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.
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I was messaging with a friend yesterday who's been going through a hard time. She's persistently battled to overcome it, but feels like she keeps coming up short.
She said, "is any of this worth the price?" As I am writing this, I feel glad she posed that as a question and not a statement. I'm glad she asked if it's worth it instead of declaring that it's not. Because it gave me a chance to answer her heartfelt question and not cast judgment on her challenging feelings. I answered her, "everything good comes at a price, but that price rarely feels good when we're living in it." That's not an answer I read in a book but one I've lived. It's an answer that comes from many past moments of hell, blinded to the possibility of any value in those moments at all - only to find out later I was just paying the price for future goods. Or, future goodness. It's one of the greater challenges of life, that we are often paying the price for beauty we can't see coming. If we only had certainty about that beauty, maybe the price wouldn't feel so burdensome. I've come to wonder, though, is it the burdensome price that actually creates the beauty? Is it prolonged hopelessness that actually helps paint the ultimate picture and feeling of hope? I don't know, but I believe there's enough truth in there that when we get to the point of asking - "is any of it worth the price" - to consider that it possibly is. Or probably. It's worth considering that the burdens of right now are always trying to hide the beauty of tomorrow. Maybe burdens are evil, or maybe they are just tough love friends. I don't know. All I know is there have been many moments in my life when I could have asked, is any of this worth the price? In those moments, I would have always said no. Nothing is worth this. But today, many days and years on the other side of those moments, I know the goodness that came from them. Today I know it is so; they were worth it. Which is why I don't ask much any more, is this worth the price? I simply trust that it is. Because everything good comes at a price, but that price rarely feels good when we're living in it. If you feel like you're paying a price today that doesn't feel good, please hang on, the worth is on its way. The price you're paying is paving that way. I suppose by the strictest view, there are three kinds of parenting when it comes to risk-taking.
Please don't ever take any, risks are where danger lives. Or, don't worry about danger, there's no such thing. Or, lastly, some approach in between. This week, I feel assured the boys fall in that someplace in between. Whether climbing mounds of rocks to take the perfect photograph, or scaling down slippery gorges and over limbs to get to the magic fishing hole, I've watched the boys apply appropriate caution while having their eyes focused full steam ahead on their immediate dreams. Because that's where dreams lives, where really living comes to life, somewhere between eyes wide open to every possible problem and eyes closed to the possibility that problems exist at all. Life is not about perfection. It's not about finding the fail-proof or danger-proof path. If you believe that path exists, you are currently and possibly hopelessly stuck in the trap of an endless pursuit. You are currently living an offshoot of death. In fact, at this dad's age, one thing I've come to feel sure of is that life is far more about mastering the art of overcoming the screw ups than it is mapping out the course that avoids them. If I were to make a list of all the things I've lived out perfectly in life, and another of all of the things I've screwed up, let me just conservatively say that the screw up list is a few tens of thousands of entries longer than the perfection list. But here's the big thing about that. Here's the truth bomb. If I had to throw one of the lists away, it would be that perfection list. The perfection list has shaped little in me. It's taught me almost nothing. But that screw up list - what a gold mine. It's at the heart of all that I get to do professionally these days. It's at the heart of all that I get to sit and write about each morning. It's at the heart of so many of the next steps I take in my life. I have not mastered the art of overcoming the screw up, but I'm getting there. Are there missteps I sometimes wish I hadn't taken? Certainly. But would I have ever figured that out with actually taking the misstep? Probably not. I've never told my boys I don't want them to make the mistakes I've made in life. And I never will. Mainly because I don't want them to live afraid of my mistakes. Or theirs. I simply tell them what I've learned in the process of overcoming mine. Take that to your next step. I tell them that and hope they proceed with caution, but never with so much caution that they become afraid of finding a way to proceed. Parenting is a tough deal. Maybe the toughest part is you never get confirmation that you perfected it or that you totally screwed it up. The signs always point to some outcome in between. But this parent finds deep satisfaction and hope and maybe a little cautious optimism watching my boys march into the land of possible missteps this week. March and discover, that's where their dreams live. March and remind me, that's where mine live too. There's a powerful question you can ask and answer when it comes to having the future you're imagining.
Here's the question: Create or wait? Maybe it's the most important question we can start with every day. When it comes to my future, will I spend time waiting for it today or creating it? Waiting. Wishing. Dreaming. Those are all standing still activities. Certainly every worthwhile future needs a bit of each. But too much of them, and your future becomes stuck. Too much of them and your future will always look like right now. What your future needs most from you is creation. Every time you create something that looks like your future, you take a step toward that future. In fact, creation is the ONLY way to take a step toward that future. Whether you're creating words or art or an invitation or a business plan or a phone call or a trip - your future is an action. No future shows up out of thin air, it shows up in the air you march into. So the future ball is in your court today. Wait or create? In the spirit of March Madness - and those Caitlin Clark logo threes - I say take that shot. Create Our education system is under a lot of pressure. There's teacher burnout, student mental health challenges, unrealistic expectations; the list goes on.
