I was leading a training yesterday and talking about our body's response to fear. I told the group, when we sense fear, the first thing our body does is inhibit our capacity to think in favor of turning our body over to its instinct to run or fight or hide.
I told them, the second you all are afraid of something while sitting here, you will no longer be able to learn from me. A petite and fairly quiet young woman sitting at the table right next to where I was standing in the front of the room asked me, "do you mean like if we suddenly feel afraid of the bat hanging on the wall over there?" I looked to where she was pointing. As did the rest of the group. And I thought, really God, now is when you want to insert real live examples into my presentation? And a bat no less!?!?! Well, as taught, all thinking and learning was put on hold while some of the group exited the room and others stood in the back watching an impromptu bat rescue. When the group returned, we processed the experiential education moment we'd just shared. But I also told them, be aware that many of the folks who come to them in crisis are driven by bats on walls they can't see. I shared with them that much of the growth and progress I've made in my own life the last several years has come from a growing understanding of how much of my life has been driven by fear. And not fear of the bats hanging on the walls of my living room, but bats hanging inside of me on the walls of my past. I told them it's important to understand, many people arrive to them in crisis not fueled by fears we can easily see, but often by fears that are buried deep inside them. They might come across as difficult or ungrateful for the help we're trying to offer. It's highly likely, though, that's not because they are ungrateful, but because we aren't helping the parts of them that most need helped. If they are like me and how I spent a lot of my life, these are parts of them that even THEY don't know need helped. You can daily feel the fear from bats hanging on the walls of your insides without having a clue you have bats hanging on the walls of your insides. That's why the most helpful thing we can do to help people in crisis, or really, people in general, is to assume those bats are hanging in there. Offer compassion for fears we can't see like we offer compassion for people leaving a room because they are scared to death of the bat we can all see. We don't always need to know what people are afraid of to be empathetic toward their fears. I think it's one of the great challenges of our culture - especially for helping and healing minded people; we can get distracted by the rescues of the bats on walls we can see and not recognize there are walls crumbling inside of people around us that we don't begin to see. It is not negative thinking but a healing mindset to be at least curious about that toward the people around us. It is not putting bats in people's minds to lovingly ask them if they are dealing with bats we can't see. And it is beyond loving to treat everyone with the assumption the bats are there whether anyone sees them or not. To assume people are dealing with things we can't see is rarely if ever a wild assumption. It is more likely a truth of all humanity. I gave folks a chance to catch their breath in the training yesterday. I'm reminded to give folks the same chance outside of trainings. Because chances are, it's a chance they really need.
0 Comments
4/27/2024 0 Comments Where do i go from here?I turn 60 today. I find myself asking, where do I go from here?
I ask that not because I'm turning 60. I ask it because I ask that of most days now, and indeed, of many situations in general. I ran my first marathon several years ago. I think that was the start of that question: where do I go from here? At the finish line of that race I determined I hadn't finished something, but rather, I was at the starting line of my next challenge. So, at the start of each new day now, I challenge myself, where do I go from here? Or, sometimes, caught up in my emotions, whether I'm happy or sad, if I'm glad or angry or lonely, or if I'm feeling particularly victorious or defeated, I try to ask myself, where do I go from here? If I feel any distance growing in my relationship with my boys, I ask, where do I go from here? If I am feeling the momentum from a particular article I've written or talk I've given, I find myself asking, where do I go from here? Where do I go from here? It's a powerful question. It acknowledges no matter how high or how low a moment or a circumstance or a period of time gets, it's only a starting place, never the end. It acknowledges I do have some say-so in where I go from here if I'll simply stop and acknowledge my say-so. That question is a reminder that life is never something we settle into, but rather an ongoing invitation to us each and every day to embrace her with new love and life and determination. I turn 60 today and I find myself asking, where do I go from here? That's nothing short of a miraculous shift in my life given that I crawled into my 50s far more prone to ask, where will you be taking me from here, life? The song, Say I Won't, by MercyMe, became a theme song of the latter years of my 50s. There are lyrics in the song that proclaim: I'm gonna run No, I'm gonna fly I'm gonna know what it means to live And not just be alive The world's gonna hear 'Cause I'm gonna shout And I will be dancing when circumstances drown the music out Say I won't It's poetic, really, that I took up running in my 50s. It would be easy for me to think, I really want to keep running into my 60s. But the reality is, no, I don't wanna run. I'm gonna fly. I have discovered what it means to live and that's exactly what I intend to keep doing. So I'm gonna fly. Because that's exactly what you can do once you start asking, where do I go from here? You ask it and realize the answer to that question is far more in your control than you used to realize. So, I encourage you, no matter how old you turn today, or no matter how up or down you might feel today, stop and ask yourself, where do I go from here? Ask it and be grateful in knowing that if you have the freedom to ask that question, you have some say-so in the answer. And life is inviting you into that answer. Where do I go from here? Don't ever stop asking. 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. It was a quiet Friday night. I found myself scrolling through Roku looking for something mindless and meaningless to watch.
