I know God has to be saying, finally, he gets is. He gets that I haven't had near as much interest in changing the situations in his life as I've had in changing him.
Because that is a truth about my life that God fully knows. I've spent a lot of my life in challenging situations because I mistakenly thought the situation was the challenge and not me. God, when are you going to deliver that promotion so my job won't suck so much? God, when are you going to help me move from this town so I can live in a place that will make me feel better about where I live? God, when are you going to improve my financial situation so I don't have to worry as much? God, when are you going to fix those people in this relationship so this person won't be so miserable in it anymore? I've spent a lot of my life wondering when God was going to fix the things in my life instead of being open to the possibility that God was using those things to change me. We miss those opportunities; we remain closed to the possibility that those challenging things are here to promote change in our lives when we spend all of our time running from those things. Or running to the next thing that sounds and feels better than the last things. We miss a lot of opportunities to change when we believe life is about our circumstance and not the person we become as a result of them. It makes a world of difference when you start living your days asking yourself who am I becoming and not what am I making of my life. I like to imagine that when I meet God face to face, he is going to ask me, WHO are you and not WHAT are you. What are you begs for details about what you made of the circumstances in your life, who are you begs you to recognize and give praise for all that God made of you through your circumstances. I know God wants me to make something of my life, but if it is at the expense of not letting it make something of me than God probably thinks I'm missing the point. And I did. For a long time. But today I am constantly open to becoming who God desires me to be. Today I am much more open to exploring the challenging circumstances in my life for the possibility that God wants those challenges to shape me. Today, I am open to far more exploring than running. Because I know God isn't trying to change IT as much as he's trying to change ME. I know God, it's about time. I am thankful that who you are is a patient God. That alone has made a world of difference in both me AND my circumstances. Thank you.
0 Comments
This is the last day of the 6th decade of my life. I've written a couple of thousand articles this decade, so it would only be appropriate to share the longest today (this forever renders long post warnings understatements).
It is also in many ways the most meaningful. Because of its length it's not well edited; I apologize in advance to anyone who reads this. It's in many ways a decade dump - one that felt pretty necessary as I prepare to begin the most beautiful decade of my life. **** This is it. The last day of the sixth decade of my life. I’m looking forward to this next decade. I haven’t always said that about the next decade; maybe I never have. Certainly, there have been a few decades I was ready to get to as a means of escaping the decade I was in. That’s not the case here, though. I’m excited. My life is much more embracing than escaping these days. Oh, some days “I embrace” looks and feels more joyful than other days. But still, I am embracing. I’ve come to believe embracing is the opposite of escaping. Escaping is pain; embracing is healing. Healing began for me in this sixth decade of life. After five decades of hurting, along comes the healing. In 2016, I was 52 years old. I sat in a presentation at a conference I had to attend for my job. A man presented on the connection between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and long-term health and wellness, to include the risk for addictions. I had never heard of ACEs. I stood out in the hallway immediately after that presentation. Dazed. ACEs coming at me from all corners of my life. I know today I was standing in the middle of an unsettling shift in my life. Like an earthquake. I was in one moment being violently haunted by my past, and at the same time, as if stuck in a rip current, drug kicking and screaming into a more hopeful future. I didn’t know it in that moment, I could have never articulated it then, but an internal wrestling match had begun, one that would make me ultimately choose: past or future; death or life. You see, healing ultimately is a choice, but one you don’t begin to make until a moment pulls the curtain back on five decades of pain. It’s possible to live life in deep pain and not know you are in pain. I have written several chapters of the book of my life. Maybe this article will ultimately serve as a suitable alternative to that book. For many reasons I’ve struggled to write that book. I don’t know. But it’s title up until this moment has always been: “It’s Hard to Outrun the Monster in Your Life When You Are the Monster.” What that presentation put me on a path of understanding was that the abuses inflicted upon me in my childhood, and the abuses I inflicted upon others in my childhood, they became source material for a monster story I would tell for most of my life. It’s a story I would tell myself every day and at the same time a story I would hide from everyone else. Which in a way lets that monster become a disease. Because the longer we tell ourselves monster stories, the longer the monster eats away