One of the greatest threats to our progress in life is perfection.
When we picture the perfect outcome, we begin to believe the perfect outcome is possible. Chase perfection long enough, though, and you discover perfection is a myth. One thing that's not a myth about the pursuit of perfection, however, is that a perfectionist chasing the perfect outcome will almost always feel like a failure. Because again, perfection is a myth. The tragic result of that myth; one fails to reach that perfect outcome often enough and they quit pursuing anything at all. The alternative every single day - is effort. An effort filled journey toward a desired outcome that we know will likely be filled with imperfection. A journey that will be filled with starts and stops. Victories and defeats. And learning. Consistent effort will always result in consistent learning. The consistent pursuit of perfection will always result in consistently being reminded of one's imperfections. So why not start by owning imperfection, and go forth anyways. Why not start by owning the end result may not be the result I want, but forward progress is better than another beat down by my imperfections. Why not move forward and discover that my idea of perfect may have been wrong all along. Maybe it's in the imperfect journey of forward progress that we stumble upon perfect. Wouldn't that be one of life's nicest ironies. Perfect at the other end of an imperfect journey.
0 Comments
There is a promise of goodness in this world.
There are days it's easy to wonder if that promise is a lie, or if that promise has been broken in some fit of anger. It's the storms that make us doubt; I have seen my fair share of storms. I've seen toppled trees and shredded rooftops. I've seen abuse and divorce. I have been invited often to believe the promise doesn't apply to me. But I have not accepted those invitations. I don't believe the promise is a lie. Because although I have seen many storms, I have seen the other side of just as many. I have seen that the promise may be often hid, but it is never gone. Rainbows, they are a sign of hope, a signal the storm is over. These days I find myself looking for the rainbow inside the storm. These days I remind myself that the hope that comes with a rainbow would never come without the storm. Hope is not lost in the storm, it's born there. Storms aren't robbing us of hope, they are producing it. Storms, they do, they make it easy to believe that hope is lost, but my life tells me different. No matter how big the storm, hope has always just begun. There is a promise of goodness in this world, and I have never been abandoned by that promise. 10/16/2023 0 Comments You are not the patterns of your pastMost of us will reach a point in life when we decide we want better. Whether that means we leave behind unhealthy situations or unhealthy habits or unhealthy beliefs, at some point we start to believe that we WANT better and that we ARE better than where we currently are.
At some point, we start to believe in a future better than our past. So we move toward that future. One might think a better future is as simple as leaving behind the struggles of the past. Only, often times struggles are bigger in the future than they ever were in the past. That's because the struggles that we clearly knew as struggles in the past, well they show up in the future disguised as comfort. When we choose a better future, rarely does our past choose to stay behind. Mainly because much of that past is a part of our biology. It's stubbornly wired into our brain and into our ways of seeing and receiving the world. You can leave behind your alcohol abuse, your toxic relationships, your poor financial habits, your unhealthy eating patterns - you can decide to abandon ALL of the unhealthy patterns in your life, but that doesn't mean those patterns decide to abandon you. Our brains seek comfort. Always. And our brains don't base comfort on healthy or unhealthy, they base it on familiarity. The brain is comforted by people and experiences it best recognizes, not by whether or not those people and experiences are good for us. If anyone has tried to make a change in their life, they know one giant thing that comes with that change: unfamiliarity. And the brain is stressed by the unfamiliar. So guess what the brain turns to. Guess who comes knocking at our door. Our past struggles. Those things we left behind because they weren't healthy for us, but now the brain wants to bring back into our lives disguised as a healthy fix for the discomfort we feel in the unfamiliar. So what do we do? I don't have an easy answer to that. I sure wish I did. What I want us to know is those struggles that come knocking at our door disguised as comfort, just because they show up doesn't mean you invited them. Just because those struggles show up after you left them behind doesn't mean you aren't worthy of change. It simply means your brain is still more comfortable being who you once were than it is accepting who you've decided to become. The brain seems to know that if it can make you feel guilty or shamed over those visitors from the past, you will change your mind about not including them in your future. Fortunately, there is more than our brains involved in who we decide to become. We have hearts. And souls. And minds. Hearts and souls and minds that can remind us of who we are. Of who we are battling to become, because becoming is a battle. They can remind us that temptation isn't weak, it's our biology. And sometimes knowing our biology makes it easier to turn our backs on it in the same way we turned them on our pasts. Find friends. Find a counselor. Find a pastor. Find a support group. Find someone who can help you pull the disguise off your past when it shows up as comfort. Find people who will remind you that you are not the patterns of your past, no matter how loudly your brain wants to scream otherwise. Because ultimately that's how those patterns derail our willingness to become who we long to become. They make us believe that our hearts and souls and minds aren't better than the patterns of our brains. And that - that is a lie as big in the future as it was in the past. So a great starting point in your becoming: don't believe it. I have watched from a distance this week as my friend chased and realized a giant dream. For a long time, she's known what this dream is. I think maybe this week is the first time she's known for sure how that dream was actually going to come about.
