God of Anyone

There are persons from my past that I struggle to understand how they can live the lives they're living right now. Lives that look good, at least from the outside. Jobs with good pay. Families with smiles on their faces. Houses with manicured lawns. Like...don't you remember what a horrible person you were? 

There are persons that I look at today and wonder why their lives aren't better than they are. Persons who are kind, decent, hard-working persons. Persons who have fought for everything they have and then, often, given that everything away. Persons who love deeply, judge rarely, and spread kindness through the world. 

There are persons that I grieve because they seem to have thrown so much away. Made some bad choices. Made some wrong choices. Done some things that have done more harm than good, but I understand how it happens. I know enough of their story to recognize how the world set them back, how the world got set against them. How sometimes, the world even managed to set them against themselves. 

I have a knack for reading more deeply into others than most of the world does. It's a gift that only became sharper during my time as a chaplain. God just gives me a sense for these things. 

And I have prayed many a prayer for these persons. 

All of them. 

And I don't know why it is that God answers some prayers and not others. I don't know why He heals some broken persons and not others. I don't know why some folks get to taste their redemption on this side of heaven and others have to simply wait with confident assurance. If there is a rhyme or a reason to it, it's not one that I recognize. 

What I do know is that that's not my problem. Those aren't my questions to answer. God never asks us to explain Him to others; He tells us to tell them about Him. About His goodness, about His mercy, about His love. 

And as we have all known because we have lived it, part of what we know about Him is that He can (and does) give everything to anyone He wants. (Jeremiah 27:5)

To the CEO in the corner office. To the stay-at-home mom. To the addict on the corner. To the cancer patient in curtain 13 (but not the one in curtain 11). To the little boy with no friends. To the little girl who is the life of the party. To the one who has taken a wrong turn. To the one walking so narrow a path they didn't even realize turns were an option. To the tempted. To the tempter. To the mature. To the young. To the struggling. To the thriving. 

To anyone He wants. Whether we, in our finite human minds, understand it or agree with it or rejoice in it or not. 

Actually, that's how I got here. I'm guessing probably you, too. 

And part of being a person of faith is not just learning to accept that, but to recognize that whatever God gives and to whomever He gives it serves to increase His glory in some meaningful way. That is, I don't have to understand it. I don't have to be able to defend it. But I do have to recognize that when I see someone blessed, that alone has something to teach me about God - has something to teach the world about God - that we might not have known otherwise. 

So rejoice! The Lord is good...to anyone He chooses. 

Even a wretch like me. 

God of Near and Far

Where is God when you need Him?

It's a question that many of us have asked at one time or another. Maybe you're asking it right now. At the toughest moments in our lives, we all want to know - is God here? Is He near us? Or is He in some far-off place in the "the heavens?" 

The answer is a painful...both. 

If we're being honest, I have felt this. At difficult points in my life, at traumatic moments, in seasons when it has felt like so much in hanging in the balance, I have both felt the presence of God as though His very breath was what was warming my heart and at the same time, understood Him to be so much bigger, so much greater, so much wiser, etc. as to be so far away. 

It can be frustrating, even for the believer, but I think it's meant to be a comfort. I think that if we take time to understand it, it is a tremendous comfort for us even in times of deepest trouble. 

Because what it means, what I have finally understood it to mean after decades of wrestling with it, is that God is both near enough to let me know that He loves me intimately, dearly, personally...and that He is big enough that He's also at that very moment being the God that I trust to be in charge of the whole of Creation. 

Jeremiah said that God is both near and far away (23:23). I have come to understand this means that He is both in my heart and on His throne.

And that is exactly where I need Him to be. 

In moments of greatest trouble, when darkness is setting in, when trauma is knocking at the door, when I'm wrestling not just with the world but with myself and sometimes, yes, even with my God, I need to know both that He loves me and that He is still God. I need to know that He's here and that He's also taking care of things. 

As I write that, I am thinking about perhaps being out to dinner with my Lord and something goes amiss. He folds His napkin and lays it tenderly on His plate, pats my hand, and says, "Excuse me a moment." Then, He goes somewhere in the restaurant and speaks to the manager and takes care of the situation, only to return and dine with me. 

The folded napkin reminds me He is still here, still with me; the way the problem gets resolved reminds me of His authority to take care of things. 

The folded grave clothes remind me that He is still here, still with me, resurrected from the grave. The small little glimpses of goodness and restoration and things being set right that I get on this side of heaven remind me that He is taking care of things. 

He is both in my heart and on His throne, and that's exactly where I need Him to be.

God of Good Reason

You've probably seen the social media memes that say something like, "Just my luck. Today, I finally found a purpose for that scrap of wood I saved for 27 years, but threw out last week." And we laugh, not because it's silly, but because it's us. Because we all have this thing in us that at least wants to hold onto things (even if we can talk ourselves out of it) because the day might come when we want/need it again. 

As I write, I have a box of "parts" sitting in the basement - hardware, screws, wheels that I've taken off of things that I'm throwing away. I have a tub of fabrics upstairs that I have taken off of things that were no longer worth keeping, but maybe the good bits of fabric might come in handy someday. I have a box of vintage electronics because that was fun, once upon a time, and maybe I will want that kind of fun again. 

We save things because they seem important in some way at the time, but there comes a point when we start to ask ourselves what, realistically, we're ever going to do with them. 

What did we save them for?

God, on the other hand, has no such questions. God knows exactly what He's saving us for. 

From the very moment God created us, He knew what He was going to do with us. Every time He has had to reach down and pull us back in, He has known what the end of our story was. He has known the next chapter, even. Every time He has delivered us from evil, He has known what the good in our lives is going to do. 

Jeremiah says God saves us for a good purpose - a purpose that He knows the whole time He's saving us again and again and again. (15:11) 

And He says that when that good purpose comes about, all the things that have come against us will come crawling back, begging us for help. 

That means that God not only saves us for a good purpose, but He saves us for a victory. And if that's not an encouragement to you in times of trouble, I don't know what would be.

The Lord is saving you, and He knows exactly why. He knows exactly what comes next, what you will do, the powers of darkness you will push back, the hope you will give, the mercy you will extend, the love you will share. Not some day, but this day. This very day, when the things that have come against you come crawling back for mercy and you...you have it to give. 

By the grace of God. 

God Gives Away

"It's all God's, and we're just passing it around." 

A friend said that to me once upon a time, when I was wrestling with being on the receiving end of her generosity, and I have never forgotten it. 

The truth is that everything we have comes from God. It is His gift to us. And as such, it it never really ours, but always belongs to Him, which means that He is free to do with it at any time whatever He wants. 

Take, for example, Israel. Old Testament Israel. This was the gift of God to His people, His promise to them fulfilled. He told them He was leading them to a land of milk and honey, a land that would be theirs. He told them He was going to make them numerous and prosperous in that land. And He delivered. 

But then, because of their sin, He took it all away. Every bit of it. Every bit of them. All their prosperity, gone in an instant. Given away to an invading nation, who was greedily eager to take it. And it's easy for us to read this story and to think that Assyria and Babylon are the bad guys, the ruthless pirates who take things that don't belong to them and conquer peoples just for the fun of it (and for their own ego). 