at us, the more likely it is you disappear and the monster is all that remains. At least in the monster’s mind. Monster stories tend to intensify when no one talks about them. When they become stories lost in one’s body and soul, protected by secrecy and stigma. When they become buried beneath guilt and shame. Some things disappear in life when you bury them, monster stories grow. I always wondered, how was it when, not yet a teen, that I fell in love with the feeling of alcohol. How was it as a teen that I was drawn to experimenting with various pills in the pill bottles I’d find in medicine cabinets marked anti-depressant. I didn’t even know what depression was back then. I do now. How was it that at such a young age I’d become obsessed with people liking me. I craved popularity. I needed it. How was it that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t say or do to fill that need? There was no lie I wouldn’t tell, no person I wouldn’t pretend to be. No alcohol or pills I wouldn’t steal and share. There was nothing I couldn’t be talked into doing if the reward was being liked. How does that happen at such a young age? Those are all shameful and guilt-ridden questions you ask yourself until you begin to understand that all of those things are something one turns to to hide from the monster. They are who one becomes to forget that he IS the monster. That day, that presentation, that term: ACEs - it put me on a path of understanding and for the first time deeply wondering if it could be true, could it possibly be true that I am NOT a monster? After all these years, decades, is it possible that I have unnecessarily been hiding in plain sight? Hiding a monster that didn’t exist. In 2016, several months after sitting in that presentation, I ran my first marathon. I didn’t see that coming any more than I saw that first ACEs presentation coming. On the surface, these would not seem to be experiences that are connected in any way, a marathon and a behavioral health presentation, but I can look back now and see that they most certainly were in my life. Maybe even divinely coordinated. In running, and especially when you are a SLOW runner training for the most challenging physical endeavor you’ve ever taken on, you spend a lot of time out on the road and a lot of time alone. It’s just you and your thoughts. At the heart of this ACEs work is an invitation to start connecting the dots of your past. (It’s why I’m currently fascinated by and obsessed with the show This Is Us). ACEs invites you to understand that the brain patterns of our lives are largely formed in our childhoods (85% of them before the age of 3), and without major rewiring, those patterns tag along with us for the rest of our lives. Friends or monsters, they tag along. Out there running, mile after mile and hour after hour, I was coming to grips with the one pattern that was tagging along with me no matter where I went or what decade I was entering. That pattern: relationships were scary. Steven Porges, a distinguished researcher, says that trauma can shift our patterns of connection into patterns of protection. Porges suggests that after experiencing trauma, individuals might be more likely to interpret ambiguous or neutral signals as threats, activating protective responses rather than open and connective ones. This can lead to challenges in forming and maintaining relationships. The result, people may become more isolated and less engaged socially. Bingo. I loved being liked, and I didn’t mind being around people, as long as I could protect myself from ever being known. Because the closer you get to being known the more at risk you become of someone walking into the bedroom of your life and discovering the monster. Out there running, I began to understand this relationship pattern of my life: Long for relationship, begin relationship, run as fast as I could from relationship the moment I suspected someone might be close to discovering the monster. Over and over, three full decades of my life, that was my pattern. I am out there running, and it occurs to me, I’ve been married 17 years, what changed? How was it that that at the age of 35 years old I was able to overcome the relationship patterns of my life and enter one of the most intimate types of relationships in life. And the answer was, I hadn’t overcome that pattern. Turns out marriage can be a great place to hide a monster. You can get so wrapped up in living out the image of a marriage – house, cars, kids, family gatherings – you can get so invested in portraying the perception of marriage that it becomes a perfect place to hide the reality of you. You get so busy, you get so determined to appear happy that no one ever bothers to ask, are you wrestling with any monsters in your life. I’ve come to know there are a lot of marriages that are far more perception than reality. There are a lot of families that are far more perception than reality. Hiding can be protective and even comforting until you come to realize you don’t want to hide anymore. You’ve been introduced to the possibility you’re not a monster after all, but you’ve spent five decades of your life believing that’s the case. For the first time, you really want to tell your monster story to someone else. You want them to hear it and assure you the man you heard was right, your experiences don’t make you a monster. But you can’t tell that story to anyone else. There is no one else. You come to discover the relationships you’ve invested the most time holding together in your life are