Archive for the ‘difficulty’ Category

I Am Not Okay With Doing Nothing

Posted: June 25, 2012 in difficulty
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Yesterday, I stepped out of the Apple store in upscale Otay Ranch Shopping Center  a little dizzy. The iPads, MacBooks, AirBooks sat on new, clean table tops just behind me. Their glassy retina displays, screen spinning accelerometers, and thin, silky-smooth metals were still flashing in my head.

Brave, the new Pixar and Disney film was also rattling around in my brain. I had just seen the movie with my daughter Rosalind, and a father-daughter bonding had occurred over the mother-and-daughter-come-to-understand-each-other plot line.  I headed over to Banana Republic,  just across the street and up one-half block, to check out their sales.

But on the way, I took a moment, and I kicked the beautiful shopping paradise scene to the back of my mind.  With my brain’s top-drawer, high-tech mental imagining system, I called up an image of a street in Bluefields, Nicaragua, a street I  had been driven up in a small, Kia taxi just last week.  Here was upscale Southern California in front of me, a BMW on the corner, but  there in  my mind was now a hilly street in Bluefields, Nicaragua, and suddenly I was flying through it in a dirty, loud and rattling Kia taxi.

Dirty, broken, board and stucco buildings lined both sides of the Nicaraguan street; rusted, corrugated metal hung here and there; malnourished dogs were everywhere, sleeping in the road, cruising the sidewalks;  motor cycles with children on the back and no helmets on spun by; a horse was tied in a ditch, grazing;  people, people, people were here and there, on bicycles, in taxis, on motorcycles, walking, carrying things, talking to each other; and  green, green grass and tropical plants backdropped the scene — growing out of the street pavers and the sidewalks, filling up the yards and towering over the small, broken buildings. The jungle had not been dismissed by the city.

And there in Otay Ranch Shopping Center, with Nicaragua in mind, something inside of me unsettled. I felt lost.

The movie that I had just seen, Brave, was about a break in a mother-daughter relationship. The relational riff was symbolized in the movie by a rip in a family tapestry hanging in the family castle, the rip falling right between the mother and her daughter.  It is a universal theme, mothers at odds with daughters, and it will sell well.

But there is also a rip in the social fabric of the whole earth’s beautiful family tapestry.

Upscale Southern California — rip — downscale Eastern Nicaragua.

The images are juxtaposed upon the earth, and not by way of the Diptic  app on the iPhone. The  pieces don’t go so easily together.

The rip exists side-by-side in the real world of living, suffering, pleasuring, hoping human beings, but it geographical gap is so wide that we don’t often notice it.

This social contrast is always present, the rich and the poor, but it doesn’t often show up on iPads and movie screens and it tends not to sell too well.

Questions occur in my bifurcated, image-torn and now  partially disturbed mind.

What does it mean to not have enough?

What does it mean to have too much?

How does too-much, help not-enough  in ways that empower and maintain dignity for not-enough, and that are sustainable for both?

I don’t know for sure, but I know that doing nothing, nothing for the poor in my own country and nothing for the poor in other countries  is not an option that I feel comfortable with anymore.

I am thinking about another trip. I am thinking about clean water filters.

This comes from having seen it, not on a computer or in the movies, but with my own eyes.

I am uncomfortable.

My world is ripped.

I am not okay with doing nothing.

This is a good thing.

Rain

Posted: June 15, 2012 in difficulty
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It’s raining very hard: the sky over the jungle is a waterfall.

The air Is full. Lightening brightens the sunrise. Thunder pounds and pounds above me.

The rain lets up. I can hear it on the jungle leaves, on the concrete walk below my porch, on the corrigated roof.

The birds chirp and sputter in the flood, welcoming the rain, happy with it. It’s life.

The frogs sing from their hidden places.

The rain picks up again. I can read the volume in the volume. Louder is more. It’s loud.

The yard fills with water. The grass is now a lake.

Nicaragua knows how to rain.

Yesterday in Kukra Hill we walked to lunch in the mud.

A young girl strolled by barefoot, carrying her sandals. Nicaraguans know rain and they know mud.

In Kukra, Pastor Joel has it in his mind to start a university. He is thinking ahead for los jovenes. He is thinking of the young girl with the muddy feet.

It is pouring rain in Pastor Joell’s head. His mind is a flood. It is loud. His mouth is a lake. It is full.

