Wandering and Wondering

“Like a million little doorways
All the choices we made
All the stages we passed through
All the roles we played

For so many different directions
Our separate paths might have turned
With every door that we opened
Every bridge that we burned”

Ghost of a Chance – Rush

I have not lived up to my promise to myself to try to post at least once a month here. It has been hard to pull all my disparate thoughts together into anything cohesive and meaningful. It’s certainly not been a lack of thinking that has kept me away from my promise. Instead, it has been a lack of clarity into the whole of all that thinking. I’m not sure I’ve got a complete handle on it yet, so this may drift and wander like I have for the past two and a half months, but I know I’m closer to something now than I’ve been.

It seems as though I turned a corner on this in the past few days as several things have either happened or clicked to get me closer to figuring out what all this wandering and wondering lately has been all about.

It has occurred to me that life is, at its most elementary level, nothing more than a series of risk-benefit analyses. Each choice, each decision, each “go” or “no go,” – even those routine things we choose or decide to do or not do every day – has been subjected to our minds’ risk-benefit analysis process. In business terms, this is usually called a cost-benefit analysis. But, it seems, at least for me, the word “cost” is less descriptive than the word “risk.” (Sidebar: in business, they mean the same thing, but “risk” scares shareholders, investors, and employees, so the more benign “cost” is substituted.)

So life is simply an actuarial table that we develop and apply? I doubt it’s that cut and dry with the more complicated decisions, but I can say with a certain amount of confidence that it is indeed with the rote, mundane choices that we’re presented with over and over throughout life.

How do I know this? I took one very simple and completely irrelevant example from my life and broke it down as to why I do it the way I do it. And as I did, I realized that this is the same principle I employ everywhere else in my life balancing logic and reason with pros and cons and either moving forward, staying put (and this is usually temporary until I find a Plan B, because this is the most uncomfortable place for me to be), or moving in a different direction altogether.

I tend to be more a risk-taker than the average person with most things in life – my heart and my money being the two notable exceptions – and yet I would not consider myself a gambler in the traditional sense of the word. But, I tend to make choices a lot of times based on the odds, and sometimes – in a defiance of any known logic in the human race, but in an anticipatory future payoff (intuitiveness?) – I’ll take the long shot. And win.

The example was how I play pool. I’m all about the physics and geometry of each shot and because of that, I play fairly well. I have strength and some mean English that also helps. But the biggest factor by far is my willingness to take the shots no one else will take. I flirt outrageously with the 8-ball the entire game. Why? Because experience has taught me that about 99% of the time, I’ll win the gamble and 1% of the time I’ll lose the game. Those are excellent odds, so the benefit of using the 8-ball just like any other ball on the table outweighs the risk that I’ll inadvertently shoot it in before my last shot. My sister always cringes when she plays with me and I do this, and my response is always the same: “no guts, no glory.”

It’s a chance. It’s a choice. And it has made the kind of pool player I am today.

So, what in the world does that have to do with my life? A lot. Most of the choices I make are chances. They may work out. They may not. But, it seems to me that doing something – even if, at its least detrimental outcome, it doesn’t work out and at its most detrimental outcome, it crashes and burns in spectacular flames – in the long run is better than doing nothing. Nothing will give you nothing. Something will give you something, even if it’s nothing more than a lesson on what not to do the next time.

That’s how I move forward in my own life. But, the reason I can’t call myself a gambler in the truest sense of the word is because I’ve done an extensive risk-benefit analysis before I’ve taken the chance. I know what the odds are as well as they can be known going in. I know what I bring to the table. The unknowns are always, as with everything, the real deciding factors, but a good risk-benefit analysis will plan for unknowns and have either a coping strategy or an exit strategy.

For me, because this is such an integral part of my personality and temperament, this risk-benefit analysis process is the underpinning of how I’ve lived and will live this temporary existence. One of the things those closest (or who should be closest) to me don’t realize is that I rarely do anything impulsively. Even if my choice or decision makes sense to no one but me, it’s truly never a whim, and although in rare cases, it is more impetuous than would seem reasonable, the formula has been applied on some level.

Knowing that about myself is one thing. Explaining it to anyone else is quite another.

