to understand how the psyche is formed. Superforces have been at work.

When one human, with its massive continent of thought and emotion, collides with another individuated mass of articulated humanification, a unique personality is thrust up. We are a product of the crash with our parents. The seabed of their lives ends up in the top of our heads. We discover their fossils at our highest altitudes.

And when hot human emotions collect beneath the surface, they eventually volcano, explode, and wipe the emotional landscape flat. The geography of human personality bubbles and hisses for years after.

And that’s not all folks. When the polar vortex of culture and tradition swirl above the people, the deep sea of human behavior circulates in a similar pattern below.

Life, inside and out, is shaped by hidden forces.

Interiority expresses itself in exteriority. This is the divine, the geological and the human order of things.

What to do? Search! Putter around, check out the clues, eyeball the landscape, ask the questions no one has dared ask, observe the revealing patterns.

Do you want to understand yourself? Then you must become a scientist of your own soul. Look at the framework under your own bridge.

Only discovers, seekers, microscope carrying hikers, hungry-to-know-what-happened rock-smashers and peak climbers, may read the clues left of the surface of exterior things and figure out what happened as a result of interior things.

A small tip for all psyche searchers looking to understand themselves and others.

Interiority often explains exteriority.

the beauty of the quiet moment

Posted: July 9, 2012 in becoming
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The disparity between what I want and what I get can be uncomfortable for me.

I have this, I want that — ah.

This morning, another option occurs to me.

This morning, I open my bag of steel-cut oatmeal and put my nose down to top and, ah — a fresh, oaty, grain-kissed aroma rises to greet me.

My wife pushes the button on my coffee maker and ah —  a roasted, nutty, rich java fragrance wafts through the kitchen and surrounds me.

I go out to my backyard patio, which this summer is dressed in green lawn and yellow flowers and silver pond water and sit with my coffee and read the proverbs of King Solomon and, ah — an emotionally-energizing and rationally-enriching concept passes through my frontal lobe.

Wisdom has the sweet smell of contentment in it.

To reach for my cup, to walk to my gardern, to read my wisdom literature, to sit quietly in my garden and reflect —  this is a present-tense good that quashes that ubiquitous, unrelenting universal push for more.

It is enough for me in this moment to be able to walk, to be able to reach, to be able to taste and smell, to be able to sit quietly. It is enough and more than enough in the morning to have someone else in the kitchen to start my coffee for me.

There will be time, in the push and shove of time, for the working out of my good dreams and passionate visions.

But for now, the simple, gentle movements of the morning,  with someone who loves me, far removed from the bluster and press of my daily ambition — so frequently fraught with stress and anxiety — these are most beautiful, refreshing and precious.

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