In Kukra too many of the beautiful young women have babies that someone beats. Too many of the jovencitas are prostitutes, servicing the men who have come far from home to work in the palm oil industry. The men walk in the mud too and play games on the porch.

Who is thinking about them? In what way are they being thought about. Who has it in his or her mind to a better future for them, to make an opportunity for their children?

The sun is up now. The jungle is a thousand shades of green. It is because of the rain.

The rain slows to a mist.

I sit here wondering.

Who will make the young girls, and their babies, who walk in the mud, sing in the jungle?

I think that the one with the rain in his head, he will do it.

I pray that what it will be will be loud.

The Past Will Set You Free

Posted: April 19, 2012 in becoming, difficulty
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“I feel like I’ve wasted the last year,” she said, as she looked at me through the camera on her laptop.

“Perhaps not,” I said back.” She and I were miles apart, but it felt like we were close together. We had screen faces and screen smiles and screen delivered nuances of expression that helped us to speak freely.

“We learn from everything we go through,” I said. It sounded cliched.  “Now you know more about yourself and about the kind of relationship you want in the future. If you hadn’t gone through this then you wouldn’t understand yourself or other people as well as you do now.” That sounded better.

It was really not much me telling her that.  My wife said something like that to me recently, and  I was paraphrasing  her, as I so often do. There is a significant advantage in being married to a smart women. Not long ago, I had bemoaned to my wife my regret over the emotionally difficult experience that I went through in switching jobs in 2008.

My wife had listened, and then responded. “It’s made you who you are.”

She got it right, as she usually does, and I liked it as I tried it on,  for me, for my friends and everyone else.

“Hmm.” We may not like what we’ve been through and it may seem a loss, a waste, an unwanted detour, but that is not the only way to view our experience.

Every hard thing we go through has the potential to shape us, make us.

When someone has been hurtful to us, this might at first bury us, but then  we might learn that we really don’t want to do something like that to anyone else. When someone has dominated us,  we may learn something mean from this, how to dominate others, or we may learn a much better lesson — to not dominate others. When someone has not honored our emotions, we might learn that only some people are safely entrusted  with our deepest emotions. When we have made a mistake, we may know not to make it again, maybe.

Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.

The past is a form of truth, so “the  past will set you free too,” if you can  see the truth extruding out of it.

I am learning to make friends with my past. The past is my best friend. It has given me everything I now have. It has been my teacher. It has been my lover.  The past has humbled me, and it has honored me.  It has left me angry; it has also taken anger out of me. The past has shaped me into the me of the very me inside the core of the very me.

And lately, I am realizing that the past has turned me into the me that I am learning to treasure.

Strike While the Stress Is Hot!

Posted: December 5, 2011 in difficulty
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Stress is up.

It’s December. Research shows that 75 % of us feel good feelings during the Christmas season, love and happiness, but the research also predicts more stress.

Shopping, traffic, financial pressures and family expectations allow stress to  rule most of us at Christmas time.

It’s been noted that  women, in particular, feel a responsibility to make everyone happy during the holidays. And the poor, as the world shops,  are made painfully aware of their lack. People who have social anxiety, and that would be almost all of us, have more anxiety as work, family and church holiday events increase.

Perhaps only children, and students, on break, relax more in December, but that would be after finals, not before. My children will be home, and I’ll love it, but that won’t make the house more peaceful.

Christmas equals more stress.

It’s never been different. The birth of Jesus was full of stress. His parents traveled, stress. They hit traffic, in Bethlehem, stress. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a cave and laid him in a feeding trough, stress. The shepherds saw angels, stress. They were terrified, a form of stress.  Later King Herod tried to kill Jesus — major stress!

God entered the stressed world stressed. The incarnation, Christmas, was and remains intrinsically stressful.

What to do?

Of course, it’s smart to find some way to relax during the holidays. Heart attacks rise, and there are ways to keep from being a Christmas statistic. To thine own self be gentle, and at peace. Take a walk, better yet, take a run.

And consider the good uses of stress.

The birth of Jesus was full of stress, so also the birth of every great thing. Every book written, play acted, song sung for others, meal prepared, wrong righted, person rescued has stress in it.

No good is done without stress, so this Christmas get stressed. To love a difficult friend or family member this December may well  require stress.