Because I’ve realized that most people don’t go through this process on a conscious level, and so they are completely unaware of, as The Fixx said, “one thing leads to another.” They simply don’t realize how the choices, the chances, the decisions got them from there to here, and even more importantly, most people don’t realize how their choices, chances, decisions affected, impacted, and altered the choices, chances, and decisions of others in their spheres of influence.

That was the missing component – the bigger picture – I was missing until it became clear last night after an unexpected and revealing phone call from my older sister.

To give some background, each January, I review my legal paperwork and make any changes necessary to reflect my current situation. For years, I’d had one of my best friends for a long time as the executor of my will because there was so much tension between my immediate siblings (as in the two sisters I grew up with) that I figured it would turn into a knock-down-drag-out free-for-all if I named either of the two of them executor. Even though, in my fastidious way, everything is spelled out and nothing’s ambiguous, so it’s simply of matter of going down the list that comprises my will and final wishes.

In the past few years, this friend has developed some serious health problems and I finally decided that I may outlive her, so I started a risk-benefit analysis of who a suitable replacement would be that would likely outlive me. I considered a couple of very-close-like-family younger friends, but they are both starting out in careers, marriages, families, and I realized they didn’t need that extra burden.

So I was back to the siblings. I thought and prayed long and hard before deciding upon the primary and the backup. I used logic and practicality as the final determinants. So, I chose, and I created for each of them two manila envelopes – one which they could open upon receiving and the second that could not be opened until after my death (there are personal letters to each of them in that envelope, as well as my actual will, some of the provisions of which are going to either force them to get along and make peace or will drive the last wedge between them).

My older sister got hers. Hence, last night’s phone call.

Now, she seldom calls any of us and she never answers email. Her first question was to ask how Mom was doing. I asked if she’d talked to her. Immediately, she got defensive and said “no, I have a life and I’m busy and the phones and emails work both ways.” “Okay…,” I thought, but said nothing. The rest of the conversation had this tenor to it.

This gist, initially, was about how no one understood how much she had going on her with her life, her kids, her grandkids, her husband, her job, etc. and how she couldn’t be expected to drop everything to keep in touch with us. “It’s my life and that’s the way it is” was something she said several times. She complained because Mom would never call her (Mom has never been a phone person and now with her hearing being so bad, she has become even less so – it was a choice that each of us made when we left home whether we would make the effort to maintain contact).

She went on for a while about all that, saying that she wanted the grandkids and great-grandkids to see Mom, but we’d (as in Mom and me) needed to be willing to meet her halfway – figuratively, as either coming out west, or helping her financially pick up the tab to bring everybody back east. I explained again – and she is so out of the loop – that Mom really can’t travel great distances anymore and she said she didn’t want to. After her complaining about that and referring to a trip that Mom made to California 25 years ago (that one blew me out of the water), I realized that she’d made a choice a long time ago about what her relationship with the rest of us would be and, in her risk-benefit analysis, choosing everything else as a priority produced better odds for whatever it is she wants to get out of life.

I said very little in the entire phone conversation because I was listening to her with this idea finally pulling together and coming to fruition.

The next subject was about whom I’d chosen as my executor. She said she was hurt that I had not chosen her, especially with the sometimes-rocky and sometimes-volatile nature of my relationship with my twin sister. She referred back to Mom dumping her as her executor (she didn’t use those words, but it was the same tone of voice I heard when she discovered that and decided to raise hell with me about it in the very early morning, pre-coffee hours of Mom’s overnight stay in the hospital in Michigan during Thanksgiving weekend) and then pointedly asked why.

I asked her who the executor of her will was. “My husband, of course,” she answered. I asked why. Her answer was because he was there, knew what was going on, and knew what needed to be done.

“Exactly,” I said. The silence lasted a bit too long for either of us to be entirely comfortable, but I wanted her to get my perspective. “Well…,” she said, and I immediately went into the pros/cons list that I had gone through in choosing. I needed someone close by who could actually get here within hours and take care of things like cancelling credit/debit cards, freeze my bank accounts, deal with the funeral home, etc. Charlotte, NC or Tacoma, WA? I needed someone who was in constant enough contact with me to be up-to-date with me and my life. I got another rehash of the phone/email thing working both ways (I’ve sent her numerous emails over the years, and I can think of only one that was acknowledged and answered).