relationships that have been tearing you apart. Not a purposeful tearing, but when you’re the one being torn it doesn’t really matter if it’s purposeful or not. When you’re the one who is coming to grips with the reality that what I need most in life right now is someone who can receive my secrets, and the people you want to share them with most have been complicit in or enabling of the secret keeping, you are torn apart. That is not a blaming or a finger pointing, it is simply a cry from the broken. When you want to scream “I am not a monster” and you are tortured by the reality you can’t scream loud enough for anyone to hear it, that is not an accusation, it’s a cry from the broken. It is a resentment of the relationship pattern that is tagging along that has helped you create a pattern of no one to hear you when you most want to be heard. The monster wants it to be an accusation. The monster wants you to lash out at the world upon this discovery. The monster wants you to villainize and fall into victimhood. And I confess, I lived much of my life complying with the demands of this monster. But you know, since that presentation in 2016, I have talked to thousands of people about the impacts of adverse childhood experiences. Today, eight years later, it’s in those conversations where I feel safer than I ever have. It’s there where I’ve discovered new patterns tagging along with my life. I have shared with some perfect strangers far more about the monsters of my life than I have with the people who on paper should have been the recipients of that sharing. But sharing isn’t a function of the relationship on paper. Sharing doesn’t know this is your wife or these are your parents or this is your pastor or this is your therapist. Sharing doesn’t honor titles and hierarchies or medical degrees and certifications. Because our bodies, our nervous systems, our emotions, they are not privy to the titles and qualifications of the relationships in our lives, they are only obsessed with feeling safe inside them. Actually, no, they are not obsessed, they absolutely demand that we feel safe before we will ever consider sharing our monster stories with anyone but the monster himself. Our nervous systems don’t grant us permission to talk about the hardest experiences in our lives, the things that haunt us, shame us, guilt us, they don’t grant permission based on WHO we are talking to, they do so based on how safe we feel inside the conversations with them. When you begin to feel safety with strangers, when you begin to see and feel your most vulnerable self come out of hiding in their midst, when you begin to discover the real you who has been living in the shadows of a monster your whole life, you grow resentful that you are living in the shadows of the relationships you spend the most time in. And sometimes that is when you become the most destructive monster of all. I apologized to someone recently. The person I’m most sorry for hurting in this journey. The journey of running from my monster to then becoming the monster to ultimately discovering I’m not a monster at all. And I said in that apology: I never knew how to heal. Not heal myself. Not heal a relationship. I had known how to experience love, I had just never had any idea how to DO love. I had experienced a lot of relationships in my life, but never ever had I learned how to heal or repair one in a bad spot. Which in the end, was at the heart of our demise. I’ve come to know in these vulnerable conversations with communities, THAT is at the heart of our general demise as a society. We in many ways know how to love, we deeply long to love, we just have no idea how to repair love when it is broken. Unrepaired love often quickly migrates into unquieted resentment. And there does come a day when the damage to repair is well beyond the desire or energy to do so. When you can no longer feel any signs of a connection, the conversation about repairing a connection seems far more once upon a time than an act of love. When you have a relationship built on hiding who you are, repairing it often starts with acknowledging we are complete strangers. Folks on the outside looking in might believe that’s just a part of the healing process. Those inside the process might feel like having some hint of who the other is is a pretty important element of that process. At the finish line of that first marathon, I often say I didn’t feel this sensation of “I did it” – instead, I found myself far more wondering, what else am I capable of? In 2018, I pressed into that wonder. I signed up to run a 35-mile trail race in Dalton, Georgia. It was a longer distance than I’d ever run, and it was WAY more climbing than anything I’d ever climbed. It was by far the grandest challenge ever to my comfort zone. And maybe as not much of a surprise to me, I didn’t finish it. In 2019, I took my first trip to Honduras. Talk about another step way outside my comfort zone. While there, I found myself standing in the courtyard of a small building in a remote village. Young kids were lining up, smiling, anxious to get a new pair of shoes. But leaning on a fence that wrapped around this courtyard was a group of older teenage boys. I saw darkness in their eyes. Not a mean dark, but a lost dark. I felt ill for a moment. I couldn’t explain it but I felt it. Maybe it was the first time I was fully aware that the emotions we feel in a moment can be emotions that have nothing to do with that moment at all, but emotions living in you, in some part of your body, from some dark place