Too often when we think about beating time, we think about living longer than the average life span. But what if beating time, TRULY beating time, is making more than average out of the time we have?
There is an evil side to time, but it's not death. At least not for those of us who believe life never ends. No, the evil side of time is the side that tries to steal from the life you're living. I went to bed last night fully committed to getting down to the beach for sunrise this morning. Then I woke up, felt the frigid temperatures, and had second thoughts. Second thoughts. That's often the evil side of time. It tries to talk us out of the things we know to be good and beautiful and right use of our time. When I walked upon the sand this morning and looked into the still dim light on the other side of the ocean, I was looking at one of the most tranquil oceans I'd ever seen. For a moment it was if time had stolen the waves. But there they were. Resting. I thought, time tried to steal this moment from me. If I were to live 150 years but had skipped this moment, who won? Me or time? Time is trying to convince us the mystery of life is solved in living forever, all the while so many of us never live the forever we're given. We miss out on people and places and chances and moments. Moments where we stand on the beach, not another soul around, watching the sun rise over waves that for a moment disappeared. And you were the only one to catch the magic in that act. Like someone stopped time just for you. We too often trade right now in for forever. Oh, the things we miss dreaming about forever at the expense of right now. This Christmas season - don't skip now. And as we prepare for a new year, maybe make it a resolution. I will no longer focus on out-living time. My focus will be on living out the time I have. There is magic to be found in your life. Don't let the evil side of time convince you otherwise.
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12/20/2023 0 Comments Handling Hard stuff betterIf we're not careful, we can get to believing the key to an easy life is an easy life. Like there's a menu of lives or something. There's the hard life and the medium life and the easy life. And if we wait long enough, eventually someone is going to bring us a serving of that easy life.
Well, take it from someone who has ordered a sampling or two of that easy life only to have it never show up, it is NEVER going to show up. The key to an easier (not easy) life is to accept that. Accept that waiting on the easy life is going to be a long, hard, endless wait. Accept that the key to an easier life is getting better at handling the hard stuff. I have a lot of runner friends. Many of them run some crazy long distances. I'll see pictures of them 100 miles into a race and they are smiling. Yes, SMILING - smiling after running 100 miles!! It's easy to look at those pictures and think, I wish running came that easy to me. But that is not what their smiles reflect - running coming easy to them. Their smiles reflect people who got good at doing the hard task of running. I think about my writing. I sit here this morning writing the 1000th article I've written and shared since March of 2020 (uhm, anyone remember what started in March of 2020??). I've had people tell me they wished writing came as easy to them as it does to me. Now, I do believe God has gifted me with the ability to write, but if I hadn't written 750,000 words worth of articles the last 4 years, I would just be a writer waiting on words to show up. We all have gifts. We all have contributions to share with the world. With each other. The problem is too many of us are waiting for life to get easier as the invitation for us to begin the sharing. Well, I'll repeat. It is, after all, the moral of this life story: life is never going to get easy. Never. Ever. Now that you know that, maybe today is the day to start getting better at doing the hard stuff. If you want a hint as to where to begin, I'd begin with the hard stuff you've been putting off waiting for it to look or feel easy. Begin tackling it today. And you know what, in time, life might just begin to feel like the easier life you'd been waiting on all along. 12/19/2023 0 Comments Mirroring the resilience of the oceanI shared a video with the ocean roaring in the background yesterday. My friend Beth commented, "we all have the opportunity to mirror the resilience of the ocean."
First, don't comment on my posts if you don't want me stealing your wisdom. 😊 But wow. What a beautiful metaphor for resilience. There I was, the day after a strong storm, I could see the water lines indicating the ocean had surged well beyond its normal bounds, an ocean in turmoil. Yet - there it was - the ocean. The rolling waves. Still showing up. The thing about waves I'd never much thought about until Beth's words, not only do the waves keep rolling, they keep rolling together. They roll together and one wave always has another wave's back. Waves are not individual drops of water finding there way to the shore. Waves are drops collectively working together with the wind and gravity to create forward momentum. To create resilience. I say often that resilience is not "you've got this." Resilience is "we've got this." The ocean is a collection of strengths coming together for one common purpose. Forward progress. My friend Beth is right. We all have the opportunity to mirror the resilience of the ocean. We all have the opportunity to be a collection of strengths coming together for one common purpose. Forward progress. Everyone. Together. Like waves... Maybe we should spend less time making waves and more time finding our waves. Together. 12/18/2023 0 Comments Everything is going to be okMy great grandfather's name was Evans Elliott. He was the coolest guy with the coolest name I ever met. Not just met, I was blessed to grow up with him right across the rural Ohio highway from the house I grew up in.