Not coincidentally, I suppose, I landed on something just the opposite. Over the years I'd heard a lot about the movie Wild. It was released in 2014 and is based on the memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed. A basic introduction to the plot from Wikipedia: In June 1995, despite a lack of hiking experience, Cheryl Strayed leaves Minneapolis to hike, by herself, 1,100 miles Pacific Crest Trail. During the journey, she reflects on her childhood and memories of her mother, Bobbi, whose death from cancer sent Cheryl into a deep depression that she tried to numb with heroin and anonymous sex. After her behavior destroyed her marriage and then led to an unwanted pregnancy, Cheryl had an abortion and resolved to hike the trail to try to rediscover the woman her mother raised her to be. There's a scene several hundred miles into the hike, many days into wrestling with her demons, when Strayed wonders, "What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?" It was a powerful question. It hit home. Especially when she went on to wonder, if I'm truly sorry for those things, is it still ok to accept I wouldn't be who I am without those things? Just last week I was there. Right there. That exact same spot. Not on the trail, but in that wrestling. I told someone I'd come to be deeply sorry for some choices I've made in my life. But then I had to acknowledge, I'm not sure I would have ever become a person who is deeply sorry for anything without having made those very choices. It is in choices I wish I'd never made where I found the place of becoming someone I think inside I'd always wished I could become. At the time if felt sort of like an apology with an asterisk. Even as much as I knew that asterisk was a part of the most sincere apology I could offer. Maybe ever had offered. Then I watched Reese Witherspoon, who was fantastic as Cheryl by the way, wrestling with the exact same thing. I felt her emotions. I recognized that pain on her face and those tears in her eyes. It made me instantly feel way more human than asterisk. It was comforting to know that what felt like an isolated and unique complexity in my life is maybe a common part of many lives. Are we all wrestling with regrets for having hurt people along maybe the only path that would have ever taken us to feeling sorry for that hurting? Most of us are taught right and wrong. Most of us learn the list of things we should feel remorse about. Most of us are taught the words I'm sorry at a young age. So maybe that's not what's missing in the world to promote deeper healing and remorse and forgiveness. Forgiveness of self and of others. Maybe what is missing is giving ourselves permission to deeply embrace the value in things we deeply wish we had never done. Or, maybe even more complicated, that we can feel deeply sorry for things that we at times also feel a deep sense of gratitude for. It's a great turmoil, I suppose. This reality of hurting others on the way to our own healing. But is that maybe the path we are all on one way or another. Is hurting others an inevitable part of the excavation of self? That sounds like an asterisk, I suppose. Or an excuse. But more than ever I wonder if it's a shared truth. In the movie you come to discover Cheryl, according to the books on right and wrong, had done some pretty despicable things along the way of her life. She hurt a lot of people. Yet, I could only feel myself wanting to hold her and tell her, I get it. I have been there; I am there. And after being a part of your story, Cheryl, I think maybe we all are. I'm leading an experience this week during which we spend a lot of time processing the impacts of our pasts. For many, those pasts include regrets.
