Was Is!

Posted: September 14, 2013 in thriving
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She believes that God has punished her with a heart attack for her wrong sexual thoughts.

His father brutally rejected him, it was never resolved. He now believes that you can’t work through conflict with anyone.

She thinks she can’t leave her philandering, alcoholic, abusive husband because some religious people have told her she shouldn’t.

Each of these people think things that aren’t true. They need truth, the kind of truth that sets frees.

Truth spoken to us is particularly powerful. A person, really any person, speaking truth, modeling truth, being truth is super powerful in freeing other people. Rules and doctrines don’t free people; truth incarnate, truth living in another person, that frees us. A person can say to another person,”I don’t believe that your stroke is a punishment from God,” and that can set in motion a new and healing movement of the heart.

A person can say to another harmed person, “Your father was wrong to reject you. Your father had a problem. He did the wrong thing. He should have loved you. You are worthy of being loved.”

A person can say to an abused wife, “Leave him. Leave your husband. He has rejected you for other women, and you need to set up boundaries and protect yourself from any more harm.”

A person, really any person, can judge a particular situation and give freedom-making counsel. Therapists, pastors, parents, friends do this all the time, and it makes a universe of difference. Therapy is nothing less than truth that unslaves. Counseling is nothing less than an empowering relationship that helps us see ourselves more accurately.

Here is the deal. We all have something to overcome. It is this: Was is! What was, the past, dominates what is, the present.

The past is a despot over the present. Past addiction, failures and broken relationship tend to rule our present ones. Too many of us live with one eye spun to the back of our heads, cycloptic we go forward ever peering past-ward. We crash through the present staring wildly into the past from one ever back-gazing, was-dominant, memory tortured eye. Like this we stumble.

Such deep compassion is needed for we us. We all need truth. We need help reinterpreting our pasts so that that they don’t wreck the present.

We can, as we ourselves learn and change, provide counsel to others, and we can seek out trained therapists, to help us make much needed identity shifts. We can be taught to tell ourselves: “I am not what other people have said I am. I am not the sum of my past decisions. I am not the past. I can be, I am now free to be who I decide to be, who God, who loves me, can help me be.”

Was may be is, but is can also change was, and is is what we help people determine it to be by their present moment choices. Is, with truth in it, actually can change how we see was. The truth can free us from was.

This is powerful stuff, good stuff; truth sets free, and if we become free, then we really can live radically, beautifully and amazingly free lives.

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.

How Does It Work?

Posted: September 5, 2013 in sociality
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“How does it work?”

“How does what work??

“Life.”

“Really now, I’m supposed to know that!”

“Yeah — you are.”

“Well, if I had to say, at this odd and slightly confusingly clear moment in time, it seems to me that life works kind of like legos.”

“What? Really? Legos? Aren’t legos kind of for little kids, and maybe losing ground to tablets?”

“Well, not yet, but I suppose the snappy things come and go, model cars and planes, Erector sets, various kinds of building blocks and jigsaw puzzles,  but our fascination with connection, with making connections, that’s life. Think Facebook, Instagram,Twitter, Starbucks, teams, school, friends,  church, family, true love — we want to connect, meet, exchange, belong, be friends, be family, snap on.”

“So, what do we do with that?”

“Well, if we are already a part of a team, a club, a  business, a school, a church, a nonprofit, a friendship circle, a family, and we want to do life well, then we should lead in creating more snap on points, more ways for people to bridge over their loneliness and meet and talk, honestly, to lego-up and build something cool, fun, fascinating, big and colorful, together. That’s what people want. They want to fit, to bridge, to snap, on, and be part off something bigger than a small plastic piece of themselves. They want a buddy. They want a mentor. They want a cousin. They want a brother. They want a spouse. They want a teacher.  They want a dad. They want a mom, or something even remotely like one, someone, anyone, who brakes the silence and listens and … connects.”

“That’s a challenge!”

“Why?”

“So many of us, these days, seem to be shy, hurt, burned, distracted, overwhelmed, busy, awkward and most of all — afraid, of each other.”

“That’s true, but if we don’t go there, to those real points of connection, then we are just left with a life of tiny lonely pieces, psychic fragments, small isolated, island lives, little junked up materialistic silos. If we don’t connect, we’ll be like sand grains lost in big shoes, dust particles floating in the great airy expanses over the deserts. We will be some weird kind of modern R. W. Emerson, self-reliance with earphones on, lonely iron strings playing one note, social hermits with our heads bent down permanently over our smart phones.  Someone must, if we are going to live well, really do life well, connect us.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Look up, out of the trench. See people. Regain social ground. Discover again the lost art of hospitality. Invite a lego to play, to dinner, to coffee, to study, to hang out, to bridge time and space and connect face-to-face, not text-to-text, not screen-to-screen, not pic-to-pic, but up close and warmly personal. Actually have relationships, and facilitate them between other people. Go be that engineer of sociality, the socio-lego-land creator, that infra-face-structure designer, for them, now, please, will you?”

