3/31/2022 0 Comments Feelings are always realSo the way a baby's brain develops - when a baby is born they are all feelings. No baby comes into the world asking what's for dinner. But they will come into the world with a feeling that is hunger.
A baby doesn't know it's hunger. That part of the brain isn't there yet. They just know it feels bad. So they cry. Hunger is one of the very first feelings a baby experiences and expresses. Sometimes quite loudly. Sometimes at inconvenient times. But for a mom or a caregiver, it's their first chance to help a human navigate their feelings. I don't know of many moms who scold the baby for crying - they don't try to correct the feeling in that moment. It's just a baby. Most caregivers understand the nature of these feelings. So they meet the baby there. They meet them there to understand their struggle. And by understanding the struggle, they are better equipped to provide care. A baby's brain starts to develop in response to this pattern. Feelings arise. Someone shows up to meet the baby in the feelings - not with judgment but with nurture and compassion. Nurture and compassion become the fertile growing grounds for relationship. For communication. For learning. For love. Too often, for a host of reasons, as the baby grows, caregivers can grow impatient with the dance - this dance of feelings and nurturing. The only dance a baby's brain has ever known. Caregivers arrive into feelings wanting to fix the feelings and not understand them. They want a child to manage their feelings, not express them. Where as at one time the feelings were necessary to understanding a baby and their needs, they were critical for a loving relationship, feelings are suddenly perceived as something that stands in the way. Feelings are a hurdle. An obstacle. A child's brain has a very difficult time responding to this new dance. A child suddenly has to start judging their own feelings. Is this one real. Is this one good or bad, right or wrong. If they can express the right feelings, the relationship will go beter. Because every child is longing for a better relationship. Every child is longing love. For a child, this gets exhausting. Many children will do away with feelings all together. They will find ways to numb them. Others will simply pick one and go with it - often sadness or anger. Alot of children will carry this dance into adult relationships. Feelings are obstacles to a better relationship, so they refuse to have them, or they pick one and go with it. The beautiful thing is - the hope - the wiring of that original dance remains in us all. To some degree, whether we know it or not, we are all waiting for someone to meet us in the feelings, to understand them - not correct them. When someone does, it's a beautiful thing - to return to that first dance. The baby dance. A dance we somehow never forget. Too many of us are missing that chance. We miss it when we judge feelings without trying to understand them. We miss it when we try to circumvent each others' feelings instead of diving into them. We miss it when we decide feelings hide a human and not introduce them. No matter how hard we try, though, feelings are real. And it's vital to us all to understand that when we relate to one another. Not just to our children. But to one another. It's the dance we were all wired for. It's love.
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I don't have an opinion on the Chris Rock and Will Smith incident. But I have a reflection.
The incident seems to have started when Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife - Jada Pinkett Smith - at the Academy Awards. Will Smith took some offense to the joke and slapped Chris Rock. In the aftermath, there has been a lot of public opinion about all of the individuals involved and about the broader incident itself. I want to reflect on one side of the reaction to the incident. Scrolling through social media, most folks seemed to have felt like Chris Rock crossed a line. Not everyone believes he should have been slapped, but most seem to think the joke should have been left out of his performance. Because let's remember, he was indeed performing. As I read these reactions, I felt like I was in the middle of a moving line. I've listened to comedians for years - Chris Rock included - who make laughs with their words at the expense of others. It often feels like that's accepted as a trick of the trade. So why did this trick suddenly go from comedy to attack? Because the target of the joke's husband was sitting next to her? Because the joke was insensitive to a disease? Because the whole thing took place on television? Because some celebrities have a different line than other celebrities? Because some people have a different line than others? I found it interesting that ordinary people were on the media platforms they use to attack one another with their words to take issue with a man they felt had attacked another person with his words. Irony? In his book The Four Agreements (thank you all for the recommendation), Don Miguel Ruiz says our spoken word is magic. But he goes on to say, "misuse of the word is black magic, we are using black magic all the time without knowing that our word is magic at all. I guess I long ago decided there is never an acceptable time for me to use black magic. There is never an acceptable time to attack another with my word. It's easy to come up with exceptions, but once you've experienced the power the word has to lift another person up - the power that the word has to reveal someones value to them - you start feeling a darkness in your gut when you use your word for anything else. I think social media has made it easy to use black magic. We don't have to see the hurt - the disturbance on a face - when we use attacking words. We get to focus on how the words make us feel and not the emotions they trigger in another. I personally don't think Chris Rock attacked Jada Pinkett Smith. I think he had an agenda - to be funny. That agenda took precedence over everything else. Including whether his words became magic or black magic. I know I am capable of letting my agendas become so important that I lose track of my words. I know I am capable of producing words that turn into an attack without me wanting to be an attacker. But in the end, if the words I use leave someone hurt, then I think I had the wrong agenda. In the book of James it is written: "With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be." In the words of Ruiz, I Iong for my word to be "impeccable." I want my word to be magic not black magic. I want my word to be praise not curse. I think that's the best line to honor when it comes to choosing our words. I don't think that line should move. Not for celebrities. Not for you and for me. Because sticking to the right line, our words have the power to add the kind of value to one another many of us have never experienced. Our words can absolutely be magical. When life changes, life can get scary.