in your past. Maybe they are not your emotions; they are your monster’s emotions. I remember coming home from work one day and snapping at my two young boys for playing with an older neighbor boy. It was hardly the first time they’d played together. I told them, I don’t ever want to see you playing with him again. They were confused. It’s the one time I vividly remember my boys looking at me like I was a, well, a monster. This neighbor boy was a good kid. He didn’t deserve monster treatment. Sometimes we judge people in our current life through the emotions of experiences in our past life. Boys playing with your kids aren’t the boys who played with you the kid. That is one thing that makes repair hard; not knowing that what you’re really trying to repair is your past and not your present. You are hiding from the villain in front of you who is only a villain because they remind you of the villains of your past. In 2020, in the heart of a pandemic, shortly after a conversation that confirmed my marriage was over, in the middle of more days than I care to remember since that trip to Honduras when I wanted to call it quits on life, I went back to Georgia. I went back to repair something I broke in many ways back in 2018. The morning of the 35-mile race, I texted my dear friend and Georgia Jewel race director Jenny. I told her, I can’t do it. I can’t do this today. She told me to get to the starting line. She told me she believed in me. It was Jenny who 13 hours later was standing there waiting for me at the finish line of that 35-mile race, offering me one of the most meaningful hugs of my life. For 13 hours I wrestled with the story of my life. All I had hidden from. All I had denied. All I had destroyed. All of the patterns and addictions that had come to thrive and grow and take over my life deep within the fertile soil of secrecy. In that moment, in that hug, Jenny might have been holding the realest version of me anyone had ever held. It is a hug I will never forget. Many folks applauded my physical accomplishment that day, but few will ever understand the emotional mountain I climbed that day. I climbed to exhaustion with just enough energy left to whisper, I am not a monster. It’s amazing how my running journey has paralleled this healing journey I’ve been on the past decade. How it has helped expose the vulnerabilities in me, unveiled secrets tightly kept within me, shown me my potential, taught me that life is never over, and that repair is never beyond our reach when our hearts desire is repair. It's been a journey that started with me running from life and now that has me running full steam ahead toward life. I told someone the other day that turning 60 is the first number that has ever sounded truly old. Which is why I’m caught completely off guard by how exciting it is to hit that number. Hope is powerful, you know. Or at least I’ve come to know it. Hope can untangle life and connect the dots. Hope can reveal monsters and then just as quickly kill them off. Hope is the friendly mirror that slips in and replaces the one that has haunted you for decades. Hope says let me introduce you to the real you. I am grateful for every moment of the last six decades. Without NEEDING to heal I would have never LEARNED to heal and without ever learning to heal I would have never been in the position I’m in today to HELP OTHERS heal. A passion that has both become my mission and my identify. Monsters are no longer my identity. I have said that there are certainly many steps along the way of this hurting and healing journey that God was not beside me applauding. But God has ALWAYS been beside me. When your relational pattern is one of being afraid of relationships, the relationship that comes to scare you the most is your relationship with God. But when you truly begin to heal, feeling God’s presence becomes the peace that soothes any fear you’ve ever had of him. In feeling as alone as you’ve ever felt you come to discover you’ve never been alone at all. I’ve come to know that’s because that was behind God’s design of human relationships. He intended them to be the peace that soothes any fear we ever had. He intended them to feel like togetherness. God has said, I didn’t give you a spirit of fear, I gave you love. Nothing unravels love or prevents love or makes us forget love like a spirt of fear. I know that is true because of my two sons. Every moment I am not with my two sons, I miss them. And missing people is not something that has come easy to me. But I always miss my boys. I’ve come to know this decade that missing and love and all the beautiful feelings and emotions that come from connection are indeed a product of the connection, of fearlessness, not the names in or the nature of a relationship. There are a lot of relationships being held together out there out of a sense of obligation; the grand prize for doing so is a pat on the back for obedience. But the reality is, the grand prize of connection and relationship was designed to be fearlessness. It was supposed to be safety and love. But when relationships aren’t built on those foundations those prizes are never experienced. One year ago today, I was back in Honduras. I was standing in a small school yard looking at all the beautiful people. There were no dark faces. No mysterious ill feelings inside. It was a beautiful feeling to know that the monsters were all gone. Not just that, but that there were never any monsters at all. They were simply stories. Stories I told myself. Oh they try to show up now and