It wasn't lost on me yesterday that in the context of this Holy Week, yesterday marks one of the more heartbreaking regrets in human history. For yesterday, a couple of thousand years ago, Judas made an arrangement with the high priests to betray Jesus. A betrayal that ultimately led to Christ being crucified. But the bible tells us that shortly after that arrangement: Judas, the one who betrayed him, realized that Jesus was doomed. Overcome with remorse, he gave back the thirty silver coins to the high priests, saying, “I’ve sinned. I’ve betrayed an innocent man.” They said, “What do we care? That’s your problem!” Judas threw the silver coins into the Temple and left. Then he went out and hung himself. Yesterday, listening to others wrestle with some of the experiences of their past, I found my heart breaking for Judas. Because yesterday, as strongly as ever, I realized betrayal is never as simple as an evil act carried out in hatred or disregard for the people in our lives. Sometimes, betrayal involves confusion and wrestling with the unresolved stories of our pasts that sadly play out in dark ways toward people we actually love. It's often assumed that Judas loved Jesus less than the other disciples because he was the one who betrayed him and sent him to his death. Is it possible that Judas loved Jesus just as much as the other disciples - or more - but never quite understood it until looking at him through the dark shadows of betrayal? Does a man go off and hang himself because he simply made a choice he regrets. Or was that regret compounded by other challenging stories of his past. And was it intensified by a deep love for that man? I don't know, but I do wonder. What I do know is we can sometimes beat each other up for choices we make in life without ever knowing the stories beneath the choices. Knowing those stories doesn't make harmful choices less harmful but knowing them does open our hearts up to understanding. And compassion. Maybe even more destructive - we beat ourselves up over our choices without ever exploring the stories beneath them. Knowing those stories doesn't make our choices less destructive but knowing them opens us up to showing ourselves compassion. And grace. I feel incredibly blessed to spend time with folks walking them toward compassion for others and grace for themselves. I feel incredibly blessed that in that walk, I myself walk too. I walk toward grace. I walk toward healing. My heart breaks for people like Judas for whom the wrestling becomes too much. Because it doesn't have to be. Not ever. There are alternatives. Compassion. Grace. Healing. The biggest risk of not knowing who you are is it gives others the constant opportunity to decide that for you.
I used to be obsessed with people thinking favorably of me. So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the things I could do to make people think favorably of me. I'm not sure I always knew that's what I was doing. But it WAS what I was doing. We all need to feel valued. It's a non-negotiable. And we seek that value in one of two places. We seek it from within us or outside of us. Since I was awful at finding any value inside me, I tried to seduce others around me into valuing me. I was great at it. Until the day I realized I was better at making other people love me than I was at making me love myself. I didn't know it at the time, but fighting for the approval of others destroys self-confidence. When you're value is found in what other people think about you, and since you never have full control of that, you are always at risk of losing your value. And you are always in a place of wondering, am I enough today? Today I am in a place where I no longer have to wonder if I am enough. I am never at risk of losing my value again. Because today, precisely none of my value is dependent on what someone else thinks about me. It's totally dependent on what I think about me. That hasn't been an easy road. I didn't wake up one day and proclaim that I am so confident about me that I can no longer be influenced by you. It just doesn't work that way. It's taken me years to discover my own identity. It's taken decades for the challenges and hardships and my own reckless pursuits of external meaning in my life to beat me up and strip me down to just me. Strip me down to just me and the question: who in the heck am I? I am a Jesus follower. I am a dad. I am a writer. And I am someone who is passionate about influencing the value of human connection in this world. That's who I am. Every day, I get up and go to work trying to sharpen those four areas of my identity. And when I feel like I've done something well in those areas, I tell myself I am proud of the work I've done. When I am done writing this article, I will tell myself, I am proud of you for writing it. Whether anyone likes it or doesn't like it, that won't influence how much I value me. I have found value in being a writer. I honor my identity when I get up and write. I build a self-confidence in my identity that can't be stripped away if I continue to honor that identity. I value me for being who I have come to know me to be. And as a result, I am now solely in charge of my value. Who are you? That's the question. Not who do others say you are, but who are you? Find the answer to that question. Find the things about you that you can value about you. Then go to work growing the value of those things every day, and tell yourself you're proud of yourself for doing it! I also need to add, I am blessed to have people in my life who regularly value the things I do, the things that reflect my identity. That feels good. It feels good because people valuing me is a natural consequence of me valuing myself, and not of me pursuing people's value. I don't think there's been a healthier shift in my life. We can all make that shift. It's been a challenging week. On the way out of the office the other day a co-worker and dear friend said, hang in there. I told her, don't worry about me, hang in there's my middle name.