Or - life can get exciting. When life changes, life can feel hopeless. Or - life can feel suddenly alive with possibility. The beautiful thing about change is, we get to choose. Hopeless or possible. Being stuck in life often comes from needing to feel life in some predictable way. Where we are and how we are living may not leave us feeling alive - it might leave us feeling quite the opposite - but if it's a life that doesn't leave us guessing what comes next, it's a life easy to settle into. We are a people who find comfort in knowing what comes next. I've learned that what I know is not always the same as the best life I CAN know. I've learned that comfortable and predictable are traits better at concealing the real me than they are at helping me discover him. When I was a kid, I'd lean against old rusty farm gates. On the other side of the gates were these wide open pastures. You can dream forever when you look into a wide open pasture. Any time you'd open those gates and step into the world on the other side of them, the hinges would harshly squeak. I wonder as I write this morning, and reflect back on those days of dreaming, how much more friendly those gates would have sounded if they'd more often been opened to the world they were guarding me from. It's easy to start leaning on the gates of life. Looking out at the other side. Feeling safe in the "I know where I am" - protecting myself from the "I have no idea where I am going." I've conformed to life enough to know that conformity is often where one loses life. I've settled into comfort in life enough to know that's often where life gets unbearably uncomfortable. I've also experienced a fair amount of opportunities in life to go where I had no idea where I was going. Not always by choice, but I've been there. And it's been there that I've often found the life I had no idea I needed. It's there I've found the oil that makes opening the gates to the world not just more tolerable - but desirable. It's there I've found that the dreams of a kid weren't really dreams at all. They were invitations. Invitations from the unknown. We all get them. We get them as kids; we get them today. Sometimes the known is exactly where you need to be. It IS where you find life. But sometimes the known is where we rust. And being willing to go where we have no idea where we are going isn't getting lost, it's coming alive. It is oil. A friend asked me last week, "Do you think everything happens for a reason?"
I said, "No, but I believe a reason becomes of everything that happens." I'm not sure I'd ever stated that belief as confidently as I did there. Probably because I'm not sure I've always believed that's the order. Because it is about order. If you believe everything happens for a reason, then life is acting on behalf of reason. Reason drives everything that happens. When you believe that, then you have to believe there is some creator of the reason. And because we have no idea what that creator's reasons might be, and because we often start guessing at them, it's easy to start mistaking ourselves for that creator. But when we start seeing the reasons that get created from the material of our life experiences, it's more like seeing that creator than being that creator. I told a friend the other day that the greatest evidence I have of God in my life is the miracles that have become of my darkest days. Did God create a drunk so he'd one day have a tool to bring light to others? Or did God ultimately use the drunk I became to show me the light he can make of anything and any ONE? A God who creates a drunk to bring reason to the world makes little sense to me. A God who finds a man who made a drunk of himself, and delivers reason to that man in his lowest moments, well that feels like a miracle to me. You may be starting this week wondering - why? Why am I here? Why is this happening to me? I want to suggest there's a better question. Maybe the better question is what. What reason will become of this day? What reason will become of the me who feels like I am no reason at all? I don't believe you or your life today is a reason; I do believe a beautiful reason is about to be made of your life. I believe we can bake bread. We can spill flour all over the counter and sweep the excess into the trash as waste. But I don't believe that's how God bakes us. Not one second of our lives gets wasted in the creation of us. God is always saying, I can and will use ALL of you. I write this article this morning for no reason other than releasing life from me. But I've written enough to know a reason will become of my words. And a reason will become of the life you pour out today. I know that, too. Don't get stuck trying to figure out reasons today. Live in the freedom of pouring out life. Live in the confidence that a reason will become of it. Live in the celebration of that miracle. Earlier this week, Elliott sent me a text letting me know he'd found out he was running in an invitational track meet today at Christopher Newport University. He was going to run the 400 meters, a race he'd only run once in his life.
