Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough: Recent Episodes
Craig Lounsbrough
Life Talk is a podcast intentionally designed to enrich your life, deepen your marriage, enhance your parenting, maximize your work life, and dramatically embolden this journey that we call life.
Think About It
You are what you choose to be. Life is not a dictated script. It’s far from being something to which you have to surrender. Yes, there are things that we did not ask for that we have to deal with. Regardless, whatever our flaws there is always room to do something about them. Always. Some option always exists. There are always possibilities. Life affords us choices and chances. The human spirit is tenacious, and powerful, and wonderfully creative. Don’t underestimate your capabilities and your resources. Realize that the resources that you possess outclass and outweigh any flaw, perceived or real. Choose to view yourself differently and more accurately. Choose to choose you for despite your low self-esteem, you won’t be disappointed.
“The Self That I Long to Believe In” is a bold, timely, and inspirational book that will help you to effectively build your self-esteem. Get your copy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. I hope that you take the time to enjoy all of the many programs on our podcast. You’ll find us on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. See you next time.
Defined By Our Deficits
“Any deficit that you have can never stand against the asset that that deficit is waiting to become.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
You know, we come to define ourselves more by what we lack than by what we possess. We define ourselves by the successes that we haven’t had, the relationships that didn’t work, the careers that never happened, and the dreams that never got off the ground because they never made it to the runway.
All of these things tell us everything that we are not. The assets that we don’t have. The confidence that we lack. The intelligence that is never intelligent enough. The talents that we don’t possess, and the determination that is never sufficiently determined. We see ourselves as a sad compilation of everything that we are not.
These deficits result in shattered relationships. Shuttered opportunities. Job losses. Financial failures. Addictions. Upended careers. Friendships that went up in flames and the charred remains of families that fell to the same fate. The shame and embarrassment mocks us, telling us that we are everything that is wrong with everything that went wrong.
Surrounded by so many failures that evidence both the depth and number of our deficits, we become defined by those deficits. We feel that there is nothing else that we can define ourselves by. We are lulled (or sometimes thrust) into the belief that we are the sum total of our failures. And soon, believing becomes becoming.
The Power of Thought
Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…” That’s both incredibly powerful, but wildly dangerous. We become what we think. We think ourselves into who we are. Therefore, we can think ourselves into the deficits that we think about. We can let those things define us until we ourselves are convinced of that definition.
The Question…
The question then becomes, “Who are we really?” Are we defined by our deficits? Is that our lot in life? Is there no escaping the things that we’ve screwed up? Do they leave an indelible mark of defeat and incompetence?
Our Greatest Assets in Disguise
Or, are our deficits are greatest assets in disguise? Is it possible that we are defined far more by the potential that rests in the deficit than the deficit itself? Do the roots of something great lay deep in our worst failures?
Our lives are assets in the making. We are always standing on the verge of becoming something better. Something greater. The ‘better’ in our lives is always just one step away. One decision away. One choice away. On attitude shift away. The ‘better’ is always that close and never any farther away.
The asset that any one of our deficits can become will always be far greater than the deficit from which it arose. Assets birthed of our deficits become the greatest parts of who we are. Taking what we believe to be defeat, seeing the rudimentary elements of victory embedded in that defeat, and turning that defeat into decisive victory is the stuff of true victory.
We’ve Got It All Backwards
God turns life on its head. He reverses the order of things. What is dead dies to death and becomes alive. Water surrenders its fluidity to feet that walk on it. Blindness becomes blinded by light. Legs that limp become legs that leap. Food for thousands from food for one. Millions from pennies. It’s all backwards. Gloriously backwards.
Sin destroys. It’s sets everything back. That’s its single mission and sole agenda. God not only shuts sin down, He throw it in reverse. He works it against itself. As Joseph said to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…” It’s all reversed. God walks us back from death to life. From hopelessness to hope. From fear to faith. From lives engulfed in deficits to lives empowered by assets.
We Don’t Think That Way
The problem is, we don’t think that way. Any belief that things might actually work this way is beaten out of us by the messages that our failures have beaten into us. We might visualize stopping something bad in our lives, or at least slowing it down. Maybe we can reign it in or temper it a bit.
But we don’t think in terms of reversals. Radical, impossible, improbable, ingenious, and wildly liberating reversals. Sin says that we can’t do that. God says that we’re supposed to do that.
And So…The Purpose of Deficits
Our deficits were meant to be reversed. That’s what we have them for. And in the reversal they become the assets that we never visualized them becoming. Hidden within our failures there lays all of the composite parts that set the stage for our greatest successes. The worst of us contains the lessons that teach us how to be the best of us. Therefore, our deficits do not define who we are. Rather, they tell us who we can become.
You Are More…
The deficits that define you are the ones that you’ve allowed to define you. God says that you are more than any deficit or combination of deficits. And that ‘more’ is boldly stated in the thirty-one “I Am” statements outlined in the Bible. That ‘more’ is laid out for you to embrace, ingest, and incorporate into your life in wildly wonderful and transformational ways. Your ‘more’ is waiting for you.
Conclusion
You will find all thirty-one of these “I Am” statements outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am.” This book is a fresh, entirely thought-provoking, and richly insightful thirty-one day devotional that will assist you in both discovering and living out your real self. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.
"Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control."
- Proverbs 25:28
Life is filled with pain. Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain. We’ve all run into it, or have had it run into us, or have had it run over us. That pain can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. It can be a product of the people around us, or the person within us. It can come to us in the form of circumstances beyond our control, or circumstances that we should have controlled. We might have had nothing to do with it, or everything to do with it. In whatever way it comes, pain comes to all of us.
The perpetually debilitating nature of our pain gradually weakens our resolve to fight it. Our belief that we can somehow beat it dissolves into some sort of mythical fantasy that becomes dimmer with each passing day. Desperate to have even a moment of relief from the pain that dogs our steps, we turn to self-medication. Self-medication can take on any number of forms, but the desire to seek relief is what drives them all. If these methods of self-medication deliver the desired relief, our decision to use them is reinforced. In time, we can begin to develop a gradually increasing dependency upon them that is far beyond their intended use or actual benefit.
These means of self-medication soothe our emotional state, grant us a sense of control over our pain, and become so thoroughly integrated into our daily lifestyle that to remove them would cause a disruption in our lives that we perceive as far greater than the disruption of the dependency that we have now created. We soon discover that the means of self-medication has created its own pain. And in time that pain replaces the pain that we were originally self-medicating against, leaving us in the perpetually debilitating state that is certain to be our fate if we decide to swap one kind of pain for another in order to somehow remedy our pain.
The longer the dependency, the tighter its grip. We fear the seemingly insurmountable challenge of breaking the addiction. This fear is compounded by our concern that what we medicated ourselves against will return in force if we forsake our addiction. In essence, we are held hostage to a something that numbs but never cures.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“I can do all things through him who gives me strength.”
- Philippians 4:13
We are bound by all kinds of limits. And we wonder why certain limits have to be limits. Why are our dreams stunted by limits that put them just outside of our reach? Why do we have relationships that become suffocated by limits, leaving them only a shadow of what they could be? Why do our job aspirations, our hopes for our children, our desires for a better world…why do all of these fall victim to limits that should not be limits?
We are a people of hope and vision. We can imagine great things. Incredible things. We have the ability to visualize a greater good and a richer existence. We can craft fantastic dreams that are enriching beyond imagination. Yet, many of these fall prey to limitations that we did not create and cannot overcome. The best of ourselves and our dreams are often left languishing in the face of limits that thwart the best of us.
There seems to be cruelty about it all. Something that borders on savagery. If our limits are going to cut the feet out from under our greatest dreams, why are we allowed to dream these things in the first place? Why a vision if limits render it impotent?
Limitations are not the issue. There’s a vulnerability to every one of our limitations. A limit to them. They are suspectable. They are not as ironclad and invincible as they would appear. And that’s the reason that they exist. They exist to be broken. Not by us, but by the God Who breaks them daily. In the midst of the impossibilities that he faced, Paul said, “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.” That is the promise of limits broken. The promise of dreams safe to dream and visions worth having.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple 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 body.
- I Corinthians 6:19-20
Life is precious. Therefore, the loss of it goes deep. There are losses that are a natural part of our existence. They hurt, but at least they make sense. But then there are the losses that don’t make sense. The losses that didn’t need to happen. The losses that were premature, unnecessary, avoidable, and entirely out of step with life as we know it (or would like to know it).
Suicide is one of these. This loss was a choice. In all likelihood it involved the convergence of many things dark and weighty; hopelessness, despair, life gone wrong, self-hatred, incessant failures, the inability to find a niche, dreams smashed, relationships lost, faith gone. And the pressing compilation of such things tips the scales and renders death preferable to life. At some point of darkest desperation, a decision is made and an action is taken. And suddenly we are left with a loss that doesn’t make sense. A loss that didn’t need to happen. A loss that was premature and unnecessary. A loss that doesn’t fit because it shouldn’t. And despite our best effort to understand it all, resolution eludes us and people continue to die.
And all of those who live out their lives in those places are eventually left asking the question of “why?” But maybe we need to replace the question of “why” with the question of “how” because that question holds the answers to what we need to change in our lives, our families, our communities, and our nation to save the next life.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’”
- Romans 3:23
Failure. It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way. It’s falling short. It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark. It’s the dream that we couldn’t breathe life into, or the fear that we couldn’t breathe the life out of. It’s the relationship that we couldn’t hold because we were not worth being held. It’s the thing that puts us in our place because we foolishly thought that we might be better than that place. It’s falling down and finding no reason to get back up.
Failure is a stark message regarding our ability or lack thereof. It is the undeniable evidence of what we feared might be true, that we are in fact inadequate or incompetent or whatever we feared that we might be. It reminds us of our misdirected efforts to elevate our place in life, and it assigns us the very station that we worked so hard to avoid. It tells us that our dreams are bigger than our ability to achieve them. That mediocrity is our lot in life, so we’d be wise to settle there and at least do that well.
But we forget that failure is the refusal to try. Trying and not succeeding is the very place where God has placed the richest cache of learning opportunities available to us. It’s a chance to try again, but to try differently. It’s an opportunity to become everything that failure says we cannot become because it is failure itself that has taught us how to outflank it. Falling short, missing the mark, or pulling out of the race are nothing more than events packed rich with learning opportunities that set the stage for greater things…possibly great things. It is not the fact that these things happened. It is what we do with the fact that they happened. And if we seize the opportunities for growth that God has graciously planted within each of these, failure will fall to a life rich with success.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’”
- Psalm 139:14
One of the worst things is not knowing who you are. And probably a close second to that is to hate what you do know. And right behind that there’s the effort to create something that you think you’ll like in order to solve both of those problems.
But all of this misses the only battle that’s worth fighting, and the only effort that will insure success. Life is not about creating ourselves. Rather, it’s about discovering ourselves. It’s not about assuming some presumed right to make ourselves what we’re not. Rather, it’s about the privilege of discovering who we already are. And that journey is one of the most profound journeys that we are each privileged to take.
Yet we live in a world bent on creating what cannot be created. Certainly, we can mimic many things, but the mimicking will never make us those things. We stand by and watch those committed to becoming what they are not, realizing that the greatest pain experienced by these persons is not the struggle of loving themselves. Rather, it’s the heartbreaking failure that they will experience in the persistent effort to make themselves what they are not. And the self-hatred that is certain to follow that failure will handily surpass that which drove them to this decision in the first place.
The rampant declaration to pursue such agendas and to force them on larger society illustrates the failed nature of the endeavor. It would be wise to remember that if something is based in truth it will not need us to sell it simply because the priceless nature of truth always places it beyond the reach of any such market. And one of the greatest truths that we are in desperate need of embracing is the truth of who we are, along with the equally great truth of who we are not.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’”
- Psalm 27:10
There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence. As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence. Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does.
When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places. In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether. We work to believe that this might be better anyway, or that they were going to leave sooner or later, or that they needed their space to live their lives. Yet we soon discover that no rationalization is ever big enough or convincing enough to release someone of a commitment for which there is no release.
And in the desperation of times like these we begin to realize that we’ve turned to God because He has remained permanent. It is His permanence that becomes our sure refuge. Our sense of stability arises from His stability. Our ability to somehow craft a future empty of a parent that should have been part of that crafting is centered on the fact that God is a certain part of that future as much as He is a part of the present that is shaping that future. And we have the certainty that He will never abandon us in either.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
“After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’”
- John 13:21
Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so. It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that the cost of crushing us in order to advance their agendas is deemed as entirely reasonable and indisputably acceptable. In this horrifically devastating scenario, we become fodder in someone’s blind pursuit of objectives that such an action will, in fact, never achieve.
Once the perpetrator comes to understand that both the agenda and the means chosen to achieve it accomplish neither, they will quickly fabricate a distorted narrative crafted to sustain the acceptability of what they’ve done. Such a short-sighted effort will demand repeated editing as the narratives cannot keep step with the ever-emerging realities of the betrayal. And herein the betrayal multiplies as the increasingly frustrated perpetrator fruitlessly attempts to justify choices that are ever more intensely being revealed as flawed, failed, and beyond the scope of every fresh iteration.
Yet, we are not human fodder. Betrayal is not a reflection of who ‘we’ are. It is, in fact, a reflection of who ‘they’ are. And although the person who betrayed us will adamantly deny such a reality, we must remember that this is simply a failed means by which the betrayer will work to justify unjustifiable actions. You are not human fodder. You are not refuse to be discarded at someone else’s whim. Quite the opposite…you are a child of God. You are a manifestation of His amazing ingenuity. You are cherished royalty. You are a one-of-a-kind person with a one-of-a-kind calling. That is who you are.
You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
Grief and loss are something with which we are all well acquainted. Some of the losses that we've experienced are small, while others are utterly overwhelming.
Our natural response in our loss is to press past the pain in an effort to resume our normal lives as quickly as possible. But in the rush to heal and free ourselves from the pain, we miss the immense growth that is awaiting us in the pain itself.
Craig's recent message outlines the fact that "There is great purpose in great pain." However, if we live in denial of our pain or place all of our efforts on simply stopping the pain we will forfeited the priceless growth that await us in the pain.
Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.
The message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is everything that the world needs in a time when the world is madly pursuing everything that it doesn't need. Our world is desperate for that message. However, our less than thoughtful handling of the message of the Gospel has diluted it to the point that its appeal is nearly gone. We have subjugated it to our particular interpretations, shaped it to our personal agendas, inserted our own biases, preached it for our own gain, presented it more as entertainment than transformation, and assumed that we have the power to deliver it by our own means. A message manipulated and diminished in such ways will have no appeal to a dying world.
Craig's recent message to a group of ordination candidates thoughtfully and yet unashamedly challenges us to preach the richness of the Gospel free of the encumbrances that have left it weak and pathetic. This message is a call to restore the purity and power of the message in a world that is desperate for us to do so.
Discover additional resources at www.craiglpc.com. You will also find daily resources on all of our Social Media platforms.
“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?”
We dig holes. Lots of them. With all kinds of shovels. But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them. We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with. We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t. We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.
And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes. And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing. Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive. By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses. By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why. Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial. Maybe we need to stop all the digging.
So take a moment. Put down all of your shovels. Be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself these questions, as well as some others that maybe you should be asking yourself. Put down the shovels, stop the digging, and get rid of the holes. Life is a whole lot less stressful when you’re not spending the better part of it trying to figure out how you’re going to get out of the hole that you’re currently in, and what you’re going to do to avoid falling into the next one. Take a moment, get rid of the shovels, and stop the digging.
We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.”
Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us. We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care. Or it’s safer, because we don’t care. We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care. If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care. If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care. And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all. It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care.
But, by assuming this self-protective position, we’re doing something that we may not be thinking about at all. We’re retreating. Basically, we’re retreating from any situations that have caused us pain before, or from situations that we feel will cause us pain if we deal with them.
And in all that retreating, maybe there’s a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of. But we don’t. We don’t. Instead, we retreat. And we retreat because we’ve worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don’t care, and we’ve done that so that we won’t get hurt. And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it. Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn’t show up to fight it. And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place.
And in the end, there’s a good chance that we’ll end up caring that we didn’t care. And because we end up caring that we didn’t care, we’ll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that’s within ourselves.
“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade. And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention. He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair. As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.” And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.”
Am I passionate for the right things? Not just passionate. But passionate in the right way. Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there. There’s a lot of causes out there. There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes. On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors. There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions. Greed is rampant. Power-mongering runs wild. Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes. And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things?
Consider this. There are some things that are timeless. There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can’t remove. There are principles and ethics that are foundational. You can try and remove them, but there’s a huge cost to that. Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether. And the outcomes are never good. History will tell us that rather plainly, if we’re willing to be honest about history.
And so, I want to be passionate about something that’s timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life. Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that. Something that’s certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. And nothing that we can create on our own will do that. What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that. That kind of stuff is only something that God can create.
And so, it’s this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it’s that stuff that I choose to be passionate about. Not man-made stuff because that doesn’t last. Rather, it’s God-created stuff. It’s the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about. Because if I’m not passionate about that stuff, passion won’t matter because very shortly nothing will.
How many times have you felt that there’s just no use? There’s just no sense in going on. You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes. Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep. And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it. We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to begin with. Or our marriage went away. Or our addiction won’t go away. Or our career goals always stall no matter how much we’ve invested in what we’re doing. The medical issues just keep happening. We can’t hold onto a friend to save our lives, or our family just can’t get along long enough to actually look like a family. The bills never stop. It’s always bad news. Our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, the kids won’t call us, and we’re dreading tomorrow because it’s going to be the exact same thing all over again. How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?
And when we’re at that point, life doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. It’s just something that we tolerate until we’re tired of tolerating. It’s not about living. It’s about surviving. And at some point, after we’ve done it long enough, surviving ‘becomes’ our life. It ‘becomes’ who we are. It ‘becomes’ all that we do. And then, over time, it ‘becomes’ all that we think we can do, or should do. How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?
And you know, we try all kinds of stuff to fix this. We immerse ourselves in some self-help philosophy, or we’re on a mad hunt for the right podcast, or we’ve ordered the latest breakthrough book, or we’re hanging on the words of some person of prominence. We try change our diet, or change our attitude, or change our social circle, only to realize that all of that really never changes anything.
So, we’re in a hole. We blew college, our marriage is long gone, the addiction keeps showing up, our career is stalled, the doctors can’t figure out our issues, friends come and go, the family bickering doesn’t stop and neither do the bills, our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, and the kids won’t call. Yeah. How many times have we felt that there’s just no use. I have. And I’m guessing you have too.
For me, when I’ve been at those places, the only thing bigger than everything that’s laid me flat is God. Some would say that God has failed them just as much as everything else has. And in my own life I’ve discovered that when I feel that way, it’s really a whole lot more about the fact that I failed God. Because God doesn’t fail us. He might not show up in the way that we want Him to. He might not engage all of this stuff in the way that we think is best. We might think Him to be too slow in the way that He works. Or we might not believe in Him at all. But what I can tell you is that with God, you never have to feel that there’s ‘no use’ because He’s got a ladder for every hole that you’re in, and a solution for every problem that you have.
So get your Bible out and read it. If you don’t have one, buy one or download a Bible app. Go to church. Call a pastor. Pray. Listen to Christian music. See what happens. Believe me, God’s got a lot of ladders, and He’s got an endless supply of solutions.
People ask me, “Is there any hope?” And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question. “Is there any hope?”
And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in? How dark has it all become? How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desperate that we actually find ourselves asking that kind of question?” And I’ll tell you what, if you’re asking that question it’s because you’re in a really dark place. And I know how dark they are because I’ve been there…and so have you.
Think about it for a minute. Without hope, what have we got? What have we got? If we can’t apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that’s hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up someone’s life or someone’s family…if there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that stuff…what have you got?
You know exactly what it’s like when life collapses. We both know what that’s like. When your dream just dies, and they can die for a lot of reasons that are just brutal. When your marriage vanishes, and you didn’t even see it coming. When you’ve run into so many walls just trying to get to ‘some next place’ in life, (any next place) that all you end up spending your life doing is waiting for the next wall to show up because you’re certain that it’s going to. When you begin to realize that the damage is just too much, and as you realize that it begins to dawn on you that it’s humanly impossible to ever climb out from under all of it. If there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that…what have you got?
If there’s no hope, what’s the sense in all of this? Why go on? Why try? Why invest? Why keep moving forward? If there’s no hope, nothing matters. If there’s no hope then this existence, living out whatever this is that we’re living out, all of this is meaningless. It just doesn’t matter. You’ve felt that. I’ve felt it. The world feels it.
Hope is indispensable. And I mean…indispensable. And if we’ve lost it, as we all have at some time, or some place, we’ve gotta find it because going on without it is simply impossible. It just doesn’t work. I know that, and if you’ve lived long enough, and if you’ve faced the darkness long enough, you know that too. Hope is indispensable.
But where do you find hope anyway? I mean real hope. I’m not talking about someone persons promises (because those break), or some passing fad (because those have no depth), or some vogue philosophy (because those are typically failed ideas that have been dressed up in new clothes), or political platforms (because those typically serve the platform rather than the people), I’m not talking about any of that because life is littered with that stuff. We’re drowning in it. I’m not talking about the latest book, or some trending podcast, or some ‘woke’ idea. And as far as I can tell, all of that stuff promises hope, but delivers nothing. If it did, we wouldn’t be here.
This is my experience. I’ve had times where everything seemed hopeless. Everything was dark…I mean really dark. Bleak. When all of the resources and all of the promises that this world made me, failed me…miserably.
And when the world fails you, where do you go? Well, you go where I went. I went to God. Now, that statement won’t sit well with some people, but if hope is indispensable and the world can’t give it to you, where else do you go? What other option do you have? But more than that, what other option would you really want anyway? I want an option that works, that’s sustainable regardless of what life throws at me. An option that delivers hope for my future, hope for my marriage, hope for a disease, hope for a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up my life. And there’s only one place where you find that kind of hope. And that’s in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Get a Bible and check it out. Go to church. Call a pastor. Give it a shot. If you do, you’ll find exactly what you need in the exact way that you need it, because that’s how the God of hope operates.
You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams. A lot of things that I wanted to do. We all have dreams. Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage. Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world. Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been.
And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams. You tweak them. You roll them over in your head. You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands. And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work. How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off. It’s a really neat kind of thing.
And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’ve had those kinds of dreams as well. That you’ve played with some really cool ideas. That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement. That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed.
But then life happens. In whatever way it happens, it happens. It happens to all of us. And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams. They die. They just die. Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies. However or whenever it happens, they die.
And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that. We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle. Or we decide to fight the thing that’s killed our dreams. We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back.
At other times we just let our dreams die. We either don’t know what to do, or we’re overwhelmed, or we can’t get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is. And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful. It’s just too much.
The world will kill our dreams. Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for. Dreams die every day. They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff. And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well. The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it.
I’ve had many dreams die. So have you. And every time one died, something inside of us died too. But when my dreams died, here’s I’ve found. I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die. Never. It’s just too big to die, it’s place in God’s plan is just too important to let it die, and it’s backed up by a God who never dies.
There are many who would not agree with me. And that’s okay. However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that’s bigger than any dream that you could conjure up. God’s dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you. So, ask Him what it is. Talk to a pastor. Get into your Bible and start reading. If you don’t have one, buy one, or download a Bible app. Listen to Christian music. Find a church. God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out. And that dream won’t die.
The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling.
My life has been devoted to helping people. You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized. In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world. It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that.
But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you. It’ll drain you. At times it will drive you to despair. You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all. Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope. Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you.
As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well. My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about.
And so, I live the two sides of pain. Those of the people that I’ve served for over forty years, and that of my own pain. And there’s nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry. And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration.
But here’s the point in all of this. Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he’s someone who’s incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who’s failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we’ve labeled Him.
But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real. I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him. And that’s not some cute or inspiring statement that’s supposed to trigger some emotion in you. It’s my reality. Life would have destroyed me without Him. God is my rock in every sense of the word. He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day. He is in the turmoil, but He is above it. He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it. He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can’t face the realities of the world. He is the greatest reality in all of the world. He is what you need. He is the everything in the middle of your nothing.
And I know this because I’ve lived it. More than once. In the pain. In the darkness. In the loss. In the confusion. In those moments of deep desperation. When hope is something that I just can’t believe in any longer because life has left no place for it. At those times in life when I can’t take the next step because I can’t get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it. I know that God is all of those things because I’ve watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I’ve sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I’ve watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible.
Our culture would deny this. In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance. And all I know is that I’ve watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it’s far more real than the culture that would say that it is not.
If you’re lost today. If your pain is deep beyond imagination. If you’re standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone. If your dreams have died. If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you’ve come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that’s big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future. It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible.
And how do that I know that? How am I convinced of that? Because He’s done that for me. Because I’ve watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people. It’s real, and regardless of who you are and what you’ve done, or where you’re at, or how deep you’ve fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it’s available to you. Right here, right now. Today, tomorrow, and forever.
Grab a Bible. Find a church. Call a pastor. Get on your knees and pray. It will work. The road back might be long, but there’s a road. And God will walk with you every step down that road. Every step. May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness. And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that’s what He does. That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.
Crafting the New
Birthing a New Beginning
She was born into an emerging America in 1890. Through the ninety-five years of life that stood in front of her she would watch an Industrial Revolution unfold, Henry Ford roll out the Model T, and Edison light the world. She would read the headlines of dough boys marching off to fight a Kaiser in what was originally called the ‘Great War’. Some twenty-four years later she would watch history repeat itself as millions of GI’s marched off in similar fashion to fight a dictator in something called World War II. In-between it all, she would face the economic depravity and emotional ravages of a devastating depression within which her husband would abandon the family and summarily vanish. She was left to support three children on a meager income of scant dollars earned in the hot kitchen of a small diner.
She never drove a car. She lived out most of her life on pocket change, making what seemed impossible possible. The furniture in her meager home was old, lending it the enchanting aroma of another era long vanished. It all was tenderly cared for in a manner that lent her home an indescribable, but wonderfully simple charm. The few appointments in her small home were tidy, clean, and above all cherished. She saw herself as marvelously blessed in the midst of manifold need, for Granny understood that ‘need’ was more an issue of attitude than a matter of circumstance. And I was privileged to be touched by this solitary life until her passing in 1985.
For over ten years, every month Granny would tease ten dollars out of her meager collection of dimes and dollars. And she would send it off to a young Hispanic girl whose father had abandoned her, and whose mother had placed her in an orphanage and summarily walked away. All Granny had was a single photo of a tattered little girl standing in front of a weathered hut. It sat in a slight frame on her tiny buffet. At the feet of the photo there laid a handful of yellowed letters that Granny had received from this little girl over that most precious decade.
Some years after Granny had passed, another letter came. In it were several photos bearing the striking image of a young Hispanic woman in professional attire standing in a small but simple office setting. On the back of one photo in stuttering script it said, “Thank you for my new life.” My grandmother didn’t live long enough to see the results of her sacrifices. However, while real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort. Granny relished the effort and birthed something ‘new’ into the life of a young woman.
We Are the ‘New’
Each of us possess ample resources to be the ‘new’ in the life of another. It is not the execution of some strategy as we might think, or the happenstance of life that births something ‘new’. It is not about some level of tenacious persistence, or the right choices made at the right time. These things and many more can bring something ‘new’ to our lives and the lives of those around us.
But it is the raw power of that single human being stepping up and stepping into the life of another that can bring something ‘new’ in ways that nothing else ever can or ever will. It is the energy of our humanity shared. It is the hope that is released in the touch of another. It is the voice of another that calls out when all other voices have long fallen silent.
It is an investment that may cost us much, yet it is an expenditure that will cost us much more if we refuse it. It is pressing against the giant of greed and intentionally raising the eyes of our hearts past our own circumstances to focus on the circumstances of another. It is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us. And it is this that sets the grand stage upon which to birth something ‘new’ in another that would never have been ‘new’ were it not for such a sacrifice.
Be the ‘New’
Might I suggest that this New Year, the ‘new’ in our lives is making the choice to become the ‘new’ in the life of another. In whatever manner we choose to do that, we all can change a life and in doing so change a world. Therefore, let us not contemplate ‘New Year’s’ resolutions. Rather, let us formulate ‘New Life’ commitments. And let us begin to do that by becoming the ‘new’ in the life of another.
The New Year
Refusing to Be Relegated to the Sidelines
We stand on the escarpment of a New Year. In many ways, it seems that what lies ahead doesn’t rally us with energizing hope, but rather it seems to rattle us with deep apprehension. From the vantage point we stand on at the beginning of this New Year, the landscape that lies ahead looks uncertain at best and disastrous at worst. We see a world reeling from decisions that we don’t understand, actions that appear to border on the irrational, and directions that seem to have forsaken any mooring that the founding principles of our nation might have given them or a sense of mortality might afford them.
We stand on the listing precipice of this New Year with a host of political agendas and secular philosophies promising rosy tomorrows and a year brimming with the brightness of a world throwing off the old and seizing the new. We hear the words and they tickle our ears, but in many ways we don’t see the landscape ahead reflecting what the words say it should reflect. While many have taken hold of the words hoping that they pan out, deep inside, many of us aren’t certain that the promises made and the agendas outlined are deep enough, rich enough, transforming enough or solid enough to really accomplish what they say they can accomplish. The reality is, we’re not all that certain that we want them to accomplish what they say they’ll accomplish anyway.
Resting in Hope Because We Can’t Rest in Anything Else
So, we rest in the hope that hope is enough because we don’t believe in the people that are preaching hope. We hope that hope will be strong enough to drive the political agendas and secular philosophies; bolstering and empowering them sufficiently to do what they grandly visualize in their documented frameworks, but what they can’t do on their own. Or do we hope that they don’t work because the disastrous outcome of their implementation is only going to make worse the very things that they claim their efforts will make better. Often, we don’t even believe in ourselves and our ability to bring change, or in any manifestation of whatever this ‘self’ is that we are. Our hope then rests in hope, not necessarily in the viability of what we hope for and who we hope in. Somehow, we hope that it will all turn out okay.
But we might ask why do we do that? Why do we so often opt for something that’s really not going to do what we need done, out of the hope that hope will carry whatever this is when whatever this is can’t carry itself? Why do we settle like that? Why do we pin our hopes on something that will likely explode in our faces if we pin anything on it, much less hope?
Sidelined Bystanders
I wonder if at its core our issue is a fear that is actually a multiplicity of fears. Fear that we’re far too small to do anything but hope for the best rather than fight for it. Maybe it’s an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant sideline of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that’s far too far away to touch. Change is too often seen as an external thing that happens outside of our efforts, so we relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence. I wonder how often we see ourselves as hapless and helpless bystanders in a greater drama that we have no ability to impact, whether that’s the drama unfolding in our nation, or the drama unfolding in our lives.
We look around us at the wild spiraling of a culture relentlessly gyrating in some direction that appears unhealthy at best, and with no direction at worst. This massive “ship of state” or the various “ships” of our lives seem to be rolling on the churning seas of some wild societal storm with those at the helm announcing that the course is sure and the speed is steady. Yet, peering out from our obscure place on the deck of these enormous ships, it seems that their courses are entirely unsure and their speeds are anything but steady. Yet, despite the angst of the journey that we see before us, we feel far too small, far too irrelevant, and far too inconsequential to do anything about it. And so our best hope is to hang on and hope . . . or so we think.
Can You Make a Difference?
Are we simply bystanders living out some periphery role in some larger drama whose stage is far too massive for us to ever ascend? Are we doomed to haplessly sit by and watch our culture, our businesses, our marriage, our kids, our communities, or whatever it is that we might be watching spiral off into some cold, dark abyss? Will we engage the coming New Year without really engaging it because somebody else is already engaging it in a way that gives us no room to engage it?
Is it Actually Possible that We Might Have Power?
We might ask “what is power?” Is power derived from a collective of people whose numbers grant them power? Is it derived from a position of authority that’s derived from some established structure? Is power something granted to people by something bigger than the people to which it is being granted? Is power a product of social position, breeding, wealth, education, the ability to be relationally savvy, or culturally astute, or outrageously intellectual, or is it held by people possessing an elevated acumen of some sort?
Or, is it the average person who takes the ‘all and everything’ of what they have and engages their world with what they’ve got? That’s power! It’s the average person like you or I who realize that it’s the “little things” that change “big things.” It’s the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps. It’s the average person faithfully living out lives of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history. Indeed, that’s power.
Ordinary People Who Do Extraordinary Things
Daryn Kagan wrote, “Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” It is ordinary people who change the world because they’ve stepped up in situations both large and small, believing that whatever their situation might be they can make a difference either large or small.
It’s not about being ordinary. It’s about being available. It’s not about being ordinary. It’s about refusing to refuse opportunity. It’s not about being ordinary. Rather, it’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the back of ordinary people. It’s not about being ordinary. It about recognizing the power of the ordinary to be extraordinary simply by being ordinary. As Marco Rubio wrote, “America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.” The same story is woven deep into the fabric of our lives.
The New Year – Will We?
As we stand on the escarpment of this brand new “New Year,” we don’t have to relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence. We don’t need to be a hapless and helpless bystander in a greater drama that you have no ability to impact. We can live out intentional lives in our everyday worlds, being ordinary people of integrity engaging the world with integrity, and doing so believing that the smallest changes result in the biggest transformations.
And so, will we dare to understand that it’s the average person who takes what they have and engages their world with what they’ve got? Will we rise up sufficiently to grasp the reality that it’s the average person like you or I who realize that it’s the “little things” that change “big things?” Will we step out on the belief that it’s the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps? Will we embrace the fact that it’s the average person faithfully living out a life of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history? If we do, if we faithfully embrace these truths and live them out, we will change our worlds and we will alter this coming year. May that be your commitment this New Year!
If we fictionalize the story of Christmas as some fanciful tale spun in the backwaters of history and people long removed, in that action we have succumb to the debilitating belief that the only viable idea of rescue is fiction. And I can think of few things that are sadder than that.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
“For the power of Christmas rests in the fact that we will never completely understand the vastness of it, but that will never stop its ability to completely transform the fullness of us.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas In a Box
As the snow began to quietly début winter’s arrival, I made my yearly descent to the basement. Rummaging through the backwaters of the musty root cellar, I spied the dusty stack of aged boxes with the word “Christmas” hastily scrawled across their cardboard sides. Inside of them lay the wonder of Christmas embodied in carefully crafted decorations and precious mementos of all sizes and sorts and types. Staring at the boxes, I suddenly found myself entirely engulfed by the horrifying fact that we spend much of our lives boxing up wonder.
The Abuse of Boxes
Indeed, we put things in boxes. The function of a box is to provide a set of distinct parameters designed to effectively contain whatever needs containing. A box imposes restrictions. It sets a limit as to how far something can go. Things are assigned a defined space where they are on hold, typically because we have no use for them in the active part of our daily existence. Therefore, they’re stored away until our existence grants them whatever tiny bit of space they are granted for however long our existence grants it. We put things in boxes.
Boxes of Heart, Mind and Soul
But the majority of our boxes are not made of cardboard, or plastic, or metal, or any other such rudimentary substances. Our boxes are not those things stored in the shadowy corners of our damp basements, or shoved into the tight confines of our suffocating attics, or crammed into the five-by ten of some self-storage on the other side of town. These do not represent the vast majority of our boxes…at all.
The majority of our boxes won’t be found in basements, or attics, or some self-storage facility. They are, in fact, within us. Deep within us. And we have made them. We’ve tediously constructed them to protect ourselves from painful histories, or shut down truths that don’t set well with us, or eliminate the people in our lives who we find distasteful. We build them to shield ourselves from ourselves (in whatever way that we feel we need to do that). We build them to keep ourselves from the guilt of doing or being what we shouldn’t be doing or being. We build boxes so that we contain those things that we would otherwise be running from, or we build them to give us a ready excuse not to run ‘to’ the things that maybe we should be running to. We put things in boxes.
Why Boxes?
Some boxes might make sense. “But why,” I asked, “do we put great things in boxes?” Powerful things? Things that can handily rescue us from the tangled messes that we make with such tedious perfection? Why do we box up that which can heal our deepest wounds, wrestle our worst addictions into submission, grant us a sustainable hope that will stand against the most sustained darkness of a world gone dark? What in the world would behoove us to box up the very things that can handily reign in all of the destructive things that we’ve cut loose that are constantly cutting us up? What sort of insanity compels us to box up the very things that we spend the entirety of our lives searching for?
We are a stubborn bunch of people. But that’s the message of Christmas that’s tough to swallow, and that’s the very thing that prompted the delivery of that message. That we are stubborn to our own demise. That we would be ‘the death of us’ unless God was willing to come and give ‘life to us.’ That the enemy is not necessarily something that’s prowling around in the shifting shadows that constantly circle us in some stealthy manner. Rather, that we are the enemy and that it is from ourselves that we need to be saved. That is the message embodied in the boxes tucked away in the musty confines of the root cellar with the word “Christmas” errantly scrawled across them. That is the intent of Christmas. That God decided to initiate the greatest rescue mission in all of human history at the greatest cost that any mission would ever demand…the death of His own Son.
Boxing Up Christmas
Despite the sour rhetoric of our times and the efforts of so many to massage us into complacent ignorance, this is the message that we as a culture have placed, pressed and imprisoned in boxes built by self-serving philosophies, special interest groups gone rogue, and platforms born of greed and power. This is the message that we find so aversive and chafing. It is our single salvation, but we box it up anyway. It is the only light in the darkness that we have foolishly come to call light. It is the only thing big enough to be able to course the turbulent seas of our times and throw us the lifeline that we refuse as we wait for other promised lifelines that never come. This is what we box up. And such an action is ignorance of the greatest sort that will insure a death of the most painful sort.
We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it. We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight. And once we’ve done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders.
Christmas Can’t Be Boxed
Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can’t keep Christmas in a box anyway. We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more. Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is. It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us. No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably. And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I was ignorant enough to box up the only thing that could have saved me.
When Christmas has concluded and the celebrations have stilled, when the songs have fallen silent and the parties have ceased, leave Christmas out of the box that you can’t put it in anyway. Let it be what nothing else can be. Let it rescue you, your family, your children, your marriage, your community, and your world. And I don’t believe that any of us want to put in any box anything that has the power to do that.
Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations
Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts. Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
“Christmas is a vivid and brilliantly revealing lens. And if we dare to look at ourselves through this rich and telling lens, we are able to clearly see the majesty within ourselves that we’ve so foolishly forsaken. But rather than leaving us saddened and forlorn by what we’ve abandoned, this lens also possesses ample power to give us back what we threw away.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas - Our Need for Rescue
Rescue. It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued. We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves. We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended us stranding us. We add problem to problem. Dilemma to dilemma. Disappointment to disappointment. The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we’ve dug only serves to dig them that much deeper. We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized, and therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we’re accomplishing something. We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such. Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued. Rescue. It’s hard to admit that we need it.
But we live in adamant denial of all of this. We put a good face on it all. We spin it as the fact that things always get worse before they get better. We encourage patience. We preach endurance. In the prolonged absence of any shred of victory, we shift our focus and hail fortitude as giving a battle lost the sense of a battle having had value despite the loss. We proclaim the glories of the battle sufficient, so that we can soften the fact that there is no victory in which to glory. We say that the light is on the edge of the horizon, and if we determine to draw on our last bit of energy, raise ourselves up one more time, and press forward, the light will dawn. Yet, night continues to rule the day as much as it rules the night. Rescue. It’s hard to admit that we need it.
Christmas is the greatest rescue mission in all of human history. It is a breathtakingly tangible manifestation of the love of God. The rescue of us meant the death of His Son. That is a price that few of us would dare to pay. But God did. It was about His Son being born in the backwater of poverty to two teenage parents in a place far off of the map of commerce and influence. It was largely a birth of obscurity. A quiet entrance possessing nothing of the trappings of a King whatsoever. This child was inserted into this world at the most impoverished point that can be imagined, so that He would know the impoverishment within which we walk. And on the other end of it, the irony of it all was that He was executed at the hands of the very people that He came to rescue.
Those He sought to save wished Him dead and fulfilled that wish in a manner brutal, heartless, and excruciating beyond imagination. Rescue. It’s hard to admit that we need it. So we killed the Person who came to do it. And too many of us continue to kill Him today. Day in and day out, many of us kill the only Person Who can rescue us.
Christmas. It stands as the greatest rescue mission in all of human history, and it came at a cost that will never, and can never be matched despite how long history might be made. That is Christmas. And we have the power to reject the only rescue that will ever really matter and therefore succumb to our own pathetic efforts to rescue ourselves. Or we have the power to accept it and never, never need rescue ever again. Rescue. It’s hard to admit that we need it. So, this Christmas, will you be rescued or not?
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
- John 3:16
Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations
Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts. Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
“Christmas was God deciding to do what we didn’t deserve in order to save us from what we did.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
“Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the ‘gift of life’ if we ever hope to be thankful for the ‘gifts’ of life.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
“It is my hope that despite the gravity of the trials, we will never forget that the privilege to live life always offsets the difficulties involved in the living of it. This is the essence of thanksgiving.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
“An attitude of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.”
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude
We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them. Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all. When we’re in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas. Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first place. In reality, this kind of self-pursuit is personal and cultural suicide in the making.
It seems that’s we’ve done that with many aspects of our cultural traditions, values and foundational principles. In the apparent insanity of 21st century living, we’re ruthlessly gutting out of our society the very things that raised our society as a nation unparalleled in all of human history. In the wild and ego-centric pursuit of rights, privileges, entitlements, selfish aggrandizements and self-centered agendas, we’re killing the very fabric of the very nation that afforded us those very rights and privileges in the first place. It seems that we’re involved in a feeding frenzy that doesn’t preserve or extend the precious rights and hard-won privileges afforded to us, but that rather consumes them in our mad grab for all the things that we feel we’re entitled to.
Real and Reorienting Thanksgiving
I think that we would be quite wise to stop for a moment and take stock of exactly who we’ve become and exactly where we’re headed in this pell-mell rush of greed and ‘right’s grabbing.’ It would seem incredibly wise to begin the careful process of comprehensively identifying and reclaiming that which we’ve carelessly discarded along the way, understanding that reclaiming these principles, values, ethics and morals is not about returning to an outmoded past that will bring the future to some grinding halt. Neither is it about an aversion to progressive thinking or constricting the scope of human possibilities. Rather, it’s understanding that effectively reintegrating these principles, values, ethics and morals in our present breaks open impossible possibilities for the future in a way that nothing else can and nothing else will. Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring these values is the most progressive course of action that we could hope to take.
Maybe the place to begin that process is right here at this holiday that we call Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is grabbing and hoarding in reverse. It’s not about getting more stuff. It’s about being thankful for what we have without the underlying toxic agenda of being thankful only to get more stuff. It casts a steady eye toward what we have and not toward what we don’t have. Thanksgiving is not about some antiquated social courtesy or worn tradition. Rather, it’s about a wholly liberating mind-set that probably fits within the wealth and cultural advancements of the 21st century better than any other preceding century in our nation’s history. Thanksgiving is free of greed, absent of agendas of acquisition, it has no hint of hoarding whatsoever, and it’s not concerned with conquering. Thanksgiving realizes that if we’re not thankful for what we have, then whatever we have will never be enough. And if what we have is never enough, we have doomed ourselves a mindset of impoverishment when we actually sit in plenty.
Thanksgiving as a Pause
Thanksgiving is a pause of the most precious sort. It is a time to reflect on gifts, blessings, unwarranted successes and undeserved acquisitions. Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we’ve been blessed despite the fact that we haven’t been the blessing that we should have been. It’s about realizing with a starkly humbling intensity that all of life is a gift, that absolutely nothing is deserved, that everything is an unearned privilege, and that every breath that we take is handed to us with the simple request that we live onto others rather than unto self.
Thanksgiving is a pause that reminds us that life is much less about the press of pursuit, and much more about the pause of thankfulness. It reminds us that thankfulness is not shackled to the crippling confines of only the good things that happen in our lives. Rather, in the quietness of such a pause we are reminded that even horrific pain and crippling misfortune have within them the unmatched building blocks for unparalleled growth and phenomenal maturation. Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter what befalls us in life, we can always take the shards and shattered pieces, and from these charred remnants we can reconstruct a life unimaginably stronger and wildly richer than that from which the shards and pieces fell. Without Thanksgiving, we miss all of that.
Thanksgiving as a Reorientation
Thanksgiving reminds us that life is not to be focused on acquisition and accomplishment, but on an attitude of thankfulness that we have the privilege and opportunity of acquiring and accomplishing in the first place. It’s not about what we can get, but that the opportunity to get things exists at all. It’s a mindful orientation that life is not about a mad dash to get as many toys as we can before the next guy does. It’s not about “keeping up the Jones’s,” or a three thousand square foot house and a white picket fence, or having two and half kids, or building financially fat portfolios.
Thanksgiving focuses on the fact that we have the privilege to envision those kinds of things and that we have the ability to actually seek them. When we embrace that kind of thinking, life takes on a preciousness. We recognize that life is not something that we acquire. Rather, it’s about something that we enjoy and savor. It’s not about possession as possession only diminishes the thing that we possess. It’s coming to the life-altering understanding that truly precious things can’t be owned anyway. Truly precious things can only be enjoyed. And the wonder of it all is not only realizing that we can’t we own them, but we don’t have to expend the energy in the maintenance of them in order to enjoy them. Such an understanding is liberating indeed.
Thanksgiving Calls Us Out
Make no mistake about it . . . Thanksgiving calls us out. In life, the greater the principle, the less people there are who will follow it. It is always the case that the higher the calling, the fewer the followers. Thanksgiving asks of our humanity what our humanity struggles to give. It asks that we shift away from an attitude of selfishness to an attitude of selflessness. It asks that we recognize that life is not something that we amass, but it is something at which we should be amazed. It is not the possession of objects, rather it is the privilege to be granted ample provisions. It is not the holding of life, but being held ourselves in the act of beholding life.
Thanksgiving is a titanic shift of mind and massive alteration of heart. Yet, in the end it grants us the very kind of life that we’ve been seeking through endless acquisition. It’s the sure path to the kind of life that’s deep, peaceful, content and rich, when the path we’ve chosen to get us there actually takes us anywhere but there. In short, an attitude of thankfulness is transformational.
Change your attitude and your life will be changed. Change your life and we begin to change our world. Maybe Thanksgiving is the very place to start.
Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations
Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts. Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
- 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities. However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities. We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time. We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common in all of creation. And that primal, animalistic side of us is more often than not the “primary” side of us. And that’s primarily a problem because “we are better than this.”
It seems that we’re relatively slow to think and dreadfully quick to react. We’re sluggish to methodically strategize our actions, while we’re reflexively quick to strike out in some sort of impulsive reaction. Rather than draw upon the expanse of our intellect and the depth of our wisdom, particularly in the difficult times, we too often grab the closest thing to us and start swinging.
Too often we’re not prudent and we’re anything but judicious. We’ve too easily abandoned our intellectual capabilities and we react in less than thoughtful ways. And when we do that long enough, we tend to forget that we have the ability to be and to act in ways that are far above what we’re being, and far more judicious than how we’re acting. We’re slowly led to believe that we’re a bit more primal than anything else, and that a keen discernment and a prudent approach is either “beyond us,” or that it “takes too much work” to get there when in reality “we are better than this.”
Is It Beyond Us?
Too often we use the whole mentality that something’s beyond us as an excuse to avoid using what’s actually within us. We don’t want to be all that accountable, or we’re not really all that interested in stepping up, or we don’t want to extend ourselves, or a million other excuses for the inexcusable attitudes of mediocrity and apathy. “We could never do that,” we incessantly tell ourselves as a means of lulling ourselves into some sort of stale complacency. And in doing so, we penalize our spirits, forfeit our abilities, and levy a heavy fine on our capabilities. “We are better than this.”
Is It Too Much Work?
The fact that acting with wisdom, prudence and discretion takes some time and requires a bit of energy is quite often something less than appealing. To act wisely and thoughtfully means that we purposefully rally our intellectual resources, apply those resources in order to carefully ascertain the situation, make judicious decisions based on our observations, and then engage the situation with wisdom, balance and discernment. That all takes time and energy, and often it takes a lot of it. Too often we’re not really all that interested in expending that kind of time and energy because we’d much prefer to speedily dispense with whatever we’re facing, or all we’re really interested in is driving an agenda and nothing more, and in reality we probably want to get on to something that’s much more fun and much less demanding. So we do what we have to do to simply get it done in order to just get it done. “We are better than this.”
It’s Everywhere
Sadly, these behaviors aren’t exclusive to us. In fact, they seem to be becoming a whole lot more prevalent in our culture these days. We watch individuals at all levels in all kinds of roles and in an endless variety of occupations doing the very same thing. Frequently we have an expectation that individuals in certain roles should obviously be acting wisely, thoughtfully and with an astute judiciousness. To us, it’s clear that people in certain positions of authority or in critical situations should be acting with a keen degree of prudence and reacting with an unbiased discretion. Yet, often they don’t. And so we see this malaise and indifference populating the actions and behaviors of people everywhere. In time, we devolve into the assumption that it’s just the way it is. And over time, we tragically lose the understanding that “we are better than this.”
Reclamation
“We are better than this.” We are better than how we behave. We are better than the ways in which we act. We are better than what our decisions would suggest and what our actions would portray. We are better than the image that we have projected into the world around us, and the reflection of ourselves that we see within us. “We are better than this!”
I would rather pointedly suggest that it’s time to reclaim the fact that “we are better than this.” It’s time to step up and refuse to be less than what we are. And in reclaiming the fact that “we are better than this,” it’s time that we not only believe it, but it’s high time that we deliberately act upon it. It’s time that we get past the errant idea that it’s “beyond us” and that it takes “too much work” to do it. It’s time that we step into the mind boggling expanse of who we were created to be, recognize the enormity of what that is, and live it out with a stubborn intensity and intentionality. It’s time to wake up and realize that we are “better than this.”
How’s it Done?
As with any great things in life, simple answers are simply insufficient. But let me propose a place to begin.
First, I think that we need to recognize that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be. We might not necessarily know exactly what that is or exactly what that means, but it’s developing the recognition that we are “more.” That recognition creates the awareness of a space that’s largely uninhabited, but entirely available to us. That reality fosters a compelling willingness to move up and move out from wherever it is that we are because we’ve recognized that there’s place to do that.
Second, it’s about intentionally being better and deliberately doing better. It’s about recognizing the limitations that we’ve habitually embraced, confronting those limitations when they pop up, and asking ourselves how we can take one step beyond them this time around. It’s about identifying that this is how far we’d typically take something, and then purposefully taking it one step further. It’s about persistence and purposefulness in the pursuit of something better.
Third, once we’ve taken a step further, it about recognizing that it actually worked because it typically does. It’s about reinforcing the fact that we actually felt pretty good about it because we typically do. It’s about pondering the fact that we went where we typically don’t go and in going there it went really well, because it typically will. And it’s about feeling that we’re better than what we’ve historically chosen to be because we are, and now we’re actually experiencing it!
Fourth, it’s living it out right in front of the very people that we encounter every single day. “We are better than this,” and we want that reality to become rampantly contagious to everyone that we meet. We want to create this infectious influenza that causes people to step up, step out, and step into of the belief that “they are better than this” because they are.
“We are better than this.” It may be that we are living in a time in history where that message and that reality needs to be broadcast with all the intensity and every bit of emotion that we can muster. We appear to live in times that beg each of us to passionately live out of the conviction that “we are better than this.” And in doing so, we rally those around us to embrace and live out the very same conviction. Indeed, if we respond to this reality we can change the world because the indisputable truth is that “we are better than this” which will make the world that we live in “better than what it is.” How about being part of the effort?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world. We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating. If we don’t understand the terrain around us, and if we’re not acutely aware of the nuances both large and small that cut across it we risk not only being irreparably lost, but we also risk being destroyed in being lost. Such a perspective is certainly sound.
However, we feel that we must do far more than just understand the world that we live in. Knowledge is information, but it is not necessarily transformation. In reality, having knowledge alone is to live as nothing more than an alien with knowledge. Yet, to keep up with the world, or to get to a place where the world has to keep up with us, we have to be far more than aliens. We must throw off that which is alien and become more of that which is the world. Subsequently, our lives are bent and spent on becoming what’s around us, rather than becoming what’s within us.
What Is Within Us?
Whatever’s within us, whatever it is that we are at our core, whatever that is often takes a backseat to what we feel we should become. What we should become, or so we think, is a spitting image of the world. We rigorously cultivate this image, assuming that such an image most effectively fits the world and therefore can most effectively navigate the world. Therefore, we become what we see around us, rather than becoming what’s within us. Subsequently, what’s within us eventually becomes lost to us.
Nonetheless, there are those people who plumb the depths of their souls and press into the innermost caverns of their hearts. There are those most robust adventurers who realize that the greatest adventures of all don’t lie without, rather they lay within. There are those who have come to the priceless realization that to effectively navigate the world is not to become the world, but to become the fullest self living in the world. And these are the world-changers that we would be wise to admire, and to which we would be equally wise to aspire.
The Thoughtful Rebels
I have been munificently impacted by many such thoughtful rebels. I have seen the many who build inward-out, rather than outward-in. There are those who daily stand in the gap and create the space for others to find out who they are so they’re not told who they are. There are many who have challenged the norms, rejected the trends, stood firm when others fled, and held the line on an intruding world so that those around them could be in the world, but not of the world. There are those wisely rogue people who run against the world in order to change the world.
The Game Changers
And these are the game-changers who were birthed by those who themselves first changed the game. These are the movers and the shakers that walked in the footsteps of others who were constantly moving things and shaking what was left. These are astutely discerning people who understood the world, but differentiated themselves sufficiently from the world so as to not be shackled by norms, swayed by trends, bullied by fads, baffled by the mediocrity, and capsized by the ever-changing currents of culture, societal expectations and politics.
Many of these game-changers were game-changers because of others who refused to let them be anything else. I applaud those bold people, the fearless people, the sacrificial people who refused to bend to culture or trends so that they’re friends and children might grow into who they are, verses turning into what the world is. I can count innumerable men and women who created the space and ran interference at great cost to themselves to guide others who knew who they were, verses being children who were trying to figure out who the world was telling them that they are.
So who will we be? How will we live out our lives? Will we be what the world demands we be, or will we be what our soul invites us to be? And in making those decisions, will we look beyond ourselves to create a space for others to do the same?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something. Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands. Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it. All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the most strategic manner possible will always fall achingly short of meeting even the most primitive and pared down demands of living life. And because that’s the case, I’ve got no alternative but to extend myself outside of myself and believe in things that are bigger than me. I not only need to believe, I want to believe.
I want to believe, especially in a world that seems to be falling apart in places that I never believed it would fall apart. In the midst of all of the unnerving unraveling that I am helpless to stop, there are things I’d like to believe to calm my heart and steady my soul. There’s some sustaining and comforting beliefs that I doggedly want to hold onto that provide me a sense of desperately needed peace in the tumultuous storms that seem to be roaring across the landscape of our culture. I want to believe.
Yet, peace is not enough. To believe in something that can bring me peace, but whose power and reach ends at peace is simply not enough. I need more than that. I need something that can do more than just weather the storms of life and bring me out on the other side with as few bruises as possible. I want to believe in things that have relentlessly stood the test of time, every time, throughout all of time. I want to believe in things that won’t fall to the abject recklessness of our times, this time or any time. But far more than that, I want to believe in things that can handily wrestle any storm into full submission. And I want to dare to believe in things that are so pristinely confident and courageously authentic that they could keep the next storm from ever daring to roll across the landscape of our culture again if we all simply chose to believe in those things. I want to believe.
I want to believe in things that have the breathtaking power and the unobstructed reach to reconstruct and reclaim whatever’s left when the storm is over. I want to believe that storms are part of life and that they come into the sinful and fallen world that we live in as a natural part of our fallen existence. But far beyond that, I want to believe in things powerful enough and audacious enough to transform the wreckage of the storm right in the middle of the very storm itself. I want to believe in things that can reconstruct and reclaim in a manner that handily resurrects implausible beauty out of what seems to be unredeemable carnage. I want to believe that no storm ever conceived can come close to having the force or the power to dislodge or destroy the things that I believe in. I want to believe in believing because if I can’t believe in something, what do I have?
What I’d Like to Believe
I Want to Believe That Mankind is Inherently Good
In the storms, I’d like to believe that mankind is inherently good. I want to believe that even though mankind can act in gruesome ways that push the edge of evil out to appalling places and reign destruction in ways previously unfathomable, that even then there is still some thread of something good weaving itself undaunted through the core of our core. I want to believe that we’re lost, that we’re drowning in greed and selfishness, and that we’ve taken to treacherous paths that descend to gaping depths of great atrocity. But I want to believe that those things don’t define us. Despite our frequently heinous behaviors, I want to believe that we’re better than that because I want to believe that there is no point that we could ever reach from which we cannot be redeemed. I want to believe that mankind is inherently good despite all the apparently inherent evil that would scream otherwise. I want to believe that there is enough good in all of us to be marvelously good if we’re daring enough to ruthlessly rid ourselves of everything that keeps us from being marvelous. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That a Single Voice for Good is Never Too Small
I want to believe that a single voice for good has a vibrant tenor, a wholly unsullied tone, a dynamically firm volume, and a magnetic quality about it that it will always be heard above, and around, and beyond any chorus of evil despite how loud it might be. I want to believe that voices for good always have an undeniable and unapproachable genuineness about them that renders all fraudulent voices completely exposed and entirely drown out. Too often it seems that a single voice for good is quickly submerged under the surging tsunami other voices which are anything but good. Evil and treachery seem to be boisterous and arrogant, bellowing with an unashamed narcissistic quality that aims to quash any voice with even the remotest hint of good in it. I want to believe that a voice for good will incessantly rise above the most bellicose volume that evil can produce, and that it will always render evil frustrated in its inability to drown out a single voice for good. I want to believe that single voice can do exactly that. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That Good is Eternal and Evil is Temporal
I want to believe that evil is not part of what this was originally all about. I want to believe that evil was not an original component of creation as it was sketched out on the original drawing board innumerable eons ago. I want to believe that evil is an infestation that wormed its way into our existence and as such can be eradicated because it is an infestation, and only an infestation. I want to believe that it is a cancerous plague that has no claim of originality in the original design. I want to believe that evil is a temporary foe that lives on a short leash of time, and that every battle finds that leash shortened one more constricting link. I want to believe that good will ultimately exterminate evil in a manner so complete that every battle will be forever laid to rest, and that the memory of those battles will likewise be laid to rest, and that good itself will be able to securely rest for the rest of eternity. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That God Uses Evil to Advance Good
I want to believe that God will not be thwarted by the greatest exploits that evil can conjure up. I want to believe that evil will always find itself obliterated by its own evil as God seizes it, shapes it into invincible good, and then sends it hurtling right back into the heart of the very evil from which it came. I want to believe that the greater the treachery and the more profound the wickedness, the more substance God has to mold good from. That in the hands of God, everything vile is the raw material from which He can forge something astonishingly marvelous. And that everything foul provides the very flames within which these good and great things are forged. I want to believe that in the firing, that which God has forged becomes something so hardened that the most intense fires of evil itself cannot even remotely singe it. I want to believe that as evil escalates in intensity, it only creates a greater abundance of raw material from which good is forged, fired, and fired against evil. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe that Believing is Not Childish
Believing is not childish nor is it naïve. It’s not some escapist refuge where the weak flee in the face of the daunting cultural upheavals that now beset our culture and hound those of us who believe. Believing will make us a ready target for those who don’t believe, and it will draw skeptics and naysayers to us as bees to honey. Believing means that we invest in what we can’t see, we hand ourselves over to that which we can’t control, and we cast our lot with the eternal verses the less demanding demands of the temporal. Belief is not for the frail or faint-hearted as belief will demand belief of us, which is a demand far beyond most anything else in our lives. And because of those realities, I want to believe.
Believing is being courageous enough to relentlessly hold onto the truth even when the derogatory actions of everything around us would attempt to entirely discredit the truth, smear the truth, and completely supplant it with falsehoods dressed in the look-a-like garments of truth. By making the uncompromising commitment to stand on our beliefs, we declare that the truth on which we have chosen to stand is nothing of unreliable myth or childish fantasy. And that will certainly draw the ire of many. Believing is standing on the truth even when everything else around us has fallen into cinders and ash, and the truth on which we’re precariously standing continues to be pounded by everything that hates the very truth that we’re standing on. And for all of those reasons, I want to believe.
I Want to Believe in God
Believing is costly. Believing is sacrificial. Believing is what the majority of the world doesn’t have the guts to do, but it is the only thing to do. I want to believe this. And of all the things that I want to believe, I want to believe in God above and beyond all of them. To believe in God in the face of everything that would tell us not to believe is the highest calling of mankind, and the greatest feat of our existence. To believe in God is to extend ourselves beyond our finite existence and cast our belief out into the unfathomable reaches of the infinite. To believe in God is to stake our lives on something that the world declares as a mistake. But to believe in God is to wager everything on the person who created everything, and no mistake could ever arise out of that. Without God, I don’t have the capacity to believe in anything else anyway as everything emerges from Him. And so, I want to believe in God, I want to believe in every one of His promises, and I want to believe in all of the things that He allows me to believe in. I want to believe. With all my heart I want to believe. And I want you to believe as well.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
I am only one. That’s all I am. I am only one and I will always be only one. I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one. In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one. And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic and colossally discouraging. Sadly, I am only one.
I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive. The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll. And whatever choice they make will dictate the ways that I will go because I’m far too small to swim against them, and far too weak to even dare chart a different course from theirs. I am only one, and being one doesn’t appear to be enough.
I am only one, and because I am, even the reality of my existence is of little note. In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence will not only be largely disregarded, it won’t even register enough to acknowledge that I was here in the first place. Even the briefest notation that I have made or will make on the pages of history will be entirely lost in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am only one.
Living as Being Only One
And so, because I am only one, I relegate myself to being only one. And in relegating myself to being one and only one, I unwittingly embrace the limitations that I perceive are part and parcel of being one and only one. I suit-up in the pathetic apparel of powerlessness, I chart a path of capitulation that’s dictated by the insensitive winds and tides of life, and I bow to the lamentable goal of surrender because I figure that that’s about as good as it gets. And then in some sort of tense angst, I hunker down and wait for whatever’s going to happen to me, letting my mind spin in wild gyrations as I frantically attempt to figure out how I’m going to deal with whatever’s going to happen when it eventually happens.
What Does Being One Really Mean?
What will I do with the fact that I am only one? I am only one in a world that’s spiraling. I am only one in a world that’s rapidly redressing itself in garments that are far from the ethics, morals and values within which it was clothed at birth. I am only one in a culture that’s lost its moorings and is finding itself on a dangerously churning sea that the culture has cleverly labeled “progressive thinking” or “cutting-edge” or “liberal thinking” in order to avoid the implications of living on such perilous seas. I am only one in a world driven by the insatiable gluttony of selfishness rather than the spirited nourishment that comes from selfless living and self-effacing choices. I am only one in all of that.
But I Am One
But I am one, and that is infinitely better than being “none.” I am one, which puts me on equal footing with everyone else. Every single person in human history who impacted history in ways either large or small faced the same exact dilemma that I am faced with: they were “one” and no more than one. I am only one, but I do not stand as empty or hollow or void. Quite the opposite. This “one” that I am comes tightly packaged with innumerable gifts, talents and abilities that stand at the ready. I am only one, but that “one” that I am is entirely and irrevocably different from any other “one” that has ever lived in the entire expanse of human history. I am only one, but I have inspiring dreams and vitally rich visions for life that are unlike those held by anyone else. I am only one, but I have unbridled access to everyone other “one” around me. Oh yes, I am only one, but I am “one.”
The Opportunity in Being “One”
I am unbelievably privileged to be one, particularly the “one” that I am. I don’t think I’d really want it any other way. But I only get one shot at being “one.” I get this one single, sole opportunity to take this “one” that I am and use it to make a difference in all the other “ones” around me. I have the privilege of impacting the “ones” around me, who will in turn impact other “one’s,” who will in turn impact yet other “ones” . . . and on it goes. I can be one person who impacts the world “one” person at a time, and in doing so I can potentially impact all of the “ones” in all of the world. That’s not a bad deal. So, I’d be wise to take advantage of this one and only one shot I get at this.
It might be wise to consider that I am only one, yet I live in a world of “ones.” That means that I am uniquely suited to impact other “ones” like me. I am what they are. They are what I am. We are all the same. And because that’s the case I have the unique advantage of speaking into their lives because I’m living out their lives, and they’re living out mine. Our existence is shared, our experiences are similar, our joys are pretty much the same and our pain is familiar to all of us. We walk through the same life, with the same experiences and the same challenges. As one and only one person, I am perfectly suited to speak directly into the lives of all the other “one’s” around me. So, why don’t I?
The Fears of Being “One”
The Fear of Not Being Enough
I think that we fear that being “one” is not being enough. Being one is too often seen as being inadequate. The world out there is not some massive mass of people. It is a collection of individuals. By and large, those individuals experience life pretty much the same way that we do. The world is a collection of “ones.” It’s a collection of people that are each one individual just like we are one person. While being “one” makes us perfectly suited to impact all the other “ones” around us, we fear that being one is not enough.
The Fear that We Can’t Be Loud Enough
I also think that we fear that our single voice is not loud enough. We don’t have the volume to be heard over the raucous, roar and interminable noise in our world. We can’t possibly scream loud enough or long enough to be heard in the ruckus and racket that defines the world around us. So our voices are drowned out. Yet, we need to remember that we’re not speaking to the world around us. We’re speaking to the “ones” around us. And because that’s the case, we’re plenty loud enough.
The Fear of Being Rejected
I think that maybe our greatest fear is that we will be heard, and that in being heard we’ll be rejected or discounted or blown-off. It seems that our single biggest fear is rejection. What if we’re heard and in the hearing, we’re labeled as stupid, naïve or ignorant? What if we’re heard and then we’re slapped with accusations of being politically incorrect, culturally ill-informed, or being something of a faith-based moron? What if we take a stand? What if we refuse to compromise? What if we speak against the toxicity that’s seeping into the lives around us? What if what we’re saying isn’t popular or trendy or politically correct?