I reminded her of that and her response, which I expected and was one of the deciding factors, was “I’m too busy to deal with email and Facebook.” In reality, she’s too busy for my sister and me and Mom. She’s got better odds spending her time elsewhere. And that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me or hurt me (it does Mom, but that’s a different dynamic and relationship). It is what it is. But, you can’t ride the fence of chance – sooner or later, you going to fall on one side or the other of it and when you do, that’s the direction you’ll inevitably be drawn toward until the other side is, at best, if at all, a distant memory.

She then told me something about the rift between my twin sister and her. It’s been bad between them for quite some time and I had expressed early in last night’s conversation that I hoped that they could find healing at some point. I have purposely stayed out of the specifics and details because it’s not something I want to be in the middle of, so I really didn’t know what all the animosity was about other than what sounded like two people being on completely different planets when it came to communicating with each other.

It turns out it was nothing as lofty and as expansive as that. The root of the current bitter contention between the two of them is a set of shell casings from the 21-gun salute at Daddy’s funeral.

I listened in disbelief to, for my older sister, a quite impassioned explanation of why she should have – in fact, deserved - them and not my twin sister (she had been given them along with the flag by Mom sometime after the funeral) who has repeatedly refused to give them up.

I was so astounded that I actually said “I can’t believe something this petty – a thing – is why you two can’t speak a civil word to each other and border on the edge of outright hatred for each other.” I was subjected to a repeat of all the reasons why it wasn’t petty and it was representative of something far bigger. I listened to all her reasoning and I thought to myself “this is absolutely insane.”

But, after I hung up the phone, I realized that both my sisters had taken chances, made choices, and now were drawing lines in the sand regarding those choices, making them not just one-time decisions, but a framework for the rest of their lives – and the rest of the family’s lives – and their interaction with each other. That’s how big these seemingly-little decisions can become.

And it made me very sad. Because I can’t fix what they’ve broken. I can’t unchoose for them. I can’t force either of them to do another risk-benefits analysis in the bigger framework outside their own little worlds. I can do little more than stand between them watching them drift further away from each other, seemingly without regret or sorrow.

Maybe that’s the lesson. To choose carefully. To consider our chances, our risks, our benefits in the larger context of how it affects everyone who is linked to our lives, either by blood or by friendship, not in the narrow and skewed focus of just ourselves.

I hope I can remember this the next time I undertake a big decision. It’s never just about me, no matter how much I would love to think it is, no matter how much I would like to hope it is, no matter how crazily I can often assume it is.

Gratitude

As we approach another Thanksgiving, I find myself thinking about gratitude and thankfulness and what that really means in how I live, who I am, and how I show it, not just on a day that a president designated as a “day of thanksgiving” almost 150 years ago, but every day, in my life, and meaning it.

Thanksgiving has great kid memories for me. Usually we came to the mountains of Tennessee and spent it with my mom’s aunt and her children and grandchildren. We’d leave every Wednesday evening after Daddy got home from work from whatever part of the piedmont or eastern part of North Carolina we lived in at the time, drive up through Winston-Salem, then North Wilkesboro (where we always stopped for gas and a potty break) – where there always seemed to be the smell of a skunk and we kids would moan and groan about it, then Boone, then Elizabethton, then Johnson City, then Jonesborough, and finally out to the little farm in Telford where my mom’s aunt lived.

By the time we got there, everyone was tired, so we three kids went to sleep in one of the two bedrooms upstairs (that’s about all I remember of the house other than the kitchen). We woke early on Thanksgiving day and tumbled downstairs toward the smell of hot, strong coffee and cinnamon toast, both of which were huge treats for us.

Around mid-day the rest of Mom’s family would gather and we’d eat until we thought we’d burst, and then we kids would go outside and play in the barn across the street.

By the time we were teenagers, we stopped the Tennessee trips – going on July 4th instead – and started doing our own Thanksgivings at home, sometimes alone, but mostly with friends joining us.

The Thanksgiving after my older sister left home was oddly a demarcation in our Thanksgivings that has endured. She came home from school and the Thanksgiving meal was disrupted by me. Mom knew that none of us kids liked the innards of any animal, but she insisted on putting turkey giblets in her gravy and dressing. I had picked around them for years without incident, but apparently I was taking too long picking around them with the gravy, and Daddy asked what the holdup was. Elaine busted me and Daddy got upset and told me to either eat it or leave the table.

