Month: March 2019

Far From Perfect

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There are days, weeks, seasons of our lives where the walls are caving in, every phone call is at best: an emergency, at worst: the worst. There is no end to our prayers, no more tears to cry, our heart hurts even though it’s already in pieces, broken so thoroughly it feels as if it’ll never be put back together. You know these spaces, this darkness, this pain. And yet we pray, we still cry, still hurt. We keep moving, because tomorrow can’t be like this, right? And then, of course, it is. This is a season like that.

But we get up again. We don’t want to, but we do. We stand.

This is why it’s so important to examine and understand weight, priority, value – for times like this. Because it’s hard to see at night. Sometimes, it’s hard to breathe and we’re overcome with despair, and it’s precisely these times when we need to know what we are about, when there’s no time to think and the foundation is shaking. When the water is rising.

Everyone responds well when the sun is shining, everyone is gracious when they win.

Anyway. 

I love to watch court shows, like the People’s Court. The People’s Court is on where I live at 1 and 5, I record the 5 o’clock and watch it the next day while I eat my lunch around noon-ish. Today, I’m not watching it because I’m writing. This isn’t too unusual, but I’ll tell you something. I’m sad today. There’s a sweet boy I know undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor right now, I’ve had a run of bad news, relationships are falling apart – others and a few of my own, my legs hurt from a spin class 2 days ago, a good friend is trying to get home but is in the hospital while his insides bleed slowly, several people have passed away and I’m praying for peace for the beautiful friends who have lost. SO. All I want to do is lay on the couch and cry a little and watch Marilyn Milian. 

I’m not, though. Instead, I’m writing. Because that’s who I am. At least it’s who I’ve decided I want to be, who I have been created to be, long before the surgeries and phone calls and funerals and spin bikes. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time exhuming myself, getting rid of all of the walls and dirt and damaging words and thoughts and lies I’ve buried myself under, trying to discover me.       

I value honesty, mercy, and forgiveness. (I’m really working on the last 2 towards myself, but I’m working on them because they are so important to me.) 

I believe people are created in the image of God (even me, which may be the most difficult to accept, right?) I believe that waaaaay down, in the deepest parts of my soul. Then when people let me down (and we always do, eventually) and I’m tempted to think humanity is a hopeless lost cause, I remember what I know – what I learned in the daylight, when it was quiet and I could think clearly. 

But if I didn’t give the time and effort then, I would surely forget the million examples of beauty and love and be prisoner of the moment, of the offense, of the wound, and make decisions based solely on circumstance. Only on the now.

I’m finished for now. I’m going to lay down and cry a little and listen to some music. But there is this Rise Against song, that seems totally appropriate today. It’s called ‘Far From Perfect’ and this is the chorus:   

“We are far from perfect, but we’re perfect as we are.

We are bruised, we are broken

But we are [expletive deleted] works of art.”

Wisdom of My Dad

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Now that we’ve introduced the concept of weight, there is an obvious question: how do I know what weighs more to me? We will completely omit the word ‘should’ here, as in “how do I know what should weigh more to me?” and add the words “to me,” because as we’ve discussed, weight might be different for each of us… and that is ok.

This question and how we answer it is vital because every single thing about how we live our daily lives hangs on our internal ranking system. My dad used to repeat, over and over, with disdain, shaking his head, “Priorities, man.” He also used to say, “Girls are strange, man,” and “Be really careful who you marry, man,” with the same tone and shaking head. (In hindsight, my dad was much wiser than I ever understood.)

Should I sleep an extra 10, or 30, minutes or eat breakfast?

Should we eat out tonight or put that money into savings?

See what I mean? Every single thing. Do you make time to floss? Eat vegetables? Go to the gym? When you’re there, do you lift weights or run on a treadmill? Do you show up late to appointments? Do you read your Bible or pray or watch Game of Thrones?

Every. Single. Thing.