The prophets tell a different story. 

The prophets tell us that it is God who has given to them what they're taking. That God is giving away what He once gave to His people. That He is choosing to do this...for His glory. (Jeremiah 17:3)

It reminds me to live with open hands. 

I can sometimes become attached to my life the way it is. Become comfortable with what I have and what I'm doing with it. Take for granted the gifts of God that make today possible. And then, I feel a certain pain when those things disappear. When they are taken away. When they are stolen from me or just vanish. 

But if I think about what the prophets say, and what my friend said - that it's all God's, and we're just passing it around, then it's easier to reframe my experience of loss into simply another chapter in God's story. 

What if He's taking from me to give to someone else to increase His glory? What if He's just taking from me to increase His glory? What if my loss is His gain? 

What if it's just time to re-allocate some assets in the Kingdom? 

What if the room He's making in my life by taking something away from me is about to be filled up with some greater thing He's re-allocating from somewhere else...for my good and His glory?

What if we're just passing some things around for a season? 

What if those things I feel like I'm losing were never really mine to begin with, but always His? 

If God can take Israel and give it to Babylon for a season, only to eventually use even this as a glorious chapter in His story, then what can He do with the Promise in my life that I'm so desperate to try to cling to...if only I will open my hands and let Him take what He has given me...and give it away? 

Teresa

From even before I met her, Teresa was unhesitatingly generous. 

We were those persons who knew about each other long before we ever actually met. I was working with Teresa's daughter in a former job, trying to figure out what my next move in the universe was, and her daughter told me that Teresa was working toward retirement and thought that hooking us up might be a good match for both of us. By the time we actually saw each other, we had heard so much about each other that it was like old friends reconnecting, not strangers meeting. 

Actually, by that point, she had already wholeheartedly recommended me to her manager. I think the first time I met Teresa was when that manager walked me upstairs during my interview to show me my new digs. Primarily on the power of her word, he was hiring me. 

Teresa and I hit it off well, as everyone suspected that we would. One of the things that struck me about her right away was how freely she shared. Want some of her lunch? A snack? She's going down to the cafeteria; can she buy you anything? Here, take this. She was getting rid of such-and-such; were you interested in having it? She'd bring it to you. At every turn, I felt like Teresa was freely offering me things - not in a pushy sort of way, but just as a friendly gesture. Just as a person earnestly wanting to share from her resources. 

The thing was...I was hiring into her job. I had a sense of how deep I thought those resources went. I had spent my life around lower-class and lower-middle-class persons, and I had this deep insecurity in me about taking anything from anyone. Especially anyone I thought might be scrimping to offer it to me. 

So we clashed over that a little bit. At least, in my heart, we did. But when she shows up having already acquired the thing she wants to share with you, what do you say? 

It would be a very long time before I found out that Teresa's resources were not as scarce as my own. They were not in my lower-middle-class framework. The truth is that until that time, I hadn't met very many folks with resources in their lives who didn't flaunt it. Who didn't make it a point of you knowing exactly how much they had and what a big favor it was for them to helping you out or offering you anything at all. Maybe a handful. (As I write, I'm thinking of at least one more who I absolutely must tell you about sometime.) 

But even when I found out what I had not previously known, it didn't change the way I perceived Teresa's heart. Not one bit. She still had this unhestitating generosity that just oozed out of her, this deep love for connection and for just bringing her bit alongside your bit and going together for awhile. 

And that's the kind of generosity that I want to live in the world. 

I am blessed to be in a season where I have more resources now than I used to, and though I am by no means financially rich, I am extremely wealthy. And I want to share from that wealth. But I want to share from that wealth in authentic, non-assuming ways, simply offering what I have and giving it anyway and using it to build those connections, for coming alongside, because those are the things that I love. 

And because I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of that generosity - sometimes against my will, sometimes against my insecurity, sometimes against my ability to receive well, but on the receiving end nonetheless - and the kind of connection that comes from a relationship freely given...that's an amazing gift. 

May I be such a blessing to others.  

God With Us

When you're searching for God, where is the first place you look for Him? When you pray, to where do you turn your eyes? (What about the eyes of your heart?) 

It's easy for us to think of God as somewhere "up there" - some mist in the clouds, some phantom in the heavens, some wisp in the wind. (Remember, though, that the prophet told us that God was not in the wind.) 

Because we don't know what He "looks like," it's hard for us to envision Him, so we simply try to envision something so much bigger than us that we cannot possibly fathom it, and in doing so, we end up disconnected from the very God we seek. 

Our solution to this, historically, has been to connect to the person of Jesus. After all, God sent His Son to walk among us in our flesh so that we could see Him face-to-face and learn what it means to relate to Him. So when we try to connect to a vision of God, we sometimes default to a vision of Jesus - the walking, talking, flesh-and-blood Son of God who is a little easier to wrap our minds around. 

But...God has always been walking and talking. 

He has not been so far away as we fear. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. On the earth, He created a garden, and He then created man and placed him in the Garden. He creates a woman for the man, and together, they go off and do the one thing they are not permitted to do, and in the very next scene, Adam and Eve heard God walking through the Garden in the cool of the day. 

God was walking. 

They dove into some nearby bushes to try to hide, suddenly ashamed that they were naked, and then God called to them, "Where are you?" 

God was talking. 

From the very beginning, God was walking and talking. In fact, this is one of the things that the prophets will continue to mention when they try to remind the people how different the Lord is from their idols, which have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear and mouths but do not speak. 

The Lord, by contrast, talks and walks. (Jeremiah 10:5, for example.) Always has been. Always will be. 

With eyes that see, ears that hear, a mouth that speaks, and a body that moves. 

No need to dream of Him as some phantom in the clouds or wisp in the wind. He's closer than we think. We need only to walk out of our bushes and see. 

God Listens

You've probably heard someone say that we don't listen to hear any more; we listen to respond. How often has someone been talking to you, and you're already preparing your response in your head before they've even finished their sentence? 

There are reasons that we do this. 

Sometimes, we do it because what we're really craving is connection, and we think that someone else is really craving connection, too, so we're preparing in our minds to share a similar story that we've lived so that we can bond over the mutual life experience that we've had. 

Sometimes, we do it because we believe we have some bit of wisdom to share. We are certain that if someone would just do x, y, or z, it would change their story. Often, we believe this because we have lived it - or a version of it - ourselves, and this is what we learned. So we are anxious to share. 

Sometimes, we do it because we're busy and we're just trying to move this little social foray along. We don't really have time for this, so we think that being ready to interject and wrap up the conversation will move us on quickly to the next thing. 

Sometimes, we do it because we are not auditory processors. That is, our brains don't fully understand the story someone else is telling us until we interact with it in some meaningful way, so we start to interact with it in our own heads, in an attempt to be more connected, but all that ends up doing is disconnecting us from being present with the person who is talking...and hearing the rest of their story. 

I confess I am guilty of all of these. 

But I have also spent a good number of years of my life in the ministry of presence (another term for chaplaincy), and one of the things that I have had to learn is how to simply sit and listen. 

Not to respond. Not to fix. Not to advise. Not to judge. Not to encourage. But simply to be present and to listen. 

And you know what? 