“Okay, I’ll get right on that!”

“Thanks!”

“No, thank you, really! I’ve been kinda lonely lately.”

“Yeah, me too.”

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.

Sex, Body Image and Redemption

Posted: August 26, 2013 in self
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When Adam first saw Eve, he said … “Wow! Check you out, baby!  Nice work, God.  Hey, Eve …  want to go for a coffee … or something…”

And Eve said, “Yes! And then she turned aside and said, “That is the best looking guy I’ve ever seen! He is so hot!”

Then Adam said, “Hey Eve, Should we get dressed up tonight… our just go out …  au natural?”

And Eve said, “I don’t care what people think … wait … there are no other people. Hey, were alone …  hey baby… !”

Adam and Eve’s beautiful physicality, it was all God’s idea and Adam and Eve must have been thrilled with each other.

God made them for each other, and he made their puzzle pieces, fit together, and God called his work “good.”

What do we take from this? We do not need to be ashamed of our bodies, our skin, our muscles, our jiggly parts, our flab, what Paul calls our “weaker parts,” our vulnerabilities, our sexuality. We should never be ashamed of God’s body work.

The body is amazing.

Sneezes regularly exceed 100 miles per hour. Feet have 500 sweat glands.  You know that when you remove your socks. Your nose can remember 50,000 scents.  You use 200 muscles to take a step.

Everyday we produce 300 billion new cells.

Women are born with one to two million immature eggs.

We can make copies of ourselves! How fun is that?

We are miracles!

We have a little studied book, the Song of Songs, where we find the writer healthily enchanted with his lover’s physicality. Solomon writes in the Song:

The sweet, fragrant curves of your body,
the soft, spiced contours of your flesh
Invite me …

You’re beautiful from head to toe, my dear love,
beautiful beyond compare, absolutely flawless. 

(Message Version)

This is scripture. Holy scripture is comfortable with flesh, with bodies, with “spiced contours.”

There is an old stereotype of the religious person who is puritanical, Gnostic, self-rejecting, who hates the body, who is afraid to hug, to dance. But this is not what God wants.

Truly spiritual people are self-accepting, not self-shaming. They make friends with their flesh, with their gender, they are thrilled with their mates bodies, and they dance at their weddings, and they enjoy sex afterwards.

But, now let’s be honest, transparent, real —  not everyone, is comfortable with other bodies or their own. Some people actually hate their bodies.

How does that happen?

How have we gotten so far away from what God began with?

  1. The Barbie and GI Joe standard dominate us. Our sense of body image is bombarded on TV, movies, and internet media with  ideal bodies —  toned, muscular, skinny, tall and amazing bodies.

2. Past physical and sexual abuse —  too many shaming experiences have made some of us hate our bodies. This has sometimes come from the mean comments  or harmful abuses of others —  parents, peers, even ourselves.

3. Lastly life, surgeries, diseases, disabilities, weight gain, aging, such uncontrollables may have taken away our sense of a whole self, an acceptable self.

But our bodies, old or young, symmetrical, dysmorphic, attractive or unattractive are places where honoring, where kindness should occur. This is scriptural.

 Do you not know that your bodies [imperfect bodies] are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Question: How can we then honor God with our bodies?  We can love them, feed them, rest them and accept them.

Last weekend I went to a Jamaican restaurant with about 20 other friends. Jerk chicken, tasty veggies, chocolate cake — yum!  Different ages, races, backgrounds – all accepted, all fed.  One person came and took a nap on a chair in the back, then came and sat in my lap and at the end of the meal had to be carried out the door. It was four-year old Loki. We honored, his little body.

We should so honor all bodies. We would do best to treat our body as if were four. We should hug it when it cries, feed it when it is hungry, carry it home when it has had too much to eat and drink.

How else can we honor God with our bodies? We can use our bodies to respect and nurture other bodies.

Jesus is a good model of this. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

It takes a pretty secure man to say I long like a “hen”  to gather my children.  But to hen chicks, to nurture children, is a good thing, a godly trait, a human trait and not a trait just reserved for women.

I like Jesus in this regard. Jesus handled his maleness well. He had close female friends and followers, but there is no evidence that he was ever anything but appropriate with them. None of them became girlfriends or wives.