In my work, I hear that list and more all the time. It can feel dire, especially as a dad of two teens in that education system. Especially has a human who cares deeply about this generation and the next. It can feel dire, that is, until you sit in the midst of folks who are deeply invested in that system. You sit with them and hear them talk about improving, not escaping. I had the privilege of presenting to a group of educators last night who are part of a local school system. They've come together as a cohort of school educators and support staff committed to gaining a deeper understanding of what it means to be a trauma informed school system. There were about 20 of them. They've committed to meet every Tuesday from 4:30-7:00 to give and receive education about trauma informed care. Other than a break this summer, they will do this all year. It struck me as I was sitting there, these folks raced from a long day of leading a classroom or supporting students in classrooms to sit for 2 1/2 hours in a classroom of their own. And yet, they didn't look like people exhausted from the day, they looked energized by the opportunity to be there. I've come to believe, in a most general way, that there are two kinds of living. There is living one step closer to the end, or one step into the beginning. I confess, I spent a fair amount of my life stepping into the end. It's a life of coasting, expecting the worse, always plotting an escape, and believing the end might just be the best part of the whole stinking story. That is not the today me, though. The today me believes each day is a new step into the beginning. Life is always beginning. Which means there is always something to learn to better prepare you for the next step into the beginning. Little energizes that way of living more than hanging out with people who are also stepping into new beginnings. And getting the chance to feed life into them. What struck me most about these educators last night, all of them coming from different schools and different positions, is there was no venting. When it could have turned into a who has it worst session, they all turned it into a who can encourage each other best session. I've come to know, when I get these chances to speak I'm going to contribute something. I'm sure of that. But I am even more sure that something bigger will be contributed to me. That was certainly the case last night. Sometimes things feel dire. Maybe they are. But there are usually some folks who believe that, although dire, the story isn't over. Find those people. Sit with them. And discover you aren't meant to be taking steps into the end. You are meant to live steps into the beginning. Today, live those steps. I am imperfect. That has always been true, it still is, and it will always be.
There are parts of me that are unfinished. That has always been true, it still is, and it will always be. And the story of my life today doesn't exactly look like the story I wish I was living. That has always been true, it still is, and it will always be. Those are three giant truths I bring to this new day and this new week. Knowing those truths sets the stage for making one giant choice about how I'll approach this new day and week. Are those truths my prison? Or are those truths showing me the way? Because every bit of unfinished business in our lives, every imperfection, ever way that life shows up that we wish would be different, every one of those things is either a blindfold or a magnifying glass. Every one of those things is either closing doors on us or opening a whole lot of them to show us the way. Which? That is up to us and not to those things. We get to decide whether we slip the blindfold over our eyes or pick up the magnifying glass to better see which way to go next. Because if you're breathing, here is another giant truth. The possibility of next is in front of you. If you've lost a job, there is either never going to be another job or the next one is waiting on you. If you've lost a relationship, there is either no new relationship ever or you're being better prepared for the next one. If you're battling a habit or an addiction, this is either the day it tightens its grip on you or the day you pry loose from that grip and start doing a little gripping yourself. If you wish you could run a mile but can barely run 100 yards, then you get to decide. One hundred yards isn't good enough, or 100 yards today is a beautiful opportunity to get 100 yards closer to my wish. You get to decide. Blindfold or magnifying glass. You get to decide. Prison forever or this is part of the process. Sometimes those truths suck. Bad. I have unfinished business. I have a boat load of imperfections. Life doesn't look like I would prefer life to look. The weight of all of those truths can sometimes be overwhelming. I get it. I get that they are overwhelming, but please don't let them bury you. Find someone today and just be real about those three truths in your life. My guess is that someone will confess the very same truths in their life. Then, commit to each other. We will not let each other take those truths into a prison. Commit to always showing each other the way. Not to finished business. Not to perfection. Not to an ideal life. Not to any of that, but instead, commit to showing each other to the next step. Because once we believe in a next step, once THAT is the greatest truth in our life, we will always find it. We will never pick up a blindfold again. 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. We often think of survivors as resilient. As much as that is sometimes true, it's not always the case.