Of all of the persons I've encountered in my years, the ones that have been most thankful for my ministry are the ones with whom I feel like I have done the least. The ones I didn't have anything to say to. The ones I didn't feel qualified to advise. The ones I didn't try to fix or solve or heal. The ones I simply heard. 

Thank you for listening. I just needed someone to hear me. 

And isn't that a great gift? 

The prophet Jeremiah says that this is one of the gifts that God gives us. He simply listens. He listens carefully (8:6). He sits while we talk, and He hears us.

Not to fix. Not to solve. Not to advise. Not to judge. But just to be present, to truly connect, to hear us, and to let us know that we are heard. God is listening. 

It's a great gift, indeed. 

God of Ruin

For centuries, one of the big games in international tourism has been the ruins. Ruins of ancient Greece, ruins of ancient Rome, ruins of ancient Israel. We are drawn to the places where just a little bit remains, where just a small bit still stands. 

The thing about ruins is that they kind of look like what they used to be. The pillars may not be as tall as they once were. The columns might not be as round. But there's enough of the shape of them left that our imagination can easily fill in the gaps. Sometimes, they give us a picture of what something might have previously looked like, and we look at the little bit of rubble sitting in front of us and...we can see that. Our imaginations help us to understand what our eyes cannot quite see, but what our vision certainly hints at.

At the same time, many of us fear that our lives might one day go to ruins. We fear this because we live in a world not of ruin, but of destruction. We look at the aftermath of storms, which the news is more than happy to show us, and we see...nothing. Nothing but rubble. Dust and dirt and debris. Shatters and shards of things that once were. We look at piles of twisted metal, shredded wood, torn lives, and we can't even fathom what used to be there. 

That was a life? 

It is a life in ruins, but not the kind of ruins that spark our imaginations. This is a life destroyed. 

For those of us who are persons of faith, I think one of the fears that can quietly creep into our hearts is the fear that God is going to do this to us. That in His attempts to turn us into whatever He needs us to be or wants us to be or created us to be, in His plan to cast things out of our lives that are hindering us from becoming who He intended us to be, He's going to just completely destroy our lives. 

We get this idea that God is going to rip through our lives like a natural disaster and all that will be left behind is absolute destruction. Shatters and shards. Dust and dirt and debris. Nothing that looks at all like a life. 

But that's not what Jeremiah says. 

Jeremiah says that God can ruin without destroying (4:27). That is, when God determines to tear something down in our life, it doesn't mean it's all rubble; sometimes, it means it's just a bit washed away. Sometimes, it means the columns are still standing, that the pillars are smaller, but still formed enough that anyone looking at our life with a little imagination - including ourselves - can see what was going on here. 

The ruins give us a chance to see a bit of the original design without being all encumbered by the whole structure. They let us see the bones without all the fat. They get us back to the basics of looking at a thing and, with a sanctified imagination, seeing it in its fullest glory. They help us to retrain our vision to see more than what seems to be there. 

This is what happens when God puts our lives in ruins. We need not dig through the debris to try to find any little piece that might still somehow be intact; rather, we look with eyes of faith to see the things still standing and develop a vision for how they are the foundation of what fills this space. 

It's a dangerous prayer, indeed, but an important one: Lord, ruin my life, that I may learn to see (and appreciate) its fullest glory. 

God of Good Seed

Like many Americans, I feel like I am in a constant fight with my yard. When I first moved into this house, most of the yard was taken up with or covered by trees - a giant ash tree right in the center of my property, the neighbors' maple giants, and one neighbor's private plot of some kind of pine or evergreen that hung over the fence just enough to drop its needles and permanently damage the pH of the soil in what I wanted to be my flower bed. 

Add to that a major flood that swept away a great amount of dirt and a lifetime of dogs (no regrets) whose urine routinely destroys patches of the littles bits of grass I've been able to have and the unpredictable midwest weather, which seems to scorch the entire earth for at least one long stretch per summer, and you can understand why having actual grass in my actual yard can seem like such a challenge. 

And yet...

And yet, I keep trying. I keep buying the bags of grass seed. I keep sowing it across the bare spots. I cultivate and aerate and spread and water and adjust my mowing and try to get any shades of green to start popping up. 

One of the things that has frustrated me in the past few years is how often I will buy a bag of grass seed and sow it around the bare spots of the yard only to have three little blades of tender grass crop up...and a whole new mess of weeds of varieties that I've never had in my yard before. 

The only thing I can figure is that not everything in that bag is grass seed. 

Some of that stuff, and it seems like this is increasingly so as the years go by and the quality of our commercial products go down, must be weed seed. 

It is never so with God. 

God talks a lot about seed in His Word. He talks about sowing and planting, reaping and harvesting, watering and growing. He talks about seed that falls on the good soil and seed that falls on the not-so-good places, places where it doesn't grow so well. He was talking to a people for whom seed was a way of life. A people who really understood seed and the importance of it. 

And what His Word repeatedly assures us is that God only ever plants good seed. (Jeremiah 2:21)

In other words, God's only planting the things that are supposed to grow. He's only putting out there the things that are supposed to come back to Him. If you get a bag of grass seed from God, there aren't any weeds in it. 

There are still weeds, of course; weeds are wild. And God acknowledges the reality of them in His parables. But the weeds are not in the seeds; the seed is pure. It's exactly and wholly and fully what it's supposed to be, with no rabble mixed in. 

So whatever God's planting in your life, you can be sure that it is pure. That doesn't mean there won't be weeds. It just means that what God is doing is exactly, wholly, and fully what God intends to do. Pure and simple. 

Pat

My high school years were rough. I mean, most of my school years were rough, and high school was no different. I didn't have a lot of friends. I had a few kids who tolerated me, but not a lot of friends. I was a bit of a nerd, intellectually advanced, socially stunted, over-involved in school activities (band, newspaper, science club, academic bowl, etc.), and dealing with the trauma of my life in a heavy way. My dad died early my sophomore year, after an 18-month fight with an aggressive cancer, and that just sent me spiraling even further. 

So...it was rough. 

I would go to the lunch room and try to get there first, speed through the line and grab my chicken sandwich, scarf it down while the rest of my small social group was trickling in, make as much small talk as I could stand, start to feel insecure about myself (I have never been good at small talk), and go out into the hallway and down toward the guidance office, where no one else ever sat. I would slink down against the wall right outside the guidance door and...just sit. I can't remember actually doing anything. Maybe reading a book every now and then. 

We had three guidance counselors. Mine was a big ol' flake. I didn't like her. She didn't understand complex things and kept actively discouraging me from liking things or trying to pursue them because "that's not what girls do." She had a very antiquated idea of gender roles, and she had a very firm belief that anyone earning straight A's could not have any actual problems in their life, and we just didn't gel. 

But Pat...

I was scared of Pat, honestly. Intimidated may be a better word. I just had a sense that she was someone who was capable of figuring me out and blowing my whole cover - and that possibility both thrilled and terrified me. It's probably why I sat outside of her office every day and pretended not to be looking for her, while also kind of looking for her and hoping to be noticed, but not too noticed, but then also completely non-chalantly pretending I hadn't even noticed her when she started to speak to me. 

Honestly, sometimes, I didn't notice her. I was firmly stuck in my own little trauma world during those years and was trying desperately to just make it through high school without crumbling from the inside out. 