What and how. Those words often compete against one another instead of working together. How, that's often the ugly word. It might be the mightiest 3-letter-word dream killer known to man. How many mornings have you woken up with something on your heart? A new dream. A vision. Something calling you into the sunrise? I've had many of those mornings. Oh, this is going to be a great day. I have a dream.... And I start thinking about it. Until I can't STOP thinking about it. But then I start thinking about HOW I'm going to pull it off. And I'm suddenly faced with the truth that I have NO idea how this dream can come to be. I lack too many skills. I don't have the time or the money or the connections to people who can help make my WHAT a reality. I know WHAT I want to do in this world, but I suddenly have no idea HOW I'm going to pull it off. And too often, by the end of the day, by the end of the process that takes me from dreaming of what to trying to figure out how, the energy found in a dream becomes mourning. Mourning the death of another dream that will never happen. How many times have I credited God for being able to put a dream on my heart only to turn around and abandon his capacity to pull it off? Many, that's my answer. One thing I'm trying to do about this, though, with a huge lift from my friend this week, I've tried to stop interpreting these things God puts on my heart as suggestions. I've tried to stop hearing God say, "hey Keith, I have a cool idea you might be interested in" and I've tried to start hearing God say, "hey Keith, I have an idea, and if WE don't pull this off we're going to miss a chance to impact the world." Andy Stanley says this about a vision God puts on our hearts: "In light of a divine vision, our daily faithfulness takes on new significance. It is no longer faithfulness for faithfulness' sake. There is something at stake. If the visionary doesn't act, something significant won't get done." Something significant won't get done. I think it's easy to dismiss a dream when we believe God is just bouncing around ideas. What if we start interpreting dreams as a sense of urgency from God, as God putting dreams on our heart because he knows we are the only one who will make sure something significant gets done. Something God NEEDS done. What if God is putting dreams on our hearts because he knows we'll keep chasing WHAT he needs done long enough for him to show us HOW he intends to make it happen? If you have a dream today, lean into WHAT. Lean into what you know. And part of what you know is this: God isn't going to light your life on fire with a what only to watch that fire die because you don't know how. God loves it when we don't know how, because God's love is found in the how. God loves it because he knows how much more we're going to love him when he ultimately shows us the how. Because make no mistake - you might not know HOW, but God does. So please, don't ever stop chasing your what long enough to experience the how. There is beauty and love in the how, especially when you see someone you care about glowing in the light of it. As I've grown older, my purpose has simplified.
I want to reflect God's light. Far and wide. In all roles I take on in life. Some days, though, I am prone to forget that purpose isn't about reflection, it's about standing. One can't reflect sunlight if one isn't standing in the sun. And one can't reflect God if one isn't standing right next to God. In order to reflect God, I must desire to KNOW who and what God is. In order to reflect God, I must desire to BE who and what God is. In order to reflect God, I must desire to STAND in the light of all that God reflects. And God, well God only reflects love. When we don't look like love, we don't look like God. And when we don't, it's not our reflection that's grown dim, we've simply chosen to stand in spaces where love has grown dim. And it's impossible to reflect something that doesn't exist where you stand. I had the chance to speak to a beautiful group of people yesterday. I opened my talk with this quote: "The greatest time to kill a king is when it's a child. The reason the enemy has been at you since you've been a child is because there is a king in you."