When I teach or do presentations on the developing brain, and talk about how much our adult brain reflects the wiring of our childhood brains, I always say my brain is wired to see the world as "everything's going to be okay." These days I'm pretty sure that's not as much a me thing or a God thing as much as it is an Evans Elliott thing. I suppose a lot of that is because my great grandmother was a compulsive worrier; all Evans Elliott had to do was sit next to her and, relatively speaking, he'd look like the calm in the storm. But he is also a man who survived the great depression. In my eyes, though, he always seemed to have thrived it and not survived it. This is a man who could reach deep inside a ewe and pull a lamb out like he was calmly pulling a candy bar out of a vending machine - me nearby wanting NOTHING to do with that candy bar - and moments later he'd sit there in the afterbirth covered straw feeding that lamb a bottle. Kind of like that's just how life goes, mess to beauty. I remember a couple of times vividly when the man, his cheek full of chewing tobacco, told me everything is going to be OK. And walked off as if he'd just revealed nothing more meaningful than the obvious. I think more, though, I remember the feeling of everything's going to be OK that came with his presence. Presence CAN be everything is going to be OK. The day he died, I leaned on an old steel gate that opened into the pasture where I often watched him feed sheep or drive a tractor off to tend to the nearby fields. In that moment, I knew if I ever had a boy, I'd name him Elliott. Or a girl.... 🤷♂️ 17 years ago today, Elliott was born, with as the doctors put it, little more than a heartbeat. The doctor worked furiously to save him and collapsed his lung in the process. In that moment, I remember saying the first prayer of my life. Oh, I'd said plenty of "our fathers" and "hail marys" and "the salvation prayer" and tons of scripted conversations with God we're taught or coerced into having over the years. But this was a different kind of conversation. This was me and God and my own free will in the hall of a hospital that smelled and felt too much like death to me. Without my script, the only words I could come up with were, "God, I have no idea what you're up to here. But I trust you. I trust that everything is going to be OK." Looking back, I don't know if I was having a conversation with God or Evans Elliott or how much they were even different that day. In the end, though, I felt God saying I know you trust that. And it will be OK. The past several years I've had to lean on that conversation a lot. I've had to lean on that reminder a lot. That it's going to be OK. I don't suppose there's a greater reminder on earth than looking at my 17 year old son, a deep thinker, compassionate, a crazy New York Giants fan, and a kid who doesn't seem to worry too much. A kid who always seems to walk around looking like it's all going to be OK. There are many days lately when I bow my head, just me and God and my own freewill, and I say, "God, I have no idea what you're up to here. But I trust you. I trust that everything is going to be OK." Today, I add, "I thank you God for the kid who once had little more than a heartbeat, for the kid who many days keeps this heart of mine beating, beating with more belief than I've ever had, that everything is going to be OK." And today, I will also add, what his mom did that day will always be the most heroic thing I've ever witnessed. Our relationship these days is simply mom and dad, but there will never be anything simple about my relationship to that mom's heroism. God breathed life into so many that day through baby Elliott. It will never be lost on me that he breathed it through her. Happy Birthday to my baby Elliott. The one whose mere presence reminds me everything is going to be OK. Because presence can be - everything's going to be OK. (re-written from 2021 Dear Jesus,
It’s the third Sunday of Advent. A season of joy. A season when we reflect on your arrival in the nativity scene, and all that your arrival will mean and has meant to the world. I’ve borrowed a song from Maverick City Music to help with my own personal reflections this month. They have a song, maybe you’ve heard of it 😊 - it’s called Fear is Not My Future. In the song, the writers make four proclamations: Fear is not my future, you are. Sickness is not my story, you are. Heartbreak’s not my home, you are. Death is not the end, you are. This morning, I want to reflect on the third proclamation; heartbreak's not my home, you are. Jesus, I have experienced broken heartedness in my life. I have experienced heartbreak