As Christ-like people, we can nurture the opposite gender in really fun, uplifting and beautiful ways. We can make friends with each other, and we can respect each other’s bodies.

On Friday I heard laughing downstairs at the church. Later, I found out that the food distribution team was laughing about some pasta they had to give out. The brand name was “Allegra,” but someone thought it was, “Viagra.”  Wow! If word got out, that the  church gave away Allegra Viagra — that would bring some new converts.

“Hey, you should try this church. They give out this pasta, that helps with … you know. My husband has been eating it, and he is a changed man!”

Also on Friday, one of the distribution leaders was so excited about the church’s underwear!  She told me, “Wow, in our clothing room, we were given some new underwear to give out!”

Cool! That should go on the church website. “FB Church, a place with you can get great Bible studies, cool worship and new underwear.” A good church is okay with human. It gives away underware. It cares for real bodies!

Bodies, gender, good; male and female, made and loved by God and useful in honoring him and helping others, all good.

But, we know too, that bodies, can make bad choices.

Being sexual beings is beautiful, and can lead to fun, to children, to nurturing, but … our sexuality can also bring pain and harm to our lives.

San Diego was rocked recently by the charges against the mayor for sexual inappropriateness. Life carries within it a challenging handling of sexuality.

King David, the towering hero of the Old Testament, made some mistakes, sexually. King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, one of his soldier’s wives, and then to cover it up, when Bathsheba became pregnant, David had her husband murdered.

Our sexual desires, while good, made by God, can derail us. David suffered some grievous consequences and losses for his behavior, the loss of a child, the rebellion of his sons. In fact, David set a model of sexual inappropriateness that his sons followed, and that was tragic.

But it is not David’s mistakes, but his recovery that is worth noting. God, the creator of our sexuality, is also the redeemer of our sexuality! How gracious, even in the area of sexual mistakes, God is!

David fails, but God is full of understanding for David’s humanness, of his weaknesses.

After David fails, after David mucks things up, David rushed to God. God still loved David, and God forgave him, and even amazingly redeemed the situation.

Psalm 51:7 records David’s prayer, after his affair.

Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean,
scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.
Tune me in to foot-tapping songs,
set these once-broken bones to dancing.

David trusts in and asks for a scrubbing, to be made clean, to be given the ability, after failure and loss and pain, to sing and dance again. How can he do that? He can do that because he knows a God who understands human imperfection and forgives.
Psalm 51:8-9 gives us more of David’s model prayer:

Don’t look too close for blemishes,
give me a clean bill of health.

God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.

God can take our mess and clean it up. He can start us again. After we have suffered from our sexual mistakes, what we need to know and grab on to is a God who can and will forgive us. We do well, after failure, to rush to God and ask to be forgiven and renewed.

What is so amazing in the story of David, is that after David makes a horrible choice, and lots of evil comes from it, God brings some good out of the situation anyway! Bathsheba and David marry after the mess, and Bathsheba gives birth to four sons. One of the sons was Solomon, who became the next King after David.

This history, this real story, shows us that God is so redemptive when it comes to our bodies, even our sexual mistakes.

What to take from all this?

  1. Love your body! God does! Be at peace with yourself as Adam and Eve were with each other. Take care of your body, feed it healthy food, exercise it, work it, rest it and steward your gender. Buy it new underwear!

2. Use your body to love other bodies, and yet be aware of the power of sexuality. It’s good stuff, but strong stuff. Control your body. And follow Jesus in being appropriate with the opposite gender.

3. If you fail with your body, and we all do in some way — if you feed it too much, over work it, are immoral with it — then stop doing that, and rush to God to ask for forgiveness and help, just as David did.

And then God, who love bodies, who made your body, and the fragile person’s inside of it, will scrub you clean, and redeem your life.

Playing Small

Posted: August 22, 2013 in beautiful
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We have been encouraged not to succeed — way too often — by our society, our peers, our parents and ourselves. The democratic template has cranked out a lot of same-think, an overage of standardized emoting, too many chain-restaurant personalities. Our own dear peers have themselves under-confimed us for fear that we would rise above them. Our own parents — those over-clapping, under-raving family fans — have pinned us to overly safe and sappy schemas of success.  Even our faith has sometimes been a smack back with a rule sack and mega-moralized attack.