The Opportunity of Being “One”
I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive. But I am one, and my oneness is sufficient to forgo surviving and embrace living. The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll. And whatever choice they make does not have to dictate the ways that I will go because I am one, and because I am I can swim against them, and dare to chart a different course from theirs. I am only one, and being one is enough.
I am only one, and because I am, the reality of my existence can change the reality of everyone around me. In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence can be noted, and because I am one it can register enough to acknowledge that I was here. The briefest notations that I have made or will make on the pages of history will add moving lines of inspiration in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am “one.”
You have one chance at being “one.” You have been granted one life to touch the other “ones” around you. Being one is being enough. Life’s about being intentional about being the best “one” that you can be, and intentionally touching all the other “ones” around you in a manner that transforms them “one” at a time. In transforming the “ones” in our world we will eventually transform our world. So, go be the “one” that you are. Step up in a world that’s spiraling, confront a culture that has redressed itself, and seize the tattered lines of a nation that has lost its moorings. Be the “one” that you were designed to be and change the world by being that “one.”
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading. It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests. The altar of self is where nations perish. And on that altar we have too often found ourselves tediously picking apart the fabric of liberty and meticulously editing the founding principles of this nation so that we might justify those agendas and rationalize those interests in the name of the very freedom we are abusing.
In response to these actions, leaders and heralds of debatable origins spout bold platitudes and chart even bolder courses that often have little substance and are void of the balance achieved through the merging of wisdom seasoned by time, the vision gifted through deep struggle, and the astuteness afforded by heritage. It seems that we are adrift on the tides of whimsy instead of the currents of calling, and that the sails borne by this ship of state are too often driven by the fickle winds of politically-correct agendas and bane opportunists instead of buoyed firm by the hard-core values born of faith and legacy.
And has the insanity of such realities been adopted as our norm? Has our identity as a proud people become the mess that we’ve permitted it to become? Is this who we are, and are we satisfied with those who of their limited vision and selfish notions run on anemic platforms that perpetuate this very mentality while at the very same time saying those platforms do not? And in the mess of it all, have we chosen to follow those who talk about what has perished with themselves having little to no idea of what has actually perished?
A Longing Undefined
There seems to be a longing born of a great absence. And there is likewise a passionate searching arising from that absence that appears to be seizing this nation today. In a malaise spawned of comfort we have increasingly distanced ourselves from the founding principles of our nation, yet we have not distanced ourselves so far that we fail to feel the bruising impact of this profound absence. And it is within this perplexing state that the soul of an entire nation of people are finding themselves plagued by a sense that something has perished that should never have perished. And in this, there is an ever-stirring sense that it is somehow our solemn duty to find this thing that has perished and restore it so that this cherished nation might rise to heights that excel those summited at even at its most glorious moments.
The Core Challenge
While it may appear simplistic, I would suggest that we begin with something simply powerful. I would suggest that this grand undertaking might begin by reclaiming two simple yet potently unifying principles upon which this nation was rigorously founded.
First, I would suggest that freedom that is not exercised for the common good is freedom absconded and assaulted. Freedom exercised for self is nothing more than greed in disguise, for to hoard assets of any kind is to simultaneously move someone else somewhere else into a deeper state of impoverishment. And to create scandalous agendas driven by self-interest is to sequester others with the shackles of our unrestrained ambitions. Therefore, freedom rightly exercised on behalf of the person standing next to us is impoverishment decisively crushed under the heels of liberty, and spurious agendas wholly exposed under the piercing light of principle. And when these things transpire, freedom is free to be free. And nothing man can devise can stand in the way of that.
Second, I would further suggest that morals abandoned as a means of granting ourselves permission that these morals would not have granted us is freedom traded for license. Such a trade-off is nothing less than cultural suicide. Freedom is never license, and we would be wise to understand that the distinction between the two is so utterly profound that they cannot exist in proximity to one another. Rather, freedom is the manifestation of a deeply held confidence that if we are afforded choice, mankind is innately principled by morals and sufficiently sacrificial in nature due to an adherence to these morals that we will fight all lesser impulses and consistently choose with selfless integrity. Without these timeless morals, decay and anarchy will be our lot. With them, the impossible will be our servant.
A Noble Calling
It is my belief that we are a far greater people than we have chosen to become. I would stand by the conviction that we are not what we have fallen to, and inherently we know this. And in the carnage of freedoms abused and morals abandoned there yet lies tremendous potential. And that potential lies not in legislative bodies, or towering institutions, or stirring platitudes, or political platforms of any design.
Rather, this potential resides in each of us. For great nations are built on individual people all of type and sort who seize the principles of freedom for all, who zealously hold to timeless morals despite the cost, and who join with other like-minded people in an indomitable march of mankind that nothing in all of mankind can stand against. It is the common man and the common woman who intentionally lives out these principles in their sphere of influence, whether that be large or small, that changes lives, awakens nations, and alters history.
May we all take such stands. And as a result, may there emerge a ground swell of epic restoration unprecedented that sweeps our hearts, seizes our souls, and restores the greatness that has been the enduring hallmark of this great nation.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. All of us run thick with untapped potential. We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing. The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses any syntax to frame it all. Despite the incomprehensible complexity of it all, the entirety of this essence is precisely consolidated and ingeniously joined so that the full measure of it might be released without any of it wasted or missed in the releasing. We are crafted to enhance all that exists around us and to make everything immeasurably more than what is. We are marvelous in ways so grand that such marvel escapes us although it resides right within each of us. Indeed, we are created in just this way.
This potential is not something of muse, as we might presume it to be since we tend to see so little of it. It’s not some hollow ideal that is more the trappings of some imaginative author who spins such ideas because they don’t have the courage to face the realities of who or what we really are. This is not about some feeble attempt to bolster our belief in ourselves as we watch the worst of ourselves create a world that we’re turning into the worst of itself. This potential is real. Very real. It may visit us rarely as it is much easier to access the lesser side of ourselves. But, it is real and it is always waiting.
Playground Feuds and Turf Wars
We have misplaced the majesty of our humanity in the lesser battles that we readily (and rather ignorantly) join. We cast ourselves as heroes selflessly battling for the soul of a community, a family or a nation when in fact we are engaged in playgrounds feuds of no greater importance than those played out on elementary playgrounds. We lay claim to some turf, which is less about what the turf might actually be and more about the fact that it’s turf (whatever it might be). We see ourselves on some colossal pilgrimage born of calling or destiny or the rallying of the masses against some great evil, however we have justified it. It must be pointed out that at times the pilgrimages are in fact colossal and of significant importance, but too many times what’s colossal is the appetite of our egos verses the worthiness of the venture. And so, too often we engage in these dirty little mongering turf wars that are more the stuff of mud-slinging than anything that might raise up humanity or change the course of history itself.
We wallow in the bane of blustering banter and then we gorge it fat on reckless arguments whose goal is to win, with us long having forgotten what exactly it is that we’re trying to win. Everything becomes a tit-for-tat circus of push and shove that might be attributed to two toddlers fighting over a toy that neither of them really wants in the first place. The focus becomes on finding some weakness, some point of hidden vulnerability, some crack in the proverbial armor that we can exploit in the pursuit of pursuing. We want to posture ourselves as some sort of valiant and sturdy victor, and if perchance we fall to the throes of defeat we then position ourselves as the victimized victim whose defeat clearly illustrates the impenetrable validity of their cause. And in the depravity and insanity of all of this we have misplaced the majesty of our humanity and we have wholly abandoned our calling.
To Reclaim Our Majesty
Might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming? Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy? Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us? Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own? At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps? When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?
It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise). But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare? Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity? Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos? Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater? Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be? In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?
I Believe
I am utterly confident in our ability to do all of those things. I have great hope in humanity. I have even greater hope in the God that bestowed us with abilities that in fact mirrored His own. And for that reason, I have a pervading and insatiable hope. Though some might say so, I do not believe that kind of hope to be misplaced. I believe in us; in you and me. I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well. I believe in something better. I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other. I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief. And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different. And then let us go and begin the process of making things different. Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Finally, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity
“Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself. For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self. Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging to be called forth to smash the chains forged of such an incapacitating sense of self. And it is my prayer that you would press against everything within you that would hold you back, and that you would raise whatever voice you have and extend that call.”
You are more than you realize. A lot more. You’ve probably heard that before, and if you haven’t, you’re long overdue. You are more than you realize. But the thing is, we don’t feel that we are ‘more.’ If anything, the things that happened to us would suggest the opposite…that we’re less than what we hoped we were (and probably a whole lot less). Whether that’s failure (in any of the million different ways that we fail), or ridicule, or jobs lost, or relationships that blew up, or dreams that went up in smoke, or friends that walked away, or opportunities that drifted away, or family members who were critical to the point that we wished they went away…or whatever it might be. The statement that “we are more than we realize” just doesn’t seem to fit this stuff.
In my recent book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In,” I wrote this:
“The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. That in and of itself may be why we don’t recognize them and therefore don’t believe that they exist. All of us run deep with untapped potential that is rustling just under the surface of our lives waiting to be unleashed.”
We are ‘more.’ Our circumstances don’t have the power to refute that or change that. For sure, our circumstances can lead us to believe that we’re not ‘more,’ and they can be very convincing in doing that. Our circumstances can also lead us to believe that we’re a whole lot less than we thought ourselves to be, and those circumstances can be incredibly convincing as well. But our capacity exceeds the failures that we experience and the criticisms that are thrown in our faces. Our abilities are not defined by what people have said, or the choices that we have made. Our abilities exceed all of those. They are greater than the limits of our imaginations, and they are not limited by people or choices that have proven to be less than imaginative.
That “more” will always be there whether you use it or not. It sits at the ready whether we recognize it or not. We are ‘more.’ That’s not the issue. The issue is will we understand that we are ‘more,’ and will we allow that ‘more’ begin to shape us into ‘more.’
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Integrity - To Understand and Live It
Integrity. You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.” It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge. It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda. That’s a conviction. It’s not about the cost of doing the right thing, or the long-term effects, or the short-term effects, or whether it will be popular or not so popular. It’s not about the response of a person, or an organization, or a certain cultural group, or some philosophical leaning, or anything like that at all. It’s doing the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing. That’s it.
Now, a lot of people ask what the right thing is. And in our culture, the right thing is too often based on the wrong criteria (or at least a terribly skewed one). In the culture today, the right thing is typically based on its level of acceptance, whether that’s in our social group, or among our co-workers, or in some organization that we’ve aligned ourselves with, or it fits the current cultural climate. Is it politically-correct, or tolerant, or does it embrace diversity (whatever that might be at any given moment). Often it’s these criteria that define something as the right thing. But the right thing is never defined by whether it adheres to an agenda or not, and it’s not driven by whether it happens to be popular or vogue or trendy. The right thing will always be bigger than any of that, and it will never succumb to any of our puny definitions and our fleeting agendas.
So, what is the right thing anyway? Well, here’s an idea that’s probably not all that popular or vogue or trendy. But here’s an idea. Jesus put it this way. He said, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Now, maybe you’re not a religious person, or maybe you’re not really a people person, or maybe you’re not either of these. However, the principle is basically the same…am I acting out of love? Love is not tolerance. Love is not permissive. Love is not about diversity. It’s not about embracing some cultural ethic because it liberates people to chase what (in the end) is going to destroy them. It’s not about liberty defined as permission to indulge in behaviors that will do nothing but indulge us to our own demise. Love isn’t about any of that.
It’s about understanding that there are an immovable set of ethics, morals and values that in the current culture have been labeled as constraining, antiquated, irrelevant, out-moded, or any other number of other definitions that have been assigned to them. And love understands that we can incessantly label these ethics, morals and values in these ways, but those labels won’t change the fact that what these ethics, morals and values are trying to protect us from remains unchanged. Love will not give ourselves permission to destroy ourselves, even though we give ourselves permission to do that. Love understands that in the scope of this existence there are principles that if ignored or defied will send us to our own destruction. And while our culture would ignore such truths, love with not. And it is this stubborn refusal to ignore these truths, and to commit to abide by them regardless of the cost that are the hallmarks of this thing that we call ‘integrity.’ Integrity is the refusal not to love, despite whatever that might cost us. Be advised, being a person of integrity comes a great price. But the price of not being a person of integrity is infinitely greater.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Thinking It's Over When It's Not
It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty. The fact is, there is no glass. We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.
In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:
“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”
Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over. We’ve been told that they’re over. Or everyone around us says that they’re over. Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over. Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with. Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not. We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think. But we can sail again.
Is something really over? Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim? Is it gone forever? Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe. It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all). Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’). It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God. In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Do you get that? Do you understand what that opens up? Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over? That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again? That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities? That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them? Is something really over? Really? You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Thinking It's Over When It's Not
It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty. The fact is, there is no glass. We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.
In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:
“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”
Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over. We’ve been told that they’re over. Or everyone around us says that they’re over. Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over. Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with. Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not. We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think. But we can sail again.
Is something really over? Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim? Is it gone forever? Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe. It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all). Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’). It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God. In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Do you get that? Do you understand what that opens up? Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over? That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again? That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities? That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them? Is something really over? Really? You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Sometimes fully being oneself in plain sight can be viewed as rather weird or downright odd. Sometimes our uniqueness is labeled as strange, bizarre, quirky or slightly peculiar. ‘Different’ in a culture of uniformity is too frequently labeled as eccentric, curious, “out there,” slightly unconventional, eerie, a tad bit unorthodox, or being something akin to being a dork. Our uniqueness can have dramatic social implications, causing us to be the outsider, the alien, the cultural misfit or just so plain weird that we’re a social phenomenon entirely unto ourselves with no place within which to fit at all; being relegated to the outcast.
These kinds of conclusions are quickly drawn and judgments are carelessly rendered rather than seeing uniqueness as potentially fresh, distinctive, or entirely singular. Far too often uniqueness is directly correlated with weirdness, dumping it into an entirely negative and typically unredeemable social sideshow. Uniqueness is pathetically reduced to oddity.It is then seen as entertaining because face it, “odd” is entertaining. The throngs of society curiously mill about these sideshows seeking some form of entertainment or amusement at the ignorant expense of the miracle of uniqueness. If you happen to have had the misfortune of having been dumped in some sort of sideshow because of your uniqueness, you’re seen as a permanent resident unless you reinvent yourself and sacrifice your uniqueness as part of that reinvention. The cost to do that is astronomical and deadening.
The Loss of Rendering Conclusions and Judgments
These various labels that we apply to others or have applied to us create a sharp and tainting distinctiveness that separates and excludes, rather than incorporates and includes. The profound asset of our uniqueness becomes a crippling liability. We have these various labels dogmatically slapped on our foreheads in exceedingly bold type with the whole of our person then being identified based on whatever’s been scrawled on the label and slapped on our foreheads. Following the brutality and ignorance of uniqueness branded as oddity, or worse yet as a deficit, we are forever relegated to the sideshow of life. The richness of our uniqueness is then lost to us, and lost to a world wallowing in stereotypes. In such a“lose-lose” situation, we are all diminished in ways that we may never make up.
Rightly Exercising Our Uniqueness
In a culture that embraces tolerance and diversity, let’s make one point very clear. Being unique is not about taking license by being oneself and using it as a stage to elicit attention, or make some sort of controversial cultural statement, or use it as a pedestal to flaunt immoral behavior, or generate some sort of shock factor in those who are watching us be “us.” Simply put, possession of uniqueness does not include permission to use that uniqueness with impunity to create something that we’re not in order to fulfill a personal agenda or fuel a social mission of some sort. Our uniqueness is not a lifeless stool to be snatched up and errantly or thoughtlessly used in the service of whatever cause we choose to use it in. Being authentically oneself is much more responsible and careful than that.
Being oneself is about embracing a deep respect for the stunning and entirely vibrant uniqueness of all of creation; a uniqueness that has been carefully crafted, unapologetically exercised and fully manifest in each and every one of us. It’s respecting that uniqueness within us not as license to be itself at the cost of everyone else around it, but something that builds upon everything else around it. It is not a pedestal to demand tolerance of the aberrant behaviors that we take license to construct from of our uniqueness. Rather it’s a place where we bow in some soulful combination of deep appreciation and mind-boggling awe as we look to carefully unearth who and what we are without twisting or tainting who we are in the process. It’s has nothing to do with revisionist mentalities or self-decreed permission where we seize our uniqueness, plop it as some lump of clay on a potter’s wheel and methodically shape it to our designs or our likening without regard for what it really is. Uniqueness used in these ways will cease to be unique.
Uniqueness Gone Bad
The uniqueness of our individuality under the total control of the individual is likely to be driven by selfish and self-centered agendas that will make us unique, but uniquely troubled, dysfunctional, disoriented and distorted. The power of uniqueness in the hands of limited people with unlimited parameters is dangerous indeed. In a culture of self-determination, personal rights and the territorial thumping of our chests to declare that we’re the masters of our own fates we take license with our uniqueness that is not necessarily ours to take. The cultural mindset of brazen independence creates a misguided sense that we are indeed of our own making, and that if we don’t shape who we are in whatever image we’ve determined that to be, we will have completely squandered our lives.
Uniqueness Well Handled
It seems that our uniqueness is not something to be shaped by us, but understood by us. It’s not to be engineered by us, but explored by us. It’s not to be created by us, but cultivated by us. We do not set its agenda; rather we discern it so that we know enough of it to know the agenda it has set for us. Our uniqueness is a precious gift that’s designed to be understood so that we can participate in making it the most that it can be, not shaping it into what we want it to be.
Our uniqueness holds within it the clues and the resources that tell us who we are, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do with this gift called life.Our uniqueness is most effectively nurtured and cultivated within moral and ethical parameters that don’t inhibit that individuality as the culture assumes, but rather creates a place for us to maximize that individuality. Moral and ethical parameters keep our uniqueness pure, supple and free from all the things that would tarnish it and ultimately destroy it. Uniqueness is a priceless gift that is as fragile as fine china, as tough as fired steel, and as broadly expansive as the creative genius of God. It is a gift beyond our ability to handle, but not beyond our ability to surrender to something greater than us so that it will eventually become something greater than us. Uniqueness surrendered and lived out in the enabling power and protective place of moral principles and ethical standards paves the way for that uniqueness to rise to unparalleled heights, to be more than we can think or imagine, and to grow far beyond the horizons of any vision we could craft for it.
You are unique . . . that’s already an established reality. Amazingly, you are one of a kind. You’ve got one and only one shot at life. So, what are you going to do with the immense gift of your uniqueness? You will kill it or cultivate it. What will you do? Consider it.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
----more----
Sometimes fully being oneself in plain sight can be viewed as rather weird or downright odd. Sometimes our uniqueness is labeled as strange, bizarre, quirky or slightly peculiar. ‘Different’ in a culture of uniformity is too frequently labeled as eccentric, curious, “out there,” slightly unconventional, eerie, a tad bit unorthodox, or being something akin to being a dork. Our uniqueness can have dramatic social implications, causing us to be the outsider, the alien, the cultural misfit or just so plain weird that we’re a social phenomenon entirely unto ourselves with no place within which to fit at all; being relegated to the outcast.
These kinds of conclusions are quickly drawn and judgments are carelessly rendered rather than seeing uniqueness as potentially fresh, distinctive, or entirely singular. Far too often uniqueness is directly correlated with weirdness, dumping it into an entirely negative and typically unredeemable social sideshow. Uniqueness is pathetically reduced to oddity.It is then seen as entertaining because face it, “odd” is entertaining. The throngs of society curiously mill about these sideshows seeking some form of entertainment or amusement at the ignorant expense of the miracle of uniqueness. If you happen to have had the misfortune of having been dumped in some sort of sideshow because of your uniqueness, you’re seen as a permanent resident unless you reinvent yourself and sacrifice your uniqueness as part of that reinvention. The cost to do that is astronomical and deadening.
The Loss of Rendering Conclusions and Judgments
These various labels that we apply to others or have applied to us create a sharp and tainting distinctiveness that separates and excludes, rather than incorporates and includes. The profound asset of our uniqueness becomes a crippling liability. We have these various labels dogmatically slapped on our foreheads in exceedingly bold type with the whole of our person then being identified based on whatever’s been scrawled on the label and slapped on our foreheads. Following the brutality and ignorance of uniqueness branded as oddity, or worse yet as a deficit, we are forever relegated to the sideshow of life. The richness of our uniqueness is then lost to us, and lost to a world wallowing in stereotypes. In such a“lose-lose” situation, we are all diminished in ways that we may never make up.
Rightly Exercising Our Uniqueness
In a culture that embraces tolerance and diversity, let’s make one point very clear. Being unique is not about taking license by being oneself and using it as a stage to elicit attention, or make some sort of controversial cultural statement, or use it as a pedestal to flaunt immoral behavior, or generate some sort of shock factor in those who are watching us be “us.” Simply put, possession of uniqueness does not include permission to use that uniqueness with impunity to create something that we’re not in order to fulfill a personal agenda or fuel a social mission of some sort. Our uniqueness is not a lifeless stool to be snatched up and errantly or thoughtlessly used in the service of whatever cause we choose to use it in. Being authentically oneself is much more responsible and careful than that.
Being oneself is about embracing a deep respect for the stunning and entirely vibrant uniqueness of all of creation; a uniqueness that has been carefully crafted, unapologetically exercised and fully manifest in each and every one of us. It’s respecting that uniqueness within us not as license to be itself at the cost of everyone else around it, but something that builds upon everything else around it. It is not a pedestal to demand tolerance of the aberrant behaviors that we take license to construct from of our uniqueness. Rather it’s a place where we bow in some soulful combination of deep appreciation and mind-boggling awe as we look to carefully unearth who and what we are without twisting or tainting who we are in the process. It’s has nothing to do with revisionist mentalities or self-decreed permission where we seize our uniqueness, plop it as some lump of clay on a potter’s wheel and methodically shape it to our designs or our likening without regard for what it really is. Uniqueness used in these ways will cease to be unique.
Uniqueness Gone Bad
The uniqueness of our individuality under the total control of the individual is likely to be driven by selfish and self-centered agendas that will make us unique, but uniquely troubled, dysfunctional, disoriented and distorted. The power of uniqueness in the hands of limited people with unlimited parameters is dangerous indeed. In a culture of self-determination, personal rights and the territorial thumping of our chests to declare that we’re the masters of our own fates we take license with our uniqueness that is not necessarily ours to take. The cultural mindset of brazen independence creates a misguided sense that we are indeed of our own making, and that if we don’t shape who we are in whatever image we’ve determined that to be, we will have completely squandered our lives.
Uniqueness Well Handled
It seems that our uniqueness is not something to be shaped by us, but understood by us. It’s not to be engineered by us, but explored by us. It’s not to be created by us, but cultivated by us. We do not set its agenda; rather we discern it so that we know enough of it to know the agenda it has set for us. Our uniqueness is a precious gift that’s designed to be understood so that we can participate in making it the most that it can be, not shaping it into what we want it to be.
Our uniqueness holds within it the clues and the resources that tell us who we are, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do with this gift called life.Our uniqueness is most effectively nurtured and cultivated within moral and ethical parameters that don’t inhibit that individuality as the culture assumes, but rather creates a place for us to maximize that individuality. Moral and ethical parameters keep our uniqueness pure, supple and free from all the things that would tarnish it and ultimately destroy it. Uniqueness is a priceless gift that is as fragile as fine china, as tough as fired steel, and as broadly expansive as the creative genius of God. It is a gift beyond our ability to handle, but not beyond our ability to surrender to something greater than us so that it will eventually become something greater than us. Uniqueness surrendered and lived out in the enabling power and protective place of moral principles and ethical standards paves the way for that uniqueness to rise to unparalleled heights, to be more than we can think or imagine, and to grow far beyond the horizons of any vision we could craft for it.
You are unique . . . that’s already an established reality. Amazingly, you are one of a kind. You’ve got one and only one shot at life. So, what are you going to do with the immense gift of your uniqueness? You will kill it or cultivate it. What will you do? Consider it.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
----more----
It's Not About Being Ordinary
It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are. In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come. But, it’s not about being ordinary. It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things. That’s the beauty of it. We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary. God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do. You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources. And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish.
The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are. And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are. We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether. And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are. And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are. So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.’ Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.”
I think that God wants you to see who you are. The whole of who you are. Not just the good, but everything that’s maybe not so good as well. Not just the stuff that we’re proud of (if we even have anything that we’d say we’re proud of) but all of the stuff. Not just the successes, but the failures as well. Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too.
Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary. And God waits to take everything that’s ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.” That’s what God does. He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not. He’s not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use. He’s looking for us to surrender all that’s ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it’s in) so that He can build it up to something He can use. “It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
It's Not About Being Ordinary
It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are. In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come. But, it’s not about being ordinary. It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things. That’s the beauty of it. We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary. God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do. You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources. And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish.
The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are. And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are. We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether. And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are. And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are. So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.’ Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.”
I think that God wants you to see who you are. The whole of who you are. Not just the good, but everything that’s maybe not so good as well. Not just the stuff that we’re proud of (if we even have anything that we’d say we’re proud of) but all of the stuff. Not just the successes, but the failures as well. Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too.
Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary. And God waits to take everything that’s ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.” That’s what God does. He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not. He’s not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use. He’s looking for us to surrender all that’s ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it’s in) so that He can build it up to something He can use. “It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Dead-End Roads of Our Making
We chart these paths. We set these goals. We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go. There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending. Sometimes that road is well defined and clear. Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all. And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods. “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.”
Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends. It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends. It just ends. They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful. It was the path to their dreams. It was the road to a life-long relationship. The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement. The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn’t go to any of those kinds of places at all. It dead-ends. In the middle of nowhere.
A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road. And if I created the road, it’s probably going to dead-end because it’s probably the wrong road. Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won’t have second-thoughts taking it). Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want. Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end. Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it’s not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end).
Dead-ends. The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us. Those are roads of no dead-ends. Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings. Forever beginnings. Perpetual beginnings. Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going. When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley. “There’s some sort of road that we’re walking.” And if God didn’t create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.’ If He did create it, you don’t need to worry about the ‘corners.’
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Dead-End Roads of Our Making
We chart these paths. We set these goals. We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go. There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending. Sometimes that road is well defined and clear. Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all. And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods. “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.”
Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends. It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends. It just ends. They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful. It was the path to their dreams. It was the road to a life-long relationship. The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement. The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn’t go to any of those kinds of places at all. It dead-ends. In the middle of nowhere.
A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road. And if I created the road, it’s probably going to dead-end because it’s probably the wrong road. Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won’t have second-thoughts taking it). Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want. Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end. Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it’s not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end).
Dead-ends. The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us. Those are roads of no dead-ends. Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings. Forever beginnings. Perpetual beginnings. Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going. When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley. “There’s some sort of road that we’re walking.” And if God didn’t create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.’ If He did create it, you don’t need to worry about the ‘corners.’
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture. It stands for something lofty, but costly. It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature. And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same. And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture. It stands for something lofty, but costly. It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature. And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same. And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Becoming Accountable
Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming? Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy? Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us? Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own? At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps? When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?
It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise). But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare? Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity? Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos? Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater? Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be? In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?
I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well. I believe in something better. I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other. I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief. And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different. And then let us go and begin the process of making things different. Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Becoming Accountable
Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming? Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy? Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us? Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own? At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps? When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?
It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise). But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare? Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity? Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos? Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater? Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be? In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?
I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well. I believe in something better. I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other. I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief. And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different. And then let us go and begin the process of making things different. Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Grief and Loss
Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons
There's an old Chinese proverb that states:
"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast. And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss. My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.
Grief and Loss
One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning. I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning. Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss. Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.
In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007. In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write. I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write. And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.
Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."
So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together. First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity. Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities. Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. The notion of God does not set well with some people. Sadly, that notion was often shaped by people or situations or less than admirable agendas that did not reflect the true nature of this God. And if we’re going to reject something, maybe we should reject it on its true merits, not those that have been imposed upon it. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“I can staunchly reject the notion that I was created to live in relationship with God. But should I do that, I will be unable to reject all of the consequences for which I was not created.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
All Is Lost
Everybody seems lost these days. People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days. I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are. That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of ‘lost’ today. Everybody seems lost these days.
Let’s face it, we live in a world that’s lost. In one way or another (or to one degree or another), the world’s always been lost. There’s a pattern to our humanity that should cause us to wise up a bit, and that pattern is that (as a species) we’re pretty consistently lost. It just seems that we’re a bit more lost these days.
And in our world today, the more that we work to become un-lost, the more ‘lost’ that we seem to become. As a culture, we walk around pretending that we have reliable maps and accurate compasses to get us un-lost. But we have neither. We attempt to create them, or make them, or say that we have them when we don’t. We claim that we have the policy, or the formula, or the philosophy, or some recent enlightenment, or some supposedly brilliant or revolutionary idea from which we can now draw the maps and fashion the compasses that we’ve been looking for, for so very long. And we grab hold of these new maps and compasses, and we use them to recalibrate wherever we are (and wherever it is that we think we want to go), and we end up deeper in woods than we’ve ever been before. The woods of our lives and our culture are littered with discarded maps and broken compasses. Everybody seems lost these days.
Of course we’re lost. We’re lost because the woods that we’re in are bigger than the resources that we have to get out them. And those woods become increasingly bigger the more that we convince ourselves that we can get out of them by ourselves. Where we are is too big for any map or any compass that we can create. And while we tend to bristle at the idea, God holds the map and has the compass. A sure map and a steady compass. And while we’re likely to continue to refute that reality, or work to ignore it in light of our incessant stubbornness, He’s got the map and the compass. And all we have to do (all we have to do) is ask Him for it. And I wonder (I wonder) exactly how lost we’re going to have to become before we finally ask Him.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Grief and Loss
Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons
There's an old Chinese proverb that states:
"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast. And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss. My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.
Grief and Loss
One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning. I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning. Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss. Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.
In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007. In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write. I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write. And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.
Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."
So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together. First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity. Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities. Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We need to stop. We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen. Just listen. For life is not what we’re chasing. It’s what we’re leaving behind in the chasing. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“Rich is the person who stops long enough to listen to a bird sing in the celebration of spring, peer into the deep blue of a drowsy summer sky, draw in the pungent aroma of fall’s leaves, and watch the listless kiss of a winter’s snow. For in doing these you have witnessed that which money cannot purchase and man cannot create.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Might I Say - What I Don't Want to Hear
We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
We all have…problems. And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems. Life comes with problems. It’s part of the deal. It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life. Life comes with problems. But the real problem is not that life comes with problems. The real problem is what we do with them.
In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not’ the problem…despite the fact that we think it’s the problem. The problem is how we’re choosing to deal with the problem. That’s the problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we’ve chosen to deal with the problem. The ‘real’ problem is that we don’t want to deal with the ‘real’ problem. And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that.
We want to immediately minimize the problem out of our frantic efforts to wave off the gravity of it at any cost in order to salvage our self-image. Or we want to blame others for it so that we are magically free of any culpability from the problem that we (through our geed or stupidity or arrogance) created. We want to devise clever narratives to excuse whatever we did that created the problem so as to hand ourselves a free pass and by-pass accountability for the carnage we caused. We want to see the problem as arising from circumstances beyond our control, leaving us utterly innocent, squeaky clean, and nothing more than the wounded victim of the choices that we refuse to own.
Or, we have come to determine that the problem is marvelously self-serving, and that it grants us some sort of cherished leverage that we would lose should we actually solve the problem. Therefore, we perpetuate the problem, turning a blind-eye toward those who are suffering because of the problem. Or, most deviously of all, we spin the problem to be the brain-child of some ill-defined, but dark and foreboding force intent on our destruction. And these people, or these organizations, or these clandestine groups clustered in some darkened room, or whatever they might be become enemy that they never were, and we become the victim that it is, in fact, the victimizer. The real problem is rarely the real problem.
But when we fall prey to our lesser selves and enslave ourselves to the fear of accountability, or risk tarnishing our cherished reputations by being exposed as the culprits, or have to expend cherished resources to clean up the mess we made when we would much prefer to hoard those resources for ourselves, or when we seize the opportunity to turn our failures on others in order to elevate ourselves above them in some sickening power grab, or when we choose whatever gain the problem might grant us over the destruction it will wield in the lives of others…when we do any of these, we are creating a problem far bigger than whatever the real problem was. Far bigger. And we would be utterly foolish to think that these choices will not come back to haunt us with an unparalleled vengeance that we cannot begin to imagine. Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem.
It takes courage to step up and own what we have done. It is the brave individual who will refuse to elevate themselves at the expense of others. It is the person of integrity who will unflinchingly stare into the mirror of their decisions and own what they see staring back at them. It is the man or woman of wisdom who will recognize that to embrace the consequences of our choices, and to own the outcome of our behaviors is the single path to freedom, and that any other path will always, always, lead to enslavement. And it is the person of faith will understands that God can only forgive that which we repent of, and that there is nothing so large that He cannot, and will not, forgive. God is in the business of wiping slates clean and handing out new starts. Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem. And if we are to begin the process of wiping out the problems in our world, we must wipe out the way that we have chosen to deal with them. We must…
“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness…”.
- 1 Corinthians 3:18-19
New beginnings. The way our lives frequently go, we doubt the existence of new beginnings...at least for us. We've had too much loss, far too much pain, and circumstances that seemed anything but kind to us. And as we look down the road of our lives, we can only envision more of the same. We really don't believe in new beginnings because all we've come to believe in is survival, and we frequently feel that we're doing that all that well either.
But our new beginnings lay in our painful endings. No one likes to hear that, and few of us actually believe it. But the seeds of our new day, our new month, our new life lay scattered about in the midst of our losses. There are new beginnings awaiting you in the brokenness of your pain. And it's worth looking beyond your pain for a moment to gather the seeds that lay there waiting for you.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. “Talk is cheap,” as the old saying goes. We say a lot of things, more due to the fact that we believe that we’re supposed to say those things, or we say so them because, in the end, they’ll get us what we want. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“The degree of my commitment to a cause will not be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am willing’ to sacrifice for it. Rather, it will be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am sacrificing’ for it.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Is Anyone Listening?
Is anyone listening? In the world within which you live, is anyone listening? Does your voice matter? The pain that you carry, the confusion that dogs your steps, the fear that drains your soul, the dreams that lay buried in a distant past, and a future that you sense is already being buried by the same things that buried your past…is anyone listening? In those moments when loneliness is all that you know. At those times when the loneliness has gone on for so long that you have little alternative than to believe that loneliness is the single story that life has penned for you, and that there is no other story…at those times is anyone listening?
Is there anyone who cares that you cry? Is there anyone who is willing to place themselves aside in order to make sufficient space for you to place yourself in their arms? Is there anyone who is willing to pick you up, to wipe clean the wounds that you have, to light a candle in your darkness, and help you press out into the light? Is there anyone who’s willing to get their hands dirty so that you might begin the process of getting yours clean? Is there anyone listening…at all?
And if perchance someone does listen, are they listening? Really? Or do we sense that they are listening out of obligation? Are we their project, or their charity case, and that in some way they are simply using us in some misguided way to fulfill some guilt-induced obligation to give back to society? Are we the box that they check in the ‘good deeds’ column of their lives because they haven’t checked a whole lot of boxes in that column? Or are they listening because focusing on our pain grants them an escape from their own? Or are they listening because to play the hero in our life is to make them feel that they have a life, or at least some sort of purpose in life so they don’t stumble through life feeling purposeless? Is anyone listening? Anyone?
In the Bible God says, "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” God will listen. Not out of obligation. Not because you are a project. Not because you are a charity case. Not because God is checking a box. Not because He’s escaping from anything, or needs to play the hero, or to grant Himself some sort of purpose. There is none of that.
God is listening. And He’s listening because to hear you warms His heart. To hear you thrills His soul. To hear you is the culmination of everything that He created, including you. He created the entirety of this world, and then He placed you in the middle of it so that you might know this God, and that He might love you. Intimate relationship. Unbroken relationship. A forever relationship. And when we broke that relationship through our sin, He refused to let that brokenness stand. That brokenness stood against everything for which God created ‘everything.’ So deep was His desire to listen to us, to connect with us, to hold us, and heal us that He sent His Son to die to heal what we broke. Yes, He listens. He created us to be heard, and when we messed it up He did nothing less than sacrifice His Son to heal what we broke. Yes, God listens. He refuses to do anything less. He listens. And because He does, He’s waiting for you to speak. And so, do the thing that you were created to do…talk to God, for He’s listening.
"Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."
- Jeremiah 29:12 and 13
There is no God. It’s not an unfamiliar statement. In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’
We Don’t Want a God
I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God. Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy. So, we decide that we don’t want a God. And subsequently, we declare that there is no God.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture. It stands for something lofty, but costly. It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature. And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same. And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Good as the Enemy of the Best
“That’s good enough.” How many times have those words come out of our mouths? The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we’ve learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways. The rather robust vernacular that we’ve created to wave off responsibility and say “that’s good enough” includes such catchy phrases as “that’ll get us by until Monday,” or “that’s good enough for government work,” or “that’s doable,” or “that’s in the ballpark,” or however we say “that’s good enough.”
The whole phenomena of “sliding by” or “skating by” has always been a byword of history. Subsequently, any vague concept of a ‘work ethic’ seems to have become much less an ethic and much more of a remotely fuzzy idea. We’re constantly working out ways of how not to work. And in doing that, we forfeit doing all the incredible things that we could be doing.
Many of us seem to have developed this fairy-dust type of magical thinking where things will just be there for us. Because we can’t see the efforts and the work of those who fill the shelves of our stores, or keep the wheels of commerce greased, or who relentlessly ply the seas of a forty-plus hour work week, they tend to become invisible. And so, things are just there because they’re there.
Ultimately, our gifts, talents and abilities are sacrificed on the altar of laziness and entitlement. We lose who we are, we lose what we could do, and in essence we lose our lives. At best, whatever our best could have been is lost. Tragically, in time we gradually lose a sense that we could actually do great things, and we forfeit the transformational reality that our best is both achievable and far beyond anything we could have imagined with the best of our imaginations. We forget that to be our best is the best thing that we can be.
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to our own limits in any given situation? It’s asking, how do I intentionally leave every situation and every person with more than what they had when I first encountered them? Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange. Being our best asks did we press it as far as was humanly possible, and did we walk away with nothing else we could have given?
And so, commit to being your best. Shun anything that is anything less than that. Realize that you were created to ‘best’ your own ideas of what your best is. Be your best, and in doing so transform yourself and transform those around you in the best way possible.
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
- Galatians 6:9
Life calls us to many things. We will have to step-up in more ways and in more situations that we'd likely prefer at times. And when we have to step-up, the manner in which we do so becomes extremely important. We can do so in ways that are less than admirable or less than honest. We can attempt to side-step something, manipulate it to our convenience, shape it to our likes or dislikes, engage it in a way that invites the praise of the people that we admire, or we can ignore it altogether. At some time and in some place, we will have to step-up.
As we watch the world today, many people are stepping-up in less than admirable ways. It has become less about integrity and a whole lot less about honesty. Stepping up has been hijacked by agendas of all sorts. It has been compromised by lesser things that have created a nation of lesser people. But we have the ability to step-up in ways that are noble...truly noble. We can address situations thoughtfully, ethically and with the guiding hand of timeless wisdom. We can change our families, our communities and our world by stepping-up to the challenges of life in ways both noble and brave. We can all step-up in ways that makes stepping-up something beautiful and life-changing.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We ignore our conscience because we want to do what it says we shouldn’t. But, we also ignore the consequences of ignoring it. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector. It doesn’t stop a fire. It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
What Is Better...Really?
What is “better?” I mean, the definition of “better.” When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not. If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.” We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones, and in doing so we say that we are making things “better.” We craft new policies, or we tear down old businesses, or we adopt new beliefs, or we upgrade this, or we downgrade that, and we label all those actions as “better.”
But “better” based on what? What’s the criteria that determines if something is, in fact, “better?” Is it based on the current cultural climate? Or, is it based on the trends that tend to be trending? Or, is it based on the desire to make a name for ourselves, or get ahead, or beat the opposition, or bring down a boss, or lift up a cause, or promote a philosophy, or demote anything that irritates us? Is it based on our desire to make a win-fall, or get ourselves out of a freefall, or just create a free-for-all? What do we base the idea of “better” on?
Labeling something as “better” is often a justification for something that’s anything but “better”. It’s that label that we attach to our actions, hoping that people will pay a whole lot more attention to the label, and a whole lot less attention to the actions that we’ve pasted the label on. Sadly, most things are not better. They’re certainly ‘something,’ but they’re not “better”.
But what should “better” be based on? “Better” is when others benefit, even if we don’t. “Better” is driven by the need of the common man, as the common man is the common cause. It’s something in the service of a hurting world, and not something that serves to hurt the world. “Better” is something that we do that leaves the world “better” than what we found it, even if we end up not being “better” in the service of that world. It’s sacrificial. It’s recognizing our responsibility to the lives around us, not the agendas within us. “Better” is when we end the day having gained nothing, but having given everything. “Better” is where love is given legs to run and greed can’t find its shoes. The world needs to be “better” in a “better” way. And that starts with you, and it starts with me, and it starts with rejecting anything that is not truly “better.”
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s)
I was thinking. And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about. But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote. We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no thinking, other than the commitment not to think. We think in the way that others have chosen to think because they’ve already done the thinking, which relieves us of the need to do so. We think we think, but the more I think about that, the less I think we think (if you know what I mean). So, while there’s a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours …we don’t.
It seems that our thinking is constrained in a manner that there’s really not that much thinking going on at all. Rather, more often than not our thinking is a tired process of monotonously gathering up a predictable handful of stale but safe thoughts. And if we play with them long enough, we figure that maybe they’ll freshen up and something innovatively fragrant might actually emerge out of the rot. If something actually does, we’re usually scared of whatever it is. If it doesn’t (which is typically what happens) we become increasingly convinced beyond hope that life is actually as stale as we thought it was.
Why?
Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow. We think within predetermined boxes because anything outside of those requires some innovation wherein we let the leash out a bit, let our thoughts find their legs, and let them run. But we’ve discovered that sometimes that simply takes too much thought, far too much energy, and far, far too much courage, for it is much easier and much, much safer to just sit. Or worse yet, we fear that once our thoughts have caught even the slightest whiff of a life running at full stride, they will forever refuse the short leash.
What if our thinking were to open up fresh venues and pull back some hitherto hidden veil that suddenly revealed vast horizons that leaves ignorance no place to hide? And what if the magnitude of such revelations is such that it handily crushes the complacency within which we’ve found so much comfort? What if? And out of the fear that such things might actually befall us, we peruse the stank back alleys of complacency, hastily borrowing boxes that we find deep in the darkened hovels of mediocrity. And life becomes a journey lived within suffocating boxes rather than an adventure crafted of breathless horizons.
Our Box Collection:
The Box of Societal Norms
We think within the box of societal norms. We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another. Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren’t sufficiently ethical or moral. Therefore, (despite the terribly narrow nature of both the boxes and our logic), they are deemed acceptable. To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response. We desperately want to be in the good graces of those around us as that’s far more comfortable and far less dangerous than being in some other more adverse state of relationship with these people. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.
The Box of the Mundane
We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, rigorously predictable, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they’ve created paths around it. We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that’s just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there’s nothing to venture off on because there’s one and only one path. It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it’s safe (if you happen to define ‘safe’ as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt). In an increasingly busy world that’s careening in every conceivable direction, the box of the mundane allows us to perfectly function on autopilot since there’s only one path that we can walk. Better yet, if we so choose we can simply sit along the side of this singular path, as this box generously allows us to somehow think (because we’re not) that sitting is a journey. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.
The Box of Our Fears
We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort). We’ve probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt. And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear. We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn’t exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all. And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it’s safe. And safety (in our minds) is a decent trade-off, so much so that we amply decorate the box and make it homey with the scant furnishings of justification, rationalization, denial and other carefully appointed excuses. We settle into the scantily upholstered armchair of mediocrity and wile away our days pretending that we’re not pretending. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.
The Box of Our Families
We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up. In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to. Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us lock, stock and barrel. Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes because, somehow, we will vanish into the dank darkness of another life, or be whisked off to parts unknown by friends, or fall headlong into a career if we dare step outside of them. Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box. Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves. Therefore, we must do the most daring thing imaginable and think through exactly how in the world we’re going to do that. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.
The Box of Self-Esteem
We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems. These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are. Sitting in our confining hovel, we know full well that there’s great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes. There’s a good chance that we studied it, or read about it, or on those better days taken a slight peek outside before slamming the door shut again. In fact, knowing all of that is often the most difficult thing of all. We know outside this box of ours there’s more life than we can wrap our solitary minds around. We constantly hear the invitations to come out. We can imagine adventure because we’ve imagined it so many times that we can almost touch it in our minds, which makes us think that somehow we’re touching the adventure out there (which in fact, we are not). But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive it. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.
I Was Thinking
I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes. Lots and lots of them. But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more. A box is not a fortified prison with towering walls and tangled barbwire, even though we have come to see it as such. It’s just a box and nothing more. And as a box, it doesn’t hold us. Rather, we hold it. I don’t ‘think’ that we have the power to move beyond our boxes. Rather, I ‘know’ that we do. And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about. When we do, the role of thinking will finally destroy the rules of the box. And when that happens, we will be genuinely free. And when we’re free we won’t be imprisoned by the dark specter of endings. Rather, we can embrace the majesty of our purpose, and we can run with the power of our calling.
And so, I think I really, really want to think outside the boxes. So, I think I’ll start getting rid of them. It might take some time. I’m going to have to be honest about them and grieve what they’ve already stolen from me. It might be scary (in fact, I know it will be). I may wonder what in the world I’m doing at times. People may wonder what I’m doing as they peer out from the cracks in their own boxes. But to not get rid of the boxes is to rot away in a box. And I know that that is not the life for me. And might I say, I don’t think that’s the life for you either. So, let’s begin the process of letting the role of thinking destroy the rules of the box. And let’s be free.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting. In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions. Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
How Do We Look at Time?
“Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing. And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything. Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown to the ‘beginning’ of everything.”
How do we look at time? As a thief? As something that moves way too fast? As something that robbed our youth and is eroding our lives with every tick of the clock? Do we see it as something that there’s never enough of? Do we see it as something that moves faster the busier that we become, so there’s never any chance that we will ever be able to catch up? Or, do we see it as something that drags when we’re bored, so much so that we’d gladly forfeit the time just to get out of the boredom? If we’re tired of life, or frustrated with our circumstances, or if we just don’t care anymore, do we wish that time didn’t exist in the first place so that we’d be free of whatever it is that we want to be free of? How do we look at time?
But is it possible that time is a resource? And in the expending of that resource (that we call time) is it possible that we can invest in something that we never really thought of? Something that we never really considered? Is the trade-off expending time that we can’t get back, for something that we can? Are we investing in something that can change a life, or alter the trajectory of a marriage gone sideways, or bring healing to someone who’s wounded, or give a bit of light to someone who’s living out their life in nothing but darkness? Is time a resource (when used wisely) can shape a community, touch a nation, or change the world? And more profoundly than all of that, is it something that God has given us to use now that it can have an eternal impact that is not bound by time at all? Is time the thing that we use to bring people to a God Who’s deepest desire is to ultimately bring all of those people to a place called “eternity” where there is no time?
If we use our time to achieve things like this, the passing of time and the loss of that time in the passing is infinitely offset by the good that came out of that time. No, we can’t get time back. No, it’s not a renewable resource. When it’s gone, it’s gone. But what if the expenditure was offset by the good that came out of that time? What about that? And what if that expenditure touches a life for an eternity of time? I would think that that is time well spent, and I would think that it makes the time we have the place from which we change things for all of time.
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is
Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it. Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us. Rather, we are able to stand in spirited opposition to those realities, and in the face of them we are capable of crafting brilliant and utterly resilient solutions that crush those realities by transforming them. We are dreamers and the authors of visions. We have the ability to conceptualize marvelous things and actually begin the act of crafting them even at those times when the presence of them or the hope for them is entirely non-existent. We are a powerful bunch vested with immense potential that exceeds even that which we understand.
Yet, we bring these abilities to bear against a world that would wish to press us flat in its skepticism. The world becomes embroiled in the selfish pursuits that it crafts as it chases things born of greed, gluttony and selfishness. The world would bend us to its darker ways rather than be bent to a better way. The world would prefer to kill both us and itself rather than give up what it has selfishly given itself over to. Indeed, the world has sold its soul to something that it is convinced will liberate the soul that it sold. Therefore, in the insanity of a world gone rogue, the world will viciously fight for the things that are certain to destroy it.
The weight of living in a world such as this, as well as the incessant press of darkness that such living spawns can at times leave us wondering if our influence might be too insufficient to wrestle the world out of a darkness that has become so terribly dark. We stand as single entities, bringing what light we can. Most times, that light seems swallowed in the vast darkness that seems to advance without restraint. We are left in the squalor of a battle that seems lost, only holding the line so that we can delay the full descent of evil and grant ourselves a few precious moments before life is over.
To Believe In Something Better
But we forget. We are extraordinarily quick to lose touch with a greater reality that infinitely surpasses the darkness which surrounds us. Our perspective becomes one of gradual defeat and continual hopelessness. Our understanding of who we are and Who we serve is lost in the grief of a battle seemingly hopeless and ground perpetually surrendered. We fall prey to the lies of the darkness whose own darkness is completely dependent upon our fear of it. Therefore, the darkness must appear dark beyond what it is in order to create the fear necessary to insure its own survival. It is not an undefeatable foe. It is, in fact, a foe that fears lest we discover the power that we possess and the vulnerability that it has.
Therefore, to remind us of who we are in times such as these and to fan the flames of our passion, I have compiled a number of quotes that I have had the privilege of authoring. It is my desire to call us back to lofty dreams and rigorous passion. To remind us that the darkness is the absence of light and therefore is totally dependent on the light remaining absent. As such, the darkness is terribly vulnerable as it possesses no means by which to stop the light other than creating fear in us. These quotes are written to set us free and send us out in the marvel of our humanity to change a world that is too ill-equipped to change itself. To say that we stand for something better, and that we will be that ‘something better’ in the standing. It is my hope that these quotes will move you to move your world, for I believe that you can, and I believe that you will:
The Rise Against ‘What Is’
“If it didn’t go all that well today, tomorrow is the opportunity that I have to do what I did today without doing it the way that I did it today.”
“Pull every dream that you’ve ever had from all of the places that you’ve abandoned them, brush them off, set them in front of yourself, run the fingers of your heart over each of them, fight the lie that you’re not enough to achieve them, and realize that the dream was not too big. Rather, the belief in yourself is too small.”
“Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us. Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.”
“You, yes you are the impossible waiting to happen. And the only reason that that sounds impossible to you is that you haven’t been daring enough to push the possible out to the point where it becomes what you once mistook for the impossible.”
“I am begging you to let nothing shackle you that God has sent you to unshackle.”
“I’ve sat with tens of thousands of people and I’ve stared into as many empty eyes. And I must say that the inexplicable contradiction for me is that despite the gaping emptiness engulfing every one of these eyes, there yet lies within each one a wonderfully formidable gifting, an irrepressible energy, a depth yet undiscovered, riches unfathomed, and the resources to amply transform this ever-darkening world. And I’ve seen enough eyes to know that if yours are also empty, like everyone else’s they are also full.”
“God doesn’t ask if something can be done. Nor does He ask if we have the resources to do it. For God is bound by neither question. And when we stand with God, neither are we.”
“You are fully and magnificently equipped to stand up and change the world around you. And to simply sit down and tolerate the world around you is to squander who you are in the process of never being who you are.”
“Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are. And without any shred of doubt, I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.”
“Stand up and be the light that God created you to be. Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.”
“Look in the mirror. Go ahead and look yet again. And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you. And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”
“If I let that which I hold to be true fall victim to a world that says it is not, I have in that action surrendered to the voices of those who know nothing of the truth other than to destroy it because it terrifies them. And if there’s one thing I should be terrified of, it’s not the surrender itself, but the fact that in the surrender I have given the world permission to avoid the very thing that it should fear.”
“It’s not the gifts or the abilities or the talents that equip us to accomplish great things. Rather, it’s the persistent and adamantly stubborn conviction that we will in no way leave the world the way that we found it. And I would rather join hands with a single person of this kind than sit with a million gifted people who are not of this kind.”
And finally…
“I will spend my life believing in you so that you will someday commit to doing the same.”
To Believe
We must press ourselves into a sort of reckoning. We must realign our minds with the truth of who we are, who God created us to be, and the fantastic mission that He gifted us with. In a battle this pervasive and insidious, we must ground ourselves in a truth so brilliant and pristinely clean that it will handily stand against the wiles of the devil and the depth of the darkness he has spun. We must align ourselves with a reality so brilliant, robust and muscular that we find ourselves unintimidated by the darkness that now stands quaking in front of us.
We have a God who has called us to great things. Great things. He has not called us to defeat or even some slightly marginal victory. He has called us to complete and unquestioned victory. And such a call would never have been extended had not this God of ours provided ample resources to achieve that victory.
Before moving to the next chapter, I would encourage you to reread the quotes shared in this chapter. I would likewise encourage you to pick one that speaks to you, to write it down, and recite it daily. Let its truth seep deep into your soul and ignite your heart. Let it breath confidence into your spirit and energy into your convictions. Indeed, it is time to rise against ‘what is.’ So, let’s rise.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We need to stop. We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen. Just listen. For life is not what we’re chasing. It’s what we’re leaving behind in the chasing. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“Rich is the person who stops long enough to listen to a bird sing in the celebration of spring, peer into the deep blue of a drowsy summer sky, draw in the pungent aroma of fall’s leaves, and watch the listless kiss of a winter’s snow. For in doing these you have witnessed that which money cannot purchase and man cannot create.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Do We Search for the Truth?
Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do? What insanity would behoove us to do anything less? But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.
Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be. It may not support our agendas, or our desires. In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated. The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing. Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place. Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place? Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff? Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it? Will we search for truth even then?
I don’t know that we do. In fact, what we seem to search for the most are ways to circumvent the truth. Our search does not seem to be ‘for’ the truth, but rather it seems to be far more vested in ways to get ‘around’ the truth. We would not even begin to label our actions as such because such actions would immediately call the whole of our character into question. But what we label something does not make it what we’ve labeled it. Our search seems to be one of committed avoidance. It is one of intentional evasion, of manufactured detours, of clever deviations that are so slick that we don’t even realize that we deviated. It’s not that we run from the truth as much as we diligently work to create pathways around it, that in the end, never get us around anything. I wonder if that’s really more of what we do.
And as such, these evasive endeavors are quite naturally filled with such familiar things as slippery denials, evasive rationalizations, ambiguous justifications, relentless blame-placing, rogue fear-mongering, the incessant spinning of events, the bogus editing of facts, and the mind-boggling contortions where we take reality and make it something other than reality.
But likely the most dangerous of these is the self-endowed liberty that we have granted ourselves to make truth whatever we wish to make it. Therefore, it’s not about avoidance, because conveniently, that’s no longer necessary. Rather, it’s about creating, which is avoidance of the most calculated, but ill-fated sort. It’s about making truth whatever we want it to be. It’s about making it fit whatever agenda, or belief system, or value system, or platform, or whatever it is that we want it to fit. If truth will not grant us that which we wish, we will simply edit it until it does. But in the end, it is no longer truth, and truth be told, we will eventually find that out, and we’ll probably find it out the hard way.
Truth. Do we search for it, or do we do something else with it? You might ask yourself, in a truthful kind of way, what you’re doing with it.
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
- Jesus Christ
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else
It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow.
In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go. At other times its definition is rather handily shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives. For others, it’s based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
The Detours We Create
Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination. Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us.
And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination. However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.
The Detours Life Creates
But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up if it hasn’t already. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point. And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we’re left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.
The Explanation of Detours Missed
How It Happens
Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us. We don’t dance as well as we think we do. Our ingenuity falls prey to our arrogance, and the winds that we assumed to be reliable often shift and drive our genius toward some rocky shoal. And so, life will fall upon us, or ram against us, or pull the ground out from under us, or wreck us.
Casual and Careless
Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? The gift is lost in the grind and we lose a sustaining sense of gratitude.
We get caught in the shallows, forgetting that the deepest waters hold the greatest treasures. But we would rather forage for trinkets because treasures are too stubborn to just hand themselves to us and we will not succumb to such preposterous demands. The shallows become our calling when they are nothing more than our coffin. Therefore, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention. We come to believe that we are living a life of great things because it is too overwhelming to embrace the truth that we have forfeited great things. The outcome of such passive living is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Preoccupied with Pabulum
Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears.
There’s plenty of pablum to go around. Therefore, we assume that if we collect sufficient quantities of it, it will add up to something bigger than pablum. Yet, dreams are never constructed of pablum and our fears are never put at bay by any collection of it, regardless of how massive. It is an escape, but it is never an answer. It’s a detour, but it is never a destination. It is an imitation of what we are attempting to avoid. Subsequently, pablum gives us a sense that we can circumvent everything that we fear and still achieve everything that we dream. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Along for the Ride
Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself. Life is a river, we say. And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.
Assuming that we are along for the ride releases us from any accountability for the ride and where it might end up. We are innocent. Or we’re victims of circumstance. Or our families put us here because they didn’t know any other place to put us. Or we’re simply being obedient to whatever we’ve subjected ourselves to. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
The Walls of Denial
At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it.
We live in walls that we pretend are horizons, or vast doorways that open to massive expanses and marvelous places. In time, we come to believe that they are not walls at all as we’ve visualized them as something that they will never be. We then live out our lives in these confining hovels, convinced that we are forging great mountains and running in wild places. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Ending Up Where We Wish to Be
We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey. We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred.
Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves. It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course. If we imprudently succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it’s going with no one at the helm. And that kind of destination cannot be good.
We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors. If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives. Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we’ve dreamt to land. If we don’t, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We run after a lot of stuff. Our time, our energy, our finances, and much of our lives are spent chasing stuff. And when we catch that stuff, we typically find that it doesn’t do for us what we thought that it would do for us. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“The insanity of it all is that the search for that which will fill us incessantly drives us to pursue the very things that will empty us. Yet, the greater insanity is to find ourselves utterly perishing in our emptiness and yet declaring to our dying day that the emptying was the filling. And that is emptiness of the most chilling sort.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Better or Worse?
Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse? Will it improve your life, or diminish your life? The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other. And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse?
But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things. First, there can be people telling us that the choice that we are about to make will, in fact, make us better. They will look at us square in the face and say that without a doubt, this decision will improve our lives. And these people can put forth all kinds of reasons as to why it’s absolutely certain to do that. But do we see that kind of growth in their lives, or do we just hear that in their words? Are we hearing real life principles and sound values and a truly refined wisdom, or are we listening to flimsy agendas and self-proclaimed platforms and substance-less statements dressed in the finery of something that they are not? Will these choices make us better or worse?
Second, the question of whether a choice is going to make things better or worse can also be clouded by whatever is vogue or trending. We want to be in step with the culture around us so as to not look the fool, or the ill-informed, or worse yet, the rebel. And it is assumed that if we are in step with the culture, and if we align these choices with whatever is currently trending, these choices are certain to make us better. They will improve our lives. And while the likelihood is that any improvement will be superficial and fleeting at best, they will only serve us until that which is vogue is no longer vogue, and that which is trendy is now outdated and a burden to whatever has now been proclaimed as new and cutting-edge. The question then remains…will these choices make us better or worse?
Thirdly, the question of whether a choice will make us better or worse is also clouded by our own greed and short-sightedness. We ask ourselves questions of what a decision will get us, and not so much if the decision is right regardless of what it gets us. We ask if our choices will position us nicely in whatever way that we want to be positioned, rather than asking how the decision positions us relative to sound principles and a set of morals to which we too often turn a blind eye. We ask how it will make us look to those around us whom we wish to impress, rather than ask how it will make us look once time has peeled away everything that is false and less than admirable, all of which will eventually reveal the true nature of our choices. And the question remains…will these choices make us better or worse?
Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse? Will they improve our lives, or diminish our lives? That depends on who and what is informing those decisions. Is it people with questionable agendas, or is it a culture trending on a rogue wave of self-gratification, or is it our own lack of thoughtfulness and integrity? Whatever it might be, we might ask who and/or what is informing our decisions? And how much are they clouding that decision to the point that we will be set up to pay a potentially unimaginable price in making it…for we have all paid such prices before and we would be the fool to pay them again. For the wrong information, and the wrong motives, and the wrong value system will leave you on the wrong side of every choice, and choices that leave you on the wrong side never make your life better.
Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse? And if Godly principles and Biblical values are not providing the guiding function for those choices, we are doomed to live out a life of ‘worse.’
“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise. Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
- Proverbs 19:20-21
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things
I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points. I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency. I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance. Rather, I want to walk their ridges. I don’t want to contemplate the taking of a journey. Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I’m taking it.
I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus. I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved. Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance. And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time. I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied.
For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it. I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race. And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.
Why Do I ‘Never Want’ to Do These Things?
Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction. Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure’ is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch. Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can’t elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us. And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.
We Are Made for More
We are made for more than all of that. Our humanity yearns for the next adventure. We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them. There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are’ is not where ‘we’re going,’ and that to park it wherever we’re at is to start dying in that very place. There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas. These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out.
Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy. We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away. We can’t show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already suppressed voice of passion. Yet, unless we set our sights on higher things we will always be empty-hearted, for blind obedience to fear and the steady ingestion of apathy leaves everything it touches empty. And I would propose that emptiness of this sort is the bedfellow of death itself.
Therefore, we achieve something because we must. And at times we dress up those ‘somethings’ so that they don’t look half bad. But too often our achievements are an insidious effort to sedate our sense of passion and render it appeased. They’re the anemic manifestation of our fears, a groveling by-product of our lackluster vision, and a response to the snide voice of mediocrity that herald’s ‘passion’ as the fool’s errand.
Passion is not fooled, even though we are fooled by the belief that we somehow fooled it. To numb passion is not to diminish its power. Rather, it is to diminish our sense of its power. In doing so we stepped down instead of stepping up. We swapped mountains for back alleys, and dramatic vistas for fading fences. And these realities create a grinding angst within us that will not be soothed by anything but heeding the call from which we’ve run.
What to Do?
Decide to Do Something
As obvious as it may sound, the first thing to do is decide to do something. Without the decision to do something, anything and everything is only an idea. An idea, regardless of how ingenious or bold changes nothing until it is birthed as a reality. The greatest ideas will only tickle our imagination, but they won’t fire it until they’re released. They will nudge us, but they won’t force us to jump. They will call, but they won’t beg.
To do something is to decide to be disciplined. It’s a decision to take a step rather than toy with ideas. It is a choice to move from the non-committal ease of playing out various scenarios in our head, to grabbing one of them by the throat and acting on it. It is not based on cost in stepping out, for the greatest cost of all is in not stepping out. And it is the sad reality that most of our ideas die without ever having been birthed as realities because we choose to do everything but step.
Decide If You’re Going to be Brave
An idea as only an ‘idea’ and nothing more than an idea is safe. As ideas and ideas only, they’re manageable. They’re domesticated. They’re leashed. We hold them within the safe confines of our minds and our imaginations, toying with them as time permits and returning them to those confines when it does not. But cut the reigns and turn an idea loose and it may not be as manageable and domesticated as we might like it to be. So, are we brave enough for the ride that is certain to ensue?
An idea that is given legs is one of the most dangerous things imaginable, but it is also one of the most exciting things possible. An idea running at full stride is wildly frightening in a manner that unleashes something that was never supposed to be leashed. It is not about throwing caution to the wind as some might think. Rather, it’s about stepping into the wind and being swept up by it while wisely holding caution as we do. It’s about understanding that wisdom is not held hostage to safety. Rather, wisdom is based on figuring out how we navigate dangerous things in a way that no longer renders them dangerous. And as such, are we going to choose to be brave?
Decide How Important Comfort and Familiarity Are
Unleash your ideas and things will never be the same; guaranteed. Things will change when great ideas are unleashed because they can’t help but change. What ‘is’ will become the stuff of a history that will lay beyond our ability to ever reclaim again. Our ideas are the stuff of the future. They are never home in the present for the present is only the thing that launches them, not the thing that cultivates them. If our lives have been expended in the acquisition of comfort and the cultivation of familiarity, our future is our ‘now’ and no idea can sufficiently grow in that.
While the degree of success rests on the magnitude of the idea being released, the greater degree to which it will be successful is the degree to which we unleash it. And if we prefer familiarity and the comfort that it engenders, we might never truly let an idea loose, or we may well attempt to cram it back into the confines we released it from after we’ve unleashed it. At best, the ideas are hamstrung. At worst, they perish.
Get the Resources
If you’ve decided that you want to do something, if you’re sufficiently brave to do it, and if you’re willing to forgo familiarity and comfort in the pursuit of it, then get the resources that you need to make it happen. Real resources. This is not about thin and pasty resources, nor is it about material that’s been worn thin. It’s not about sugary-sweet notions or trite sayings that are fun and fanciful but are shallow and porous.
Rather, this is about finding bold, honest, timely, daring, frank, deep and brisk material that will thrust you out beyond the confines you saw as the terminus of your dreams. Find resources that are unforgiving in helping you grow, reliable in content, proven in substance, and thick with wisdom. Learn from trusted people who have been there-and-back who have likewise taken other people there-and-back. Grab these resources, let them grab you, and then rigorously apply them without delay or excuse. When you do, you will start the process of placing yourself in a position to begin heeding the call of great things.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting. In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions. Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices
“You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.'”
Men and women died in the service of this country. They died. They…died. They gave up their lives. Their futures. Whatever roles that they would have played in their families. They gave up their dreams. They gave up their aspirations. They gave up ever going home again, or walking past the school that they went to as a kid, or enjoying warm summer evenings, or decorating a Christmas tree, or hugging their kids, or planting a garden, or talking to a neighbor over the fence, or a million other things. They gave all of that stuff up. All of it. Now, that all might sound a bit romanticized, particularly for those of us who don’t want to hear it. But it’s what they gave up. In fact, what you and I do every day is what they gave up doing…forever.
So, we are here only because someone else is not. We are here because someone, somewhere paid the ultimate price so that we could be here. So we could have a future. So we could go home at night. So we could walk past our old school. So we could sit outside on those summer evenings, or decorate a Christmas tree, or hug our kids, or plant a garden, or talk to our neighbors over the fence. People died so that we can do all of that stuff. We are here because they are not.