rather recently. And the one thing I've come to discover about heartbreak - heartbreak always wants to become your home. It's like the cracks and holes in your heart suck you in and hope to keep you stuck there forever. I know you get it, Jesus. There's a scene in the bible when you learn your close friend Lazarus has died. The bible tells us: When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled” and “Jesus wept.” You knew you were going to raise Lazarus from the dead. So your heart didn't break over the loss of a friend. Your heart broke seeing and feeling all the brokenhearted tears flowing for your friend. Just like you raised Lazarus from death, and soothed the broken hearts of your friends, you reach into the holes and the cracks of our broken hearts to remind us that heartbreak is not our home. And no, you don't always return those we've lost, lost through death or simply a change in seasons, but still, you refuse to allow us to accept that grieving our loss is supposed to be our new home. Even though it surely gets to feeling that way. I don't believe that time heals all wounds. All broken hearts. But Jesus, I believe you heal all of mine. You do because you are my home. You are my home and you know little can destroy my sense of direction on the way home to you like a broken heart can. Little stands in my way of finding the whole heart of the baby in the manger than the shattered heart in me. But Christmas is our reminder. Heartbreak is not a signal to retreat into the brokenness of our own hearts, it's a signal to reach for yours. Heartbreak isn't misdirection; it's invitation. Heartbreak is a signal to weep with you, like you wept with Lazarus' sister and friends, and not slip alone into the depths of our own tears. It's a signal to remember, no matter how much our broken heart begins to feel like forever - like home - it is NOT our home. You are. You voluntarily left our forever home to come into the very depths of a feeding trough in a manger, into the very depths of our every broken heart, to invite us home. Heartbreak is not my home, Jesus. You are. And during this season of advent, and during every season of every broken heart I ever face, I am thankful for that. Thank you, Jesus. If I had to describe my work these days, and my passion, it's helping people understand that not only are the broken parts of who they are fixable, that truth is one of the most valuable parts of their being.
I know it's the most valuable part of mine. Much of my writing and speaking and teaching these days is me healing the broken parts of me out loud. In doing so, as I share the value I've discovered in my own brokenness, people begin to discover value in the broken parts of themselves. That doesn't make me God, but it does help me understand God. From the earliest seconds of humanity, when Adam and Eve were hiding in shame from God in the trees of the garden, God realized his immediate life's work wasn't going to be hanging out with us in a beautiful garden, it was going to be helping us find a beautiful garden in the things we'd rather God not see. God got so committed to this job that he left his own heavenly garden to come tell us firsthand, God to human and human to human, I don't care how overgrown your life is with weeds, you ARE a beautiful garden. God would go on to allow himself to be as physically broken as a human can be broken to say, there is beauty in your brokenness, I can see it so clearly up here hanging on this cross. The shepherds went to find Jesus in the manger, but not before Jesus had come to find the shepherds in a field. Came to find them to tell them, in your minds you are mere shepherds, in my mind, and in my heart, and in my life, you are everything beautiful. And now that you have found me, you have a beautiful story to share. Christmas is a reminder that we all have a story to share, and we don't have to wait until it's a happily ever story to share it. Happily ever after is often a myth. Broken is always a reality. So when it comes to helping the people around us, broken is often far more relatable, far more readable, than happily ever after. God has indeed promised us a happily ever after. But that promise doesn't often find us in our happiness, it finds us in our brokenness. If you are feeling broken this Christmas season, open that brokenness to the promise. And in all of those spaces where you might find yourself feeling unworthy, discover those might very well be some of the most worthy parts of you to someone else. I know they're the most worthy parts of you to the baby in a manger. He left heaven to tell you so. The Nativity story fascinates the hell out of me.