And then there are our own sad self-judgements, our own lists of our omissions, wantings, failures and weaknesses. The diaries of our dreams have too often gathered dust in boxes under our well-made beds. We have risen up; we have raised up, and we have grown up and  sold our ourselves too short, crafted our psyches too small and made our images too tiny. We have  miniaturized our souls  by the habitual false humilities, proudful self-negations and insecure self-critiques.  “I feel there is something special in me, but I am so …” and then follow the piled layers of self-criticism, the suffrocating toppings of self-doubt, the backward, crab-like scuttlings of self-hatred and self-assassination.

We need a dose of Marianne Williamson:

it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

And “playing small” doesn’t serve you or God well either. Wise, happy, godly living is found in being all that we really are, perfect and not perfect. It is our mandate to be as light and big and bright and powerful and fun and creative and free and happy and successful at life and love and doing good as God planned us to be — planned for us even before the creation of the stars, our sun and our lovely planet. We were meant to be, all that, whether other people confirm or compliment of encourage that or not.

I beg you all, for everyone’s sake, for God sake, for your sake and for the sake of all the people who need you, walk out more, step out of your fearful self, be who you were made to be — shine, laugh, jump around, dance, throw up your hands, toss your personality into the air, release your gifts into the sky and watch the world sparkle as good rains down though the sun-lit present on you and all you love.

Bracing For Success

Posted: August 12, 2013 in success
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When we occasionally glance ahead, look down the garden path, attempt to peer ’round the blind corner — perhaps we are at a wedding or funeral or looking over water or falling off the edge of day and almost asleep — we sometimes startle and steel ourselves, for just head it comes to us that there might possibly be bits and pieces of difficulty, minor disturbances, a war, aging, another recession, even the annoying matter of dying.

But do we ever, and perhaps we just might need to, steel ourselves, in quiet moment of reflection, for success?

Success needs to be braced for, because it isn’t ease. It isn’t a non-stressing event, the calm of anonymity, the hide-and-seek moment of repose found in not having yet been found. Success isn’t business-as-usual, the casual kiss upon arriving home again at night to old, familiar, comforting foods and loves.

Success is adrenaline. Success is life — caffeinated. Success is an aphrodisiac. Success is a tyrant. Success is the stress of living, not dying, the crazy, hyper-active moment of being found, of jumping up and running hard, the anxiety present in the award, the demanding residue resident in the encore, the infectious blush of being kissed by strangers, of being expected to appear, over and over and over again.

Most people run from this.

But success is life, saddled up and riding right along side of failure, and one should expect success, steel oneself for it, lean into it, if nothing else than because of the inevitability of it, and for the kicks present in it, for the laughs, for the poof and goof and sheer outrageous broad smile and back-stage-arm-pump of it.

We will succeed, if we don’t sabotage our own success out of the fear of not being able to handle it. We will succeed, if we are willing. And success will change us, but in good ways, not destructive ways, if we get our heads first spun right for it.

How? This: We can survive success by means of humility. We can steel ourselves for success by putting a knife to our own throats, by first fencing in our own lust and greed so that we don’t harm ourselves and others with it. We can best prepare ourselves for awards by dressing up and putting on the demeanor of waitresses, janitors, busboys, Motel 6 housekeepers, slaves.

The survive-the-success-thing is found in this, to abstain from what we most want to eat by making friends with not eating. To prepare for banquets, we must first get used to gut-gnawing hunger and stomach cramps, so that when the feast is set for us, and our forks are raised to eat whatever we want, we won’t.

And we may also do this, get ready, by screwing our heads on straight concerning the sources of success.

Every success is a gift, given not by ourselves to ourselves, but given by others, by life, and by God. We will not, nor ever will do, anything that should make us preferred, over and above anyone else, since it does not originate in us but outside of us and in them. It is all given, the DNA, the birth place, the stretch and wave of time, the procreative influences, the mentors provided, the unsought opportunities, the universally salutary milieu, the open sea, shore, boat, wind and clear sky of it.

So, do — steel, brace, prepare, bow, receive, enter and humbly enjoy — success, when it is given to you.

Pushing Through

Posted: August 5, 2013 in restoration
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Monday night I pretty much hit the wall, after working nonstop for twelve hours, preparing the floor, and I ended the day by hitting the sack — late. Work tends toward that, a flat ending, following a familiar line that gets you there. The energy line goes something like this: it rises up on inspiration, peaks at perspiration and dips at last into mind-numbing exhaustion.

The job I was on was to restore the old oak floors at the church. The mission was to beautify the world, the vision to create sacred space in which people might be inspired to know God, the question after more than a month of slaving: Was it worth it?

Yeah, it was, but to see that, I had to look past tiredness, I had to overlook the imperfections in the floor which we, as we worked, lovingly referred to as “character,” and I had to imagine a better future, a future in which people will walk in the doors of this church, love it, make a home there, on the floors, and do nothing less than, transform, renew, refinish — like the floors.