And I don’t know what I would do if I somehow I had to look even one, just one of those people in the face and tell them that I’ve abused what they died for. Or, that I took it all for granted. Or, that I was so callous that I didn’t even think about what they did for me because I’m too caught up in my own agendas to think about anything else. Or, I’ve lived my life thinking that I was owed these freedoms instead of realizing that I’ve been gifted with them. Or, that I’ve used these freedoms for all the things that they should have never been used for. I cannot imagine telling a fallen solider that that is how I used what they died for. I can’t imagine it.
So, maybe it’s a time for reflection. A lot of reflection. Reflection as individuals, as families, as communities, and reflection as a nation. Maybe it’s time to realize what we have. Maybe it’s time to reflect on the sacrifices of people who we will never know who handed us what we have. And maybe we need to reflect on our responsibility to hold all of that with the utmost respect. Maybe, just maybe it’s time to do that.
We each have a conscience. Whether we listen to it or abide by it is another story. But we each have a conscience. The issue with our conscience is what will we do with it? The immediate answer might be that we will listen to it. But do we really do that? What if our conscience says "no" to the things that we want to say "yes" to? What if it takes us in an entirely different direction than the direction that we would like to go? What if is says that our dreams will be our downfall despite the fact that we are deeply passionate about those dreams? What if it calls us to something that we feel is either horribly frightening or terribly inconvenient? What if?
Too often we follow our conscience if the following is easy or if it's in keeping with our agendas. It's easy to follow our conscience when it lines up with everything that we want. But when it doesn't we often edit it, tweak it, put a hefty spin on it, or ignore it altogether. And it is in making decisions like these that we end up in places that we never wanted to be. It is the ignoring of our conscience that leads to the destruction of our lives. Our conscience is not this shrill and nagging voice. Rather, it is one of our most reliable compasses that keeps us out of the most terrible of places.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Sometimes we feel helpless. In the midst of tragedy, or painful losses, or devastating moments, we often feel that we are helpless to do anything other than standby and watch. Yet is that really all that we can do? Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“Prayer inserts me into the middle of any battlefield regardless of how gruesome or bloodied. And in the carnage of whatever that battle might be, it allows me to deliver a force greater than any raging on that field.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?
Who are you giving yourself away to? To what propaganda have you come to subscribe? To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb? Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached? What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense? What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to? Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum? Who are you giving yourself away to?
We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone. That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they are, we have successfully and rather astutely avoided them. We would say that we are not so gullible nor so pathetically naïve as to fall for such trickery. But are we? Have we? Really?
How often are we deceived into believing that some shining leader has been intimately touched by the cry of our hearts, and has been so moved by those cries as to lay aside everything near and dear to them in order to respond to those cries, despite the cost to them to do so? How many times have we been fooled into believing that some cause been raised up because the collective voice of the people has been blatantly ignored by all of the other causes that purported to serve those people and heed those voices? How many times have we been beguiled by the rhetoric of power-mongers’ who are quick to prey upon the disadvantaged in the culture in order to build small camps that are then set to war against each other, for the way to control is to divide. Who are you giving yourself away to?
Are these ideals and causes and beliefs and values ours? Really? Or were they made to appear that way? Have we been bamboozled? Have we fallen for the old snake-oil sales pitch? Have we drunken the Kool-Aid not by the glass, but by the gallon? Have we been sold a bill-of-goods while believing that we have hit the mother-load? Have we been so deceived that we are living out someone else’s convictions that having nothing to do with us? Are we nursing someone’s else’s agenda we our life blood? Are we erecting podiums built for some leader who will soon forget every single person who built it for them before the leader themselves falls away from that very podium? Are we slaves who don’t recognize the fact that we have sold ourselves over to slavery? The question remains…who have we given ourselves away to?
What are you giving yourself away to? Into whose web have you fallen? For you were not created for the convictions, or the agendas, or the podiums driven by someone else’s self-serving purposes or self-glorifying agendas. You were created for greater things. Life-altering things. Things that make history as much as it changes it. You were made for much greater things than the slavery of deceit. So don’t squander your life falling for someone’s slight-of-hand, or slippery spins, or buttery smooth verbiage.
Rather, discover what God placed you here to do and refuse to do nothing less than that. Be who God created you to be and not what someone else wants you to be, for to be ‘you’ is to be the greatest person that you possibly can be. Do not give yourself away to those who are certain to throw you away. Rather, give yourself over to be the person God infused you with the life and the power and the authority and the wisdom and the privilege to be. Be you, for your greatest life lies in doing that.
“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
Psalm 139:16
Few of us think with thought. What I mean is that too few of us really examine the times that we're in verses getting caught up in the times that we're in. If we're not caught up in a particular cause or some compelling agenda of some sort, then there's a good chance that what we're caught up in is the fear and insecurity of these various causes and agendas. We're typically rather reactive rather than thoughtful. We reflexively respond, rather than digging deeper and asking the difficult questions. We move to 'fight-verses-flight' rather than something more calming and productive.
This podcast is a selection of Craig's quotes designed to give us comfort, perspective, insight and confidence as we face the uncertain times that we are living in. These quotes assist us in being thoughtful in a manner that allows us to not only effectively navigate these times, but bring something of stability and healing to them as well. They are written to help each of us become more thoughtful about the times so that our response to them can be more productive for us as well as those around us.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We build bridges or barriers. If you think about it, everything that we do builds one or the other. And the function of a bridge is quite different than the function of a barrier. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“Every decision will build a bridge or a barrier. Therefore, what stands in front of you at this moment illustrates the decisions that you made on your way to this moment.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Where Did All The Time Go?
“Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost. Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time. So much can be lost.”
“Where did all the time go?” We ask that all the time. However, it’s not where the time went. It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going.
Think about this. When it comes to time, we only get a certain amount of it. We get this block of time that has a distinct beginning that we’ve already experienced. We’re done with that part of it. But as for the ending, we’re not all that certain when that’s going to show up. All we know is that sooner or later, it’s going to show up. And we can’t buy more time to push that date out. Time’s not renewable so you can’t use it a couple of times over to stretch it out. You can’t manufacture more of it. You can’t store it away so you can go grab a bunch of it when you’re about ready to run out of whatever amount of time you had. Time is what it is. And whether we use it wisely, or foolishly, or selfishly, or sacrificially, it goes by at the exact same speed every single second of every single day.
We can’t mess with time or alter it. We can’t But here’s one major change that we can make. We can ask, what are we doing with the time that we have? Is there anything that we’re doing that’s constructive? At the end of a day, or an hour, or a week or whatever, do we have anything to show for whatever it was that we did with that time? Did we use it as a means to heal from something in the past, or lay a foundation for something in the future? Did we use it to solve a problem, or did we expend it running from a problem? Did we use our time to make amends in a relationship where we had made a mess? Did we use it to chart a course to a goal that will lift our lives to the next level, or did we squander our time charting a goal to not chart a goal? Did someone, somewhere get out of bed this morning better than they got out of bed yesterday morning because we added something to their lives in the course of the twenty-four hours between those two events? Is someone more hopeful about the future because we engaged them in their past? In whatever way today is better for you, or for me, or the world out there, is it better because we used the time to make it better rather than squandering the time making it nothing?
And so we ask, “Where did all the time go?” We ask that all the time, and the older you get the more you’re going to ask it. But remember, it’s not where the time went. It’s what we were doing while it was going. What did you do with it, because you did something with it. But was the “something” of value? Did it heal you, challenge you, move you forward, call you to right a wrong, prompt you to touch a life, lift a soul in distress, give a weary heart some shred of hope, guide a child, mend a relationship, connect with God, or anything else like this. Because these are things that mark time well. These are the things that make our time well-spent. And if we fill our time with these kinds of things, we won’t be asking “Where did all the time go?” because we’ll know where it went.
Do we realize that the choices that we make today lay the foundation for tomorrow's outcomes? Do we really think that things just happen, or do we understand that what happens today is the consequence of a series of choices that we made yesterday? We seem to stand stunned and perplexed by what we see in our culture. But are these things really happenstance and the turn of fate, or are they simply the consequences of the choices we have made along the way?
As the old saying goes, "You reap what you sow." We are certainly reaping. While we need to understand and accept that central reality, our time would be better spent asking how we learn from those choices. Why did we make them? What was it that we hoped to get out of them? How do we stop making them? What would better choices look like? What ethics, morals, values and principles should guide the choices that we make in the future so the consequences of those choices work for us instead of working against us? We are the cause. And since we are, we can also be the cure.
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. It’s my sense that God doesn’t need me to speak to you. He’s quite capable of doing that without me. But there are times when I sense that He wants me to speak something of Him to you. And this is one of those moments. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“I don’t always preach God, for His existence is obvious. Rather, I preach what will happen to our existence if we deny His.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
What I Would Say to the World
I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say? What would I say? And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say? And maybe, just maybe I would share these thoughts with them. This, I think, is what I would say:
This is what I would say…You’ve spent the whole of your life filling your plate with the scraps that life has thrown your way. And even so, you feel horribly undeserving of these. But please understand that there is a glorious table generously spread with everything that you will ever need. And you might think about the fact that God sits at that very table staring at an empty chair that has your name on it. So, maybe you should step up and RSVP the God who is desperate to see you in that chair.
This is what I would say…You can possess every single bit of every single thing that you see, and yet you will still be insufferably empty. For you cannot be filled by the things created by the world. You can only be filled by the God who created the world. So my hope is that once you’ve gorged yourself to emptiness on the stuff of the world, you would reach out to the God who stands ready to fill you with the stuff of Himself.
This is what I would say…If you don’t believe that you are worthy of being loved, you won’t accept love. And it’s my conviction that the most unbelievable breakthroughs come when we step past our unbelief and act on the very thing that we don’t believe in. So my prayer for you is that you step and accept.
This is what I would say…You are worthy of every single thing that God patiently stands waiting to give you. And if He is waiting for you to allow Him to lavish every bit of who He is upon every bit of who you are, you would be wise to throw away every bit of everything else.
This is what I would say…Don’t think for a moment that God wouldn’t step up and save you from that which is consuming the very essence of your existence, for to save you is the very essence of His existence.
This is what I would say…I am praying failure into your life. And I am not doing that to harm you. Rather, I am doing that to so disgust you with the failed promises of the world that you can do nothing other than turn to the God who has never failed on any promise.
This is what I would say…God says that you are enough. You might look in the mirror with a million voices screaming something very different into the person that you see looking back at you. But voices and mirrors lie when God never does.
This is what I would say…You are not a mistake. Rather, you are a mass of living, breathing potential desperately begging to be unleashed. The only mistake is that you failed to recognize that this God of ours took the time to build into you something so phenomenal that you mistook the inability to see it for its absence.
And that is what I would say. To you. To fracturing marriages. To hurting teens. To those who have lost hope. To desperate patients. To those who graciously read what I write. To the wounded and the bleeding. To a culture dazed and living daily in fear. And even to those who have themselves created that fear. This is what I would say. And it is my hope that in saying these things, I have touched your life in whatever way God might chose to inject these words into your life and your situation. This, yes, this is what I would say.
Who are you giving yourself away to? To what propaganda have you come to subscribe? To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb? Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached? What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense? What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to? Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum? Who are you giving yourself away to?
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“Decisions based on timeless truths will never leave our tomorrow regretting the decisions of our yesterday, for such truths will always supersede any ‘then’ or ‘now.’”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
What Is Success and What Is It Not?
“Success”. People chase after this thing that we call “success.” But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”? How do we define it? How does the culture define it? How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play with define this thing that we call “success?”
Certain things are considered more valuable to achieve, or we grant them more weight, or we give them precedence over other things. There’s this pre-determined hierarchy of sorts that’s established by the culture, or by a certain industry, or a particular profession. There are things that are granted an elevated status by virtue of their longevity, or the difficulty involved in achieving them, or the sacrifices that have to be made in order to accomplish them. There are things that we define as success because few people achieve them, or maybe no one’s achieved them. Whatever the case, there are an array of definitions. But I don’t think that that’s what success is.
I don’t think that the definition of success is about achieving some goal, regardless of who defines it. I think that “success” is primarily defined by what success communicates to us about ourselves. The goal is secondary. It’s not the achievement itself, but the fact that we achieved. Striving for success is frequently an effort driven by our need to convince ourselves that we have worth, or value, or intelligence, or determination, or whatever we need to convince ourselves that we have. It’s about trying to overcome a failed childhood, or erase the messages of less than supportive parents, or wipe out previous failures so that they quit haunting us. Success is less about what we achieved, and more about who we are by having achieved. It grant us something that we’re missing. It fills a hole. It compensates for a deficit that we carry around within us (whether that deficit is real or imagined).
But here’s the key. Three thousand years ago a king said to God, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” We are made in a way that there’s no need to prove ourselves. Our design, our crafting, our gifting, our abilities, even our limitations are exactly what they should be. Everything that we are (all of our weaknesses and all of our strengths) are perfectly choreographed. They combine to create this unique, but potentially powerful balance. There’s an intentionality to us that’s perfectly shaped for the thing that we’ve been put here to do. So, it’s not about proving our worth and value. It’s about acting on it. It’s not about spending our lives proving something that needs no proof. It’s about living it out. You have nothing to prove, but you have a lot of great things you can do. So, believe in yourself and go do great things.
I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say? What would I say? And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say?
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts of men, for efforts of those sort leave cities flattened, nations teetering, and lives crushed. Instead, I must shift the whole of my gaze to the God who tenderly kneels in the midst of this unimaginable carnage and effortlessly makes the healing imaginable.”
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Our freedoms are not a "right." They are, in fact, a "privilege." They are not ours to abuse. Rather, they are ours to cherish. But as we abuse these rights by demanding our right to them or exercising them in ways that will destroy these very freedoms, we forget that they are fragile. Very fragile. They are not permanent. They are not guaranteed. They will not stand under the weight of our misuse of them. And if handled inappropriately or abused in one of the many ways that we abuse them, we may someday find ourselves without them.
We are a nation that is losing it's mooring. We are blatantly rewriting our history and thoughtlessly discarding truth in some mad dash of ultimate destruction. We are using our freedoms to destroy ourselves. And I would think that that is the saddest use of these cherished and long-held freedoms that I can think of.
What Is Right and What Is Not?
What is ‘right?’ What provides our guiding function? What is our “north star?” Our constant? Our set of rules that keep us civil? Our code? Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code? What is ‘right?’
The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think that we actually have the power to do that in the first place. The question, “What is right” needs to be probed without exercising some sort of non-existent license that leads us to believe that we have the right to decide that ‘everything’ is right. It is a question not of opinion or bias or cultural trends or vogue ideals. Rather, it is a deeper question. Much deeper.
It is not a question of how we grant ourselves the greatest leeway by building the widest moral highway we can possibly build. It’s not about scripting out the boundaries for ourselves that are boundaries in name only, so that we might delude ourselves into thinking that we are walking the high road, when we are, in fact, mucking our way through the lowest path. It’s not about the kind of life that we want to live, but the kind of life that we should live. It’s not about declaring all things ‘right’ so that we can finally relieve ourselves of the guilt of having done so much that is wrong. And that involves submitting our greed to the weight of principle. And in the mind of many a life traveler, that trade demands far, far too much. Yet should we decide against the trade, we will soon realize that the cost is far, far too high.
And so, we might consider that ‘right’ is something that ‘is,’ not something that we create. Its existence pre-dates our own and will extend beyond our own. It is a collection of building blocks that when gathered, form the foundation of existence itself. It’s a natural set of laws and principles that keeps things regulated, in balance, ever-steady, and gently positioned in order that we might enjoy the maximum of this existence. This thing called ‘right’ is an ingenious compilation of the values that keep us safe from others, but mostly safe from ourselves…for on our own we do not seem to do either very well. Right’ is the daily working out of the ethics that allow none of us to abuse all the others of us. Instead, it allows us to enrich those with whom we share the privilege of this journey. ‘Right’ is that fragile collection of morals and values that are so easily broken, but never destroyed. But hard as we try, we cannot break them without deeply, and possibly permanently, breaking ourselves.
And are these things not embedded in us, so much so that we immediately know when we have violated them? And does not the frantic need to douse the guilt explain why we in a rogue culture are incessantly attempting to make ‘right’ that which we cannot for no other reason than that which we are fighting against has always been, and will always be, bigger than us? Will we be so foolish as to upset the gentle balance of ethics, morals and values to the point that we will never be able to reset a world that we sent careening? And so, the question is, “What is ‘right?” And my answer is, “What God built, and how He instructed us to manage it.” There is nothing, there is nothing that will ever be more right than that. Ever.
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
- Micah 6:8
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four
Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before? Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago? When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?
A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events. In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before. It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision. And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different.
Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time. We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same. It looks different or not quite right. It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be. It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.
And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now. In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?” And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone. However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.
What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be. This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds. The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are. We never really considered the heading on our compass. And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it. And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.
What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago. We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here. But now we know it. And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.
Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it. Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here. Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited. We fear a life squandered. And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”
I Am Where I Am
At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS. We can then hunker down over the topography of our past trying to scrawl out the line that brought us here. We can do all of that. And in doing that there may be value.
However, we are where we are. Like it or not, we’re “here,” wherever “here” is. First, the task is really about determining exactly where we’re at in order to get some sort of bearing on our life. After that, we need to determine where we want to go. Then we need to determine do we have the time and the resources to get there. It’s not about bemoaning where we are. Certainly we can make room to do that for a bit if that gets it off our chests. It’s really more about grabbing hold of our lives and planning a strategy to take us where we want to go.
Where Am I?
So where am I anyway? Not where I think I am or necessarily perceive myself to be or have deluded myself into believing I am. But where am I . . . really? It may be a tough or even painful thing to think about. It may be harder to accept and embrace. It’s likely that not thinking about it was a major contributor to getting you here in the first place. So look around and be chillingly honest.
Embracing where we’re actually at will likely involve grieving time and opportunities lost, anger that it happened, disappointment in that we let it happen, frustration that we weren’t attentive enough to keep it from happening, confusion over how it happened, and a host of other weighty and powerful emotions. Our desire to avoid these may result in a less than honest assessment of our location. However, such a less than honest assessment of where we’re at will entirely undermine any ability to reclaim lost dreams and dashed hopes.
Where Do I Want to Go?
Where I want to go is not about running from where I am. Sometimes our destination in life is determined by our desire to get away from where we are. If fleeing our present place in life is what drives us, we’re likely to make poor choices about where we want to go simply because the motivation is not entirely adequate.
Second, where we want to go does not necessarily have to be a radical resurrection or reconstitution of our old hopes or dreams. We’re in a different place under different circumstances with different realities and different responsibilities than we had way back when. It’s more about re-evaluating life and asking fresh and new questions about where we want to go.
Third, we may find that we really shouldn’t go anywhere at all. It may be that we should commit to build upon and expand where we are. Investment and renovation in the very place we’re at may result in the exact life we’re looking for. Where we want to go may very well be utilizing the resources that we have right here and shaping them into something that we didn’t ever consider they could be.
Do I Have the Resources?
Some resources we have less of, like time. Other resources we have more of, like maturity and knowledge and experience. It’s about assessing our resources and realizing that we likely have more resources at our disposal than we did in the earlier years; we just don’t realize it. Then it’s about pooling and maximizing those resources into whatever endeavor we feel directed toward.
Have You Considered . . . ?
In reality, most of us end up someplace other than what we intended. Life is not so smooth or manageable as to chart direct courses on tidy timelines. It’s more about recalibrating and making course corrections along the way, believing that life is a journey that takes us off course at times, but provides us resources to likewise alter those courses. Not where you want to be? Think about it.
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“If I don’t passionately desire freedom for all of my fellowmen, it’s likely that I haven’t been sufficiently freed from my selfishness so that I might see their captivity.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
What Is Our Narrative?
What is our narrative? What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors? What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do? What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction that we create so that we don’t have to face the truth, or face the world, or worse yet, face ourselves? What is our narrative?
And have we immersed ourselves in our narratives to the point that they have become our truth? Can we lie to ourselves long enough, hard enough, and convincingly enough that we become entirely deceived by the lies that we ourselves have created? And in these pathetic narratives borne of rampant fear, famished greed, mis-placed motives, and ethics long cast aside in the crazed search of pleasure mongering…in these sordid narratives, have we likewise penned the lines of our own destruction? Are we, in fact, the authors of our own demise? For in the words of Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
We would be wise to heed these words… “The greatest fool is not the person who has been fooled by the lies of others, despite how crafty and ingenious those lies might have been. Rather, it is the fool who has lied with such amazing dexterity and subtle finesse that he himself has come to believe his own lies. And this is the most forlorn and yet the most dangerous person that I can imagine.”
Are we the fool of the narrative? Whether we have tediously written out the narratives to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors. Or whether we have given ourselves entirely over the narratives of others who write them for the same reasons. Are we the fool of the narrative?
For we are better than this. We are better than to be hauled off to destruction through the lines that we have penned, or to fall prey to the narratives of others. We are better than this. For God can explain our world, but He can also explain how He has overcome it. God can ally our fears, for He is never smaller than that which we fear. There is no need to justify God’s agenda, for it is always for the good of all. And if we commit to live in the manner that God has outlined, there will never be anything to excuse.
Maybe, just maybe we should forsake every narrative…those of others and those of our own. And maybe, just maybe we should embrace God’s narrative…for that will always stand as the greatest narrative ever told.
“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
- Proverbs 23:7
Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three
The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies. It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred. Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.
Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost. There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them. Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery. There are those things that we are made for, yet which are entirely absent.
Sacrifice is one of those things. It’s something that we know we are all called to. It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central. Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior. It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others. It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible. Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being. That’s sacrifice.
The Balance of Sacrifice
All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people. It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives. Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation. There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery. Sacrifice is calculated and made clean. Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.
Priorities
It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities. There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through. That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else. Clearly, that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole. And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self. That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.
What’s the End-Game?
We all ask where we want everything to end up. At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left? That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.
If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us. The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone. That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end. The service of self terminates at our own death. Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain. It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.
What about Legacy?
What kind of footprint will each of us leave? Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration in it? Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves? Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose? Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else? Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?
In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self. Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders. A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not. It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them. It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction. That is sacrifice.
How Will I Live?
Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are. The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others. We are raised up when we lay ourselves down. It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations. Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside. It is all of us at our very best. So how then will you live?
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector. It doesn’t stop a fire. It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
What Are We Focusing On?
We can be very focused people. We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on. Indeed, we can be very focused people. In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn about whatever it is that we’re focusing on.
The issue is not about being focused, as that’s simply part of our nature. The issue is what we’re focusing on. What has captured our attention? What has challenged us, or captivated us, or made us angry, or riled us up and incited us to some kind of action, whatever that action might be? What is it that we have latched onto, or what is it that has latched on to us? What is it that’s seized the whole of our imagination and inspired us to throw off all caution, step up and run after dreams of the most magnificent sort? Or, at the other end of that spectrum, what’s frightened us to the point that we’ve turned away from our dreams, fled in utter panic, and rushed off to hide ourselves in whatever place we feel has afforded us a safe place to hide? What are we focusing on?
Whatever it is that we’ve given ourselves over to and focused all of our energies on, it’s typically something that we don’t have. Whatever it is, it’s something that we’re ‘not’ in possession of. It’s something that’s eluded us, possibly over and over and over. Or something that’s teasing us because we can’t quite get our hands on it. It might be something that we’ve got pieces and parts of, but we can’t quite get enough of it to have the whole of whatever it is. It could be that critical and absolutely essential next step in a career, or something that’s just enough of whatever it is to nudge our position in our social group to that next cherished and sought after level. It could be that one thing that will give us the financial prowess that we yearn for, or that bit of power that will allow us to leverage ourselves to some ascended position, or that one last resource that will, once and for all, liberate us from the grind of the daily grind.
But whatever it is that we’re focusing on, it’s something that we don’t have. It’s something that we don’t possess. It’s something that’s not in our grasp, or our control, or our bank account, or in our collection of successes and accomplishments that finally defines us in a way that we feel we are worth being defined as. Whatever it is, it’s something that we don’t have. And that’s something to think about.
That means that, quite frankly, we’re not focusing on what we ‘do’ have. What we do have falls into irrelevance because it’s not what we don’t have. It appears that part of the value of what we have (possibly the greater part) is more about achieving it and less about possessing it. Somehow its value seems to get diminished by the sheer acquisition of it. And so we press it aside in the famished pursuit of the next thing, when what we possess is the very thing that’s allowed us to pursue the next thing. We lose the appreciation of all of the resources that we have as we immerse ourselves in the race for what we don’t have. We sit amidst all of the resources that nurture us, protect us, feed us, grant us rest when we need it, give us needed refuge when the day has battered us, and solace when the world around us is too loud and overly demanding. And we end up focusing on everything but that. We focus on what we don’t have, and in doing so, we abuse and neglect what we do have.
And so, maybe you should take moment and ask what am I focusing on? What has my attention? Where are my energies being directed? But more importantly than all of that, maybe you should think about what you’re ‘not’ focusing on? For that is going to be far more telling.
“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.’ And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
- Luke 12:18-21
Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two
Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality. Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were really real. Nice ideas often seem to be spun of the threads of idealism and the fabric of fanciful thinking. The reality is that they don’t really seem to work in the real world. Sometimes the very things that we wish were true simply dissolve and disintegrate when the reality of life hits them. Forgiveness seems to be one of those things.
Sometimes the greatest, most profound truths seem to be the very things that are completely removed from the reality of the lives that we live. In reality, it’s not that they don’t fit or are idealistic or naïve or far-fetched. Most often it’s simply the fact that we don’t know how to incorporate them. Sometimes the greatest truths are so big and so encompassing that we can’t figure out how to figure them in. And because we can’t somehow make them fit, we assume them to be irrelevant, weak, inadequate or just plain stupid. Such often seems the fate of forgiveness.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as “to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offence or debt.” The American Psychological Association expands the definition of forgiveness “as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, and/or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.” Whatever your definition might be, forgiveness is about letting go in a manner so total that the offense and the restitution are released.
Obstacles to Forgiving
Forgiveness is a releasing which makes it difficult on at least three basic fronts. First, we typically demand restitution be obtained or that justice be meted out for whatever offense we have incurred. There is a deep sense of justice that demands correction of an offense through some sort of action that both compensates us for whatever loss we’re sustained while teaching the offending party that such actions are inappropriate and intolerable. The act of forgiveness works against this feeling, making forgiveness difficult and contrary.
Second, forgiveness creates a perceived sense of vulnerability. If we “grant free pardon,” do we then open ourselves up to have the same offense perpetrated upon us again? Are we giving space and opportunity for the offending party to do to us what they did before? In forgiving, have we relinquished power that we can no longer hold over the person who offended us in order to keep ourselves safe or make them pay?
Third, we see forgiveness as letting someone ‘off the hook.’ It’s a free pass, a mulligan, a turning away where we permit ignorance to erase that which should not be erased. We feel we do an injustice by not handing out justice and instead waving off an offense in a manner that seems both irresponsible and ignorant. Forgiveness is often seen as an easy way to resolve or bypass something that should be dealt with.
What Forgiveness is Not
Forgiveness is not saying that the offense was ‘okay’ or somehow less than what it really was. It’s not watering down the offense or somehow sweeping the whole thing under the proverbial carpet in some sort of passive gesture. Forgiveness has nothing at all to do with avoidance or passivity. There’s nothing placating or escapist about it. It’s not an act of weakness nor is it a means to maneuver around that which we find unsavory or downright scary. It is in reality an act of the utmost strength, the highest form of sacrifice and the deepest manifestation of our humanity.
The truth is, it’s simply saying that to hold the offense against the person is simply too toxic for the one holding it. We will be offended and we will take hits that are deep, searing and violently cutting. When that happens, we must have an alternative to holding them. There must be a release of some sort. Holding the offense stymies the one holding it, therefore not allowing the offended party to move on. Forgiveness makes nothing ‘okay.’ It’s not about that. It’s about creating freedom and release in manner that nothing else affords us.
Neither is forgiveness a means of giving the offending individual permission to reoffend. Forgiveness comes with the understanding of the nature of the offense, as well as the establishment of boundaries to keep the offense from happening again. Forgiveness is not permissive or passive. It’s not about being an inflatable punching clown that pops up for the sole purpose of taking another hit in an endless series of hits. It is an intentional act of release, not an act of permission.
What Forgiveness Is
The old saying is quite true . . . forgiveness is more for the one who forgives than for him who is being forgiven. In forgiveness, we choose to let go of the emotional toxicity that harboring anger over an offense breeds. We are not granting permission to the offense or minimizing it. Forgiveness is an act of personal liberation where we are setting ourselves free from whatever was done to us. It is not an action that invalidates the offense. Rather, it is an action that leaves the consequences of the action between a just God and the offending party while freeing us up to move on with our lives. Forgiveness is a choice to leave the past with those who created it so that we can move on to a future yet to be created. It has nothing to do with weakness and it has everything to do with strength.
The Hardest Person to Forgive
In all of this forgiveness stuff, the absolutely hardest person to forgive is most often ourselves. There’s some sort of blockage when we are the one in need of our own forgiveness. There’s something doubly binding when we are both the offending party and the one extending forgiveness all wrapped in one. The duality of all of that puts us in two roles at the same time, making forgiveness doubly difficult.
Despite the inherent difficulty, it’s right here that the greatest grace (unmerited favor) needs to be extended in that we embrace both authentic remorse for offenses we’ve incurred while extending ourselves the full release of forgiveness. Something about this dichotomy is terribly difficult, holding many hostage to mistakes far in the past that dim or even rob the hope of the future. Forgiveness is inherently powerful enough to extend itself wholly and completely to us even when we are the ones in need of forgiving ourselves.
Freeing Ourselves
What are you holding onto and why are you doing it? If you look closely enough you’re likely to see that the rationale for withholding forgiveness is far outweighed by the liberating release inherent in forgiving. Take stock of what you’re holding onto and consider the worth of holding it verses the freedom found in releasing it.
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
We Reap What We Sow
We reap what we sow. In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do. The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do. Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow isolated to the action or the choice itself, by doing something we have, in fact, set the stage for a future outcome that will reflect whatever the action or choice was that we made. We reap what we sow. And that is an immovable reality.
And if we look around us, what we see today will tell us, quite clearly, the stuff that we sowed yesterday. The events of today grew out of the choices of yesterday. We can complain about the world today. We can bemoan our lot in life, or we can find ourselves becoming deeply hopeless and darkly dismayed about the state of our culture. We can grieve deeply over tragedies that seem to befall us at every turn and that leave us drowning in an agony so consuming that we don’t have time to heal before the next one befalls us. We can be utterly stunned at the nature of events and the course of the culture, having believed that such things were leagues beyond the scope of reality…but here they are. The headlines are strewn with news so dark that it sometimes seems nearly apocalyptic and we sit teetering on some abyss that our choices delivered us to. But does not our surprise reveal our ignorance, because the fact of the matter is, we reap what we sow.
Have we been so oblivious as to somehow think that this would not be the case? And are we so adamant about wanting to preserve our so-called ‘rights’ to engage in whatever destructive behavior that we choose to engage in that we altogether deny the cause-and-effect of those choices? Will we pretend that we are somehow above such an immovable reality. Will we delude ourselves with the belief that we have license do whatever we want, and that we somehow have obtained the power to grant ourselves a free pass from the consequences of doing what we want? Are we foolish enough to believe that we can indulge in the most rogue and base passions imaginable, and do so in some sort of perfect isolation?
Or do we actually accept the fact that we will reap what we sow, but that in time what we reap will somehow magically become better, despite the fact that it was, and will continue to be sown from the same exact stuff from which we’ve reaped the bad stuff? Or have we been sufficiently fooled by those who would declare that what we’ve reaped was actually that of others who have liberally sown our cherished and rather admirable efforts with toxic seeds designed to undermine our efforts, and it is their seeds which we have reaped? Let’s not be fooled, for we’ve been fooled for far too long already. We reap what we sow.
And so maybe we should look at what we’re sowing. Honestly. Frankly. With great pause and even greater thought. And maybe we should think about what the things that we’re sowing are going to result in. And maybe we need to refuse to live in denial of that painful and frequently disappointing reality. Maybe we should understand that while we might like to believe that we will reap something good from compromised seeds, that that is not the case, nor will it ever be despite how much sowing we might do. And maybe, just maybe we should start sowing something different. Something very different. Something radically different. Maybe it’s time for a change of seeds, a real change, an honest change. Maybe it’s time to sow something better because we cannot afford to continue to reap things that are this bad.
“A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
- Galatians 6:7-9
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One
We yearn for security. There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady. We want life to be safe because we have a passion to engage life. And to engage life out to its furthest edges, we must of necessity step out of ourselves and into that which is around us. We have to step up, step off and step out. Any real journey is of necessity a journey beyond ourselves. A robust journey unapologetically takes us outside of all that we are able to keep safe, into that which we cannot. To do that, we by nature need some degree of safety in the endeavor.
Not only do we naturally yearn to lean out into life, life at many junctures demands it, and a real journey is not possible without it. Life frequently arrays itself before us in a manner that forces us to trust; to moderate or marginalize caution and to step out onto ground or relationships or circumstances that have not entirely convinced us of their certainty or safety. Sometimes we have to step out into things that are not of themselves safe at all.
Yet, if we are to journey, we must step out into these things. Likewise, if we want to embrace everything there is to embrace, we must step out into and onto all of these things for most of them do not necessarily come to us. We must of necessity go to them; extending not only the effort stepping out, but taking the entire initiative of seeking them out as they move either largely hidden or complete obscure. Life most often calls us outward. It beckons with grand and rich invitations that hold out the promise of growth and great adventure. But it does not always come to us with those invitations. We most often must go to it. The hard evidence of our passion for the journey is illustrated in our willingness to chase it however elusive it might be.
The Risk in it All
Life however is terribly imperfect. It seems that there was some grand design that granted us tremendous ability and then graced life with tremendous opportunity. There seems to be shadows of some great correlation where we were equipped to do great things and then life laid out great resources and ample space within which to do those things. The chemistry of it all made life something potentially grand.
Somewhere the whole marvelous arrangement seemed to have gotten marred. Somehow it was apparently damaged. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), which is the ultimate loss of the ultimate gift. The original intention of grand opportunities remains, but it now has to overcome obstacles, barriers, and various difficulties. Life demands that we battle disappointments, cruel turns, unexpected twists and surreal pain. Life remains for the taking, but it now comes with risk; sometimes great risk.
Betrayal as Part of the Risk
Into all of this comes betrayal. Betrayal is a cruel reversal. It takes the trust entrusted and uses it for purposes contrary to trust’s intent. Trust is a powerful thing. It willingly bequeaths both power and vulnerability when it extends itself to another or to life. Without trust, the greatest things in life are simply not achievable. Trust pushes out the boundaries. It allows us to extend ourselves out into places we would not otherwise venture. Whether that trust is vested in the destination itself, who we’re journeying with, who we’re journeying for, or whether that trust is vested in ourselves, it must be present. Trust is the prerequisite to risk and without risk little can be accomplished.
Betrayal takes trust and cruelly uses it to the advantage or purpose of the one initiating the betrayal. The agenda is most often self-centered. It’s about using trust to achieve an agenda that trust was not extended to achieve. Betrayal is altering both the journey and the intent for which trust was extended. A great gift is used for a great evil against the giver. Something painful and at times barbaric is then perpetrated.
Betrayal at Its Worst
The greatest and most painful aspect of betrayal is the belief that the very action of betrayal is not betrayal at all. Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the façade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals; being in reality a double betrayal. It is where the betrayer is set upon betrayal in a manner hidden and cloaked. It is chillingly devious and it carries an impaling venom deadly to the one who extended the gift of trust.
There is also a deluded sort of betrayal where betrayal is seen as a correct course of action or a necessary agenda by the one initiating the betrayal. Betrayal is often justified or rationalized as something other than betrayal. At times the action is viewed by the initiator as healthy or appropriate or entirely just, and it is projected as such. It seems the right and necessary thing to do. Unacknowledged betrayal is the most damaging and destructive betrayal we can experience. It presumes a violation as no violation. In the face of great betrayal it pretends no such betrayal. We are then left with the betrayal itself and no means of resolution with the party who betrayed us because they see no violation. We are left not only damaged, but we are left entirely alone with no means of justice with the betraying party.
Coping with Betrayal
Betrayal wounds deeply and its effects are lasting. Yet it has come into all of our lives and it will come again. There are several ways to cope and heal.
First, we must recognize that betrayal is not our fault. We may have done things that have been damaging or inappropriate, but nothing justifies betrayal. Despite whatever our actions were or were not, betrayal is not appropriate. There are always other means to deal with life issues. Other options exist.
Second, betrayal is often another person attempting to navigate their life circumstances. Sometimes those efforts are naively well-intentioned and based in ignorance or immaturity. Other times they are malicious, intended to force an agenda that the person feels can be achieved in no other manner. Either way, betrayal is the effort of an individual attempting to navigate some circumstance. Regardless of how or why it happened, it is inappropriate.
Third, betrayal is painful but it affords opportunity for growth. The farther down we are thrust, the higher we can rise. Betrayal pushes us to the darkest lows. These places, dark and cold as they are, create opportunities for us to grow to tremendous heights. Rather than embedding fear of people or life within us, betrayal gives us experiences and profound discernment to engage life with even greater risk knowing that our dramatically sharpened discernment provides us vision for a safer course.
Betrayal has likely come for you already. It may have visited you many times. You can be assured it will show itself again. Whatever the case, it can build you or diminish you. It will not leave you the way that it found you. Do not let betrayal betray you or your future. May you grow and be enriched because of it.
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“Running from what we fear is like throwing a bunch of stuff in the bed of a truck and somehow thinking that driving the truck will distance us from what’s laying in the bed.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Repentance
Reconfigured Standards
We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one. We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’ There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions. There’s a paradigm that we all work within. Call it genetics, call it cultural, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something. We each have them.
But the thing that shapes them the most is us. We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be. But we want standards of convenience. We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want. We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up. At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us not to do. We want standards that are standards in name only. We want standards so that we can say to others and to ourselves that we are people of standards…when, in fact, the standard is not to have one.
And to pull all of that off, we tediously and rather ingeniously reconfigure our standards to the point that they’re not quite empty, but pretty much empty. They have a slight hint of ethics or morals or principles or values hidden away somewhere within them. But that slight hint is left there solely as a means of granting those standards a soothing illusion of legitimacy. But they are not left there as something to which the standard adheres. And then we intricately weave these largely empty standards into our lives just enough to provide the illusion that we are indeed people of standards. We make them sufficiently legitimate to look the part. We make them tolerable. We make them doable. We take the ‘standard’ out of the standard, but we leave them with the name. And in the end, we are utterly fooled into believing that we are people who live by standards. That we are people of principle. That we walk the hard road of integrity. That we live right. That we stand for all that is good and just.
But we are not. We are people living a distortion of what we say we’re living. And that is utterly heart-breaking. If we honestly face that reality, it’s nothing short of catastrophic. It’s a shock to our system. It’s a blow to everything that we’ve built. It’s a pill that’s far, far too big to swallow. It’s a reality check that upends this incredibly fragile and permissive narrative that we’ve built the entirety of our lives on.
And it is in the acceptance of this painful and often devastating truth that repentance is born. This is where we stand before all of the good that we thought we were, and we recognize that this ‘good’ is a myth convincingly spun by this horribly comprised standard that we fashioned. Repentance is a stark realization and a horribly jarring awakening that we’re living a life of reconfigured standards that are not standards at all. Repentance is a hard and terribly frank look at the flimsy narrative that we created to grant us permission to live a fluidly permissive life of self-serving, dark, and personally destructive agendas. Life is full of this stuff. They’re everywhere in every place. These permeate everything, including you and including me.
Repentance is acknowledging these behaviors, and then rejecting these behaviors as destructive for us and everything around us. It’s confessing the destruction we’ve brought on ourselves and everyone around us, and it’s repenting of such an inexcusable and wholly squandered life in a manner so comprehensive that no moment, from this one forward, will ever be squandered again.
And once we’ve cleared the house of all of that stuff, repentance is being sufficiently bold to ask what the great standard is. The final standard. The ultimate standard. The real standard. That standard that will stand no matter what. The standard that will stand upon, against, and over every other standard. What is it, where is it, how do I draw it into every shred of my being, and how do I live by it in a manner entirely uncompromised? Repentance is uncompromisingly abandoning every reconfigured standard that we ever created and embracing the only standard that will outlive every other standard. Ever. And that is repentance.
And so where are those kinds of standards. Those are the standards that God, and only God, can create. Therefore, it is God to whom we should repent, for He holds the only standards worth dying for and living out. He holds the only standards that will still be standards when all other standards have long fallen away. He holds the great standards, the final standards, the ultimate standards, the real standards. That’s where they are. In fact, that’s the only place that they are. Repentance. Abandon your reconfigured standards and seize God’s eternal standards. That’s what will save you. That’s what will bless you. That’s what will transform you.
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
2 Corinthians 7:14
Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common. To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well. It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore. Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.
It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’ We would define those as the common things. If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals. ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play. They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such.
Common Sense
It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common. After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good. Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it. There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome. Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses. It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails. Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.
Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent. It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic. It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason. Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears. It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.
The Absence of Common Sense
The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense. We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else. Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.
What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense. If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible. In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense. We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.
But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway. The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on. The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is. The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ourselves for how smart we think we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well when he wrote, “Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” George Bernard Shaw put it another way when he said, “Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.” Common sense is the stuff of simple man’s uncluttered instinct simply applied to whatever we’re facing. Instinct is all of our life experiences pooled together that gives us a sense that something’s right or wrong, good or bad, constructive or destructive, wise or not. Common sense then is simply using that instinct; refusing to convolute it by engaging in tangled complexities, and doing nothing more than directly applying it to our situation as our instinct tells us to apply it.
If that’s the case, then why is common sense so incredibly uncommon? Common sense would suggest that common sense itself is contaminated and distorted by things that dramatically diminish or altogether destroy common sense. We bias it and distort it through a number of means that undercut it and render it largely anemic. In doing that we rob it of its simplicity, we sully its purity and then we strip it of its effectiveness. We make decisions based on whatever we’re left with and the end product is typically something reeking with the rancid stench of stupidity.
Authentic Common Sense is Free of Prejudice and Bias
Common sense is a frankness that’s not convoluted by prejudice, bias, special interests, personal demands, self-centered motivations, self-seeking agendas or any of a thousand things that twist it to something rank and spoiled. Those things cloud common sense to the point that it’s so mucked up that we can’t see in it, or through it, or even around it. In reality, common sense is a blend of truth and fact untainted by any agenda that would dilute or skew it. It’s clean and transparent, entirely uncluttered by all of the muck and mire that we rigorously pump into it.
What makes common sense so uncommon is that we contaminate it with all that stuff. We have a difficult time setting our agendas cleanly apart and maintaining some disciplined degree of objectivity. We don’t get that common sense has a voice of its own and that voice is not our voice. What we adamantly listen for is our voice, our opinions, our sense of what should be. What do we think about this, that or the next thing? What are the pro’s and con’s that we can weigh out to weigh in our favor? We tend to like to hear ourselves talk anyway, so when we hear our own voices we typically like what we hear. Because we like what we hear, we assume it to be common sense and we act on it as such.
Common sense is not our voice. It’s the voice of life experience. It’s the voice of uncompromised truth and hard fact. It’s the voice of a guiding conscious that whispers or sometimes screams in the back of all of our heads. It’s the voice of something that’s far greater than who and what we are that speaks simple truths that are so clean that we can’t even apprehend them in the sludge of our own minds. Whatever commons sense is, it’s not our voice. So, if we’re listening to hear what we’re saying, we’re not listening for common sense.
Authentic Common Sense Uses Knowledge as Wisdom
Despite the fact that it’s pretty clean and simple, we somehow have the need to analyze, decipher, scrutinize, probe, inspect, dissect and then review it all in retrospect. If we don’t go through this gargantuan process, we feel that we’re not being entirely responsible and thorough. In this cumbersome process the intellectual acumen takes it all in a thousand different directions which are then further skewed by our own biases. In the end common sense is altogether killed and swapped out with something that’s certainly intellectually shiny and pretty impressive, but probably entirely irrelevant and likely utterly off-base. Once we get to this place it’s all so messed up that we typically can’t even backtrack sufficiently well enough to find the place where we left common sense buried and dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll said that “it is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” Common sense is not something that’s learned in academia. Rather, it’s something gained by raw, hands-on, day-in and day-out experience where we get slapped and slugged. Common sense is gained in the rough and tumble of life, where we get beat, bruised, belittled, betrayed and battered. It’s standing up after we’ve been pummeled, shaking ourselves back to some level of consciousness and asking “what did I learn from whatever it was that just happened?” Whatever we learned, we add it to our base of preexisting knowledge. It’s the pooling of all those experiences and bringing them to bear on our situation that’s the raw fiber of common sense.
The Value of Common Sense
Common sense is a whole lot more valuable than we might think. There is something inherently grounded in common sense, something that resonates with the facts and the realities of whatever we’re facing. It keeps things on track, focused and balanced. It directs correctly and in a manner that brings relevant solutions that are effective even in seemingly implausible and impossible situations. Common sense takes the confusion that we tend to create and develops a clarity that sometimes seems too simplistic to be worth anything of real value. Yet, common sense can have tremendous value. Re-evaluate your thought processes. Reconsider the impact of both your own mind and all the sordid messages impressed upon you by the culture. Get back to the basics and you’ll find that life often has a stunning clarity that was stunningly missed.
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in front of me. 'Faith' in believing that the resources I possess can handle what stands in front of me. If I stop at the former, I will change nothing. If I embrace the latter, I can change everything.”
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Fear – How We Create It
Fear. We all have it. Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience. At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are. At certain times and in certain situations, fear seems to stalk us. It seems to relentlessly circle us, waiting for some opportunity to pounce on what little bit of sanity and what tiny shred of hope we have left. Fear. It can be brutal. And we all have it.
In grappling with fear, we might ask ourselves how many times have our choices set the stage for the fear that we’re experiencing? How many times have our choices, in fact, resulted in the very actions that created the very things that we fear? How many times have our choices presented opportunities for fear to find some space in our lives, or increased our susceptibility to what we already fear, or made what we fear bigger than what it already is? How many times has our fear been a product of our choices?
And in contemplating these thoughts, we might ask two very profound, yet very fundamental questions. First, where am I walking? And second, who am I walking with? Where am I walking in life, and who am I walking with?
First, where do we walk? What kind of places are we walking in anyway? In good places? In the wisest of places? Are we walking in the places that everyone else is walking in simple because everyone else in walking in them? Are we walking in the kinds of places that are trendy now, but will likely fall out of favor as quickly as they fell into favor? Are we walking in places where we can fly under the radar, because in today’s cultural climate we’re frequently too afraid to be on anyone’s radar? Are we walking in places that have thrown ethics to the wind, so that we find our life’s a journey where we’re always walking into the wind? Have we chosen the places where we’re walking based on some politically-correct notion, or some vogue philosophy, or some fleeting agenda that’s not grounded in much of anything other than not being grounded?
We can walk in all kinds of places. Some are places that are good to be in. Others are not. Some will strengthen us in preparation for the next place, and others will keep us from getting to the next place at all. Some are wise and others are foolish, even though those walking in foolish places claim those places to be wise indeed. However, the question remains, where do we walk…because our fear often arises from the very places where we’ve chosen to walk. Therefore, have we chosen wisely?
Second, who are we walking with? What kind of companions have we chosen? What kind of people are walking along with us? Are they for us? Are they against us? Or are they altogether apathetic about us? Do they care are about us, or are we largely irrelevant to them? Is the journey viewed as a joint venture, or have they declared (either silently or not so silently) that it’s “every man is for himself?” Is it about the destination, or is it about a partnership in the journey to the destination? Can we count on them, or can we count on not counting on them? Who are we walking with, because our fear often arises from the people we’ve chosen to walk with.
Where am I walking, and who am I walking with? Have we chosen the right places and the right people? Or do we look around us and realize that we’re in all the wrong places with all the wrong people. Or maybe we’re in all the wrong places without any people at all. Or maybe we’re not even certain as to exactly what place we’re in or who’s in whatever place this happens to be. In other words, we’re lost. Really lost. And there’s a good chance that we’ve been lost for a long, long time. A really long time. So long in fact that we wonder if we can ever be found, and that creates a lot of fear all by itself.
Where am I walking, and who am I walking with? You might want to think about that, because those might be the very questions that you need to ask in light of the very fears that you are grappling with. It’s likely that your choices generated a lot of your fears. And so maybe you need to walk in an entirely different place, and you need to walk that ‘different place’ with the God Who is never the wrong person.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Psalm 23:4
Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across the chasm of time into the present. The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, lynching’s, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear.
Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is. Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master. That’s how we view it. That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all. And if we don’t see slavery of this type, we assume freedom. That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.
Slavery to Ignorance
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Ignorance is being oblivious, to one degree or another, to the obvious. Confucius said that “ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.” Ignorance is walking around in the dark without realizing what ‘dark’ is, and having no understanding of light.
It’s not seeing what actually ‘is,’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’ that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all. It’s having no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be. Ignorance is naiveté multiplied to blindness. It seems that living in blindness can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others.
The old adage that “ignorance is bliss” is blissfully ignorant of how much damage we can experience walking in that kind dark darkness. Despite all of that, the worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant. It’s one thing to intentionally ignore something and turn a blind eye. It’s quite another thing to be so ignorant that we don’t even know that anything’s there to turn a blind eye to. Ignorance at its fullest is fully convincing. It sells us wholesale on the hypnotically appealing belief that there’s nothing to be ignorant about because there’s nothing out there to be ignorant about. We buy the whole sales job lock, stock and barrel because it’s what we want to believe regardless of whether it’s really believable or not. At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and right into our worlds.
Ignorance can open the doors to a lot of things and give a whole lot of space for a whole lot of things to exist in our lives. Yet I think that ignorance of our enslavement is one of the worst types of all of the kinds of slavery that we can be shackled to. To be ignorant and to be enslaved at the same time seems to be the absolute worst kind of slavery since we don’t even know that we’re enslaved. We become ignorant to slavery and slaves to ignorance.
What Enslaves Us?
How many things enslave us? We tend to see that things demands things of us, that we struggle with certain behaviors or attitudes, that we have our holes to dig ourselves out of, and our mountains to climb over. We look at our lives and see what we need to change, what should be altered, where we need the proverbial “nip n’ tuck,” a bit of “cut and paste,” or maybe a little bit of Botox for the personality. We likewise see the pieces of ourselves that need to be entirely eliminated in some sort of wholesale, demolition-like fashion.
We see our foibles, the fallacies of false fronts, our warts and things that warrant our attention. We know that we’re not where we should be and that where we should be isn’t anywhere along the road of where we’ve been going. We know at times that our values have been compromised, our integrity has been marred, and that far too often our morality has had the air completely sucked out of it. We realize that we’ve crafted career strategies that have outright killed our marriages, and that we’ve sacrificed families to seize six figure incomes. We know that we haven’t been accountable when we should have been, we haven’t apologized when we should have, and that we’ve never restored even half of what we’ve stolen along the road of our lives. We know.
Ignorance in Action
Yet, we tuck these things in the deep file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness. Once we do that, we make every effort never to pull the file ever again. Yet, nothing is filed and no filing cabinet exists despite the ingeniously creative wealth of our imaginations to believe it to be so. In reality we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots thickly entwining our souls. Yet we ignore this. We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose velvety verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface.
Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough. That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change. We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they? We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing.
We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them. Once we create them we nail them to the walls of our conscience so that we have them for ready reference during the times when guilt handily rankles our souls. We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives, somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think. Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.
Our Enslavement
We are a peculiar people indeed. We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be. We’re notorious for feeding, watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance. And we live as slaves to that stuff.
We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much. Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored deep in catacombs of ignorance are wholly insufficient. We live trying to change things by ignoring them. We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic to deal with. Or we justify them with conveniently trite sayings or offbeat philosophies that act like cooling waters on the searing hot coals of our conscience. In all of this maneuvering, we try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness.
The end result is slavery to those things we’re chosen to ignore. They drive us to futility attempting to compensate for them by ignoring them. They pound and thunder and bend us from behind the veil of ignorance. They dog our steps and flog our minds. They draw us down and drag us out. They impale us as they impact us. In short, we become subject to them whether we wish to acknowledge its happening or not. We become so enslaved by our own foolish and short-sighted vision that we become ignorant to that which enslaves us. When that happens, we become slaves in the most awful manner possible.
Refute and Refuse Ignorance
We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures. We need to cast off justification and we to torch rationalization. We need to frankly acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things in our lives that we’ve chosen to ignore. Once we do that, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them. In that way our enslavement can truly end because that which enslaved us is that which we’ve enslaved through its elimination.
LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is:
“Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending them? For this is the stuff of legacy that we tend to forget until long after we’ve sent them.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
There Is No God - Evidence
There is no God. It’s not an unfamiliar statement. In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’
I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God. Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy. So, we decide that we don’t want a God. And subsequently, we declare that there is no God.
Subsequently, we then become our own gods, for the absence of a God does not eliminate our need of one. So, we fill the role. But because we demanded that we be these little gods and become the captain of our own ships, sunken ships litter the seas of our lives and they lay strewn across the endless shoals and windswept beaches as far as the eye can see. Because we want to be our own gods, wreckage is everywhere. Everywhere.
And because the validity of our god-hood is thrown into question by the repeated occurrence of such disasters, we shake our fists and we declare that there must be no God because He would not have allowed tragedies of this magnitude to happen. How could a loving God permit so much carnage? We ask how a compassionate God could stand by and consent to devastation and destruction of this magnitude. Clearly then, our hypothesis that ‘there is no God’ is supported by the shipwrecks, when what we’re really proving is that we are no god.
So really, the issue is ‘not’ that there is no God. The issue is that we are trying to be god, and that we don’t do it all that well. In fact, we are reaping the consequences in monumental ways. And if we are enraged by the shipwrecks made up of missed opportunities, broken marriages, fractured families, financial destitution, crushed dreams, hopes gone hopeless, friendships aborted, a culture in demise, losses without number, and so much more, it is ourselves to whom we must be enraged. For we said, there is no God, and we presumed the power, and the wisdom, and the intelligence, and the discernment to take the place of the God that we said didn’t exist. And if we are actually going to do that, we also have to assume the consequences of that choice.
Therefore, maybe the greatest evidence ‘for’ God is the destruction that we have caused in claiming to be god. Maybe the thing that we should be looking at is the failure of mankind to be his own god and the captain of his own ship. For if you look around you today, all that we have done is to sink those ships. And we’ve sunk thousands of them. We’ve sunk opportunities, marriages, families, finances, dreams, hopes, friendships, and a entire culture. And does not the evidence ‘for’ God shout from every shattered hull and every broken bow. There is no God, we say. But doesn’t the evidence of our attempts to be god suggest the existence of the very thing that we deny? Does not what we have done evidence the God that we say doesn’t exist? Maybe we want to think about that before we sink any other ships.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
Psalm 14:1
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else
It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow.
In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go. At other times its definition is rather handily shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives. For others, it’s based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
The Detours We Create
Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination. Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us.
And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination. However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.
The Detours Life Creates
But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up if it hasn’t already. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point. And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we’re left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.
The Explanation of Detours Missed
How It Happens
Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us. We don’t dance as well as we think we do. Our ingenuity falls prey to our arrogance, and the winds that we assumed to be reliable often shift and drive our genius toward some rocky shoal. And so, life will fall upon us, or ram against us, or pull the ground out from under us, or wreck us.
Casual and Careless
Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? The gift is lost in the grind and we lose a sustaining sense of gratitude.
We get caught in the shallows, forgetting that the deepest waters hold the greatest treasures. But we would rather forage for trinkets because treasures are too stubborn to just hand themselves to us and we will not succumb to such preposterous demands. The shallows become our calling when they are nothing more than our coffin. Therefore, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention. We come to believe that we are living a life of great things because it is too overwhelming to embrace the truth that we have forfeited great things. The outcome of such passive living is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Preoccupied with Pabulum
Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears.
There’s plenty of pablum to go around. Therefore, we assume that if we collect sufficient quantities of it, it will add up to something bigger than pablum. Yet, dreams are never constructed of pablum and our fears are never put at bay by any collection of it, regardless of how massive. It is an escape, but it is never an answer. It’s a detour, but it is never a destination. It is an imitation of what we are attempting to avoid. Subsequently, pablum gives us a sense that we can circumvent everything that we fear and still achieve everything that we dream. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Along for the Ride
Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself. Life is a river, we say. And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.
Assuming that we are along for the ride releases us from any accountability for the ride and where it might end up. We are innocent. Or we’re victims of circumstance. Or our families put us here because they didn’t know any other place to put us. Or we’re simply being obedient to whatever we’ve subjected ourselves to. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
The Walls of Denial
At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it.
We live in walls that we pretend are horizons, or vast doorways that open to massive expanses and marvelous places. In time, we come to believe that they are not walls at all as we’ve visualized them as something that they will never be. We then live out our lives in these confining hovels, convinced that we are forging great mountains and running in wild places. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Ending Up Where We Wish to Be
We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey. We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred.
Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves. It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course. If we imprudently succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it’s going with no one at the helm. And that kind of destination cannot be good.
We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors. If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives. Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we’ve dreamt to land. If we don’t, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize.
Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's For Profound Living
An unknown author wrote, “Real treasure lies not in what that can be seen, but what cannot be seen.” Oddly, we possess this strangely cockeyed perception that we must be able to see something in order to treasure it. What we see as treasure is really only the thing that’s revealing the treasure itself. The treasure in a daisy is not the daisy, but the massively creative genius behind the daisy. The flower itself is simply a tender, fragrant and quite intricate manifestation of the real treasure. Reflected in the wonder of this simple flower we are privileged to see a whisper thin slice of something truly marvelous. Real treasure then lies nestled in hidden places with generous clues to its magnificence scattered all about us like a generous field of daisies that rolls off to blue horizons. Sadly, we call those clues “treasure.”
The real treasure is often too airy and intangible for us. But, we feel that we have to see treasure, which in reality keeps us from seeing treasure. Not only do we have to see treasure, we think that we have to be able to somehow hold it in our hands. And then, in far too many cases we think we have to be able to own in order to really treasure it. What we haven’t figured out is that if we can possess something it’s simply not a treasure, for real treasure is far too elusive to be held in the hands of any man.
Sadly, we rarely consider the reality that real treasure is the stuff that can’t be seen. Therefore, we don’t look for it because we presume that there’s nothing to look for. Because we don’t look for it, we miss real treasure and we accept the bogus, phony and plastic stuff of life for the stuff of treasure. We plod through life with our pockets crammed with a squalid array of worthless trinkets that we think to be treasure. We live anemically impoverished lives and we don’t even know it.
In fact, it may well be that to treasure something in a truly treasured manner it must be entirely ethereal; it must be something that we can’t see, that we can’t hold and that we can’t own. When we possess something, the fact that we have the ability to possess it suggests that whatever it is, it’s terribly limited; so limited in fact that we can control it. Possessing something suggests that whatever we possess is subject to our whims and the flux of our own whimsy. Anything we can control must have some sort of inferior status that automatically excludes it as being treasure of the most treasured sort.
Being unable to possess something suggests that it has a sweeping scope, an unfathomable significance, and a fathomless depth that is far beyond us or beyond anyone else for that matter. Real treasures are elusive because if they’re not, they don’t rise sufficiently above our sordid and stained humanity to be genuinely categorized as treasures. Real treasure will not be owned, or bound, or appraised, or hemmed in, or leashed, or locked in a vault, or confined to a trust, or be made subject to either our ridicule or praise. Real treasure is priceless because it supersedes and completely eclipses any rogue monetary standards that we’d foolishly attempt to place on it. Real treasure will not bow in servitude or obediently follow at our heels because it is superior to us. Yet the real wonder of real treasure is that it is withheld from no one.
Sparrows and a Clapboard Garage
Every spring the sparrows came back to the old garage; something like coming back to a comfy, old friend. Darting and bouncing in feathered frenzy, they would burst from the muscular maples and the tangled brush of the Mock Oranges, flirting and flitting in front of the garage in some sort of grand hello after a winter’s separation. Upon their return their boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm seemed wildly intoxicating; vibrant, vibrating and filled with all the fresh energy of spring. I often wondered if they had spent the cold, gray months of winter in a nearly uncontrollable anticipation of greeting their old friend once winter had rolled off the horizon of spring.
Sometimes in life there seems to be a subtle yet wonderfully warm camaraderie of sorts that develops between things you’d never think would or could be connected like that. Those things are a kind of treasure in themselves. That seemed to explain the quiet, entirely unspoken kind of relationship that existed between the old garage and the sparrows. They seemed like long seasoned friends that didn’t need to say much because the bond that they shared spoke more than words ever could. The old clapboard garage and the house sparrows were each warmed, gently magnified, and beautifully enhanced by the other. Each was a treasure embraced as a treasure.
The sparrows would glide up between the heavy wooden doors and slip by the sturdy steel tracks that they ran on; seeming to nestle into the garages soft, clapboard embrace. Every spring the sparrows would settle in and nest right above the heavy wooden doors, tucked just inside the thin edge of the garage attic. There was far too much love and warmth in the old garage, so there were usually two or three nests enfolded above the wooden doors.
It was easy to see the sparrows incessantly coming and going as they bobbed and darted about. Yet, as with any real treasure you couldn’t see what they were doing. Treasure enveloped in secrecy always lends a bit of tantalizing mystery to it all. The sparrows were phenomenally tireless; transporting endless bits of straw and brown grasses into the garage; building a place to birth the treasures of the next generation. Within moments of entering the garage they would poke out elated heads, and then burst into flight with empty beaks. In no time they would return with more strands of lacey grass, or bits of tattered weed, or cottony fibers, or limply discarded pieces of string . . . over and over.
Within weeks the sound of new life could be heard tentatively reaching out from above the old, wooden doors. Scattered chirps and peeps liberally tossed out as brilliant shards of spring would be shushed when anyone approached. Patient mothers were teaching their little ones that life is an incomparable treasure, but treasure does not eliminate danger. These little, hidden treasures would become ever louder as they grew. They would grow strong and eventually seek the independence of flight. Before the close of spring they would launch themselves in a gangly and awkward kind of flight. Curiosity would beckon them out to explore the places close to the garage, bursting into uncoordinated flight but never wandering too far way. Life would eventually call them out ever further from the clapboard garage until they were gone into summer’s embrace.
Characteristics of Treasures
Unobtrusive
Treasures are hidden away in quiet places. They speak in soft tones and often become silenced as we approach. They don’t beg to be found, but embrace us if we do happen to find them. They are the product of completely ordinary circumstances unfolding in wonderfully extraordinary ways. They are found hidden in the nooks and crannies of our existence; all around us if we quit allowing our attention to be captivated by that which is noisy and listen for that which is quiet and still.
The Product of Unexpected and Loving Camaraderie
Treasures are a product of treasures. Real treasure is the product of lives shared, experiences intermingled, roads merged into single lanes, sacrifices jointly experienced, the soulful laughter of two hearts in beat with each other, and lives bountifully expended in unity. Treasures are the step-child of lives lived out in shared experiences that dramatically multiply both the experience and persons in a manner geometrically beyond anything the persons could hope to experience alone. Treasures rise out of the relationship of people who are intimately woven together by the threads of time and the needle of experience.
Always Creating and Never Preserving
Treasures are not stagnant. They’re not to be preserved as in the preserving they will most certainly wither and they will perish. Real treasures begat other treasures. Real treasures are designed to perpetuate other treasures. Sometimes the perpetuation involves the replication of the original treasure, and sometimes the replication is something entirely different but just as wonderful. Treasures are ingenuously and deliberately crafted to enrich the world. If one thing is for certain, they are not designed to be encased in the lifeless museums of our making, or the vaults we create to keep them to ourselves. It’s in their multiplication that the cold of life’s winters are forced off the edge of the calendar to make way for spring.
Sown to the World
It’s our natural inclination to preserve treasures; to corral them and box them and seal them tight. We assume that unless they’re preserved they’ll be lost, which is entirely contradictory. In fact, they are designed to be launched and thrown out to the horizons of each of our lives regardless of whatever the season is that we might be in. Authentic treasures permeate our world; they gain wings of their own and they disburse so that they might reproduce in other places and in other lives. The stuff of treasure is irrepressibly infectious and prudently wild; intent on providing enrichment whenever and wherever it can. We must work against our own inclinations and toss treasures out to the world around us.
It would be tremendously wise to rethink the concept of treasure in your own life. What you may be holding onto may not be treasure at all. In fact, if you’re “holding” onto it, it’s not.
“Right now, it’s Saturday for me. I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’ It is my Saturday. If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness. A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation. Either way, right now it’s Saturday for me.”
An Intimate Collision
Ever been in the “in-between?” You know, something’s gone (whatever that is), but whatever’s coming next hasn’t showed up yet. Or, life shut down in one place and it hasn’t opened up someplace else. Or, there’s this huge hole in our lives where some ‘thing’ or ‘someone’ used to be, and now that ‘it’ or ‘they’ are gone, we’re waiting for what’s going to show up and settle in that gaping hole within us. We lost a friend, or we lost a job, or we lost a home, or we lost a parent, or we lost our confidence, or we a lost a goal, or we lost a sense of self, or we lost a marriage…or whatever we lost. And whatever’s next after these losses is nowhere in sight, and because it’s not, we’re stuck in the “in-between.” And we hate being here.
But while we’re there (because sooner or later we will be there), we would wise to remember that the “in-between” is nothing more and nothing less than the step to our next step. It’s not a place where we’re stuck. It’s not a place where the “wheels came off” and we can’t get them back on. That’s our impatience talking. Rather, it’s a place within which we are being made ready for the next step. But because we’re so incredibly impatient, we don’t give this time of preparation the time it needs to prepare us.
And often our greatest mistake is to force ourselves forward by fabricating the ‘next thing’ so that something showed up and we can move forward because it did. Or by shoving something into the places where whatever we lost used to be, and then moving forward without being ready to move forward because none of that stuff we shoved in there fit…or maybe it did fit, but we put it in there prematurely. Or worse yet, we delude ourselves into believing that we really didn’t lose anything, or at least anything significant, and we just keep on forging forward to some destination that (in reality) no longer exists, or has shifted to a different place or moved to a different time. None of that works.
