How To Heal a Heart

Posted: July 3, 2013 in restoration
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“I just wanted to give a little advice to help her.”

“Yeah, I bet that didn’t work.”

“No it didn’t; it blew up in my face, the little advice.”

“Why was that?”

“She didn’t want it.”

Of course she didn’t. It was something from the head, but the matter, it was something in her heart. It makes me want to go fishing, catch something, drag it to shore and feed the world with it. You can’t heal a heart with just a head. It’s like asking a bandaide to heal a cancer.

The mind can be a shallow thing, full of opinions, biases, judgments and stunning limitations. The heart is a deeper thing, full of will, personality, experience, dream, hurt, emotion, identity, desire, hate and love. The heart has a depth that the mind cannot fathom.  An idea won’t heal a heart. A rule  won’t heal a relationship. Deep calls to deep, experience calls to experience, brokeness cries out and clutches brokeness, weakness reaches out and gently touch weakness.

“Try saying, and trying feeling it as you are saying it, something like, ‘I’m so sorry you are hurting so badly.'” And maybe give up, thinking one talk, one time, and one little piece of ‘wise’  advice will do it.”

I wonder, could we learn to better sit with each other, for a while, for as long as it takes, and listen and really understand the best we can, and really “get it” and so find our way back to each other’s broken hearts?

We might; if we let heart cry out to heart.

 

Standing In

Posted: June 24, 2013 in helping
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As a therapist, mentor, counselor, doctor, teacher or pastor, one of the most painful things to watch is your clients returning to their own vomit.

“I went back,” she said.

It couldn’t be more anguished.

The return to abuse, addiction, dysfunction, dependency and harm – it is almost too much to take. When the helped ones return to the harm we helped them run away from, it is excruciating for the helper and the helped alike.

“Why did you go back?” we may ask them.

They don’t rightly know. We don’t always either. Sometimes they have lost the power to know, caught as they are in a mindless, addictive cycle and habit of harm, and we ourselves are sometimes shocked beyond the ability to keep reasoning well about the causes of such horrible things.

The worst comes when it comes to the kids.

“The children saw him hit you?”

“Her kids saw her passed out on the floor?”

It’s possible to give a child life and then begin to slowly take that very life by exposing that precious, fragile, developing psyche to what a human being, of any age, should never have to see and hear.”

What to do?

It’s not always clear. We do what should be done: we report abuse, counsel boundaries, protect children, advocate for recovery, make clear the choices and lay out the raw consequences.

But there is a tension present as we do our work — to do too much, to not do enough at all.

Broken people may break even the best of counselors, and we healing helpers, when we try to mend them, risk being just another sunken life boat in their sorry, slouching, smoking, sinking ship wake.

“I’m done with him!” we will be tempted to say.

Should we be? That is for us to carefully decide. But if a damaging cycle is to be broken, then someone must stand in like a champion and help break it. Someone sane must plant themselves at the fulcrum, between the teeter and the totter, between madness and sanity, between rescuing and empowering and tell it like it is.

Someone tough and smart, full of grit and dirt themselves, jammed up with raw, gut wrenching truth must say it like it is, and then say it again, and then have the stomach yet to say it yet again.

We caregivers, to help some of the most broken, must refuse to take an inappropriate responsibility for their irresponsibility, while still standing in and telling them to take a much needed charge of themselves and the ones they say they love.

It is a gift, this thing of standing at the fulcrum between order and chaos and holding forth with sanity and class and love, and it is a privilege to have the chance to do so.

If you’re called to it; then do it.

This matters!

It is life or death for some of them.

Sex

Posted: June 8, 2013 in Uncategorized
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Sex is popular!

It always has been! It feels so freakin’ good!

Its fun! Its funny! It’s entertaining. Shakespeare sure had fun with it in English theatre. Most of us still do! The sexual innuendo, quip and comment, they still get the hoot and the laugh.

But as much as sex is a part of our literature, our history and our modern experience — on TV, in movies, on ads, in books, on the internet, in discussions with friends and family — honestly, it remains an area confusion for so many people. I know it has always been a bit confusing to me!