again, but I simply say to them, you are a story I no longer tell. The me who went to Honduras in 2019 thought he was going there to heal others, the me who went in 2023 actually was. The me who turned 50 nearly ten years ago had decades of unhealthy patterns tagging along. Tomorrow, I will turn 60, and I know many of those patterns will be left behind. Many of them with this article. It has not been an easy decade by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose there are many on the outside looking in upon it thinking, he sure went through one hell of a midlife crisis. When people say that I think maybe they put too much blame on the midlife while withholding curiosity and compassion and empathy toward the crisis. Many times, that crisis has very little to do with middle age and everything to do with early age. Many times that crisis wasn’t as much crisis as it was healing. As I begin this new decade, I am not healed. And neither are you. I suppose that’s my biggest takeaway from this past decade. That one big secret to a content life is not finding a magical place called healed but to invest in the magical process of daily healing. For many of you, that will start with discovering you are not your monster stories. If that is already you, if you already know that, then chances are that’s because you have people in your life you’ve shared those stories with. People who responded by treating you like a beautiful human and not a monster. That is my commitment this next decade. To doing everything in my power to help people come to know they are not their monster stories. Because that is where hope begins. And it is hope that untangles life and connects the dots. It is hope that reveals monsters and then just as quickly kills them off. It is hope that slips in and replaces the mirror that haunts us with the mirror that smiles upon us. Smiles and says, let me introduce you to the real you. I think you’ll like him. Smiles and says, you may not be repaired, but you know how to repair now. Oh, what a beautiful way to start a new decade. I am grateful for all who have joined in my healing journey, and to the degree that journey has aided your own healing, I thank God for that. For ultimately it is God who has coordinated this healing journey called life. It is God who has said you were created in my image and not the image you create of any monsters. Thank you for never leaving God. Thank you for your image. I asked AI this morning, what is crowdsourcing?
AI said, crowdsourcing is a method of solving problems by tapping into the collective knowledge, skills, or resources of a large group of people, typically through the internet. Maybe crowdsourcing isn't a bad idea. That is, unless we're bad at picking the right collective. Then it's a really bad idea. The problem with crowdsourcing, many times, is we already have a solution in mind when we go looking for our collective. We aren't looking for a collective to help us come up with a solution, we're looking for one to support the solution we've already come up with. Seth Godin says, "The hallmark of a curious person with goodwill is that they’re eager to change their minds." I think I'd repurpose that great quote to say, the hallmark of a good crowdsourcer is they are eager to find a collective that might change their mind. I know many of the challenges I've faced in life have come as a result of me charging ahead according to my own will. To fuel my charging, I've often surrounded myself with people who would support that will. A crowd who would encourage my charging. I have followed paths that purposely circumvented people who might suggest I was on the wrong path. In my mind, not because they might tell me I was wrong, but because I was absolutely certain that THEY were wrong. When we are always certain our way is right, it's exceedingly easy to pick out the people who are wrong. I had a friend share with me recently that she is having a hard time knowing what path God wants her to take. I told her I've come to discover God is never really good at telling me what path I should take, but he's very good at letting me feel unsupported in certain paths I want to take. You know how I have come to know that? The quickest way I've come to identify I am on a path God might not support me in taking? I know it because I'll go talk to people who will support my path and not my God who might challenge it. I am far more eager to find people who will support my solution than talking to a God I know might try to change my mind. I am asking all the right questions in my life, I am just crowdsourcing with the wrong collective. We live in a day and age where it's possible to find support for every solution and path we come up with in life. You look hard enough, you'll find the answer you long to hear. That makes it more challenging in many ways to live out a great secret to a more fulfilling life: being eager to find people who might actually change our minds. I no longer believe in right or wrong paths as much as I believe in right or wrong guidance. I no longer believe in right or wrong answers as much as I believe in rolling through life with right answers we cultivate from the right source. I think it's a beautiful thing that we get to crowdsource, we simply need to be very cautious about the kind of source that crowd turns out to be. It can be frustrating, feeling like I don't have what I need to go where I need to go. I've discovered that frustration often comes from me thinking I need to go places I really don't need to go.