Literally. The Nativity scene, even more than the scenes at the cross and the empty tomb, is the foundation of my faith in Jesus. The more I reflect on the baby in a manger, the more I can not escape my personal truth: that baby came to deliver us all an inescapable message: We must live in loving relationships with one another. Without them, we will surely die. This Jesus, to my knowledge, is the only God story among all God stories out there, the only one amongst all the religions and theologies and doctrines, where the God decided to enter the scene of our own humanity in humanity's most vulnerable state. A Baby. As human babies, we were once all clinging to life. Lives we would have surely lost if another human didn't come to our rescue. Our lives all began with someone saving them. And so, it's important to recognize, this baby Jesus came into the world, fully human, looking into the eyes of his Mother Mary, fully depending on her to save his life. The creator of the universe could have waltzed into the world a larger than humanity father-figure in charge of it all, yet instead, CHOSE to arrive as a baby totally depending on someone else to take charge. God CHOSE to be dependent and not depended upon? Why? Oh, how many times I have asked that question. Why? More than ever, though, I feel like I know that answer. I am a man, a human, who has faced and created many human sufferings in my life. If I had to name the greatest of those sufferings, I would say today that it's having lived a life with very limited meaningful human connections. Meaningful, being those safe connections where one can be fully themselves, fully exposed and fully weak and fully vulnerable, yet miraculously strengthened by the other. The other, about which one might say, "without this relationship, I am less than." Yet, the God of power, the God of strength, the God of everything, chose to make it a point, maybe the greatest point of all, that THAT IS the nature of humanity, and the nature of God, that we are all living in dependence on one another. We are all living in dependence on one another to feel safe, and connected, and provided for. And the order of that is important. It is not just important, it is divine. Yes, the God of the universe was born a baby in a manger. But that baby was surrounded first and foremost by humans, not angels, who prioritized making that baby feel safe. And then, in that safety, our God began to feel connected. And provided for. I suspect some might read this and accuse me of trivializing an all-powerful God. And I would say, oh, quite the opposite. I am recognizing and pointing to a God who used his power in the most humbling of ways to deliver us all a message. That in a world that more and more trivializes human connection, reduces it to 'likes' and 'loves' and 'views' and superficiality and casualness - we are creating the world's greatest suffering. Disconnection. Loneliness. The baby Jesus, who would later in life proclaim that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love one another, chose to arrive into this world as the very definition of that love. Safety. Connection. Provision. In that order.... The manger scene is not cute. It's not adorable. It's not a beautiful beginning to a beautiful story. It is a warning. One timely and one worth listening to. The Creator of the universe could have chosen an arrival that declared, never fear, God is here. And yet he chose to arrive with the message, never fear, for we have each other. The most powerful God came offering the most powerful message of them all. Each other. The often-overlooked message in the nativity scene. Each other. 12/14/2023 0 Comments Love, Actually, Is All AroundLast minute yesterday, I decided to go to the local movie theater and watch Love Actually. I saw this movie for the first time on television last year. It moved me, frankly, so I thought, why not catch it on the big screen.
The movie opens with a narrator proclaiming, "if you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love, actually, is all around." As his words spilled out, I looked around the theater. I was the only person in there. I was, actually, all alone. I told a friend afterward, I'm not sure it's a good idea to go see a movie about love being everywhere in a theater by yourself leading up to a Christmas you'll spend by yourself (well, except for a dog and two cats and the beach 😊🤷♂️). But watching that movie, uplifted by MMs with peanuts and popcorn (talk about love, actually), I was reminded that even on a screen, love is always reminding us of love, or preparing us for love, or inviting us into love. Inviting us into it and inviting us to see it. Because sometimes the lack of love is not the lack of love, it's just simply overlooking it. The more we fail to see love where it actually exists, the less we begin to believe love actually exists at all. After the movie, because MMs and popcorn just don't constitute dinner, I dropped into a little family owned pizza joint next to the theater. Like the theater, the place was empty. A man and a woman were working together behind the counter. I asked if they were still open. They both smiled and said yes. I told the woman what I wanted. She told the man. They smiled at each other as he put my slices in the oven. I don't know if they were married. Or friends. Or co-workers. But to me, they looked like love. The woman handed me my slices and out the door I went. But I couldn't help but hear that movie narration: "If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love, actually, is all around." This holiday season, and beyond, take time to notice it. Love, actually.... For most of my life, I've had emotions showing up wanting to teach me something.