From one perspective, this is biblical. My Christian brothers and sisters know how committed the enemy was to killing the baby Jesus before He could ever be regarded as a king. If this biblical perspective isn't your perspective, I understand that. But there's another perspective. It's science. A vast majority of the neural pathways of our brain are formed in childhood. A majority of the ways we see and receive the world are formed in childhood. A majority of the ways we come to see relationships - are they safe or are they threatening - are formed in childhood. And all of those ways are harder - intensely harder - to change the older we get. Scientifically speaking. I had no idea when I was putting my talk together that I'd follow a young woman who'd share the story of her life. A story that started with a traumatic childhood. A childhood that fell into addictions and all the horror that goes with both fighting against and supporting those addictions. But hers was also a story of recovery. This beautiful queen is now sober and an author and a therapist and a leader in her church. As she talked, though, as she walked us through her nothing less than a miracle story, I couldn't help but wonder, how many will never overcome their childhoods the way she had? How could they? How many will never see the kings and the queens within themselves because of all that had been killed within them as children? How many will land in and stay in addictions as a way of dealing with that pain. Because when you see addiction, that is most often what you're looking at. You are looking at someone grieving the loss of the queen or the king within them. No one lands in addiction because that is who they want to be. They land there because they no longer know how to be who they were born to be. That is the brutal cycle of addiction. It momentarily helps one forget their pain, but it NEVER allows one to forget who they were supposed to be. It never allows one to be removed from the shame and from the guilt and from the self-hate of not realizing their inner queen or king. When you look at someone struggling with addiction and allow yourself to think, "what a wasted life." Trust me, no one has said that to the addicted more than the one suffering the addiction. Which is why we need to skip "wasted life" thoughts and meet folks with safe places. Safe places for folks to say, I've lost my queen or my king, and I want to find her. I want to find him. Folks struggling with addiction, they aren't lost. They've simply lost their king or their queen. And quite often the events of their childhoods have left them ill-equipped to find them alone. The truth is, we are ALL ill-equipped to find ourselves alone. One first step we can take is stop judging people for who they are and start being curious about the king or queen they've left behind. And then, if you're truly interested in being a healer, help them find them. I've said this often, we are all one way or another in a fight against our childhoods. I do believe that's the enemy's doing. The greatest time to kill a queen is when she's a child. The greatest tragedy of that fight isn't the fight itself, though, it's that so many of us are in these fights alone. Or that we turn our fights on one another. Which all makes the enemy smile. What scares the enemy? That's the thought of us ever joining in each other's fights. Togetherness. Healing. A world full of queens and kings. That's a fight the enemy can't win. And it is absolutely one we owe it to each other TO win. Today. Anyone who has ever purchased a car knows this: the moment you drove it off the lot it, it was worth less than you'd just paid for it.
And with every mile you drive that car and with every dent it collects and with every year added to its age, it continues to lose value. Until one day it's simply worth nothing at all. Sadly, too many of us see our lives as cars. We feel ourselves getting older and it gets easier with each day to believe our best days are behind us. We reflect on all of the dents in our lives, the traumas and the struggles and the mistakes we've made along the way, and we wonder, who would ever have interest in this life. Most every day we find ourselves pulling out the blue book of life and looking for the answer, what am I worth today? Only that's the wrong book with which to do your research. Our value is found in the Good book, not the blue book. For the bible tells us over and over that we are wonderfully made, and in the eyes of our creator, our value never fades. In our dents we find his compassion, not disdain. In our mistakes we find his forgiveness, not his judgment. In our traumas we find his tears, not his disregard. In God we have our first and only owner, nothing we do makes him reconsider his purchase. Nothing leaves him wondering what our resale value is. We are the ones who question our worth, but we have no need to. Because if the one who created us to treasure us never stops treasuring us, why would we ever see ourselves as less than a treasure. I don't care how old you are, how many dents you have, how many crashes your life has endured, you are a treasure. And with every step you take today, no matter what that step holds, you will remain a treasure. Because you were wonderfully made. And in his eyes, your wonder never ceases. So, drive on with your life, knowing you are headed to his arms and not a junkyard. In that truth, your worth will forever be priceless. It's World Mental Health Day. It's worth sharing again this piece I wrote in 2021.