I left the table and went to my room and in bitter tears descended into the comfort of the complex physics problems that I’d spent that morning working on. Hours later, Mom came and told me I needed to eat something, so I sat alone at the kitchen table, eating a little cold turkey (not much else). Everyone else was watching football, but I was still upset enough that I chose to wash my plate and go back to my physics. Math made more sense to me that day than my family did.

In many ways, it still does, because people are complicated and there aren’t always definite answers, concrete and inarguable solutions, a way to bridge the gaps and differences that make each of us unique. Many times what I believe is anger at someone is really frustration because he or she is not a math problem I can easily solve. Maturity and experience have taught me that, but it doesn’t always change the desire to transform a difficult person into a solvable equation, and so often, I just walk away because I don’t know what else to do.

My biggest regret about that day is that I didn’t apologize to my dad. He never thought I’d actually leave the table, or he would have never given me that choice.

There was a lot he didn’t understand about me, just as there is a lot none of us understands about the people we love fiercely and would die for but sometimes can’t live with. I know it hurt him, as I know many other things I did in our time together hurt him. The first time I ever saw him cry was because of something I did. That memory is burned in my mind and it brings tears to my eyes even now as I see him at the kitchen table, with his head in his hands, sobbing. The actual incident was not major in the big scheme of things, but like the copious amount of blood that can spring forth from a superficial head wound, the effect on him was deep and painful.

Since we’ve been adults, we have only spent one Thanksgiving together as that 5-member nuclear family that struggled to hold on to each other and our familial bond throughout our formative years. Life took us kids to a lot of far-flung places and competing schedules to the extent that it became almost impossible for all of us to be in the same place at the same time.

A few years after Daddy died, we managed to get everyone in the same place for Thanksgiving, but it turned into a disaster. My older sister was already having the affair that would end her second marriage and Mom got the flu and ended up in the hospital, which precipitated the most surreal drama-laden few days I can remember in recent memory. It was miserable for everyone.

And, although we never talked about what happened and why it happened and dealt with it – I think this is referred to as “clearing the air,” which has never been a strong suite in our family because none of us really knows how to do it the right way and we know the effort would create a bigger mess, so we just walk away and “forget” it ever happened – I think we all realized that family gatherings don’t work out very well for us and we’ve given up on them. The next one will be Mom’s funeral, and I already dread it.

Let me be clear. It’s no one’s fault, per se. It’s just reality of who and where we are as a family. We manage to get along reasonably well for the most part in distinct groups. As the former family mediator and arbitrator – a position I resigned about 10 years ago after it finally dawned on me that in that role I always ended up getting caught right in the middle of the crossfire – I definitely have the best relationship with each of my sisters and my mom. I’m still the one everyone talks to. But the dynamics between my sisters and between my sisters and Mom are a recipe for disaster.

So what does all this have to do with gratitude? A lot. Because when I back up and I look at my life, I have a lot of things to be thankful for and I find my ingratitude reprehensible and it’s something – a mindset,  I suppose – that I’ve been consciously trying to change the last few years.

What is gratitude? It is an inner appreciation, gratefulness, and thankfulness for the gifts that are so generously given to us in life (for that matter, for life itself, which I’ve only within the past year or so, really been able to say, for the most part, I’m thankful for – most of my life I’ve spent asking for a way out of it because it’s been hard, but I’ve mostly come to the realization that the hard things are necessary for growth, understanding, compassion, empathy, and maturity) by God and by others.

It is not, as I’ve discussed in some depth recently with someone who is now a close acquaintance, but could be a friend down the road, a bouncing “don’t worry, be happy” persona. Happiness is not joy and joy is not happiness. I would never label myself (and neither would anyone who really knows me well) as a happy person. The glass is always half empty and it always will be. Read Ecclesiastes and you will find in Solomon’s words a mirror of my take on life. It’s all vanity and chasing the wind. However, I do have the joy of gratefulness and thankfulness for the many good things that I would have never known if the breath of life had not been breathed into me by God.

What are the main obstacles to gratitude?