The whole process, the original “bright” idea, the collaborative, “lets take a look,” the peek under the old, stained carpet, the discovery of the distressed but still beautiful oak floor, the equipment rental, the sanding and more sanding and more sanding, the realization that we didn’t really didn’t know how to sand an old oak floor, the sanding again, the choice of a finish, the realization that it was the wrong choice, the process of choosing again, the final floor prep, the flawed first coast, the better second coat, the still imperfect third coat, the still imperfect but last-shot-in-order-to-leave–enough-dry-time fourth coat of poly.

Wow! The putting of the pews back in, the screwing them down in the old holes, the standing back, the asking of the questions, the interestingly different responses. It is so interesting, people’s response to change. For those who didn’t engage in the process, the first blush is often negative, in odd and inaccurate ways.

“I think it will be loud.” It wasn’t. “Shoes will put black marks on it.” They didn’t. “It will be hard to clean.” It isn’t. “I hope I don’t fall.” Nope, not slippery.

But when all is said and sanded and coated, there are the encouragers, the perspicacious, appropriate responders: “Awesome job! It looks great! It is so clean! It is brighter in here! This was the right thing to do! I love it! Thank you!”

I not sure how I feel; it’s a mixed bag of emotions, from “we could have done it better” — my own form of negativity — to “I am so glad I had the courage to make this happen!” Yeah, that’s how I really feel.

Life is like that; it’s a push and a stretch and a long hard row, that changes the world, that revisions spaces, that refinishes reality, that makes a possibility for better to be created on top of better.

What’s next!

Makeover

Posted: July 22, 2013 in thriving
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If we owned a cat, and it wouldn’t play, we wouldn’t yell at it and threaten it. We would gently win it with a string, an open paper bag, the soft coaxing sounds we use to woo our animals.

If we owned an apple tree, and it wouldn’t apple, we wouldn’t hack on it with ax or saw. We would fertilize and water it, and mulch the soil at its base, humming perhaps as we worked, soothing it with horticulture’s gentle art.

If we had a child who was shy, and she was afraid to promote from preschool to first grade, we wouldn’t harshly command her to do this, but instead we would reason gently with her, take her by the hand to visit her new school before the start of the year and calm her with our softness and our care.

So when we don’t do well, when we break down, when we yell or cry, when we are an emotional mess, when we don’t play or fruit or advance according to the plan, we must not hack at sobbing selves, scold the mess, beat the soul, demand a change. An inner loveliness, the fruit of a healthy spirit, the soul’s own playfulness, none of this will ever be won with threats and punishments and demands unreasonable.

Found in the primer of life, in the preschool’s first lesson of living is the simple wisdom: First learn to be kind to your self.

The famed fruits of the inner life — patience, love, gentleness and kindness — these must first be practiced on our own selves. We are the first ones in need of patience with our own impatience and kindness with our own unkindness. We can never hope to authentically and consistently visit on others what we haven’t first visited upon ourselves.

Woo your own shy soul with tenderness. Gentilize your own degentled self with gentleness. Patience your own depatienced soul with the soft, soothing hum of the seasoned gardener.

What virtue ever flowered that didn’t flower first within, nurtured from seed to bloom by kindness — not force.

The Spaces In Between

Posted: July 8, 2013 in time
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We live toward events — Christmas, graduation, marriage,  a new baby, a vacation, a dinner, a movie.

This summer I’m looking forward to some lazy days at the beach. In the fall, I’m looking forward to going to Boston. Next year I hope to celebrate the opening of our new courtyard at church.

And yet the bulk of time, for me and everyone, is in between. The mass and weight and stretch and bend of ordinary time — the time that exists before and after planned, traditional events — is also worthy of being loved and lived for.

We see it not. In between — or what we think of as in between — we tend to drudge. We poke through the present. We endurer the workday. We get through the night. We lean toward the future with a biased eye, as if the present were itself not eventful.

And yet, what is true is that no time is in between time. The present moment is always in itself an event — voluable, celebratory, sentient, real, semantic, phonic, rich. Every moment of life is consequential, the phone call at work with which we stretch out and touch another human being, the drive home through the community, the “Hi” at the threshold — every second worthy!

The next event is always the next moment, and the present moment is always the next event arrived at the doorstep.

Therefore, wise ones, banish in between! Don’t think about tomorrow, because tomorrow has no thought for itself. Declare love to the present, embrace the now, kiss the instant, revel in the second, praise the nanosecond!

There is no time like this time!

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