I wasn't dismissing her encouragement. It meant the world to me. And the truth is, in many ways, my response wasn't a short response to her as much as it was a big reminder to me. A reminder that my life is a story of fall into the pit, jump into the pit, get pushed into the pit, but always, no matter how I got in that pit, mine is a story of always rising from the pit. Tim Ferris says, "as good as it feels to have a plan, it's even more freeing to realize that nearly no misstep can destroy you." I think we all have perceptions of how life would go in our ideal world, but the more we chase that perception the more we come to realize we don't live in an ideal world. It's inevitable, either we misstep or life missteps, but one way or another our plans are constantly facing pits. There's surely value in having plans that help you avoid as many pits as possible. That's wisdom. But I've come to believe there is also value, maybe even more value, in developing a mindset that doesn't fear the pits. Having a mindset that declares, no pit has swallowed me whole yet, and today won't be the first pit to do so. If you had a hard week, celebrate. Not that you SURVIVED the week, but that you BEAT it. You did. The pit had a chance to swallow you whole, but you declared over it that hang in there is your middle name. Hanging in there is NO small deal. We sometimes underestimate just how giant the force in life is that is constantly encouraging us to call it quits. Call it quits on our dreams and plans and hopes. Call it quits on our will to do life at all. So if you had a hard week, celebrate. Look life in the face and say nice try, but hang in there is my middle name. Don't you know that about me by now, life? You woke up today. Go make something of the day. What's the worst that can happen? I don't know, but chances are you already beat whatever it is. You'll do so again. Because hang in there is your middle name. I have felt like a new person the last year. That has little to do with my circumstances. In many ways my circumstances are as challenging as ever.
But how I approach my circumstances? Well - that has changed significantly. I'm assured of that this week in giant ways. I've had car struggles. I took my car in for what I'd been led to believe was going to be a routine repair. It hasn't been routine. It's actually been quite expensive - and the expense grows on. My car is still in the shop, the auto repair experts are still trying to figure out what's wrong with it, and a time or two in our communications I've sensed they don't feel the same angst about my circumstances that I do. That last part has been particularly challenging, since I've been taking my car to the same place for a decade with nothing but positive and helpful experiences. One night earlier this week, after a hard conversation with the team at the shop, I felt anger. As I drove off in a loaner car, which was the most rickety reminder ever that I was NOT driving off in my car, I started plotting ways to make their lives as miserable as they were making mine. Oh, I can't wait to get home and blast them on social media. I'm going to sue them for doing work on my car they weren't sure would solve the problem. I'm going to stand out in front of their shop for weeks holding a protest sign that warns people against getting their car worked on here. Anger knows no bounds when it comes to creative revenge.... Then, I felt something stop me in my tracks. That something was me. The new me. The new me who realizes so much of the emotion I was experiencing in that moment was connected to feelings I carry with me from past experiences, not car experiences. Anger being a big one. That's how emotions work, you know. Psychologists tell us emotions last about one or two minutes. So what I felt about that conversation regarding my car passes pretty quickly. What I feel and think about it, though, well that can go on a long time. And if I let it, it can go in some really negative directions. The new me knows that. The new me knows that in the aftermath of so many emotions in my life, my thinking and my feelings can unknowingly be fueled and directed by events in my past. My lashing out at car people can look and feel like lashing out at my past people. Over time, lashing out just becomes an automated pattern of my brain. And whether holding it in or openly expressing it, lashing out just becomes who I am. So there I was, in a space I've become much more familiar with this past year, a space of recognizing that I was letting events in my life dictate the level of joy I was feeling in my life. Was I happy about my car troubles? No. I am still not. But sometimes joy doesn't look like happy. Sometimes joy looks like not being overcome by an anger that no longer looks like the person you want to be. Sometimes joy looks like NOT lashing out where you once would have. Sometimes joy is owning the power that comes with not having full control over your emotions, but having absolute authority over what you think and feel in the aftermath of them. That's not always easy. I had to pull that loaner car into a parking lot. Take some deep breaths. Quietly pray, not for a better circumstance, but for a healthier way of thinking and feeling about the circumstance I was in. I didn't drive away happy, but I did drive away in peace. There was joy in that. A joy, thankfully, the new me experiences more and more these days. Last night, as Ross and Phoebe and Rachel and Monica and Joey and Chandler laid their keys on the table and walked out of the apartment for the final time, I was conflicted.