Sex gets talked about. From the dorm room to the bedroom, from Hollywood to the hovel, from the church to the club, from the bathroom to the board room, people talk, but often the discussions are brags, bits of gossip, judgments, comments on trends, moralizations, envious congratulations or bitter rejections.  They aren’t that helpful in sorting things out.

The church has tried, but it has mostly worked different angles of the “Theology of No. ”

It’s never been much different. Sex has always been super popular, supermentionable (in certain places while not in others), theologized, moralized, humorized and practiced. But that hasn’t seemed to encouraged a better understanding of the deep currants of emotion that swirl around it, how it affects our hearts, our minds, our inner persons. Afterall, sex, isn’t at the core, very rational. It taps into something deep in us, and that deep would be good to explore more.

Questions remain: When, how, why, what or with whom do we do it or not? How does it define us, make us feel, give us identity, and affect other decisions in other areas of life.

I think this kind of discussion is needed more than ever because things are changing quickly, especially in our thinking about premarital sex. The statistics show us moving toward earlier sex, younger sex, more premarital sex.

A study of trends in premarital intercourse over the past half-century in the US shows that 48 percent of women born between 1939 and 1948 reported having had premarital intercourse by age 20. That jumped to 65 percent for women born between 1949 and 1958. Among women born between 1959 and 1968, those reporting premarital sex by age 20 was 72 percent, and for those born between 1969 and 1978, the figure was 76 percent.

The Princeton, N.J.-based Gallup Organization has tracked Americans’ views on premarital sex for decades and found that fewer have disagreed with the practice over the years. In 1969, two-thirds of Americans said premarital sex was wrong; 21 percent said it was acceptable. By the early 1970s. Just 47 percent were critical of sex before marriage.

In 1985, a majority of Americans — 52 percent — said premarital sex was acceptable. Today about 60 percent say the practice is acceptable and 38 percent say it is wrong. For young adults the acceptability is higher; 67% of them see it as acceptable.

What we can see here is that people are now growing up in an environment that is increasingly both accepting and practicing sex before marriage.

Some young people I know, people in their teens and 20’s  have said to me recently, it seems like “Everybody is doing it,” which is pretty true, but not entirely, and so “Why not do it too?” The current powerful wave of acceptance, a kind of tsunami of peer influence, makes sex to many young people a no-brainer! Ride the wave! Just do it! No need to talk about this anymore.

But we don’t need leave our brains at the door when it comes to sex. We can talk about it, and we need to because it matters, what we do, how it makes us feel, how it shapes identity. This discussion isn’t over. A significant number of polled people in the US, 40%, still do not think premarital sex is wise. That’s means it’s still a viable issue, still up for discussion.  I think its smart to talk about it more, think about it more, and not just statistically or just morally.

Sex is a big deal, obviously; it’s so amazing, so powerful, so universally practiced! It has so much built into it to make it fun, meaningful and desirable, but also challenging and painful and even potentially harmful to us! Sex can make a life, but the consequences that stem from it can also break a life. The teen mom living in poverty with her young children is too often a tragedy in the making. Sexual activity is a rich, complex, influential thing that it warrants an ongoing discussion. Identity and sex, the psychology of sex, the emotional component of sex — all would be good to explore more.

Consider the issue of how sex affects identity. Some people think about sex as merely a physical event. Not so. To have sex with someone is to enter into a psychological and social experience. Sex is a movement from me to us. Sex takes us from individuated, to combined, from separated to bonded. When we have sex with another person our bodies merge, and so do our identities. We are now one in a shared intimacy, one in a deeper sense of vulnerability, one in sexuality, one in knowing each other, one in shared history.

Whether or not we later describe this as a good or bad experience, either way we have bared ourselves and opened ourselves to shared experience, mutual vulnerability, common identity. “We did it,” means we combined!

As a result we will never again think of that other person the same, or will our relationship with them be the same. We have crossed a line and entered into the “us” zone of identity. Whether we just fall asleep afterwards or have a long talk into the night, we will in some sense carry that person with us as we go forward. One of the difficulties that ensues from this if it is premarital is that we may well feel closer to that person than we really are. We have, in a sense, acted married and so we may feel married because we have married our most intimate selves to another soul.  Sex sometimes, in this manner, actually confuses people’s thinking. Sex can make us stupid. Once we sleep with someone, we may, in effect stay asleep and fail to notice areas of deep incompatibility that will eventually undo the relationship.