She made it a point, though, to speak to me. To say hi. She started to ask how I was doing, just in passing, and would just acknowledge whatever answer I gave her, which was something usually so very high school-ish. "I'm good." (I was never good in high school.) Until one day, I just lost it. She spoke to me, and I just lost it. 

And Pat...was ready for it. 

I pass a lot of persons in my life. Persons for whom it seems strange that they would be in that place at that time, just as I happened to be there. Persons who are either positioning themselves to be noticed or being positioned by God that I might notice them. And...I notice them. I notice them, and I notice myself in them - that person who was feeling so insecure about herself that she couldn't tolerate something so seemingly simple as a lunch room full of peers, that person so hoping to be noticed that she was both trying to be noticed and also not to be noticed too much, that person who needed more than anything to be seen. 

And I try to see them. I try to let myself get involved. I try to engage even in small ways. And...I try to be ready. I try to be ready for whatever they're building toward, whether they are conscious of what's coming or not. 

Pat taught me what it is like to be on the receiving end of such grace, and I have never forgotten it.  

God of New Life

Every year, I read through the full Bible and try to make at least one note every day of something that jumps out at me, something that hits my heart. I always try to journal something I haven't journaled before, to pick something new out of each day's reading instead of falling back on the same old things all the time. I'm writing these reflections from the notes I made two years ago (yes, it's taking me that long to reflect on them and put them into the form that I want), and as I came to today's reflection, I realized that just this morning - this exact morning - I made the exact same note from the exact same verse in my journal. 

Maybe that means I'm always in a similar place this time of year, that the same verse would jump out at me in the same way. Maybe I'm always in this place, and this verse just hits like fresh water on a hot day every time I come across me. Maybe God just wants me to pay special attention to this verse for some reason that I have yet to figure out. 

Whatever it is, this is the verse and this is the note: 

God does not allow pain without birth. (Isaiah 66:9)

The actual verse says something like, would God bring you to the pain of a birth and then not deliver? 

Of course, we know that in the real world, this very thing does sometimes happen. It happens more than we want it to. We go through all the pain of growing and developing and coming to new life, only to have it falter at the implementation stage. Only to have something go wrong. Only to not quite get to where we thought we were headed. 

But we have vernacular for this in our church lingo, and it goes something like this: it feels like Friday, but Sunday's a-comin'. 

Because in our heart of hearts, we believe this. We believe that it's not over until it's good and if it's not good, it's not over. We believe that God doesn't bring us through all the pain of labor and not deliver us. We believe that when the promise of new life is before us, when we can feel it in our loins, when we have it aching in our hearts, it's coming. For real. For sure. 

God hasn't brought us this far to only bring us this far. 

We haven't gone through this just to go through it, but to grow through it. New life is coming. 

That's harder to believe in some seasons than in others. It's harder to hold onto sometimes. It's hard to let it sink into our hearts when that first drop hits so hollow in this empty place that feels like it's been waiting for too long and that echo...oh, that echo of hope as it hits like that...it's almost too much to bear. You can start feeling like everything that's been growing in you is about to be stillborn, like you're never going to hear that cry of new life that you've been waiting oh, so long to hear. Like maybe it's not new life you've been growing after all, but something more like a kidney stone - something that's just supposed to pass. 

Friends, no. For God has not giving us a spirit of kidney stones, but of new life - and life abundant. He's growing in us something good, and He's bringing it not to pass, but to be. Delivery is just around the corner, and all of this pain...it's gonna be worth it. It might feel like Friday - or as I've found is more often the case in my life, Saturday - but Sunday is a-comin'. It is. You've got to believe it. 

And if right now, you're in a place where you can't believe it, know this: I am believing it for you. Because I've seen it too much to believe any different. So just hold on. 

Would God bring you this far, in this much pain, with this much trouble, and not deliver you? 

God Suffers

I work in healthcare. I've worked in healthcare for a long time. And my work in healthcare has let me see some of the best that humanity has to offer. (Some of the worst, too, but that's another story for another day.) 

In times in which we are struggling and broken and confused and hurt, it's such a blessing to have someone alongside of us who is struggling with us. And that's what I get to see - I get to see men and women, moms and dads, husbands and wives, sons and daughters who are carrying these tremendous weights of stress because their loved one is lying in a hospital bed, struggling to get better. 

It's more common today than it was a decade ago when I first started in healthcare to see the relatives of the infirm complaining about the burden they carry, talking about how heavy it is for them, lamenting the life that's been forced on them by "having" to care for someone else, but you still get those moments when someone is just aching in the depth of their soul because someone they love is hurting and there's so very little (in earthly terms) they feel like they can do to help. 

You can see the weariness on the wife's face as she holds her husband's hand and tries to keep him from being too restless. You can see the angst on the father's face as he climbs into the bed with his child, trying to give them refuge from the fear. You can see the grief starting to form on the son's face as he watches his mother decline more rapidly than anyone thought possible, as he starts to make the arrangements for hospice care. 

And you can even see it in the faces that have to, reluctantly, turn away for a moment because they simply can't bear to watch it any more. Can't bear to look at the pain and the fight and the fear that is ravaging their once-vibrant loved ones. 

Friends, this is how God feels about us. 

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that God suffers when His people suffer (63:9). And we're not talking about a God who is exasperated, who as at the end of His rope, who can't believe He's got to shoulder one more burden and right now, as if there is some season of life that is better for the hard things than another. We're not talking about a God who suddenly gets too much on His plate because we are so weak and fallen and broken and infirm. 

We're talking about a God who cries silently at our bedside, holding our hand while we sleep and praying for our rest. We're talking about a God who tenderly keeps providing, holding a proverbial spoon to our mouths while we struggle against loss of appetite or a sudden inability to swallow. We're talking about a God doesn't go home, but spends however many days in a row as we need Him right here by our side - in the same old dirty clothes, weary Himself, knowing that His presence is the best thing He can do for us right now. 

We're talking about a God who sometimes has to, reluctantly, turn away for a moment because seeing us like this - broken, fragile, traumatized, torn, hurting, aching, infirm - breaks His ever-loving heart. For real. 

He suffers when we are suffering. 

His love for us is that great.

God of Peace

We live in a world where human beings feel so fragile and delicate that it can be hard for us to speak the truth to one another any more. We sweep offenses under the rug, where they fester until the stench is so bad we cannot ignore it any more, all in the name of trying to be nice...or respectful...or, at least, non-confrontational. 

It's a world in which we have an excuse for just about everything, and we're always anxious to jump in and explain why we did something incorrectly or why we made a wrong choice or what factors were at play when we did something that we normally wouldn't have done. Anything to make someone else understand that we shouldn't be held responsible for our decisions because we didn't really make a choice...it just kind of happened. Social pressure and stress and trauma and all that, you know. 

And I confess that my mannerisms have led others to believe they have to treat me this way, too. That I am somehow too fragile for correction. That I have an arsenal of excuses in my pocket, ready to launch at any perceived slight. Because I want to be perfect, and somehow, not being perfect would crush me. Nobody wants to crush me. 

But you know what? 

I prefer to be corrected. 