What we need to remember is that the “in-between” is not where our lives are stopped. It’s not some bottomless hole. It’s preparing you for your life. It’s a recalibration, not a reversal. It’s an end, but not a dead-end. So, if you’re in the “in-between,” learn from it, listen to it, be observant of it, tease out the lessons in it, and let it prepare you because the opportunities that it has for you aren’t going to be there forever because the “in-between” never lasts forever.
Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone – Simple Truth’s for Profound Living”
Someone once uttered the timeless saying that “timing is everything.” There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way. We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that we’re chasing. The whole element of timing seems critical. The more important something is, the greater the issue of timing seems to be. Timing can be so critical that at times we set out to minutely orchestrate the tiniest pieces and parts of whatever we’re doing so that everything is perfectly cinched, tightly in synch and precisely on time.
Falling Apart Just to Fall Apart
Yet sometimes it all falls apart anyway. I mean it disintegrates; something like Murphy’s Law times three or four. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of something being a bit out of step, or not lining up quite right. It’s not about tweaking something or gently nudging it back into whatever place it was supposed to be. Sometimes the wheels fall off the thing, which then causes everything else to fall off as well. We end up with the classic train wreck where we met a downhill train on an uphill grade. More than that however, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason for the train wreck. It simply didn’t need to be, but it was. It was all way beyond any odds or all statistics. Whatever happened, it was a cruelly extenuated string of stupid, dumb luck.
Sometimes it just all falls apart . . . all of it. We’re left standing dumbfounded, mired in the confusion of it all and running our minds down a thousand roads of the classic “what could have gone wrong?” question. Sure, we’ll likely find some things that weren’t too well thought out or strategies that were a bit ill-conceived. We might unearth some rationales that now, in hindsight, weren’t quite as rational or shrewd as we originally thought them to be. We even might stumble over some misdirected motivations or less than ethical agendas that were part of the whole thing. The way we pasted it all together may have not been entirely seamless, and the stuff that we pasted together in the first place might have been less of a fit than we have originally thought. We may have even chosen to force fit some stuff that in the end really didn’t mesh all too well. Yeah, there are probably some quirks and a few flaws.
Yet, there are times when these quirks and flaws and other dynamics really represent only a small portion of the whole train wreck. We dig and scratch and scrape only to uncover a sparse handful of these dynamics. There are times when the sum total of them is far too small and far too innocuous to really explain why the wheels fell off and the whole thing fell apart. They don’t add up sufficiently to explain the mess that lays scattered, derelict, smoking and broken at our feet.
When Lack of Timing Makes Us Look Bad
George McGovern once said, “You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.” Sometimes we just try to play it all off, or make light of it in order to make it lighter. We missed a step somewhere, or we lost our place in the script, or we missed our cue. We can make it all cute and cut up about it. We can poke fun at ourselves to lighten everything up a bit. We can make polite statements to take the edge off of our stupidity. But when we lose our timing and things go horribly wrong, there may be nothing remotely right that can be said.
No Answers
In the end we’re left with bushels of questions that rot for lack of answers. Things just didn’t line up. There’s no sustaining or compelling rationale other than it didn’t happen when and how it should have happened. If the timing had been good, it all would have all been good. But the timing was not and now everything lays wrecked and ravaged.
Sometimes the losses are marginal. At other times they’re catastrophic. Sometimes we can just pick up our toys, brush them off, head on home and play another day. Sometimes there’s nothing left to pick up other than the charred ash of incinerated dreams and the unidentifiable pieces of years’ worth of hope and sacrificial toil. Sometimes it’s no big deal, and at other times the whole thing is deal-breaker. Sometimes we can pick up and move on, and at other times there’s nothing to pick up and no place to move on to.
Better Questions to Ask
Maybe we should expand our thinking a bit. Maybe we should ask the question “is loss sometimes the best thing that can happen?” That’s a bitter and biting pill to swallow, on top of the fact that it’s a completely unsavory to even entertain in the first place. It suggests however that things in life don’t line up because maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe what we were doing was in reality a whole lot more wrong than it was right. Maybe it would have been a whole lot more damaging than it would have been constructive. Maybe it would have been the thing that would have robbed us totally blind rather than enriching us beyond measure. Maybe it would have become the monster rather than the malevolent benefactor. Maybe the fact that wheels fell off of it and it derailed was one of the biggest blessings we’ve experienced in a very long time.
Is there room in our thinking to entertain the possibility that failure is sometimes preferred to success? Success does not always deliver a blessing and failure does not always deliver a curse. Life is far too vast to place success and failure into scrupulously neat and tidy categories that we aptly apply in each and every situation. Sometimes the best thing for us is the very thing that we feel is the worst thing. Sometimes in God’s grand scheme, pain and loss are the pavers to something grand and glorious. Sometimes a misstep is a nothing more and nothing less than a change of cadence to right a path right to God.
The Taxing Nature of Our Preconceived Outcomes
At the beginning, when we’ve started to head off into most of our endeavors we don’t have the perspective of what this will look like on the other end. All we see is what we have in front of us, how it all goes together, and then based on that how we guess it will all come out in the wash. We can take a shot at speculating outcomes and be pretty convinced that our conceptualization will indeed be what it will look like on the other side. We can do the math and project the numbers and point to what it should all add up to. We can play with our mental bell-curves and crunch the emotional numbers to calculate an outcome. But sometimes things don’t add up according to our calculations, despite how tedious they might be. Sometimes our best projections because our most haunting nightmares.
We’re typically not open to this kind of thinking because we’re angry about the loss and we’re licking our wounds because we feel gipped. We didn’t land where we projected we would land and we scour the minute fractions and infractions in order to get us to those ill-fated coordinates. We’re not in the mindset to think about the fact that maybe it blew up so that we wouldn’t. There’s no room in our heads to realize that we might have just been saved from ourselves. We’re too recklessly obstinate to realize that if we keep insistently goading the situation in order to achieve our preconceived outcomes there might come a point when we won’t be saved from ourselves anymore. All we tend to focus on is the feeling that we’ve been victimized, ripped off, audaciously cheated, short-changed and short-sheeted. The reality is that sometimes we are. But quite often this is life’s way of putting on the brakes.
Is It Untimely?
Are our circumstances untimely, or very timely? Do our situations appear untimely only because we’re seeing what didn’t happen, but we refuse to see the things that are happening right in the middle of what didn’t happen? Are we so myopic that we can’t see beyond the train wreck to the fact that the wreck stopped the train and that that might have been the very thing that compassionately saved us, or maybe graciously redirected us? To our chagrin, the exact time and place when we think something shouldn’t have happened may very well be the exact time and place when it absolutely should have happened.
Rose Kennedy said that “Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.” It’s not about what we achieve, but what we learn on the way to the achievement. We glue our eyes to the goal and we ignore the journey on the way there. And that journey will often involve our world’s falling apart despite heroic efforts to keep them together. Yet, our world’s falling apart have within those events great lessons that we would be well advised to embrace. Moments are not always nice, but they can be rich. So, when your world falls apart in the untimeliness of living, look at the wreckage. You just may have been saved and didn’t even know it. You just may have been mercifully redirected and missed it. Your world falling apart may in actuality be your world being put together.
We Like Things to Be New
New. We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new. The idea of ‘new’ is appealing. And because it is, we chase it. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much. We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’ Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’ But many are not. And at some level we know that. But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’ However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And because there’s this natural association of ‘new’ as being ‘better,’ we often focus on making something new, or doing something new, or trying something new, or inventing something new without really being thoughtful about whether this ‘new’ is actually ‘better,’ because in our minds, we’ve automatically associated ‘new’ with ‘better.’ And that kind of thinking is both dangerous and flawed, because ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
Sometimes we want ‘new’ to be ‘better’ as some sort of random shotgun approach. We think that if we try enough things for long enough, we’ll eventually hit something ‘new’ that actually (and rather surprisingly) turned out to be ‘better.’ Or we think that our situation, or our lives, or our relationships, or our finances, or our attitudes couldn’t get any worse, so we beguile ourselves into believing that ‘new’ might not necessarily be ‘better,’ but the odds are that it won’t be worse than whatever it is we’re living, or doing, or investing in, or waking up to every morning. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And so, here’s something to think about. Why ‘new’ anyway? Not that ‘new’ is bad…at all. But why this nearly crazed need to always discard the old in favor of what we define as new? Our problem is that we often see some belief system, or value system, or set of morals, or some perspectives honed by time and experience as old, or antiquated, or ill-informed, or out of their era, or out of date altogether. They might have had value in another time, and they might have brought something meaningful to an era now passed, but things have moved on and it’s time for something ‘better.’ It’s time for something ‘new.’ But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And therefore, we foolishly begin to associate something that’s been around a long time as ‘old,’ rather than seeing it as ‘timeless.’ If something has come down to us through the years, or if its origins find their roots somewhere in a distant past, we casually and thoughtlessly assume that it is not applicable to today. That things are different today. Very different. And that this ‘different’ demands something ‘new.’ That the ‘different’ of today renders the wisdom of yesterday as being entirely out of step.
But the fact is, some things are ‘timeless,’ which places them forever beyond any feeble or weak definition of either ‘new’ or ‘old.’ That some things, in fact most great things, never get old because they apply to our humanity regardless of the era or the time within which we live. The deep things in life are not bound by any generation. Rather, they fit every generation. The great things are never outdated by time or technological advances. Rather, they are the things that time and technology cannot move forward without. Some things stand entirely above time, and change, and the evolution of humanity in whatever way we evolve. No. ‘New’ does not mean ‘better.’ And it does not because it’s not about ‘new.’ It’s about refusing to be so ignorant as to take what is timeless and attempt to force-fit it in the shallow rubrics of old and new. Because if we continue on such a destructive path, ‘new’ or ‘old’ won’t matter because we won’t be around to see either.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
- Matthew 24:35
He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life. Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift. He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity. One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.
“I have seventy cents,” he said. Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him. “Dad, I have seventy cents.” Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else. “That’s nice,” I replied. He was irritably insistent. My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him. “Dad, I have seventy cents!” His voice was emphatic. I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day. Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
What We Miss
I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me. The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections. All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.
I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment. I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies. Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling. In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon. In essence, I miss simplicity. “I have seventy cents Dad!” It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.
Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes. They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched. His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it. His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic. “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
And then I saw it. Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred. The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities. A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse. I finally saw it.
Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words. The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held it. It was stained and bent. Primitive letters etched out the silent plea of a lost life. He was no more than ten feet away, and I missed him. The sign read, “Need help, please.” “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
Simplicity Missed and Reclaimed
“Don’t push these children away.” Jesus’ voice was purposeful, highlighting an eternal principal violated by stumbling men who chased after life and missed living in the pursuit of living. “Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are the very center of life in the kingdom” (Mark 10:14, The Message). Simplicity is central to the infinite, which is an odd and incomprehensible dichotomy. That which is complex beyond comprehension embraces simplicity at its core and derives all that it is from that core. The infinite invites us to simplicity as that which is of eternal value is best seen in that which is simple and uncluttered.
Simplicity is the key that turns the tumblers to the door of the eternal. It is the single and sole passport to an audience with the infinite. We must suspect then that such a concept is built into the fabric of the finite as well. Simplicity is the essence of life and living from which all else springs. Without it complexity loses it roots, it has no grounding, no boundaries and no identifiable point of departure that defines it and shapes it. And it is here, with the cluster of children swirling around Him in innocent admiration that Jesus declares simplicity as simply central.
The Pharisees and their malicious attempts to trap Him were barely hours old, still resonating in His mind. God incarnate, the Creator of the universe had been asked to justify Himself. It was indeed the absurdity that arises when simplicity is missed. The rich young ruler and the stench of materialism were only moments away. Face to face with God, the rich young man would prove himself unable to see Jesus in the tangled web woven of wealth and the complexity inherent in the sordid accumulation of power. He had too much of this world and too little of the next; all of which leaves no room for simplicity. The walk to Jerusalem, betrayal, spikes, a splintered beam, oozing blood, death . . . all of that was only a mere handful of days away. Awash in the many manifestations of man’s sin and on the threshold of abolishing it, Jesus “gathered the children up in His arms and He laid His hands of blessing on them” (Mark 10:16, The Message).
Simplicity Lived
As you look at this picture of Jesus, do you see it? It too is on the margins of our lives, sadly so. Jesus is sitting, gingerly drawing an armful of giggling and squealing children into His lap. The thick hands of a carpenter run calloused fingers through mounds of curls gracing a tiny head, drawing a smile out of a timid child with a playful and slightly bemused stare. Embracing their innocence and simplicity as so far removed from the world He faces, the world that He will die for.
He sees in their impish and innocent faces the simplicity that keeps the world from seeing Him. He is at the vortex of His earthly life. In a matter of days all of history will be rocked by His death. The universe will itself reel. Hell will fall. Satan will flee. The immensity of the powers of darkness will suffer complete and uncompromising defeat. He will defiantly tread the bowels of Hell itself and then He will rise and He will, in His resurrection, change the entire course of human history for the full course of human history. What He is about to do is monumental beyond anything that has ever transpired in the whole course of existence.
But here, at this moment, sandwiched between these cataclysmic events, He laughs with children who have no sense of Who He is, or what awaits Him. But, innocent they are. And so He plays for a moment. He tickles and gets tickled. He tells a joke and the air is filled with the squeal of childhood laughter. Eye to eye with gentle intensity He tells them of their immense value and of a Father’s love for each of them. He will die for them shortly, their innocence maybe making that sacrifice more bearable and more compelling.
It is the Creator connecting through simplicity with the created in a way that is entirely unabated and unobstructed. It is the treasure of the deep soul finding connection with the vast God through the conduit of simplicity. The mayhem of life’s traffic, all of the red and green and yellow lights that had dogged His ministry were laid aside so that He could immerse Himself in life’s real purpose.
The Door of Access
From this adoring pile of romping children His gaze shifted, directing his words to the twelve standing about the scene. It was not to be a lesson for children, but one from them. Tussling with their youthful energy, He says, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (Mark 10:15, The Message). The contrast is numbing, even paralyzing. The key to complexity is simplicity? But how can simplicity ever hope to grasp complexity? Simplicity would suggest intentional ignorance through the abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge. It was a stunning and completely puzzling reversal.
The complexities of life and living, the minute intricacies of the Law and the sacrificial system, the unfathomable breadth of the cosmos and starry hosts that beg exploration and contemplation, the mysterious yet striking predictability of nature, the grandeur and the magnificent majesty of God as the incomprehensible “I AM” (Genesis 3:14, NIV) next to which all of creation fades and pales into oblivion is accessed through simplicity? Here, in the laughter and play of these children laid the incalculably priceless key to kingdom access and the sole passport to the infinite? It was simply too simple, so simple that grasping it was, in itself, complex.
Peals of laughter drew them back from contemplation, being a sweet elixir to a sullen life. They were the voices of those who had seized the keys to the kingdom through simplicity. Accepting as these children accepted, with innocence and simplicity, humility and obedience, through trust that never asks if there is anything else other than trust. Engaging in a raw embracing, a simple acceptance free of attempts to determine how to shape one’s life so that it might find a shred of acceptability before God. Freely accepting the unconditional as exactly that . . . unconditional. And so it was in the children.
Jesus stood, the lesson now having been taught by example and by word. He stooped, placed His hands on the children for a brief final moment and blesses them, extending into their simplicity the blessing of God. He was able to do so because of the massive and free-roaming space created in and by their simplicity. Access to the kingdom was granted to such as these, its evidence seen in the blessing. It was all so simple, yet so magnificently transforming. Lives have expended lifetimes trying to achieve what these children achieved in but a moment via the vehicle of innocence and simplicity.
A final hug, a parting embrace and the children dispersed, running into the arms of waiting parents. A pair of them skipped off holding hands. Sticks trailed curlicue designs in the gritty dirt. Several ran around parents in errant circles of delight and innocent mischief. A small cluster gathered mounds of wildflowers, pressing their nectared petals deep into their faces, inhaling their perfumed ecstasy. The sound of laughter faded and then dissipated on the soft winds of the day. The bevy of children scurried off to the next adventure, not realizing that they had just had the greatest adventure of all. But simplicity embraces all life as an adventure.
Getting Back
A honking horn exploded into the moment. The light was green. I instinctively punched the accelerator and drove off. “But Dad, I have seventy cents!” How our hearts are drawn to simplicity, yet how difficult it is for us to allow it to remain so; how painful when we cannot respond to it. Life caused me to drive by him, and to do this day I am irritated by that action. Corey and I talked about that man, and we talked about how we could help someone with his seventy cents; seventy cents of simplicity. Could I please have seventy cents of simplicity! Enough to see my world like Corey does. Oh God, could you please grant me seventy cents of simplicity!
How Do I Find Seventy Cents of Simplicity?
How do I balance complexity with simplicity? How do I rectify the God of the universe playing with children and incorporate that principal into my world? How do I correlate the melding of the infinite and simplicity? Where is that common ground where I can embrace simplicity with a relentless vigor and yet live in a world of complexity?
It is not the absence of complexity, for creation is woven of it and it is the embodiment of God Himself. It is the example of the infinitely complex God playing and romping with simple children that we must seize, hold fast to and draw from. The key is the full embodiment of both simplicity and complexity where neither is lost or sacrificed at the expense of the other, but where the complete embrace of both brings fullness and balance to life. The challenge is to hold to both equally. We assume that complexity is the absence of simplicity. Rather, is complexity not the very thing that highlights simplicity and makes simplicity so very obvious and so deeply cherished? Is it not in the holding of simplicity that complexity has a point of origin and a benchmark which dictates it shape, tenor and tone? And is not the fullest embrace of the two, with each holding the other in balance the very thing that maximizes life and living?
We need to live with seventy cents of simplicity, clutching it in our fists and refusing to let it go. Allowing it to hold and ground our exploration, acquisition and understanding of life’s complexities. It is our task to apprehend an understanding of the world God has put us in, but to likewise to maintain eyes of simplicity that keep us centered on that which is central to all of life. Complexity that is not continually grounded in simplicity is apt to be errant, causing us to be consumed in the complexity itself. For that brief moment, following a confrontation with the Pharisees, a pending confrontation with a rich young ruler, and only days away from death, Jesus centered Himself in simplicity. So should we.
Pondering Point
“I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, The Message). Could it be that this “more and better life” is in part the ability to embrace complexity while holding tenaciously to simplicity, allowing simplicity to ground us and center us in the complicated and detailed facets of life; each providing a balancing effect for the other, thereby allowing us to embrace the fullness of life without sacrificing anything that a single focus would cause us to miss? And is such a balance the work of God in our lives, His grace and power allowing us to achieve this dual embrace? Indeed, I think it is.
We Are a Mess
We are a mess. We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant. Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas. And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be. We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible.
Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas. The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat. And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform. Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the agenda is simply too flimsy and too ill-conceived to be defended. And the fact that it cannot be responsibly defended calls into question the very legitimacy of the very agenda that has come to define who we are. For many, this then becomes horribly frightening as it also calls into question the very culture that they are desperately attempting to create that will grant them permission to live out an indefensible agenda.
The concept of personal rights is exercised to near insanity, resulting in demands for liberties that are far more about license to be what we are not, and to do what we should not. We have placed the desires of self over an abiding respect of the liberties that give us the ability to express those desires in the first place. Many in our culture have utilized scare tactics simply because reason cannot support these agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas. We create paradigms that instantly and rather immediately renders anyone in opposition to these agendas as holding some sort of unacceptable bias or ignorant prejudice or ill-informed option that is immediately ruled as simply and utterly intolerable. Once these paradigms are forced upon these individuals, they are immediately labeled as the bane of the culture and unworthy of anything but to be deported to the far fringes of the culture where all of the ignorant and uninformed are banished. All the while, these unsustainable agendas tear at the very fabric of the culture, leaving these individuals entirely unaware that their self-declared and indefensible freedoms will be the destruction of those freedoms.
In it all, we are in desperate need of perspective; of clear, clean, fresh, and undiluted perspective free of bias and wiped clear of agendas. We are in desperate need of balance long lost. We are in desperate need of a recalibration that pulls us away from the insanity of a culture gone rogue, to a reality where things such as selflessness, and integrity, and truth, and morality, and sacrifice, and love for all are granted permission to run rogue and live rogue.
And to do that, we need to be shaken awake and slapped upside the head in order to open our eyes and re-engage a sense of common sense. We need to have something pull us out of our own heads for a moment in order to understand that ‘our own heads’ will only cause us to ‘head’ in all the wrong directions. We need something that will blow the walls off of the confining and selfish vision that our agendas hold us hostage to in order to understand our need to be liberated from our tiny agendas in order to help a world that’s held hostage to horrific things that completely shame our tiny agendas. We need to be broken open, shaken from slumber, rocked out of our mediocrity, shamed by our laziness, humiliated by our greed, thrust out of our complacency, and brought to both our knees and our senses regarding who we’ve become verses who we should and can become.
And to do that, all we have to do is look at the world around us. All we have to do is to take our heads out of our ‘heads’ and look at the world around us. At war. At poverty. At oppression. At dictatorial leaders who enslave entire nations in unspeakable bondage. All that we have to do is to look at disease and those who have no means to fight it. At children picking through garbage heaps and people sleeping in boxes. At nations that recklessly invade other nations for reasons that are both pathetic and the stuff of political manipulation and power-mongering. At rampant crime that pillages the innocent in order to line the pockets of those who are not. At the hundreds of millions of people for whom an education is an impossible dream and food on the table a fading hope. Get out of your own head and look around. And once we do, we must keep looking ‘around until we have chosen to get out of our comfort zones and place our tiny, selfish agendas aside in order to step out into everything that’s ‘around.’ Look around. Get out of your head and look around. And then do something other than live to preserve an agenda that can’t stand on its own two legs, for there are seven and a half billion people out there, many of which need help standing on their own two legs.
“…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
- 2 Chronicles 7:14
Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds. There is no forward movement in times like these. When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about. Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself. Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.
Dean was deaf. But he was mentally retarded as well. Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life. In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all. He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it. He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself. He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything. He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.
He had never mastered his deafness. Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them. He never leaned into it. Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps. He never compensated. Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.
Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there. He was somehow held inside with the world held outside. Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths. Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.
A Conviction of Greatness
Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it. We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden. It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside. We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within. There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.
That was Dean. He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto. His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him. He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself. His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself. Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out. Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it. He couldn’t.
I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid. I had no choice but be relentless. Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls. And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering. I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of. He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart. I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.
Deaf to Life
Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him. The world was loudly silent for him. Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it. Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful. But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent. The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for him. Notes and scores that were casually written across the faces of friends, that were penned in the raucous flamboyance across bustling open air markets, that found subtle notation in droning bees gently drifting from blossom to awaiting blossom all gave the faintest hints of the melodies they illustrated, but the sounds were never there. The sheet music ran in front of him in endless reams, but they didn’t spawn a sound.
The haunting call of myriad geese aloft, the pounding surf throwing itself against a forever beach, or the fingers of the wind rustling through listless treetops were silent for him. The roll of a distant summer thunderstorm on a humid horizon, or the raucous laughter of life rising from the soul of humanity itself was nothing more and nothing less than the sound of silence. Entombed in a vacuum of deafening silence, the orchestra had always played soundlessly for this deaf man; vigorously indeed, but vigorously silent. He was deaf and he was starkly alone.
He attempted to interact and engage with the music and the melodies. But to try to participate in a world you can’t hear leaves you ever outside of that world despite how hard you try. His lips were slow and drawn with words that were ill-formed. He arduously attempted to wrap words around voice and syntax and intonation that he had never heard. He spent himself in perpetually frustrating efforts to do what he couldn’t conceive and could much less imagine, to put sounds to words he’d never heard.
His words were slurred, distorted, verbally twisted and linguistically bent, readily inviting and successfully garnering ridicule, mockery and confusion from those that lived in the world of sound. His was a life forced out onto the fringes of life, exiled there in a lonely land where silence is a hated, but forever companion. There was no breech in the wall to slip back through in order to touch humanity so as to belong to something other than the silence.
Rejection by others was based on the errant assumption that some sin had caused his deafness. This conclusion was elevated as full-fledged fact, rendering him an outcast on the falsest of premises. Rejection and silence are both isolating, the difference is that one is a choice, the other is chance. What they have in common is that the person upon whom they both fell chose neither. It was something like a full emasculation of everything it is to be human. This is what it was to be deaf and mute. And so his life went.
There was a rumor that circulated. A distant murmuring unheard by deaf ears, but caught by others said that Jesus was in the Decapolis. This prophet and miracle worker had come. The verdict as to who this Jesus was remained a point of discussion and debate. Some of that was quite heated and some of it was really rather innocuous. Yet, He was coming and the captivating risk that He was something more than a mortal man was compelling.
Had those around this deaf man tired of his dependency, these friends of his, or did they care for him? Was he little more than an object that could be used to entice a miracle of this prophet? Was their intent little more than a ploy for a cheap thrill? The text is unclear. The motive is foggy and indistinct. But they take the deaf mute to Jesus. It didn’t appear to be an action of the deaf man’ own accord as there is no hint of self-determination or self-initiation. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of remote inkling that the possibility of being ushered into the world of sound is a distinct possibility. How can you possibly know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it? How can you desire something if desire has no place to be cultivated because we’ve no idea that there’s anything to be desired?
Sometimes we see in and through others what we could not otherwise see because it’s not within us to see. Sometimes we experience the passionate and vigorous pulse of desire vicariously through the heartbeat of others and we sense the pulse in them. Sometimes our vision of the possible is only possible because we see that vision reflected in the eyes of another and we watch it listlessly dance about in their smile. Sometimes we actually end up dancing because others have caused us to believe in the dance and have ushered us out on the dance floor even when we can’t hear the music ourselves. Such were the deaf mute’s friends.
And so, the rumor draws them to Jesus. Soon the embedded mass was found. Ushered by these friends, the deaf man pressed through the crowd. The small entourage cuts a swath through a fluid array of assorted humanity that swelled and eddied around Jesus. The clamor of a world of never-ending needs simultaneously sought relief. The world clamored around Jesus seeking some shred of hope and some healing that arises from that shred of that very hope. The crowd swirled around this wandering prophet as if in the grip of the undertow of all creation, an irresistible current from which all other currents find their sole source. Passing through a cultural morass of assembled humanity the deaf man is drawn toward the center.
The aged, stooped and shuffling in the grip of long years wandered about in a cloudy curiosity. Children darted in and out. The blind walked about groping, stretching trembling arms outward, substituting touch for sight and sound for vision. Stumbling, they made their way to Jesus. Crutches that were terribly crude and deeply weather-worn were nothing more than primitive prosthetics that sought a miracle for an absent leg. A cripple, his fingers clawing the arid soil drug useless appendages and tattered garments that trailed in the talcum dirt behind him.
Limp in his mother’s arms an infant teetered on the chilling precipice of death, the pallor of death strangely awash across the face of newborn life rendering his skin hues of suffocating purple. His mother stood on panicked tiptoe, stretching her neck to catch a glimpse of something, anxiously groping toward the center of the mass. It was all silence to the deaf mute. It was all wildly alive, vibrant, turbulent and wonderfully riotous, but deathly silent. From his vantage point, the drama was only partly revealed.
Pressing onward and inward, it was more of the same. The scene was packed tight with shifting layers of broken humanity, the curious, the destitute, the rich and poor alike. Finally the last layer of jostling, clamoring humanity parted like the parting of some glorious tapestry. A man of silent stature stood in the crowd, yet infinitely above it. The nucleus of the swirling mass of people and their needs was deafening in silence. Jesus back was to them. Slightly stooped, His hands gently rest on the shoulders of an elderly woman. The look of astonishment was set in her eyes and splashed across her face. A worn cane lay abandoned at her feet. Something unusual had transpired. It was immediately clear that there was thick compassion in His touch, His stance, and His mannerisms. A parting word to the woman and He turns.
His gaze shifted and panned the crowd. Mussing the hair of a playful child, both smile deeply and invade the heart of the other in a superbly divine intersection. Another step and this Jesus was drawn to the outstretched arms of an ecstatic infant. He moved toward her, His face electrically alive with love and aflame with anticipation. To squeals of laughter He took her, held her high, pulled her to His chest, ran His hand across a misshapen leg and it was straight. The convergence of two souls, He drew her deeply to His face. And then He handed her back to an elated set of parents who now held a daughter who was wholly whole. All of it was too much for words; it was too inexplicable to embrace in the confining catacombs of human understanding. The only question that one can formulate is “Who is this?”
Before the answer can be formulated Jesus is drawn to the pleas of those who have brought the deaf mute, pleas the deaf man cannot hear. The man, this Jesus stepped toward them, fastening His attention on those who had brought the man. He seemed discerning and listening with some sort of intuition and understanding that superseded anything they could comprehend.
He then turned intense eyes and fastened His gaze on the mute. His eyes were more than human, although they appeared to be something that was fully human at the same time. They were infinitely deep, profoundly thoughtful and intensely focused. A soft but chiseled spirit enamored the crowd and drew the deaf man to Jesus. It was all a terrible yet inviting contradiction of commanding power and gentle softness. Jesus’ eyes had the breath of infinity behind them. The deaf mute found himself becoming entirely lost in them until Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the crowd. God was afoot; the Creator of the universe in intentional motion toward an intentional destination. It was all terrifying but exhilarating at the same time.
This fluid mass of humanity parted a second time, but from the inward out. Shifting layers of broken humanity sliced a swath to the edge of the mass. Jesus breeched the fringes of the crowd, walking with a man whose life had been lived on the fringes of life. Jesus was in the process of isolating a man who lived isolated in deafness. In a moment, the crowd was far behind them, their voices falling into a distant murmur. Those that advocated his healing were absent. Suddenly, inexplicably, this deaf mute was alone with God.
Ears and tongue; the world is drawn in through one with the self being released through the other. They both engage in a partnership of exchange, drawing in and letting out. They draw in the world to process it and then release it back into the world with part of the person attached; adding to life, flavoring it, affixing yet another unique note to the chorus of the ages. There, in the world of the deaf, this dance was never initiated. The deaf man was isolated from the world and to the world.
Drawing the man along, Jesus sought isolation. It was within isolation that isolation would be broken. One on one, God and man in relationship echoing back to a lost garden. The Creator and the created rectifying lost creation in an act of recreation. In this joint journey they walked past the rancor and raucous of an open air market filled with bartering and bantering, scales and sweeping gestures. They skirted around scurrying children and walked past stray dogs milling close to tables spread with red meats. A pair of centurions laden with weaponry strode past in the service of oppression, granting Jesus and the deaf mute no notice. Passing priests in ceremonial robes stepped in pompous cadence on errands of perceived righteousness.
And then, an unexpected turn into a vacant alley made up of basalt stones that cut a manmade canyon. The sun found scant room to watch the making of a miracle. It casts angled rays, canting itself to catch the pending phenomenon. The din of the open air market and the jostling of the vendors was put at a sufficient distance, becoming gradually muted and fading soft and indistinct into the background.
Then, a miracle was wrought with gestures that were so familiar to the mute. Gestures were the very means of understanding and the way in which the deaf mute had navigated his world. Jesus was not a God interacting in mystery, but in intimacy. There were no methods cloaked with indiscernible actions or unfamiliar rituals. All was simple, direct and familiar; fingers in ears and a touch of the tongue. Saliva was a symbol of the fullest sharing of self as a participant in the miracle right along with the deaf mute. Jesus engaged the man not as a distant entity cloaked beyond recognition in some sort of misty immutability. Salvia was believed to have had a curative quality; a belief entirely fictional in nature. However, the symbolism of the act provided a needed vehicle that outweighed the myth of the act itself. So Jesus ingeniously chose to use myth as a vehicle for a miracle; a miracle done in the simple language of the deaf mute’s isolated world to obliterate his isolation.
And then there was something for Jesus Himself. Something the deaf man could not hear or participate in. Jesus looked up to heaven. There is a weighted sigh of a God whose love eliminates His ability not to feel. It was a reflection of both His heart and the heart of His Father. It seemed to be the private pain of a God grieving over His own creation, escaping the lethal weight of it all only by virtue of His divinity. Jesus’s sighing was likely the plaintive moan of God once again embracing the awful reality of fallen mankind as manifest in this single, mute life. It was likely the expression of a great angst that arose from an infinite understanding of how far this man’s life was from God’s original intent for him.
There, in that alley God would meet the need of one man. In a few days, He would meet the need of thousands with a scant seven barley loaves and a few small fish. A few months beyond that and He would meet the need of all mankind on a barren hill. It would be a hill that would not be sandwiched between the walls of some abandoned alley, but between two crosses and two worlds. However, there was the need of the moment.
“Be opened!” (Mark 8:34, NIV) said this Jesus. Not just his ears, but his life as no miracle is excluded or in any way restrained solely to the obvious. “Be opened!” Be free to live fully, to hear in perfect pitch the richness of the notes and measures, the scores of life and living. Be opened to engage everything else in life that was open. Be opened so that being closed simply cannot be.
Jesus took a step back and watched life unfold as the miracle reverberated far beyond the miracle; something like when a stone is dropped in a mirrored pool, sending ripples far beyond the point of impact. An alien experience transpired for which the man had no point of correlation. Sounds began to filter through. The orchestra gradually swelled and expanded. The void of silence filled to capacity.
Suddenly, he heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, shifting his weight again and again to reproduce the sound his stunned and hungry mind had never imagined. The barking of a dog floated in from afar, the source of the sound and everything that defined it was entirely unknown. Birds darted overhead in tangles of wild flight, cheeps and chirps synchronizing the feathered masses journey. He was caught in the rapture of hearing his own breath. And then words, the first he had ever heard, annunciated clearly, perfectly and concisely. His own voice now came back to him perfect! The cycle was now marvelously complete.
Jesus stood silently, giving the man room and time to embrace the wonder of the moment. Miracles become freeing and claustrophobic at the same time; opening up entirely new venues that are often bigger than our ability to embrace. Time was needed to allow this astonished man sufficient time to reorient to the miracle of a life restored. Maybe Jesus saw in this man, this deaf mute the liberation that the cross would extend to billions.
It may be that the individual miracles, like this one, allowed Jesus to foresee in this solitary face what the cross would do in an endless sea of faces across endless spans of time. Not the kinds of miracles that would eventually fall to the deterioration of frail bodies and the eventuality of death, but miracles that would be eternally fresh because they open up all of eternity to all who seize it. I wonder if maybe it might have been these moments that allowed Him to endure the long moments on a lonely cross.
And then, the first words of another human being that he ever heard. “Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus said. The first words seem irrational and inexplicable. The world of sounds brings with it responsibility to the world it unveils. Miracles bring with them accountability to both the Restorer and what has been restored. A relationship with God brings obedience, the responsibility to act on faith even when that action appears irrational, contrary, odd or plainly wrong. “Don’t tell anyone”. But containment failed. The measure of the miracle was larger than the measure of the man to contain it. But that is what happens when an infinite God interacts within our finite frames. What He does is always bigger than us and bigger than our ability to contain it. Our faith may be big enough to elicit a miracle, but our faith is seldom large enough to embrace it once it happens. Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the alley and into life.
Aside in an Alley
And so, Jesus pulls me aside at times and isolates me in my isolation. He places creation aside and draws me to a secluded place, away from the crowds that surround me and the world that has so often thrust me to its fringes. Often I am afraid to be there because I am confused and frightened to be one on one with God. I would much prefer to have Him heal me at a safe distance, or intersect my life in the companionship of others, or touch me as part of something larger within which I can meld. But one on one in some alley in my life; secluded with God? Sequestered with the Creator? It is both terrible and wonderful.
And then, to have Him connect with me intimately in that place of isolation? The God of the cosmos coming to me in my isolation? Not just in proximity or in earshot, but in my language and in the raw essence of my being. God steps into my isolation and speaks to me there. Not standing outside of my isolation and beckoning me out of it from out there. But coming in, gently taking my arm and gesturing me out of it. Partnering with me and in the partnering coming squarely into my isolation to commandeer me and rescue me. Cutting through the mass of issues, pain, self-absorption, and self-hatred that surrounds me and drawing me along with Him.
And there, in those isolated alleys of my life He frees me. He relishes watching me come to life and then fumble with a life that’s so new that I have little idea how to hold it. He is as amazed at watching me come to life as He was when He first formed Adam from the dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7, NIV). It is just as poignant for Him, never being diminished for a God whose love for His creation rages undiminished. God is always revealing that creation can only exist if it is constantly creating. “He has done everything well . . .” (Mark 7:37, NIV). Harkening to yet another statement . . . “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, NIV). In that alley God was creating all over again as He always does, doing everything well and good.
Dean’s Alley
It was all experimental, but the doctors said that the surgery might restore Dean’s hearing. He was not enthused at all. Dean walked through the process more like a laboratory rat that had no idea of what was happening or what the possible outcome might mean. He was lethargic through it all, demure and distant.
But the day came quite by accident. I turned and there he stood. My first response was to say “hello” out of some prescribed tedium and routine, knowing that he wasn’t reading my lips. Sometimes rote and ritual turns life lifeless. It robs us of expectation and hope. I felt that way with Dean. But I said “hello” anyway.
He simply looked, canting his head a bit and registering something in those crystal blue eyes that I had never seen. Sometimes we imagine something so much for so long that when it’s ours it’s both wonderful and terribly different than we had ever imagined it being. I think that was the case for Dean. He had heard my voice. The surgery had worked. For the first time, he had taken in the tone and flavor of the single word that I had uttered and had found himself awed by the utterance. He smiled and seemed to wait for more. I paused. “Can you hear me?” I said tentatively, desperately hoping that he was no longer locked in and I locked out.
Instantly he grabbed my arm, turned and in the rush of wonder pulled me down the hall and into his room. He stopped in the middle of that quaint room and pointed at the various objects around us in frantic gestures. It was all so new for me that I had no idea of what he meant. He continued to point in a manner insistent and adamant, walking around the room in a rigid gait and incessantly pointing.
Finally, I realize what he wanted; he wanted me to pronounce what the objects were, to speak their name, to say them so that he could hear them for the first time. Picture, telephone, window, bed, floor, light, wall, rug, Craig; it was a young man surging alive with an urgency that flooded the room with a terrific and wonderful energy. He was hearing it all, for the first time.
Sometimes you sense that you’ve been put in a place of privilege that you are completely and wholly undeserving of. That’s where I was on that day. God came aside this young man through the hands of a caring doctor and an experimental surgery. Now I was privileged to stand beside him as well, inundated in a tsunami of wonderment and life.
It all went on for days and days. I couldn’t wait to see Dean. In indescribable awe, I watched a young man come alive in a way that makes coming alive worth all the pain and disappointment and deafness that we have to endure to get there. A miracle came to me through Dean. Deafness was abated in infinitely more ways that simply physical hearing. Dean reminds me of deafness and what it can do to a person and a life. Dean also reminds me of deafness abated when God comes along side of a single life and renders deafness deaf.
Repeated Deafness
Unlike the deaf mute and unlike Dean, my deafness and my inability to speak to my world come often. Frequently I need Jesus to put His fingers in my ears and touch my tongue. Sin, selfishness and the lure of the world renders me deaf and ill-suited to speak as I should. My condition is pitifully recurrent. God’s presence is likewise persistently recurrent. Daily I am in this alley with Him. While I tire of it and find myself sweltering in embarrassment, He never tires. He likes, it seems, these alley encounters. He relishes taking me aside. And I know that one day He will take me aside for that final time, that time when I will ascend to a place where deafness and speech deficits will simply not exist. Their memory will be vanquished. And there, in that place, I will stand eternally before God in perfection with new worlds perpetually opening up to me. In that place the layers will constantly part to reveal something new. His smile, the relish in His face will never be old, but always new.
Pondering Point
The loud voices in life, those that clamor for our attention are most often not the vital voices. The fact that they have to clamor suggests as much. It is the smaller voices that are weak, thin and easily drown out that are rich. It is these that tend to be the priceless voices. Their worth easily lost in the pompous and presumptuous voices that say much but hold little. It is easy to become deaf. And when we are, we miss the precious voices whose worth is immutable.
I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark
We all create expectations. But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’ How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next moment? How many times have we taken the darkness of today and handily projected it onto the landscape of a tomorrow that is in fact full of light? How many times have we expected that failure will be our lot, disappointment our bedfellow, and that this curse is somehow our due? We create expectations because that’s what we do, so we’d better be very careful as to how we create them.
What Shapes Our Expectations
There are an innumerable array of elements that mold and craft our expectations. However, there are several that seem to directly impact most, if not all of the rest. In and of themselves, these three are certain to kill our vision and utterly convince us that tomorrow will surely embody the darkness of today. Left unchecked to bleed into the other areas of our lives, they can leave us destitute.
First, we have a tendency to focus on the negative experiences that we have had for fear that the positive ones weren’t authentic, or if perchance they were, they’re unlikely to come our way again. Second, we build a faith that’s safe, which means that it’s ‘faith’ in name only and therefore it holds no power. Third, our vision is limited by the walls that we’ve meticulously constructed all around ourselves in order to protect us against imaginary enemies, or at least enemies that are not nearly as gigantic as we’ve given them permission to become. And while it’s obvious that far more goes into the creation of our expectations than these three ingredients alone, these would appear to be inordinately impacting.
Making ‘What Is,’ ‘What Will Be’
Because these appear to be an inherent part of us, we gather up the sum total of our negative experiences, we fall victim to them because the lackluster nature of our purported faith can do no other, and we hold them hostage to these incessantly compressing walls of ours. And in this ever-weary concoction of negativity, faithless faith and massive walls, everything coalesces to shape a distorted observation of ‘what is,’ which then goes on to shape these rather dark expectations of ‘what will be.’
Therefore, our expectations are constricted to what will ‘not’ happen verses being exuberantly expanded to embrace what actually might. We project the misery of the present onto the landscape of the future and render it such before we even get there to better ascertain what it might actually be. We live with this morbid expectation that nothing will get better, that the future is eternally doomed to be nothing more than the past in redress, and that any hope of something better would be yet another expectation disappointed when we feel far too fragile to bear yet another disappointment of any sort at all.
Hope Deferred
The morning was yet dark as if the darkness was purposefully lingering in spite of a morning that should have long been well on its way. The cold of a winter in retreat somehow remained fiercely undiminished, casting a biting edge across what was supposed to be a warming spring. The snow had secretly begun falling under the cover of a night now lifting, leaving a world elated by spring’s flowers laying helplessly encased in winter’s white. It was as if the coming of spring was a promise disappointed; a hope fallen prey to a winter that spring was supposed to be advancing against. That days tenderly warmed at the edges with hints of green breathing new life into winter’s impossible cold were a hope ripped away.
Sometimes we let circumstances of the moment create our expectations of the future. We altogether lose the vision of being able to see beyond what besets us at the moment. What we see is the ‘what is’ that our minds have interpreted as ‘what will be.’ And we throw the ‘what could be’ of a future yet unwritten into the straitjacket of a ‘what is’ that has all but consumed us. The ‘now’ is projected forward and the future is subsequently cast in its unforgiving mold. We create the shackles that bind us to the present and we fashion the blindfold that keeps us from seeing the future as anything but the present. Our expectations of ‘what will be’ are crafted entirely by ‘what is,’ and yet it is highly likely that neither are correct.
I Heard a Robin
Suddenly and without warning, out of snow and darkness I heard a robin. I heard the harbinger of spring call out into the dead of winter. I heard a single song that raised itself up against the dark and the cold and the anger of a winter being forced into retreat. It sat entirely at odds with everything that made that morning that morning, this bold song of this single bird off in the distant distance. As held against the power of the frigid morning, it seemed to be voice mocked by the morning itself. It seemed a lone prophet of spring that was ridiculed for bringing a such a song into such a morning. But it sang anyway. It sang until the sun rose. It sang the promise of something better that I could not see because I had errantly projected the ‘what is’ of a dark moment onto the ‘what could be’ of a spring already surging in my direction. This single robin was not deterred by the darkness and foreboding cold of my expectations. It sang. And that evening, it bid the cold day farewell by singing into the night of spring well on the way.
Expectations
It took a robin, this single harbinger of spring to remind me that the moment is just that…the moment. On the heels of any day or any event there is a robin singing in the distance. There is the hope of something coming, of the end of the darkness and the cold, of all things always moving on to new things. I cannot allow my expectations of ‘what is’ to create some sort of construed view of a future that in and of itself will not bow to my ‘what is’.
It might be dark. It might be cold. I might not see the horizon. But out on the horizon’s edge there stands a robin. There is something that is raising its song into the darkness and the cold, heralding the truth that something new has long been running in our direction. Such is the story of spring, and better yet, such is the promise of God’s redemptive plan. Something new is coming and the darkness of our expectations cannot stop it. It’s existence is undeniable and its arrival is inevitable. So you might take a moment, step into a darkness that is cowering before the light of a new day, pull your coat tight against a cold that is bowing in sure retreat, raise an ear and listen for a robin.
Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk. There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them. They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body. It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him. It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely. It was a cheap, plastic fish.
The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin. His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement. He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges, further canting his gait. His soul was much the same, deeply worn along the outside edges as well; throwing into a precarious imbalance the cadence of an already distorted life. Darren found himself limping through a world that placed ultimate premiums on that which is new, believing that any value is inherent only in the degree of newness any object possesses. The world viewed his worn edges as old, used up and spent. He was unfairly evaluated as discarded humanity and rendered invisible to the eye of a world too busy.
Baggy pants were thread thin at the knees and frayed at the pockets with stitching pulled and strained at variant seams. An oversized shirt bespoke of his desperate efforts to fit in life. Like his shirt, it never happened. Stained and limp, a faded handkerchief hung from a weary pocket. A mouthful of decay filled each smile and poured out in each conversation. Chapped lips were edged thick by coarse stubble sprouting from a grimy bed of mottled skin. The expanse of his squared jaw and sunken cheeks were covered with a bumper crop of inattention. His words were primitive and slurred; rolling off his tongue in seamless bursts that made comprehension nearly impossible. Shoulders were drawn down by the weight life had exerted on him, pulling him forward in a Neanderthal sort of cadence that was long and slothful. And he wanted to show me his plastic fish.
“Kind of like the disciples, huh? They caught fish. They were fishermen!” he said. A broad smile of decay anticipated a hearty response from me. Darren was thirty-five, yet he was enamored with a dollar store plastic fish. “Like the disciples, huh?” His persistence accelerated my desire to talk to a real adult. Church was over and there were many candidates milling about. My momentary objective was to determine how to terminate this infantile conversation and find someone with some shred of intelligence that I could talk to. I moved to close the conversation with Darren and did so quite deftly I thought. He would have no idea that I had just ditched him. As I stepped away from him, he held the plastic fish in his weathered hands as if it were a precious treasure and muttered softly to himself, “I was a sinner, now I’m a fisher of men too.”
God Strikes
There are unexpected moments in life when God sends simplicity as a blinding light that is far more pure and infinitely more superior than all the intellectual musings I could devise. Darren’s words . . . “sinner” and now “fisher of men”, though soft, backlit my soul in blinding light and thundered through the very core of my ego-centric spirit. They rocked me, simultaneously illuminating my flagrant sense of superiority as paper thin and backlighting my egotistical self against something far greater and far grander. A light both brilliant and revealing was thrown onto something I had unknowingly lost in the dark pool of piousness and shallow Christianity that I had cultivated. “Sinner” and “fisher of men” represented two opposite ends of life. One was represented by sin sheathed in death on one end, and that of salvation and the humanly unexplainable privilege of salvation on the other. He had seized something spiritually authentic that was indefinably powerful because of its innocent simplicity.
His words drew me down with my soul melting into repentant puddles on the pavement and pooling around Darren’s feet. And in my heart a stark thought shot through my brain. It seized my heart and surged through my soul as the light exposed the grotesqueness of my immaturity . . . “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV). I had rarely felt so abjectly ugly and so starkly far from God. I was sickened by myself with nowhere to run in order to get away from myself. Darren had brilliantly backlit my life with a hand full of simple words, a plastic fish and an innocent life. I was repulsed by what I saw in the blinding light.
Fish and Light
The cool of the night aimlessly drifted by. Time drifted listlessly with it. Waves gently lapped the weathered wooden hull as if the night was completely pacified with simply existing. Sails flapped passively, rolling in a dance with an occasional listless breeze that floated out from somewhere deep in the night. The timbered creaking of shifting weight was soft against the darkness. Oars dipped deep and silently, spinning tiny whirlpools of water that softly gurgled in the thin veil of satin moonlight. The damp scent of water gathered in a thin, veneer layer of mist that tentatively skirted the water’s surface. The night was intermittently rendered musty with the odors of nets wet with nothing but water. A distant heron hauntingly called into the night from a far shore. Muffled voices and the lights of other boats drifted listlessly across the water.
Nets were cast in a perfectly spinning arch, pirouetting to the rhythm of the night as they were launched by thick arms sure with experience. Slapping the water, they were given a moment to sink into the night of the lake. Descending, the keel of the boat became smaller in the submerged descent. The chalky white moonlight was shattered into a million moving shards of milky light on the underside of the waves, fading as the depths were listlessly plumbed. The water cooled, darkened, and was stirred by soft currents. All was listless in a dreamlike descent.
And then there was a massive tug initiated by the same sure arms of experience. The net reeled and folded in upon itself, instantly enfolding everything within it. A series of firm tugs follow in a different kind of rhythm that was much less peaceful and much more intentional. Lunging toward the surface the net broke the liquid plane and was hauled into the coarse belly of the boat.
Again it was the same. There was nothing in the nets embrace but weeds, water and disappointment. A gruff remark, and then a curse edged rough with the abrasion of frustration cut the night and oozed the pus of anger into the boat’s belly. Frustration was manifest and coarsely expelled into the night by exasperated fishermen whose finest skills could not coerce the deep waters to offer up their bounty. The waters stubbornly chose to withhold their living treasures. The net was hurriedly prepared by frustrated hands and launched again, and again, and again. Frustration layered upon frustration until nothing other than frustration defined the whole of the night.
The moon slowly descended to sleep behind the horizon. The multitude of stars drifted across the expanse of the velvet blackness, moving in unison with the turn of the universe and the winds of heaven nudging them to the same horizon. Night would soon drift into day. The nets remained empty. Soon the sun stirred with the first tentative band of pastel thin light on a yawning horizon, softly illuminating empty boats. So went the night.
This was Simon Peter’s world, that of his father and his grandfather. His was a lineage of weary boats, hemp nets, flapping fish glinting in flashes of silver, sails and storms. He was isolated within the world of trolling by night as the fish rose to cooler waters and sleeping by day. Lost in this world of his, he was so engrossed in its demands that he was defined by that world, having standardizing everything else by its shape and form. This world of nighttime fishing and the life that goes with it dictated the shape, tenor and tone of his life. It was so familiar and natural that becoming it, for Simon Peter, was being nothing less than who he was and where he needed to be.
There was little thought of anything else for he knew nothing else. No other world other than the methodical frustration of sparse nets, contrary winds, too few fish to market leaving purses thin with coinage, long nights followed by exhausted days with the only promise being more of the same . . . nothing other had backlit his life enough to see anything any different.
In His World
There was an unexpected intrusion in Simon Peter’s tiny world. A carpenter turned prophet found His way to this place of nets, nights and weary men. Word had spread carrying rumors of miracles that had long drifted across the lake, having reached the shoreline and lapped against the wooden hulls of the docked boats. It was likely that many of the fishermen had gotten wind of Jesus as their sails might have caught a slight breeze.
But it was of little import. Rather, it was an inconvenience. Like too many nights, the night had been long and fruitless. The nets had yielded nothing more than water, weeds and weariness. There were no fish to market that day. The lake and the night had joined forces to deny these hunters of the deep any trophy. The coming night would be pressed with the need to make up for a night lost. It was time for sleep, troubled sleep at best, but sleep nonetheless. Yet, despite the need for sleep there was an intrusion . . . of all days.
The crowd grew, giving some degree of credibility or celebrity to whoever this was. These frustrated fishermen picked up a few words here and there, discerning pieces that remained only pieces within the fatigue that enshrouded their minds. Religion won’t catch fish and nice words won’t mend nets. Sweeping platitudes won’t feed hungry families, and brazen prophecies won’t raise wily fish from elusive depths.
But Simon Peter had seen what the winds of rumor had only blown. A mother-in-law had been healed by this itinerant Jesus person. The crippled walked pensively but surely on unfamiliar legs with crutches joyously abandoned at their feet as a necessity that was instantly rendered unnecessary. The blind stumbled in the attempt to align faces with voices for the first time, turning to drink in deep blue skies and finding themselves hopelessly enamored by mounds of brilliant wildflowers. The pallor of death was swept from the faces of catatonic infants with tiny arms and thin legs instantly washed alive with vitality that had no explanation, except . . . He had seen it.
Simon Peter had attempted to correlate all of that with his world of boats, frayed nets, canvas sails and fish. The experience and the exposure had not changed him yet. It was only an anomaly because his world had not been directly intersected. What he had observed was wonderment, but wonderment that had taken place some distance outside the parameters of his tiny and predictable world of wooden boats and hemp nets. It had yet to manifest itself dead center in that world and to render everything entirely less than predictable.
However it happened, Jesus was suddenly in Simon Peter’s boat; dead center in Simon’s world . . . ground zero. Suddenly his boat was turned into a podium and a fisherman was turned into a chauffeur. From the bow of this tired fishing vessel the words of Jesus droned on. It’s not that they weren’t compelling. It’s just that they fell upon a mind dulled with fatigue and deluged with both empty nets and empty pockets. Sometimes the greatest messages are missed because the human mind is occupied with a miniscule net of fish drawn from some tiny puddle when the Fisher of Men is standing right in their boats casting a net into the whole ocean of men.
Scripture does not indicate what Jesus said that struck Simon, it’s what He did. And then, the command came. The nets had already been mended, cleaned and stowed. Weary sails had been drawn tight and tied. Arms were weak and heads were fuzzy. The fish had undoubtedly descended to cooler waters, far beyond the reach of their nets and all of their accumulated skills. And yet this Jesus wanted to go fishing. The logical argument was of no use. A lifetime of experience was discarded and discounted by this Teacher. He was confidently insistent. And so, wearily Peter mumbles, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5, NIV). And he does.
Oars are lowered by weary fishermen who exchanged glances washed in confusion, anger and a slight flush of stupidity for agreeing to this idiotic venture. Plunged into cool waters, awakened oars create spiraling eddies in their wake. The morning sun was now full, having long lifted itself off the horizon of a new day, spilling a cascade of gold that broke into sparkling flecks of yellow glitter on gentle waves. Oars were drawn in with glistening droplets falling from their weathered edges, ever so quickly catching a slight fleck of sunlight before becoming lost in the waters below. Arms of experience grasped the nets, spread them and deftly launch them in perfect flight. Again, they slapped the surface of the water as they had a hundred times the night before. A thousand times maybe. This time however, it was different.
Backlighting
Instantly there was a slight tug. Then, the nets were seized and sent wildly convulsing. The pull was overwhelming, catching the strength and experience of even the most seasoned fisherman entirely off guard. Strained arms were etched with protruding veins. Faces were flushed red. The boat listed under the weight as nets were hoisted to the surface. Drawing against the collective resistance, the surface was broken in an explosive torrent of foaming water and flailing fish. The morning sun caught and threw the first silver glint of hundreds of thrashing fish reflected riotously in the churning waters. The water was agitated, surging white and frothy with the multitude of the catch.
Simon Peter was astounded, his mind gaping with the inability to correlate what he saw with what he knew. A sudden panicked call went out to other boats. They scurried and cast off in pell-mell and chaotic fashion; experienced fisherman completely inexperienced with netting the impossible. Oars plunged deep and hard, frantically pulling against morning’s water. A small army of boats surged forward, creating panicked wakes. The catch spilt as a silver torrent into other hulls. Boats creaked, listed and then dropped to the water line, rolling fat with the bulky weight of the catch.
Simon Peter was caught in the breech of trying to draw in nets that were fraying and snapping while correlating the event in his own mind. For him, it was irreconcilable. It did not match his world or his experience. He was thrust beyond his limited sphere by an event that had occurred in his world, in the very center of it, right in the middle of who he was and what he did.
It was entirely other worldly, smacking of something supernatural even. Every sense and sensation of the miracle was inserted into the very center of his life to blow him beyond that center. His life was now held in sharp and poignant relief against something incomprehensibly greater and immeasurably grander than he. He was no longer compared solely to his world; a comparison which once gave him permission to mindlessly inhabit that world without thought. Now, instantly, he was held up against something infinitely beyond his world. And there, in the stark and contradictory contrast of a miracle happening in his boat, on his lake, with his net and his hands, he saw himself. Here, he was backlit.
Starkly backlit by God, his life was thrust into keen and crippling perspective. The blinding light revealed the thin veneers of his life so much so that he was exposed beyond his ability to comprehend the exposure, much less deal with it. The din of the activity faded as Simon was drawn down, face to face with his revealed self. The sea, the boats, the commotion of fellow fishermen . . . they all disappeared as he devolved deep into himself. Simon Peter was fraught with himself, finding himself grappling with the reality of his person as he had never seen it before, or been willing to see it.
He turned, stepped, and lunged to the front of the boat. Here Jesus had watched the miracle unfold; God incarnate enjoying the provision of the fish, the message in the provision, and lives about to be changed by the provision. Simon Peter dropped before Jesus, a proclamation of utter transparency leaping from his lips in stammering honesty. Starkly set against the activity around him he shouted, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).
God had invaded the core of Peter’s being and he had been illuminated against it. Here he saw the real self. He acknowledged what has been exposed as far too much to comprehend, and far too big to allow him to recalibrate it all into something that made sense to him. He could not embrace it, so vast was the exposure. So, he had to get away from the light and get it away from him. Yet, he would ultimately find that entirely impossible. Soon the disciples would be named and his name would be the first called in a list of many names. It was no wonder as being backlit is often the precursor to being called.
My World Defining Me
And so I am lulled into the ebb and flow of my life, into the circumstances that swirl in variant pools around me; the eddies and rippling waters that reflect back to me more of what they are than who I really am. And I blindly accept those reflections as me, allowing myself to become impoverished in the surrender of acceptance. It is when God steps into the middle of my world that what I took for God I find not to be God or of God. It is when He seats himself dead center, squarely at ground zero that I am inoperably exposed. It is here that something vastly superior is held up against who I have defined myself to be and what I have settled for.
Too often my own light is borrowed, reflected off of variant events around me much like the moon borrowing its light from the sun and reflecting back what does not belong to itself. My life is backlit by weak imitations that reflect things that are not their own, backlighting my life by anemic events that reflect a light so washed out that the landscape of my life is hardly perceptible. This I eventually take for light with the eyes of my soul having become so unaccustomed to real light that its absence is no longer comprehended. I then settle and sell out to vagueness as this kind of light provides little more than that. All the while the profound challenges and wild passions lay a silent captive to the deep shadows that such a light casts; shadows that never surrender their contents to whatever light I bring to them until my life is backlit and the shadows are forced to surrender.
The Hopeful Shock
The shock of being backlit by Jesus rests in the instantaneous awareness that it brings. The sudden illumination of everything makes everything vividly stark and painfully clear. Such is the penetrating nature of this light that the light itself brazenly outlines and defines every sordid aspect of who I am, leaving no room to ponder or stew over them myself. Neither does it give me room to manipulate what has been revealed because the clarity is so pure that it’s cognitively impenetrable and completely indefensible. Otherwise the moment would be robbed, becoming something less than wholly divine in the thievery.
To be backlit by Jesus is to fully see and fully comprehend all at once. All that is left for me to do is to embrace the truth vividly set before me, or squander the moment in futile attempts at denial. More times than I can explain I have rushed to the front of the boat, prostrated myself before Him and begged him leave because I am faced with the horror of myself.
At those times my putrid disgust with myself clearly bars my relationship with Him. Inevitably every time, He looks beyond what I cannot. He sees who I am verses what I have become, delineating the difference in vivid starkness so clear that I cannot stand before myself. He reminds me of His grace which makes my grotesqueness the raw material from which He weaves His glory. And then, bedeviled and helpless by what I see in myself He calls the authentic me to works beyond my comprehension when all I want is for Him to leave. And it is in the angst of desperately wanting to flee and break His hold on me that I am held against myself and am drawn kicking and screaming into phenomenal growth.
Making a Habit of the Light
And so I go fishing with Jesus every day. Fishing for men? Yes. But also that kind of fishing that repeatedly back lights my life against the majesty of God. It is placing myself in His presence while fighting every urge not to do so; readying me for the poignant realization that I am not what I presume to be and being with Jesus will highlight that every time. It is not His disappointments in me for His grace will always tempter that. It is my own disappointment in myself. I want to avoid Him because I want to avoid the pain of personal honesty. But I find an incongruent passion that causes me to leap into the boat because I know the joy of being honest before Jesus and what He does with that. I am constantly, repeatedly and forever changed.
Darren and a Plastic Fish
People continued to mill about me, but they had vanished in the midst of deep thought and emotional turmoil beset within me. I turned to Darren who was meandering off to some unknown destination; much like his life. I reached out and touched his shoulder. He stopped and staggered a bit as he turned to look at me, his body long worn beyond grace and dexterity of movement. Sparking eyes set deep in worn sockets met mine, shocking me into the realization that I did not have that sparkle. I paused tentatively. “Can I see your fish?” I stammered. Although a rare treasure, he instantly placed it in my hands without hesitation or forethought. He unabashedly shared the wealth of his life in a simple gesture, freely giving to a soul that needed what he had found; handing to me what he had grasped. I needed the authenticity of his faith and the deep conviction in whose light my own pathetic belief system shrank and ran sour.
Such treasures often come in simple packages, like Darren. Their simplicity is in their security, as few would look there. Few look there because few lend their eyes to simplicity because simplicity suggests vacancy and emptiness. Those who do look there find the opposite . . . they find treasure. They are not out to rob or pillage the treasure, but rather seek it as a precious gift that no one can hoard or hold individually. It is bigger than one individual and made to pass to and through all individuals, so it passes much more simply through simple people like Darren. It is to be savored, drawn fully into oneself and then left to enrich the next passerby. Hidden away in the Darren’s of the world God has deposited His light, set to explode into any life that is so daring and so desperate as to engage the light in simple places.
I held his plastic fish, turning it this way and that, drawing down into its plastic and paint as had Darren, trying to draw out of it what he had. “I’m going to hang it in my house,” he blurted. “I don’t have anything on one wall. It’s all white. Just white, that’s all. And I’m going to hang it right in the middle,” he said. A barren wall; like his life. His faith was hung right in the middle of it. And I thought, how totally appropriate and how absolutely wonderful.
I handed the plastic fish back to him. “I’m going to go home right now and hang it up!” he said with electric excitement. As he turned to shuffle away, I called after him and said, “Thanks Darren.” There was no response. He hadn’t heard me. He was engulfed in the symbol of his faith, a captive to his mad love affair with his God and his fish. Other people still mingled about me, but I no longer desired what they offered. As Darren stepped into the passenger seat of a waiting car I realized that I wanted what he had. I wanted a plastic fish. I wanted a vibrant faith. I wanted to be consumed with God as was this disheveled man; to have all of that hanging in the center of my life. And he had backlit my life in such a way to show me the terrible deficits that I had.
I can still see that fish in my mind. It is clear and vivid reminder of my faith, of following Jesus; of that to which he calls me. Being reminded of that by an event that backlit my life so that I could see my life. And so, Darren, if some day you are to read this, I simply want to say what you didn’t hear that day . . . “thank you!”
Why Is the World Like This Anyway?
Why is the world like this anyway? Why is the world so much of what we don’t want it to be like, and a whole lot less of what we do want it to be like? Why is it so incredibly difficult to create the kind of world that we all would love to live in? How is it that we’re able to visualize what we would actually like the world to be like, yet we seem so incredibly incapable of actually creating the very world that we visualize?
Musicians have penned thousands of magnificent lyrics about such a world. An untold number of novels have spun inspiring stories about it. Endless movie makers have produced captivating films that have brought it to the big screen and have enthralled us with the possibility of it all. Poets have extolled its virtues in rhyme and pulpiteers have spoken of it in words both beautiful and compelling.
We know what we want. We’ve immersed ourselves in the idea of it. We sing about it, write about it, make movies about it, pen poems and preach sermons about it. So with all of that, why can’t we make it happen? Why?
In contemplating all of that, I would wonder if we are the problem. It seems that we are forever getting in our own way. We can be our own best visionary, but we can likewise be our own worst enemy. It’s odd that we can visualize great things but become the obstacles to those great things. We do that in virtually every area of our lives. We are creatures who possess great vision, but alone we lack the resources and the fortitude to sufficiently eliminate all of the things that would impede or ultimately destroy that vision. We can imagine glorious things, but we have a very difficult time accepting the fact that the worst of our behaviors will always sabotage the best of our dreams. We have been blessed with a brilliant visionary ability that is marred by the fallen nature of our being.
Some of us (possibly many of us) don’t necessarily like the idea of God. Many of us prefer to believe (in whatever way we choose to believe it) that, in a sense, we are our own gods. That we are capable and sufficient on our own...thank you very much. That the idea of a God suggests that we’re needy, or that we’re not quite as independent as our independent spirit would like to believe, or that we’re a bit more broken and a bit less able to fix that brokenness than we’d like to admit. That somehow we need this ethereal parental-figure, even though we are quite finished with the whole idea of being parented. That on our own, we’re incapable of getting past the things we’d prefer not to own. That our own sin and fallenness eventually crushes the dreams that we lovingly dreamt, which leaves us fearful of ever dreaming again.
We are left with the vexing reality that despite this wonderful ability to envision great and marvelous things, somehow we can’t quite get the job done. Human history has marched through thousands upon thousands of generations and we still can’t get it done. Endless centuries have come and gone, and the vision of marvelous things remains nothing more than a vision. We might achieve pieces and parts of it here and there, but it appears that we can never create the whole. Why can’t we change all of that? Why is the world like this anyway?
Are we so stubborn as to not see the fallenness of our nature? Doesn’t the evidence over untold millennia make it quite clear? We are made in the image of God, so we are capable of dreaming great things. But that image is fallen, so on its own it can’t achieve them. Yet, to think that in partnership with God those things are actually possible…well, I would hope that that might be the greatest vision of all. Why is the world like this anyway? Maybe you should think about that.