I've said many prayers in which I've asked God to provide me a way to go where I've decided I need to go. When often, the most powerful prayer is to ask God where he wants me to go with what I already have. We are often good at asking God for what we need to get where we need to go without ever stopping to ask God, where do I need to go? That often creates a great conflict of interest. When where I think I need to go and where God needs me to go are not in great alignment, we will often feel greatly unprovided for. I have to confess, it's in that great conflict of interest that I have turned away from God at times in my life. When you feel unprovided for you can get to feeling like the provider doesn't hear you. Or worse, that the provider hears you and is ignoring you, that the provider hears you and is ignoring you because the provider doesn't care for you. I have deeply committed the last few years to have prayers that ask God to show me more than they ask God to give to me. It has not been easy. There are still many days I feel like I am lacking, but still, most days I feel like I'm going in the right direction. Yesterday, I went to my mailbox. I realized I hadn't been there this week. As I sorted through the stack of mail, a stack that is almost always junk mail, I found myself holding a hand addressed envelope. Hand addressed envelopes are always mysterious yet exciting these days. When in my excitement I opened it, I discovered a check. It was payment for speaking at an event I'd forgotten I was getting paid for speaking at. I can't overstate how timely this check was. Timely for two reasons. One, it eased a burden a bit. Two, and most important, it was a very clear affirmation from God that if I will keep asking for his guidance, he will keep providing in ways I don't ask for and certainly don't see coming. God is a great provider. He always has been. It's just sometimes we forget that what he provides best, what he wants to provide most, is guidance. God knows the best path for us. It's when we forget to ask God about that path or follow it that we feel most forgotten. If you feel like you don't have what you need to get where you need to go today, consider the possibility that you don't need to go where you think you do. And then consider asking God for an alternative path. Turning our prayers from prayers of provision to prayers of guidance; it can make all the difference in the world. There are moments my life doesn't feel so praise worthy. But that is always a feeling; it is never a fact.
Praise worthy is a perspective, one I often need to find and not one that usually comes looking for me. God doesn't come knocking at my door begging me to notice him, but oh how he completely loves me showing up at his door declaring to the heavens just how much I notice him. That's what I have to do sometimes to shift the way I feel or to put myself on better footing. I have to go to God's door and simply declare that I notice him. Declare that I am so grateful for him. I told a colleague yesterday that life has been sluggish the last couple of weeks since returning from my spring break week with the boys. Sluggish, in that I find myself wishing we were still hiking the mountain trails together. Sluggish, in that I wish I was still watching my boy catch his first trout. Sluggish, in that I know those moments are quickly fading away. And real talk, sluggish in all the emotions that come with knowing the number of those fading moments I've missed the last several years. But sluggish is a feeling; God's door is a place. And when I show up at that door and praise him for the mere gift of my two sons, when I praise him for the beauty of the mountains we explored together that week, when I praise him for friends who open the doors of their home to us and make trips like that possible, when I praise him, the air changes. Our feelings and emotions and our sluggishness, they are the air. We have a lot more control over this air than we think. This air is not like the weather; it is predictable and changeable. If you are ever wondering where God is, simply praise him. You will then suddenly be at his door. And chances are, that will feel a lot better than the place you were before you got there. Life is praise worthy or life is not. Neither is ever a fact but both are always a choice. Thank you for that choice, God. That is indeed praise worthy. I've spent a lot of my life stuck. But I've come to believe stuck is more a belief system than an actual state of being.
Stuck happens when I don't believe my next choice will make life feel any better or any more hopeful than it does right now, so why make a choice at all? Stuck comes from believing that because this feels like the end it indeed must BE the end. Unstuck, moving forward in your story and leaning into new life, that comes when you believe this might feel like the end, but you know it's only the beginning. In his sermon this weekend, Steven Furtick highlighted this wonderful advantage God has when it comes to our stories. God gets to see them from the future. God gets to see my childhood traumas and my hang-ups and addictions and my life of failed relationships from the actual ending and not from the place that feels like the end of me. God gets to know how those stories actually end and not how I imagine them ending. The struggle comes, I think, when we insist on knowing that ending before me take a step toward it. It's not enough for us to have faith that God knows something about our future story that makes it worth living, so we refuse to live. I am fortunate today to have lived through a life full of moments that felt like the end but were actually beautiful beginnings. Even still, I'm not immune to stuck. But when I get to feeling stuck these days, I know for sure that I'm not. Stuck is not a place, it's a belief. And I ask God to remind me that my story that feels like the end is actually a story that still has a lot of chapters missing. Can you remind me of that, God? Can you point me to the missing chapters? Can you remind me, God, that my story has a very real ending that will make much more sense of my life than the ending I'm imagining in my stuck beliefs? If you are reading this, you have not reached the end of your story. If you feel like it is, that feeling is just that, a feeling. Please know that feeling comes from missing pieces of your story. Pieces written that you have yet to read. Don't give up on the chance to read them. Parts of them are in today. Parts in tomorrow. All of them are in keep going. So keep going. What feels like the end of you is only the beginning. So keep going. My word for 2024 is behold. It's a word that challenges me to take in as much beauty as possible, to put myself in the path of oncoming beauty as frequently as I can, with anticipation that each moment of beauty is only the beginning of the story.