I prefer to face the repercussions of the choices I make, even if I didn't feel like I was making them. Even if I felt like I was getting carried along by the waves of something I didn't ask for, there's still part of me that understands that I chose not to put my feet down and stop myself from getting carried away. There's part of me that understands that to a very great degree, the things that happen in my life happen by my own choosing. And yes, even failing to choose is a choice. 

Isaiah says that God changes punishment to peace (60:17), and this is what I find is most true when someone chooses to speak truth into my life. To call me out on something. To point out the places where I am falling short or even, yes, failing.

At first, like everyone, I feel the sting. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. But when I get some time and space to actually reflect, when I have a moment when I don't feel that impulse to defend myself (and better yet, when I have a relationship where I don't feel that impulse to defend myself), what I find is that...they're right. Whatever they're calling me out on, they're absolutely right. 

Most of the stuff that others would call me out on are the things I do when I'm not my best self. When I've let myself get carried away. When I'm not standing firm on the things that I know in my heart - things about me and about God and about who God made me to be. At first, I feel the sting - the sting of failure, the sting of hurt, the sting of the hurt that I have caused, but when I get a moment to actually reflect on it, when I let the critique or criticism or even consequence settle down into my heart, I usually breathe a great big sigh of relief. 

Someone has dared to speak truth to me and has freed me from that little bit of the false self that had taken control. Because of their tender love, I am released once more to be simply myself, called back to the core of who I am, set free from the facade and the broken image and the things I have fallen to. 

That's what God's punishment does, too. It sets us free from the false things we've created in our lives...or the things we've let be created in our lives simply by refusing to put our feet down and keep ourselves from being carried away, and it lets us settle back into the real us - the persons we were created to be, the ones we want to be, the ones we say in our hearts that we are while we're making excuses for having not been that. 

A little bit of truth gives us the freedom to become those things - for real - again. With a measure of peace and rest and a great big sigh of relief that the truth really has set us free. 

Oh, that we may breathe again. 

God of Quiet

We often talk about the 400 or so years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, a 400-year period of relative silence while the people of God tried to hold onto the promise but had very little new information to go on. Nothing big, anyway. 

And we talk about the era we're currently living in as another long period of silence from God. This one, we call the "already but not yet" - Christ has already accomplished it, but we're waiting for its fulfillment. This is further intensified by the fact that a group of men met a couple thousand-ish years ago and decided to close the canon - that is, they declared that the Bible was complete and done and nothing could ever be added to it, which leaves us with no opportunity to "officially" add to God's testimony and Word. 

In other words, they effectively told us that God isn't speaking anything new any more. What we have is what we have and now, it's just about waiting and believing and holding onto what we know. 

There's a great danger in this, if that isn't already obvious to you. The danger is that when we are not actively listening for God's voice because we don't expect to hear it, then...we stop hearing it. 

Isaiah says, in a message from the Lord, "Is it because I have been quiet for so long that you no longer fear me?" (57:11) In other words, the prophet was asking the people if they had lost touch with the Lord because He wasn't speaking to them. 

And I think that's the case in our present age.

We think that we're living in this period of long silence from God - the already, but the not yet - where we have all the information we think He's going to give us, and we're all trying to build a faith on what's been said before and what's been promised for later and trying to hold on somewhere in the middle where yes, it's quieter. I mean, there's no Messiah walking our streets performing miracles everyday and there are no disciples/apostles gathering the masses to build something new and I've watched a lot of clouds in my life, but haven't seen Anyone coming back riding on them yet, so...it's quiet. 

Or is it?

I think we've become so accustomed to the idea that God has done all of His speaking until the Day comes that we have His voice in the distant past and we have it in the promised future, but we're missing it right here. 

Friends, do you know that God is still speaking in our world? He is still speaking truth to hearts that need to hear it. He is still speaking love to those who need to know it. He is still speaking grace to those who need to receive it. Miracles are still happening every day. Prayers answered. 

We may not be adding them to the canon, and we may not be revolutionizing our whole interpretation of God's love on them, but God's voice is among us. It is present and active, just like His word; living, sharper than any double-edged sword, cutting through right to the hearts of our being...if we were just listening. 

The problem is that we've been so convinced we're living in a "quiet for so long" that we have lost our ability to listen, for the most part. We have lost our ability to hear. And because of it, we are losing our ability to believe. 

Do we no longer fear - or love, honor, worship, crave - the Lord because we believe He has been quiet for so long? 

Then open your ears and listen, for the Lord is still speaking among us. 

Steven

I am a person who wants to know. All the time. Whatever it is. If we're wondering whether I want to know it or not, I do - whether it's the most precious gem of wisdom in all the world or the most banal bit of trivia. Tell me all of it. I want to know everything. 

My desire to know is probably why everyone comes to me with the strange questions; they just assume if anyone has the answer to them, I do. And sometimes, I'm even known as a know-it-all. 

So, then, imagine my surprise 8 years ago when I was sitting in the office with the new doctor and Dr. Steven said to me, "If you want to know, we can do the bone marrow biopsy right now...if you don't need sedated for it." 

IF I want to know? Of course I want to know. What kind of person doesn't want to know? 

He chuckled a little as I tried to hide my flabbergastedness that that was even a question, then he said, "Persons of faith always want to know." He then told me there was an entire subset of persons - persons, apparently, not of faith - who either don't want to know or at least, don't have an incredibly pressing need to know. They could take it or leave it. 

That single conversation, which took all of maybe 2 minutes, with a doctor I was meeting for the first time but who had years of experience dealing with the questions has changed the way that I interact with persons - in ministry and in real life. 

When I meet someone who has a pressing need to know, I immediately wonder what it is about their faith that makes them want to know. That doesn't have to be a Christian faith or even a religious faith; all I know is that this person has such a firm belief in something that they think they are better off knowing and dealing with whatever it is than not knowing. Whatever it is they believe in gives them the strength to face life in a different way than someone who doesn't have that resource. So I know when I am talking with someone like this that they have a reservoir somewhere that they're drawing from that equips them to handle things, that equips them to trust themselves - or their higher power - to handle things. 

That's a handy piece of information to know. 

At the same time, this simple little conversation also gives me pause. It reminds me to stop myself sometimes. Because I am a person who wants to know, who likes to know, who can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to know, I can be very quick to jump in and just tell you. I can be quick to lay out the facts or spill the beans or put the situation on the table. That's how I'm wired. 

It wasn't until this conversation with Dr. Steven that I truly understood that not everyone is wired that way. Not everyone wants to know. So it's important for me, as a person who loves knowing, to learn to stop and step back and make sure that whoever I'm about to tell is also a person who wants to know. 

That one's harder for me, but I keep working on it. And it really does come from this one single conversation 8 years ago. 

Thanks, Dr. Steven, for changing my perspective on knowing.  

Leveling Out

Your faith will come back to you. I promise it will. If you've put in the work, if you've build your foundations, if you've been loved by God (and you have), and if you want it to, your faith will come back to you. And you don't even have to cling as tightly to it as you thought you might. 

Because what happens is that we get this rocky places in our lives, these struggles we weren't expecting and these seasons we didn't ask for, and we chip away at them with everything that we have in us - every bit of faith, every bit of believing, every bit of fruit, everything we can muster - until they become little piles of pebbles, little bits of debris. 