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
Filth described her very well. While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was. Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy. These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies. Sometimes we become what life has done to us. Hers was a life that was already an abysmal collection of untold catastrophes that resulted in filth nearly indescribable. She was only fourteen.
Susan was of little note as she stepped off the bus that first day of summer camp. She was one of over one hundred campers swirling in an arriving mass of anticipation. Gathering tattered bags and a tattered spirit, her eyes were set hollow with the effects of a life lived in hatred. Filth and a pervading stench drew her apart from the rest almost instantly. Her soul seemed to reek with a putrid odor that handily eclipsed the smell emanating from her skin and clothing. There was about her an inner ugliness that permeated everything else about her, that had consumed her and had digested whatever shred of good there might have been. It all seemed to have effectively left the fragrance of any human goodness now consumed in the sludge of whatever it was that seemed to define her.
Her defense mechanism was so refined that she immediately repelled all who drew near, thrusting others so far away that she guaranteed her own isolation. Her own woundedness was so utterly complete that the poison of the pain she felt spewed in venomous rages at anyone who drew near. Her self-hatred was effectively projected outward onto anyone who dared draw near physically or emotionally. She seemed as something less than human, something abominable; something terribly horrifying within which any shred of humanity was consumed and utterly lost.
The following week of camp was to be marred by ugly confrontations. She devolved into assorted rages that were wild, brutish, entirely unprovoked and profuse. She refused to shower. Ferocious outbursts were filled with anger distilled into lethal poison that devastated other hearts, young and old. Physical assaults and violent rages had an insane wildness and a touch of insanity about them. There emerged at times something animalistic about her, something very primal that raged unrestrained by either reason or rationale. At times the line between that of a visceral animal and a human being was blurred and terribly ill-defined.
In the end, Susan was isolated in a lone cabin. Her parents refused to come and get her. Her pastor was unwilling and unable to deal with her rages as her life did not fit neatly into some clean theological rubric that he could manage. The camp staff gathering to pray for her, but found their prayers as ineffective. Some sort of spiritual possession was questioned, and rightly so. She was a monster; a raging pathetic monster that we waited to relieve ourselves of at the close of camp. Such was our judgment of her.
Judging From Fear
Judging is, I think, a manifestation of our own fears. We judge so that we might have some sense of control and some feeling of superiority. If we judge that which is before us, we assume we will not become whatever it is that we are rendering judgment upon. We set ourselves apart as distinct from that thing or that person with that distinction somehow convincing us that we are different. Judging places us above that which we judge, meaning that we will not succumb to it from our supposedly elevated position.
We judge because we fear, and because we fear we are not prone to look deeply into the person that we’re judging. For if we look deeply, we might see ourselves. We might be forced to surrender to the reality that that which we are rendering judgment upon is as much a part of that person as it is a part of us. Superficial judgment allows us to bypass our own humanity and live in the lie of superiority. The person whom we judge is then sacrificed to our thin self-serving judgments and whatever is it that God wanted to do in our lives through that person is tragically lost.
Judgment Revealed
It was to be that final night of camp. The next morning a mass of buses and cars would invade the gravel parking lot, snatching up sun burnt campers filled with the wild tales of a week’s adventures. But that would be tomorrow. For now, night had fallen, drawing up a warm blanket of thick summer air across the camp and out beyond the wooded expanse, tucking the world in at each horizon. Crickets sang in a chorus of the night from the deep woods, lulling the day to slumber with their mesmerizing notes. Frogs bellowed thick from a stream that meandered through a wooded ravine down a slight ridge. Their chorus hauntingly rolled up the rise and across the slight meadow. Lightening bugs cast dancing pinpoint pigments of yellow across the shadowy landscape and deep into the tall stands of sleepy timber. The moon had only shaken a sliver of itself awake, mingling with the starry minions. It was the perfect night; soft and subtle. God’s creation was melding into perfection.
With the campers bedded down for that final night, I strolled down to the chapel now bathed in the soft shadows of night. A few moments with God at the end of a long week seemed so right. Drawn, I descended the winding dirt and gravel path with the soft crunch of each step muffled by night’s thick softness. Slight shadows cut from the thin pastel light of a sleepy moon seemed to whisper something about reverence and what it is to be alone with God.
Another person had thought the same. The outdoor chapel was framed by a wall of river rock that extended muscular granite arms around an expansive gravel floor. Across the gravel expanse there stood a rock and timber altar with a muscular, rough-hewn cross as a shadowy sentry. Thick timbers supported a vaulted wooden roof spread with broad knotty pine boards. The woods beyond were alive with the night. And Susan was there.
A shadowy figure knelt at the altar. Her aloneness was poignant, an isolated life kneeling before an altar in a desperate hope of somehow breaking that isolation. The crying was soft and indistinct, being defy muted by her fear of vulnerability. The moment was a manifestation of a broken heart and deeply wounded spirit which had somehow collided with God enough to strike a spark of hope. She was kneeling there, her fingers embedded in the rock altar, hoping that this hope would not fail her as had everything else.
We had all seen her as ugly, despicable, the slimy scum of humanity that teetered on the savagery of a wild animal. We wanted nothing more than to see the sun break on the final day of camp and watch her leave both the camp and our lives. We could not wait to be rid of her, to relegate this vermin back to the hole from which she had crawled. To say we hated Susan was likely excessive. To say we despised her was likely true. And yet, here she was, broken. The wounded humanity she so vehemently lashed out from was pouring out across that rock and timber altar. Her core was exposed and for the first time I saw a slight glimpse of her humanity. I had errantly judged it not to be there for fear that I would recognize it in myself. Now I saw her brokenness and in it, I recognized my own.
I feared her, not knowing in that moment what to do; not wanting to do anything out of the fear of behaviors I’d observed and the hatred I’d seen spew from her. But I found myself walking toward her anyway. Having made no conscious decision to do anything, I stepped, my footsteps dictated by something wholly other than me. Suddenly I was beside her in the thick dark, in the thick of night; in the thick of her night. Without a word spoken, she reached up and took my hand and drew me down to her side with a force that buckled my knees. Putting a trembling arm around me as if the whole of her spirit was leaning its weight on me, I felt for that brief instance the intolerable hell of her life. And in that moment I understood why she was what she was.
Her words were to silence the night that surrounded us. Nature drew down into the moment, stood on tiptoe so it seemed as God reached out from the expanse of that starry night and changed a life.
Her next words set me back, instantly slicing through all the things that had caused me to judge her so harshly and revealing who this really was. She said, “would you pray with me?” Without a word from me her heart ruptured open in prayer. I never uttered a word. I didn’t have to as such an action would have been only an intrusion in that transforming moment. Massive floodgates surged opened and a enormous reservoir of pain that had accumulated over the incalculable expanse of years and events deluged the darkened chapel. I knelt . . . stunned. I had arrogantly diminished her in my judgments, and I experienced my own cleansing in hers. It was a marvelous and privileged moment.
In the end, we spent over an hour kneeling in the gravel, cloaked in a deep summer’s night. Her prayers, a lifetime tidal wave of events and circumstances kept coming; of abuse and neglect and drugs. The assorted maladies such as hunger, too few clothes, empty birthdays, numerous evictions and the rejection of society that abject poverty brings to a young life. There was a devastating abortion and a fathomless litany of other terrifying choices that shredded her soul. A father’s alcoholism, a brother’s suicide, and a mother’s incessant marital unfaithfulness layered in it all. Things that I could have never have comprehended. Hers was a devastated life beyond description; a human holocaust.
And it all poured into the night, across the rock and timber altar, down the gravel floor, out into the deep woods and into the expanses of heaven itself. When it was done, she was free and her core was cleansed. Likewise, I was free. In that chapel God gave me far more than I had ever expected as I had trod the dirt and gravel path earlier that night. I saw bits of me in her, and they were likewise swept away in her own release.
The next sunrise may have actually been her very first sunrise, the day dawning over a new life. With the sun barely warming the eastern horizon, she went to the shower. Her clothes were deposited in the washer. She combed her hair into long translucent waves, brushed her teeth bright and put on fresh clean clothes. A touch of borrowed make-up and a slight sprits of perfume rounded out the transformation. Arranging herself in the mirror, she gently primped herself to perfection.
Susan walked into the cafeteria for that final breakfast wholly new. Silence fell over one hundred campers. Its power was deafening. All of our superficial judgments had defined her for all of us. So complete were they that we all sat there trying to somehow make them fit this new person for, sadly, we knew no other way to define her. The old judgments of a monster melted away in the light of their gross insufficiency and a fresh understanding of this remarkable young woman seized the room. A litany of miracles walked in with her.
At that final breakfast she went from table to table to table. Asking for forgiveness from those she’d hurt. Weeping with those lives she’d scarred. Holding the faces of so many in her hands, looking intently into their eyes and telling them how sorry she was. Hugging and holding and crying with an endless array of campers and counselors. No one ate breakfast that morning because sometimes life becomes bigger than food and larger than any agenda. Sometimes life intersects us so powerfully that the only thing we can give attention to is that which intersects us. And Susan intersected us all.
A revival broke in that cafeteria. Clusters of young lives gave themselves to God over eggs, bacon and a radically changed life. Busses and arriving cars were asked to wait until the surge of one life changed had fully raced and run through the hundreds of other hurting lives that morning. The vast gulf between what we were and what we could be was searingly highlighted in Susan. And in the end, God ravaged the work of Satan and the deep pain of innumerable adolescents through the life of a single young lady who chose to see her core and live differently because of it. It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen. A wretched and putrid life detested by those around her changing the very lives that had hated her, thereby leaving a legacy of life with those very lives.
An Errant Judgment
The rocks had dropped; one by one. Each thud stirred a slight wisp of talcum-like dust that quickly settled. With it, a slight wisp of hope and of life spun gentle eddies in her heart. Garbled whispering rose from the gathered cluster of angered religious leaders. Cutting glances rendered razor sharp with hatred were slung across the courtyard toward her. Righteous indignation wrapped itself like a robe around pious bodies. And then, a slow dispersing of those gathered in their robes and finery with the old leaving first. The sound of feet on departing gravel built and then gradually lessened as the courtyard was emptied.
Soon silence drifted in, leaving the scene littered still with lifeless rocks that attest to hatred halted and judgment deferred. All that was left was a prostitute and the Son of God. What remained was a broken woman human groveling in the acidic guilt of promiscuity . . . and Jesus. Wholeness and hollowness stood one on one.
Half naked, the hours had been truncated with deception, discovery, detainment and deliberation. Deep in an illicit sexual embrace, eyes were watching it all happen, peering past slightly parted curtains. A door stood ajar. Shooing away curious passer-byers, they collected visual evidence as to the unfolding offense under the guise of a righteous action while hiding the feeding of their own sensate passion by vicariously engaging in the heat of passion themselves. The trap was sprung. She was seized, a few loose garments were thrown around her naked body, heckles of debauchery were hurled at her and she was dragged away. Her partner somehow vanished as his purpose was fulfilled.
The religious leaders had now departed. Jesus slowly stood. His eyes, contemplative and soft, shifted from the marks scrawled in the dirt and were drawn across the empty courtyard. It is painful that people condemn in others that which they cannot accept in themselves. That somehow the act of condemning it in others supposedly frees them from that very same thing in themselves. They had in some way proven themselves invincible to whatever they were confronting because they had identified it and confronted in it another. In doing so, they somehow viewed themselves as insulated from that same thing.
In the oddity of facing our own filth, judging is most often not a necessary action, but an action initiated out of the fear that those judging might themselves engage in such horrific actions. Judging is too often a self-centered act designed to free the one judging from the belief that they will ever be consumed or controlled by that which they are judging. The sense of love that one might possess for another human being had succumbed to the fear of what oneself might actually do and the narcissism of self-preservation that arises out of that fear. It had all resulted in their judgment of this woman. The rocks that littered the court yard yelled it loudly long after those who had dropped them had exited.
Jesus drew a slight breath, paused and then turned. Before Him there now knelt a scathingly hollow human being. Few turn to the profession of prostitution unless there is wounding emptiness. There are few people in life who are so relentlessly hollow and hold such an unyielding self-hatred as those who ply her trade. She had likely arrived at this moment in time hollow and empty; in desperate need of a touch, of some slight affirmation. Receiving even a morsel of someone’s heart and life might have been just enough to pull her up and out of the life that she lived. Empathy instead of judgment; compassion instead of condemnation; love instead of legalism; someone who might look just a bit farther beyond the putrid exterior to see the wounded and bleeding person inside.
Men had used her, violating her for a few scant coins. They saw her only as an object upon which to release their sexual tensions and live out their distorted fantasies. They had been unwilling to see the person who died a little more after each illicit rendezvous. They didn’t care to see. They had judged her too, but they judged her differently. They had judged how she might be used by them and how the assets she possessed could be abducted in the vandalism of another human being.
Then there was the disgust of other men that was thrown out in taunts and heckling as she made her way through tight streets. Vendors refused to sell her goods. Still other men wanted to stone her, to kill her; to rid the world of her without understanding why she was who she was. All of them rendered their sordid judgments, each colored by their place of proximity and point of orientation to her life. It was the very same thing I had done to Susan.
Yet, here was a very different kind of man, the kind of man I would like to be. His example prompts and prods me to grapple with my inadequacies rather than judging those in the lives of others. His example convinces me that something human resides in even the most destitute of persons and that I must be diligent in seeking it out even when I can’t see it. I must do these things so that I might do the same as He did.
Jesus had no need to judge. He did not need to judge her to feel insulated against her atrocities. He had no need to elevate Himself over her to feel safe from that which had destroyed her. He was not concerned with advancing Himself or His interests at her expense. He simply saw her humanity, He protected it, and then He allowed it to be released rather than condemned by the rendering some sort of self-serving judgment.
He stood in the breech and turned the condemnation away. ”’Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’” (John 8:10), he said to her. A life of condemnation was suddenly still and hauntingly absent; she was entirely free of the condemnation that had satiated her life and shackled her heart. It was an odd and alien experience for her. She was no longer suppressed by the judgments of others that were designed to elevate them. She was not sacrificed out of the need of someone else to feel superior. She was not used so that someone else was satisfied in the using. She was freed to be different and to do different.
Often God intervenes in ways that are outside of our realm of experience. Often the very thing we need, we cannot conceptualize. But it is these very things Jesus brings to us. And in the perfect freedom of the moment that Jesus brings we find ourselves frozen. She was frozen and unable to look up. Her silence makes it clear. This man had turned away the wrath that had followed her all her life. The stones of judgment lay still in the dust. Their voices had been muted and she had no idea what to do in a relationship where she would not be judged.
Caught in the void, she attempted to somehow acclimate to what had happened. She floundered in the freedom because freedom is the place where judgment is absent. She was free to be who it is she truly was without the proclaimed judgments of others forcing her to remain who she was. She stammered with the words forming in the midst of mental groping and said, “‘No one, sir’” (John 8:11, NIV). It was just the two of them. Face to face with this man; alone in the courtyard of her life.
Our Courtyards
“‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:11, NIV). It is not about judgment or punishment. There was no recitation of sins. No lengthy exposé on the spiritual and psychological implications of sexual sin. There was no need. All that stuff was clear. It was known. Her choices were not the point of discourse for they were only the manifestation of pain, not the pain itself. The lacerated core of this woman that had been heartlessly bludgeoned by so many others is what defined her. Not the outward appearances as they are only a product of those wounds. Not the manifestation of behaviors that are a part of all of that as well. Not her acts of sexual promiscuity. But the terrified and bloodied inner self that intentionally repulses all others at all costs so that wounded self will not incur further damage.
It’s about refusing to judge as judgment only sentences others to that which we’re judging them for. Rather, we need to take a wholly different tact and attempt to see past the behavior to the person behind the behavior so that we can release them from the wounds that so bind them.
Likewise, I have stood in many of my life’s own courtyards. There, in those places, inherent in me is the fundamental knowledge regarding my own nature and the manifest actions of that nature. I often pretend that to not be the case, rummaging forward through the accumulated filth of my life pretending not to know the reason for its accumulation. Playing dumb. Feigning ignorance. Judging others ruthlessly so that I think myself superior and insulated from being what they are, thereby escaping accountability and the possibility of their fate. But I know. I know full well.
But, those that condemn me have departed. The rightful punishment that I deserve is suspended. Justice as I perceive it has been placated and postponed. All that should be happening to me is not. And in the absence of judgment is freedom. God renders all judgment void because the cross consumes it all and renders it all as all gone. The distractions, demands and declarations of the world as it rails against my sin is rendered silent. Any judgments are unable to shackle me to my sin because all judgment has been suspended. Everything that would give me pause to defend defenseless actions is absent for there is no judgment against which I must defend myself. Every voice that would legitimately and rightly describe the repercussions of my behaviors have fallen silent. Justice is suspended in silence. And it is only God; my sin and God and the freedom to be different.
A Choice Freed from Judgment
What was her choice after Jesus turned and left? She stood there, aghast and in paralysis. The sunrise would likewise dawn an entirely new day for her. In the months and years ahead she would wash Jesus’ feet with her tears. She would attend to Him; push through the crowds that hailed Him and then condemned Him; follow Him through the pressing mobs and winding streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha. She would endure the eternity that seemed those three and a half hours on the cross. She would watch Him die, wait through that Saturday with angst indescribable, and be the first in all of time to see Him risen. Her life would be radically new in ways incomprehensible to her, being wrenched out of the bed of prostitution and propelled to partnership with the Messiah. All because Someone refused to bind her with His judgments and instead, sought her freedom.
The End Product
The bus had rumbled up the long gravel road of the camp, dust and diesel leaving a path attesting to its journey. The dust and diesel was now dissipating and thinning in a slight summer breeze. Clusters of birds raised a cacophony of song in the dense foliage of the surrounding woods. Golden sunshine rained from a generous sky of blue. Hundreds of sunburnt campers with suitcases, duffle bags and rich memories gathered in clusters around a myriad of cars, busses and vans that inundated the parking lot. In the departing mayhem there was a tug on my shoulder. A transformed face greeted me. This was not the girl that came off this same bus six days ago. Instantly I was in the grip of hug dripping with the love of a grateful heart. Long and rich, the hug was one of life and living. In the midst of the embrace, she whispered, “thanks so much. I’ll never be the same again.”
Her bus rolled off down that driveway, leaving a trail of dust and diesel as it had when it had arrived. On board was a miracle. God had gotten to the core of her courtyard and suspended judgment. There she seized the second chance. And it changed her forever.
Pondering Point
We judge based on externals. It’s easy that way. There is no expenditure of energy attempting to ascertain that which we cannot see. Seizing and evaluating the obvious is easy, convenient and simple. It allows us to render rapid judgment and avoid encountering a life at the core of that life. It’s cheap living that is superficial and thin. We do the same with ourselves. We are distant from our own cores. That however, is where Jesus meets us. Here, at the core of our courtyards we are afforded two things. Genuine repentance centered in the acknowledgment of our core, and then the chance to do something radically different; a wild departure into the fullness of life and the fullness of God.
Change - It Begins With Us
Change. It’s needed for sure…just look around. But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting.
As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this:
“Change. It's needed, but maybe not in the way that we think it's needed. It seems that we need to be thoughtful about the values that we've embraced because of the ethics that we've discarded. We need to challenge the apathy that we've fallen into because of the convictions that we've fallen out of. Make no mistake about it, the collapse of the world around us began with the darkening of the souls within us. Therefore, it's not about changing a nation that's in turmoil out there. It's about changing a soul that's gone dark in here.”
Change begins with us. With you and with me. It begins here…right here. The kind of change that we need…that we want, isn’t going to come from ‘out there.’ It’s going to come from everyday people like you and like me who decide to be different, to act different, to think different, and to live different. It’s the impact of the single human being touching the lives of other single human beings in the process of living out our lives as human beings. It’s how we celebrate with others when all is good, and how we lift them up when it’s not. It’s determining that if we’re going to live out this life, we’re going to live it out so that when our days come to end, whatever’s left after we’re gone is better than whatever it was when we first showed up. It’s about deciding to ‘be’ the person to other people that we want them to ‘be’ to us, and not waiting for them to ‘be’ that to us first.
It’s about asking if we’ve let our values slip. If we’ve abandoned some ethics that we shouldn’t have abandoned. If the principles by which we should be living have been lost because we got caught up in the flood of people, who themselves are lost. It’s about asking if we’ve let our character be less than what it should be (or less than what we really want it to be). If we’ve compromised standards, or become apathetic, or given the circumstances around us the power to make us jaded and negative and ultimately toxic to ourselves and to everyone around us. It’s asking if we’ve let the deterioration of the culture define us, instead of us working to define the culture and turn back the deterioration. Have we become what we hate and therefore we hate what we’ve become, so we’re stuck in what we’ve become (but not what we are).
And in all of that, it’s recognizing that we don’t need to be any of that, or do any of that. We can be different. We can set ourselves apart from a culture that’s tearing itself apart. We can be an agent of change. It is within us to do that. And in choosing to be different in order to bring change, we cause those around us to be different as well, which can change everything.
Change. It’s needed for sure. But let’s quit waiting on someone else to do it.
The front porch was the door to the world “out there.” As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off. It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance. As a kid, other than it being huge, I didn’t know everything that was out beyond the oak planks and cement steps. What I knew however was that the front porch would unflinchingly manage its entrance into my life.
It was a rarely used place because I found the solace of home much better than the turmoil of a world I didn’t understand. The front porch was that first step out into that world; the threshold to whatever was out there. I suppose it was something akin to witnessing terribly frightening realities from a vantage point of absolute safety; vulnerability rendered neutral either by safety or the sturdy knowledge that safety breeched would not be unsafe at all on the porch.
That’s what made it the safest place of all. It was the stepping off point to a big world that I knew little of. It seemed like the portal from the safety and embracing warmth of my world to whatever lay out there; fixed and firm but never naïve. In the child of my mind, the front porch edged right up to the world, but it held me perfectly safe and completely secure all the while. It provided me a front row seat as the happiness and horror of life paraded by, holding me, it seemed, entirely in perfect peace. I loved the front porch.
George Moore astutely pointed out that "a man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." Somehow I knew that I would someday step off the front porch and go out there into whatever the world was, and that the journey would eventually return me to this place. But for now, it was a magical and certain haven on the sidelines of life.
Fall always graced the front porch with vibrantly colored leaves from the massive maples that lined the street as mammoth sentries. Hardwood behemoths, they would rain color; drops of searing reds falling in torrents when the wind blew firm. Blown onto the front porch the spun in royal red eddies; dancing with abandon as the wind courted them with a mix of tease and intention.
The turn of the season always invited me to the front porch to watch fall hand itself off to winter. You could watch it all safely from the front porch, as you could watch anything. It was, it seemed, somehow the best of all worlds.
With three or four bulbous pumpkins, several stalks of dried corn cinched tight with flax cords, a ragged bale of hay and a handful of incandescent leaves as trimming, we would dress the front porch for fall. It became a stage of sorts from which we would celebrate the departure of fall; pulling onto the front porch all the assorted things that symbolized the season. It was all staged right there on the oak tongue and groove flooring. We said goodbye from the safety of that place, acknowledging a passing from the kind distance that the front porch afforded us.
Adulthood and Distance Gone
They were other dying eyes the weekend my Mom died; one pair so much younger and entirely unexpected. I met them on the front porch. It’s not a long front porch, other than being long with the kind of miles that memories pave; lined generously with so much of my childhood. If memories were to define its breadth, it would stretch beyond any home to contain it. The tongue and groove flooring is yet firm, having welcomed and ushered feet both wandering and intentional to a sturdy oak door for nearly one hundred years. Friends, visitors and strangers have all crossed its planking in order to engage the family within; that defining portal to the world out there.
How do you grasp a place framed by towering pines and muscular maples whose width and breath hem you in above and around? Beyond the reach of their canopies, a sweeping lawn paints a tender, green expanse mottled with the glory of fall scattered about in leaves of gold, explosive red and scintillating orange. Out past the fringes of its grassy mantel stand more forest behemoths that seem to challenge the enormity of the sky itself. The old porch is surrounded by a mantel of nature’s best.
How do you engage a place that sits back just far enough from a sleepy street to muse as the world goes by while finding ample space between you and it? What do you do with hedges, thickets and sweeping canopies thick with the chatter and chorus of birds singing out of the sheer rapture of living? What do you do with squirrels that skirt precariously on thin limbs as if taking no notice of the peril they place themselves at, leaping vast expanses of air from one forest behemoth to another? What do you do when life affords you just such a place?
But what do you do with it when you’ve engaged the sordid world out there in ways entirely unimagined by the childlike mind that staged fall on its expanse? What do you do when it seems no longer a portal because you’ve stepped out so far beyond it that you can never again step back to the other side of it; even when in your most dire moments you desperately wish that you could do so? What do you do with something that provided the most gracious and sacrificial protection imaginable but whose role seems to have been long terminated by time, circumstance and this mysterious thing we call adulthood? What do you do?
If something this grand and yet this quiet is afforded you, then I would presume that you needed it. If you don’t think that you needed it, there’s a good chance that you’re oblivious to your own needs or you’re oblivious to the provision God affords us in our times of need. David sings, “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer, my rock, in whom I take refuge” (Psalm 18:2, New International Version). Weave the metaphors and realities of our rock, fortress and deliverer together and we have an impenetrable place of deep and certain refuge. We all need such a place for such times as those that were about to befall me. We need a front porch.
Permanent Provision for Grief
Is there always a front porch of some sort or other? Can there be a consistent place of unexplainable solitude that provides us a place of refuge? Can God carve out this kind of oasis in the midst of the most searing grief, an oasis that does not remove us from our grief but gives us complete sanctuary in it; that lets life move and circle all around us but provides us tranquility in it? More than that, do we need a place of such solitude and security that allows us to invite grief right into the middle of it, knowing that this place is so secure that nothing can shake it even when it is invited into the heart of it? Is that possible?
“I am with you always . . . “ (Matthew 28:20, American Standard Version). “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1, American Standard Version). We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in the midst of our grief in order to determine the provision made within it. Grief is consuming, wrestling away the sum total of our attention and energies in order to deal with it and attempt to flee from it. If grief becomes our focus, the hand of God is something other than our focus.
We don’t think to look for any provision as grief assumes none. Grief assumes a process by which grief is navigated and resolved; a process which rarely assumes a place from which to do it. Grief renders us vulnerable which leaves us with the assumption that the struggle is ours alone. Grief calls us out. It strips us naked. It renders us helpless in our helplessness. It assumes little else and it does little else. Yet, what kind of front porch has God given us in the midst of our grief?
Loss Strikes Twice
Into it all, Paul walked onto my front porch and into my life again. He had walked into my life some thirty-five years earlier as a dear childhood friend, settling into my developmental years; navigating the tumultuous journey of adolescence alongside me until I left home for whatever it is that calls young men outward and sometimes upward. However, the demands of living and the scurrying about that seems so much wasted energy had long ago drawn us apart. He had changed over the gaping hole of the twenty-six years since we last said goodbye. The Paul that I knew was gone but there all at the same time. After over two and a half decades of unforgivable separation, Paul came by to visit.
Sitting there on that same front porch, we shared the passing of time and events, of life unfolding for each of us mostly in ways unexpected; the unanticipated and circular journey that led us from that front porch and back again decades later.
Trials and successes, painful failures and lost relationships, dreams realized and other dreams that we surrendered to the cold hands of reality. We talked about life through the eyes of middle age when the ever-increasing distance from the past rolls dim off some subconscious horizon of our minds, while the shortening days of the end of it all draws ever sharper. It was all amazingly rich. In a few moments, the years seemed erased.
With the friendship rejoined, Paul gazed into my eyes with a thick pause wrapped in an unexplainable intensity. With a frankness that belied the length of his own struggle, he cast a longing glance at the hearty trees that surrounded the front porch, ran his finger around the ring of his coffee cup, drew a breath of sweet fall air and muttered that he was dying. It was not some sort of speculation that there might be a cure or that the treatment might yet stop the advance of cancer that relentlessly pushed forward on multiple fronts throughout his body. It was the surrender of a valiant warrior who felt that the battle might not be fighting cancer, but closing out a middle aged life in front of an audience of friends and family as a man of integrity, faith and bravery. It was not about survival anymore, but about legacy.
His condition was terminal. Terminal is such a final word. It’s the ultimate period that’s put at the end of last sentence on the final page of the book. Nothing follows it other than nothingness. Its finality is so unfathomable that you have no alternative except to hope that it really might have been mistaken for a comma; that it’s some other sort of punctuation about the person’s life that might legitimately suggest a pause before moving on again. But terminal . . . how I wished it was something other than the chilling finality of a period.
My mind instantly teetered, tipped in the emotional imbalance and then plummeted. Whirling in wild gyrations, Paul's face immediately blurred and spun. A thousand memories, variant clips and fragmented mementos of our shared childhood raced across the forefront of my mind at speeds that were emotionally deafening. My heart dropped so far that I had no sense of it any longer. An emotional paralysis humanly halted it all.
And then Paul's voice, soft and firm, grounded me. He said, "you don't need to say anything. Just thanks for listening and thanks for the years we had." The words, so needed, were wrapped in a silken veneer of complete peace that gently wrapped itself around me.
My mother was hours from death, Paul was two months or so away from the same thing. I bore both on that front porch. Stunned and pummeled twice. Blackness had fallen once, and then once again. Sometimes you are convinced that life has struck you sufficiently for it seems that its task in irrefutably crushing hope and driving you into some sort of trackless abyss has been so thorough that there is nothing left to destroy or maim. But sometimes life strikes twice, insanely attempting to kill that which has already been killed; finding some savage and sadistic pleasure in touting its victory and superiority by striking one more needless blow on its way back to wherever it came from. If life doesn’t make sense, it’s at times like these.
Being Truly Lost
Struck with a deafening blow by the pending passing of my mother and sent reeling again by Paul’s disclosure; I was dead-center in that place; ground zero in grief. In those places there is no sense of bearing, of true north to at least know where you’re at. Most of the time when we talk about being lost, we have some general sense of direction that provides us a place to start heading off to. We at least have some vague and diffuse sense of where to go.
But being truly lost is nothing of the sort. It’s having absolutely no idea of where you’re at because where you’re at is a place you’ve never been before and could never have believed existed except for the fact that you're now there. It’s having no idea where you should go because all that was once familiar is now terrifyingly unfamiliar and entirely uncertain, rendering the place that you need to go to as unknown.
All of this takes on the horror of a rapidly escalating panic as we suddenly realize that we are utterly and irrevocably alone in it all. Life at its worst isolates us because the more devastating it is, the more unique our experience in it. We become abjectly alone. That’s lost. It is a rare, horrible and deathly place that engulfed me on the front porch that day.
A Path Out of Being Lost
It was all too much had I not bore the immensity of this while sitting on that front porch, that place of deep solace wrapped in majestic trees and God’s thick arms. The front porch offered me a place of solace to watch two people that I loved embrace the reality of a world that is turning and turning dramatically. Oddly and unexpectedly, it was in the watching that I began to find my way out of the lostness.
Both were dying with great grace and valor. There was nothing of surrender in it at all. Surrender implies a weakness that renders us inadequate in conquering that which stands before us. Rather, death with honor and a chaste spirit was hardly weakness. It was bravery of the greatest sort. And on that front porch, surrounded by this place of refuge that God had granted me, I could see it all with great clarity and conviction.
It was not about searching for some path out of the lostness. It was all about watching. The keys and the compass were handed to me in the very things that had thrust me out and down into the abyss that I had plummeted into. Pain frequently results in panic. Panic seeks an immediate resolution and remedy by whatever means that resolution and remedy can be achieved. Panic frequently leads to a flailing and an impulsivity that only deepens and constricts the darkness that wraps itself around us with long, constricting and chilling fingers.
I watched Mom and Paul courageously course their way through the onset of death; deciding to face it head-on with defiance and daring. They had each embraced a posture of bravery and faith; seizing the inevitable, turning death on itself by celebrating and cheering past victories and savoring the innumerable gifts life had lavished on them. It became a recitation of glories, gains and gifts, and deeply flowing gratitude. It was the most genuine celebration of life that I had ever witnessed. I could not grasp it and felt that if I were the one facing death that I would be absolutely nothing of what they were. It was joyous and marvelous, mixed into some sort of wild and terribly rare concoction that I had no right to sip, but was handed by the glassful nonetheless.
Virgil stated, “They can conquer who believe they can.” Conquering for Mom and Paul was about seizing the apparent untimely arrival of death and choosing a posture of celebration and savoring. I confess my inability to grasp it all other than I know it to be real because I watched them grasp it. They seized it in a manner that not only ministered to them, but ministered to others as well. They believed that they could conquer . . . and conquer they did.
It was in this that I instantly found my bearings; both where I was and where I desperately wanted to go. Lostness dissipated by simply watching. The birds seemed to hold their songs for a moment and the trees leaned ever so slightly as if to hear a heart grasp a profound reality. The porch provided me the place. The examples provided me both keys and compass.
In the end, those keys and that compass allowed me to find myself so thoroughly and center myself so precisely that my sense of myself was honed sharper than it had ever been. It was nothing short of stunning and astounding.
God as My Front Porch
“My God -- the high crag where I run for dear life, hiding behind the boulders, safe in the granite hideout; My mountaintop refuge . . . ” (2 Samuel 22:3, The Message). Carefully listen to the metaphors of safety and security that are richly interwoven in this verse. God is place of perfect security. It’s not that life can’t reach us there. God is not a god of seclusion, sweeping us away from all harm and setting us far out of the reach of a world of pain and inexplicable circumstances. He is our refuge right in the middle of this kind of world. He is the place that grants us the place to be found and to find. He is our front porch.
God is that place of perfect security in perfect insecurity. He is that place surrounded by enduring beauty, filled with his marvels so that we might not forget all that is good in all that is wrong. He places us just far enough from the world to muse at it while being separate from it; to find a place from which to learn the lessons that we need to fearlessly engage it. In Him there is a quietness that doesn’t deny the cries of a hurting world, but a quietness that keeps it all at just enough of a distance to grow in it, but not be consumed by it.
“Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life” (Philippians 4:7, The Message). That can only happen in just such a place. In our grief, God affords us a place like that . . . a front porch. And this place is strong enough to weather all the grief that life can throw at us. It is entirely sufficient.
It's a place quiet enough, safe enough and sufficiently spacious for the keys and compass that we need to be handed to us in manner that we fully see them, fully embrace them, and allow them to fully impact our lives. The front porch is then a place of safety, but a place that creates enough space for the miraculous to have plenty of elbow room.
It is an odd, indescribable, nearly inscrutable thing to be able to feel the searing intensity of a life unraveling, and to feel it all in the midst of perfect security that affords me both a path out of my own lostness and opportunity for amazing growth. That is what God affords us in our grief. It is a most marvelous thing indeed.
Paul took it all in stride. He smiled, laughed with a contentment at the life he had been able to live, glanced at the trees and vast expanse of lawn covered in fall’s flaming bounty and said, “it’s been a good life . . . it really has.” Dying fully at ease, that’s what he was doing. He exemplified God’s security in a way most marvelous. God in our grief, that’s what I saw in him. I know it works because I saw it in Paul. Mom exemplified it all of her life. The front porch created a place safe enough and expansive enough to see it.
Because I saw it, I was released to release that which was being lost to me. I was unexplainably released to come alongside my losses and tearfully, yet boldly escort those very losses to the next place.
Am I Passionate for the Right Things?
“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade. And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention. He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair. As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.” And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.”
Am I passionate for the right things? Not just passionate. But passionate in the right way. Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there. There’s a lot of causes out there. There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes. On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors. There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions. Greed is rampant. Power-mongering runs wild. Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes. And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things?
Consider this. There are some things that are timeless. There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can’t remove. There are principles and ethics that are foundational. You can try and remove them, but there’s a huge cost to that. Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether. And the outcomes are never good. History will tell us that rather plainly, if we’re willing to be honest about history.
And so, I want to be passionate about something that’s timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life. Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that. Something that’s certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. And nothing that we can create on our own will do that. What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that. That kind of stuff is only something that God can create.
And so, it’s this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it’s that stuff that I choose to be passionate about. Not man-made stuff because that doesn’t last. Rather, it’s God-created stuff. It’s the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about. Because if I’m not passionate about that stuff, passion won’t matter because very shortly nothing will.
They leave sporadically. Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance. Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses. The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray. Trees stand as tenements emptied, their residents having taken wing for warmer skies.
But it was the geese really. Their movement was monumental; indescribably massive in scope as if a whole nation of waterfowl moved in unison. Other birds would cluster in sordid bands and bounce southward; a grouping here and a grouping there. But geese . . . they would advance as an innumerable army seizing the very skies themselves.
As a kid, they would surge down the Atlantic flyway as if it were a conduit that compressed untold millions of geese into an invisible highway in the sky. The main body would come in droves of thousands; an endless string of black pearl strands being pulled southward; waving like the tail of a grand kite in the wind. It was too vast to embrace; being one of those things in life that defies the parameters of our imaginations and spills far outside the reach of our senses. Because it does, we’re never quite done with it because we never quite absorb it all. It slips by experienced as something grand, but we inherently know that the grandeur that we were able to embrace was but a minuscule part of the whole. As I kid, I knew that.
The Atlantic flyway cuts a mystical swath through the heart of the southern Lake Erie region. All but an hour's drive or so away from home, we would tumble into the car and head out to sit on the sidelines of the miraculous. From miles away, you could see thin layers of black string formations low-slung across the sky; birds ascending and descending in numbers too vast to count. The water, the adjacent fields, the roads themselves were thick with them, each seeming to be an exact replica of the other; each energized with a corporate sense that something grand was afoot that was as individual as it was collective.
Even as a kid I knew that what I was observing was but a moment in time. Some things are too grand to last for long because you can only absorb so much wonder and majesty before you’ll explode. But therein lays the rub. You want it to last, even if the sheer pleasure of it all kills you. At least death would be happy. You’d die with a smile.
To appreciate most things you have to let them go. Some things become even more precious by their absence. When you lose something you grieve the loss and the exercise of grief can be brutally hard. At the same time, appreciation for that thing is dramatically enhanced in kind of a give and take exchange. It’s the push and pull of life that as a kid watching a million geese I didn’t get. All I wanted to do was to stand in the middle of this ocean of airborne life and somehow try to be a part of it; to find my place in it and believe that I could join it if only in the celebration of a season turning and a migration transpiring.
In feathered constellations of hundreds and sometimes thousands they would launch themselves from all around me in a deafening burst of pounding wings and haunting voices; assailing the sky and rising to warmer horizons. And in it I was left behind, simultaneously feeling a sense of abandonment, an equally thick sense of loss, but a deeper instinctual sense that this was right and proper and good. I had to let go. I had to let it be. I had to close out this moment, let it pass into my history, go home and resume my life. As a kid, that was tough.
Yet there was something temporal is the grandness of it all. Jacques Deval said, "God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." Some things cannot be bound over or held, despite our desire to do so. It's in the context of unabated freedom that we experience the highest exhilaration and seize the fullest manifestation of that which we are enjoying. Caging it kills it because it robs life of the freedom to be its fullest self. Geese need to fly unfettered, otherwise the majesty is gone. Life is much the same.
Somehow making something temporal makes it precious. Standing amidst thousands of migratory geese, I knew that part of the magic lay in the fact this incredible phenomena was only momentary; a brief moment at that. Holding it would make it ordinary. I couldn't fathom it all as being anything but wildly extraordinary and so I stood in the midst of the sheer magic of the temporal and relished it until it passed. Then I would walk away with a living piece of the magic embedded in the heart of my soul. I had to allow it closure or the magic would be stripped.
Closure – Fighting Against Ourselves in Adulthood
Fall was passing, hugging the calendar on the cusp of an arriving winter that was set to push fall off the page. Sometimes life moves too fast. At times we want it that way. At other times we wish that the calendar would seize up and come to a complete halt, taking away the reality of a pending end and suspending change that we don’t want. Why is it that we can’t stop the clock even when it feels completely legitimate to do so? Why is time so ruthless and insensitive as not to grant us even the slightest pause; to hold the sweeping second hand of life for even a single moment when such a reprieve would allow us to briefly hold a little longer that which life itself is stealing away? To let kids stand amidst wild geese a bit longer?
But time moves on, creating an endless space within which change unfolds and flourishes. The passing of time means that all is in transition all the time. It means that we gain and lose along the way as part of the transition, but it also means that life always has the opportunity to be new, to be fresh and to be tried again. It means that life is left wide enough and unfettered enough to unfold with all the boldness and mystical expansiveness that makes life, life. But with the freedom comes the reality of change and the fact that it renders everything temporary and existent only for a season. An end will come.
However, we can know that change and any end is grounded in “Jesus Christ (who) is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8, American Standard Version). With that undergirding, we can find peace in change, knowing that change is ultimately grounded in Him who is unchangeable. Therefore, change need not be feared, grieved or hated as something that steals or depletes or cheats, but rather as something that is ordered by Him who ordered the entirely of creation from eternity past and beyond. We can let change be the creative molder of life, hating it at times but believing in a final outcome as purposeful.
Passing and Change
Ice had begun to take a toe-hold around the edges of the pond. From the edges, it sent slight crystal fingers out onto the surface of water chilled and sullen. Songbirds had taken flight southward. Geese were massing in thread-like V-formations that drew silky black threads of pounding wings across graying skies, their call drifting in the deep woods as they passed. That year I had not stood among them. I had not for years.
Frost had laid a wafer thin layer of ice crystals on the beams of the wooden bridge. It was yet tentative, instantly melting to the touch and pooling in tiny droplets under my fingertips. Everything was changing and I found myself angry and resistant about it all. I didn't care about what might be diminished in stealing freedom. I wanted life caged and held.
The Illusion of Holding What We Can’t
I’m sometimes not ready for things to pass; for geese to ascend and cross horizons out of my line of sight. Life is precious. That which is precious we strive to hold. There is something about its value that drives us to possess it, to retain it; somehow feeling that possession is the only means by which that which is precious can be truly enjoyed. Without possession it is fleeting, easily escaping our grasp and robbing us of the pleasure that it brings. And so we seek out that which is precious. We hoard it if possible. We lock it up, insure it, put it in wills so that it remains under our control even in death, and do our level best to preserve it against anything that would steal it away. And because we hold it, it is no longer precious for we have robbed it of what is most precious . . . the possession of inherent traits too precious to ever be held.
Yet, I think we hold the precious out of fear. Fear that life will be flat, that we will have lived empty lives filled with the damp grayness of a sullen existence; the kind of dampness that goes right through you and the kind of grayness that suffocates you. We fear that endings won’t begat beginnings and that geese won’t return. We have to accumulate that which is precious and keep it in order to stave off the dampness and lighten the grayness. But how do you possibly accumulate and hold a million geese heading south or a mother dying?
Life then becomes the summation of the possessions that we think we hold, which in reality is finitely very little, temporal at best and killed by the fact that we're holding it. Our purpose becomes the continued holding of these things. Our identity, whatever it is that they are. Our passion becomes their maintenance so as to preserve them. Our hope becomes entangled in the continued accumulation of them to stave off potential loss. Our future becomes a cycle of maintenance and continued accumulation. And we can’t let go because if we do, we’ll have nothing left. We then lose the sense of awe when life sweeps our way, and we forfeit the humbling sense of appreciation when its time in our lives is concluded.
The Obedient Letting Go
“If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms” (Luke 17:33, The Message). Fall was obediently letting go, not demanding some other terms. Summer had let go a long time ago, releasing all of the energy, vitality and splendor of life despite the fact that the life it was releasing surged with a stamina and passion that simply seizes you with wonderment. Yet, summer let it go. Fall was letting go a spectacular inferno of color that raced through endless treetops and splashed the forest canopy to the sky’s edge. It launched millions of geese and hurled them southward over forests thick with falls fire. It was all precious and blindingly glorious, but life found a way to let it go, to release it, to allow it to be free. It seemed to celebrate and revel in the releasing as much as it did when the season first came.
Mom was dying, and I didn’t want it to happen. I railed against letting go. I had no interest in closure because I didn’t want the loss in the first place. She was precious beyond description, a woman unique in a way that makes uniqueness priceless. Time would not stop for her. The sweeping second hand moved with terrible precision, marking off precious seconds that I could neither hold nor halt. It seemed at that moment that I could hold nothing, precious or otherwise. Everything was slipping through my fingers and drifting off on the winds of time much like vapor caught in the swell of a firm breeze; much like geese rising and heading south without me.
We walked across the broad timbers of the arching bridge, into the hospice and down the hall to her room. She was in the throes of death, able to hear but not able to respond. Pasty and a million miles drawn away from me, she laid there; each breath laborious and slow. Her eyes fell into a sinkhole of graying cavities, the blue sparkle having lost its luster as the light of her eyes faded and then found itself doused. Her vision had shifted, catching fantastic glimpses of something majestically eternal which only the eyes of her soul could see. It was all spectacular, rendering entirely unnecessary any need she might have for closure as the magnitude of her destination obliterated all loss. Those deep blue eyes were needed no more.
Obedience and denial found their place in me at the same time, each vying for a place that they could not simultaneously possess. I wanted to let her go, but denied that I needed to. I was appalled by the course freedom had chosen that was allowing her to die. I wished to hold her captive as I might hold endless hoards of migratory geese; not understanding the futility and absolute absurdity of such a thought.
For the next six hours every thought, each memory, the vast storehouse of emotions, the swill and swell of all that makes me human; all were plumbed to depths I could not have imagined. The more she faded, the deeper I went. Up from their subterraneous caverns all of these things surged in an engulfing flood, allowing me to touch my own humanity in a way that made my humanity entirely unfamiliar to me. I shared it with her as she drew further to some distant horizon that I could not go to, reciting those kinds of memories that sweep you away with warm and thick emotion regardless of the number of times you tell them or play them off the folds of your mind and heart. I surrendered to the inevitable course of life and watched her take wing as I had done as a kid engulfed in a million geese all gloriously free.
The Freshness of Obedience
And here I let go. I let go because life is not based on the holding of anything. Life is based on freeing yourself from holding so that you can embrace the wildness of the journey. Holding onto something renders you captive to wherever that thing is at, holding you hostage to whatever that place is. Life that is held is life stagnant. Life that is stagnant is not life.
Life rolls on because it must, because it was designed that way. It’s ever fresh, building upon the past in the present in order to enrich the future. Holding life kills it, much like holding a flower eventually wilts it. That which is precious can’t be held or possessed because it’s fragile and elusive. It’s those qualities that make something precious. If it’s not fragile and elusive, it’s not precious.
So I let Mom go in a sheer act of will that seemed to entail more energy than a million geese aloft, with an exhilaration of equal proportions. I released her to a deepened belief that God’s plan is a process, a series of events that flow much like a river; pooling here and there at times, and cascading in a bubbling froth at others, but always moving. If we attempt to throw a dam across this river, it will pool, stagnate and go no further than the parameters of the dam we have constructed around it. It will eventually mass itself and burst any dam that we can construct because life is irreparably bound to the achieve the complete manifestation of its design and intent. Freedom is entirely and indisputably indispensible to that objective.
Regardless, we attempt to manage it anyway. And in doing so, we will have managed it to death and controlled the vitality right out of it; much in the same way that forbidding the migration of geese would rob us of the wonder of it all; as if we could forbid it at all anyway.
Likewise, if I hold the past I cannot simultaneously seize the future. My grasp will be directed in one place or the other; my energies vested in holding onto misty mementos locked in an unalterable past. Or I can take a firm hold of a future that is unwritten and therefore entirely unencumbered. Letting go lets me grieve. Letting go allows me to run in the natural currents of life, therefore resting in the fact that whatever the outcome, it will be good and right.
Grieving Through Accepting
At that moment, I began to grieve. Something broke open that permitted the first feelings of grieving to flow. You have to release to grieve. Releasing is accepting the course of things out of the belief that there exists a sure and certain order to this course. Geese fly south with an uncompromised certainty. Releasing releases us from our battle to alter the course that our life is taking, and to rest in both the gains and losses of where it’s going; geese moving on, seasons turning and Mom’s dying. We are free to celebrate wildly when it’s called for. And we are likewise freed to grieve deeply when it's appropriate. We can embrace both sides of life rather than attempting to control it in a manner that we experience neither.
A fall sun was preparing for an early slumber. A myriad array of geese and ducks had settled on the periphery of the pond, drawing up against the deepening twilight. I was once again able to walk among them, to join them a bit before I would lose them to the instinct of migration.
Mom would not live to see the next day. She would be gone by the time this array of waterfowl would take to the sky on pounding wings at the first blush of tepid dawn, heeding a call to skies far south. The sun would edge over the eastern horizon without her smile to illumine or her eyes to take in the glistening promise of a new day. For the first time in my life, the sun would rise without her. Life had moved on, leaving yesterday forever in a myriad collection of seemingly endless yesterdays. For the first time, she had moved into yesterday as well.
Acceptance – The Key to Freedom
Acceptance is our willingness to admit that we can’t control life or direct outcomes. It embraces the fact that robbing life of the freedom it needs in order to be everything it was designed and ordained to be is deadly, audacious, and in the end entirely impossible anyway. Acceptance either comes as we teeter on the precipice of sheer exhaustion; our own spent nature leaving us no alternative. Or we readily embrace acceptance because it puts us seamlessly in step with God rather than grating against Him by vying for control with Him.
Acceptance is errantly viewed as surrender when it’s really an acknowledgement that we don’t have the control that we pretend to have and that we’re not as powerful as we might like to think. Geese will fly and people will die. Acceptance is embracing our insecurities. It‘s recognizing that control is our attempt to establish a sense of security and safety in a frequently tumultuous world. Acceptance then is embraced by relinquishing our need to control and choosing instead to rest fully in God’s constant care and provision.
That sense of acceptance that is heavy with peace and rich with empowerment is a sense that when walking with God, life rolls on as it should, even when the gravity of situations or their course would seem to suggest otherwise. It’s about discerning the ebb and flow of life for the clues that God has placed there, rather than merely having our vision halted by questions about whether life is good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust. “Those who hope in me will not be disappointed” (Isaiah 49:23, New International Version) says the God of geese and the overseer of death.
It's looking past the nature of events to the lessons and flecks of gold that God has scattered liberally within them. Acceptance is letting freedom give life ample space to do its work without our mindless intrusions and savoring its subsequent bounty.
We can accept whatever comes our way if we know that in the event, regardless of the nature of the event, God has placed something there for us that’s of more value than the situation within which God has allowed it come. Acceptance creates infinite room for an infinite God to work out the infinite in the finiteness of our worlds. It geometrically expands our worlds out beyond the most unimaginable horizons. It breathes possibilities into everything that looms impossible. We throw open the windows of our existence; pulling back drapes of despair and we let our souls air out in a vastness that takes our breath away. In the releasing that acceptance demands, we lose everything that we thought was something, and we gain everything that that is truly everything.
A kiss on a dying forehead that was even now becoming cool; my hands stroked her face and brushed back hair so gray and still that it seemed to have already fallen into an eternal slumber ahead of my mother; a final goodbye. We stepped out into a parking lot somehow sterile and lifeless; people coming and going as if moving through some sort of mechanized script. The angst of holding on and letting go plied hearts and hands as they stood somber over awaiting cars; numbed and lost, fumbling for keys and answers.
And then they burst across the treetops. Hundreds of geese in a collection of V-formations surged over us, skimming the underside of a fall sky and brushing the last pastels of twilight. Fall accepted its own departure, seeing itself as part of some grand drama that played out in the simplicity in geese aloft or as vast as a turning cosmos. Everything seemed thrilled to be a privileged part of it all. In embracing such a feeling, I found the beginnings of closure and a door to the future.
I waved goodbye to the airborne minions and I said goodbye to Mom. Somehow in the letting go I experienced a transition to a place where I was allowed to settle; a place warm and familiar. And in this place of solace, I was likewise prepared for yet another unexpected goodbye.
It's Time to Listen
We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
Did you ever run with leaves: a wild race born of wind and liberated foliage? It’s a race, but more than that it’s really an invitation to partnership and farewell. Racing with the leaves was not about finishing first; rather it was about a romp enjoyed in the midst of a transition being celebrated. It was playing with a friend before that friend was called away home.
It happened in fall’s own autumn when the leaves turned dry. They had long lost their color, becoming curled and brittle; gnarled sometimes like hands beset with arthritis. Winter’s impending snows skirted the horizon and teased the forecast. It was something like the last hurrah before fall slipped away. As a kid, it was an invitation to play one more time; to playfully challenge the remnant of leaves that had yet to sleep.
It most often began in the street as a brisk winter wind dove and spun from graying skies; slipping just centimeters over the asphalt. The myriad leaves strewn about seemed to grab hold for one final thrill, hitching a ride for one more bit of hilarity and fun. They raced, spun and tumbled down the road, at points catching themselves in winter’s eddies and spinning in perfect circles as if caught in a delirious waltz. Pooled in some sort of scripted conglomeration, they would suddenly burst forward amass to continue their pell-mell race down the road.
For a kid, it was all too inviting. It was play and farewell all in one. You had to race; to run in some sort of camaraderie or you felt that you were somehow betraying fall and being brutish about its departure.
And so we raced. It was playful enough until winter blew a briskly firm wind that sent jovial leaves bounding past us at a pace we could not match. Left behind in a deluge of wildness, we would pull up and stop; breathlessly watching the leaves hurl themselves down the street and into the bosom of winter. It was more than just leaves. Rather it was bidding a season farewell; watching it roil and dance down the street, turning back and waving goodbye as they went. Fall was drawing out of reach, leaving us behind to wait for the next season.
Breathless and aching, it was a bittersweet moment; those times when you don’t want to lose what you have while you’re simultaneously looking forward to what’s coming. It was about wanting to hold all things at all times, not in the sense of seasons for seasons don’t hold; rather they give and then take. We want all the accumulated good of life to be constantly present, rather than a good thing having to leave in order to make room for another good.
Kids don’t understand goodbyes. I saw it all as kind of circular; that whatever I was losing would come back. Fall would come again. We’d race again. The hello and goodbye of this season would happen again and again. It did not embrace loss as permanent so it was easier to let go knowing it was eventually coming back. Kids don’t understand that sometimes things leave forever; that finality has a non-negotiable terminus where an end is indisputably an end often without apology or explanation. But,I didn’t know that. Fall was drawing out of reach only to return on the backside of next year’s calendar. And so we waved goodbye to fall and ran wildly into winter.
Drawing Out of Reach in Adulthood
It wound in stilled wonderment past the sturdy walls of the hospice and around the pond, mystically inviting grieving passerby’s to a soulful stroll. Brushing the edge of a dense forest caught in the early stages of releasing falls blaze, the brick path offered those on its gentle concourse the opportunity to brush the edge of their own existence as well. Death does that, and a hospice is a place for death.
The path was an artistic fusion of decorative bricks laid out in relentless mosaics. It was ever changing and always beautiful. Gracefully worn at the edges and framed in slight strings of emerald moss, the path was a brick menagerie aged and gentle. It wound around the entire pond, encircling the waters with a gentle but slightly distance embrace.
It had known the footsteps of many whose strides were made heavy with pending loss. Tears had mottled its surface. Sobs had run in rivulets deep into its crevices. The lamenting of lives lost and opportunities squandered had drawn the brickwork tight. Grief and celebration held simultaneously had prompted wonderment; the path often attempting to understand the contradiction. It had aged indeed, but with the sturdy mantel of wisdom and the tender softness of a rare empathy. It didn’t dominant but invited the passerby with muted whispers to a curious walk along the edge of life and death.
That Thin Line
The first of falls leaves had begun to litter the path by the time my brother and I walked it. They wanted to race, but their invitation was more than we could heed. The invitation to frolic and farewell was the same, but I had no heart for it. Fall would be back. My mother would not. Fall drew out of reach every year only to return. As a kid, I didn’t understand that sometimes things leave forever; that finality has a non-negotiable terminus where an end is indisputably an end often without apology or explanation. Mom’s departure would be permanent, without apology or adequate explanation.
The path seemed to weep as only true sympathy can beget weeping, brushing aside fallen leaves as so many tears; itself declining one more romp. Something about this path seemed thick and generous with empathy, somehow knowing our pain because of the pain of so many others whose steps and pain still lingered in the crevices and cracks of its brickwork. It beckoned, inviting us to a contemplative stroll that took the mind beyond the simple hedgerows of the heart and deep into the wilderness of the soul.
Death invites us out there, beyond the comfort of life’s edge. It seems that the thin line where life and death meet is a tempestuous and fearful place. One does not cross over only to return on the backside of some calendar. Goodbyes are not followed by hellos; at least none that happen on this side of that line. There was a foreboding permanence that this line was not circular; rather it was linear, moving on to something else someplace else.
A Glimpse of Both Worlds
This precarious line calls into question so many things we prefer not to call into question. Latent feelings lying deep within some sort of emotional substrata are awakened and rise despite our desire to keep them submerged. Edging up against our own humanity is always a frightening thing. Living in the denial or ignorance that finality is final allows us to live with a sense of the eternal in a world terribly temporal.
There is that inherited bit of eternity that lies deep within us that rails against the confines of the temporal, awakening a deep sense that we were originally designed for life without limits. When limits are laid out as lines across the landscape of our lives, much like that path, we find ourselves facing something that was not meant to be, but something that is anyway.
Yet, this line is filled with a sublime richness, handing out pearls of wisdom and priceless insights that give away, in some nearly magical way some of life’s most closely guarded secrets. It is here that the dichotomy of life and death, of the finite and the infinite, of the eternal and temporal edge up to each other and eventually intersect in one place. The two sides of life merge in a rare and uncanny way, giving us vast glimpses of the whole of existence.
Somehow winding down its broad path it afforded the grieving the privilege of winding down a path not often traveled in both heart and spirit. Here the deep wood drew up shoulder to shoulder with the brick path, much as death and life draw shoulder to shoulder in such moments.
It was not a clash, but one aspect of life being fully present with the other likewise fully present; life standing side by side with death in a partnership of sorts. It was indeed the consummation of the entirety of existence, an extremely rare convergence where each inhabited a single place at a single moment. It was really not about anything waving goodbye only to say hello in the turn of some season. It was about the complete appropriateness of this finality as being the crowning touch to life. It was the need for a final exit that set the stage for a final entrance in a place where hello was in reality “welcome home,” and “goodbye” would be eternally unknown and therefore entirely absent. Something surged within me as two aspects of the same thing came together on a simple brick path that wound tight against fall’s wood.
Our Fear of the Line
I lived on the life side of that line, as far away from the line itself as possible so as to be as far from death as possible. My mother was drawing ever closer to that line, moving to cross from this side to the other. Her illness had thrust me to the edge of that demarcation, either as a means of keeping Mom from crossing over or attempting to see that the place she was heading was both prepared and fitting. I don’t know. An illness had pushed her near the line when I was in kindergarten at a tender five years of age. Thankfully, she did not cross then, although she had brushed frighteningly close.
This time the crossing was imminent. There would be no return, no coming back on the backside of the calendar. Leaves blew down the tight brick path into a pending winter. I felt no urge to bid them farewell, nor did I feel brutish and insensitive by not doing so. The farewell that I was facing supplanted any desire for any farewell ever. Yet I attempted to grasp the appropriateness of a final farewell in exchange for a forever hello.
Other loved ones had crossed over this path . . . aunt and uncles and grandparents, descending into some sort of abyss that permitted no spectators, leaving me distanced by the fear of that place. From this side, I couldn’t see what was there. Like the forest running deep and dense, death quickly drew those I loved out of sight behind veils of shadow into some place that I couldn’t see. If there was life out there, I couldn’t make it out. And if there was, could it ever possibly be as colorful as life on this side of that line? What was Mom crossing over to? Seizing the hem of a winter wind, the leaves bounded into the deep wood and cavorted out of sight.
The Known Unknown
“For I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2, American Standard Bible). Somewhere out there a place was prepared for Mom. Across that line that she was approaching lay a provision unknown to me. It was said to be spectacular; the stuff of mansions. But I wanted to see it to affirm it as being so in order to lend me some comfort. She was drawing out of reach. When you draw out of the reach of one place, you draw into the reach of another. However, I couldn’t see that other place.
I held to belief that whatever that place was, it was magnificent. Magnificence begets mystery, somehow becoming so grand that it’s too grand to be randomly disclosed. It is the stuff of privilege, holding secret its bounty until those destined for it see it for the first time. Grandeur disclosed in a sudden massive display is thrilling. I hoped that heaven was such a place. Despite the fact that I couldn’t see it past the deep wood and shadows of life, I prayed that it was out there waiting for Mom in indescribable splendor; a welcome growing in wild anticipation of her arrival from which any departure would be eternally unnecessary.
Despite the wonder of all of that, my first and most fierce intent was to stop this crossing over, oddly railing against a journey I could not stop. Sometimes life appears to carry out its plan without seeming to cast an eye towards those affected by that plan. I felt alone and invisible, lost on a gentle brick path teased by parting leaves that wound around a quiet hospice.
Drawing Away and Fading
A number of the bricks embedded along the way contained inscriptions of names and dates etched deeply into their reddish clay surfaces. Some had filled with dirt and scattered speckles of moss; the footprints of time revealed. Others were entirely fresh and sharp, being new to this gentle path. Each name represented a history likely embellished with both wonder and tragedy; a story now completed and slipping with ever increasing vagueness into a misty past. They were inscriptions . . . a handful of letters shouting out names in brick and mortar relief, leaving the world one remaining voice that would forever speak the names of those who had died in this place.
The names cascaded through my mind as torrents of people whose faces I attempted to visualize and whose lives I found myself fabricating. They were entirely unknown to me. Yet, it seemed all too appropriate to resurrect them in my mind at least, to not allow death to draw them out of reach entirely. It seemed some primitive effort to minimize the power of this line by pulling a foggy fragment of these people back across to this side.
The brick path was a curious path, made for the living by those now dead; made so that the drawing away might not result in being entirely drawn from existence itself. It was an inevitable path, one that we all walk, skirting the immortal at one time or another. Some are in front of us along this path, others are behind, and yet others refuse to walk it even though not walking it is not an option. Life on one side and death on the other.
The record of those passing across that line were etched as whispers on fired clay beneath our feet so that names and lives would not be forgotten as they drew out into the deep wood. All of these names had drawn out of reach, leaving the single footprint sketched out in a handful of letters. These bricks held their ground while falls leaves bounded over them and raced off to winter. Mom would cross this line. Her name and her life were already being etched across my heart.
The soles of our shoes scuffed the path’s surface that day. We paid little attention to the support that it laid under us and the guidance it provided us. We were adrift in a mother drawing out of reach in this place of death. It is likely that the path served the most anonymous role conceivable, being a path upon which the grief of those walking it made the path entirely obscure. Mom was becoming obscure as was the entire scope of life itself. Yet this path gave us a footing that we didn't even recognize, much as God gives us a sure footing when what is precious and sacred is being drawn out of reach.
The Onset of Grief as the Inability to Stop Loss
Grief often begins before the loss impales us. Grief finds its origins in the anticipation of loss and it deepens as we become increasingly convinced of the ruthless inevitability of the loss. At his most dire moment, Jesus uttered the plea “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me . . . “ (Matthew 26:39, American Standard Version). His grief was related to what had not yet transpired. It was ground not in the loss itself, but in anticipating the loss.
It may be that anticipation of loss is something of guesswork and speculation, being our attempts to manage or deal with a pending loss. Sometimes it seems that we attempt to visualize loss as some sort of proactive strategy so that the fury or fire or ferocity of loss itself is contained before it befalls us. Such endeavors call for great speculation, thought and a host of presumptions that frequently render the process itself in excess of the actual loss.
Likewise, it seems that grief arises from our inability to stop the loss. Our grief also appears grounded in the realization of our weakness as held against the enormity of what looms before us and our inability to coerce life into avoiding those things. It’s that we can’t stop loss. We’re powerless before this thing called life. It will forcefully move through our days, our hours and our most guarded core with no consideration for what costs its movement may incur. Often life pulls across this line and out of our reach the very things which we so desperately wish to hold onto. And mom was drawing out of our reach.
Obedience and Understanding
Are we willing to be obedient to that which we may not understand? “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9, New International Version) declares God.
It's not about understanding the movements of God and creation. It’s about finding some meaningful abandonment and embracing an entirely confident surrender to that which we can’t grasp and therefore don’t understand. We intentionally set ourselves squarely outside of ourselves, allowing ourselves to live in places we have no hope of comprehending, choosing to believe that there is no other place so grand to be. We realize that the vast majority of this thing we call life and all that makes life grand and massive and terribly exciting is out there; in a place that only God understands. And there, we are left without any understanding except that we are perfectly placed and at home more completely than anything this side of eternity.
It's impossible to find this place, much less reside there unless we trust that in God’s hands all is purposeful with a purpose whose value is far, even infinitely beyond whatever loss might be sustained. Is it a matter of fighting the pull of life or attempting to redirect the great torrents that come against us; to halt the army of departing leaves that race down the road and into winter? Or is it assuming control by the relinquishment of control? Is it seizing with a brash intentionality the belief that in the pulls, torrents and torments God has a grand purpose if we only dare to look, ask or step aside so that we can run to this place of faith, safety and utter abandonment?
Paul wrote that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, New International Version). Faith is not about dissection or deductive thinking or rationalization or endeavors designed to rein the infinite into an intellectual corral where it can run itself in predictable circles. Faith is about deciding not to know. It’s not about ignorance or the lack of commitment to gain and garner knowledge. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that all knowledge will quickly collide with a grand wall which human intellect cannot scale, dismantle or burrow under. It’s acknowledging its presence and embracing, even seeking its arrival. It’s about knowing that the vast majority of life is surrender to what we can’t know and a God who we can. If we can do this, then when death comes and it moves into the shadows of the deep woods beyond our vision, we can accept it, embrace it, and in time even cheer it on.
But here lies the great defeating rub. The lynchpin upon which our thinking is either prone to lavish graciousness or unbridled hate is understanding, or lack thereof. We demand to know. Tell me about this crossing over. In light of its unfathomable permanence, explain its rationale and process to me! Show me how it fits and how it’s the better option.
“It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7, American Standard Version). We hate that, particularly in crisis. It’s not enough. It explains nothing. It asks me to believe without hard data or fast facts that would give me a reason and platform to believe. Our lack of faith demands the infusion of information. Information shapes an explanation. And we hope that the explanation is sufficient.