He told me he wasn't excited about it; "I don't like this race," he said. Then he told me his only goal was to beat the 1:09 time he had at this distance last year as an 8th grader. Yesterday, the day before the race, he told me he wanted to run a practice run up at Randolph Macon's track. I knew in an instant what this was - it was Elliott's way of making sure he was going to be able to beat that time. It was his way of making sure he'd accomplish his goal before he had to set out to actually accomplish his goal. This was my kid who isn't always the most confident kid. I met him at the track. I held the timer. I said go. I watched him blaze around the track. I looked at the timer and thought, he's going to smash his record time. But then halfway, he stopped. He just simply stopped. He walked slowly back to me. When he reached me he said, I decided I didn't want to take a chance of overdoing it. I said, Ok - that's probably a good idea. Then, shortly after, he told me, "even if I don't beat my 400 time from last year in this race, I'm sure at some point I can still beat my 100 and 200 times from last year." This was my kid who isn't always the most confident kid. This morning, I met him at the edge of the track. I told him, listen to me, don't race the guys in your race. They are faster than you. If you try to keep up with them you're not going to beat YOU. You're not going to beat your 1:09. Let those guys go, I said. Run your even splits through the first 300 meters. Then in the end, try to catch one of the guys in front of you. I stood at the finish line. I watched Elliott take off. I watched him run a nice even race the first 300 meters - in the back of the pack. Then, I watched him come out of the final turn and run hard down the stretch toward the finish line, and pass another runner. And oh I knew he was going to do it. I could literally feel it. Sure enough, the scoreboard at the end of the track said, Elliott Cartwright: 1:03.4 - he'd crushed his time from last year. We were sitting in the stands. He was drinking some Gatorade. He said, I could have run that race faster. Then he told me, I don't know if I can ever take enough time off my 100 time to win a race, but I think I can take enough time off my 400 to win if they'll let me keep running it. And suddenly, I was talking to my kid who is a more confident kid. On the way home I was thinking, we don't grow confident by beating someone else, we grow confident when we beat ourselves. We grow confident when we beat our self doubts. We grow confident when we start discovering we're better than we think we are. I was thinking, once again one of my kids made me better today. He challenged me to get better at beating myself. I'd told Elliott when we walked to the car - just keep beating yourself buddy. You keep beating yourself - one day you're going to look behind you and see you're beating everyone else too. Confidence just seems to have that effect. If I allow myself, I can get lost in the question, "who am I?" That can be a tough question to ask when the answers seem to change from year to year. Sometimes month to month. Heck, there are days the answer changes from minute to minute.
Maybe that's a sign it's the wrong first question to ask myself? Pastor Steven Furtick suggests we should always start with the question, "God, who are you?" Too often when we are asking - "who am I" - we are asking, am I a dad or mom, a boss, a runner, a writer, a democrat, a catholic. So often when we ask "who am I" - we're considering that answer through the lens of how we present ourselves to the world. (And often, how WELL we're presenting that to the world). But when we first ask, God - "who are you" - we've begun asking ourselves what we are made of and not what we make of ourselves. That's important. Because if we try to make something of ourselves out of ingredients that aren't within us, life gets complicated. Confusing. If you believe like I do, that we are made of God's spirit, and that God's definition of himself is true; love and light - then the more you come to know who God is the more you come to know you are made of love and light. Maybe who I think I am becomes irrelevant when I spend my days asking God, who are you. Maybe when love and light become the ingredients that overtake my insides, I know them as myself, love and light will become what the world sees on my outside. Maybe who I am and who God is start to look like the same thing the more I ask, God - who are you. It's an answer that comes in your bible, for sure. But it's an answer that comes in the dark and quiet. It's an answer that comes in a walk through the woods. It's an answer that comes on the edge of the ocean or looking up at a tall mountain. It's an answer that comes when we hold a baby lamb or pet our dog. It's an answer that comes when we hand a twenty to the homeless or go on a mission trip. It's an answer that comes when we start considering the miracle of all that's been created, and honoring it, with gratitude, and stop beating ourselves up for the mess we think we've made of it, and the mess we think we've made of ourselves. Don't ask yourself who you are today. Ask God who he is. 3/25/2022 0 Comments Don't count me outI ❤ this 5 year old memory.