Then, if we're paying attention and if we're really engaged, we take one or two or three of those pebbles, however many it takes, and we use them to level out a place in our faith that was a little unsteady. A place we didn't realize was a little off, but that has been exposed by our most recent season. 

I get that these seasons are not things we're often excited to add to our story. Most of the time, we want to just move on, move past them, forget they ever happened...hope others forget they ever happened. Most of these seasons are not times in our life that we want to remember. 

They certainly aren't going to become cornerstones. 

And that's not what I'm saying. They don't have to become cornerstones. They just become little shims. They just become little tweaks. Like when you've spent the whole day installing a new vanity in the bathroom and you finally get it all together only to discover that maybe your floor is not quite as level as you thought, so you just tuck a little piece of something up under one side of the countertop to keep the lipstick from rolling away. 

Like that. 

Your faith needs tweaks like that from time to time. Like an old house, it just settles over time. It leans in a little bit over here, and it pokes out a little bit over there, and there's a well-worn path through the floor of it right here and there's a bit of dust gathering in a cobweb to your left and it starts to creak in places that didn't used to creak before and cracks start showing up...not because you're doing anything wrong, not because the foundation is bad, not because the structure is failing, but just because that's the kind of life that we're living. 

Sometimes, you just need a little piece or two of something to level a place out again. And that's what these seasons in our life give us. 

They don't have to reshape our faith. They don't have to completely overhaul it. There's a narrative in our world, our Christian world, that wants to tell us that God gives us the storms so that we come out of it clean with a brand new faith and a whole new outlook on life and all the broken things having fallen away and...and wow, that's exhausting and not even true. 

Most of us just come out of these seasons living in the same old houses of faith that we've been building for a long time. These seasons just give us the little tweaks that we need to fix the little things that bother us. You don't have to tear the whole thing down every time something happens. 

Just take a little piece of the season you've been chipping away at and use it to level a little place that got a little droopy over the years. It's just that simple. And that little piece becomes part of the charm of the whole place. 

That's how faith works. 

Even in the seasons when it doesn't feel like it's working for you.  

Fruit

I don't believe God faults us at those times when our faith isn't big enough, and I think that it's important that we continue to choose to believe, even when it doesn't seem to help us live. But I recognize that trying to just push through with what feels like an empty faith doesn't really satisfy that thing inside of us that's trying to live anyway...or desperately trying to hold onto living. 

This is where I think a solid faith does have an advantage for us. Because even when our faith isn't strong enough or big enough or good enough or meaningful enough, the fruit of our faith gives us the tools to develop a bit of a work-around and come back to a good place anyway. 

Or, at least, a place we can manage. 

The Bible tells us that the fruit of the Spirit - the fruit of faith living inside of us - is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And in the times when my faith isn't big enough - when believing and knowing and trusting and hoping and living in confident assurance simply isn't possible - I find that the fruits of the Spirit, those things living inside of me because of the faith I have cultivated over the years, help to give me a way through. 

If you fill yourself with joy and have fun in the moment and relish the experience and celebrate the season, it's really hard to be bummed about it or worried about it at the same time. 

If you find a reason to be thankful, the things you're worried about get cast into the shadows. 

If you are gentle, you find you're less harsh even with yourself. 

If you exercise self-control, you can stop yourself from doing some things that faith would have told you were wrong, but you aren't listening to faith right now. Self-control can still pull you back from the brink. 

If the whole world is collapsing around you, but you choose to do good, you can feel like you're pushing back the whole tide. 

If you're weary of waiting and it's starting to grind on you, choosing patience changes your perspective and puts a new spin on things. 

And you don't have to have a faith that's working for you right now to be faithful. This goes back to yesterday's post - you choose to keep believing, so you choose to keep acting according to what you know and not what you feel, and so you live a faithful life even in the face of your empty faith, and that's something. 

These things don't come naturally if you haven't already put in the work to establish them, but when you have a faith that you've been working on for awhile - really committing yourself to and honestly working to develop - then when that faith falls short, these fruits pick up. They put you in a better place just by living the way you've trained your heart to live, so deeply ingrained that it's become almost natural for you. 

And I am telling you - this is a precious, crucial, indescribable lifeline for times like these. 

If you can't believe, choose love. If you can't believe, choose joy. If you can't believe, choose piece. If you can't believe, choose patience. If you can't believe, choose kindness. If you can't believe, choose goodness. If you can't believe, choose faithfulness. If you can't believe, choose gentleness. If you can't believe, choose self-control. There are seasons to grow the fruit and seasons to pick it, and if you can't believe, if your faith is failing you, then this is a season to start picking some fruit and living off what you've been growing. 

And, I promise you, this will lead you through. It will get you where you need to be. It will. 

At least, it's never failed me. 

Choose

So what do we do when the faith that we have isn't big enough? 

For most of recent Christian history, this was considered a fundamental flaw in a believing person. If you admit that your faith isn't strong enough, then what you're really saying is that you don't believe thoroughly enough. That you don't have what it takes to cut it. 

After all, God is still as big, as loving, as omnipotent, as omnipresent, as good, as everything as God has always been. So if there's a season in which your faith is failing you, it's not because God isn't up to the task; it's because you are. 

I don't believe this is the real truth. 

First of all, it's not helpful. I don't know a single person who has ever been able to believe more because they were shamed into thinking they weren't believing enough. I know plenty of folks who have tried to fake it, but none who have actually pulled it off. 

But more importantly than that, I think it diminishes the reality of our human experience. We are fallen creatures in broken flesh in a failing world in desperate need of a Savior. We have a limited capacity to understand and engage in anything, let alone something so beyond our wildest imagination as God Himself. The Bible tells us there are things about Him we will never understand on this side of eternity, which means there are things we simply don't comprehend about faith. And without a perfectly full faith, we should not expect that our faith would ever be perfect. 

That is, if we know there are things about faith that are bigger than us, we should understand there are things about the challenges of this world that require faith that are bigger than the faith we can muster. 

There is a point for all of us where believing the things we believe simply isn't enough. Not because of some personal failure, but simply by the finite nature of our being. 

I think God wants it to be this way. Because it always brings us to a point of evaluating what we believe. 

And having to make a choice. 

When my faith isn't big enough for the moment I'm facing, when the things I know and the things I believe and the things that I know I believe don't seem to matter to the challenge I'm facing, then I have a choice. I can throw in the towel, say that faith is worthless, look for something else to make meaning of my life...or I can choose to keep believing the things I believe, loving the God I love, trusting the God I trust. 

This is not a contradiction. I can tell you in the very same breath that I love God with all my heart, mind, and soul, and that right now, that's not enough. Both things can be true at the same time. Not because my God is too small or my faith is too small, but because my being is simply limited. 

So I think that's the first step - in a moment when we are faced with something that seems bigger than our faith, we have to choose, then, what we do with our faith. We have to choose to keep believing. We have to choose to keep affirming. We have to choose to keep saying yes, this is what I know. 

But we also have to choose to be honest and say that our knowing right now is simply not enough. That we need something more. That we need some kind of bridge to help us get back to that place where our faith is big enough, where it fills those spaces in our life that we most desperately need it to. 