If you don’t flow, you’ve decided that it’s not important (or at least not as important as something else.) If you show up late, you’ve decided that your time is weightier than mine, that those 5 minutes are worth more than sending a message of respect. If you eat vegetables or go to the gym, you may have decided that taking care of your body is emotionally and spiritually valuable as well as physically, at the expense of any number of other tasks or hobbies.  

If you stop at the bar on the way home instead of going straight home to eat dinner with your family or refuse to pay child support or drink too much or tend an addiction, you’ve made decisions. And, for the record, nobody’s here to judge whether those choices are good or bad. We just need to agree that every decision we make is based upon our discernment of weight.

Once we agree on that, everything becomes an intentional act of will.

That’s important because we live an awful lot of our lives as if things are out of our control, mindlessly sleepwalking through the beautiful moments of each of our days.

Have you ever thought consciously about breakfast? Or sleep? Or being late? Or spending time with your buddies? And what messages each of those decisions sends – to you, your soul, your family, and your God?

The enemy of mindfulness – and gratitude – is numb disconnect, having eyes but not seeing, ears but not hearing. 

The other part of the Scriptural invitation is to connect and finally wake up to the amazing gifts of love that are our lives.     

Change the Details, Change Your Life!!!!

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Before we get to the details that will change your life (that sounds like a spiritualish self-help promise on a book jacket – “Change the Details, Change Your Life!!!!” – in a whimsical font over a gauzy picture of me with a cheesy smile and big hair, doesn’t it?) Before we get there, we have to ask some hard questions, figure some things out and do some homework. You can’t paint the walls and choose fixtures before you pour the foundation. 

In the Bible, we see that there are some situations where we are faced with a choice where the options come into conflict with each other and are both mandated in the Scriptures. (Wait, WHAT?!!!?) 

There’s a story about a Good Samaritan. (It’s found in Luke 10:25-37, you can read it now, I’ll wait…) So, the first 2 religious men crossed the street to avoid him and walked right on by. The horror, right? Except for, in Numbers 19:11 “All those who touch a dead human body will be ceremonially unclean for seven days.” and Leviticus 5:2 “Or if a person touches anything unclean–whether the carcass of an unclean wild animal or livestock or crawling creature–even if he is unaware of it, he is unclean and guilty.” and Leviticus 21:1 The Lord said to Moses: “Say to the priests, the sons of Aaron—say to them, ‘For a dead person no priest is to defile himself among his people…” and Leviticus 21:11 “He must not go near any dead body or make himself unclean, even for his father or mother.” 

It’s a horrible thing they did, until we realize they did exactly what they were supposed to do! 

George Bradford Caird says, “it weighed more with them that he might be dead and defiling to the touch of those whose business was with holy things than that he might be alive and in need of care.” 

But, as far as “care” goes, also in Leviticus (19:18), it says “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” and Deuteronomy 15:11 “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” and Proverbs 14:21 “Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but blessed is he who is generous to the poor.” and Psalm 82:4 “Rescue the weak and the needy”

So, what would you do? Would you follow the law, the Bible? Which part? How do you choose? Which is weightier?

In Luke 14:1-5 “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way. Then he asked them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?””

Well, of course we’d all pull our donkey out of the well. But in Exodus 20:8-10 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.” 

Isn’t rescuing our donkeys “work?” Of course, it is. 

Now what? 

And add to that that we might choose differently, right? The honest truth is that things that are weightier to me might not be to you.

It seems that the Scriptures are an invitation into a certain way of life, where everything isn’t spelled out and it’s not all black and white. Maybe this is because what you may value, or need, at certain times in your life aren’t the things you will value at others. And maybe its because we’re not all at the same place on the journey. Maybe maybe maybe, so many maybe’s. But this big, beautiful book is like a doorway into questions and more questions and transformation, and letting go of our need to understand, to have everything under control, and to be right. 