Something about me. And for most of my life, when those emotions showed up, I shooed them away. Or assaulted them. Or ran from them. What I rarely did, however, was ask them: what would you like to teach me? Eduardo Bericat says, "As human beings we can only experience life emotionally." Robert Green says, "If you can't listen to where your emotions came from, they can't teach you anything." And Brene Brown says, "Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don't always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively." I think you get the picture. We are emotional creatures. And if we don't have a good understanding of what our emotions are trying to tell us about ourselves, if we can't identify them the way we can identify the difference between Apple and Android, we'll always struggle to live out the most authentic versions of who we are. For me personally, if I started to rank in order the emotions that have tried to teach me the most, and in turn the emotions I've one way or another ignored the most, vulnerability would rank number one. Oh, I hear you FEAR, I know you think you should be top dog, but I'm afraid vulnerability has you beat on this one. Brene Brown defines vulnerability as "the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure." Let's start with this: I now know - thank you Ms. Brown - that most of my life I've felt vulnerable. And then let's go here: most of my life I had no idea I was feeling vulnerable. Most of my life, I would have identified the emotion I now know as vulnerability as a powerful feeling signaling it's time for me to run, to break off serious relationships, to collect casual relationships, to drink, to drink some more, to crack endless jokes, to chase career milestones. Most of my life, this emotion, VULNERABILITY, that was showing up trying to tell me that I was about to experience emotional exposure, and that that was okay, felt like a heart-racing, gut-wrenching warning that someone was about to discover my emotional secrets. They were about to gain access to my forever-secured emotional scars. This morning, before writing this article, I felt vulnerable. In fact, I still feel it now. But I am not running. I'm not fighting. I'm not stuck, frozen in my chair. I am listening to my foe turned friend, vulnerability. I am listening to her ask, you are standing on the ledge of emotional exposure, are you sure you want to leap? Many days, because I stop and listen to the emotion, and try to entertain what he is trying to ask me, I DO take the leap. And I have discovered it is not a leap into a dark pit - surely not near the dark pit hiding from the emotion was - but rather it lands me in this beautiful place of authenticity. I had a friend recently tell me, I'm not often happy, but I'm almost always authentic. And I'll take authentic over happy. That struck me at first. It sounded depressing. Until I realized just how often happy in my life looked like drunkenness, how often it looked like a fabricated joke to hide from real unhappiness, how often it looked like a relationship that lacked any relation. As I've listened to vulnerability, as I've embraced the emotion's message, I've come to learn that running from emotional exposure is rarely, if ever, the path to happiness. That leap and that pit is rarely joy. But vulnerability, if we will embrace the messenger, and accept the possibility that comes with being fully known, I will tell you that you may not always be happy with the world, but more than ever you will come to be happy with yourself. And if you're someone who has spent a life shooting the emotional messenger, that kind of happiness is a gift. Before you shoot, listen. And learn. 12/12/2023 0 Comments I believe my season will comeLike many in my community, I woke up yesterday to snow on the ground. It excited my boys. A two-hour school delay. But for many, the snow, the winter, it is not exciting. In fact, it can be depressing. Winter, the days are shorter and darker, the trees and plants and plush yards have all gone to sleep. Snowfall blankets the world as if wishing for the world to disappear. For some, winter is not exciting. Winter is a reminder that they have been stuck in the winter of life for far too long. But our God - and us and our world and our lives - we are seasons if nothing else. We are winter to spring, seed to harvest. Over and over. Though the winter is long ever richer The harvest it brings Though my waiting prolongs even greater Your promise for me like a seed I believe that my season will come (~Hillsong Worship) We are not people of patience. We are not ones comfortable waiting out the winters of life for the promise of the harvest they bring. But our God IS a God of patience. A God who could have saved the world in an instant sent a baby in a manger. A baby that would grow through the seasons of life, like you and I, until there was life no more. But in His final winter, the baby in a manger left us with a promise. The harvest is worth waiting for. Oh God, if you're not done working, I'm not done waiting. Nowhere has your patience shown through more brightly, like a bright sun on fresh snow, than the patience you have planted in every struggling moment of my life. In every winter, you have been there, looking like harvest. Hope. And more and more, the surprise snow, it is a reminder, I am just in the winter. And the God of patience is patiently readying me for spring. This Christmas season, more than ever, I do believe. I believe that my season will come. |
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
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