Thankfully, our faith - the things we already know - help us to build that bridge when we need it. 

Faith

I'll be honest - it's been a tough week for me. 

Anyone struggles in the acute healing phase of a major surgery; I sadly know this too well, but it doesn't keep it from being true. You put your body through this massive trauma, where someone literally makes you unconscious, cuts into you, does unimaginable things to your being, then wakes you up and tells you good luck. Then, your body is trying to process both the trauma of being so incredibly disturbed and also the onslaught of the chemicals (medications) required to make it possible to even do this sort of thing, and there comes this point where you're simply overwhelmed...no matter how strong you are. 

Or maybe it's just because I'm getting older. Maybe I really was better at this in my 20s. But I probably wasn't. 

In the past week, because of these two factors - trauma and chemicals - I have wrestled with things that I don't normally have to deal with. They just throw my entire system out of whack, and it's hard for me to stay on firm ground and find any footing at all. Add to that that you're usually separated from your regular routine - I can't run, I can't exercise, I can't go to work, all the things that give meaning and structure to my life - and it's simply a recipe for some really hard days. 

Now, everyone who knows me knows I have a bedrock of faith. They know I'm a chaplain and that I have counseled others through this very sort of thing. They know what I believe on any given day, and they know how strongly I believe it. They know, especially in this season, that I'm coming into a time of renewed faith and love in Christ. They know that I have these tools at my disposal. 

So it's no surprise that over the course of the past week or so, I have received a number of lectures, of mini-sermons, of notes of encouragement reminding me of the truth of God's Word, His promises, His goodness, and all of the things that I know and believe that are supposed to build some kind of hedge of protection around me and keep me safe from the very dark things that trauma and chemicals do to my mind and my body. 

Except...

One of the things that trauma and chemicals do to my mind and my body is put up an impenetrable fortress that somehow keeps faith out. 

And that's what I want to talk about...because we don't talk about it enough. Sometimes, in this world that we live in - a world that is wonderful and marvelous and broken and weird and a whole host of things in between - faith simply isn't enough. Faith simply doesn't exist as a resource that we can draw on all the time. 

We want it to. We want to believe that it does. But sometimes, things come in and separate us from the ability to draw on faith in the same way. In these times, faith can seem empty. Or hollow. Or weak. Or foolish. Sometimes, it just feels distant, like it was something some other person in your skin could believe in another time and place, but not you. Not in this one. Sometimes, it feels like faith just doesn't even matter. 

In times like these, being told what we know, being told that we know better, being told that we believe better than this, being told that we're "sure of" something...because maybe we have been sure of it, even for a really long time...is almost cruel. I have just wanted to shout back at persons - I don't believe that right now. I can't believe that right now. That doesn't mean anything to me right now. 

But of course, when I have attempted to do so, they simply laugh it off and say, "Yes, you do." 

But no, I don't. I really don't. There are times when faith is just not there as a resource, for whatever reason. And it doesn't mean that I don't believe any more the things that I know are true. It doesn't mean I don't still love God. It doesn't mean that I don't believe that God still loves me. It doesn't mean that what I have believed forever, and what I still believe, isn't still true. 

It just means that right now, it doesn't feel big enough. And there's no amount of trying to cling to it that changes that feeling. 

This is just the human condition. 

So...what do we do about it? 

Benjamin

I feel like I've been screaming for years. Begging someone to listen. To hear me. To acknowledge my experience. For years, I've been running to doctors, who have either said, "Yup. That's what's happening," without any interest at all in getting to the bottom of why and actually fixing the underlying problem or they have completely dismissed my experience of living in my own body and said, "Everything looks great. I don't really know what you're complaining about." 

Meanwhile, my life was quietly spiraling downward, losing more control of myself, losing some of my favorite functions. All the while knowing that something was wrong, but not being able to get anyone to actually listen to me. 

And then, I met Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin. And I told him the same story I'd been telling for years, told him all the things that other doctors had been telling me, told him how it was getting me nowhere at all. He listened to what I had to say, took one look, and said, "Yup," and I thought here we go. Another guy who can see it, but can't get to the bottom of it.

Then, he told me it was going to take a surgery, but we'd fix it.

Friends, I met Dr. Benjamin a month ago. Literally one month - the first week of June, when God orchestrated that when I called his office to try to get on his list (because he is the guy, I was told), he had just so happened to open up office hours for two business days from that phone call, and I got one of those spots. 

It's been one month, and Dr. Benjamin has already been through my insurance, had me in surgery, seen me for a follow-up appointment, and gotten me back to work. 

Just like that. 

And I'm wrestling, of course, with what all of this means. With the possibilities that it holds for giving me important parts of my life back. With how stupidly simple it's been to actually fix the problem after years of screaming into the seeming abyss with folks who weren't interested. With how frustrating it is to have wasted so much of my money and time on tests and doctors who were never going to listen to those tests and doctors who were dismissive of me and a whole host of persons who could have helped me if they had only cared enough to listen and to understand the very real stress this whole thing was putting on my life. 

And as I'm wrestling, I'm also thinking, of course, about the number of persons in my life that have been screaming into the abyss. The ones who have just needed someone to listen. The ones who have called me or who have had me walk into their space in some kind of capacity who needed, more than anything, for someone to listen. To acknowledge the very real nature of what they're going through and the impact it's having on their lives. The very real impact on their very real lives. 

I think about the persons who have crossed my path who have been suffering - literally suffering - because no one would hear them. 

And I am reminded to listen. 

I confess that I have been able, I think, to "solve" fewer problems that I have encountered than Dr. Benjamin, but I also confess that I have been part of some really cool moments, by the grace of God, that took some orchestrating but were worth every bit of it. All because I was willing to listen to what no one else was hearing. 

Listening is a beautiful gift and a great honor - for the person doing it and for the one receiving it. You never know what great things you may do if you take the time to tune in. 

May I always be a person who is listening. 

May my listening ear be the catalyst that changes someone's life for the better and sets someone free. 

Change

One of the things that strikes me whenever I get a little bit of downtime (usually, forced downtime) is this eagerness I have to get back to my "regular" life. Life as I knew it. Doing the things I love to do. Living this rich existence that I have grown to love. 

But...do I really want to do that?

I think one of the gifts of a season like this, even a short one, is the opportunity to re-evaluate some things and to make some changes if it's time to do that. I mean, why does your life have to go back to looking the way that it always did?

Some of the changes that I come out of these seasons with seem silly. They're so small and inconsequential. So small and inconsequential, in fact, that it's easy to think that they don't really matter after all. That my life would not change very much if I implemented them or if I didn't. And in that case, it can be really easy to fall back into old patterns. Habits die hard, even when they are completely arbitrary and sometimes foolish. 

For example, here's something that I'm coming out of this particular season with: I'm no longer hungry when I wake up. That seems like such a small, silly thing, right? Like, who cares? It doesn't seem that it would honestly make a difference. 

Except that I am a person who has always eaten very first thing when I get out of bed. I literally get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and make breakfast. It's the first thing I do every morning. So then, the idea that I am no longer hungry when I wake up could be a significant change in the flow of my day. 