This is 2nd grade Ian. Carrying his inhaler - struggling at the very back of the pack to reach the finish line of a 5k. A finish line his brother had long since reached. I thought, I'm proud of this boy. He's not an athlete like his brother, but I sure love his fight. Last weekend, I watched Ian the 7th grader on the lacrosse field. No one out there was more athletic. He was making play after play. Ian, without any pressure from anyone, gave up sugar years ago. His idea - not mine. We go out to eat and Elliott gets a cholcolate milkshake with every meal; Ian says - no thank you. He spends hours in the yard practicing. And now he talks about going out for football and basketball and track. 5 years later, a different kid. 5 years later, the kid counted out is making sure he's always counted in. We can learn a lot from our kids. Don't count people out. And sure as heck don't let anyone count you out. Harry Miller recently medically retired from the Ohio State football team. On the surface, he was a star athlete. Beneath the surface, he was spending his days trying to talk himself into living. On the football field, he was a man headed to the pros. In his home, he was a man cutting his wrists and worrying about how God might receive him after taking his own life.
Miller said, "A person like me who supposedly has the entire world in front of them, can be fully prepared to give up the world entire. This is not an issue reserved for the far and away. It is in our homes. It is in our conversations. It is in the people we love." Miller credits his coach and his program for helping him find help, and for putting him in a position to continue offering help. As a result, his words have been shared widely on social media. Yesterday, he stared into a camera on The Today Show, in tears, and promised a hurting world there is more hope than they believe. As he spoke, his tears became my tears. I think it was these words: "People have called me brave, but to me it just felt like not dying. It felt like being honest. Maybe bravery is just being honest when it's be easier not to." I've come to know that being honest is letting go of secrets. Not secrets like I walked out of the grocery store with a Snickers bar I didn't pay for. Secrets like I'm a dead man walking. Miller said in an another interview, "“Maybe it was hard to see the scars through the bright colors of the television. Maybe the scars were hard to hear through all the talk shows and interviews. They are are hard to see, and they are easy to hide, but they sure do hurt. There was a dead man on the television set, but nobody knew it.” I had a conversation with a friend several years ago. It was the first brave conversation of my life. It was the first conversation I'd ever had about secrets. Nothing felt brave about that conversation. It only felt life-giving. It felt like not dying. Here is the thing about that. I'm not the only one getting five decades into my life trying to figure out how to have brave conversations. I'm not the only one getting five decades into my life holding on to secrets. I'm not the only one holding on to my secrets for dear life until life no longer feels dear at all. And sadly, more and more, it's only taking a couple of decades until life no longer feels dear for our young people and our kids. Miller said he first talked about taking his life when he was 8 years old. It's catching up with us in epidemic and pandemic ways. This secret keeping we do. This inability to have brave conversations with one another. Because it IS an inability more than it is a willingness. We don't practice brave conversations with one another. We don't learn how to have them to the point that we ultimately do what we do with most things we aren't skilled at. We avoid them. Social media has taken this avoidance to an even higher level; it's shaping us to believe secrets and hard conversations don't even exist anymore. Steven Furtick says, "What you are seeing on your Reels is not real. I wonder what happened five minutes after they posted that. I mean just five minutes, not five years." I'll tell you what I think happened. Many of them returned to their secrets. But they left us with a growing impression we're the only one who has them. And we hold on to them all the tighter. With dear life. Until life is no longer so dear. I'm going to tell you, when you share you secrets, life in an instant feels less lonely. I don't think it's what we're looking for when we let secrets go, but it's what happens. A loneliness we didn't know was married to our secrets, for a moment disappears in our bravery. Vivek Murthy, who wrote a book on loneliness, says, "people wouldn’t come up me and say 'I’m lonely,' but they would say things like 'I feel like I have to deal with all of these struggles on my own' or 'I feel like if I disappeared tomorrow, nobody would even notice' or 'I feel like I’m invisible.' What I realized is that whether people were struggling with addiction or depression or violence in their communities, what was weighing on them most was the sense of having to deal with these challenges all alone." Our secrets are our greatest challenges. The greatest weight of those challenges is carrying them alone. We carry them alone because we've become a world built on relationships that have escaping or avoiding challenges as a primary goal, and not embracing them as the greatest form of togetherness we can have. I think much of our world is fake. We live in a world built to hide our secrets. Protect us from them. Me protecting me. You protecting you. The result is a Reel world that is no longer real. And more and more every day, our friends and family can no longer handle the Reel world or the real world. I think we need a brave new world. We need a world that sits at the dinner table and bravely asks, what's the hardest thing going on in your life, not how did you do on your test or how did practice go? We need churches that will quit promoting the forgiveness of our secrets as a way to avoid being a church that bravely shares in them with one another. Not for the sake of shame, but for the sake of togetherness. And love. We need friends who can walk through the woods and stop and bravely ask, can I tell you something? We need a world that has permission to quit pretending there are no secrets, and bravely start sharing them with one another. Because I'm here to tell you, secret sharing really isn't brave. It's simply not being lonely. It's not dying. 3/23/2022 0 Comments life starts nowYesterday, my friend Bridget posed this question to her Facebook friends: "If you were to put a message in a bottle, what would the first sentence say?"