The other way it might go is that if the sex is premarital, and casual, and the partners don’t know each other well, then they may have a tendency to dismiss the ramifications of what they did. “It was nothing! It was just a one-night-stand.” That’s not true; sex is always  something —  it is intrinsically the kind of thing that people build lives on, the kind of thing that has always been honored as sacred, for centuries and centuries, respected, valued, treasured, a kind of gateway to family and community. Pretending that isn’t true won’t make its specialness go away. Sex is a moment of profound mutuality, a moment in which one soul opens its door to another, sups together, and sleeps together, in trust. That special person, chosen to share in that delicious, memorable, soul bonding feast will remain inside, long after the door has closed and the phone stops ringing.

The truth is that whenever we have sex with someone, and then separate from each other for good, the next day or ten years later, there will be a ripping apart of what was bonded by the experience, whether we hear the tear or not. Sex bonds, and that bond undone is a rip in our hearts.

Therefore, to wait to have sex until after marriage has the potential to increase the chance that we may live with a preserved, slowly deepening, enriching and safe experience of shared sexual identity. If we commit with rings and vows, then bond sexually and stay together, we increase our odds of not damaging our fragile identities and those of others.

There is another aspect of shared sexuality, that also needs to be more carefully thought out. It is the underdiscussed factor of self-control. This is huge! Good sex and self-control go hand-in-hand.  I like this part of the discussion; it’s personal to me. Self-control has been something I’ve thought a lot about.

Self-control is crucial to a good life. To live well, we must practice self-control with money, with time, with food, with work, with thoughts, with all our appetites in order to successfully navigate life. Take the issue of self-control and our sexual appetite — this is very important to good relationship. Self-control is deep part of true love.

Here is the deal. Long lasting relationships, marriage itself, has seasons, and they don’t all promote good sex. Couples will find that over a life-time their sex will be limited or even put on hold from time-to-time by stress, tiredness, pregnancy, children, work obligations, fights, psychological instability, travel separation, illness and aging. Sex isn’t always “great!”

During those times when we are not getting from the other person what we need sexually, we will need to practice some level of self-control. It won’t do to have a fling, an affair, a one-nighter with someone else just because sex at home isn’t happening or isn’t good. Our partners won’t be okay with that. The horrible relational trauma that comes with such betrayals indicate in itself how special we really all know the sexual bond is. Sex, married or unmarried sex, is an area in which our souls long for some kind of trust, loyalty, trust and stability.

Self-control is certainly shaped and affected by our experiences with premarital sex. If we practice self-control before we are married, we help ready ourselves for self-control after we are married. If we can’t be trusted before we are married, with our sexual impulses, then that leaves open the question, can we be trusted after we are married? We may be, but trust is built, for us and other people, on a track record. And there is something else here. Our overall outlook on and satisfaction with sex will always be based on our previous experiences. The research shows that the more sexual partners a person has had, the more they are likely to be sexually unfulfilled. They tend to compare experiences, to compare partners, and find themselves dissatisfied.

Sex, good sex, sex within good relationships, sex that fulfills, sex that lasts over a lifetime, is steeped in self-control and shaped by it.

Sex, what to do? The choices matter, and as we have seen, these choices involve the preservation of unfragmented identity and the preservation of relationships. What we do matters, and what we decide can change based on rational thinking and decision-making. Culturally, we as a culture have been moving in the direction of practicing sexuality more before marriage. That can change, and there is some indication that it is changing.

“Teen birth rates fell steeply in the United States from 2007 through 2011, resuming a decline that began in 1991 but briefly interrupted in 2006 and 2007. The overall rate declined 25% from 41.5 per 1,000 teenagers aged 15–19 in 2007 to 31.3 in 2011 — a record low.”

The economy, birth control, education — all have been considers as factors, but even the experts are not entirely sure how to account for these changes.