It’s God’s odd, seemingly incongruent dichotomy that we grow the best when we know the least. Lack of understanding provokes faith and forces it. If we don’t understand we either seethe with rebellion, or take a radical posture of resting in a grander plan whose scope and breadth we simply cannot see or adequately apprehend. Mom was drawing out of reach and I was forced to the precipice of this decision to demand to know or let it go. I found it easy in theory but enormously taxing in reality. I wrestled with it imperfectly.
Beating Grief Equals Surrender
Is beating grief the wrestling with surrender and surrendering to surrender? Would grief not only be reduced, but possibly abolished? Surrender is largely synonymous with abandonment in the sense of abandoning our right to fear and embracing our greater right to peace. “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7, American Standard Version) . . . is ours if we rest in surrender rather than the terrible angst of information that is always insufficient in loss.
Surrender is a choice. As a choice, it is a privilege. We have the privilege of surrendering to God. Surrender in a relationship with God is not about defeat as we presume it to be. It is a supremely tactical move vested in wisdom and faith.
In dealing with grief, it is handing over our lives and our pain with the full acknowledgement that surrender to God means the defeat of grief. “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42, American Standard Version). It’s not acknowledging our inadequacy, rather it is acknowledging God’s adequacy. We move away from the need to know and move toward the need to believe. Knowing is never sufficient . . . genuinely believing always is.
Surrender is letting go to something infinitely bigger than I who sees a plan much bigger than the one I see. It’s resting in the conviction that the path unfolding before me is rich even though its escarpment and ascent seems only the stuff of pain and its glories largely obtuse. It frees me to set a course along that line between this life and the next, drawing into the lungs of my soul both halves of life as living and dying.
More profoundly, it’s embracing the fact that Jesus crossed over this line into death and then of His own accord and power came back across this same line into life again. “He . . . is risen” (Luke 24:6, American Standard Bible): three simple words that are said of no one else in all of human history. Sometimes the grandest of all events are best described in the poverty of a few simple words. In a handful of syllables it was declared that Jesus crossed back over. He did both sides of it, and He controls both sides of it. He returned on the backside of the calendar. If indeed He controls both sides of this seemingly precarious line, then the line is really of no accord.
The sun set a rapid course for a horizon tinged in the color of autumn and chilled by that October fall. The path drifted into the chilled shadows of fall; the leaves having ceased their romp. The day’s advance marked far more than the closing of a simple day. For the first time, and the last time in my life it marked the closing of my mother’s life as well. She seemed tied to this day, passing as it would pass. She was moving out of reach as was the sun and the day it defined.
Oddly, I had no alternative but to surrender. I fought the only option presented to me for an option that I did not have. A few of autumn’s leaves swirled at my feet, dancing it seemed on this line between life and death, inviting me to race. They pirouetted as some grand waltz between life and death as if this place marked celebration, seemingly understanding the permanence of Mom’s transition. The words “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39, American Standard Version) seemed so easy for Jesus to say. The seasons seemed to grasp them. However, they were not easy, but Jesus said them anyway. I struggled to do so, for in doing so I released that which I did not hold. I stepped back. In the stepping I let go of that which I didn’t hold and I let my mother draw across that path and out of reach.
Tears once again mottled the surface of a gentle path that brushed the edge of a dense forest. The leaves raced off the edge of fall, I found myself unexplainably able to release them to the next season. Although it was fight, in the slow release I sensed a pending space to begin grieving. I cried in the fight against myself and the first thin wave of grief that the fight permitted.
It’s eight feet at best, if even that. When you’re a kid you run with the natural assumption that life will fall in your favor. It grants exceptions and kind of looks out for you. You think of life as some sort of doting grandparent and adventurous friend all in one; inviting you out to wild frolicking play while hovering close enough to catch you if you fall. It’s the best of both worlds; of all worlds really. It makes life terribly wild and inordinately safe all at the same time. So, it’s only eight feet. The next limb up was probably another four feet at least. That was a stretch. But eight feet; that was just about perfect.
We had spent days raking those leaves; several days. Pungent remnants of a summer nudged off fall’s calendar. When we had raked them when they were still electric; royal gold’s, velvety reds and sizzling oranges. Pigments liberally scattered from an artist’s pallet, the ground had been magically transformed to a patchwork potpourri of splendor on a canvas of faded summer grasses. We hated to rake it up really; to desecrate the canvas. But the passion for fun prevailed and so they were raked into massive piles, clearing summer’s faded canvas to wait for a distant spring.
It was only eight feet. But with both the wild child and protective grandparent of life begging us to jump, we could do no other. Eight feet is only eight feet. But when you’re a child entirely wrapped warm in the embrace of the wild and protection of life you leap, you plummet in a manner that feels much more like flying through a tract-less sky fully abandoned to the gracious mercy of life . . . and then you land.
It seemed that you fell forever, but it was all terribly immediate at the same time. Both the vast endlessness and terrific brevity of it wove a puzzling dichotomy, giving the eight foot plummet two sides; providing me two entirely unique experiences at the very same time. It seemed part of life’s mystical ability to be inexplicably different and wildly divergent about a single experience; God being relentlessly fresh every time He touches us.
In the landing, at that very moment the exhilaration of the entire adventure distills itself down into some sort of crazy tonic that instantly saturates your brain, electrifying every neuron with emotion. And there, gazing up eight feet to the branch above and another fifty feet to the massive canopy that bequeathed these leaves, life surges with tsunami force within you. You can’t move but all you want to do is move. It’s incredible, and it is good.
Off in the distance, the last of autumns leaves pirouette from trees now heavy with fall’s slumber. The breeze has turned a bit brisk, slightly seasoned by the chilled hand of an approaching winter. Birds gathered in mass as throbbing clouds of aviary sojourners bouncing south under heavy skies.
It was only eight feet, but the descent and the landing dramatically sharpened the senses to allow every ounce of fall's vitality to surge in all at once. Life becomes so electrifying that you have to shut it off or you feel that you’ll explode from the inside out. And so, it’s back up the tree for another eight feet of wonder.
And Then Adulthood
Columns of stately maples, elms and oaks stood at attention; woodland sentries stoutly ringing a small, broad pond. Its glassy expanse thinned in the middle, drawing its banks close enough to permit a small bridge to cast a slight arch across its tepid waters. A slight chill permeated the air. Tentative but timely, the thin crispness was just strong enough to hint at the turn of the season on that mid October’s day. Yet it was sufficiently subtle to cull a rich aromatic delight from the first of freshly fallen leaves. Fall was back . . . early.
Fall had come quietly that year, unobtrusively as if heeding something reverent and austere. The leaves held a bit that October. Slightly pausing, they turned from summer’s tired green to the exuberant blaze of fall. They seemed to hold their canopies close, refusing as of yet to fully surrender to a season turning on the axis of the year. Life, it seems, is so very profuse that even the pending death ever engulfing me was muted and restrained in the swell. It’s breath-taking and life-taking all at once. Mom was dying. Fall had turned another side to me that I had never known or wished to know. The plunge was infinitely more than the eight feet of childhood. This time the descent was endless as the emotional freefall of her dying felt bottomless. The wonder of that season remained, but it has become tightly woven and inseparable with the loss in the turning.
The doting grandparent and adventurous friend seem to have backed away, if not disappeared altogether. “To grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable” (Madeleine L’Egle). Yet vulnerability is exacting and devastating, especially when the colors turn early.
Mallards slid from low slung fall skies, cutting smooth lines in the glassy surface of the pond; sending glistening ripples in the same V-formations that these waterfowl had drawn across a graying firmament. With the momentum of migration propelling them, they skimmed under the wooden bridge’s span and briefly settled on fall’s waters, preening translucent feathers before fall called them back to her skies.
The ornate bridge's sturdy wooden beams and gently curved rails invited the grieving to pause over reflective waters. Death invites lingering and pondering. It provokes it as death raises innumerable and terribly tangled questions about life. Death is a reality that calls the rest of life and all of our assorted strivings into sharp relief, begging dark and foreboding questions. It forces the questions that we are able to deftly deny . . . until death comes. And death had come unexpectedly that fall, ramming the fist of adulthood squarely against the sweet memories of wild laughter and eight foot plunges. The disparity was stunning and wholly paralyzing.
Several figures lingered on the bridge’s broad oak and maple spine. They too wrestled with death, giving us a shared experience that mystically forged comrades from complete strangers. A hospice wrapped in fading gardens invited such pondering and the melding that results from a mutual experience.
Strolling the bridge's oak span, they paused over glassy waters in a momentous struggle to understand how something as final as death figures into the exuberance of life. Behind them leaves pirouetted and avian voyagers charted paths southward as always, but there was a sharp relief of what the child side of me wished to grasp in the momentum of fall and what the adult side of me was mercilessly forced to deal with.
I stood a short distance away at the edge of a sandy bank generously hemmed with dried reeds and brittle cattails that tiptoed through glistening shallows. Even from there, I felt the thoughts of those on the bridge as sharp and leaden as if they were my own. How does it all work, this life and death thing? How does it hold itself against all the wonder of life to which it seems so contradictory? The suddenness and incongruity of it all pressed upon me with a blackened vigor; I found myself standing in a slumped stupor weighed by forces and crushed by realities that descended without notice or warning. How does it all work; the beauty and tragedy of life? A hospice created a place where such questions were gently entertained in lives where those questions were now being forced.
Tinges of fall color in the surrounding forest reflected in the mirrored surface, dancing on the slight wakes of arriving geese and shimmering when a passive breeze gently rippled the calm waters. Hedges of blueberries and tangles of wild grape filled in the forest floor, hemming in this place of wonder and solace. Inside the hospice, a few feet from that pond and the surrounding woods my mother was dying . . . quickly, unexpectedly and without remedy. Nature itself was turning in what was always her favorite season of the year. That fall, she would depart with it. Even though I was desperate to do so, I could no more hold on to her than stop the roll of the season turning in front of me.
Grand and Grievous All at Once
How can life be so terribly grand and so utterly grievous at the same time? I sat but a handful of feet away from a dying mother and attempted to reconcile this most glorious season with a suffocating loss that pressed my heart with such weight that it labored to pound out each precarious beat. Yet I was at the same time drawn back to an eight foot jump in the arms of a wild grandparent who always bid me gracious favors and loving protection. I saw nature in spectacular display all around me with forested vistas rolling off to vividly painted horizons. Yet, in front of me there walked those whose faces were veiled ashen in the pending death of a loved one.
How do you reconcile it all? I wanted to believe that life was either good or bad. In resting in one or the other I freed myself of the gargantuan task of having to believe in both. In doing that, I removed the hideous disappointment that befell me when the bad prevailed, and I kept myself safe from unsustainable joy and hope when the good abounds. Either way, I know that one or the other will seize the landscape of my life and just as quickly leave it to the other. I would simply prefer to rest in one rather than have to alternate between both. I was falling much farther than a mere eight feet and the exhilaration of it all had turned terribly black.
My mother was dying. The juxtaposition between an eight foot fall and a mother’s death was entirely unfathomable. I sat at the ponds edge groping to seize and hold close the wonder of life on one side in order to believe that life makes sense and that good is sustained even in great and terrible pain . . . or more so, in great evil. On the other side, with great trepidation I tried to reach out and touch the pain ringing both cold and hollow; knowing that I could not deny it nor could I ignore it.
An eight foot drop and a dying mother seemed as from horizon to horizon in distance from one another, yet I knew that I had to embrace them both. Sitting by that pond, a handful of feet away from a dying mother, I could not span the gapingly impossible expanse.
It was here, in these places that we realize the vast dichotomy of life. At one end of the created framework there is set intoxicating joys that exhilarate and enthuse us to the end of our emotions and beyond. At the other end there looms the specter of devastating pain and chillingly dark moments. Life embodies both of these dramatic extremes. And at times we are helplessly tossed between both of them.
Managing the vastness of life is about managing our response to it. When the colors turn early and the riotous leaps of eight feet turn bottomless, we can choose our disposition and thereby navigate these extremes. Martha Washington wrote, “I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances (italics mine).”
More than simply navigating these extremes simply to survive, we can put ourselves in a position to effectively savor the vast dichotomy of life. We live in a world of immense and incomprehensible variety. Incredibly, we are shaped and created with the capacity to fully embrace, experience and incorporate the full depth and breadth of that marvelous diversity. In the embracing, we can experience the vastness of life as both dark and light, subsequently growing in ways unimaginable while managing the venture by choosing our disposition. I prefer eight foot leaps, but I likewise see the opportunity in bottomless falls.
Turns that Leave the Precious Behind
Peering over the pond and out to the deep woods beyond, the seasons were changing. Life was rolling on leaving behind something immensely precious. Nearly, it seems, discarding something it should not. At times life seems insensitive, casting aside that which yet has some remnant of life remaining. Something seems incomplete, a resource not yet exhausted; something seized and stolen before its time.
Sometimes life seems unfinished, the edges not yet sanded smooth, the final touch not yet having been rendered on a canvas bathed in colors of near perfection; a finish line not yet crossed swelling with applause and exhilaration. It simply should not be over. So it seems. There should be more eight foot leaps to make, but eventually there will be the final jump. And it had come.
Sometimes completion is not what we think it to be. We hold some idea of what something will look like when it's complete or has fulfilled its purpose. We apply a standard that in most cases is terribly inferior to the perfect destiny for which this person or this time or this thing had been created. We see the loss of the moment and are blinded to the larger purpose. Life tips on finely orchestrated events that vastly supersede our comprehension. Jesus uttered “it is finished,” (John 19:30, New International Version) to an event that his followers could not believe should have finished in that manner. In their minds something was not completed, yet it was completed perfectly.
Grieving acknowledges completion. Whether we can see it or not, it’s resting in the belief that there's a completion that gives sense, meaning and a rationale to our loss. Completion means that anything more is unnecessary. That loss is not about a future now stolen. It takes unfairness away and replaces it with an appropriate closure.
Twice Stolen
In the taking, it’s all relegated to the whimsy of memory. Memory is what’s left after something’s over. It seems wholly incapable of fully holding on to the thing that it's attempting to recall. It’s but a lean shadow, a thinning recollection of something marvelous and grand. Memory can only hold a piece of that which we lose. In the holding, it often takes artistic license and amends the memory so that it’s either less painful or visually richer. In either case, it’s easier to hold. So when we lose something wonderful, in great part we lose a great part of it forever.
Goldfinches and orioles skirted the woods edge and lighted on bustling feeders hanging sturdy at the bridge’s edge. Having been left far behind the hem of a summer long thrown off the edge of the hemisphere, they reminded me of a season past . . . harbingers of what was. Summer itself walked with us through lush green days caressing us with warm kisses of new life. It granted us sultry nights be-speckled with galaxy upon galaxy of stars packed into its rotund, velvety canopy. It begged us to smell dandelions, to run sandy beaches, to roll in mounds of wildflowers, to ascend the muscular limbs of maple and aspen, to climb lofty peaks and to wonder in a way that makes reveling sublime.
It was all fading now, relegated to the back alleys of my mind, conjured up in anemic images void of the flurry and flourish, of scent and the sacred. But its time was over even though we presumed there to be more life to be had. Summer had more to give it seems. But sometimes the colors change early.
Inside this hospice, a few steps from fall itself my mother was passing just like summer was passing. From the inside of her room, her window framed the glorious scene of transition unfolding in front of me. But from the outside looking in, this same window only served to frame her in death. She had yet to draw her final breath, although it was terribly close. Already the images of her were fading. Already she was passing into the far corridors of my mind cloaked in ever deepening shadow before I felt she should. Already the tone of her voice, soft around the edges was becoming muffled. Already her gestures, her mannerisms and smile, her tone and touch, the dancing crystalline blue eyes so full of life were slipping as turning wisps of smoke through my fingers. I couldn’t remember the eight foot fall anymore although I was desperate to do so.
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror” (I Corinthians 13:12, New International Version) says Paul as he squints, cants his head a bit and gazes into the next life. I saw but a poor reflection gazing at this life as it unfolded inside a window where the colors turning early. Already I was grieving not being able to hold her or the memories so poignant and sweet. The colors were indeed turning earlier than I presume they should. But colors were turning anyway.
Turns of Life Turning Forward
“I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2, American Standard Bible) says Jesus. “Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62, American Standard Bible). “I have come from the Father and must return to the Father” (John 16:28, American Standard Bible).
Jesus actions in the present were all about the future . . . that time which stands a nanosecond in front of us and beyond the larger season that we call today. Out there is something called eternity; that thing which seasons cannot define or contain. Eternity is the future infinitely multiplied against itself. It’s the ultimate destination that always held Jesus gaze, yet it didn’t hold mine as much as I wish it did.
Was this season over? Was eternity rushing upon my mother? Or was that all simply a marginalized perspective drawn tight by blinders of fear or absence of vision or thinness of faith?
In actuality, it’s a step into something that will never be over. Eternity is the end of the end. There are no more endings there. The end of this life is the beginning of an endless eternity of ceaseless beginnings. And so, is the end really an end, or the beginning of that which will never end? Is eternity the extermination of even the notion of an end? Then we are obligated, if not forced to ask, “what is more in death . . . loss or gain? Are we losing something, or is what we’re gaining so vast and terribly grand that it essentially wipes out any loss whatsoever?” Does it eclipse eight foot jumps?
Does it matter . . . really? Was it suggestive of a past now being lost before its time, or was it a past being set aside upon which an endless future was to be built? Was it about the limits that the past imposes upon us because its story is unchangeable history written in incomplete relief, or was it about limitlessness of a future as a story yet to be crafted, formed and told that will not be held hostage to whatever the past was or was not? Was life about a checklist of accomplishments completed and thoroughly marked off with some prescribed tedium? Or was it about joining a much vaster adventure that is not defined by our expectations, but by the hand of a God who perfectly brings every life to closure at the perfect time in order to seize that exact adventure and set us out on horizon-less hills? Will it make eight foot jumps in the throes of childhood appear terribly minor by comparison? I think so.
How it All Fits
My mother was dying. For the first time in my life I found myself caught between a past on the verge of passing that seemed premature, and a future that I was not ready for. It was fall. October was slipping away and my mother with it. In it I felt both my dread of loss and my lack of faith in the future. If my Mom didn’t somehow figure into my future, any vision that I would cast instantly disintegrated into a bitter talcum that blew an acidic residue all around me. I couldn’t let go because the past was fading fast, the future was inconceivable and eternity was simply too incomprehensible.
Panic stricken, facing uncertainties behind and before, I held on to that which I couldn’t hold on to without seeing both the promises for her and I. I sensed something infinitely grander, but at that raw place of unexpected loss I couldn’t grasp it. I could see it all around me in the flush of a season celebrating death so that it could celebrate life. But the bridge that this created for me, much like the stout maple and oak arch that spanned the waters before me was simply too difficult to cross. I edged up to its footing and I knew the passage that it called me to. I needed to cross. I wanted to cross. But I could go no further.
The Colors are Turning
The leaves rustled in the wind, its fingers culling nature forward in both death and dance. It was an odd combination indeed . . . celebration and cessation all at once. A non-negotiable bargain struck for us by the sin of the first man; a counter offer on a cross without which life would stall, stagnate and eventually cease to be life. Seasons must turn. Season is built upon season in an escalating dance. Oddly, the cross itself was accomplished so that we can pass from the season of this life to the season of the next. On the cross, Jesus built the ultimate bridge. He jumped, but infinitely further than eight feet.
Geese and an assortment of waterfowl moved in slight circles on glassy waters. Massive assemblages of birds skimmed the treetops as feathered aviaries on a mystical journey to southern skies. The grand arch of the sky lent itself gray and cold. Nature was beginning to tuck itself in. The colors were changing early and I was not ready.
I turned to leave. As I did, my gaze was drawn to a small metal plaque by the bridge. I stumbled upon the words that were etched there, “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11, New International Version – italics mine). I was and I am grateful for the promise, but I stood at both bridge and woods edge, running fingers over the raised wording on this simple plaque unable to claim its message. The colors were turning early and I was being prepared to let them turn. I was being prepared to let life go out of my reach, to let it all run ahead of me without me. Around me life was advancing in dark directions that were not of my creating. Yet I had to let it advance and in the advancing find some hope or rationale that would permit me to join it; to know that out there in terribly unpleasant places there lay a hope and a future. I had to let go and I had to leap.
We all throw around the idea of having a purpose, or not having one, or wondering if we’re supposed to have one, or whatever we’re wondering. We wonder if we really need a purpose, and if so do we create it or does it already exist and we just haven’t happened to happen upon it just yet. For some of us, we think that the whole idea of having a purpose suggests that life is much more intentional than maybe we thought it was, and that maybe we’re all part of a grand design of some sort.
For others of us who tend to see life as more happenstance, it’s more about figuring out how we can figure ourselves in to whatever’s being figured out around us. In that sense, we create a purpose if what’s around us appears to make it worthwhile or possibly necessary to do so. However, or in whatever way we go about it, we all ponder this whole idea of having a purpose. For having a purpose gives us a desperate sense of purpose when our self-esteem would tell us that we serve none.
There’s something about life that doesn’t quite make sense without a purpose. There’s too much rhythm to life. There’s too much that seamlessly meshes, even when scrutiny of the most exacting kind would not be able to ascertain how it possibly could. There’s a beautiful and even mysterious connectivity that creates a dynamic unifying function, drawing everything together in some jointly corporate effort as a means of keeping everything moving and growing and flourishing. Even the darker side of life, perpetually roiling with its chaos and anarchy has an underlying cadence that maintains the darkness and feeds the destruction. Things have a place and a purpose in that place.
We Need a Purpose
Whatever the nature of our orientation might be, it seems that we need a purpose. There’s a lot of things that we talk about and discuss and debate and ponder and pontificate about in life. We analyze and scrutinize a whole bunch of stuff. And most of those discussions are really all about sizing all of that stuff up in order to determine if we want to engage in them or not. Do we want to invest in those things, or learn more about them, or build some part of them into our lives? Or do we categorize them as wholly irrelevant, blithely toss them aside, and move on from them to whatever the next thing’s going to be? Most of our discussions are a part of this bit of shopping that we’re doing in order to determine to if we want to purchase the product or pass on it.
But when it comes to purpose, it’s not about shopping. Shopping implies that we have a choice. It suggests that we’re leisurely strolling the endless aisles of life working out those endless decisions of whether we want to purchase something or not purchase something. There’s a sense that we can live with or without whatever it is that’s crammed onto the shelves that flank us on our left and on our right. The majority of these things are bright and shiny accessories that simply compliment what we already have or lend a bit of accent to what we already believe in. In the complimenting and the accenting, they don’t necessarily add to what we have nor do they detract from it. Most of them are appealing options designed to supplement something, not sturdy truths constructed to support something. We can take them or leave them without any major repercussions in the taking or the leaving. That’s most of life.
But purpose doesn’t appear to be a bright and shiny accessory. It’s not designed to ‘supplement’ anything because everything else is designed to supplement it. In fact, it’s not an item that we choose to select or not select. Purpose doesn’t leave us with the luxury of deciding whether we’ll choose it or whether we won’t. It’s inborn. It’s how we make sense of our existence as it’s played out within the rest of existence. We have meaning because there’s a role that makes sense of our existence and that serves to compliment everything else in existence. It’s simply not optional for purpose to be an option.
If we’re going to live with fullness, we have to be fully committed to seeking out and working out our purpose. Otherwise, we will exist with a gaping internal vacuum that will leave our lives ill-defined, or worse yet, undefined. And herein we often discover the source of our damaged, raw and bleeding self-esteem. We feel that we have no purpose and that can only mean that we have no value.
The Question Regarding Our Purpose
Therefore, the question regarding purpose is not “do we need one?” The question regarding purpose is far beyond any tangled debate as to whether one is necessary. We can engage in the rather diffuse and ever-shifting debate of whether we have a purpose. We can ponder the subject and bring it under the scrutiny of political leanings, emerging philosophies, wildly divergent doctrines, the voice of the important people in our lives, or other such assorted maladies. Regardless of the microscope under which we put it or the template that we force upon it, it’s not a question to be asked. Rather, it is a reality to be embraced.
Debates such as these often arise from those who would view life as this perpetually shifting expression of whatever they feel moved to express at any given moment. In such scenarios purpose gives way to the randomness of those who demand randomness as a platform to indulge whatever they wish to indulge whenever their mood moves them to indulge it. Or, it arises from those who tightly align the idea of ‘purpose’ with the belief in a Superior Being that orchestrated this existence and our place in it. Wanting to reject all such notions of a God in order to hold tight to the gospel of self-determination, they reject all such notions of a purpose (or at least a divine one). Arguments such as these can likewise arise from those believe there’s a purpose but fear the magnitude of it. In their minds, to know it and to pursue it is to risk failing at it. So, it’s better not to know.
In reality, the question of purpose is simple, direct, but inherently complicated. The question demands bravery. It rises on the belief that we have an utterly indispensable role to play in our own existence because it is not just our own existence. Fulfilling our purpose has an equally critical role to play in the existence of others. It is our part in this ever-unfolding corporate story that we have been granted an indispensable part in.
It is to understand that despite our own sense of unworthiness, we have been given a purpose. The fact that we have a purpose is not so shaky as to be dependent upon our belief as to whether we’re sufficient enough to have one. Quite the opposite. The fact that we have been granted a purpose evidences that we were worthy to have one. But more than that, we were sufficiently competent to play a role whose impact would move far beyond the limits of ourselves.
The Power and Scope of Purpose
To have a purpose is to possess power. For any purpose never begins and ends in itself. It is never that constricted, for then any purpose would be something so anemic that its very existence could not be justified. It never is held to the parameters of the life within which we live. Our purpose always moves out, as it never consolidates itself as a means of always moving in upon itself. Engaging in our purpose and working that purpose out has an influence far beyond the scope of the purpose itself. It is highly influential. It is the thing that builds upon the purposes of those around us, vigorously enhancing communities, nations and the global experience itself. To have a purpose is to possess power. And if we have been granted power of this sort, our value cannot be understated.
In fact, to not ask the question of what our purpose is, is to relegate our lives to mediocrity of the basest sort. It is to question the rationale of our existence as not existing. It causes us to debate the essence of who we are and what we’re supposed to do with who we are, which in fact questions everything that we are. We possess the power and the freedom to ask the question. And I believe that we’ve been granted that authority so that in the asking we might find the purpose. The question is, “What is my purpose?” The question is not, “Do I have one?”
It’s embracing that question and insistently asking it until we have the answer squarely in our hands so that we can begin to live it out squarely in our lives. That action both defines and breaks open our existence in ways few other things do. And it most certainly validates the worth of our existence in ways powerful and profound.
What “Purpose” Tells Us:
First, We’re More Than Just the Sum Total of Our Existence
The fact that we have a purpose evidences the fact that we are more than just the sum total of whoever it is that we are. A purpose says that we have a much larger role in this thing that we call life than just the living out of our individual lives. Life is bigger than any of us will ever be as an individual. Purpose tells us that we’re specifically designed to engage every bit of that expanse. Purpose tells us that everything that’s within us is designed to engage everything that’s outside of us, and there’s a whole lot out there. A purpose tells us that we are far more than just the sum total of our existence because we are called to do something in an existence that far exceeds us. A purpose tells us that we are more than just “us.”
Second, There is Something Greater Than Us That We’re Invited to Participate In
The fact that we have a purpose tells us that is ‘something else’ out there. It tells us that the horizons in life don’t come anywhere close to ending at the end of our existence as the single, solitary human beings that all of us are. The nature of purpose is such that it will always be bigger than us and it always live beyond us. It grants us the opportunity of legacy. It extends our influence beyond our own death when we’re no longer here to extend it. These unshakeable realities substantiate the fact that there’s more out there than we can possibly imagine. Purpose not only invites us out to embrace the wonder of imagining all of that, but it extends us a priceless invitation to actually step out into it. Gratefully, a purpose tells us that we are not the end of all that there is. In fact, ‘we’ are barely the beginning, and that in and of itself is wildly exciting. A purpose says that the ‘out there’ is far, far greater than the ‘in here.’ And it invites us out to freely run in it, to exuberantly play in it, and to potently transform all of it in the running and the playing.
Third, We’re a Piece of a Much Larger Puzzle That’s Would be Incomplete Without Us
Our purpose tells us that this massive world out there, as huge as it is, is sorely incomplete without us. As big and as enormous and as complicated and as intricate as the world is, it remains less than completely complete without us. We have a purpose in this world that only we can complete. Large or small, complicated or simple, breathtaking or life giving, regardless of what our purpose is, the world will be incomplete unless we fulfill it. That makes each and every one of us terribly important in ways that most of us never even consider, and few of us even remotely conceptualize. We are utterly irreplaceable which makes every one of us invaluable beyond any sort of monetary reckoning that we could hope to calculate. Everything that’s out there will be less than everything that’s out there if we forsake our purpose. And that fact makes us incredibly valuable.
Fourth, We Do Not Need to Surrender to the Mundane
Our purpose tells us that life is intentional. It is to live out something not in the frustration of random happenstance, but in something for which this life was purposely designed. It tells us that we have the power and the mission to vividly enhance life, rather than living in some terribly foreboding mindset while we sit on ‘pins and needles’ anxiously waiting to see how life is going to play itself out. There is a destination that has enough meaning and sufficient value to call us to the challenges that will certainly be part of fulfilling that purpose. That we are not here to aimlessly pass by and leaving nothing in the passing. To the contrary, our existence is designed to live on beyond our existence. To leave a bold legacy of generational impact. To fight against all that fights against us in order to create space and grant opportunity for all of the things that would wish to live within us to be expressed outside of us. And to do this for those in that walk beside us as well as those who will come behind us.
Fifth, We Can Deny It
Could it be that the first and foremost purpose of ‘purpose’ is to convince us that we have one? Is it likely that our purpose can only be fully manifest in a manner utterly transformational when we are convinced that we have a purpose to manifest? Possibly the most brilliant way that ‘purpose’ can do that is by granting us permission to deny that we have one. However rigorous the nature of the argument might be against having a purpose, we bring it to bear in our defense and we passionately pound whatever podium we’re pounding on in that defense. And any reasonable person would hold that if we’re putting so much thought, energy and passion into a defense of this sort, there must be something there to defend against. Therefore, it is our own arguments against having a purpose that substantiates our actually having one.
We Don’t Have to Create a Purpose, We Only Have to Find It
Purpose is not something that we create, or have to create, or can create. To do what it does, it must be exceedingly greater than what we could ever create it to be. It’s not something that we create because it eclipses our vision and it lays leagues beyond the scope of our creativity. If we’ve created something that we’ve defined as our ‘purpose’ and we’re chasing after whatever that is, what we’re chasing is probably a nice idea or some collection of ideas. But it’s not our purpose.
Rather, purpose is something that we find. It’s not about tediously constructing some sort of purpose out of the scattered pieces and errant parts of whatever we understand ourselves and our lives to be. It’s not about rummaging around the confines of our existence looking for ideas, or sitting and awaiting the arrival of one of those ever-elusive moments of inspiration. It’s not about figuring out how we build it or where we get the parts from in order to build it. God’s done that work already, and He’s done it with absolute perfection. Neither is it about about earning it, for it was always yours and it was never not yours. Your very existence unarguably speaks to the fact that you have one.
We just need to commit ourselves to finding it. Not earning it, but finding it. Not piecing it together, but discovering that it was never in pieces in the first place. Next to our search for God, seeking out our purpose is one of the most phenomenal adventures that we will ever have the privilege of undertaking. As we’ve noted, it’s a treasure hunt of the greatest sort. It’s an adventure that leaves all other adventures as largely adventure-less. It’s seeking out the very thing that we were designed to do. It undergirds and gives meaning to everything else. It is the rationale for our existence laid out on the table and explained. And it’s there to be found if we commit to the search.
We Were Made for Our Purpose
Once we begin to quit denying our purpose or quit attempting to manufacture it, the nature and fabric of it will begin to coalesce. With this ever-emerging clarity, we may well find ourselves increasingly paralyzed but subsequently awed by both the size and gravity of it. It’s imperative that we understand that what we are seeking is decidedly bigger than the sum total of who we are. In fact, if we dare to explore it fully it will eventually tower over us, for anything less is less than a purpose. It’s big because it’s supposed to be. It’s big because we were created big.
Therefore, the immensity of a purpose too often dictates the intensity with which we are prone to flee it. Yet, if we understand that we are explicitly built to perfectly mesh with this gloriously enormous thing that we call ‘purpose’, we begin to understand that we are finally at home in way we’ve never been at home before. We sit with something huge because we are created by a God Who is huger still. Therefore, to be paralyzed by the size is to miss the fact that a purpose is not to be managed. It is to be done. It’s not to be sized up. It’s to be lived out. And once we’re there, the size of our purpose becomes utterly exhilarating instead of profoundly intimidating.
To Not Seek Out Your Purpose is Only to Exist
Yet, many choose not to believe that they have a purpose, or they believe that they have one but don’t bother themselves with finding it. There are those of us who succumb to a life of mindless tedium, or a pathetic routine where we senselessly march in lock-step with a world around us that’s forsaken its purpose as well. There are those of us who readily embrace the pabulum of mediocrity which declares that things are about as good as they can get, so we’d better just settle for what we’ve got.
We surrender to a purposeless existence which is surrendering to death way ahead of death’s actual arrival. And the sad story around all of this is that the majority of people will walk the journey of life down a road flat, never ascending, and rarely challenging. Many of us will know nothing other than a directionless cadence, having left the footprints of our lives meandering down a road that’s meandering itself. Eventually the road will lead to wherever apathy and mediocrity pave it. And we can be certain that it will never lead to whatever our purpose was.
Your Purpose Awaits
You have a purpose. Despite your low estimation of yourself, you have a purpose. It stands eager and ready to be discovered. Purpose is never going to be so elusive that you can’t find it simply because purpose is deeply desirous of being found, seized, unleashed and ultimately achieved. In doing so, you will change your life and the lives of those around you, because when you embrace your purpose nothing less than change can happen. If you don’t seize your purpose, you will live out an anemic life and the world will be the poorer for it. Your existence will be of marginal effect, if any effect at all. And that reality is nothing short of tragic. It’s time to ask one of the largest questions that you will ever ask yourself. And that question is, “What is my purpose?” The fact that you exist endows you with the right to ask that question. So, let’s begin shaping and exploring that question.
Success has been accorded an endless array of definitions. Some of them are crafted to make failure seem more like success so that we can limp through life and fail without remorse or guilt. Other definitions are quite lofty, written to give us opportunity achieve in a manner that has little to do with the achievement and everything to do with restoring blunted self-esteems. At times success is defined by whatever will accord us the accolades of others or advance us socially or professionally. At yet other times, the definition of success is more about giving ourselves a sorely needed boost when our spirits have been lagging.
Sometimes definitions are crafted as we go along, granting us permission to fluidly and rather nonchalantly alter the definition of success in order to form-fit whatever the outcome of our choices have been. In doing that, we have granted ourselves full license to define the outcome in whatever way suits our choices. We can craft a definition of success to embolden a faltering cause or create support when our base is splintering and our people are wavering.
Then there are other times when the definition of success is modified to diminish the works of those we’ve come to abhor and elevate those upon whom our favor has fallen. Some definitions of success are those shaped by the shifting pen of political correctness, or the placating tenets of the culture, or by the gnawing need for acceptance, or formed from the dictates of a particular social grouping that demands adherence to a prescribed set of standards. Sometimes success is defined by the proclamations of some revered leader, or the family system that we grew up in, or the job description that shapes our nine-to-five lives.
Lost in the Array of Definitions
Whatever and wherever their source, a dizzying array of definitions abound. Many seem to be a target created after the trigger was pulled, making every decision a bulls-eye even if the aim was horrid. Some are thrown out because they’re easy, or we’re not certain what success is so we just come up with something that might pass for success if people don’t pay too much attention. And in the squalor of definitions gone awry and rogue, we seem to have lost a genuine definition of success.
Subsequently, it is this mad array of definitions that sends us scurrying in a million different directions in order to be successful in whatever way success is defined at the moment. We might not know what success is, but if we do well enough in enough areas, or if we adhere to enough of the things defined as trendy and vogue, or if we chase whatever everyone else is chasing we just might happen to land on something successful. Maybe it’s the proverbial ‘shot in the dark’ that might altogether miss, yet the fact that we took the shot itself was defined as success regardless of what it hit. In the end, success becomes more defined by figuring out exactly what success is rather than actually fulfilling the definition.
Why Success?
It's interesting that success, in whatever manner it is defined, has come to define our worth and value. That’s why a lack of perceived success will tank our self-esteem quicker than just about anything else. Success appears to have become the litmus test as to the credibility of our existence and the unforgiving gauge of our worth. Success has evolved into the exclusive commodity by which we ascribe value to ourselves and others. It’s the thing that gives us status, grants us credibility, authenticates what we say, lends weight to our opinions, and awards us with the sense of a life well lived. It is the crown jewel of our existence; something to be vigorously pursued and rigorously obtained at all costs, for not doing so is a life squandered, opportunity lost, and self-esteem decimated. We are led to believe that to ‘not’ be successful is to live out the story of this sorry existence of ours without having validated the legitimacy of the existence that we wasted.
Fear of Questioning the Definition
Success becomes so acutely defined and so irrevocably defining that we seldom entertain any other possible definition. We find ourselves entangled in the culturally mandated definition of success, or the definitions imposed by our families or friends or occupation. We become so absorbed in the sorting out and the achieving of those definitions that the endeavor to achieve them becomes inordinately consuming. We have little tolerance to question the definition of success because we were told that we shouldn’t...so we don’t. Or, the pursuit of it is so intense that we never stop long enough to question it. And if we did, we fear that the cultural definition might be incorrect or our families would get sufficiently perturbed that our lives will have forever run amuck because we missed the cherished mark in the questioning of it. So we don’t question it.
Therefore, given that the defining scale of success has assumed such a dominant role in our culture, and given that we presume there to be some golden definition out there, we must find a definition for it or at least write one that would be approved of. Otherwise we have no precise framework by which to determine our success or lack thereof. Once we feel we’ve landed on the singular definition of success, we throw ourselves into the chase for fear that our lives might devolve into obscurity, our legacy might be pathetic, and we ourselves remain contemptible. But what does this mean in terms of how we’ve come to identify who we are and in that, how we’ve attempted to determine the value of who we are?
What We Do or Who We Are?
As we have noted in a previous chapter, too often the yardstick that we use to measure our worth is defined by ‘what we do.’ What we do is measured by a series of accomplishments, the manner in which we have embellished life through those accomplishments, and the achievement of goals lofty behind the imagination of the common man and far beyond the reach of the hoards. It’s understanding what’s fundamentally achievable and then embracing the belief that our worth is defined as raising oneself significantly above that which is fundamentally achievable. It’s being intentional about ascending to some lofty escarpment that we ourselves had deemed impossible to surmount. Therefore, the definition of success is the measurement of accomplishment.
In applying this standard, we evidence our worth as held up against the enormity of the task itself and the manner in which the everyday person accomplishes the task. If we can eclipse both, we feel that we have established our worth by virtue of these comparisons. But eclipsing both requires determining what success is so that we know we achieved it. ‘What we do’ is granted credibility by whatever our definition of success is. Without the definition, we have nothing by which to measure ‘what we do.’ We won’t know if we hit it or not. And in our minds, if that definition hasn’t been met or if the bullseye hasn’t been hit, everything that we do becomes the everything that achieves nothing.
The Flaw of Success
Yet, the nature of such a mentality of success demands that we constantly achieve. It is an effort of insanely perpetual works that requires that we continually prove our worth as the previous success eventually fades sufficiently to demand a new one. Sure, we can define it. But success as used to determine our worth and value is always temporal. It’s always moving. Therefore, we become enslaved to successes that demand nothing more than other successes. It becomes apparent that success is a temporary aphrodisiac that will always demand more of itself without helping us develop any sense of worth regarding ourselves. Understanding this, success then might be best defined as breaking the need to be successful as a means of proving our value.
We need to break this need to be successful due to the fact that success becomes a morbid cycle where we become successfully defeated. As noted, success in and of itself is not a problem nor is it bad unless it becomes the standard by which we measure our worth and value. Success that evidences our worth must be repeated without an end to the repeating because there is no success great enough to grant us a sustained sense of worth and value. We are worth far more than any success might impute. Because that’s the case, success must be revisited again and again because it can speak little into something as vast as we are.
We Are Too Big to Be Defined By Any Success
As we noted in a previous chapter, our value is not based on ‘what we do.’ Rather, it is based on ‘who we are.’ If we remain stuck with the feeling that our worth is based on ‘what we do,’ the definition of success is what lends credence to those efforts. The definition of success gives ‘what we do’ a mark to shoot for and a distinct line to cross. It lends clarity to where we’re going and when we get there. Yet, we can hit the mark and cross the line and raise our arms in ardent celebration with our self-esteem none the better for the experience.
Success is irrelevant in respect to our self-esteem as any definition of success regardless of how lofty does not possess the power to sustain our sense of worth or feed our sense of value. When it comes to our sense of worth and value, success is the thing that’s not the thing. It’s been marketed as the snake oil for our self-esteem by the carpetbaggers of our culture, but it’s snake oil only. The quietly alluring aspect of success is that it promises a perpetual sustenance and feeding of our self-esteem. It whispers the message in a rather seductive and convincing manner. Given that the culture has fallen for its smooth talk and has subsequently run pell-mell after its message, its legitimacy is reinforced.
However, it is always in need of resuscitation. Success cannot do what it promises to do. It can’t deliver on time in any time. It comes with wild promises but empty hands. It spouts great platitudes that thrill the listener, but it crashes with such force that it shatters the eardrums. With such an apparently irreconcilable flaw in its makeup, it would be worthwhile to postulate that our worth must be based on something significantly more consistent and profoundly more fundamental than success.
We Want to Define What Defines Us
The great rub that keeps us from getting out of this rut is that we want to define what defines us. We can acknowledge that the definition of success does not grant us worth and value. We can understand that, believe that, and come to accept that. We’ve chased these imposed definitions long enough to know that the chasing never resulted in the catching. But instead of understanding that our value is not based on any definition of success, we determine that the definition is wrong and that we can right that.
When the promise of those definitions begin to falter, we secretly being spending our time covertly crafting alternative definitions. Since this other route has failed us, we can craft life, impose the values, shift the circumstances, and modify a host of other variables that eventually shape a fresh definition of success in order to give us a maximum chance of success.
The failure lays of all this in the fact that we did not learn from the failure that we just experienced failing at. We’re repeating the very thing that we said we’re no longer doing. We didn’t learn that it can’t be done. We just thought that it couldn’t be done the way that society did it or our families did it, so we will do it differently. We missed the fundamental lesson our value is not based on what we do as defined by the definition of success, regardless of who creates the definition or how appealing it might be. We lived the lesson, but we missed the very thing that we were living. We missed the lesson that maybe success is believing that we already are a success by virtue of our existence and that our calling is not to prove it, but to act upon it.
It’s the pursuit of success and the failure of what it promises that leads us to errantly believe that we are not successful. That we have failed being successful, or that we were not successful enough. That maybe we were deluded into thinking that we were successful when we weren’t and we just didn’t know it. That in some capacity and in some manner that we’ve yet to identify, we failed even though we honestly thought that we didn’t. In fact, we didn’t fail. Rather, success failed us because it cannot deliver what it promises. So, there must be another avenue.
Value Based on Who We Are
As we noted previously, maybe we should dare to consider that our worth does not need to be established either by effort or definition. Maybe we should consider the possibility that it has never ‘not’ been established. That success was achieved by the fact that God decided to designed us and then deliver us into a far larger design to make an impact in and upon that design. We’re here, and that itself is a success.
Everything that we do from here forward is not about success, for success has already been achieved by the fact of our existence. It’s about calling. It’s about fulfillment of the purpose that we’ve been given the privilege to fulfill. It’s about honing in on our purpose and purposefully carrying it out. It’s about obedience to the call, not the adherence to some definition that measures our obedience to the call. It’s doing all of that knowing that our worth and value exists by virtue of the fact that we exist. From there on out, it’s about the doing and not about the proving.
If this is the case, then the attempt to establish something that is already established is about attempting to prove something that is already true and has always been so. And if that is true, it doesn’t need us to establish its value. The need is for us to believe it. To work it out in our attitudes and live it out in our lives. To rest in it and on it even at those moments when we don’t feel it. To speak it into our existence when the world would speak something entirely different into our existence. And that rests squarely upon us.
Thinking a Bit More Deeply
It would therefore be wise to consider the possibility that our worth is based on something so profound and unerringly rich that its worth singularly speaks for itself. Something that does not need to be proven simply because it is established in a manner that the need of proof is the weakness of our vision and not the fact of reality. It would make sense that our worth should be, and in reality is based on something that cannot be proven for any other reason than its value lies forever beyond the most magnificent achievements that would serve to even remotely evidence it.
Could It Be That We Are More?
Could it be that we are more than we are? That we have a limit that has no limits? That in fact, we are not destined for limits, and that any that we have are those that we have taken upon ourselves? Are we set apart from the rest of our existence because we are not bound to that existence? We are forever pressing against the boundaries because we assume that something exists beyond them and that something exists within us to take us beyond them. We have this sense that our limits are nothing more than opportunities to expose these limits as the next step to the next place. We are always pressing ourselves outside of ourselves. The life truly lived is the life that is always calling itself outside of itself. Therefore, at what point do we reach this impenetrable wall that defines the end of whatever it is that we are? The answer is, we don’t. And we might ask why we don’t.
I would propose that next to God Himself, the thing of single greatest value is ourselves. The priceless nature of a single human life, despite the manner in which we’ve blithely degraded that worth, is wholly immense. And this immensity is utterly inestimable on so many indescribable levels that proof stands as entirely irrelevant.
Human beings stand as the most definitive accomplishment of creation, positioned as the pinnacle of a creation that is indescribably marvelous in and of itself. We are the final touch of the cosmos themselves. We are the defining brush stroke of a creation that encompassed the galaxies, raised up mountains, gouged out canyons, threw birds into flight, painted fiery sunsets, and spun the mesmerizing diversity of the seasons. We are the thing for which these were created and we are the things that have been vested with the most improbable but most privileged job of caring for them.
We are God’s defining work. There can be no shade of arrogance or darkening of pride in such a reality as that would only serve to sadly mar us and leave us with a diminished countenance. Indeed, we should be inordinately humbled that we are God’s crowning achievement and that alone grants us inestimable worth. It is not about proving our worth through the sweaty efforts of success or achieving some definition thereof. It is about realizing successes of even the loftiest sort and boldest character could not in and of themselves prove our worth, for our worth is entirely inherent, undeniably priceless, and established in the fabric of creation itself.
Achieving for Sheer Pleasure, Not Proof of Value
We would be wise to embrace the liberating reality that we can achieve in life for the sheer pleasure of achievement, rather than as a despairing effort to establish our worth. We can walk through life with vigor and tenacity out of a sense of worth, not out of some desperate effort to prove our worth. We change things and we change the course of things because we have been privileged to possess both the ability and the permission to do so. Life is engaged, energized and inspired by our worth, rather than depleted in the pursuit of it. Our days are lived embracing the reality that our value is based on who we are, and to embrace that liberating reality is to embrace a life liberated.
The Viciousness of Low Self-Esteem Explained
In light of this, low self-esteem is the antithesis of who we are. It is ourselves fully removed from ourselves. It is the ultimate scorched-earth mentality that leaves the massiveness of who we are engulfed in smoke and razed in ashes. Of course low self-esteem is brutal. It must be if it is to have any impact upon the immensity of who we are. We are a vigorous lot, despite our frequent ignorance regarding that fact. Therefore, a low self-esteem must be relentless lest we shake it and reclaim our authentic selves in the shaking. Our enemy is formidable. But our resources are more formidable yet. Self-esteem would tell us that this is not true out of the fear that we might discover that it is and therefore bring the full weight of ourselves against it. You are what you don’t see. You will always be what you don’t see even if you choose to never see it. This is who you are and this is what you are.
If we cannot embrace this indispensable reality, we will be irreversibly stunted by the limitations of the achievements we pursue. We will chain our potential to the baseness of achievements. When we do, the infinite worth that defines us will be forever overshadowed by the shallowness of achievements, for the greatest achievements will never come close to reflecting our true value. Your value is based on who you are, despite what you do. And that is a critical but glorious shift that we each must make.
“Who Am I?” What the Question Evidences
“Who am I?” The question seems a bit overused these days. It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of living in awe of what God wrought within us. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.
The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence. That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in. By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the thesis that we are something other than being nothing, and that ‘something’ has relevance when ‘nothing’ doesn’t. By asking the question we reveal the need that we possess to believe that we exist and that our existence is purposeful. We want to believe that we are supposed to become ‘something’ rather than float around being ‘nothing’ going nowhere in the going. To ask the question is to evidence the fact that we are beings in need of asking the question. And that in and of itself evidences the incredible depth and unparalleled richness of our humanity.
In addition, the question of ‘who we are’ also suggests that a simple answer is simply not suitable. That some cheesy pabulum will not suffice. That the definitions proposed by innumerable philosophers and those who for centuries have probed the inner-workings of life aren’t quite enough. That holding ourselves up against everyone else in order to grasp some sense of who we are by comparing ourselves to who everyone else is simply repeatedly comes up short. That aligning with political hashtags or running off after a litany of causes that have caught the wandering eye of those without a cause don’t answer the question. That even though we’ve gorged ourselves on self-help philosophies and immersed ourselves in the rigors of mindfulness (or any one of the many other popular contrivances) we still don’t have the answer.
And that is not necessarily that all of these things are incorrect or that they don’t speak something of truth into our lives. It’s not that at some level they don’t have some sort of value. It’s that they’re not enough. The cumulative weight of their collected insights falls short. Mankind has asked the question of “Who am I”? for as long has mankind has existed. And yet in the end, we don’t have an answer that explains the whole of who we are. After untold millennia we are still on this search and we are still asking this question.
And if all of this evidences anything at all, it evidences the depth of our depth. It speaks to the innate and persistent complexity of who we are. Stored within the body, mind and soul of each of us there is a vastness that all of the combined explorations of mankind have yet to fathom, much less understand. And can we not correlate this complexity and depth with our value? Everything in existence has value for the place that it holds in relationship to everything else in existence. But we stand apart in complexity, intellect, reasoning and ability. We have been equipped for and tasked with the responsibility to care for everything else and nothing else has been assigned that role…except us. Indeed, does this not evidence our value?
How Do We Not Know?
The ever-baffling fact regarding the question of ‘who we are’ is that we live with ‘us’ every single solitary day of our existence. Yet, even though we live with ‘us’ with a transparent intimacy that no one else in all of existence ever will, we still don’t know ‘us.’ How could that be? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living? Yes, as we have stated, we are phenomenally complex. However, is there something else?
We Don’t Want to See
One answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see. It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are. It may affirm the presence of something we desperately hoped wasn’t there, or it may confirm the absence of something that we hoped was. It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve. It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said we are, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are. We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.
Or, looking at ourselves might actually confirm that we are better than what we thought ourselves to be, which will result in some sort of accountability that we don’t want to be accountable for. It may highlight rather formidable parts of ourselves that we haven’t cultivated, or personal resources that we’ve wasted in the wasting. It may reveal potential that has languished in the pit of ignorance, or giftings that have been left to rot in the sewers of apathy. It may call us up to places that we don’t believe we can go, leaving us greatly vexed by the contradiction of it all. So, we don’t want to see because seeing is just too painful, or too demanding, or too burdensome, or it comes weighted with too much guilt.
Becoming What They Want
Or, we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become. There are demanding social pressures to adhere to. Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance. There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas. There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant. There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were. Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’
Pressured to conformity by these elements, we develop this sectarian view of what we should be. We’ve collected this societal and relational collage that appears to be a perpetually changing montage of what we’re supposed to be. Somehow this becomes the standard template in place of ourselves being that standard. Over time, we are lulled into believing that the pursuit of this template is the truest pursuit of self, when it is nothing of the kind. And we become what we are not.
Being What Circumstances Made Us
It’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not who we are, but who circumstances made us to be. Abuse as a child. Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense. Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit. Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate. Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others. For us, these answer the question, “Who am I?”
The wounds, the disappointments, the betrayals, and the losses both large and small have defined us. In addition, the process of healing from the wounds inflicted, as well as angst involved in waiting for the ones that are yet to happen further define who we are. The embracing of an existence defined by what happened to us, further shaped by what we fear will happen becomes the sum total of who we are. Our lives become a tragically circular story of being wounded and then healing only to be wounded yet again. The difficult issue in being defined by our circumstances is that to understand how all of that has defined us means that we have to think about how all of that has defined us. And in our mind, the pain of doing that far, far offsets any potential self-discoveries. So we don’t think about them (or at least we try not to).
There’s Nothing to Discover
Or, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover. That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing. That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous. We are what we already know, despite how little that might be. Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out. We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over. There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way. Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that.
From nothing you can only get nothing. So we become embedded in a sense of hopelessness regarding both the present that we live in and the future that we have come to dread. The journey of self doesn’t exist because there’s nothing to journey from, and nothing to journey to. There’s a settling of sorts, where we fall into a sedentary malaise. And in this place where everything is nothing, our soul slowly stops breathing.
Other Reasons
Or could it be something entirely different? Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension? That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along? That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is? That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space? And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self.
All of this implies that we are, in fact, created vast beyond comprehension. And this personal vastness is so vast that it gifts us with resources that are beyond the years that we have to live out those resources. We are bigger than our own lifespan. Therefore, ‘who we are’ is based on ‘who we are in the becoming of who we are.’ Who we are is not defined by some sedentary event such as an alliance, or someone’s expectations of us, or the events that have befallen us. And unless we understand that, we will have missed the process of becoming who we are by looking for an answer in all the other things that can’t answer the question.
The Size of ‘Who I Am’
We have been gifted with a depth that will invite exploration and make space for such exploration for the entirety of our lives. We will never discover something about ourselves that will be that distinctly final discovery that concludes the journey. New vistas, fresh insights, and breathtakingly vast levels of awareness always await. We are entirely fluid, having each thing we learn expand upon everything that we learned before it, and subsequently enhancing everything that we’ve yet to learn. We grow geometrically, moving out in every direction at every moment in a continual cascade of growth. The end of who we are exists only as a figment of our sorely limited imaginations and is an outcome of the fear that maybe we are more than we’ve allowed ourselves to be.
What we do know is that we are the sum total of what we know about ourselves, plus the infinitely larger part that we don’t know. There will never be the final question. That every answer to every question is an invitation to the next question and the next one after that. We are people made of horizons and for horizons, and if perchance we live within walls, it is we who have created them. The question of “Who am I?” is not one question answered by one answer. It is a robust collection of questions that slowly but deliberately reveal the tantalizing picture of who we are. It is an adventure of the greatest sort. The hunt for treasure that captivates all of our imaginations. It is discovering the genius of God as that genius was manifest within us without any hesitation of any kind. Hence the question, “Who am I?”
This search itself blatantly evidences the fact that we are bigger than ourselves, for if we knew everything about ourselves a search would be unnecessary and the questions unprovoked. There is more to us than we know, and even though we live in union with ourselves every day we remain a mystery to ourselves. Despite our low self-esteem and incessant deprecation, the question of who we are evidences that there is more to us than we realize. And if we walk this search for self out, at some inherently deep level we know that ‘who we are’ is so vast that we will spend the entirety of our lives in search of it, yet we will never know all of it. And if the whole of us is beyond the whole of a lifetime to discover, how indescribably grand must we be? And maybe this is what should shape our self-esteem. This is how we should view ourselves. This is what fires our imagination and fuels our journey.
Seeking the Answer Verses Searching for Peace
The question then begs the search, which can be unsettling for many. The penetrating angst and unrelenting curiosity generated by the question of ‘who we are’ is the impetus that sends us searching for some sense of peace about who we are. This peace is not necessarily obtained by having some answer to the question of who we are. To our own demise, the frenzied search to calm our souls in this grand search often sends us into the ‘plug-and-play’ of a culture ready to give us the once-over and then plug us into whatever the once-over has determined us to be. It becomes something of a search for the defining box that our careers hand us, or the identifying label that our social circles have crafted for us, or the place that our socio-economic defines as ours, or the role that our family or friends have etched out for us.
There’s a myriad army of people and philosophies and social structures ready to dress-us-up and deck-us-out in the borrowed garments woven of their biases and stitched tight by their sordid agendas. Should it have its way, the world would abscond with us, embezzling our resources in the service of its agendas. And while all of these might give us an identity, that identity is borrowed or imposed or both. Suffice it to say, an identity either borrowed or imposed is a costume parading itself around as something it is not. At best, it may grant us a fragile and fraudulent peace that we gladly mistake for the real thing.
However, it lacks sustenance and stability. Typically, it’s constructed to fit a space suited for those who created it, rather than knock down the walls that have constricted us. It’s what fits them, but what enslaves us. Therefore, we have to repeatedly adjust it as we might, tear it down when we tire of it, build it back up when we’re scolded for tearing it down, and repeat the worn out narrative of why this is us and why it works…when it’s not and it doesn’t. Subsequently, the question goes unanswered because we don’t have the time to ask it.
Because it doesn’t work, our low self-esteem sits on forlorn hands and tells itself that the search is impossibly complex and that we would wise to relegate ourselves to some static existence of some sort. We are either nothing, or we are something that we are not, or we are all things bad built upon all things bad. We end up in one of these places because we’ve come at this defining question from every possible angle except the right one.
Within Not Without
As patently simplistic as it sounds, we are defined by who we are. We need not reach out to everything around us in order to define that which is within us. If we reach out to something or someone outside of us in this search for self, whatever or whoever we reach out to needs to walk us back inside of us because that’s where we are. It’s about being intelligently introspective in a manner that is intentional, thoughtful and relentless. It is about peeling away the sticky layers of culturally imposed norms, digging through the impregnable strata of our histories, breaking out of all of the superimposed roles, and rigorously erasing all of the rogue messages that others have penned across the tablet of our souls. And in the upheaval of a process that grand, it’s then formulating the right questions hoping that we’re actually daring enough to ask them.
In this rigorous process, it’s not about evaluating what we see as held against some clandestine societal rubric or chafing personal bias. Rather, it’s more about accepting what we see and asking how it can be shaped, honed, cultivated and nurtured. It’s about believing that we were created with all the essential elements to become the essential person that we were intentionally and rather ingeniously designed to be. It’s about understanding that there is a specific role out there somewhere that’s waiting for us to show up and that it’s probably sitting a whole lot closer to us than we think it is. And the best way that we can show up for that role is to come as we are and not as the world says we should come. It’s presenting ourselves before the God that created us, stepping into the life He set in front of us, and believing that it will unfold if we just show up for everything to unfold.
This is not about giving ourselves permission to spin off on some ill-defined quest of self-indulgence, for our true selves won’t find themselves shaped for that kind of agenda. This is not about permission to become absorbed in a self-satiating endeavor where we suddenly realize that life is ours for the taking when we’ve spent our lives having life take from us. Rather, it’s respecting our authenticity as being something that adds to life rather than adds to self. It’s about realizing that our true self will never detract from the true selves of those around us nor will it ever impinge upon them. And if perchance it does, it wasn’t ‘us’ to begin with.
You are uniquely designed with everything you need to be everything that you are. And that design is sufficient to be able to do everything that you were designed to do. It is big enough to exceed your lifetime. You may not see it, but as have noted, seeing something does not evidence its existence or lack thereof. It’s coming against the lies that have been spun about us, the identities that have been forced upon us, and breaking the box that other more fearful people have crafted for us. Despite the nature of your self-esteem and the darkness that it has layered ‘round about you, may the quest to discover all of this be relentless in it’s scope, potent in it’s process, and blessed throughout.
The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem
“We’re driven. Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven. That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive. It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to run from ourselves. We can be driven to do great things, or to hide from great things. Being driven grants us the ability to fly, but we can use it just as readily to die.
If we are bent under the weight of a low self-esteem, our drivenness is often exercised to our own demise. It’s used to create places to hide, excuses to run, rationalizations to justify the awful person that we are not, and the freedom to embrace beliefs about ourselves that have no basis in reality other than the reality we’ve crafted from the skewed messages of others. On the other hand, we might become driven to prove ourselves as worthy through various accomplishments and achievements. We work, we strive, we reach, and we relentlessly press on to show that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be. If we fail in such an endeavor, we’re driven to convince ourselves that we are nothing of the sort so that we don’t ever take on such a preposterous task ever again. Either way, we possess a drivenness even if it isn’t used in our best interest.
Driven to Prove Our Worth
Maybe this whole mentality of drivenness has been a product of our life story; having to do it all ourselves because no one was there to help us. Maybe this left us with the need to prove ourselves and to establish our worth by whatever means we chose to prove that. Often we have the need to display our intellectual prowess, to exercise the muscle of our skill-set, or flaunt our expertise in order to secure our place in some sort of ill-defined and vague pecking order that defines our sense of worth and value. Our identity then becomes entirely defined by all of the things that we do to prove our worth and the efforts that we put forth in doing them.
In some instances this happens because we’ve lived in someone’s shadow and we need to show ourselves as bigger than the shadow that was cast upon us, or at least prove that we’re as big as whosever’s shadow that was. At other times we’re out to prove people wrong, to conclusively show beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’re competent even though people repeatedly said we were entirely incompetent. It can be the product of a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern where we grew up being affirmed when we performed, with such affirmation being clearly withheld when we didn’t. In the end, it’s typically ourselves that we’re really trying to convince simply because the toughest audience that we play to is ‘us.’
Driven to Prove Our Lack of Worth
Or we’ve done the opposite of all of this by being driven to surrender to minimums. We’ve decided to withdraw from it all and just do what we need to do to get to the next day. It’s about being driven to draw away and hide so that others won’t see us for who we are and thereby judge us, or we won’t see them and subsequently judge ourselves by comparison. We’re driven not to be driven so that we avoid failure, or anything might even remotely resemble failure. Or, we’re often driven to surrender before the battle ever shows up so that surrender was a choice and not a pathetic manifestation of our inabilities to fight the battle.
In embracing this mentality, we’re not driven to disprove this sense of worthlessness. Rather, we’re driven to prove it by not disproving it. It’s a battle of a different sort. It’s not a surrendering to any battle that we’ve fought. To the contrary, it’s a surrendering to the need to fight for something that doesn’t exist to be fought for. Surrender then indisputably evidences our worthlessness while simultaneously granting us full license to walk away without guilt or remorse. And while such a package seems marvelously relieving, it is in fact horribly life-killing.
The Failure of Trying to Proving Ourselves
Proving Our Worthlessness
The drivenness to prove ourselves is wildly relentless. But what are we trying to prove and in what way are we trying to prove it? If we wish to prove ourselves as inadequate or inferior, we do so by acting in ways that substantiate those things. Our lives become a reflexive response to the preconceived notion that we are worthless. Therefore, our actions reinforce what we have come to believe ourselves to be.
We can sabotage our own good fortune. We can take opportunity and destroy it, thereby declaring that it was never really opportunity in the first place. We can shrug off compliments, offset every positive with a blistering array of negatives, or endlessly compare ourselves to others by dramatically inflating them to be far more than what they really are so that we look far less than what we really are.
Proving Our Value
Or, we try to work against this despairingly negative sense of self by expending all of our energies to prove it wrong. Our lives devolve into these incessant tasks that never achieve their stated goal, leaving us convinced that despite our best efforts we are not worthy of our best efforts. Fundamentally, at the core of the desire to prove ourselves through achievement there lies two fundamental needs. First is the need for identity. And second, is the need for worth and value. If the basis of our identity and our sense of worth and value is rooted in achievement, (which is the stuff that we do), then we’ve always got to be doing. We’ve got no alternative except to always be on the run, always planning the next thing, always tediously mapping out the next endeavor to insure that it’s better than the last one, and always taking everything that we lay our hands on to the next level to the point that we eventually end up putting the next level entirely out of reach anyway.
Part of the perpetual frustration lays in the fact that the point at which we hope to gain this cherished sense of accomplishment to build ourselves or diminish ourselves is ill-defined. We have some vague and often wandering sense of it, or we’ve determined a general proximity of sorts. If it has sufficient clarity, we can be fairly certain that we’ve arrived. However, we’re often doomed to realize that what we wanted this to do for us upon our arrival did not happen. Therefore, there’s a sense that we failed on our way here, thereby robbing our arrival of what we hoped to gain from it. If our sense of it was unclear, we typically determine that we really have not arrived or we’ve arrived at the wrong place. Whether we are driven to prove ourselves worthy or unworthy, either way failure is certain.
Who or What’s Driving Us?
William Frederick Book wrote that “A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.” We know that we expend energy, and typically we expend a lot of it. But we rarely question if we’re driving our energy or if our energy is driving us. Who’s in control here? We pound and we push and we perseverate and we plod along and when we get pummeled we pick ourselves up and press on. The relentless nature of it all rarely if ever gives us the time or the resolve to pull back, pause and ask who or what’s controlling the energy that we’re expending? And if we were to define success either in proving our worth or showing ourselves as worthless, defining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it would be a vitally important part of that process.
It would be reasonable to say that if we’re not controlling the expenditure of our energy, if we’re simply responding or reacting or being driven by something that we can’t in reality achieve through whatever our efforts are, then the energy spent is wasted. The deceptive nature of it all is that just because we’re expending energy we assume that something’s being accomplished. The fact that we’re doing so much could only result in some sort of goal attainment. Something good and successful (in whatever way we’ve defined success) must be coming out of this simply because the energy we’re putting out has to be resulting in something . . . doesn’t it?
Productivity as Value
Productivity is often defined by expenditure, even though the two may not correlate at all. We’re busy about being busy, and somehow being busy suggests purpose. We’re pounding out this thing that we call life, as if the pounding has a purpose other than the pounding. We’re fighting the battles, climbing the mountains, forging though whatever wilderness we think we’re in, and charting out journeys of glorious adventure. We’re pressing through the obligations of the day and the challenges of the week. Or, we’re working hard to believe that we’re not worth believing in so that we can finally lay ourselves to rest because we have no value to lay our lives upon. Either way, we’re busy and we believe that our busyness evidences our value.