The first is taking everything for granted, a mindset that we as Americans have fallen into. We expect, as opposed to the rest of the world, good things, great things, everything to go our way. Because of that we lose sight of the fact that everything is an unearned, undeserved gift.

Another obstacle is comparing ourselves upward to other people (i.e., comparing what we have against what someone else who has more has). That leaves the door wide open for ingratitude.

A third obstacle is the combination of self-centeredness and pride. We often get into the mindset that it’s all about us and our pride in what we’ve done blinds us to the fact that the good things didn’t originate with us and so much of what happens is bigger than us and out of our control.

Getting past those obstacles is a daily and life-long fight. We can always find, without even looking, reasons not to be thankful, not to be grateful, not to be appreciative. But it takes conscious effort and focus to find the reasons for gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation.

What am I grateful for?

My immediate and extended family. Even though we’re all fraught with flaws and warts, I love them and I’m thankful that I have them. I don’t always like them, but I always love them.

My adopted families. The saying that “friends are the family you choose” is dead on the money. I have a wonderful cadre of adopted family, whom in many ways I’m closer to than my own life-given family, and they make life so much more palatable than it would be without them.

My small, but hard-core, time-tested, for-better-or-worse group of friends. I’m one of those people who has a lot of acquaintances who consider me friends (I’m much harder and stricter on this definition that most – just because I happen to be friendly doesn’t mean I’m someone’s friend nor they’re mine – friends earn that place of honor in my life just as I earn it in their lives), but only has a few people that I actually call friends. These are the people I want to spend time with, no matter how introspective, anti-social, and solitude-seeking I am.  These are the people that I would actually answer the phone for if they called. These are the people I would go to the ends of the earth to find, to rescue, to help, or to just be there. They are the most precious gifts I have.

I have just reconnected after many years of losing touch with one of those friends and her return to my life has been like hole in my life being filled, a void unvoided, a breath of fresh air. It’s rare for me that a person doesn’t suck all the oxygen out of the room (love that quote from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) and having me gasping to run away for air. Extreme extroverts and real touchy-feely people (and I’m not dissing them – that’s who they are, but they drive me insane even in small doses) seem to do this more quickly to me than most. And for some reason I seem to be a magnet for them. I am not thankful for that.

I am thankful for God taking care of me in pretty amazing ways all my life. I could fill the rest of my life just recounting the incidents where His divine Daddy hand reached down and took care of me and helped me. Even in this current situation, where there have been many obstacles, He has taken care of my needs.

I am extremely grateful for the answered prayers and the unanswered prayers.

I am thankful for God’s creation. Although I’m not a fan of the mountains, the fall here was beautiful, and I love the skies of encroaching winter in their gray cloud-filled march toward what I hope will bring a bounty of snow this year. And when I’m searching, longing, restless, I can always bring right to the front of my mind’s eye my beloved Atlantic ocean. I can smell the air, hear the waves, see the crashing water on the shore, feel the sand below my feet, and almost catch a light breeze wafting across my face. My Dad did that and I’m profoundly grateful for it.

When I was a kid, growing up in the South, I remember being grateful that I was born white, because I saw, I fought against, argued against, and even protected in many cases, the African-American kids who lived with less (I have a strong memory of one bus stop when we lived in Wallace, a small town in eastern North Carolina, where the house was a literal shack, and the kids came onto the bus smelling like whatever they used to heat the house – it was not a pleasant odor, but it wasn’t a lack of cleanliness), were oppressed, were ignored, were treated like second-class citizens. Even as I write this today, that old anger rises to the surface because I hated the way their lives were just because they happened to be a different color. I hated the prejudice, the unfairness, the unrighteousness of it. I still hate it. And yet I was thankful I didn’t also have that obstacle to overcome.

There are so many other little things I’m grateful for, but these are just a few of them. My resolve is to show, to be, to live more grateful, more thankful, more appreciative every day, not just one day each year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Digging in the Dirt

“I’m digging in the dirt
To find the places I got hurt
To open up the places I got hurt”
Digging in the Dirt – Peter Gabriel

The past.

It’s dominated my thinking for the last few weeks after observations and conversations about “it.” I watched and listened to my sister, who kept telling me that therapy had helped her get beyond the past and beyond being hurt, while it was clear that she was everything but over the past and still carries a lot of hurt. I also had a conversation with a long-time friend who, after I explained that I don’t rehash the past because it’s useless and the only things I can do anything about are today and tomorrow, said that she wished she could be like her husband and me who “never look behind, only forward.”