It is true that we have been talking more to young people about sex than ever before out of concern for the quality of their lives. This is one influencing factior. More talk is needed, especially at the level of understanding the matters of the heart, how sexual activity affects identity, emotion, and the development of needed life skills like self-control.

We will keep having sex, no doubt about that.  So, lets also keep thinking and talking about sex too.

We haven’t figured ourselves out yet, but we certainly should keep trying.

This matters.

A Template for Living Well

Posted: May 29, 2013 in thriving
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None of us perfectly fit someone else’s template for living. We are unique, and here in the Unuted States we love to claim that. Each person is unique; it’s our folk wisdom National Anthem.

Maybe each person is unique, and each country is unique, but none of us should ignore a wise template for living. The good life looks surprisingly similar here in the US, and we who are older should tell younger people this. We should show them this, with our lives.

Look now, this is child’s play; no it isn’t, but we shouldn’t ignore life smart.

Those who marry when between the ages of 20 to 24 are nearly twice as likely to get divorced as those who get married between the ages of 25 to 29 years old.

Personal maturity matters when it comes to marriage. When it comes to being single too!

In our culture, people with more education tend to make more money. There are exceptions. Not that many.

  • High school drop outs: $18,734
  • High school graduates: $27,915
  • College grads (with a bachelor’s degree): $51,206
  • Advanced degree holders: $74,602

Does this matter? Well, people with higher incomes tend to live substantially longer than those without.

What doesn’t work?

Heavy drinking and drug use doesn’t work.

Research has identified subtle but important brain changes occurring among adolescents with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), resulting in a decreased ability in problem solving, verbal and non-verbal retrieval, visuospatial skills, and working memory.

Men who get divorced, and stay divorced, that doesn’t work so well either. They are at really high risk for premature mortality. It would have been better for their health had they not married at all.

Conscientious people tend to stay healthier and live longer. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive generally prolongs life.

There isn’t a need to go on and on here. Point made; some ways to live are better than others.

Solomon wrote:

Nothing is better for a man
than that he should eat and
drink, and that his soul should
enjoy good in his labor.

This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.

It matters that we make decisions that move us toward maturity, toward stability, toward lasting relationships, toward meaningful work, toward being responsible, toward enjoying the life God intended for us to enjoy.

The good life has always looked pretty much the same. It is responsible, it isn’t drug and alcohol dependent, it involves having been trained in something, it is not too rushed. It takes work, it involves loving, close relationships, (whether married or single) and it includes God!

College isn’t for everyone, marriage isn’t always the good life, money isn’t a panacea, some can’t work in regular jobs. I’m not trying to promote a middle-class, materialistic ethic, but maturity, training, hard work and having enough to take care of yourself and others matters.

Here is the deal. Unique is often not that unique; noncomformity and irresponsibility may be kind of fun for a time, kicking back can be a kick, falling in love young is an awesome feeling, but ignoring a smart, responsible, proven template for living — it can be a disaster.

Seeing You

Posted: May 19, 2013 in people
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“Put one hand here, one there,” I said.

And off he went.

“Ah, I did it wrong,” he said

“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anything. Ty it again. Just don’t stop moving when you put the drum down.”

I was teaching a fifteen year old to run a drum floor sander on an oak floor I was refinishing.

When we finished he said, “Thanks, that was interesting.” It was a good feeling for me too.

Working with young people — I like it, old teaching young, and young helping old.

Earlier in the day, in the parking lot at the church, I ran into Angelina. When I saw her, I got down on both knees. She’s five. We are friends. She comes to church with her grandma. Two years ago I adopted her for Christmas. She hasn’t forgotten. We always trade hugs when we see each other, and it’s safe and warm with us, like Christmas.

When I was in my twenties I remember wishing I had someone besides my parents who thought I was special, who believed in me, who would help me forward. It didn’t happen. When I was young, no one ever said to me, “Wow, you are going to do well as a thinker, as a writer, as a leader. Go for it!”

Very few people, besides my mom, saw what I was to become, and helped me move toward that. I didn’t get much help running the sander.