Our value however, is not believed to be a constant. Therefore, to maintain our value we have to remain busy. Yet beyond that, there is some glitch in the human psyche that says that to have consistent value, we have to be consistently busier. That what worked today, will be inadequate tomorrow. That what was sufficient this week, will be woefully insufficient next week. That proving one’s worth through busyness requires a perpetual escalation of busyness to the point that there are simply not enough hours in a single day, or a collection of days to be that busy. We will fail. But we will view ourselves as the failure rather than understanding the sheer impossibility of the dynamic.
The Privilege of a Place
However, the things that we do, despite the positive or negative nature of them, illustrate the fact that life has crafted a place for us and therefore we have a purpose. Life has deemed us of sufficient value to carve out a spot that is uniquely ours. We have the privilege of having been gifted with this life and having been handed the authority to live it in out in whatever way we choose to live it out. In fact, we have been tasked with living it in a way that is entirely unique to us. We have been granted a privilege unlike anyone we will ever meet.
We might be using that privilege negatively. We might be using it to our own demise. We might be turning it against ourselves. But we have the privilege of having a place that is uniquely ours, regardless of what we choose to do with it. And because we have all of these things that life has granted us and subsequently called us to do, we obviously must have value. We have been granted the privilege of both life and choice because we have sufficient value to have been granted those privileges in the first place. We might misuse them, but we have them to misuse. And that means that we were good enough to be granted them in the first place.
What Drives Us Drives Our Energy
It’s the fact that we’ve been called. We have a purpose that is uniquely ours. We’ve been granted a niche. We have a place at the table. We have a place that has been specifically reserved in this eons long thing that we call life. Yes, deep down we want to be successful. As we have said, the reality that we have been granted this place is life evidences the fact that we are of sufficient worth to be there regardless of success or lack thereof.
However, having been granted this place does not appear sufficient for us to feel that we have real worth and substantive value. Our low self-esteem lulls us into believing that we don’t actually belong here…at all. It speaks to us in tones either loud and deafening or quiet and bedeviling that this is not our place. Therefore, we have to prove that we are worthy to be here. We have to show that this calling or these privileges weren’t a fluke, or something that we fabricated out of our desperation to feel that we have value. We have to make this real. We can’t simply bow in grateful appreciation for what life has bestowed upon us. Rather, we have to prove that we are worth the bestowing.
Because we have embraced this line of thinking, our energies are expended on our attempts at achieving something in order to prove our worth in the place that we’ve been granted. We’ve got to achieve, for if we don’t maybe we weren’t good enough for this place in the first place. We’ve got to earn our place. But while we’re expending energy holding our place through the earning of that place, we have to earn our way to the next place at the very same time. We have this sense that the place we’re at has limited value. That in the ever-incessant flow of life, wherever we’re at has a really short shelf-life. We know that soon it will become the place that we should have left in pursuit of the place that we should be going. The accolades of today’s achievement can quickly become the murmuring of tomorrow’s questions as people begin to wonder why we’re still sitting in yesterday.
Therefore, we fight to stay where we’re at while simultaneously fighting to move into tomorrow. We desperately want to solidify our current position, but not so much that we inadvertently lock ourselves into it. We must lay rigorous claim to the moment in order to preserve it as the step to the next moment, for if the former fails that latter will never exist to be given a chance to fail.
It Doesn’t Work – Wasted Energy
With that all said, whether we actually achieve what we’re out to achieve or not (whether that be good or bad), in reality it neither defines us nor establishes our worth. Whether we rise to some position of prominence, or achieve some step, or have a litany of letters stacked up behind our name, or cross some ill-defined finish line; none of these have any bearing on our worth or value. Our energies have all been about the achievement of whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves as a means of evidencing the fact that we are worth a place at the table. And while all of the trappings of doing all of this stuff appears to build us up, the trappings are in fact the very trap that will leave us living out our lives surrounded by successes, but engulfed in the forever question of “Am I good enough?”
The need to achieve these goals controls our energy, not us. We have this terribly rampant fear of not knowing who we are and subsequently having absolutely no grounding at all to effectively engage life as it roars at us, spins around us, and challenges us to do something with it and about it. Or, we have this terribly desperate feeling that our worthlessness has become completely exposed due to the fact that we stand here with nothing to hold up to show that we have value, and that based on our inability to evidence our value we have no inherent right to the place we’ve been granted. Therefore, we stand shamed before the whole world. Or, we do the opposite and we sabotage our situation to prove that we don’t belong here rather than working to prove that we do (which isn’t any more helpful).
And then we start asking ourselves a host of terrifying questions. What if none of this works? What if we don’t measure up? What if we fail life? What if we look the part but are nothing of the part? What if it was all energy spent and wasted in the spending? What if we were the fool and we just postponed the reveal? Living with ourselves in a manner such as this is dying dressed in the façade of living.
Easing the Panic
And so we default to achievement to rectify it all and get rid of the questions. If we achieve, it all goes away. If we achieve we can hold up the mirror of whatever we’ve achieved, point to it and say, “See, that’s me, that’s who I am, and therefore I do belong in the place life afforded me.” We can grab that mirror and gaze into it every time our self-esteem wanes or teeters on some precarious edge. We can carry it around with us and peer into it when this perpetually flagging sense of self starts to flag. We can do this until the mirror doesn’t work anymore and we begin to fall into the trap of believing that maybe we don’t belong here.
Achievement says we have value because we can point to the validation of the achievement; that we took nothing and made something from it which says that we do have a place and a purpose. That we stood in the face of both searing criticism and daunting obstacles, and in the standing we bested them both. That we overcame. We won.
And in reality, these things neither define who we are or substantiate our value. Our energies are horribly misdirected and tragically wasted because those precious energies are entirely controlled and completely disseminated by these convincing illusions that are destined to fade and die. We can’t prove our worth and value through achievement of any sort. And until we recognize this, we will live our lives very much ‘out-of-sorts.’
However, rather than understanding that these never work despite the best of our energies, we fall into the trap and we assume that ‘we’ didn’t make them work. We presume that we just weren’t good enough. We determined that we didn’t have the wherewithal and that we lacked enough of everything that was need to become something. It just wasn’t in us. Subsequently, we mentally and emotionally bury ourselves in a place that we never should have been in in the first place.
Our Value as Internal, Not External
Despite the screaming message of the culture and the declarations of those on lesser ventures, our value rests in who we are, not in what we do with who we are. Without a doubt, what we do with who we are has value, but it does not grant us value because that value already existed prior to any achievement. Our existence alone is the greatest statement of our worth and the clearest evidence as to our value. What we do with that existence is up to us. But the sheer reality of that existence evidences value. The fact I am writing this and you are reading this attests to the fact that we both have immense value because we both exist to do both of those things.
Have you considered the fact that without who we are, what we do would not exist? Every victory, every achievement, every accomplishment hinges on the fact that we were there to do it. Therefore, what we do is entirely dependent upon our existence. All that we do emerges from everything that we are; our gifts, our talents, our abilities, our qualities, our characteristics, our attributes and so on. What we do is simply a manifestation of all of those things expressing themselves in whatever we’ve put our mind to expressing them.
Deserving Our Place at the Table
That is why we were granted the place of privilege that we were granted. That is why we have a seat at the table. What we do is simply a manifestation of who we are working itself out in who and what God already knows us to be. We would be much better served to use our energies to bring growth and maturation to who we are, not to squander those energies in our attempts to prove who we are or establish who we are not. This is not to say that achievement is bad. In reality, achievement is very good and we are privileged to do it. Rather, it’s to say that achievement for the wrong reasons or misplaced motivations is damaging.
We don’t have to prove that we are worthy of the places that life has granted us. Yes, we need to be thankful for them. We need to cherish them. We need to hold them in high regard and never minimize them. But we’ve been given them because we’ve been deemed equipped for them. There’s nothing to prove. What’s the sense in attempting to prove what’s already been proven? There’s just the work that we’ve been blessed to do and the positions we’ve been blessed to have. And those are not granted to us to prove anything to anybody. Rather they are given to us to bless and maximize everything.
Mentally that’s a tough shift to make. It’s a reversal of epic proportions and the fact that it is evidences the depth of the lie that we’ve been living. Each of us needs to embrace the fact that our value is in who we are. And we need to widen that thought by understanding that this value that we carry within us exceeds our greatest estimation of it. It will readily eclipse anything that we do. That value is already there within us, even if we don’t see the far-reaching nature of it. Seeing something is not necessary to evidence its existence. It rests in exercising the faith that to be human is to possess potential. To be a child of God is to possess the infinite. And to possess infinite potential means that there’s a grand mission for the manifestation of it. Therefore we don’t need to create something or prove that potential. We only need to rest in it and let everything flow from it.”
Everybody seems lost these days. People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days. I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are. That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of ‘lost’ today. Everybody seems lost these days.
Let’s face it, we live in a world that’s lost. In one way or another (or to one degree or another), the world’s always been lost. There’s a pattern to our humanity that should cause us to wise up a bit, and that pattern is that (as a species) we’re pretty consistently lost. It just seems that we’re a bit more lost these days.
Of course we’re lost. We’re lost because the woods that we’re in are bigger than the resources that we have to get out them. And those woods become increasingly bigger the more that we convince ourselves that we can get out of them by ourselves. Where we are is too big for any map or any compass that we can create. And while we tend to bristle at the idea, God holds the map and has the compass. A sure map and a steady compass. And while we’re likely to continue to refute that reality, or work to ignore it in light of our incessant stubbornness, He’s got the map and the compass. And all we have to do (all we have to do) is ask Him for it. And I wonder (I wonder) exactly how lost we’re going to have to become before we finally ask Him.
New. We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new. The idea of ‘new’ is appealing. And because it is, we chase it. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much. We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’ Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’ But many are not. And at some level we know that. But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’ However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
Great things scare us, as they should. If something doesn't scare us then it's probably not all that great. All of us are called to great things. Those things will likely be different for each of us. However, in whatever way they are great, they are great. We are not here to pass through this existence as some distant observer of whatever's going on in this existence. Our lives are not passive and our role in the lives of others is not passive either. Whether large or small, we are here to do great things.
However, our fear often keeps us from doing great things. The task is too large. We don't have the knowledge or the time. Our resources are far too inadequate. The task would be better left to others who could do it better than how it would be left if we did it. Great things are for those 'other' people. We might be called to do a few 'good' things, but great things are beyond the scope of who we are. Nonetheless, we are called to great things, and to avoid them or miss them would be one of the most tragic ways that a person would waste the wonder and potential of their life.
Indeed, we put things in boxes. The function of a box is to provide a set of distinct parameters designed to effectively contain whatever needs containing. A box imposes restrictions. It sets a limit as to how far something can go. Things are assigned a defined space where they are on hold, typically because we have no use for them in the active part of our daily existence. Therefore, they’re stored away until our existence grants them whatever tiny bit of space they are granted for however long our existence grants it. We put things in boxes.
Boxes of Heart, Mind and Soul
But the majority of our boxes are not made of cardboard, or plastic, or metal, or any other such rudimentary substances. Our boxes are not those things stored in the shadowy corners of our damp basements, or shoved into the tight confines of our suffocating attics, or crammed into the five-by ten of some self-storage on the other side of town. These do not represent the vast majority of our boxes…at all.
So, what is hope? I mean, as a concept, what is it? Is hope a definition, an idea, some sort of mindset, a belief system of some sort, an idea that we hold up against the pain in the world so that we can believe in something better? Is hope a myth, or some storied fable? Does it actually exist and can we count on it in our most desperate moments? Is it something that we can actually grab onto. Is it tangible, and real, and standing at the ready when our world’s collapse and darkness descends? So, what is hope…anyway?
Or, are all of those questions the wrong questions altogether? Are those questions the humanization of hope? Are they what we would like it to be, or do they represent some sort of hopeful mythology that we’ve created to offset the darkness of a world that’s too often dark? So, what is hope?
A king in the Bible named David wrote this. He said, “My soul finds rest in God alone;
my salvation comes from him. Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my ‘hope’ comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.”
There’s hope in three short sentences. Hope is not a thing. Hope is a Person. It’s not a concept authored by men. Rather, it’s the character of the living God. It’s not a nice idea to hold up against the darkness of the world that we live in. Rather, it’s a God who holds us up against the reality of everything. Hope is a Person. Hope is the living God who supersedes the depth of our greatest pain, Who is bigger than any challenge that will ever throw itself in our path, Who possess a power that brings all other powers to their knees, and who has plan for your life and a path out of your pain. Anything else other than this God might look like hope, feel like hope, and parade around like hope…but it’s nothing of the kind. Men can’t create it. Men can only find it. And once we decide to seek God out in order to find it, we as individuals, as spouses, as friends, as family members, as members of a larger community will have finally found what all of us have been looking for all of our lives.
What am I listening to? What is it that I fill my head up with? Whatever we listen to is eventually what we will become. We can pretend that's not the case, and we can lead ourselves to believe that we can manage the stuff that we let into our heads. But the fact is, what we list to is eventually what we will become. However, the worst of it is that we don't think about what we put in our heads. We find some element of something as appealing or soothing or nice in whatever way it's nice, and therefore we grant all of it entrance into our lives without really stepping back and asking what it's saying to us.
What is the world speaking into your head? What have you given it permission to say and in what way has that changed you? At Christmas, we might wish to ask what that message is. In fact, we might want to hold that message up against the message of Christmas and ask ourselves which one we would rather have shape our lives? The message of Christmas is a message that no message formed by man can challenge. The message of Christmas is the message that we're all looking for that we will never find in the messages of the world...despite how hard we might look. The message of Christmas is "the message." So this Christmas you might ask, "What message am I listening to?"
Rescue. It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued. We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves. We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended up stranding us. We add problem to problem. Dilemma to dilemma. Disappointment to disappointment. The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we’ve dug only serves to dig them that much deeper. We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized. Therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we’re accomplishing something by at least having tried. We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such. Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued. Rescue. It’s hard to admit that we need it.
Great things are hidden in small things. That sounds terribly illogical. Yet, it's only illogical because we don't really understand the nature of great things and that their greatness is marked in part by their ability to inhabit small things. Greatness is not so much about size or importance as it is about meaning and value. It's not necessarily the size of the thing, but the power that it possesses. It's not about how vast something is, but the potential that it has within it. It's realizing that great things find the best home in small things, for great things are always a compilation of small things anyway.
The God Who inhabits the vastness of this entire existence was born into the body of a single baby. Greatness in smallness. His plan to invade the world in order to save the world would not be to unleash all of the forces at His disposal in some strategic sweep. It was, in fact, the opposite. And therein lays the brilliance of it all. In the same way, we are small. Yet, because we are, we have the space for great things. Ample space. This Christmas, we need to celebrate the birth of this baby. But we likewise need to ask, "What does the greatness of God wish to do in the smallness of us?"
Rich living has nothing to do with wealth...depending upon the kind of wealth we're referring to. Rich living is found far more frequently in impoverished lives. It is in these lives that the clutter of material wealth is absent so that these lives are free to see what is truly precious. Life is not about the pursuit of 'stuff.' Rather, it's about the pursuit of the everyday experiences that are handed to us without cost or obligation. It's about 'being thankful that we can be thankful' and that such thankfulness is not based on possessions, but on the privilege we have to be possessed by life itself.
Rich living means that we live with a sense of gratitude. Life may be easy or it may be difficult, but we find a space for gratitude in either place. It's recognizing that life is a privilege, even at those times when it doesn't necessarily feel that way. It's an appreciate for the little things that we lose in the search of bigger things. It's realizing that thankfulness is not about great accomplishments, but little gifts. That all around us are things that we can savor and enjoy because God scatters such things every place we go. It's about climbing trees and mending shoes.
Flying with the geese. Following the seasons instead of being left behind in whatever season that we are in. Taking wing and launching ourselves off to new horizons, fresh goals, untainted opportunities, and unexplored places. To live life as an ever-unfolding adventure that is always anticipating the next adventure. We want to live life like this. We really do. We might fear it sometimes. We might think that it takes too much energy or we don't have the time. We might believe that we don't have the abilities to live a life like that. We can think a lot of things, but we want to fly.
At Thanksgiving, we need to be thankful for the fact that we can fly. Maybe not like the geese that head south every year. But we have opportunities to fly in different ways that are even more magnificent and breathtaking. We are only relegated to the sidelines of life because we have put ourselves there. Life does present us with opportunities that are beyond the scope of our own understanding. But we have to take hold of them. We must press past our fears, refuse our desire for comfort, be willing to head somewhere that we've never been, and then we must then go. I am thankful that all of us can fly. The question is, will we?
Thanksgiving. To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day. Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.
But in whatever place we might find ourselves on this spectrum, we must understand that the remarkable power of Thanksgiving will live undiminished regardless of where we fall, simply because our determined adherence to it, or our blatant rejection of it cannot touch or in any way diminish something spun of things eternal.
We all have…problems. And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems. Life comes with problems. It’s part of the deal. It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life. Life comes with problems. But the real problem is not that life comes with problems. The real problem is what we do with them.
The Problem is Not the Problem
In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not’ the problem…despite the fact that we think it’s the problem. The problem is how we’re choosing to deal with the problem. That’s the problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we’ve chosen to deal with the problem. The ‘real’ problem is that we don’t want to deal with the ‘real’ problem. And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that.
Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do? What insanity would behoove us to do anything less? But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.
Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place? Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff? Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it? Will we search for truth even then?
Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse? Will they improve our lives, or diminish our lives? That depends on who and what is informing those decisions. Is it people with questionable agendas, or is it a culture trending on a rogue wave of self-gratification, or is it our own lack of thoughtfulness and integrity? Whatever it might be, we might ask who and/or what is informing our decisions? And how much are they clouding that decision to the point that we will be set up to pay a potentially unimaginable price in making it…for we have all paid such prices before and we would be the fool to pay them again. For the wrong information, and the wrong motives, and the wrong value system will leave you on the wrong side of every choice, and choices that leave you on the wrong side never make your life better.
Battles. We all fight them. Sometimes they're just the minor things that are a natural part of the day-in and day-out living of our lives. Sometimes they're unspeakably brutal and unexplainably savage, making no sense as to why they're happening. Battles can sometimes be something more of a minor irritant, or they can be something that leaves our lives in flames, cinders and ash. At times we battle people, we battle circumstances, we battle society, we battle injustices, or we battle within ourselves. Either way, we all fight battles.
But how do we fight them? Do we fight them just to survive them? Do we choose not to fight and opt to surrender as the easiest course of action? Do we fight them by playing the victim and therefore not really fight them at all? Do we have someone else fight our battles for whatever reason we have them fight them? Battles will come as they are a natural part of our existence. But how will we fight them? And how much does that choice dictate the outcome that we will live with?
You are a message. You cannot live your life without someone, somewhere watching you. Your existence is not solitary to the point that that existence does not impact another life. Your's is not a life of isolation. You are not insulated from the rest of the world in a manner that that world is not impacted by you. You are a message, whether you like that or not. And because you are, you might ask what kind of message you are sending.
Think about it. The fact that we are a message to others positions us to change things. Sometimes we feel inadequate, small, and something more of an anomaly in this infinite existence within which we find ourselves. But because we are a message, we can touch other lives. In fact, we can change other lives. And in the changing, they can likewise go and change other lives themselves. You are a message and because you are you might wish to consider what kind of message you're sending, for the quality of your life and that of generations to come will be effected by the message that you leave.
How have we come to the point where the message of the Gospel is largely considered irrelevant in 21st century America? How is it that God is outmoded, outdated, antiquated, and has nothing of value to say to us as we live out our lives today? How is it that the God Who created ‘all of this’ has been left behind by the very thing that He created? How have we come to this point?
But maybe the question is not “how,” but “why.” Why have we come to this point? Why have we come to visualize God as some ancient artifact that might have worked for less educated people living out their lives in some primitive society hundreds, if not thousands of years ago? Why have we relegated Him to a period of time long gone, and in doing so completely failed to recognize that times might change, but people don’t? Why have we come to see God as entirely outmoded in light of our progressive philosophies, or our ever-shifting ethics, or our new morality?
God is most relevant thing in existence. His principles apply to our world today probably more than any time in human history. He alone holds the truths, the ideals, the values, and the principles that can assist us in navigating the profound challenges of our times and our lives. The principles handed down to us in the Bible are entirely sound, uncompromisingly relevant, timely in ways that are mind-boggling, and sufficiently powerful to assist us in navigating the descending darkness of the times that we live in. God and His principles are the most relevant thing that I can think of.
Are we paying attention? We think that we are. We would tell others that we are. We lead ourselves to believe that we've embraced opinions or points of view because (in our minds) we really took the time to understand the dynamics related to them. We would say that we're informed, probably more than any generation before us. We listen and we read and we analyze, so we say and so we think. But are we paying attention?
Too often we're not paying attention at all. Not really. We're frequently embracing something because someone we admire is embracing it. We're standing up for some cause because it looks good on the surface and we all too readily assume that if it looks good on the surface, everything underneath the surface must be good as well. We're invested in something because a whole bunch of other like-minded people are invested in it, so with so many people invested it must be worthwhile. The fact of the matter is, we're not paying attention. And maybe what we need to do today is to pay attention to the fact that we're not paying attention and begin to recognize the incredible problems that that continues to create.
We are empty. Terribly empty. We don't like to admit that...but we are empty. And into that emptiness we throw all kinds of things...relationships, money, material wealth, alcohol, career pursuits, various belief systems, self-help gurus, bulging portfolios, and more. We throw all kinds of things into the hole that's within us.
But the hole remains. Despite how much we throw into it, the hole remains. And have we ever considered how it is that we can throw so much stuff into a hole and yet never fill it up. In fact, despite all of the things that we throw into it, it remains just as empty as if we'd never thrown anything into it in the first place. But we don't learn that lesson all that well. And therefore, we just keep throwing in as much stuff as we can get our hands on.
We are empty. Horribly empty. And that emptiness is only magnified by our panicked efforts to fill that hole, only to fall exhausted on the ground of our lives realizing that the hole is entirely untouched. For whether we like to believe it or not, or whether it runs contrary to our cherished agendas, or whether it's vogue or not, only God can fill that hole. Only God.
In the midst of their behaviors, I often forget that behind the behaviors are people. When they rant about some cause or press some agenda down the throats of everyone around them, I forget that they are people. When the worst of them triggers the worst of me and I wish things upon them that I should not wish upon them, I would be wise to remember that they are people. When they respond with selfishness or ignorance and I sit pondering what's wrong with them, I need to remember that they are people...just like me.
It doesn't take long to become jaded. We can move rather quickly to a position of hatred, bitterness and resentment. And in doing so, we become contributors to the division and alienation that we say we hate. Moreso, we become the people that we say we dislike, and in doing so we become a little less (or maybe a whole lot less) like God. And so, maybe we need to think about things differently. Maybe we need to realize that all of these people are 'people.' That behind the behaviors, the choices, the rants and thoughtless behaviors, there are people who are just like us who are imperfect (just like us). And maybe in realizing that, we can begin to close the gap instead of contributing to it.
What is a hero? A real hero? Not one cast of some script or fashioned as part of a fictional plot. Not one that is created by political spins, or constructed by syrupy platitudes, or made larger-than-life by nighttime talk shows. Not the Hollywood type, or those who are deemed heroic because they play a sport or have acquired some degree of social visibility. None of these. The question is, "What is a real hero?"
As we approach 911, we might want to ask that question. We might consider that we have laid the mantel of 'hero' on many people who were nothing of the sort. We have reigned down accolades on those who have only risked in an arena made safe, but never risked in one that was not. We hold up individuals who read the script and play the part but never actually do the part. And given that we have done that far too many times, maybe at the remembrance of 911 this is a time to ask, "What is a hero?" Really. Craig's podcast takes a thoughtful, yet direct look at that question so that we might celebrate true heroes.
We are better than this. We are better than who or what we've become. We are better than the poor choices that we have made and the life of compromise that we are living. We are capable of phenomenal things that we can barely imagine, if we can imagine them at all. Yet, we stoop to lesser things. We bow to the bane of compromise and we walk in the shadow of mediocrity. We settle for the crumbs that we toss out to ourselves while not understanding that a meal of epic proportions is ours for the taking.
We live minimal, marginalized and menial lives not because we have to. We live those lives because we choose to. We live in the shadow of what we could be but often never become. And the consequence of this minimized existence diminishes both ourselves and everything around us. We are better than this. In fact, we are far, far better than this. It's not too late to understand who we are and to start living in the power of that person. We are better than this and now is the time to step up to engage that marvelous reality.
We don't like to be accountable. We hate being called on the carpet or called out. Often we prefer just to put our tail between our legs and sneak away to some place that no one will ever find us. Or we choose to justify our actions, place blame, or write it off to a bad day or a bad week or a bad life. We want to make excuses why it really wasn't all that bad, or that our intentions were good, or we were misinformed, or a hundred other excuses to keep us from having to be accountable. We don't like to be accountable.
Being accountable means that we have to own our stuff. We have to admit our mistakes, own up to our greed, face the music when we penned the lyrics, and simply say that we were wrong. That's tough. But it's needed. We need to be accountable. We need to own our mistakes. We need to 'belly up to the bar' and admit that we made a poor choice. And then we need to correct those errors despite the cost to us in doing so. Look at our world today. It's abundantly clear that we need to grow up and be accountable. And that starts with each of us.
We all have a limp that relentlessly dogs our steps, causing us at times to be dog-tired as we work against our limp in order to keep our lives sufficiently erect. For some of us, our limp is so slight and relatively minor that it’s really quite difficult to detect. For others of us it’s blatantly obvious, causing us to lurch through life with unsteady and uncertain steps. To whatever degree we limp, we all walk with a limp.
There are those of us whose limp is clearly physical, rendering its effect on our cadence as painfully obvious. Then there are those of us whose limp is emotional, or relational, or spiritual. It might find its origins in a relationship gone bad, or a life gone nowhere, or hope gone away. The possibilities are as endless as the ways in which each of us limp. But we all walk with a limp.
Shep– Running with a Limp
His name was Bob Shepherd. My Dad called him “Shep” for short. The name stuck with him throughout the length of their friendship, ultimately going to the grave with both of them. Dad and Shep mutually shared an array of marvelous life experiences that made them the best of friends.
Shep’s limp was polio. His left leg hung a full three inches shorter than his right leg, profoundly throwing his body from left to right with a heavy pendulum-like cadence that should have toppled him with each step. But Shep mastered his limp in a manner that his cadence was a match for anyone who would walk the road of the life with him. Indeed, Shep walked with a limp. But as Shep found out, a limp need not be limiting.
The Assumption
Our limps carry an assumption. And typically the assumption is that the limp will be limiting despite the limit of our efforts to make it otherwise. Our goal is to limit how limiting we think our limp might be. It’s all about minimizing the limp which casts the limp always and forever as a disability and a liability, thereby completely robbing it of possibility.
Getting Close to Normal
Or we set about the task of defining“normal,” and we determine that whatever “normal” is, we’re not normal. Then we determine exactly how far our limp has put us from “normal.” It becomes a grand crusade to get as close to “normal” as we can, rather than understanding that we can create an entirely “new normal” that can be far more impressive than the bland “normal” that we’re chasing.
Surrender
For some of us we surrender to our limp,feeling that the nature of our limp is forever beyond our ability to offset in any manner despite our most aggressive efforts to do so. We grieve whatever loss our limp has thrust into our lives, and we chart a defeated future that’s now mapped out by whatever our limp happens to be.
The Possibilities of the Limp
Is it possible that our limp is the very thing that allows us to run? And without a limp, could we in reality run? Have we been so entangled in assumptions, and so enslaved to some definition of normal,and have we embraced a defeated posture of surrender for so long that we’ve missed the potential inherent in the limp? Is a limp the very thing that distinguishes us from others in a way that gives us a powerful platform from which to influence others? Does a limp give us distinctive experiences that others will never have the privilege of experiencing? Could it be that such a glimpse dramatically expands our view of life, while our limp profoundly extends our experience of life? If so, then our limp could very well be the greatest gift and the most profound opportunity that will beset this life of ours. Like Shep, we can run with a limp.
Limp and Legacy
Our limp could potentially be one of the greatest assets that we will ever possess. And so as we consider our limps, it is my hope that we see the tremendous possibilities in them and the privilege of having them. Like Shep, may we master our limp in a manner that our cadence is a match for anyone who would walk the road of the life with us. May we run with a limp in a way that we could never do so without one.
Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across that chasm into the present. The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear.
Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is. That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all. And if we don’t see slavery, we assume freedom. That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.
Slavery to Ignorance
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Ignorance is being oblivious,to one degree or another, to the obvious. It’s not seeing what actually ‘is’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all. It’shaving no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be. It seems that kind of living can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others. The worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant. At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and into our worlds.
Ignorance can open the doors to a lot of things and give a whole lot of space for a whole lot of things to exist in our lives. Yet I think that ignorance of slavery or our enslavement is one of the worst things of all. To be ignorant and to be enslaved at the same time seems to be the absolute worst kind of slavery since we don’t even know that we’re enslaved.
What Enslaves Us?
How many things enslave us? We tend to see that things demands things of us, that we struggle with certain behaviors or attitudes, that we have our holes to dig ourselves out of, and our mountains to climb over. We look at our lives and see what we need to change, what should be altered, where we need the proverbial “nip n’ tuck,” a bit of “cut and paste,” or maybe a little bit of Botox for the personality. We likewise see the pieces of ourselves that need to be entirely eliminated in some sort of wholesale,demolition-like fashion.
We see our foibles, the fallacies of false fronts, our warts and things that warrant our attention. We know that we’re not where we should be and that where we should be isn’t anywhere along the road of where we’ve been going. We know at times that our values have been compromised, our integrity has been marred, and that far too often our morality has had the air completely sucked out of it. We know that we haven’t been accountable when we should have been, we haven’t apologized when we should have, and that we’ve never restored even half of what we’ve stolen along the road of our lives. We know.
Ignorance in Action
Yet, we tuck these things in the file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness. In reality, we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots entwining our souls. Yet we ignore them. We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface.
Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough. That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change. We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they? We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing. We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them. We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives, somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think. Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.
Our Enslavement
We are a peculiar people indeed. We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be. We’re notorious for feeding,watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance. And we live as slaves to that stuff. We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much. Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored in ignorance are wholly insufficient. We live trying to change things by ignoring them. We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic dealing with. We try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness.
The end result is slavery to those things we’re chosen to ignore. They drive us to futility attempting to compensate for them by ignoring them. They pound and thunder and bend us from behind the veil of ignorance. They dog our steps and flog our minds. They draw us down and drag us out. They impale us as they impact us. In short, we become subject to them whether we wish to acknowledge its happening or not. We become so enslaved by our own foolish and short-sighted vision that we become ignorant to that which enslaves us. When that happens, we become slaves in the most awful manner possible.
Refute and Refuse Ignorance
We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures. We acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them. In that way our enslavement can truly end.
Trust. How do you define it? Typically our definition of it is terribly basic and somewhat shallow. We seem to define it as that ability to rest fully and completely in something or someone. That's about as far as we take it. Yet, the incredible power of trust suggests that it is more . . . much more. Remove trust from a relationship and that relationship simply cannot survive. Extract trust from whatever situation we're in and we will doubt that person or that thing or that event to the point that we withdraw. Erase trust and we simply don't want to go there, wherever "there" is. Take away trust and all you have left is the need to rebuild trust.
You might want to think about this as well. Real trust, trust that does the distance is built over long periods of time with consistency, honesty,commitment and the relentless exhibition of integrity and self-sacrifice. Yet, trust can be destroyed in a matter of seconds. It can come crashing down based on one single action, one errant choice, one impulsive moment, one poor decision, one untimely comment. Trust is both terribly powerful in prompting us to invest in something even at great risk to ourselves. Yet, for all its power it is terribly fragile, undermined and completely fallen with but one word, one choice, one ill-conceived idea, one mistake.
And so, what are the ingredients of trust; the pieces and parts? More importantly, what qualities do we embrace and what characteristics do we live by that builds trust deep into all of our relationships? When we look at trust, we might first ask"what is our role?" The Encarta Dictionary defines trust as possessing a number of key components. Trust is multi-faceted and complex, a labyrinth of pieces that are undergirded by a dualistic theme of integrity and self-sacrifice. And so, do we simply hope for trust, or are we the ones who through our deliberate actions and unwavering choices work to build it? These then are things that we need to build into our lives to build trust in all of our relationships.
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Reliance. "Confidence in and reliance on good qualities, especially fairness, truth, honor, or ability." In a word, integrity. A person of integrity does the right thing regardless of the cost to themselves. It's an attitude, a life commitment, a unwavering stance that will not bow to unethical pressures, the power of the peer group, the demands of society, or the dictates of the moment. A person of integrity will stand his ground and will choose that which is right and good regardless of the popularity or price of doing so. Such a person naturally cultivates and engenders a foundation of deep trust.
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Position of Obligation. "The position of somebody who is expected by others to behave responsibly or honorably." There are standards that are good and right. Some call them absolute truths, those standards that dictate all other standards and all other situations. Sometimes embracing and abiding by these brings honor and respect. At other times, abiding by these will incur great cost and potentially damaging rejection. Regardless of the cost, trust is built by standing responsibly and honorably. There is something of consistency is such stands; allowing others to see that regardless of the demands faced and the temptations that might come, the individual will stand firm on principals of justice, truth and integrity. Such actions create a trust that weathers shifting circumstances.
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Hope for the Future. "Hopeful reliance on what will happen in the future." Trust is about the confidence in people's actions and their commitment to a set standard that creates a confidence regarding future outcomes. We are able to derive from the commitment and actions of others a sense that the future will work out, that will it will have some degree of predictability, and that if it doesn't work out, there will be the means to manage whatever happens. Trust creates stability that even in the midst of instability things will work out. It's about the stuff of consistency; that we are and we will do what we say we are. Trust then is established not just for present, but for the future as well.
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Care. "Responsibility for taking good care of somebody or something." Trust involves being willing to place that which we value into the hands of others. The things that we value the most, the very things that we have sacrificed for, that we have given our lives over to obtain or protect . . . trust involves placing the things most valued into the care of others. There is a relinquishment in trust; the ability to hand over to someone else all that we cherish and love, knowing that they will be as safe in the hands of another as they would be in our hands. Such a trust means that we can trust even when we cannot be present to insure that things will be well.
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Responsibility That Somebody Has. "Something entrusted to somebody to be responsible for. Accept responsibility as a sacred trust." Here is the place of sacrifice, where someone holds others interests above their own. Trust means placing the other person first. When someone embraces that kind of attitude and posture, trust is built because the elevation of another insures that any action will be in the best interest of the other despite the cost to the one to whom trust has been extended. This elevates trust to its ultimate level, allowing us to rest in the fact that our best interest will be uncompromisingly held as primary regardless of the situation.
It's About Who We Choose to Be
In the end, trust is built on integrity and self-sacrifice. The exhibition of these attitudes and behaviors automatically engenders trust. Trust is about embracing that which is true and right, that which is honest and just and pure. It's then about relentlessly living those things out in everything that we do, even if living them out incurs a great cost to us. It's a posture of honesty and authentic living that exudes through everything that we do. When these are displayed, trust will follow. We might then ask the question, "are we these kinds of people?" "What have we built our lives on?" "What might others say of us if we asked them?" Trust is about what you stand on and who that makes you. Maybe the building of trust in your life and your relationships is much more about who you are and the things that you have incorporated in your life that make you that person. Maybe the building of trust begins with you. Maybe . . .
You ever notice that we seem to be on this relentless quest where we’re scrutinizing ourselves raw in order to ascertain what we think our flaws, our foibles, our weaknesses and our warts are? We put ourselves under some sort of minutely dissecting microscope with skewed lenses in order to ferret out all of our little imperfections. We incessantly crawl around on all fours with our eyes mere centimeters from the surface of our lives, scratching and picking and sorting so that everything that we are is entirely clean, socially acceptable, without cultural blemish and perfectly instep with whatever it is that we’ve chosen to determine our steps. With our noses to the ground on an outrageously mad hunt for any and all imperfections we whittle away our lives being what we think we’re supposed to be, rather than being who we were created and designed to be. Ever notice?
What Sets the Standard For Our Search?
There’s certainly a standard in our culture. There are expectations that clearly outline who and what we’re supposed to be. Those expectations are based on culturally acceptable norms that create “cookie-cutter” stereotypes. Stereotypes perpetuate the cultural norms by encasing them in some kind of frozen blocks so that they automatically perpetuate themselves in any and all places. An unknown author wrote, “Stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person the trouble of learning.” The worse bias that we can have is a bias about ourselves as it saves us the trouble of learning that we’re a whole lot more than we thought ourselves to be. A bias also saves an incessantly busy culture the time of really looking deeply into itself in order to ascertain the wealth within it. And so we press and contort ourselves in order to fit into whatever box the cultural stereotype has designed.
Society too often creates a “one size fits all” kind of mentality. There’s an assumption that there are slots to fill and we must fill the slots. Find your place, get in it and stay there. Figure out whatever the cadence is and march accordingly. Find your box, move in,decorate it, set up shop and be happy. What color is your parachute, what’s your social standing, what’s your breeding and background, what’s your disposition, what’s your passion, what’s your career, and how’s your personality wired? Once you’ve figured all that out, set it aside, take a number, get inline and realize you’re just one of the crowd.
In many cases, the standards of society are good, meaningful and productive. There are a large number of societal standards that are worthy of our emulation. However, society too often sets standards for society, not the individual. Society often wants it clean, uncomplicated, tight and easy, so just find your place in line and get it in. Because that’s often the mindset, cultural expectations are designed to fulfill and achieve that mindset. In succumbing to it, we lose our individuality and sacrifice the resources of that individuality.
Discovering Our Uniqueness
The balance that few people seem to achieve is one where we purposefully cultivate the core of who we are, while working to slough off the biasing goo of the culture. It’s not about a blatant disregard for cultural norms or expectations at all. Rather,it’s being committed to our uniqueness as a person rather than being rigorously force-fit into whatever the culture wants to force-fit us into. It’s realizing that when we maximize who we are, we are then of maximum benefit to society and the world around us. Yet, before we can be authentically “us” we must determine who or what that “us” is. In more effectively making that determination, there are a few thoughts you might want to start with:
Understanding Our Limitations
First, healthy self-evaluation takes place when we’re frankly honest about our limitations. Sometimes our limits should be exactly that .. . our limits. Wisdom often involves knowing when to stop, when far enough is far enough, and when it’s legitimately time to invest our energies elsewhere. Limitations exist for reasons. It’s not about giving up or surrendering or being weak-willed or passively apathetic. It has nothing to do with being sheepish, shy, insecure or outright scared. Rather, limitations let us know when something is completed, that further work on our part is unnecessary, that anything beyond this point is squandered energy, and that we need to direct our resources toward the next place in our lives.
Developing Realistic Expectations
Second, effective self-evaluation takes place when we’re realistic about our expectations. Our expectations can be too high, too low,entirely misdirected, or so vague that we couldn’t even tell someone what they were. Expectations define what we expect of ourselves and they typically say volumes about how we feel about ourselves. Lack of expectations either suggests a sloth-like laziness, a blatant ignorance about life, a disregard for the gift of life and the shot we have at it, or a glaring lack of self-confidence. Realistic expectations cannot be the stuff of wildly irresponsible ideas or the product of fear-based barriers. They should reflect the genuine capabilities of our uniqueness which will create the most balanced environment within which our uniqueness can flourish.
Self-Evaluation that’s Outside of Our Vision
Third, healthy self-evaluation occurs when we view ourselves through the template of a belief system that calls us out, up and beyond our own humanity to believe in our ability to embrace something infinitely higher and terribly more profound than the lax designs of a mediocre culture. It’s believing that the vision of who we can be is dramatically limited by our vision of who we can be. It’s believing that something greater than us has something a whole lot greater in mind for us. If we’re not careful, we forfeit vision for confining rubrics because they seem more reasonable and a whole lot more doable. We then embrace a pathetic and unnecessary compromise that spreads the infesting germ of mediocrity throughout our lives. We can kill the germ of mediocrity by looking back at ourselves through eyes of something a whole lot bigger than us that sees us as big as we really are.
We Are More
Few of us do any kind of self-evaluation with anything remotely resembling the kind of depth that unleashes us. We are diminished by our own assessment of ourselves; an assessment that wholly abandons our uniqueness. We rarely embrace a framework that even comes close to allowing us to see the immensity of who we are; that based on that understanding beckons us to be humbled in the stunning recognition of who we are, and that challenges us to draw upon the resources around us to build upon the immense resources within us. We are more than we presume ourselves to be;much, much more.
Most of the challenges that we face are far bigger than us. They have a power and a vastness to them that far exceeds whatever resources we have to bring to whatever battle we're fighting this time around. And while we might be able to make a dent in some of these things, and while we might be able to nudge them a bit in a better direction, we rarely have the kind of impact that we would want to have.
So why are the challenges in life typically bigger than what we have on hand to fight them? Why is it that the effects that we can have on them are marginal at best and non-existent at worst? Why have we been positioned with such minimal abilities in the face of such monstrous liabilities? Could it be that these realities are the evidence of God and the resource of prayer that we have been given to engage this God? Could it be that maybe prayer is the answer that we don't believe is the answer? Is it possible that this antiquated act of coming before God is not antiquated at all?
Discouragement. We all know it well because we've experienced it so many times. We watch the world wildly spin as a result of foolish decisions, self-aggrandizing leaders, misguided movements, and abandoned values. We watch jobs crash, marriages evaporate, children run rouge, friendships dissolve, and dreams die. We've watched it all happen, and we stand discouraged beyond words to explain.
Yet, how do we learn to live in a manner where we can find strength to engage our discouragement? How we can exist living being well aware that life will be full of discouragement, but that discouragement need not be the thing that causes us to surrender? How do we find sufficient hope to press forward, fight the battles, bring the change, and make this existence better in light of everything that's working so hard to make it worse? How do we do that? It's by deciding how we will view things. It's determine what our perspective is going to be. It's not about being foolhardy or foolish or naive. But it's about looking at our world in a way that we will become "dense to discouragement."
We have adopted a "progressive" mentality that has resulted in the discarding of anything that we feel will inhibit the agenda of the progressive mindset. There appears to be a wholesale realignment of our culture that has resulted in a frequently thoughtless and often reckless abandonment of whatever would appear to be obstructive to the frequently unclear objectives of this movement.
One of these appears to be a longstanding set of culturally accepted ethics, morals and values. These have been incessantly cast as antiquated and outdated, having served our culture well in another time where these were actually needed. It is assumed that the progressive nature of our supposedly progressive culture no longer needs these. In fact, they are believed to be inhibiting to a culture solidly on the move. Yet, to be truly progressive is to realize that to truly move forward we must do so with parameters not constructed by the agenda of the moment, but ethics morals and values that have been shaped by God to serve all moments. If we are to forge into the unknown, we must do so guided by a set of things that are known. Otherwise, we will find our culture where we never wished it to be and we will blame that outcome on what something it was never meant to be.
Pain is anything but random. It is the precursor to growth and it contains within itself the very ingredients for that growth. It's opportunity that we would much prefer to pass on, but it's opportunity nonetheless. Sometimes the pain is horrific, at other times it's simply irritating. Pain most certainly runs the gamut. But regardless of the intensity with which it befalls us, it is opportunity knocking and growth waiting to happen.
Despite all of that, we tend to see pain as nothing but pain. We attach misfortune to it. We often see it as the result of someone else's selfish or foolish choices. It is the worst of fate unleashed at the worst of times. It interrupts our momentum, steals our joy, ransacks our hope, and pillages our hearts. And because it does all of that and more, we see no value in it at all. But value is there. Opportunity for growth sits waiting in the smoke and ashes. Pain is painful, sometimes beyond words to describe. But it is also opportunity.
How do we change a nation? We might start by changing ourselves first. Change begins with us. We know that, but we also doubt that changing us changes much of anything else except us. How far does that kind of change go? Does it really have a broad sweep and a wide impact? Does it really count all that much? In the scope of history, much less the scope of this single day, will it matter? Will it really matter?
Don't underestimate the power of the one person that you are. Don't. Your life is staged to touch many lives. The example that you live out, the principles that you exude, the words that you use, and the battles that you choose to fight or not choose to fight...all of this has an impact. All of it. It is said that one life touches six others in profound ways. And those six others each touch six more. And on it goes. Do not think for a moment that the change you make and the life you live does not have impact. And don't think that that impact doesn't outlive you, for it does and it will. How do we change a nation? Let's start by changing ourselves first.
Too often we don’t appreciate what we didn’t work for or had to sacrifice for in one way or another. Hand something to us with no effort exerted on our part to acquire it, and we’ll probably exhibit some scantily shallow and rather quickly fleeting degree of appreciation for it. But make us work for something and expend actual energy in order to obtain it, and we’ll likely hold it with noticeably more importance. Force us to step it up and sacrifice for some cause to the point that we lose something desperately cherished in the pursuit and it becomes valuable above and beyond most other things. Press us to the edge and put us in a position where we actually risk dying for something and that this one cherished shot that we have at life hangs in a frighteningly precarious balance, that ‘something’ becomes indescribably priceless.
If we didn’t give something in order to obtain something, then we’re probably holding it rather loosely and with some inexcusable degree of disregard. If there’s not some work or sacrifice or risk in the exchange, then the greatest gifts imaginable can experience the greatest disregard conceivable. Taking great things for granted is little more than taking them to a grave from which we can never reclaim them. Liberty is one of those things.
Do we know what a work ethic is, much less abide by one? In a culture of entitlement and rights mongering we seem to have lost a work ethic, We've come to assume that we're 'owed' which simply means that work as a concept has become unimportant or possibly irrelevant. And if that's the case, a work ethic itself becomes irrelevant and therefore non-existent. A clear and responsible ethic can drive us to great things both for us and for those around us. It can powerfully assist us in achieving what we will never achieve in pursuing an attitude of entitlement. Lack of a work ethic leaves us without the motivation or drive to maximize our abilities and raise ourselves to heights we otherwise couldn't imagine. This brief video outlines both the need for a work ethic and the key ingredients of a potent and motivating ethic.
We tend to talk about positive thinking as opposed to negative thinking. We associate negative thinking with depression, darkness and an overall pessimistic view of life. Negative thinking can be our way to avoid failure, offset our defeats by setting them up to happen, and reduce our expectations to some point so incredibly low that anything that happens can't help but be a success. We can certainly find great value in such a dynamic, but in many respects such an orientation is far too limiting. While the idea of positive thinking is certainly powerful, it appears to miss a more fundamental and core principle that can be utterly life altering on every level of life. This podcast explores the idea of positive thinking or just plain truth.
We make decisions all day, everyday. Whether those decisions are the redundant routine things that fill up most of our days, or those decisions are the seminal moments that alter our lives for the rest of our lives. Some of the decisions that we make are conscious; choices that are the product of much time, rigorous thought, the balancing out of potential consequences, weighing the pro’s and con’s, performing analysis sometimes to the point of paralysis, and drawing on whatever our resources might be to make the best possible decision. Sometimes our decisions are well researched,talked about, prayed about, stewed over, mulled over, poured over and turned over in our heads until our heads hurt.
It seems that the real truth of the matter is that the things that drive our decisions are much less about the reality of whatever those decisions are and much more about our underlying value system. What drives our decisions is something much more core to who we are. The chemistry and alchemy of our decisions arises from core values that shape our perception and our thinking. To say that our choices are nothing more than a mix of all the stuff of whatever our present options represent cheapens the ability we have as humans to make powerful decisions in the most difficult of situations. We’re driven less by the realities of what we’re facing, and more by the core values, beliefs and deep within us. So therefore we might ask, "What does drive our decisions and do we want those things driving them?"
Too often we don't take the time to really ask why we support what we're supporting. We get swept up in some energizing movement, or we're utterly captivated by some cause. Something feels inherently good and the premise that drives it appears sound. We find that an army of people have raced to the forefront of this cause, or it's embraced as long overdue, or it appears right for the times.
But in all of that, do we ask the larger questions? Do we ask if there is some underlying issue that's bigger than the cause that prompted it? Is there more here than just the excitement of the moment or the rallying cry of the population? Do we proceed with a wisdom that will solve the larger issues, or will we just perpetuate all of those by running amuck in lesser things? Change is needed. But if it is not thoughtful change, nothing will change.
What do you say in the midst of crisis? What do you say when everything is turning sideways and the world around you in roiling in some sort of perpetual chaos? What do you say? What do you say when the pain is overwhelming, the solution is underwhelming, and the path out of whatever this place is doesn't exist? What do you say when the bottom drops out, the sky falls in, and we're left in a free-fall that's bottomless? What do you say?
There is much to be said in times such as these. Much. The problem is we don't think about it. We get worn-down by worn-out platitudes, or the empty promises of a lost culture, or the propaganda of the various soothsayers that run rampant throughout our culture. We mope around in the muck and mire of the anemic pablum of people who are more lost than we are. But there are things that we can say. Great things. Healing things. Timeless things. Hopeful things. What do you say at times like these? Listen and find out.
Aldous Huxley pointedly pointed out that “most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” If you think about it, “infinite” is a rather extensive capacity and we‘re quite adept at utilizing that capacity to its fullest extent. Taking things for granted means that they no longer garner our attention. Out of their value to us they’ve lost their value. Because of the fact they they’ve served us quite well and that they’ve served us quite consistently, we develop the sense that they’ll always be there, or that they’re just supposed to be there. We assume that things occupy a place in our lives just because they’re supposed to occupy a place. We make things something more like an entitlement or something we’d ascribe to the norm. And so, we take things for granted.
The incongruity of it all is simply that things that should demand our attention, or are at least deserving of it are ignored. Gifts, talents and personal abilities are exercised day in and day out but aren’t seen in the exercising anymore . . . at all. Because they’re not seen, they aren’t cherished as we are quick to forget that which we’ve rendered invisible. People or resources or abilities that should be held in high regard or seen as a privilege are categorized as the stuff of ‘stuff.’ Through inattention and the amassing of whole bunch of stuff which is largely nothing more than a whole bunch of stuff, we take things for granted. That fundamentally means that it’s fallen off our radar under the pretense that it just is.
As we meander along and do that, things gradually fall unnoticed behind an invisible veil where all of these things are smack-dap in front of us but are completely invisible to us. As they fall behind the veil of taking things for granted, their presence in our lives remains entirely unchanged, yet because of their invisibility their worth or value, which is sometimes terribly immense, is lost. We walk around with precious things, and precious people, and precious resources, and precious talents that are entirely invisible and therefore ignored.
We don’t often think of actions that show us as rich; that seize the strength and wonder of our inherent humanity and cause us to do great things. We miss the fact that sometimes just getting through a typical day requires feats of strength, tenacity, courage and outright determination. Most often life’s about survival and getting ahead, if we can even pull these off. But we tend not to think that the commonplace and mundane are quite often feats of great wonder, drawing from deep within us abilities that we’ve taken for granted.
Is it possible that the mundane is really the marvelous in quiet disguise? Have you ever considered the possibility that great feats may really be nothing more than an intentional and focused use of the resources that existed within the person . . . resources that we likely have an ample and similar supply of ourselves? Have we allowed the marvelous within us to be taken for granted so that its dollar value has been degraded to pennies when in reality it’s all priceless beyond any collection of pennies regardless of how massive? And are we in a place where we need to consider all of this because we’ve underpriced and marginalized our worth through the persistent effort of taking things for granted?
Taking Things for Granted By Mental Laziness
So we’re robbed and we’re the culprits that did it. We’ve used the highly effective tool of taking things for granted. Part of our taking things for granted involves our dogged mental and emotional laziness. Things of true worth in life don’t clamor for our attention. They don’t attempt to seize the stage of our lives in some brazen display, touting their worth as they strut back and forth across that stage. Rather, the things of true worth are to be sought out, looked for, and discovered in a passionate search for the stuff of life that genuinely holds the stuff of life. It’s a rejection of all the plastic and veneers; all the things that attempt to replicate the real stuff. It takes effort to find the things of real value; great and unrelenting effort that we often don’t want to exert. Plastic and veneers are much, much easier so we’ve got loads of them. We take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’
Taking Things for Granted By Entitlement
And then there’s the whole “I’m owed” mentality. Things are just because they’re supposed to be. This whole deal we call life is obviously supposed to come with all the finery and accessories. It’s just part of the package. It’s just supposed to be. So why value something when it’s not a gift, or a treat, or a surprise, or a bonus, or just a nice addition that somebody thought would tickle our fancy? In whatever way, shape or form that extra stuff comes in, it’s a bit of icing on the cake of entitlement, but it’s not the cake. The cake is just supposed to be and so it is. Entitlement is magically toxic, tragically transforming blessings to bare-bones stuff and priceless gifts to allocated accessories that are ours solely by virtue of our birth. We take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’
Taking Things for Granted By Permission
It’s quite amazing how many things we can give ourselves permission to do. Sometimes what we give ourselves permission to do is to tolerate what we shouldn’t, which is likely the worst kind of permission we grant ourselves. Tolerating something implies that we probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place but we’ve chosen to do it anyway. There’s a dash of ignorance and a pound or two of stupidity in a lot of the permission that we grant ourselves. There’s a turning away, a bit of ethical ‘sleight of hand’ and some mental ‘nip and tuck’ that numbs us enough so that we can pass on our integrity without really feeling that we’ve passed. So we give ourselves permission to take a whole lot of things for granted. We repeat this to the point that we take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’
Taking Things for Granted Because It’s the Norm
Sometimes we look around us and we try to find people doing the things that we’ve questioned doing. Somehow, if someone else is doing the stuff we find questionable, their actions lend whatever they’re doing just enough legitimacy to do it. If someone else is doing it, we sometimes feel that we can step over the line just enough to dabble in the behavior and then jump back to the other side of that line. So, in a world that sloughs things off, we do the same. We take for granted what those around us take for granted. They reinforce our actions and we reinforce theirs. In time we don’t even realize what we’re doing and we take for granted ‘taking things entirely for granted.’
Breaking the Habit
Magnificent living involves not taking the magnificent for granted. It’s a refusal to marginalize the wonder of life by placing it behind some veil, invisible and lost.
We get attacked. That’s a reality of life. Somewhere, at some time, someone is going to come after us. We’ve going to get cut, clobbered or end up with an assorted collection of contusions. Sometimes the intentions of those that hurt us are misdirected, and at other times they’re completely intentional. Sometimes the actions of others are the stuff of mindless impulse and therefore kind of shot-gun in their intention. At other times the actions of others are completely malicious, being viciously planned and savagely implemented. There are times when the actions of others are based on an errant understanding of events or circumstances, being tragic mistakes and gross misfires. At others times the intent is simply to hurt so the nature of the precipitating event is altogether irrelevant, other than being a product of cruelty and by-product of selfishness. When these things happen, we naturally respond. Yet, what does our response say?
Obviously we respond. We respond to a whole bunch of things in a whole bunch of ways. Oddly, our response is often not analyzed because we assume it to be normal or appropriate given whatever it is that we’re responding to. If we do in fact analyze our response, it’s often because we thought that our response was too pensive and tentative, or we thought it was a too bit robust and overwhelming. In other situations, we might think that our response was completely misdirected or somehow inappropriate given the situation. Then there are the situations where we feel that we shouldn’t have responded at all when we did in fact respond, or we chose not to respond when we should have.
However we respond, we respond. Whether that’s a response that’s thought ou tor thoughtless, we respond. Our focus then tends to be solely on our response, whether it’s a good response, a bad response, or a rather irrelevant response. It seems that we tend to analyze our response instead of analyzing what our response says about us. There’s this crafting, managing and executing of our response, but really nothing about what the response tells us about us. We might be wise to quit looking solely at the response, turn things over on their backside, and ask what our response says about us. What does the nature and type and kind o response say about who we are? What does the intensity and direction and flavor of our response suggest about who or what we are at our core?
A Bit of Analysis
Fulke Greville wrote that “No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.” That should create a whole lot of caution within each of us. Of all the people that we interact with, it is ourselves that we should be analyzing the most. We really can’t afford to live our lives walking in the darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in. We can ill-afford to do things like some brainless simpleton, assuming that doing them is just doing them. Truth be known, we’re much, much more complex than that.
There’s a tendency in human behavior to respond without asking why we’re responding the way that we are. Maybe it’s something primitive, something that has to do with the whole concept of fight verses flight. When it comes to survival, we don’t necessarily have the luxury of stepping back and pondering what we’re doing. Or maybe it’s more about convenience; that stopping and thinking and contemplating takes time and energy, and maybe in the rush of it all, it’s just messy and inconvenient. Or maybe we don’t really want to understand why we’re doing what we’ve doing. Maybe that will uncover some less than complimentary things about us that we’d prefer not to know. Yet, we need to know.
What Our Responses Reveal
Insecurities
Often our responses reflect our deep-seated, gnawing insecurities. In some instances those insecurities result in a response that’s wildly disproportionate and entirely over the top. In responding like that, we insure that whatever or whoever’s attacked us is sufficiently repelled or annihilated altogether. At other times we don’t respond at all, fearing that if we do we’re likely to incur further attacks or more abuse. So we run and we hide.
Immaturity
Sometimes are responses are entirely misdirected, mis-allocated and misapplied; in other words it’s all reflexive and nothing of reflection. We may not have the maturity to fully understand exactly what happened to us and why it happened to us. We may not have developed the depth of intellect, insight and the balance of maturity to render a response that’s appropriate to the offense. So, if our response is rather wild, we might be immature.
Impatience
We do tend to be an impatient lot. Impatience simply means that we want some sort of result in the ‘right now.’ Impatience means that we forfeit thinking in favor of doing. We forfeit gathering data in favor of doing the deed. We strike out instead of strategize. Our impatience drives us to an immediate, reflexive action that will likely serve to enflame a situation that we’re attempting to douse. If our response is knee-jerk, we’re likely impatient.
Selfishness
Many times our response is deliberately directed to meet our need or serve our agenda. In the fuming mindset of retaliation we take little if any time to consider the collateral damage of our choices. Nothing happens in isolation. If we ignorantly act as if that were the reality, we’re simply slogging around in the egocentric backwaters of selfishness. If our actions are all about self-preservation and they spurn the common good, we’re likely selfish.
Moral Shallowness
Most of the time, our responses will challenge our ethics and our morals. When we respond to an attack, the most devastating, brutal and agonizing responses are likely unethical. If we really want to ravage someone and leave the landscape of their lives scorched and barren, that action will probably be immoral, or so close to immoral that we’d be stupid to engage it. If we really want to wail on somebody and drive them so far into the ground that they’ll never crawl out, we’ll probably have to stuff our ethics, turn a blind eye and live with the guilt of it all for the rest of our lives.
What Our Responses Say About Us
Don’t just respond, even though that’s the easy thing to do. Ask what your response says about you. Let your responses cause you to respond to you. Ask the hard questions. Do the tough analysis. Face yourself. You will be a better person who leaves behind a better world even when that world attacks you.
The question is not, "Am I passionate?" The better question might be, "Am I passionate for the right things?" There's a lot of passionate people in our world today, but often the passions are misguided and self-destructive. People take up questionable causes and advocate for selfish positions in the name of 'passion.' Voices are raised, positions are advocated for, and pulpits of all shapes and colors are pounded. But 'passion' may not be productive. And so, as we advocate for our 'passions,' we might ask how healthy and legitimate our 'passion' really is. For many 'passions' result in our destruction, and we would be wise to make certain this is not the case with any of ours.
Holding onto something? Of course you are. We all do. There are things that we feel are of great value, for whatever reason they’re of value. Our tendency is that once we determine that something’s of value, or we’re told something’s of value, we tend to grab ahold of it. The degree to which we grab it and the force of our grip on it is determined by how much we value whatever it is that we’re holding onto. Because that’s the case, our grip can be something like a horrific steel trap, or it can be rather loose and supple.
What’s odd is that we don’t often think about how hard we’re holding onto whatever things we’re holding onto. We presume that it’s a natural and normal thing to hold onto the things in our lives that we value or see as central to our lives. We misleadingly assume that once we’re in possession of whatever it is that we’re in possession of, we’re obviously supposed to always remain in possession of it. We develop a kind of hoarding management mentality that naturally dictates that we hold onto things that serve us in some fashion,or contribute to our lives in whatever way they contribute. The bizarre workings of our minds can cause us to hold onto things that don’t serve us at all and are simply dead and pathetically decaying weight. The fact that we possess things causes us to assume that we’re supposed to keep them. What else would we do with them? We assume that holding onto things is natural and needed and necessary and obviously normal. Is it?
What Determines What We Grab
So we inventory what we have in our lives; people, assets, careers, friendships, dreams, goals, relationships, material possessions, various resources . . . all of the sordid stuff that we have in our possession. Then we assign each of those things some sort of value based on a grid intricately and tediously constructed from our goals, our value system, our present position in life, whatever threats or risks we perceive that we have, our sense of security or lack thereof, our self-esteem or any myriad number of determining factors. Then our grip on these things is determined by the value we assess them as having.
We also inventory what we don’t have in our lives but want to have. We look outside the realm of our possessions to those things that we want to bring within our realm. Whether those things are fiscal assets, material possessions, various relationships at various levels of relationship, career goals molded by our aspirations, the square footage of our home, the reach of our influence, our place in some social food chain, or the smoothness of the image we want to project to those around us. Whatever we want, in whatever way we’ve determined we want it will likewise determine the degree of our grip on that thing. Likewise, whatever we’ve determined we want will also determine the degree of our grip on the things that it will take to get it. We’re all about the business of grabbing something to secure our possession of it, or maneuver ourselves in order to get it.
What About Grip?
It’s interesting that the harder we hold onto something, the more likely we are to kill it. We assume that strengthening our grip insures the continued possession of whatever we’re holding onto. Indeed, our possession is in all probability insured. However, what we don’t realize is that we’ll possess it, but it’ll likely be empty and dead. Things that are of real value in life can’t be held like that. The oddity of it all is that the very things that we want to possess; the things that we vigorously expend our lives in some helter-skelter rampage to possess, those very things are killed in the possession. All of that seems terribly contradictory, but it’s terribly true. How many times have we held firmly onto something only to lose it anyway despite the iron grip we had on it? In how many instances have we gone to great lengths and dizzying heights to insure the continued possession of something,only to have it slip right through our fingers? How many times have we rigorously secured something by nailing it down,fencing it in, sealing it tight, cinching it firmly, locking it down hard,insuring it, putting it in a trust, or somehow solidly encasing in some tedious manner or fashion only to lose it despite the aggressiveness of our efforts?
What Do We Possess?
Yet, there are times when we feel we haven’t lost something despite our grip on it; that we’re still in possession of it and we have it stored away in whatever vault we store things away in. We point to those things as evidence that holding onto things doesn’t necessarily result in the loss of them. We’re confident that we can grab ahold of things with an iron grip and despite the iron grip keep them very much alive. Yet, can we possess something and kill it in the possession. Do the great and wonderful things die if they’re held? Is there something about the precious and sacred that in order to live they must be free? Once it’s dead, what is it that we possess? How many dreams have we achieved but have seen so many other things die in the effort to achieve them? And once the dream is hauled into the boat of our lives as some mammoth catch, does it flounder at the bottom of our boats and then expire in the rancid air of captivity?
We can hold on to many things and point to them to show that we’re still in possession of them, but really not be in possession of them at all. Things that we grip firmly lose their life and are irrevocably sapped of their vitality. They become depleted and hold no interest for us anymore, entirely losing their luster and appeal. The things that are left after we hold onto them are more often than not empty carcasses and hollow shells that have the illusion of life, but none of the essence.
Possession Is Found in Not Possessing
If we want to embrace life, we must never set traps for it or cage it. We must understand that it is in the wildness of living that we live. It’s in the privilege of observing life in all its unbridled passion and surging forcefulness that we are enriched and gorged in the enriching. Possessing life can only happen in not possessing it. Possessing life is observing it and then romping and frolicking right along with it. In reality, it’s letting life possess you. It’s giving life permission to have its way with you, not demanding your way with it through the possession of it. Possession of this thing we call life is giving up the possession of ourselves and our rights to possession and handing that over something infinitely bigger than us. Surrendering ourselves and letting ourselves be in the possession of life is the secret to possessing life.
So, what are you holding onto? Whatever it is, it’s going to die. Maybe you need to free yourself to be in the possession of something greater in you and realize that everything that you’ve looked to have in the mad race of possession is all right there.
Life has those lingering proverbial statements that seem timeless; those quips and quotes that have that some kind of message that’s just so compelling that you simply can’t ignore them. Whatever they say, and there’s a bunch of them that say a whole lot of things, they say something that’s so core to us,or who we’d like to be that secretly we’d love to be able to live them out. It seems that because they have something genuinely real to them they persist indefinitely because they’re indefinitely fresh and relentlessly applicable.
However, it seems that these timeless, proverbial treasures are so good that they’re too good to be true, or least too good to be achievable. We’d really love to be able to actually do what they say and live like they suggest, but they’re pretty demanding and rigorous. In fact, they’re sometimes so demanding and so rigorous that they seem a bit impossible. Yet, they remain compelling nonetheless, like some precious gem just beyond our reach.
Love Your Enemies
The command to love our enemies is clearly one of those things. It certainly sounds nice. It would probably relieve a whole lot of our stress. It would likely make the world that “kinder, gentler” kind of place. It would probably diffuse a whole lot of stuff and smooth over things before any real damage is done. Yeah, but how realistic is that command that really? Face it; we live in the 21st century. Look around. It’s not a “kinder, gentler” kind of world. Rather, it’s a place where we need to be on our guard and protect ourselves or we’re eventually going to ‘ground round’ in some situation with someone sooner or later.
Taking that thinking a bit further, how do we love the people who are beating us up in any number of ways that we get beat up? In fact, is loving them even remotely reasonable as that seems to imply that we’re somehow giving their actions a degree of permission or legitimacy. Aren’t we telling the offender that their offenses are okay? It also seems to suggest that we’re up for further offenses and that we’ve become something of the proverbial ‘doormat’ in our relationship with whomever wants to walk on us.
Oscar Wilde said “always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.” That sounds kind of appealing in a sneaky kind of way because that’s really about a covet kind of revenge. In actuality, that’s more a sinister way of getting back at our offenders without them really knowing that we’re getting back at them. That’s not about love.
I think we move closer to something of substance in the words of an unknown author who wrote, “The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me.” That should give us pause . . . probably a whole lot of pause. There’s another proverbial statement that says that what we hate in others is really what we hate in ourselves. The hatred for our enemies may well be the characteristics in them that we see in ourselves. It would seem that that should start to reorient our thinking a bit.