I could go on getting up and making breakfast. I could continue to eat first thing in the morning. It's what I've done forever; my autopilot makes it easy to keep doing that. Except that now, when I force myself to eat even though I'm not hungry, I start my day with this sick feeling in my stomach. This feeling of blah that I can't quite shake. It just sits heavy inside of me, and it throws off everything I want for my day. 

Truth is, I don't know what it's like to wait a little bit to eat. If I even get hungry at that point. I know the importance of breakfast, so I'm always going to have a little something, but what if it's not the first thing I do? How will it change the way my body works throughout the day? How will it change my energy levels? What will become the new thing that I do first? The possibilities that stem from one small, silly change are numerous. 

I don't know what it might change for me. But I'm willing to find out. 

And that, I think, is the greatest gift of a season of downtime. We get to go back to our lives, but we have a little bit of this newfound freedom to choose again how we engage with them. We get to decide if that thing we always did because it was what we always did actually enhances our life or creates a barrier to it. We get to recognize where we've had some unhealthy relationships with our routine and decide that maybe now is the time to start over. We get to build depth back into a blank canvas, into completely empty spaces and layer it just the way that we want to to create the most meaning, impact, energy, love, fulfillment, whatever. 

I think that's why it's so easy for me to engage with the emptiness, with the quietness, with the waiting. I'm not idling; I'm totally offline. Because whether it's a few minutes in a waiting room, a few days of PTO, a few weeks of recovery and rehab, I want the opportunity, when I boot this system back up, to fill it the way that I want to fill it and not just default to the last system update. I want to make tweaks. I want to rework my priorities. I want to rediscover my love for the life that I haven't been able to live for however long it's been. 

I want the opportunity to change. 

Even if I don't eat breakfast first. 

Are you willing to use your empty spaces to make your life more full? Are you willing to embrace the opportunities life gives you for change? Or are you so restless that you're ready to rush back and start living by rote all over again? 

What would it do for you to make one small, silly, seemingly-inconsequential change right now? I bet your heart already has an idea of one.  

Filling the Space

I said yesterday that the things that most persons dream about doing more of if they get a little down time just aren't appealing to me as ways to pass the entire day. 

I love reading, but I don't want to just sit around and read all day. 

I love jigsaw puzzles, but I don't want to spend an entire day hunched over one. 

I love playing with my dog, but eventually, she needs to nap. 

I enjoy cooking delicious foods, but my stomach can only hold so many of them. 

We've been trained to think this is the dream life - a life where we are able to just sit around and do this kind of stuff all day every day without a care in the world. Without other responsibilities. Without expectations. After all, your life is restricted and you can't do the things you would normally do, so now's the time, right? 

The truth is that, as a lifestyle, I find these things boring. Really. When I am living my actual life in the real world, these are the things that allow my brain to engage in a different way. In that sense, they provide a break from what I've been doing and add a depth to my life that is much needed. If you work a highly analytical job, for example, then it does something to your soul to be able to escape into a fantasy novel for a bit. If you spend your days working within a highly rigid system, then coloring gives your brain a chance to do something else. If you spend your days with a lot of freedom, having to make a lot of decisions, then having something like a puzzle - with a very clear answer - brings your brain back to the center. 

These are activities that create balance. They round out my brain at the end of a day, or in the middle of it, and give me a chance to utilize skills and perspectives and intelligences that my average day doesn't incorporate in the same way. When I am able to take a few minutes and read another chapter, find another piece, throw another toy, mix another batter, then I am reclaiming a part of myself that my responsible adult life has had to push to the side for a bit. 

That's what makes them worthwhile. 

But take me away from my life, make me sit down, remove me from the day-to-day existence of my being, and these things don't hold the same charm for me. 

They probably don't for you, either.

I think that's why it's easier for us to end up just vegging out with our extended downtime. Not doing nothing, but doing nothing worthwhile. Because we might love reading, but it's not stimulating for us in the same way when that's all we have to do. It gets tiresome pretty quickly. We might enjoy crafting in some particular way, but when that's not an opportunity to click on a part of our brain that hasn't been used today, it doesn't have the same satisfaction. It gets boring.

Because it's no longer adding depth to our life. It is, quite literally, just passing the time. And it feels very...empty. 

That's how I end up doing a whole lot of nothing - literally doing nothing - when I get the chance. I'm not interested in just filling the space. I'm more interested in thinking about what that space means and how I want to fill it. What the things that I fill it with mean and why they are enriching to my human experience. 

So no, I haven't binged any new shows. Haven't even seen a single episode of one. I might have finished one book, just reading at the same pace that I always read at - about an hour a day. I put the finishing touches on a crochet project that I started more than a month ago; it shouldn't have taken that long, but it's the way my brain engages that makes it worth the while when I pick it up. And I did a whole lot of nothing. 

And, all of a sudden, it's time to go back to my regular life. 

Or is it?  

Empty

I think sometimes the greatest thing that can happen to you is to have your life taken away. 

No, I don't mean that you should die. I mean that you should be sidelined for awhile, forced to stop, forced to no longer do the things that you've filled your life with. 

When you get this blessed opportunity, two things happen: first, you get to reevaluate your life, what makes it worth living, what you really think of it and second, you get to understand the ways that you've filled it, with what, and for what reasons. 

I have had more medical procedures in the past few years than most folks have in a lifetime. I am right now recovering from yet another one (can we stop this already?). And when I talk to others about what recovery looks like, everyone says the same thing - oh, I'd love to have time to do nothing. Or I'd love to have more time to read. Or it'd be great to finally get some time to catch up on that craft/project/whatever that I never seem to have the energy for. 

As though recovering from major surgery is a time known for its renewal of energy. 

The truth is that given this amount of time and space, most persons will squander it away by vegging out in front of the television and finding some new show to binge. 

Right now, you're laughing because actually, that does sound like you. 

And then one day, you wake up, and it's time to get back to the life you once new, back to the grind, back to the schedule, and you feel like you missed your chance at something important. Because you did. 

You know what I am most likely to do in the acute recovery period, when my life is limited and I cannot do the things that I normally would do on a given day? 

Nothing. I am most likely to do nothing. 

I am most likely to go about my day in relative silence, not filling the space with anything in particular. Like sitting in a waiting room, I am content to do nothing for a season. 

It feels like a waste, I think, to many. Such a good time to read a book or work a jigsaw puzzle or share more cuddles with my dog (okay, maybe I'm guilty of that one). But what I find is that these things that I enjoy doing add depth to the life that I am living, but if they are my life, they don't have the same type of joy and restoration associated with them. 

They feel like pass-times. Like busy work. Like things I am doing just to fill the space. 

And what I really want in these seasons of slowness is to feel the space. To feel it acutely. To have that emptiness hanging over me. There's value in feeling what your existence is like before you fill it up with stuff. 

It helps you to understand the things that you're filling it with. 

Are they really adding meaning and depth and significance to your life? Or are they just passing the time? Are you getting the things out of your life that you really want? Are the things you want even worth wanting? Would your life be any richer right now if you were doing that thing that you always do but that you temporarily can't? 

There's no better time to evaluate the way you're living than when you can't live that way. There's no better time to take a good look at your life than when you can't live it the way you want. 

If you are given the blessing of your life again...what would you do with it?