It's based on God, and his frequent call in the bible for us to behold. Behold as an invitation to discover the beauty beyond the beauty. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord! And this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”… Behold. As I prepare for the week ahead, I am struck that this time last weekend my the world was busy preparing for a solar eclipse. People were traveling across the country, arranging watch parties, scrambling to snag the last pairs of glasses. News channels racing to claim their spots in the path of totality. My world was preparing itself to behold something spectacular. And they did. It was a beautiful thing. Curt Thompson described what I witnessed eloquently. He said: "The eclipse, with its stunning display of cosmic alignment, served as a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world. It transcended geographical boundaries and cultural differences, uniting people from all walks of life in a shared moment of wonder and awe. In witnessing this celestial spectacle, we were reminded of the inherent beauty that exists in moments of collective appreciation and unity." A collective appreciation and unity. A beholding. But here I am, not even six full days removed from the event, and it's gone. There is no more talking about it. No more pictures shared. It feels like the awe has faded into a distant memory. To be truthful, it doesn't feel like a memory at all. The eclipse and the unity it encouraged feels more like a moment now and not an invitation. It feels like something we watched together while missing the invitation into togetherness. Like many who observed the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, I wonder if we saw the beauty, but missed the sign? It is not too late. Life is constantly calling us into moments of collective appreciation and unity. We simply have to be more committed to holding on to the moments that we behold together. We have to imagine them as something larger than an eclipse, something more meaningful than a baby. We have to see the eclipse as ours. The ocean and the mountains and the streams as ours. We have to hear the birds as our birds and see the dolphins emerge from the ocean as our fish. We have to see the sun and the moon as our day and our night. Our. Because behold, that is what the eclipse was asking us to feel in accepting the invitation to experience total darkness in broad daylight. It was always something bigger than that. Behold, we are all in this together. It's only been six days. We still have time to hold on to what we beheld. We still have time to discover the beauty beyond the beauty. Unity. It's ours. My prayer life has had several iterations over the years.
I was introduced to prayer as words we memorize and recite to God. I was always good at the memorizing and reciting. I'm not sure I ever got good at the 'to God' part, though. Then I went through a period of life where I hid from prayer, for fear God might actually show up in the middle of one. At some point prayer turned to save me. Not so much save me from my sins but save me from myself. Come to find out those two aren't really so different. I suppose prayer began its healthy iteration in my life when I was 42 years old. My firstborn was born with not much of a heartbeat. There was a lot of concern among the doctors he wouldn't stay born at all. I said to God, I have no idea what to say here, but I trust you know what needs to be said. Turns out that was quite biblical. Romans 8:26 says, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans (The Message). I was sure full of wordless sighs that day. Today, I'm better at putting words to my sighs. Not great, but better. I've come to realize I was never good at putting words to sighs with anyone, which makes it really difficult to do it with God. I think that stands in the way of a lot of us having a meaningful prayer life. We have a hard time sharing our feelings and emotions in the presence of one another, so we're really not well practiced at doing that in the presence of God. Or trusting that it's even a good idea. We don't often let out our most challenging insides, which makes it nearly impossible to lift them up. I've discovered that God doesn't much need me to lift them up. For me, I've come to feel, God's favorite prayer from me is "would you please just join me in this mess in my insides?" Turns out God isn't nearly as afraid of my hard stuff as I am. And over time he's good at making me less afraid of it. It's made it easier, to be honest, to invite others into the messiness of my life. Many days my writing here is prayer. It's me sitting here with God processing my life. With you. The words are never memorized before I pour them out. They rarely start with Dear God or end with Amen. But I do invite God into each moment I sit down here and write. Maybe it's God who adds amen. I don't know. But it does feel like the truest form of prayer I've ever experienced, this simple recognition of and leaning into God's presence. Into God's hug. It makes sense to me now. I mean, the greatest peace we can experience in life often comes from the peace we feel in the presence of another. Why would it be any different with the God who created us to find peace that way? In presence. If you run out of words to say to God today, or you don't have them quite memorized yet, maybe just simply say, thank you for being here God. Thank you for showing up. I don't think you'll have to say amen; I think God will have already said it. With a smile. In your presence. 4/8/2024 0 Comments April 08th, 2024Today's a big event. A total solar eclipse. They say the next widely visible event like this one won't occur until 2044.