But more helping and mentoring of us all is needed, more seeing into what someone might be and calling it forth. More compliments are needed, more affirmations, more prophesy, more invitations to work together, more opportunity. More showing people how to do what we know how to do is needed. More crossing the generation barrier is needed.

Today I told a young mom who put on a garage sale for the church, ” I like you. You are really organized. You communicate well. I have something in mind for you. Let’s talk later.”

We will. She has got it, the organizational thing, the ability to make stuff mind, the smooth talk skill, the super woman energy source.

Last week I told my friend Glen, who was taking off on a camping trip with eight to ten boys and a few dads, “Man, I love your concern for young men! It is so cool how you have helped the kids in your group without dads. You are the real deal.”

He is! Glen is old, but he is helping young. He is believing in someone besides himself. Glen knows that young men without fathers should not be unattended. He is preventing something; he is crafting something. He is manufacturing social endowment, giving away the store, adding value to human beings.

We need this. People around us need to be adopted, empowered, endowed. We need to tell more people, when we see them doing well, ” You are the real deal! You are something special! You are going to go far!”

What are we thinking, keeping quiet? We are not noticing potential, not seeing the amazing person standing before us, not affirming genius when we see it. We should not be so silent. We should enthuse over them all, the old the young, the disabled, the failed, the smart, the average.

We should smile over them, beam on them, hover behind them, like good parents, shouting, “You can do it! Go for it! You’ve got it in you!” And we should include them in what we do, and show them how to sand, to refinish and to redeem life.

It isn’t that we ever want to flatter, bribe or manipulate with pseudo compliments or false affirmations. We aren’t looking to use people to do what we need to do. No, we want only the truth about each one; we only want to speak out the real value and actual potential in each person, teaching as much as possible as opportunity presents itself.

What is needed is to give the young an opportunity. What is needed is to give the old a vision for passing along their own precious, rich, beautiful familial, occupational, psychological, spiritual and social endowments.

The thing is to get out of ourselves enough to recognize that the amazing people around us are headed somewhere, and that we can help them get there.

There are two ways.

We can walk into rooms as if to say, “Here I am!”

Or we can walk into rooms gushing in redemptive, life-changing honesty and humility, “There you are!”

This Is What I Do — Kind Of

Posted: May 14, 2013 in people
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What it’s like to do what someone else does?

What’s it like to be a rock star, the President, the criminal, the scientist, the spy, the addict, the mother, the etymologist the homeless?

I don’t know. I do kind of know what it is like to do what I do. It’s a bit complicated, but in a way I like, but maybe I can explain it to you. I have four vocations —  at once. I know the inside and out of a quadratic profession.

I am a thinker-writer-teacher-pastor, and I like that; I especially like the bleed between the four. I like the blood and guts and danger in the mix, and the safety in it too — swords, advances, battles, salves, bandages and medicines.

As a thinker I sit a lot and brood. I chew the conceptual cud.

Then I write. As a thinker-writer I become Adam, exploring Eden. I become Aristotle, sorting out the creation. I’m Linnaeus. I hunt for new species. I find little thought beasties. I name them. I tend to them with adjectives, feed them synonyms and poke them a bit with rhetorical devices. I classify the little lovelies, and groupify them.

I pick, sort and stackify words, sentences, larger units. At first, it turns out badly. Then I move them, again, again and again until I better like the ways the word-thoughts line up — just right, like school children at a classroom door.

Then I pat them on the heads, if they please me, and press “Publish.” Then people read them — a few do.

That’s a little bit what it’s like to be a thinker and a writer. Add eye strain, rejection and insecurity and you are getting there.

But it’s not like that. It’s never that clean.

Then, when I am the teacher, I throw the words I’ve discovered as a thinker and writer out of my mouth out into an open spaces with people in them. Then I’m like a Plato, Jesus, Pascal or perhaps Thoreau — or perhaps not. Its interesting what happens then. The ideas I send out scatter.

Written words hold their place a bit and shake, but spoken words run more crazy, like bottle rockets.

As the teacherly words come out of my mouth, they tangle up with the all the words that have ever been said before and with all the words extant in whoever is listening to me. Then my precious little word stacks bounce around inside their heads.