*** A dear friend reached out to me recently and told me a friend of hers recently lost his life to suicide. I could hear the heartbreak in her words. I could imagine the heartbreaks the people who loved him were feeling. And, I could also deeply feel the pain her friend had been living in prior to his suicide. No one saw it coming, my friend told me. And I told her, you know what, many times we don't. We don't, because people who are pushing their feelings away the moment they appear have often mastered hiding them from OTHERS in that very same moment. They hide them with charisma and laughter. They hide them with achievements. They hide them with service to others. They hide their abnormal pain with images of far more acceptable human delight. Because the reality is, people in pain know the only people who have a harder time accepting their pain than them are the people closest to them. We are all fighting for two things in this world. We are fighting to understand ourselves. And we are fighting to be understood by others. Nothing opens the doors for us to better understand ourselves than feeling a desire to be understood by others. The moment someone says I want to know the feelings you're pushing away, that's the moment you start sharing the feelings that allow you to understand yourself for the very first time in your life. That's the moment you begin walking the path toward enjoying life and not living with the exhaustion that comes with pretending that you do. As friends and family and neighbors and country, I think we have to get more comfortable with pain. We have to get more comfortable with being Ok with the idea that not everyone is OK. For almost two years now, we've been way more than comfortable talking publicly about whether someone does or does not have a virus. But if someone is struggling with their mental health, we don't seem to be nearly as interested in developing rapid tests for that. I need to tell you - We ARE each other's rapid tests. By being people who are as eager to understand the people closest to us as we are eager to understand ourselves, we become each other's rapid tests. By coming to better understand the pain YOU are pushing away isn't much different than the pain YOUR NEIGHBOR is pushing away, we become each other's rapid tests. By recognizing that much of the shared chaos we are living in is really our shared efforts to push away the pains that pain us and the pains we think will pain the people around us - and realizing it's time for less pushing and more pulling each other in, we become each other's rapid tests. Ours and theirs. It's time to grant ourselves and each other permission to stop pushing and start embracing. Stop pushing and start accepting. Stop pushing and start healing. Mental health is not that 'other' part of our overall health. It's simply an important part of our health. And like all other parts of our health, sometimes it's well; sometimes it's not. When we begin embracing that - we'll begin embracing the opportunity to make each other as well as we've ever been. We become each other's rapid tests. It's easy to forget God's gaze of joy directed at us.
It's easy to forget, that just as a parent waits to gaze joy into the eyes and heart of a newborn, God is always waiting to gaze into his children the same way. We too often miss it, though; we too often fail to imagine God's gaze. While longing for and suffering the unmet gazes from one another, we overlook the gaze that is always there. Always shining. And like the prodigal son once discovered, God's gaze has no limitations. No conditions. Only that we show up and accept it. God created us for the chance to gaze upon us. He never walks away from that chance, even after days and months and years of us walking away from our chance to receive it. We too infrequently smile upon our own lives with joy. Why then, we ask, would God smile upon me? Maybe it's time to change the order of things. Maybe it's time to first imagine just how frequently the God of heaven's gaze of joy is smiling upon us, and then ask, knowing that, how on earth could I not smile upon my own life with joy. If you haven't imagined it lately, do so today. Imagine the joy of God smiling upon you as you walk into his presence. Because the question is not, will he be overwhelmed with joy when I show up. The question is ALWAYS, will I show up? So many of us need it more than ever, the knowing that we are worthy of a smile radiating nothing but joy in the seeing us. So many of us have longed for too long to receive joy for nothing but our mere presence. It is there, I promise you. The one who created us to smile upon us never loses interest or hope in just one moment of us showing up to receive it. His joyful smile. So that we walk away knowing, it's a gaze that will never ever leave. Principles and culture are always going to collide.
I always have some level of admiration for people who can stick to their principles in the collision; both principles I agree with and disagree with. Because I know it's not easy. It's not easy to hold on to things you've decided are the foundation of who you are when the rest of the world doesn't like what you stand for. I'm trying to stand stronger in what I believe these days, while being less concerned about how many people are going to say I believe that too. That's a tough deal when you believe your beliefs represent greater beauty and goodness for all. That's a tough deal when you're human and you long for acceptance. But we all get there at some point. My principles or the world's principles? Can I live with myself or is it more important to have the world want to live with me? I have deep admiration for people who choose principles; that's never an easy choice. |
Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
May 2024
CategoriesAll Faith Fatherhood Life Mental Health Perserverance Running |