Maybe I'll be here. Maybe I won't. Either way, the invitation to be a part of the one today is timely. So I think I'll accept it. An invitation? It is. At least to me. It's an amazing thing, this idea of a total solar eclipse. It's amazing because it makes me deeply wonder, how does the moon, 400 times smaller than the sun, ever stand a chance of blocking its all encompassing fire and flames and fury? How does something so big and so bright fall prey to the moon, who will momentarily send all in its path into darkness? It's the distance. This is possible because even though the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, the sun is also 400 times further away from us than the moon. It's blazing heat can often make it feel like it's closer than it is, but the reality is the sun is unimaginably far away. Unimaginable, that is, until the moon comes into the picture. Until the moon comes into the picture and reveals the power of proximity. This invitation I have today, it's from God. My God who wants me to know that some of the heat and stress I can feel under these days, most of those stressors feel so intense because I allow them to live much closer to me than they really need to be. Much closer to me than they really are. It's my God who wants me to know that it's me who sometimes turns away from the power and strength found in who is closest to me to focus on things distant that can feel like they are going to melt me into nothingness. This eclipse, it's an invitation from my God to see and feel the power of leaning into the relationships that are closest to me, to protect me from the things that at times can feel most destructive to me. The sun is 400 times bigger and 400,000 times brighter than the moon. Yet today, the moon will make both insignificant as it sends us into total darkness. How? Closeness. That's how. God is inviting me today to be reminded that the things that often feel the heaviest and most daunting and at times as if they can never be overcome, can indeed be overcome. If I will turn my attention to the one who is closest to me. The one who is closest to me and who will today draw the attention of millions to an invitation to be reminded of that. We often turn away from the one most interested in protecting and guiding us in life because he often feels so far away. Today I will be reminded that he is much closer than I think. And there is unimaginable power in closeness. Elliott taught me how to do long exposure photography yesterday. Well, actually, it's more transparent to say he taught me how to hit a button in the photos app on my iPhone.
Nonetheless, that button helped me create an amazing picture of a waterfall we found yesterday. So amazing, in fact, I had to do a little research to find out exactly what this long exposure photography is! Here is part of what I found, and most applicable to this photo: One of the primary reasons to use long exposure is to blur moving elements. This could be anything from waterfalls and rivers, which get a smooth, silky appearance, to clouds moving across the sky, which can create a dramatic and dynamic effect in the sky. As I reflected on that definition, and this image, I got to pondering how that effect might be useful in life. Blurring the moving objects to bring more intense focus to the still objects. To the stable and dependable and immovable objects in our lives. For me, prayer is like long exposure photography. It's that time in the morning when I sit and blur out all the noise in my life to bring focus to God. It's when I leave the lens of my life open long enough to let all the noise fade so that I can clearly see and feel and hear God sitting right there next to me. Right there next to me where he always is, but where I quite frequently lose sight of him while paying attention to all the moving objects in my life. The rushing water in a waterfall picture is beautiful. It can be mesmerizing. But the water in the image is fleeting. It's here and then quickly gone. But the rocks, the rocks never leave. Rain or snow or shine or flood or drought, the rocks remain. It's easy to lose sight of that when mesmerized by the water. Life is full of moving parts. Life is full of things that are here today and gone tomorrow. Life is full of things we can enjoy but not fully depend on. The key in life is to find your rock. To know where to stand in the midst of the swift and moving parts so as to never get swept away. The key is to every once in awhile hit that long exposure button. Hit it and have revealed for you in majestic ways, the Rock. The Rock, it's not trick photography, just a way of using photography to reveal the immovable parts in our life. Sort of like prayer. |
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 |