The Cost to Our Enemies
What we don’t consider is the cost our enemies pay in being exactly that . . . our enemies. Being our enemy demands that people do things or carry out certain actions that make them our enemies in the first place. Our enemies are not enemies without some sort of decision or action that makes them our enemies. Something was done, or some event transpired, or some situation was initiated that clearly put them in a starkly adversarial position relative to us. In other words, they had to do something to become our enemies.
And that action, whatever it was, had to be severe enough to rupture, smash or entirely decimate our relationship with them. Their actions had to be sufficiently toxic to set them completely at odds with us. Something pretty significant had to transpire to polarize our relationship with them and put us at the opposite end of spectrum in some sort of adversarial stand-off. Something pretty bad had to have been done by our enemy.
What we think about is the cost of that action to us. In fact, we tend to be all over that. We can easily and quite extensively tell people how bad it was, how much it hurt, how unfair it was, and how uncalled for the actions were. We can recite all of that with great ease.
What we don’t think about is the cost to our enemy in doing what they did to us. Of course we don’t. We probably don’t have a whole lot of interest in going over that because we’d prefer to lick our wounds in light of the abuses that were perpetrated upon us. The abuses levied against us get all of our attention and the majority of our emotional airtime. It’s not that we shouldn’t deal with those things, but they become our entire focus.
Yet, perpetrating these things upon us comes with a cost to the person doing those things to us. In fact, it’s likely that the cost to our enemies for whatever it is they’ve done to us is greater than the cost of those actions upon us. We don’t see the cost to our enemies because we’re the ones in pain. We assume that the level of pain we’re experiencing reflects the cost, and it’s likely that our enemy is not in pain. In fact, they might be downright happy and somewhat elated about what they’ve done to us.
However, there are consequences for how we live our lives; deep, profound and devastating consequences. Many times those consequences aren’t reflected in the pain someone is experiencing and they’re not necessarily reflected in whatever the outcome of the moment is. Most consequences are much deeper, something like a slow acidic burn that gradually eats away at the edges of our souls; killing us in small degrees so that we die a slow, unrecognized death. There’s a conscience ignored that will eventually have its day. There’s the reality that nothing that’s ever done in isolation and that when we sow pain, or betrayal, or abandonment, or any other destructive thing it will affect everything else around us. Then there’s the reality of time and circumstance that simply means that what we visit upon others will eventually be visited upon us. And finally, there’s the numbing action that occurs when we act in hateful and deceitful ways; a numbing that robs the robber of the essence of their humanity, therefore robbing them of the whole of life.
There are terrible consequences that are tantamount to the destruction of the offender’s life. In harming us they are in turn harming themselves in ways that they cannot imagine; ways that they would likely repent of if they could only see it. And so, we need to attend to our own pain, but in understanding the loss to our enemy we can find a place to love them.
What would the world be like if there were no love? It's probably not all that unreasonable to say that without love, the world may not exist...at all. Without love, mankind would likely destroy itself in all the sordid ways that love keeps us from destroying it. Love is essential. Absolutely. Love embodies not only love, but a host of other principles and values that hold-the-line against our lesser urges and less than admirable traits.
A world without live wouldn't be a great place at all. And so maybe we should ask how we create more of it. How do we enhance the love in our world? How do we strengthen the love that exists, and yet expand the scope and impact of it far beyond what it is? And while such notions often sound idealistic and the stuff of romanticized dreamers, what would actually happen if love were expanded? What would happen if it took a greater place in our lives, our families and our communities? What if?
It seems one of the oddest dichotomies. Life is full of strange and downright weird contradictions. At many times in our lives, at many points both important and not so important we find ourselves pulled in two completely opposite, but equally compelling directions. At times it seems that two entirely different people reside within us, each mesmerized and held captive by things completely contrary and contradictory; each aggressively vying for the thing that pulls them in opposite directions. Of all of these kinds of moments, there is one that seems more vexing than the rest . . . and love drives it.
We all want to love and be loved. There's a whole lot that we can do without. As much as we'd love to do without love at times, we're simply incapable of doing so. There's something woven through the very core of our tapestries that desires to both expel love out and draw it in. We'd love to do it without fear or reservation. We'd love to be wrapped init, immersed in it and enriched by it. We'd love to have it abound to the point that we drown ourselves in it because we know that such a drowning is nothing of dying but everything of living.
We know that a world submerged in love is a world safe, precisely balanced and warmly thoughtful. It would be a world centered on the good, protected from the bad, a place committed to refuge and stoic inits nurturance of all. We know that a world embedded in the giving and receiving of love would not be naive, it would be never be careless and it would always err in favor of risking for the good of others despite whatever the magnitude of the risk might be. It would cultivate the best of our humanity and patiently reshape that which is not.
We know that this kind of love between two people is nothing short of marvelous and mystical; something that brushes right up to the edge of our humanity and lavishly spills over into some place that we recognize we were designed to live but seldom discover, much less visit. Love is not a reality that disappoints. It's not some idea of fanciful dreamers or misty-eyed idealists. It's not something spun from the pens of secluded novelists or cooked up as some idea to offset the pain in our world. Rather, it's the only thing powerful enough to endure when everything else does not. Love is a staunchly core reality that we rarely ever find. And it is in missing it that we experience disappointment.
Once Burnt, Twice Smart
Loving means risking. There's no way around it.As with anything truly valuable in life, there's always something of risk in attempting it. It seems that we should be able to love without the concurrent risk of being hurt in the loving. Yet, in the reality of the world that we live in, good things stand toe-to-toe with the bad.
So when we love, we choose to be vulnerable. In reality, there is no other choice. We must choose to open ourselves up because unless we do so, love has no place to go. Unless we do so, it will beheld outside of us in some place where it can never 'be and do' all it was designed to 'be and do.' Unless we open up, we will hold it at bay and long for it while it's right at our very fingertips.
So we eye it and contemplate it and thirst after it, but we don't reach out for it. Typically we don't reach out for it because we have before. And in doing so before we've been burned . . . badly burned. We've been hurt, or betrayed, or back-stabbed, or abandoned or any number of other cruel things that took our hopes of love and incinerated them into something of acidic smoke and charred ashes. "Once burnt, twice smart" as they say. It should not have been, but i twas. We learn never to go there again because being hurt in love always seem to far, far outweigh the love that we originally sought.
Playing it Safe and Killing Love
Much like anything in life, we can play it safe. Playing it safe doesn't mean that we will be safe. But there's some sense that we can make it safer anyway. Yet we insulate ourselves from love. We want it, but the risk is too great. We thirst for it, but we can't bring ourselves to risk for it. We face the terrible dichotomy of wanting something so desperately, but having that core thirst for love thwarted by all the fears that come with having loved before and having been burned.
So love goes wanting. We create thin and shallow replacements for it so as to reduce the risk of reaching for the real thing. We call a lot of things"love" that run the gamut from something that approximates love to things that have nothing to do with love at all. We cheat ourselves, we cheat others and we cheat this single, precious opportunity that we have to live and love.
Love, Again and Again .. .
We need to love. We must. We can do so realizing that all the grievous pain of loss will never offset the wonder of love. We can do so with wisdom, boundaries and respect. We can walk into love with our eyes clear rather than fogged by the fraudulent love we call infatuation. We can love responsibly so that it does not become abused and turn into something it was never meant to be. If we cherish love, respect its power, refuse to use it for our gain, always commit it's benefits to others and are lavish in our expression of it, it will serve us well.
And so why risk loving? Because the risk will always be offset by love. Done well, the risk will be always be worth the risking. To forfeit love is to forfeit much. "To love or not to love?" That's up to each of us individually. Your choice, whatever it might be, will impact you more than you may realize.
It's over... but it's probably not. It's not about something being over. In reality, it's more about a negative attitude that thinks something is over when it's not. We think that some dream is forever gone, that they'll never be another relationship, that our career objectives will always remain objectives, and that life will never fall in good places for us. Often, we think something is over before we even start it, which doesn't make something over. It makes something that was 'never started' to be anything but never started.
It's over...but it's probably not. Something might be over in one way, but it can be accomplished in another. Something might have come to an unfortunate end, but that never precludes a new beginning. Or something might not be over at all. Rather, we're just too hesitant to press it forward for fear that we might not actually be able to manage success. It's not over, so hang in there.
We all worship something. For the strong and stalwart types among us, we probably find that statement a bit pathetic or at least somewhat unsavory at best. For the more passive among us, that statement might make us feel more subservient and possibly more used than we already feel. For everyone else that’s somewhere in the middle, it might resonate as slightly antiquated with a dusty touch of religious sentimentality. Regardless of where we fall or who we are, the concept of worship can cut against the grain and be seen as an action that undercuts our independence. Worse yet, the whole idea or act of worship might usurp our independence altogether, which for many us is a rather frightening proposition.
Often we conceptualize worship as being something that demands our obedience and allegiance. To many, worship suggests subservience and a kind of scripted groveling where we’re irreparably stooped and bent in penance or slavery to something. To others, it’s an action that they sense is owed to something in their lives, or it can be an action that draws one close to the object of worship. Whatever the case, we all worship something.
Our Need to Worship
Dorothy Thompson said that “the instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.” That’s pretty powerful. There’s something woven and intricately threaded within us that demands that we worship. Benjamin Disraeli framed it nicely when he said that “man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.”
There’s something core within us that needs something core above us. So, it seems that we’re always about the process of creating something that can be that “core” thing. In reality we’ve become quite adept at it. In creating,cwe might ask ourselves are we creating just to create, or are we creating something to worship? How much of our energies, our efforts and our creativity are directed toward the creation of something that’s much more than simply something that we came up with, and is actually more about something that we can look up to? In all the scurrying about that we do in life, in all the assorted investments that we make, and in all the tedium that we’re all about, are we in reality creating something that’s big enough and sufficient enough to appear worthy of our worship?
Worship Implies a Throne
Worship suggests that something has been elevated above everything else. There’s something within our lives that holds that key and sacred place; the thing that we have set on the throne of our lives. The whole concept of a “throne” suggests that each life has a place of primacy, a central location or point which everything else draws from, and around which everything is centered. Most of us don’t think about the concept of a “throne” likely because such a notion is the stuff of antiquity; some object that we would associate with ‘pomp and circumstance.’ That imagery doesn’t really fit in our conceptualization of our lives as we live them out in the 21st century. A “throne” is just too eccentric and off.
Yet, in thinking about worship it seems unpardonably imperative to embrace the understanding that we each have a central place in our lives that is second to none. There is that place that we carefully guard, that “hill that we’re willing to die on,” that part of ourselves that’s unquestionably non-negotiable, and that thing that we feel we simply couldn’t live without. There are those places where no one’s allowed and no one can touch. We have that inner sanctum, that holy of holies that’s reverenced and revered. We may not think of these places quite that way, but they’re there. These are our thrones.
Something on the Throne
It would seem to follow that if we’ve got a throne, and we do, that something’s probably on it. Therein lays the great question for each of us. What do we put on the throne? It seems that while we have a throne, we are privileged to put on it whatever we want. Things can demand that we put them on the throne; whether that be people, or dreams, or relationships, or careers, or material objects, or religious beliefs, or the desire for status in whatever arena we desire status in. Petitions for the throne can come from painful events, disheartening failures, any of our many wounds, or a wide array of emotional issues. Things such as denial, hatred, bitterness and revenge can all jockey for a place on the throne. Then there are all kinds of addictions or other destructive behaviors that will want to sit firmly on the throne so that they can exist unimpeded and unquestioned.
Ourselves on the Throne
More often than not, we put ourselves on the throne; or at least that’s what we think we put on the throne. We want to reign supreme in the kingdom that we call “us.” We reign with an iron scepter and we bow to no one. Bryant H. McGill said that “self-made men often worship their creator.” That’s quite frightening. Yet, the throne of our lives is such a massive and sometimes overwhelming place that we’re fooled as to who’s actually on it. It’s really not “us” that’s on it, but things we’ve put there that we think are “us.” Often we’re deluded into believing that we’re reigning, when we’re subservient to what we’ve put on there. Because we put these things on the throne we assume that we control them. Yet, what we put in power, what we elevate to that position will turn and control us. Likely one of the greatest deceptions is to firmly believe that we’re on throne when we’re not.
What Should We Put on the Throne?
The throne of our lives is a powerful place. It would make crystal clear sense then to carefully determine what we put on the throne. Often we’re not wise enough to know exactly what that should be. Our frequent short-sightedness and hedonism are hardly suitable lenses through which to make such a choice. It’s entirely feasible that anything that “we” put on the throne will in time turn on us, usurp us, use us, or possibly destroy us. It’s downright possible that anything that we put on the throne will help will turn to our ill.
Maybe it’s more about “allowing”something on the throne; something that does not demand that place, but requests it. Maybe something that inherently seeks our good over its own. Could there be something that designed us purely for itself and us purely for it; something that is the only natural and good fit for the throne of our lives? Is the throne of our lives custom-made for something or someone like this? Anything else on the throne will surely lead to a life that embraces the agenda of whatever it is that’s on the throne. Only one thing sits on the throne on our behalf. So, who’s on the throne?
As the old saying goes, integrity is defined by what you do when no one is looking. It's a choice...pure and simple. It's a choice to do the right thing regardless of the outcome for us. It's realizing that we may pay a price to be people of integrity, but to 'not' be a person of integrity will cost us far, far more. It's a lifestyle choice. A choice of character; of determining the kind of people that we want to be and the kind of legacy that we want to leave. It's about how we will live out these few scant years that we have to live and what our lives will look like at journey's end.
Too often integrity falls to greed, or ease, or peer pressure, or the demands of the larger culture. But a true person of integrity understands that to fall to these is to fall in ways that we cannot afford to fall. So, be a person of integrity. You won't be perfect at it, and there will be moments of failure that you will regret. But it's not always about winning the battle as much as it is refusing not to fight it.
The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies. It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred. Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.
Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost. There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them. Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery. There are those things that we are made for,yet which are entirely absent.
Sacrifice is one of those things. It’s something that we know we are all called to. It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central. Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior. It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others. It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible. Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being. That’s sacrifice.
The Balance of Sacrifice
All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people. It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives. Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation. There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery. Sacrifice is calculated and made clean. Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.
Priorities
It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities. There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through. That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else. Clearly,that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole. And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self. That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.
What’s the End-Game?
We all ask where we want everything to end up. At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left? That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.
If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us. The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone. That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end. The service of self terminates at our own death. Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain. It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.
What About Legacy?
What kind of footprint will each of us leave? Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration init? Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves? Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose? Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else? Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?
In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self. Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders. A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not. It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them. It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction. That is sacrifice.
How Will I Live?
Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are. The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others. We are raised up when we lay ourselves down. It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations. Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside. It is all of us at our very best. So how then will you live?
I can't save myself. I do not possess the resources to come to my own rescue. I might be able to do a few things to keep my life moving, or weather a few bumps in the road. I might be able to bypass some road blocks or side-step a few ruts. And while I can maneuver enough to slog along at points, that is not saving myself. When it comes to the need to be rescued from the disasters that befall me, or the times when my resources pale to the struggle within which I find myself, or the challenges that possess a power far superior to any that I possess...I cannot rescue myself from any of these. And in the end, I cannot rescue myself from certain death and the consequences that follow. I cannot rescue myself, and I am glad that I can't. For then I am forced to acknowledge that something or Someone greater than me must exist who can save me from the 'me' that can't save itself.
Self-image is that perspective that we have about ourselves. It’s kind of like looking in some sort of mirror in order to determine what we look like. We stand in front of these mirrors and try to figure out who we are, what we are and what we’re not. We tilt our heads and squint, trying to make out the reflection of our heads, our hearts or whatever’s in there.
We are constantly coming back to these mirrors in order to figure out who we are and what’s in there. Conflict brings us back. A relationship gone bad brings us back. A job loss, financial collapse, personal failures, the upheaval of mid-life crisis or some tragedy all bring us back. These kinds of things make us question ourselves so we’re back in front of some foggy, squiggly mirror with squinted eyes trying to get our bearings again.
Distorted Mirrors
You’ve seen the mirrors that distort your image. Those can be the kind in the Fun House at the circus on antique mirrors aged and faded by time. The image isn’t quite right. Sometimes it’s close and other times its way off, but it’s not accurate.
It seems that most of the time a poor self-image is the result of a distorted mirror. You see, we don’t make our mirrors. Most often they’re made for us. Key people in our lives make them. Mom’s and Dad’s and relatives and friends and teachers and pastors and bosses make them. These people all have a hand in building the mirrors that we peer into.
For some of us those mirrors are fairly accurate. We were fortunate enough to have some solid people around us who knew enough about who they were to help us build accurate mirrors. For others of us however, we came from difficult or dysfunctional situations where the mirrors got all messed up. We were told that we were worthless. Negative messages poured in almost relentlessly. We were labeled, categorized, put in some sort of personally diminishing box, cataloged and stamped as inadequate, stupid, a born loser, a mistake, a burden, an object, or any of a million other destructive identities.
Our mirrors were shaped to reflect these things back to us even if they weren’t there. We gaze into these mirrors trying to see who we are. Reflected back to us are distorted images emblazoned on these mirrors that have nothing to do with who we really are. When we look in the mirror it sure looks like those things are there, but they’re not. They’re convincing alright, but they’re not reality. Our self-image is whittled away and eventually destroyed if we’re not able to understand that what I see is not what I am. Rather, it’s what other people told me I am.
It’s Their Reflection
People in our lives build their reflections into our mirrors. It’s called projection. Projection is where someone places their issues on us. It’s a convenient way to avoid dealing with our issues by putting them on someone else. And so people project their issues or their deficiencies or their quirks into our mirrors. And when we look into those mirrors, those things distort our image.
We are not those things. They are simply a distortion of our true selves. Sadly, we tend to embrace them as being true about us and we incorporate them into our lives as if they are real. They’re not.
Adjusting Our Mirror
We need to adjust our mirrors, to clean them up. That can be done by identifying what people have put there and telling yourself that it’s their image not yours. It’s looking closely enough to ask “whose reflection am I really seeing here?” It’s not about denying any of the bad stuff we see by attributing it to someone else. That kind of stuff’s too easy to do. It’s more about an honest assessment, teasing out fact from fiction and tale from truth. Who am I really? It’s a great question and one worth figuring out. So . . . look in the mirror again, but look differently.
Time. It's limited. It moves without heeding our desire that it slow down or speed up. It is not interrupted by the greatest joy or the most profound heartache. Once it is spent, there is no redeeming it, elongating it, renewing it, or storing it. It is a precious resource that we would be wise to use with wisdom. And while we can't do any of those with time, we can pack many good things into it. We can use it to change a life, restore a relationship, direct a wayward child, give a bit of time to someone who's lonely, or make a mark on the world that will carry on once our time is over. Time. It's precious. But what we can do with it is precious itself. And so, you might ask, what you will do with the time that you have.
It would be pretty safe to say that all of us want to be successful. We’re not stagnant creatures just milling about and burning time until we drop dead. There’s something more intentional about us; something that responds to challenges and has a natural inclination to set goals, whether we actually achieve them or not. We have a need to have a purpose; something that defines us as more than carbon-based life forms going through a series of meaningless motions on our way to the grave. We have a need to achieve, to conquer, to rise to great heights and soar. It seems that being alive is not enough to justify our existence or lend value to that existence. Rather, we have to make our mark and leave a timeless legacy that shouts that we were more than simply people who lived out our days.
This need to justify our existence naturally and most predominantly results in the need to succeed in some way. To do that, we have to define success. How do we know if we’ve succeeded? What will give us a sense that we’ve accomplished something? How will we determine how far we’ve come or how far we’ve yet to go? Did we do it right or did we do it wrong? To answer those questions we’ve got to define what success is. Otherwise we have no yardstick that we can use in order to determine our progress or lack thereof.
How We Define Success
The problem for most of us is not in succeeding. The real issue is in how we define “success.” Whatever that definition is, it’s extremely powerful. Our definition of success, whatever that might be, has power beyond our recognition and it has implications for us that in large part never even dawn on us. How we define success will define what we do and how we do it. Our definition of success will quite literally direct the whole of our energies.
Whatever our definition of success, it will be the thing that drives us, that determines where our energies are invested, how our resources are expended, what risks we will take, exactly what we’re going to be willing to sacrifice, and the degree to which we’ve achieved or failed. Our definition of success becomes the yardstick by which we measure both what we do, and ultimately what we’re worth. It can become the idol at whose feet we bow and to which the whole of our lives and our energies are sacrificially expended. It becomes the focal point of what we do. Therefore, our definition of success becomes terribly critical.
Our Definition Defines Our Value
Our definition of success is driven by whatever our ultimate goal is. There are tons of goals that we could sort through and sift through and discuss and evaluate and weigh out. However, at the core of each goal there’s typically one central goal that defines all other goals. That fundamental goal is to have a sense that our lives have “value.” Whatever our goals are and whatever they look like, it’s likely that their main objective and their core purpose is to convince ourselves that we have value. It’s entirely imperative that we see ourselves as having value as value justifies our existence and validates that we’re worthy of the space that we’re taking up. Having a sense of value is core to our humanity because without it we feel empty, hollow, entirely lost and totally unworthy. Value is indispensable.
The way that we convince ourselves that we have value is by convincing others that we have value. It’s a kind of a self- inflicted ‘sales job’ where we get others to believe that we have value which in turn convinces us that we have value because until others see it in us, we can’t possibly believe we have it. Because that’s frequently the case, as sad as that might be, our definition of success is built on and around doing something that others will look at in awe, or reverence, or be driven to emulate, or hold in high esteem, or find praiseworthy because it’s all so grand and mesmerizing. Once others grant it value, we grant it value. When we ever that is, has to incessantly generate outcomes that people will value so that we can stuff ourselves full of that “stuff” sufficiently enough in order feel that we have value.
A Better Definition – What It Is and What It Isn’t
A definition of success is not so much about success as it is standards. It’s not about accolades as much as it’s about authenticity. It’s not about strategy, it’s about sanctity. It’s not about where one wants to go, it’s about living well right where we are. It’s not about what one does but who one is. Success is based on how we chose to live which dictates what we choose to do; not the other way around. Success is the maintenance of virtue and the life-long refining of a right heart when the world around us sees no value in either or anything else admirable for that matter. Success is a commitment to an unwavering morality for the sole purpose of morality and not for any applause that such a stance might obtain for us.
As Elbert Einstein put it, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” Success is living well and dying with that legacy left in our wake. It’s not about how many people witnessed our living well or how many can attest to it at the end. It’s simply that we were those things whether they were displayed in front of masses of people or lived out in the greater testing ground of total isolation where no one sees but us and God.Success is a life well lived regardless of how many trophies or certificates or promotions or contracts we got in the process of living. The marks of real success can’t be hung on a wall, or deposited in a bank account, or used as leverage to advance a career. Those things are more the stuff of achievement, which are good, but they’re not necessarily “success.”
It’s not that achieving things or diligently working for those kinds of things is bad. They’re not. It’s simply that they’re not the hallmark of the kind of success that shapes lives; that transforms people, that rocks cultures, that calls others to higher ground and boldly exhibits something that’s far beyond the tiny confines of our human existence and something more of the character and essence of the God who created us. Success is right living, exuberantly virtuous living, mindful living, and selfless living that combine to result in a bold living that can be stunning. It’s all lived out without wondering how many brownie points we’re going to amass by living that way and how good it’s all going to look to everyone around us. It’s just living with brazen integrity for the sake of living that way and nothing more. That’s success.
An Adjustment
Our culture ties success to achievement as defined as worthy and worthwhile in and by our culture. Yet, real success is a life well lived regardless of the achievements or lack thereof that might be a part of that kind of living. Live right. Live well. Live with integrity. Be guided by a strong morality. Be a stand-up person in a world that’s too often standing-down. That’s success. That’s worth living for and dying in. Re-define success for yourself and live it.
Hope is often deferred. Today we see hope not only as deferred, but often as vanishing. We had hope in a career, or in a marriage, or in a friendship, or in some dream that we had dreamt for years. We had hope that certain promises would make the world better, or change the course of a life, a family, a community, or a nation. We had hope that tomorrow would be better and that yesterday would be forgotten. We had hope that our kids would grow up healthy, that the medical issues would be resolves, or the debt would be overcome. But too often, hope is deferred. Yet, hope in God is never deferred because God is hope.
We dig holes. Lots of them. With all kinds of shovels. But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them. We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with. We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t. We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.
And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes. And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing. Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive. By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses. By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why. Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial. Maybe we need to stop all the digging.
Ever feel dead? I mean the kind of dead where life’s lost its vitality, its meaning and every bit of its luster? The kind of dead that leaves you feeling entirely numb and completely hopeless all at the same time; being stranded in this limp kind of limbo where you’re alive but you don’t feel like it at all? Ever feel like there’s absolutely no purpose, no direction from here to someplace other than here, no value whatsoever, no redeeming quality anywhere, and no ladder to get you out of the bottomless hole you’re in? Ever feel dead?
Here’s a curious bit of information that’s quite striking. Archaeological excavations unearthed wheat seeds in pyramids dating back to 2500 B.C. That makes these ancient seeds somewhere around 4500 years old, give or take a century. In order to determine the types of grains used in the ancient world, archeologists planted them to see what would happen. They grew! Somehow, the spark of life hung in there for four and a half millennia. What should have been long dead was very much alive. What should have been snuffed out was not. What should have been entirely hopeless wasn’t. Think about it.
It’s that time of year when things become new. Spring and Easter are reminders of that which was terribly dead being made impossibly alive. There’s something of a restorative quality about this time of year, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Maybe it is true.
Starting Over
How many times have we wished that we could just start over? Would it be better to be dead and start over all new and fresh? Sometimes it seems that it would be a whole lot easier to simply wipe the slate clean of whatever life has been. There’s nothing like a fresh start, a clean break, a new day, a mulligan or a do over.
However, life doesn’t grant us those options. History is history. It’s carved in granite in some sort of indelible script on the pavers that mark the road of our lives. We can heal from it, learn from it, grow because of it, forgive what we did to others and forgive what was done to us. We can let it haunt us, dog us, diminish us and destroy us if we let it, but we can’t change it. It’s resource or demon. It’s something that can be an asset or liability; a gift that blesses us or ghost that haunts us depending on how we use it, but it’s there for good.
So, we’re stuck with our pasts. Is life then about starting again, or is it about taking the resources of our past and using them to start over again? Do we really want a fresh start, beginning with nothing in an attempt to build something? Or would we be wiser to take whatever we have, whether it‘s perfect or painful and start from there? Would it be wiser, possibly much wiser to plant that which seems dead and see what happens?
Starting Over is Not Starting Fresh
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not. New starts are best built on the difficulties, failures and pain of the past. It’s not about wiping the slate clean. It’s about diligently studying what’s written there, learning from it, discerning its messages, drawing from it and applying what’s there. Life from death in a resurrecting cycle where what kills us is turned in on itself to build us.
Starting over is taking what life has dealt us and learning to see it as a resource when all we see is ruin. In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old. We just don’t see it that way. We discard the old because we assume old equates with dead and useless. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Starting Over by Believing that You Can
The seed in you is not dead. Sometimes we don’t start over because all seems dead anyway. There’s no life left so what’s the sense. It’s all lain barren for so long that nothing could possibly hold any spark of life. Whatever’s in us seems parched, dusty and long ago abandoned to the sands of time and hands of fate. Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time. There are seeds within us that seem long dead that are in reality very much alive. New beginnings lay in dead husks.
Starting Over by Looking Back
So what are the lessons back there that lay strewn among the ashes and carnage? We would rather not pick through that stuff if we had our druthers. It’s ugly. It’s often painful. And sometimes there’s a stench back there that reeks of abuse, abandonment, betrayal and loss. So we’ve buried it . . . a long time ago. Why unearth it? We unearth it because seeds for growth are sown in fields of pain. What seems dead is very often alive.
Start Over by Reinvesting Your Life
Try again. Give life another shot. Do it differently maybe, but go at it again. Believe that things in life spend infinitely more energy trying to live than working to die. Life is about living. Look around you as spring moves across the landscape. Life fights back. It’s designed to overcome. It’s intentional about living with intention. It takes seeds that seem dead and from them, life brings forth life. How about you? Ever feel dead? How about believing in a new day, giving life another shot and watching what happens. The seeds are ready.
Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us. We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care. Or it’s safer, because we don’t care. We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care. If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care. If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care. And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all. It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care.
And in all that retreating, maybe there’s a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of. But we don’t. We don’t. Instead, we retreat. And we retreat because we’ve worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don’t care, and we’ve done that so that we won’t get hurt. And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it. Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn’t show up to fight it. And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place.
And in the end, there’s a good chance that we’ll end up caring that we didn’t care. And because we end up caring that we didn’t care, we’ll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that’s within ourselves.
How have we come to the point where the message of the Gospel is largely considered irrelevant in 21st century America? How is it that God is outmoded, outdated, antiquated, and has nothing of value to say to us as we live out our lives today? How is it that the God Who created ‘all of this’ has been left behind by the very thing that He created? How have we come to this point?
But maybe the question is not “how,” but “why.” Why have we come to this point? Why have we come to visualize God as some ancient artifact that might have worked for less educated people living out their lives in some primitive society hundreds, if not thousands of years ago? Why have we relegated Him to a period of time long gone, and in doing so completely failed to recognize that times might change, but people don’t? Why have we come to see God as entirely outmoded in light of our progressive philosophies, or our ever-shifting ethics, or our new morality?
God is most relevant thing in existence. His principles apply to our world today probably more than any time in human history. He alone holds the truths, the ideals, the values, and the principles that can assist us in navigating the profound challenges of our times and our lives. The principles handed down to us in the Bible are entirely sound, uncompromisingly relevant, timely in ways that are mind-boggling, and sufficiently powerful to assist us in navigating the descending darkness of the times that we live in. God and His principles are the most relevant thing that I can think of.
Life is never static, therefore it's always changing. Life never settles into some place where it's going to ride out its time for all of time. Life is always building, and in the building sometimes it adds things and at other times it takes them away. There are times where advances move us forward, but where reversals also move us forward despite our frequent inability to understand that reality. Sometimes life changes in ways we like, and at other times it changes in ways that are less than favorable.
Whatever the case might be, life changes and we are part of life. Therefore, we are both built for and maximized by change. As part of that journey, we need to focus on the unseen opportunities in change rather than fight it out of our fear of it. We need to see something closing as something else opening. We need to let the past be the preparation for the future, not the place that is our future. The season is moving forward, and if we move with it we will move to places both great and glorious.
There’s pain, and then there’s intensely deep pain. We all have pain. We all have the pain of failed experiences,sordid disappointments, wasted opportunities and wasted investments that we thought were opportunities. There’s the pain of not being where we imagined being, of being forced to embrace dreams as more fantasy than substance, of friends in flight and fortitude forgotten. There’s the pain of growing up and growing jaded, a world devolving despite relentless efforts to reverse it all, of diminished confidence in our fellowman and a diminished confidence when the fellowman is us.
Then there the ‘core of your soul ’kind of pain that’s entirely different. It’s the kind of pain that’s rarely sharp but indisputably debilitating. It's profoundly aching to a paralyzing numbness with a venomous bite that’s emotionally heart-stopping. It’s exceedingly more than painful, it kills; not a straight-up obvious kind of death, but more the killing of the soul that leaves us alive while simultaneously dead. It’s a pain that flaunts healing, that defies a cure and that leaves a forever ‘limp’ in our souls. How do we deal with that kind of pain? How do we survive it? Join us for a few thoughts that might help you begin the process of moving past that kind of pain.
Halloween is one of those things that captivates many people. It’s been granted status as a holiday and because it has, what it is and what it symbolizes has been granted some sort of legitimacy. Halloween and what it embodies has been given some stamp of approval because we’ve stamped it onto the calendar. And so we feel we’ve been granted some element of permission to cross some lines and play with darkness because we’ve got this holiday on the calendar that says we can.
As with anything else, we need to think about what we’re doing when we’re deciding to cross a line, whatever that line might be. What is our reason? What is our purpose? If we’re out to raise our lives to the next level or advance others, our reasons likely have legitimacy. But if we’re crossing the line just to say we’ve crossed the line, or we’re doing so out of some captivation with whatever it is that’s captured our fancy, or dabble in something that we feel that’s forbidden, then we’re likely to become captive to those very things and ultimately consumed by them. Therefore, we'd be wise to consider what we're playing with and how it's going to end up playing us.
Discouragement. It's no stranger to any of us. Whether it's from a goal that we can't reach, a marriage that we can't make work, personal issues that we can't solve, or friendships that we can't mend...we all become discouraged. Sometimes our discouragement is based on the size of the challenge that we face or the fact that the issue keeps raising its ugly head regardless of our many attempts to bury it forever. Sometimes it's our own fatigue or the exhaustion that we feel in all of our failed attempts to finally get to where we want to go.
Discouragement can be completely debilitating. It can cause us to believe that there's no hope, no solution, no way out or no way in. Yet, because we're discouraged does not mean that the battle is lost. It simply means that we might have to change our approach, alter our tactics, determine if we're fighting the right battle in the right way, and reengage in a better way. In essence, we've got to develop courage, determination and persistence. Because if we can develop and strengthen these traits and then utilize them with wisdom, we've got a good shot at beating what's been beating us.
History is the story of millions who lived out lives that are now held in this great vault called 'history.' It is their legacy. It is the declaration of the fact that they lived and it is a careful summation of what they did with their lives. History is also the thing that instructs millions of us today. It is the thing that shows us how to avoid the devastation experienced by those who went before us and how to repeat the successes that were theirs as well. As such, history is powerful, history is immense, and history is sacred.
Yet, if it does not align with our agenda or if it opposes it altogether, we rewrite it. We take unwarranted liberties with this precious thing that speaks to the lives that have gone before us and we alter it. We perpetrate the abuses as greedy people who demand that history fall in line or history will fall to the editing pencil of our agendas. Such abuses are certain to find us out if we don't snuff them out.
How important is the truth? How critical is it to not only a healthy existence, but any existence at all? Is the truth negotiable or is the truth absolute? Is there such a thing as truth, or is the concept of truth the figment of imaginations that needed something steady and sturdy to get them through life?
We can ask many questions about the truth and we can pick the concept apart quiet handily. But history shows that the abandonment of truth creates space for the shifting contrivances of men. And those are a sure path to a terrible destruction. Truth is imperative. Yet, we will redefine the truth, reshape the truth, spin the truth, or abandon it altogether if it does not support whatever our agenda might be. If an agenda requires the modification or the elimination of the truth, that agenda is certain to destroy us at the very same time that we are building it.
We assume way too much. In our culture today, there are many who assume that their agenda or point-of-view is correct. Sometimes their agendas or points-of-view go beyond being correct to being the single, solitary view, leaving no room for other opinions or perspectives. Many of these agendas are not necessarily based in facts, logic or truth, although it is claimed that they are. Often they are based on something less solid and less than completely enduring. Those that hold these various agendas or views often feel that they're solidly based in facts, logic and truth, but such a perspective is often questionable.
It seems that we need to stop and think a bit. We need to back away from what often appears to be blind adherence to whatever agenda is trending or whatever view grants us whatever permission we wish to be granted. We need to become thoughtful instead of thoughtless. We need to ask the larger questions, probe a bit deeper, and face the truth regarding what we're standing for or what we're standing on. And if we do that, maybe we can begin to embrace the truth embodied in this quote:
"It is my prayer that we would stop for a moment, turn off the voices that clamor for our allegiance, put aside the incessant rant of political agendas, and sit with ourselves for just a moment. And in the quiet of that moment, listen to your heart. For what you will hear is not all that far removed from the people that the ‘voices’ and ‘agendas’ claim to be your enemies."
We get caught up in the fervor and energy of some cause to the degree that the fervor and energy keeps us from determining what the real 'cause' of the cause is. We seldom sit back and ask what is really happening and what this is really all about. We believe that we are informed. We sense that we have an understanding for that which we've found ourselves caught up in. We say that we can defend the rationale of the cause and justify its platform. But can we?
We are not a thoughtful people. We are too often a rash people. We jump to conclusions. We believe something if it sounds appealing enough to believe. If the cause is championed by someone of status or fame, we conclude that the cause must be worthwhile. We fall for the hype, we consume the propaganda, and we run pell-mell into something that eventually runs over us. We need to become thoughtful people. For if we don't, we will end up in places that we never thought we would be.
So, what’s up with memories? We all have hoards of them, apparently endless reams of them that run a seemingly impossible gamut. Our memories encompass a boundless array of events. They’re expansive enough to fully embody the entire breadth of our emotions. They can be crystal clear and irreparably clean in their recollections. They can likewise be fuzzy, misty-like and somewhat fluid; creating dramatic and moving renderings of our past from the abstract, to the surreal, to something quite conventional. Memories preserve what would otherwise be lost and they create a means by which to redeem ourselves through the lessons learned and adjustments made because we can recall it all enough to learn.
Are memories just sights and sounds and moments and experiences filed somewhere in some methodical filing cabinet located in the gray fissures of our brains? Are memories about some internal hard drive that collects all this stuff for retrieval at some critical or possibly opportune time? Clearly, memories have a vitally important place in our lives, otherwise why would we have them in such wonderful and woeful abundance? The ability that we have to store information and experiences and feelings serves a multitude of indispensible purposes. In fact, it’s likely that we simply couldn’t live without the mind’s ability to remember and to recall. If we could, we would certainly be so much the poorer.
So it would appear that memories and the ability to recall things would appear to be incredibly, possibly indescribably important. The question is do we maximize this ability? Do we utilize this marvelous faculty as fully and as completely as we could or should? Have we ever even considered the magnitude of this seemingly fathomless resource or do we embrace it as little more than a tool to reminisce, or a curse that causes us to remember that which we’d much prefer to forget? Does memory become just the stuff of curious trivia or abundant fodder for colorful conversation? Or is it possible that this ability is far more valuable and more indescribably powerful than we even begin to realize. It’s possible that we don’t even come close to understanding what this amazing resource can do. Have we then forfeited a quite phenomenal resource? Because we do, we leave it languishing as some sort of all too common process that readily generates trivia and information, but is lacking for life-altering substance.
Memory Feeds Us
Amy Tan wrote, “Memory feeds imagination.” Memory is the vast and endless storehouse that ceaselessly feeds the richest parts of our deepest selves. It’s the copiously rich and prolific food-stuff from which the marvel of our core humanity is luxuriantly nurtured. Memory refuses to grant us permission to live solely in the one-dimensional realm of the present. Instead, it affords us the opportunity to live in the flourish of the present while simultaneously sipping fully on the many variant flavors of the past. Memory can seamlessly draw from both the past and the present, feeding more than sufficient creativity to live with flourish in the present and robustly create an entirely innovative future.
Memory Preserves
Memory is that thing that will not allow life to listlessly pass by and be forever lost in the passing-by. Life comes by once and if it were not somehow captured in the passing we would hold it only for the moment that we have it, and then it would be gone. We would be creatures of the moment only and we would be unable to take every moment and use those moments to build on every other moment. Memory allows for the amassing of a prolific array of building blocks rather than living with the flatness of holding onto the building block of the moment and having to forfeit it for the building block of the next moment and then the moment after that. Memory preserves.
Memory Maximizes the Storehouse of the Mind
The human mind is incomprehensibly vast. Such is the extent of the mind that we’re not even remotely capable of understanding what it can do. The only limitation that the mind has is the amount of information and experiences that’s put into it, not the capacity to store it. If we leave the mind empty, if we’re unable to seize each moment and store those moments in the mind’s vast storehouse for retrieval, the immense size of our minds simply wouldn’t matter. Why foolishly squander the resource of the mind by leaving its vast enclaves empty and barren? Why would we let empty space define us?
Memories Build on Themselves
Tyron Edwards wrote, ““Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it.” If we simply see memories as memories, as nice or not so nice places to walk around and reminisce we won’t mine the riches in them to enhance the riches in them. We walk through our memories for a whole lot of reasons, but typically not to submerge ourselves in them in order to let them build upon themselves. Typically our trip into them is much more something similar to a casual jaunt and a whole lot more superficial than serious; something like a stroll rather than an expedition, or a walk in the park verses parking ourselves in them. We miss the fact that memories build upon themselves in a prolific flowering that makes the sum total of the memories greater than their individual parts. Memories expand in their encounters with other memories.
Memories Mark History
Memories are the files that hold our histories. Histories grant us an undeniable and powerfully sustaining sense of purpose as they recite our paths. In reciting our paths we develop a sense that our lives were not the woven from the fabric of randomness, but that there is a rational progression that suggests something of meaning and intent. Memories map out a path taken that permits us to see a rhyme and reason to what appeared to be randomness. They allow us to see our lives in retrospect and in doing so to identify footprints that, from the distance afforded by memory, are anything but wandering. It’s here that we come to understand that our apparently meaningless and misdirected lives have something a whole lot more purposeful to them. In such a telling discovery, we can see that our lives had a rationale that suggests undeniable purpose.
Remembering Memories
You might be well advised to wade into the vast seas of your memories. Such a journey is potentially rich, certainly richer than meandering, or more likely, running away from them.
Communication is critical to our existence. Without it, we are isolated entities functioning without the ability to connect to anyone or anything around us. Without communication we lose relationships, we can't create community, and any ability to cooperate in building out a life and a larger culture simply does not exist. Yet, despite the incredible importance of communication, we don't focus on doing it well. Much of our communication is rather sloppy, slip-shod and less than thoughtful. With others often communicating in a similar fashion, our interactions deteriorate to the point that relationships are simply not possible, or they remain distant, or they become damaged beyond restoration. This brief video outlines several basic yet powerful communication skills that will begin the process of enhancing your communication.
We live unnecessarily restricted lives. And in living those lives, we slowly suffocate in the things we have created and surrounded ourselves with. Living this way, we tend to place blame on circumstance, or we surrender to some misplaced feeling that life is just this way. We feel we don't have any power to change things and that our lives will simply move on in whatever way the winds of chance and culture blow. This brief podcasts suggests that much of the constraints and difficulties that we live with are a product of our own choices. It likewise highlights way to begin to change these in order to liberate the life we live.
We all know what they say about "assuming." But assuming something is not just a random guess or a proverbial "shot in the dark." Rather, there are often agendas or biases that drive our assumptions. Assumptions are often far more than simple or naive guesses. Many times they are our attempts to push an agenda, or drive a situation in the direction we wish it to go. Often assumptions are really more the manner in which we broadcast a bias or manipulate a situation to the end that we desire. We can assume something to be something, so that in the assuming we actually make it what we want it to be. While subtle, such behaviors can be terribly destructive. This brief podcast outlines this interesting and thought-provoking dynamic so that we might have an enhanced awareness of it in our own lives, as well as the lives of others.
Too often we feel that a fresh start is virtually impossible. If it's not impossible, we feel that we're not deserving of it, or we fear that the result of change may put us in a situation that's worse than the one we've already found ourselves in. Many times we feel that change is nothing more than old patterns playing themselves out in some sort of sick circular pattern which leaves us moving forward by moving backward. And so, we stand before our future believing that it will be a sad repeat of our past until our lives our past. This brief video outlines a fresh and encouraging way to look at our futures as full of bold possibilities and new opportunities.
Life is a journey, and it’s not a solo one. But far more than that, along the journey and deep within the journey we find richness in relationships; those who know us intimately in a manner that can obliterate the terrifying sense of aloneness and wipe out crippling sense of meaninglessness. There’s an indefinable camaraderie in relational intimacy that lends a priceless and terribly rare sense of meaning to the journey, while infusing the journey with an often surprisingly exuberant strength as well. We need those who can share in the muddy rigors and turbulent turmoil of our journey in a manner that exponentially expands the meaning and the joy of the journey in ways we hadn’t even thought of at the outset of the journey. To journey alone is to journey to possible success. But to journey alone is to journey to success that is empty, pitifully vacant, likely isolating and therefore void of the sense of success despite the success itself.
Life is a journey, and it’s not a solo one. It’s designed for intimacy. So what’s real intimacy? Intimacy is that soul-mate kind of connection that has nothing to do with physical intimacy, but everything to do with the complexity of two human beings finding a fundamental interweaving of their corporate humanity that together renders them more than the sum of whomever or whatever they are apart. It’s the realization that I’m alone in this life as single human being whose experience is uniquely mine. Yet, I am alone in a world that affords me the opportunity of intimacy where I can take the unique experience that is mine and mine alone, and I can take the unique person that I am and connect all of that with another human being that results in the loss of none of that uniqueness whatsoever, and the gain of adding the life of another to mine, and mine to them.
Relationships enrich. They are a gift, an opportunity, the creation of a wildly imaginative God who wanted us to have everything that we are and enjoy the “everything” of another human being with the ability to have each enriched beyond measure and never diminished beyond question. Relationships expand us. But we can’t have relationships if we can’t communicate. If you take communication out of relationships, you have no relationship. Communication is essential, yet we’re losing the very ability to communicate.
Loneliness and Full In-Boxes
Loneliness is about relationships, or more fundamentally, the absence of relationships. The word “relationship” has become terribly ill-defined,or more specifically under-defined in a culture that’s consistently moving in wildly random directions at speeds that we can’t even begin to define, other than whatever speed it is it’s not fast enough.
Because of the speed that we’re relentlessly moving at, we communicate just enough to fill the informational void, get the data, plug it in, or meet some brief connective need of the moment so that we can move on to the next moment to make room for the moment that comes after that. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” The acquisition of data and the obtaining of information convey something, but that’s not communication. It does however leave us with the abysmal illusion that communication took place, yet its illusion only. We’re left with a bunch of data,but an equally large sense of aloneness.
All the while we’re attempting to connect,build relationships and maintain relationships in the snippets, sound-bites and the precariously thin threads of texting, posting on walls, blogging, connecting with our “tweets,” IM’ing, being “linked-in” and so forth. We have electronic communication that fires messages at the speed of light to devices half a world away or the cell phones hanging on our hips.
Sure, these modes of communication provide for the transmission of data. But they are not sturdy enough, sufficiently deep enough, or possess the essence of the human touch adequately enough to connect with the heart and soul of another human being. Certainly, these types of communication have their place. But they fall terribly short and are woefully inadequate in connecting the beating heart and tender spirit of one human being to another. They are crudely incapable of weaving together the fabric of two complex souls so that they can fully share in the human journey in some sort of unified partnership.
Relationships are about the degree of connectivity that we have with others. Degree implies depth; that kind of connection that’s calibrated by ever-deepening degrees of intimacy that bonds us in a cement-like fashion with another. Sure, we can have a boatload of acquaintances and we can be social butterflies that flit and flirt around a never-ending array of people in some sort of completely shallow, flirtatious dance. We can play the social games and do the various gatherings and have everyone think that we’re so wonderful and so clever and so quick and so charming and so brilliant. But that’s an orchestrated show designed to impress. In the end everyone walks away entertained and having had a rollicking good time, but with nothing other than a perpetuated sense of emptiness, wondering are there any real people out there? What that kind of thing is not is an honest interaction stripped bare by vulnerability whose sole intent is to engender nothing but intimacy with another human being who feels as empty and lonely as we do.
Communication as Critical
Communication is bridge by which two lives intersect. It’s a communion of souls, a bathing in the heart of another, a melding of two people into one while each individual stays uniquely themselves. This is not about data transmission or sharp sound-bites. It’s not about how many gigabytes we’ve used or what we used them for. Communication is the use of words, touch, body language, eye contact,actions, behaviors and so much more that are the stuff of the human soul and not transmittable by any electronic device.
Phyllis McGinley wrote, “Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything,but silence breaks the heart.” We can say a lot of things and make a lot of noise, but how many times is what we’re saying really nothing more than silence? How many times do we think we’re communicating and all we’re doing is conveying information? Your relationship will not survive on the conveyance of information, despite how adept you might be at doing it. Your relationship can only survive on communication. So you might be well-advised to ask if you’re conveying information and the relational silence that creates, or you’re communicating. There’s a world of difference.
We live our lives based on agendas. Most of our agendas are pretty subdued so that we don’t often recognize them or really comprehend exactly how they affect our behaviors and our choices. On the other hand, some of our agendas are glaring, screaming into our lives in a manner that every action and choice is methodically dictated by them.
Agendas have a methodical way of commandeering our thinking. They can create within us an ever-increasing sense that if we don’t adhere to them we’re going to be in big trouble. While agendas may innocently start out as goals or frameworks that are designed to productively channel various aspects of our lives, they often grow into monolithic proportions. Sometimes our agendas become tyrannical gods, legalistic rules, incessantly demanding expectations or rock-hard boundaries that are held as imperative. We then become our agendas and we subsequently project our agendas into everything we touch.
Because of the intimacy and vulnerability of relationships, agendas tend to rear their ugly heads with quite a bit of force. Most relationships don’t start out that way, but as they evolve so does the implementation and integration of our agendas. In time, our agendas become the things that define the relationship rather than the people in the relationship defining the relationship. There is a dictatorial sense to it all; a suffocating and strangling kind of orientation where people are made to fit an agenda. The relationship itself is thoroughly stifled and ends up pooling in the rank waters of relational stagnation. In time, the relationship can become intolerable and is therefore vacated.
There are a number of agendas that we forcefully cram into relationships, or cram relationships in to. If there’s one thing that’s for certain,certain agendas are certain to kill a relationship. In doing an agenda inventory, we may wish to look for some of these:
The Agenda of Power and Leverage
Typically we build relationships to build out our goals. Relationships have often become little more than a resource with the ultimate objective of the relationship to achieve whatever goal we have in mind. Relationships are often seen as a tool, some sort of asset, something that gives us power or leverage. Sometimes we see it as the thing that supplies us strength or motivation when we’re expended, or that resource undergirds us when our energies flag and our fears flare. It’s that thing that we can fall back on when we need a boost, or turn to when our emotional legs buckle, or something that lends some degree of accountability that causes us to “buck up” when we burning out. Whatever we use it for and wherever it fits, it becomes something of a resource rather than relationship.
To view a relationship as something to be used is to insure its death. When a relationship dies, a bit of us dies with it. In that sense, using a relationship for our advantage is clearly using it for our disadvantage, not to mention that the other person doesn’t fare all that well either. Relationships need to be fed and nurtured with ample space to allow them to flourish. Power and leverage too often becomes punitive and lethal.
The Agenda of “Because We’re Supposed To”
Of course we’re supposed to have friends. And because we’re supposed to have them we’d better go out and round up a few. After all, we wouldn’t want to look like social misfits, or undesirables, or people who live out on the fringe of society and have people look at us kind of sideways. So we have to claim knowledge of somebody, or that we hung out with so and so, or that we’ve have either enough invitations or maybe more than enough. Sometimes relationships are what we’re supposed to have in order to look the part, and so we go out and we collect them. It’s something like playing “dress up” where we put on people like some kind of finery and strut about with an air of importance and social finesse. It’s all about the “look at me” scenario,“ain’t I something?”
People are not clothing nor are they some sort of fashion accessory. They’re not points to be counted as we tally up our social scoreboard. They’re not steps on some sort of social ladder, nor are they an aphrodisiac for our insecurities. This agenda kills relationships.
The Agenda of Working Out My Issues
We all have issues. Sometimes we view relationships as the place where we can work out our issues. There’s some sort of belief that the person we’re in the relationship with will have some sort of ability to help us navigate our issues. It could be that they’re close to us, that we see them as committed to us, that we can be vulnerable with them in ways we can’t with others, or that relationships are all about helping everyone become the best that they can be. Relationships are sometimes seen as having this emotionally magical thing going on that’s got all the mystical ingredients in it. All we’ve got to do is lightly sprinkle this relational fairy dust on us long enough and abracadabra, we’re good. Whatever our mindset might be, relationships are sometimes seen as the place to heal of our issues. While healing can certainly take place, inherently a relationship does not possess everything that we need to heal everything in our lives.
The Agenda of Revenge
Sometimes we’re in a relationship to get back at someone else. The relationship that we’re in is about revenge, about throwing something in someone’s face that hurt us previously. At times the relationship we’re engaged in has little or nothing to do with the person that we’re in the relationship with. The relationship itself is in actuality targeting someone entirely outside the relationship. It’s about retribution fora perceived hurt that was inflicted or a harm done. Sometimes it’s purely about manipulation as we attempt to press our agendas with someone else through the relationship that we’re in. Other times it’s our way to break with another person or an entire social grouping by aligning ourselves with somebody who’s completely removed from them. Revenge wounds everybody, every time.
What’s Your Agenda?
Maybe you never thought about your agendas. They become such a natural part of our thinking we don’t even see them as agendas anymore. But they’re agendas and they’ll have the toxic impact that so many agendas have in relationships. Think about yours. Think about their legitimacy. Think about the agenda of your agendas. Think about where they come from. And most importantly, ask if you really want to keep them.
Albert Einstein said that “ an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Yet, we see reality as anything but illusion. Wikipedia states that in philosophy, “reality” is defined as “the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.” When we throw around the word “reality,” we assume it to mean all that’s really real. We see “reality” as something where all the fake and fraudulent has been entirely stripped away leaving nothing but that which is true and genuine. The word “reality” suggests something that’s completely grounded, that’s entirely true and that’s totally accurate. We sense it as something that’s solidly rock bottom and unarguably the end of the story. “Reality” for most of us is what life was like before we added all the junk to it that we’ve added. It’s the uncontaminated raw essence of existence. In other words, it’s the untainted, untouched and unalterable truth.
Shopping for Our Realities
Yet, out of our indomitable need to be masters of our own fates and the captains of our own ships, we prefer to shape our own realities. It’s odd that we think we have the ability to wield power that we really don’t possess at all. We don’t see ourselves as wonderfully privileged to be a part of this amazing journey that’s been laid out before us. Rather, we see ourselves as being people who have the inalienable right and uncontested license to design,fashion and form this journey from the ground up. We claim life solely as our private enterprise and we cast it entirely in our design. Indeed, we have a strange way of taking liberty with things that we really can’t take liberty with. We can be an arrogant bunch at times,thinking we have the ability or the right to manage things that we simply can’t.
In some respects it might be likened to some sort of god-complex or maybe the classic short-man syndrome. Whatever it is, we think we’re privileged enough or powerful enough to control that which we can’t. One of the realities of humanity is our sense that our right to independence extends to our right to craft our lives in whatever manner we choose to craft them. That then creates a mentality that a pre-existent reality which is universal in nature and scope is an entirely unfair and unjust hindrance. The realities that we create tell us that a universal reality can’t be a reality because of the manner in which it impedes us. Therefore, if we massage our minds enough to believe that a universal reality does not exist we must create our own reality.
It’s no news to anyone that there are many realities out there for the choosing. That’s what tends to make all of this a bit confusing. However, it does afford us the opportunity to embrace the reality of our choosing. And if there’s not one out there that really appeals to us, we can go right ahead and custom or semi-custom design our own.
Our Own Custom Designs
Our “reality” is often what we’ve constructed. We build out our lives and we fashion our existence, sometimes carrying those tasks out in very meticulous ways, and at other times doing so in rather abrupt and less than thoughtful ways. Sometimes we create our realities based on well laid out plans, and at other times we piece-meal things as we fly by the proverbial “seat of our pants.” Oftentimes we exercise great care because we care, and at other times we’re careless because we could care less. However and in whatever way we do it, what we construct stands before us looking strikingly real and credibly genuine at times. We can perform a down-right convincing job of rigorously constructing an intellectual,or emotional, or spiritual, or relational behemoth that looks breathtakingly lifelike. The pressing question becomes, does the “reality”we’ve created reflect the larger realities around us? And in creating our own “reality,” have we forfeited “reality?”
Our Semi-Custom Designs
The world around us seems like a grandly expansive buffet chock full of cheap imitations. It’s interesting that what we create is always an imitation of something else. Whether in whole or in part, the things that we fashion in life always borrow from something else. That suggests that there must be something original, some creative point of departure that emerged from nothing but itself. Everything after that is, to one degree or another, a copy.
So we shop this massive buffet of cheap imitations and we pick a bit of this and a bit of that. Sometimes we take things in their entirety,or we whack off or carve out the parts that appeal to us. Whatever it is that we walk out with we craft it into our realities. Therefore, our realities are borrowed and integrated into some sort of semi-custom design. What we borrow is what appeals. So our intent is to create a reality that’s appealing, that’s nice, and that’s comfy and cozy. Our semi-custom realities can be custom made to fit our personal agendas, our biases, our prejudices, our fears, and our emotional baggage. They can be fashioned to lend credence to our views, give us permission to avoid our pain, allow us to live in blissful ignorance, and rubber stamp whatever we want rubber stamped.
Borrowing
Then there’s the ability to just borrow our “reality” wholesale. It’s the “I’ll take one of those” mentalities where we simply grab whatever “reality” is closest or whatever “reality” is the easiest and run with it. In doing this we forfeit any ability to engage life as unique creations and become whatever someone else has designed. Sometimes we do this out of a compelling argument that convinces us that someone’s design of “reality” is the real deal. Whatever the motivation, we borrow a “reality” and we park ourselves in it and on it. Typically we never really question or scrutinize the “reality” of the “reality” simply because borrowing is a whole lot easier to do. So we live in a borrowed world on borrowed time.
Real“Reality”
Anything that we assume to do will obviously be limited by our limitations which are pretty limited. That means that if our “reality” is limited to what we create, we’ll end up living in a pretty tiny world that’s going to be thinly populated, pretty sparse, quite dreary and just plain flat. On our own we cannot begin to hope to exercise a degree of intellectual acumen, or emotional depth, or spiritual magnitude that could rise to even touch the slightest hem of the realities of the world we live in. We build our finite realities instead of exploring an unrestricted infinite reality. We then spin little lives in dark caverns that we’ve come believe are filled with irrepressible light; and we languish.
In reality, the question of “reality”has been bounced around throughout human history. It would appear that a hallmark of “reality”is that we didn’t create it. Second,“reality” is not the product of innovation or alteration. Third, if something’s hard and demanding it’s probably closer to reality than the easy stuff. Fourth, embracing reality rather than shaping it or borrowing it is going to give us the richest and fullest life. And finally, reality is expansive enough to give us a life-long journey of endless horizons and ceaseless discovery. The “reality” is that you might want to really think about it.
Someone once uttered the timeless saying that timing is everything. There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way. We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that we’re chasing. The whole element of timing seems critical. The more important something is, the greater the issue of timing. Timing can be so critical that at times we set out to minutely orchestrate the pieces and parts of whatever we’re doing so that everything is perfectly cinched and tightly in synch.
Yet sometimes it all falls apart. I mean it disintegrates; something like Murphy’s Law times three or four. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of something being a bit out of step,or not lining up quite right. It’s not about tweaking something or nudging it back into whatever place it was supposed to be. Sometimes the wheels fall off the thing, which then causes everything else to fall off as well. We end up with the classic train wreck where we met an uphill train on a downhill grade. More than that however, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason for the train wreck. It simply didn’t need to be. It was all way beyond any odds or all statistics. Whatever happened, it was a cruelly extenuated string of dumb luck.
Sometimes it just all falls apart . .. all of it. We’re left standing dumbfounded, mired in the confusion of it all and running our minds down a thousand roads of the classic “what could have gone wrong” question. Sure, we’ll likely find some things that weren’t too well thought out or strategies that were a bit ill-conceived. We might unearth some rationales that now, in hindsight, aren’t quite as rational as we originally thought them to be. We even might stumble over some misdirected motivations or less than ethical agendas that were part of the whole thing. The way we pasted it all together may have not been entirely seamless and the stuff that we pasted together in the first place might have been less of a fit than we have originally thought. We may have even chosen to force fit some stuff that in the end really didn’t mesh a whole lot. Yeah, there are probably some quirks and a few flaws.
Yet, there are times when these quirks and flaws and other dynamics really represent only a small portion of the whole. We dig and scratch and scrape only to uncover a sparse handful of these dynamics. There are times when the sum total of them is far too small and far too innocuous to really explain why the whole thing fell apart. They don’t add up sufficiently to explain the mess that lays scattered, derelict and broken at our feet.
In the end we’re left with bushels of questions that rot for lack of answers. Things just didn’t line up. There’s no sustaining or compelling rationale other than it didn’t happen when and how it should have happened. If the timing had been good, it all would have all been good. But the timing was not and now everything lays wrecked and ravaged.
Sometimes the losses are marginal. At other times they’re catastrophic. Sometimes we can just pickup our toys, brush them off, head on home and play another day. Sometimes there’s nothing left to pick up other than the charred ash of incinerated dreams and the unidentifiable pieces of years’ worth of hope and sacrificial toil. Sometimes it’s no big deal, and at other times the whole thing is a deal-breaker.
How Does It Work?
Maybe we should expand our thinking a bit. Maybe we should ask the question “is loss sometimes the best thing that can happen?” That’s a bitter and biting pill to swallow, on top of the fact that it’s a completely unsavory to even entertain in the first place. It suggests however that things in life don’t line up because maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe what we were doing was in reality a whole lot more wrong than it was right. Maybe it would have been a whole lot more damaging than it would have been constructive. Maybe it would have been the thing that would have robbed us totally blind rather than enriching us beyond measure. Maybe it would have become the monster rather than the malevolent benefactor. Maybe the fact that wheels fell off of it and it derailed was one of the biggest blessings we’ve experienced in a very long time.
At the beginning, when we’ve started to head off into most of our endeavors we don’t have the perspective of what this will look like on the other end. All we see is what we have in front of us, how it all goes together, and then based on that how we guess it will all come out in the wash. We can take a shot at speculating outcomes and be pretty convinced that our conceptualization will indeed be what it will look like on the other side. We can do the math and project the numbers and point to what it should all add up to. We can play with our mental bell-curves and crunch the emotional numbers to calculate an outcome. But sometimes things don’t add up according to our calculations, despite how tedious they might be. Sometimes our best projections because our most haunting nightmares.
We’re typically not open to this kind of thinking because we’re angry about the loss and we’re licking our wounds because we feel jipped. We’re not in the mindset to think about the fact that maybe it blew up so that we wouldn’t. All we tend to focus on is the feeling that we’ve been victimized, ripped off, short-changed and short-sheeted. The reality is that sometimes we are. But quite often this is life’s way of putting on the brakes.
Is It Untimely?
Are our circumstances untimely, or very timely? Do our situations appear untimely only because we’re seeing what didn’t happen, but we refuse to see the things that are happening right in the middle of what didn’t happen? Are we so myopic that we can’t see beyond the train wreck to the fact that the wreck stopped the train and that that might have been the very thing that compassionately saved us, or maybe graciously redirected us? To our chagrin, the exact time and place when we think something shouldn’t have happened may very well bethe exact time and place when it absolutely should happened.
Rose Kennedy said that “Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.” It’s not about what we achieve, but what we learn on the way to the achievement. We glue our eyes to the goal and we ignore the journey on the way there. And that journey will often involve our world’s falling apart despite heroic efforts to keep them together. Yet, our world’s falling apart have within the event great lessons that we would be well advised to embrace. Moments are not always nice, but they can be rich. So, when your world falls apart in the untimeliness of living, look at the wreckage. There’s something rich there for you.
What’s love? That question is probably a topic to be debated. We’ve got a million different definitions for this thing that we call “love.” It seems that we’re in love with the idea of“love,” but we’re not all that caught up in the sacrifices that love will demand of us. And so, we craft and we carve and we contort love to be something that we love, but something that we don’t love so much that it demands much of us. None of that is really love. And so, what is love?
It’s the stuff of endless novels, myths and legends. Entire movies and plays are driven from the first line to the last by this single theme. We live for it, fight for it, plead for it, cheat for it and die for it. We even go so far as to fabricate cheap and limp imitations of love to at least get a small piece of something that looks like love. But none of that is really love.
We step into the quandary of the greeting card aisle and we’re faced with an endless variety of cards that extol love. We’ve got a whole holiday dedicated to it. Our tombstones are cut with inscriptions that talk about how we loved or were loved. We’re quick to say that we love certain foods or certain people or certain hobbies or certain colors. Sometimes we speak the word“love” with a deep passion we don’t even understand. Other times we throw it around to describe something we tend to like or feel good about. But what is it?
Love is Powerful
One thing’s for sure, love is powerful. We all want it, or in reality we all need it. It’s inborn in us as some sort of fundamental human need that’s as important as water, food and oxygen. You can’t grab it. You can’t box it. It doesn’t ship well and refrigeration doesn’t preserve it. Love doesn’t allow you to control it or catch it or herd it. We didn’t invent it and all of our efforts to dissect it end up leaving us as mystified as ever. There are a million different stanzas and an equally large number of musical scores that bespeak of our love for “love,” but it still evades us. It’s abundantly clear that we’ve in love with “love.” But what in the world is it?
Feeling or Decision?
Is love a feeling or a decision? We can say with some certainty that love is a deep human emotion where the most fundamental of our passions are stirred. There’s something so powerful about love that people have risen to unbelievable heights and achieved phenomenal things because of love. On the other side of that, people have also plunged to frightening lows that some individuals never crawl out of. Love is a powerful emotion that makes us uniquely human and gives us the ability to do things we never imagined we could do. But, is love a feeling or a decision?
What if Love is Both?
Indeed,true love is a profound emotion. However, it must move beyond an emotion simply because love without a decision that throws love into action is love that is in the very process of dying. Love without a decision never moves love outside of itself. Love without a decision never touches anyone but us. Love without a decision will utterly rob us of the very miracles that only love can pull off. Love without a decision, or a decision without love will both fail miserably.
And so we choose. We choose when it hurts to choose. We choose when the choice may cost us dearly. We choose when not choosing seems the better choice. We choose when everyone around us deems such a choice as absolutely lunacy because they’ve forgotten what love is. We choose because love will never be unleashed unless we make a decision to unleash it.
Love as the Expression of True Living
There’s one final thing about real love that makes it unique. In fact, it might be the most important thing. Living and sacrificing in love gives life an authentic richness far superior to a life that’s invested in just taking, or trying to give based on some cost/benefit analysis. Love is first and foremost about how it helps someone else. But in sacrificing for someone else something powerful returns to us. Love kind of splashes back on us. It will eventually come full circle possessing more than what we’d sent it out with. That’s enriching in ways that are truly great. Make a decision to love and it will return. Make a choice and you will be loved. Choose to love and you’ll end up falling in love with loving.