Without any thought I typed my response to her - "life starts now." Because my answer did come without thought - I thought about it a lot afterward. It struck me that my response reflected the message I'd like to find in a bottle - and not the one I'd like to deliver. Her question left me imagining a walk on a beach, stumbling upon a bottle, opening it to explore the contents inside, and pulling out a small piece of paper and then reading the words: life starts now. I could feel the renewal. I felt myself holding that bottle and staring at it and wondering who'd sent this perfectly timed message. God, maybe? I don't know. All I know is for a moment I didn't feel stuck. I didn't feel stuck between a past that has no ondoing and a future that seems at times completely unattainable. Because I do get stuck there at times - I think we all do to a degree - between the undoing and the unattainable. Time is the enemy there, I think. It refuses to be re-written. It refuses to allow you to believe there is ever enough left. But life isn't about time. Not the time behind me or the time ahead of me. It's not about spring forward or fall back. It's not about the time I've spent or the time I have left. Life is about now. It's about the opportunity we are granted with each moment to believe time is my friend and not my enemy. Life is about this beautiful gift we've been granted to say in any given second of our choosing - life starts now. In this very second, we get the gift of letting go of the treasures that passed us by and letting go of the treasures we feel will never arrive and we get this opportunity to create a treasure out of right now. It's a gift that comes every second. Because life always starts again right now. Right now we get to reach down and pick up that bottle and read - life starts now. I am so grateful for friends who toss bottles into the water. I am grateful for the messages they send into the world. They truly do make time our friend and not our enemy. We will approach this day one of two ways.
We will either go at it believing "I can do it" - or - we'll believe the opposite. That we can't... I hear people say all the time, "I think they've lost confidence." Well, I don't think people lose confidence, I think they just no longer choose confidence. I get it. Confidence can be a hard choice. You miss 10 free throws in a row and it's hard to imagine number 11 is going in. You fail to reach the finish line of a race a couple of times and the finish line suddenly feels invisible. But it's not invisible. It's still there. And reaching it won't happen when you can suddenly feel the finish line, it will happen when you choose to go see that finish line. Our minds are powerful. If we start believing I can't do it, our minds will spend all day singing that song with us. Until we have a whole stinking chorus in our heads singing 'you can't do it.' And then the whole world joins in until the only thing we hear is 'you can't do it.' But when you choose I can do it, the mind becomes your hostage. You refuse to leave it to its own devices until you know your mind believes you. And then you start getting pretty picky about the people you have in your life. Steven Furtick says, "there is nothing like people who believe in you when there is nothing to see to prove what they believe." I think these are people who sense when you are 'losing your confidence.' These are the people who pull you aside and say, oh heck no, you're going to keep choosing confidence. You're going to keep choosing "I can do it." If you are starting this day wondering if you can do it or not, you are not wrestling with a lack of confidence - you are not wrestling with a negative feeling or emotion - you are simply tempted to make a bad choice. You are tempted to choose "I can't do it." Let me start your day by reminding you - yes you can. I'm choosing to be confident in you. Choose confidence for yourself. |
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
February 2025
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