To be social, with family, work associates, church family, will include more stress. Do it and you will be better for it, and so will they.  Prestressed concrete is like a person who risks and acts — stronger.

Stress may kill, a few things that need killing this year  — apathy, indifference, isolationism and selfishness.

This Christmas step up and strike while the stress is hot.

 

You’ll find more insights about stress at www.modernproverbs.net

fear

Posted: April 26, 2011 in difficulty

What was this?

Water was running down the driveway, lots of water, hard, out of the house and down the drive!

 I hurried into the garage, turned the water shut off value; the water kept running. I rushed to my tool bench to grab a wrench. I had to  turn off the water at the street. What? My tools were gone, all of them, stolen!

A man grabbed me from behind. He had been hiding, behind the side garage door. I wrestled with him for a moment. It was the thief. He broke away and escape around the side of the house.

Running back out to the driveway, I could see that the water was beginning the undermine the whole driveway; the drive had begun to sink, several inches into the ground. This was serious. The house was next! I ran back inside to try to discover where the water was coming from. It seem to be running right out of the slab, in a corner,  as if a water pipe in the concrete had broken.

I ran back out in the street.  My neighbor was there.  I asked him if he would loan me a  crescent wrench. He seemed confused. He didn’t know what this was. He went away and came back with something. It was a breaker bar for a socket. Worthless!

I ran to the  concrete lid covering the water shut off valve in the sidewalk.   No shut off valve there, only a  a tangle of wires and plastic handles.

I could hear the water running, running, running.  I was in a panic.  

 I  sat up. Someone was in the shower; it was  morning.

Then I remembered that in the night I had gotten up because I had heard water running. One of the values on my sprinkler system had gotten stuck on, and I had used a screw driver to shut it off, and had gone back to bed, and the incident had morphed, in my mind, fueled by fear, into a major dream sequence.

Fear! It drives the mind, and behavior and my dreams.

I don’t like it.

It makes me want to unravel its tangle, move beyond it, triumph over it.

Fear is the worse motivator in the world. It drives the worst machinery of mankind forward — arguments, wars, greedy take overs, crime. Fear wastes huge amounts of resources — time, money, sleep,  people.

One of the main goals of the maturing person is to learn to understand and control fear, to use it, to milk it, to dominate it, to move beyond it to the higher motivation for life — love.

What does it take to not live in fear? How would it feel to not be afraid? What would you do if you were not afraid?

For starters, do this.

Get right up next to God, very close to God, trust God, trust his perfect love, a love so powerful it can cast down fear.

Get so excited and passionate about what you want to do that you drive your ramped-up desire right over the top of fear and do what you want to do even though you are  afraid to do it while you are doing it.

Get your butt kicked so badly by life that you end up so  familiar with hard stuff and so angry about it that you are too mad to let your fear dominate you anymore.

If you need therapy, counseling, medication, treatment go get it. Fear is not something beaten  alone. Go get what you need to get so that you can start doing what you need and want to do.

Force yourself to get out of the house, into life, interacting with people, going places and being with people. Action cures anxiety.

Fear and anxiety are treatable. They are something we all struggle with.

Got it? Do it.

For more thoughts and insights on fear, visit www.modernproverbs.net and click on the tab fear or record your own thoughts by bloging a response below.

i never knew you

Posted: April 11, 2011 in difficulty
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Someone came to my office last Saturday and said, “He’s fallen off the wagon again,  and he’s asking for you. Can you come see him?”

So I went out to the lawn in front of the church to see him, where people were gathered to receive the food that we were handing out, but I couldn’t see him right away.

He was there, and I was looking straight into his eyes from about 18 inches distance, but I couldn’t see him. Of course I could see his face, but I couldn’t see the person I had seen when I saw him last. An opaque grey film, like a death shroud, lay on the surface of his eyes.

But it was him, I reconized the face as his. He was in there, like a mad man at home, hiding in the back of the house, lurking insanely in the back closet, looking through the crack in the door, but not coming to answer the friendly knock.

His head weaved in an unstable, drunken way, and he staggered back a little from me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I put my hand on him to steady him and  leaned in toward him trying to connect with him, trying to look into him, to see the man I had seen last time I had seen him at church. There was little of that now, mostly just thick fog, lying on the surface of his pupils,  locking down his soul like a lid on a casket.   