Then just for fun and to establish rapport, I may swing a verbal right jab or linguistic left hook or a kick in the funny bone or what ever comes to mind to try to get to the students. The goal is to get to them — fast and hard.

Sometimes my teaching words stick in people, like spears, and savage what they think, and sometimes the words I speak knock people sideways and they head off in a new direction. That’s kind of cool.

That happens less than you’d think. And then there are the weird things that happen to teachers. Sometimes the ideas I’ve delivered change shapes right in the air, right between me and the listeners, and magically becomes something I didn’t even say.

Then people compliment me or criticize me for telling them things the very stuff they packed into the room with them. It can get interesting. Sometimes it turns out great! I’ve gotten credit for many ideas that other people invented while I was talking. It’s one of the perks of the teacher — bogus credit.

That’s a bit of what it’s like to be a teacher. But not much.

And when I am a pastor my vocations kind of all combine. A pastor, as I understand it is a leader. He is a good thinker and writer and teacher who is taking people place — mostly toward God.

As a pastor, I lead a lot. That’s what I do. I’m not sure what other pastors do, but this is what I do. I lead other people into who God meant for them to be, and I lead places into what God meant for them to become, hopefully. That’s the medicine in what I do.

To do this I listen a lot, to other people’s words and to reality, and to my honed sense of what’s good and what is not, and I try to listen closely to God.

As I listen, I look for a pattern, a sense of things, a drift, a needed next step, a forming personality, a set of emotions that need validation and for a new word or concept. Often I listen through other people, listening hard for the thinker, writer, teacher and pastor within them. Then I help them explore and discover the medicine within the next clear step.

It’s my opinion that people trying to follow God often have a sense of what’s needed next, especially if someone is there to listen, challenge and affirm what they think they are hearing.

The writer, the teacher the pastor as I experience them are really the same thing. These professions are in interaction with each other and with a kind of deep looking, inside and out.

This is just a little bit like what it’s like to do what I do.

I love it!

If you did it, or anything even vaguely like it, you would like it too.

How To Be Okay With Yourself

Posted: May 9, 2013 in god
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“Green is a restful color,” she said. We were sitting in a kitchen in Washington, D C in the spring. The view outside, gorgeous green.

“Yes, so you might not want to do your yard back in San Diego in xeriscape,” I said. “No green, no rest — for your psyche.”

There isn’t enough anyway, anywhere, green or rest.

Our deep selves are like the seas in Albert Pinkham Rider oils that I saw in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art yesterday, all dark, tossed and stormy — threatening too. Perhaps we disapprove of ourselves and others too much.

We look through an imperfect spyglass. No inward, stormward peering eyes are 20/20. All human eyes critique, out of focus. We look out and see other people’s thunderstorms. We look in and see terrifying oceans. Better than anyone else, we see our own conflicted selves. Men in containers lost in wind-blown seas see what only the boated, angled and near-tipped selves can see — disaster coming!

Once, broken over her disabled condition, my daughter told me, “I hate myself.” We both wept. More tragicified salt water. What else was there to do?

I think God may see differently.

Perhaps we haven’t noticed but God is much less judgmental than we are. He rides the wind above our inner storms. His patience with our distubifying selfishness, greed, lust and brazen indifference is one of the the most obvious things about him.

Perfection is more relaxed with imperfection than imperfection is with itself. God looks at us, sees it all, and loves.

God sees us, within the forgiveness gifted us in Christ, as pure and good and even perfect. We have trouble agreeing with him.

But God is right about us. In Christ, riding in his sound, safe, shuttered, sea-worthy craft, the sea calms, and we rest. He places to our eye an accurate glass to look in and out at what he sees, and we see for the first time, good, in focus.

Can you be good with seeing yourself and others as good?

If so — then you too will see spring greens, and rest.

Kind

Posted: April 29, 2013 in people
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The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in–you rub the sore
When you should bring the plaster.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

“He called me a boy,” she said. “Why do people do things like that?”

“People don’t think; they just say stuff,”  I said trying to help. I could tell she was hurt. Someone rubbed the sore.