Do I wish they were staying, or am I glad to see them go? A couple of months ago, I told you I was about to begin watching the television series FRIENDS for the first time. I'd never seen it, but had recently read Matthew Perry's memoir: Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing and I had to watch the show. Most of you said I'd enjoy it. You said I'd laugh endlessly. I did. But included in the laughter was a sadness I could never fully shake. Not even for an episode. I never settled into the rhythm of a comedy. I loved all the FRIENDS characters, but I always found myself looking for Chandler. In every scene. Like a protector. And because of his memoir, I knew no matter where I found him, no matter where he was on the set, or where he was in a particular scene, or no matter what line he was speaking, I always found him hiding. Hiding and acting his way out of a personal hell. If you read the memoir, you know there wasn't a single season of FRIENDS when Perry wasn't actively using alcohol and drugs and battling the grips of addiction to both. Even when he was winning the battle, he always knew he was on the verge of losing it again. Losing it in more destructive ways than the time before. When the FRIENDS show began and it was clear it was about to become a monster hit, Perry recalled thinking in his book, "I was going to be so famous that all the pain I carried with me would melt like frost in the sunlight: and any new threats would bounce off me as though this show was a force field I could cloak myself in." If you read the book, you know few predictions ever failed harder. Perry's pain only intensified as the series went on; new threat after new threat pummeled him. Some episodes I found myself sad that Perry had to keep showing up pretending. He talked at length in the book about the obligation he felt toward his FRIENDS co-stars and to the audience to keep showing up funny. He talked about becoming nauseous when a funny line didn't land. Other episodes I found myself amazed that he could show up at all. Even though I could see the ebbs and flows of his health as the seasons progressed, most episodes he looked like he'd showed up ready to go. If you read the book first and then watch the series, this feels like witnessing a miracle. I think the happiest moment of the series for me was when Chandler married Monica. I'm sure it is. The biggest thing I took away from the book about Perry was just how lonely he was. He went through countless casual relationships in search of something he really didn't know he was searching for, only to never find it. I remember shedding a few tears at his wedding to Monica. I remember thinking that this made for television scene, this holy matrimony made up by some writer to entertain me and you, might have been the closest Perry had or would ever come to finding this thing he was looking for. True connection. Part of me wondered at the time if the writers knew this. If this was their way of honoring Perry's always showing up to help the audience find something they'd been looking for. At the end of the book, Perry reflects on some childhood friends. Friends who weren't famous. And he said, "none of them had battled their whole lives with a brain that was built to kill them. I would give it all up to not have that. No one believes it, but it's true." As I watched Perry set his key on the table and walk away, I believed him. Unequivocally. Acting can be exhausting, whether you're doing it to entertain or to survive. So I think I am glad it is over. The show AND Perry's battle. But his book is such a powerful reminder that what often looks entertainment around us, what often looks like joy and happiness and well put together, it is sometimes actually falling apart. Sometimes acting is not for our sake but for theirs; it's helpful and loving to be curious about the people around us with a heart for knowing the difference. You were a good friend Chandler Bing. Thank you for openly sharing your battle with that Big Terrible Thing. I hope it will encourage more of us to be open about the battles with our own big terrible things. I hope it will give us all permission to be a little more real, and a lot less reliant on being good actors and actresses. I grew up on a farm. One of the greatest joys of that was watching seeds become plants that ultimately became harvest. Every fall, when the big machines would take the crops from the field, it was easy to remember that just months earlier those fields were endless rows of sprouts.