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can see that you’re in a lot of pain.”

“Oh,  the pain,” he cried out, and reached out toward me with an open hand.

 I knew this part of him; I’ve been in psychological, spiritual pain too.

“Oh,” he groaned in complete anguish. “I just came to see you today,” he said, “to get a little love. Because I knew you guys would give me a little love.”

I remembered when he had told me with such confidence a few months earlier, “I’m done. I’m done with the drinking.”

But he wasn’t done, drinking, self-medicating, trying to kill the pain, trying to kill himself just to kill the pain.

And so I gave him a little love,  by sitting down with him on the retaining wall, by taking his hand, by praying for him, by telling him he could stop, again, and by telling him that we all loved him. I told him that I wanted to see him again.

“I can’t stop,” he said.

 “You can stop,” I told him, “You’ve done it before.”

But I knew what he meant. For forty years he hasn’t been able to stop after he has stopped, again and again and again he hasn’t stopped.  

Then, in totally anguish he looked at me and said, “I know that Jesus loves me.”

 I knew him then, because he was so much like me, a residing faith all mixed with brain numbing pain. There was the faith,  the real faith, leaking out from behind the opaque eyes, hovering in front of us on the lawn, his faith and mine, the faith that makes us brothers, that has always bonded us together as brothers, two incompletely healed men in front of each other, both in need of Jesus.

“Yes, Jesus does love you,” I said. “You’ve told me this before, and I believe that it is true. He loves you, even when you are like this.” 

He left after a while — to go get another beer, which begs the question: What to do?

                                                                         ***********

 In Matthw 25 we find the following teaching of Jesus:

  31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

   34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

   37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

   40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

   41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

   44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

   45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

   46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”


Jesus told his followers that when they saw the sick and broken and needy, that they saw him. It is interesting that he didn’t say that when they saw the good, the strong and the successful that they saw him.

 Jesus’s words about needy people are actually quite unsettling.  Jesus said that those who do not care for the lonely, sick, hungry and incarcerated, will not be invited into the kingdom, but instead will be punished.  He didn’t teach that we had to fix them, but he did make it clear that we were to care for them.

This is kind of sobering to me, the implications  of what Jesus taught, the teaching that we will not be judged, as we are so often taught in our safe, intellectualized, sanitized Christian churches, by our faith alone, but that we will be judged by whether or not our faith caused us to love and care for sick, hungry, cold, imprisoned, lonely people of the earth, regardless of whether they changed or not.

Jesus taught that if  we love him, then we will love people,and that if we do not love them, he will not recognize us as his own in the final judgment. That’s unsettling too.

I know a lot of very spiritual people. I try to be one myself, God-following, praying, helping people in a good way, but Jesus actually taught that some powerfully spiritual people, who do great acts of spirituality in his name, will not be a part of his kingdom. 

Look at Matthew 7: 21.  

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

 They knew him. They claimed him. They did great things in his name. That will not be disputed. They will tell you that. Jesus will buy that, “They knew me,” he will say sadly; then he will add, “but I didn’t know them.”

What will make that true?  It will be, I believe, because as these mighty ones lived out their lives, they didn’t do the will of God which is to love people the way Jesus commanded them to, and so they were very clearly not of his kind.

Jesus doesn’t know those who claim him but don’t know love.  He doesn’t know them because they refuse to love  and because they refused to let Jesus know them and love them.  We all are at risk, I think, in this way. We do this, remain unknown to Jesus, so to speak, whenever we do not admit our brokenness, our  weakness, our loneliness, our addictive habits, our spiritual famine. And when we do this, when we act like we are okay, when we aren’t okay,  this has terrible consequences.

Not knowing the weakness in ourselves, we don’t know the weak in our communities, and so we don’t welcome the weak or care for them and in doing this we don’t welcome Jesus and so we don’t know him! Crazy, fascinating, the mistake, this train of mistakes, beginning in ourselves and following on in tragic fashion to our community and to God.

To deny our own humanity, our own broken, impoverished, addicted, imprisoned selves, causes us to also separate from those like this in our community, and this distances us from God.

“I never knew you,” cries Jesus, “because you hid from me behind the reinforced gates and walls of wealth and accomplishment and self-interest. You denied your pain, and you hid from the pain of the world, and in doing so you hid from me, and I couldn’t find you to know you!”