“You look very nice today. That’s your color,” I said, bringing the plaster the best I could.

“Thank’s!” she said and smiled, bandaged, just a bit.

Kind —  it’s a medicine. It’s salve to the soul. We need it more. Shakespeare got it right, as usual; too often the truth we speak lacks “some gentleness.” We bring a wound when we should bring a bandage. We get fired up, we don’t think, we comment, we misread, we blame, we critique, we attack, we wax unkind.

The other day I locked myself out of my office. My office manager drove from home, to let me back in. She didn’t say, “You should pay more attention.” She just smiled, and let me in. Kindness. Beautiful.

Kindness is the reaction that has a way of minimizing embarrassment, normalizing weakness, affirming loss. Kindness is a warm blanket draped over a shivering soul.

I told someone about a failure of mine. She said, “You did the best you could with what you knew. Using the facts you had at hand, you made the best decision you could at the time.” That’s true, and kind.

My disabled daughter Rosalind can be shockingly kind. If I mention, in casual talk, that her friend Steve can’t speak, and he can’t, she’ll say, “But he can sign really well.” If I say about another disabled friend, “He has trouble controlling his anger,” she responds, “But he really tries. I think he is frustrated.” Rosalind’s default response toward others with disabilities is kind.

This is revealing. When we get it, the pain, when we have experienced it, disability or failure or loss, then kind gets worked into us.  Kind hugs come from the one who knows what it is to need a hug.

Kindness is a kind of strength. Recently one of my friends stepped to a table after a meeting to help another friend, suffering from Parkinson’s, rise from his chair. Another went to his other side, and both, taking an arm, lifted him up so he could stand, and then they waited until he could gather control of his body and leave the room with dignity. That’s kind.

Kindness is not a wimp. Kindness is a tough guy. Kindness does some serious shutting up about things that could be criticized. Kindness does some heavy lifting for those who cannot lift themselves. Kindness crushes criticism with  help. Kindness has a kind of super strength. It can nullify meanness. It can erase hurt. It can doctor a broken ego.

How unwise are they that lack the gentle touch.

Every healthy soul is constructed out of a thousand kindnesses received — and given.

Elizabeth

Posted: April 17, 2013 in beautiful
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Then I asked, “Why do you like the trees?” speaking loudly to be sure she heard me.

“They make me feel calm and peaceful,” Elizabeth said.

“I like the trees that grow over the walk,” she went on, pointing to the ones that met and formed a canopy ahead over the sidewalk. “I like the birds in them, and I like the clouds that look like angels.”

I looked up as we walk along together, slowly, to accommodate her cane. There were some patchy white cumulus clouds overhead, but I couldn’t see the angels.

“The birds sing in the trees,” she said.

We walked under the leafy canopy, I luxuriated in time with her, ambling along beside her, passing now through this wonder and that, and suddenly the world felt magical to me, seeing it from her angle, through her eyes.

“I have a lot of memories of this community,” she said. “My mom and I pushed a shopping cart up the hill from Target with our Christmas tree in it.”

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“I lived here with my mom for twenty-one years,” she said.

When we reached her apartment, I felt like I was entering a sanctuary. Right away, our focus went to the cat, sleeping on a paper bag under the old TV. Cinderella got up, and came over for some love, rubbing against her leg.

“She likes me to pet her,” she said, “and rub her ears. What color do you think she is?” She paused and then answered herself, “She’s white, and black, and gray around her head.” Then she asked uncertainly, “Isn’t she?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Those marks around her eye are gray. She is a sweet kitty. She’s perfect for you.”

“She’s skinnier than when I got her from the animal shelter,” she said,”I think she lost some weight. Probably needs to lose more.”

The cat was overweight. It was also deaf. It had formerly been abandoned, but it now it had bonded with her, in only two weeks.

She looked up at the wall above her, covered with photographs, clippings and paintings.”My mom liked Indians,” she said. She paused, then said, “It’s really hard sometimes, with all her stuff here around me.”

“You’re doing really good,” I said, “With Cinderella and your therapist, your recovery groups and your church family.”