There’s another story, about a kid who disowns his family, runs off and makes a giant mess of his life. Eventually, when he realizes how giant the mess is, he returns. The Father doesn’t wait for an explanation or even an “I’m sorry, dad,” He throws a party because He’s just so happy the son is home. Now, everyone is happy about this, except for one, the kid’s brother. And it ends with the Father inviting him in. But if he chooses to go in, he’ll have to leave all of his ‘rightness’ outside, and discover who his Father is, who his brother is, and what he’s been dying to know all along: who he is. What weighs more, the party or being right? 

And I’ll give you one guess to what the Bible does with this… nothing. The story ends before he decides, with the brother, with you and me, outside, the invitation hanging unanswered in the thick night air.

A Brand New Thing, starting today

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There is something called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, which “causes one’s surroundings to appear distorted. Just as Alice grows too tall for the house, those suffering from Alice in Wonderland Syndrome will hear sounds either quieter or louder than they actually are, see objects larger or smaller than reality, and even lose sense of accurate velocity or textures. This terrifying disorder, which has been described as an LSD trip without the euphoria, even perverts one’s own body image.” This sounds horrible, but it’s interesting to note that Alice In Wonderland Syndrome is also called Todd Syndrome. I wonder why? (My brother-in-law’s name is Todd.) Who is this Todd? Was he or she the psychologist that diagnosed it or the first one unlucky enough to be afflicted? Sheesh, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the internet and lose several hours or days or years. I was simply searching for information on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) when I happened upon my brother-in-law’s syndrome. 

I’m pretty sure I suffer from this seasonal depression, and the reason I tell you this is because it probably explains my irregular posts, breaking the most important rule of ‘effective blogging.’

But as these things so often do, everything in the entire universe is speaking the same language – maybe it always is, but I so rarely listen, and when I do, my mind is blown by the connectedness of the messages being received. You know what I mean, right? The song on the radio, plot of your favorite show, the conversation you overhear between 2 people you don’t know in the grocery store, the Bible passage you randomly picked, all pointing you in a shockingly specific direction. 

So, we’re going to break the usual format and start a sort of online series, called Every Detail.         

Leviticus (everyone’s favorite book of the Bible) details a time in the history of Israel where the people, who have been slaves in Egypt, have now been set free. They now have a land and a fresh start, an opportunity to re-order the world from scratch. How will they do it? What will be important? How are they going to live in this new creation? 

It talks about sacrifices, forgiveness, food, skin, mold, discharges – it’s a weird book nobody reads anymore that is so boring your face gets numb in just a few paragraphs. But the foundation it builds upon is a total integration of every dimension of life, that the details matter, and how you do anything is how you do everything. 

We’ve been sold an idea of compartmentalization, where there are different parts of us that don’t bleed into the others. George Costanza, on Seinfeld, spoke of the conflict between “Relationship George” and “Independent George.” We may not have relationship and independent selves, but we might have work, friend, student, church, parent personas, like avatars in separate video-game worlds. The fallacy goes that these faces are natural and necessary, a kind of modern survival strategy.

“If Relationship George walks through that door, he will KILL Independent George!!!”     

The Bible argues that this murder is absolutely necessary. But instead, maybe Independent George should kill Relationship George, or church Chad should kill work Chad, or whoever. The idea is that we should not be dis-integrated in any way, and who we are should be who we are in all spaces, regardless of who is there or what time of day or night it is, and the images we’ve created, with their masks and affectations, for different audiences, have to go.

We have been created, purposefully, wonderfully, for a certain beautiful reason – and every detail of our lives should reflect this. This is what this space will address, in many different ways: how we re-order our worlds and what that means for every part of us, from our desks to our closets to our food to our toothpaste to our daily routine. 

Last night, in a discussion on our increasingly fractured and hurting world, one of us asked, “How do we change it?” 

Because it is not just what it is. 

Because all revolutions begin with that question.

What if the answer has been right there, in front of us, all along?