Jesus does not know us when we do not know the drunk man staggering up to the church door. He does not know us when we do not know the hungry family living three blocks away from the church. He does not know us, when we do not go sit with the old woman, living alone, and eating dinner at night alone and wondering why she is still alive. Jesus does not know us when we do not know the child who is absent a parent,  or both parents or a grandma, the inadequately loved, hurting, at risk child in our neighborhood, school or church.

We may cross the globe on a well-financed and well-intentioned mission of mercy to bring the truth to people in another country, we may minister powerfully in our church by leading worship or teaching classes or sitting on boards or praying for the weak, and yet if we will not even cross the streets and sidewalks in our own cities and commuities to know the people living in need in our own backyards, we may find it someday said by God himself, “I don’t know you.”

Jesus does not know us when we hide from him by hiding from our own  hopeless, hurting, needy flesh and blood lying sprawled out on the church lawn drunk.

Flat out: Jesus doesn’t know the indifferent, the selfish and the uninvolved in all of us. 

His love can forgive even our lack of love, but Jesus himself warned us very strongly about this matter.

We must cry out for mercy and help in this business of loving people. The best cry we can make to Jesus is, “Know me! Know every weak, hungry, addicted, broken, imprisoned, naked, drunken part of me.”

And when see the other fallen and broken creatures of the world, the best thing that we can  cry out to them is, “I know you! I know you because you are me! And I know you because you are Christ to me.”

 ‘I tell you the truth,” said Jesus, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”  Matthew 25:45

What should we do? We should know them!

 

super moist tripple chocolate fudge

Posted: February 1, 2011 in difficulty, people
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Into the paper cupcake holders in two cupcake pans I poured a thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake mix.

Then on top of the thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake, I poured a thin layer of sweet, whipped cream cheese.

Next — into each cupcake sleeve, I gently spooned, on top of the super-moist triple-chocolate-fudge and the sweet cream cheese, a layer of country-cherry pie filling.

Then I poured another layer of super-moist-triple-chocolate-fudge cake, on top of the surpy, cherry pie filling, which covered the whipped cream cheese, which covered the first layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake.

At this point I grew frightened and decided to put it in the oven —  to kill it.

Twelve minutes later, when the little super-moist, chocolate, cheesy, cherry-filled bodies had baked, and then cooled, as part of the embalming process, I spread a thick layer of rich and creamy vanilla, cream cheese frosting on top of each one.

Then — I – ate five!

I hate myself.

Paul, the amazing Christian super saint once wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Romans 7:15)

Sounds like someone else has been into the super-moist triple-chocolate cupcakes. Of course, the truth is that we all have all been there, where we didn’t want to go, doing what we hated to do.  We have overeaten cake or indulged a nasty character defect or shot off a mean-spirited repartee or harbored an infected and moldy core of unforgiveness. Or if we have not done these then we have indulged something else non grata, not fun, a fair bit of  anguish, the loss of control, the doing what we don’t want to do, the regrets later. This is just what we do — the stuff we hate.

And so, what to do?

I backed our SUV into a telephone pole a few years ago. When I confessed my mistake to my wife, she said, “That’s why we have insurance.” Never once then or after did she say anything condemning about my driving mistake.

Good, very nice. There is a recipe in this. There is a culinary treat to write down, on a card and to keep in a drawer, to Facebook to a friend, to use again.

After any one of us have poured down a super-most layer of triple chocolate fudge blunder, we should pour on top of that a thick layer of  sweet, cream cheese honesty. Then it is best if someone else in the kitchen  with us adds a thick layer of cheer pie kindness. If as so often happens, another layer of triple chocolate fudge mistake is added, and it gets baked all together, as so often happens in life, we  should all yet “cool it,” and  top the mess with a thick swirl of cream cheese forgiveness.

Finally, once we have all our layered delights finished and spread out in front of us, then we should each eat five or more of them, just to help us get the layering pattern “down,” and to help us learn to make this unique way of preparing food a real part of us.

A mistake? It needs a loving relationship.

Then,  “We’re really cooking baby!”

Failure

Posted: June 2, 2010 in difficulty
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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.

Experience

Posted: August 12, 2008 in difficulty
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praise

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

Posted: April 8, 2008 in difficulty
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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?

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