“I guess,” she said. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

We talked a bit more. I left with a hug. Her hearing aid screeched.

Walking back though the old neighborhood, under the canopy of bird-filled trees, underneath the unseen angels in the clouds, I thought about her life.

Fifty years, side-by-side with her mom, fifty years of being completely taken care of, and then suddenly, boom, her mom is gone, and she is alone, deaf, caned, uncertain, grieving desperately, struggling like all of us, for sanity, and yet ever so bravely, taking the first, small, courageous steps forward into a new world.

I’m so glad I know her.

Elizabeth is taking care of her cat.

Elizabeth is taking care of herself.

She is taking care of me too.

Tidal Worship

Posted: April 9, 2013 in church
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The water was high on the rocks in the flood control channel. I flew along parallel with the water, powering down the freeway, ogling the tidal flow beside me, eager now to see the marsh.

I accelerated up the overpass and swept down the other side of it, through a long banked turn, and there it was — the salt marsh, flooded. It was filled floor-flat. Where there had been mud, now there was a lake; where there had been sinuous narrow marshy channels, now there were wide rivers — marsh to bay, one body of water, with the ocean beyond, rocking the continents.

Life is tidal. I love it. I don’t. I don’t when my emotions flood me under. My experiences, thoughts and feelings, taken at the flood and not, at high tide and low tide, can be a little disconcerting.

Last Saturday evening I sat in Brown Chapel at Point Loma University and watched a band, all young musicians and singers, lead worship. People in the audience stood, some raised their hands, some went forward to stations to do art, to write, to reflect.

I did nothing. I just sat, and watched. I felt nothing. I didn’t stand. I never raised my hands. What was moving some of these worshipers, what filled them with passion, left me as placid as a mud flat.

It’s interesting, how we are differently moved.

And then again, the other day, driving my car and listening to worship song playing loudly on the car system, I broke and cried. It was a song I’ve heard many times, stored on my iPhone, but this time it washed me under.

What’s the deal? Obviously, the movements of our emotions, our spirits, these are not something we control. Our passions, our worship moments come on us as they will, not by choice or by plan but somewhat inexplicably — low feelings unscripted and high emotions unanticipated.

But despite this tidal reality, this emotional norm, we are easily made uneasy with ourselves. When others are moved by a worship service, a prayer, movie, song or other public performance, then sometime we too feel that we should be moved. In church, I have experienced an identity shift crisis over this. Should I be true to my own feelings, my own identity, or must I conform to the current group’s identity, their experience? It is common, in church, to experience a peer mandate to “get with it,” spiritually.

But when we experience church differently from others, the worship dissonance may disrupt our sense of harmony and create internal conflict. “What’s wrong with me?” we sometimes muse in worship settings. Others around me are most alive to the moment, I feel most shockingly dead.

I can stand should-to-shoulder with others who are pouring out their hearts to God in worship and feel nothing. I have even had the unpleasant experience of feeling critical of fellow worshipers, as I stood with them, and critical of the whole “worship” experience around me. It is possible, to be insanely yucked up while others are insanely fired up.

What’s wrong? Nothing. Nothing is wrong when we experience a worship disconnect more than is wrong with anyone else.

Jesus himself explained this quite nicely in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Jesus was saying that we who are born of the Spirit, the children of God, the ones who know and worship God, don’t control the coming and going of the Holy Spirit of God.

Face it, we don’t know when or where the Holy Spirit will flood us, move us, emote us, inspire us, and when He won’t.

“Duh!” we don’t control God. We don’t control inspiration. We don’t control the presence of God. We don’t control the tidal movements of God. We don’t decide when we will be moved, when not. We don’t control the inner workings of our souls. We don’t have much control over emotions.

That acknowledged, here’s the deal: Don’t try.

I’ve been through it all — the ecstatic moments, the inert ones, the high tide, the mud. I’ve been struck emotional by the presence of God. I’ve been in his presence and felt absolutely no awareness of him. We all have.

The upshot of all this?

Relax. The tide comes in, the tide goes out; that’s normal, within you, with God.

Life, worship, emotions, your own soul — it’s all tidal.

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