I've come to know I spent much of my life focused on survival. I lived with a determination to make it through whatever challenge came my way. Whether they were challenges I created or challenges others created or just the natural challenges of the world, I lived determined to come out on the other side of them. I always did, and I'm thankful for that. There's been a shift the last decade of my life, though. I've shifted from having the mindset of survival to the mindset of resiliency. A survivor often lives in fear and anxiety, always preparing themself to get through the next threat. I know that. And when I wasn't living in fear and anxiety, I was finding ways to drown them out. The resilient human, however, leans on hope and recovery and learning. They don't like threats much more than the survivor does, but they come to embrace them as an opportunity to grow. They come to see threats not as something that might spell the end, but as something preparing them for a stronger new beginning. A survivor's prayer often focuses on 'get me through this day'. The resilient prayer often begs to learn something useful today that will prepare them for tomorrow. If you're surviving a challenge today, I applaud you. I hug you. It's not easy to adopt a survivor's mentality. More and more people each day live on the edge of giving up on the idea of surviving. I have been there. I want to challenge you, though, while you are there, while you are in survival mode, assure yourself you will make it to the other side, but then also ask yourself, what can I take with me when I do? What can I take from this storm that will make me less fearful of the thunder in the next one, because the next one IS coming. And even more, what in the here and now can teach me to dance with that thunder when it does come? It's possible you have no idea. The emotions of survival often make it hard to learn and grow. So ask a friend or a family member or a pastor or a counselor. Share your fear and then ask, what do you think I can take from this? Because that has beautifully shifted me from survival mode to resilient mode. Sharing my struggle. Sharing my fear. Sharing all the emotions that get bottled up by the intense will to survive. When you share emotions, you start to discover others have been there before you. Others have survived and learned, and in the sharing of emotions, you begin to dance. Dance to the sound of the thunder. And in time, you'll hear the storms coming and not fear them. You'll come to know the storms are not here to take you out, but to pave the way forward. I love the survivor me. More today than ever. But more than that, I love me the dancer. And trust me, in SO many ways, I never pictured me ever becoming a dancer. But it helps me feel sure that you can dance too. If I can we all can. Together. We live in a world where life happens quicker than ever. An idea can be floated into the social media world and within hours be seen by millions.
That often leaves us believing ALL of our ideas should come to fruition with viral speed. But that is not life. And the greater reality is, viral ideas usually disappear into the social media black hole just as fast as they arrived. Ideas that last, however, projects that make a difference, relationships that are meaningful, causes we're fighting to make change in, the reality is, the most meaningful work in life is usually slow work. It requires us to get up every day and pour a little more into it with trust that the end game will arrive. The slow game is hard to commit to in a fast game world. When we look around and see people SEEMINGLY reaching success over night, we are left disappointed that I'm not much closer to my idea of success today than I was last month. Or last year. And disappointment lives dangerously close to giving up. I have become devoted to the phrase "not yet." My dream didn't happen is a dream killer. My dream didn't happen YET, that circumvents disappointment and grabs hold of the belief that dream work is still in progress. Not yet says there is still work to be done today. It didn't happen closes the deal on the work all together. If you're feeling disappointed that something hasn't happened in your life, ask yourself, am I upset that it hasn't happened, or have I grown impatient because it hasn't happened YET. Many times we give up not because our idea wasn't coming along the way we wanted, but because it wasn't coming along on the timeline we wanted. Don't be lured by this world into believing everything happens with the snap of a finger. Many things that lack endurance, or legacy, those things can happen fast. But things that last forever often feel like forever coming together. So hang in there. If it hasn't happened, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not happening. It just hasn't happened yet. Wouldn't it be nice, that if we put in enough work, enough effort, enough forward motion, that we could one day land in a place that is predictable. A place we could control. A place where we could always know life is going to be okay.
Ah, the land of no curveballs. Anyone who's lived much has figured out that's not how life works. There is no such place as everything is going to be okay. At least not by our most desired definitions of okay. And at least not this side of heaven. Yet, still, if we're not careful, that's the place we can get hell bent on pursuing. And when we do, we get caught up wishing and hoping and praying for happily ever after instead of embracing our ability to build something out of the not so happy we're currently in. The older I've gotten, the more I've come to understand life is far more about the bounce back than the settling in. I mean, when does life ever really give us a chance to just settle in and enjoy the ride? When has the GPS of life rolled on without complications to the destination of our dreams that we've plugged into it? For me - never. There have definitely been some smoother periods of life than others, some smoother trips, but every trip I've ever been on has included the Siri of life interrupting and announcing there's an accident up ahead, and we're now going to go in a different direction. Some of us think victory is overriding Siri and saying, oh no you don't, I'm forging ahead. That was MY destination. You don't get to suggest an alternative. I spent a lot of my life in that forging ahead mode, denying and rejecting alternative routes. I like to think I'm much better today at accepting the route change surprises that come my way. I like to think I'm better at not only accepting them, but starting to imagine the unexpected views and experiences I might have along the way of the new route. I like to think I embrace the opportunity that comes with the unexpected. But the opportunity doesn't just show up and say here I am, meet your new opportunity. My attitude is the opportunity; it's my decision to let go of the old route and commit to a reset. Commit to a new way and a new life, with faith Siri knows some things about direction that I don't. Many of us live very anxious lives. Much of that anxiety comes from not being able to control our directions as much as we'd like. I get that. But the cure for that will never be more control. The cure will be accepting there will always be a lack of control, there will always be curveballs, but when we put our mind to it, we can all become pretty good at hitting curveballs. Sometimes clean out of the ballpark. We can good at hitting curveballs and quit dreaming about our ideas of what is next and start embracing the realities of what is next. Because one of the greatest realities of all is: those two things are rarely the same. Our dream reality and our real reality rarely match up. So we get to pick; get good at dreaming or get good at resetting. Victory is found in the resetting. Life may throw you a curveball today. Don't reject the pitch. Hit 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 |