I wish I'd known as a kid the symbolism I was witnessing. I wish I'd known just how often that cycle would repeat itself in my life. Seed. Grow. Harvest. And I wish I'd known that not all seeds are easy to watch grow. That even though the seeds in the fields around me more often than not grew up with limited obstacles and were a joy to watch grow, not all of life's seeds grow so unencumbered. There have been many seeds in my life I could have never imagined growing into a harvest. As a result, I think, I spent a lot of time believing the seed was the story. And since that story at times felt dead, like an enemy, I never saw those seeds as something that would grow. Believing anyplace we are is the starting point for growth and not the end, that is hope. Hope is always the fuel we need to keep going. Going to the harvest. I had a significant gambling issue in my younger years. To support it, I got good at stealing from people. And lying to them. You destroy a lot of things on the way to destroying yourself. I remember one day driving home from a horse track. I'd lost a lot of money, money that I'd stolen. It's one of the first and most vivid memories I have of wanting to end my life. Drive off the road and be done with it all. It honestly felt like the best option among none. I didn't drive off the road. I'm not sure why. I don't have some God came down and took wheel story. I just didn't do it. That day is a dark day in a life full of them. It would have been impossible for me to have ever seen that day as a seed. The other day I was talking to a dad friend. He was talking about a young person who has been experimenting with online gambling. He said it seems harmless, but he's starting to worry, at least a little, that the young person might be a little too into it. I told him the story about the harmless two dollar wager I made at a horse track a few decades ago. I told him how quickly harmless goes from simply fun and experiment to driving while trying to determine the best destination, home or into a tree. As more and more people have access to gambling, and face the challenges it brings, I am given more and more opportunities to share my experience. I am given more and more opportunities to feel a day I wanted to call it quits as the day a seed was planted. I don't think God scripted it that way. I don't think my seed to harvest path when it comes to gambling was anyone's plan. It was just life. And life doesn't always look like a smooth road. It sometimes looks like a dark one you don't want to be on. The key is to, as often as you can, recognize everything is a seed. Even the seeds we can't possibly imagine growing into anything, they will. They will if we can begin to imagine them as a harvest story and not a death story. I don't know what you're struggling with today. Maybe for some of you it's a really dark struggle. I don't want you to imagine what the harvest might look like from that darkness; it's impossible to imagine in many cases. But I do want you to believe in a harvest. Believe that one is waiting for you. Believe that you are a part of a seed that is growing you and not ending you. Believe that one day you will be telling the story about some of your deepest shame or guilt or grief or hardship and realize the thing you couldn't stand being a part of, the seed you couldn't bare to watch grow, it miraculously became a beautiful harvest. Not all seeds are easy to watch grow. But every seed can become a harvest. Believe it. |
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 |