But it’s not as black and white as all that: it’s not that some of us never forget the past and others of us just erase it as though it never happened. As I’ve thought about those things and drilled down mentally into the topic of the past, it has occurred to me that there are actually two pasts – one that’s instructive and the other that’s destructive.

No one can go forward without reviewing the past. To try to do so would be foolish. But which past should be reviewed is where the potential danger lies.

There is a factual past, which is instructive. It is an objective factual analysis of the what, why, how of a previous incident or situation. If the outcome of the incident or situation was positive and moved life forward, then those lessons should be internalized, exercised. improved upon, if possible, and applied to today and tomorrow. However, if the outcome was negative and stopped life in its tracks or set it back, then the lesson to learn is what could have been done differently to achieve a positive, forward-moving outcome. The results of that analysis should then be internalize, exercised, improved upon and applied to today and tomorrow.

That is the only true value of the past – to teach an either/or lesson and to use for the future.

There is another past that is what most people find themselves entrenched in when they go back in time. It is the emotional past. This is the past that, for the most part, is destructive. Most people can’t divorce themselves from the feelings and emotions of a situation, past or present. And negative emotions and feelings seem to have a much greater and much deeper hold on us than positive ones.

Most times when people deal with the past, they deal with their emotional reaction and/or the emotions of the incident or situation. And that can be very distructive and actually stops people dead in their tracks. They relive the negative stuff as if it was happening to them all over again and all the old wounds from old hurts gush open and overtake them, followed by anger, resentment, bitterness, and pain.

We record the past in an emotional context, so I understand how difficult separating those from the facts can be. The joy of weddings, births, successes are part of the glue that holds our lives together during the sadness of broken relationships, deaths, losses, and failures. We speak of good memories – the past – and we smile as we recall the pleasant feelings surrounding something enjoyable that we’ve done or experienced.

One of my best memories of being a toddler – a memory that I can pull out on any day and see it as clearly as if it was the day it happened – was a hand-in-hand walk with my dad around the farm at sunset. I don’t remember us talking, though we must have, in whatever way a toddler and a father talk, but I remember that I didn’t have to compete with anyone or anything else for his attention and for that brief moment in time, it was just him and me.

It was an ordinary thing, and perhaps to a lot of people an odd memory to cherish as one of my best, but my dad had so much responsibility and so many demands on him that to give any of us individual time, especially then – it would be easier as we got older and he became more established in the routine of family, job, and other responsibilities – was a rare and treasured treat. It’s a good memory for me because of how it made me feel then and how I feel now when I think about it.

It is also one of the very few memories of the past I have that has an emotional context.

I have no recollection of whether my ability (or need) to strip life of its emotions always existed or was developed. As far as I know, it’s always how I’ve recorded life. As a child – a very sensitive child – I knew that emotional stuff could really hurt and really damage me. Things that other people could breeze right through would rip me to shreds. So, either I developed this as a way to protect myself or it was a fairly intrinsic part of my personality that kicked in after a few times of being decimated by emotional pain.

Somehow, either instinctively or by learning, I was able to let go of the feelings part most of the time and become an objective observer of my own life.  That has served me well, and now, as an adult, I am wise enough and knowledgeable enough to know how transient, unreliable, and biased emotions and feelings can be, especially negative ones. They don’t capture the truth or the reality of an incident or event; they merely capture a subjective version of what happened, which may or may not be the truth.

I’ll cite the well-known example of an event with several observers – a car accident, a bank robbery, etc. There is a not a consistent story to be found. Why? Emotions. Imagine trying to describe a fatal car accident in which you swerved and missed being one of the dead by inches. Imagine the emotions you’d be feeling. Now imagine being on the other side of the road, far away from the danger of the accident, but close enough to see it happen. As a person who didn’t narrowly avoid being killed, what you saw would be quite different from the person who was almost killed.

The fact that emotions are attached to incidents, events, memories, recollections – the past – makes perfect sense. Obviously, that was part of the Design. But, think about the above example. Each person tells their version of the past – the accident – based on how it made them feel, not based on what actually happened. So, an emotional past is a self-centered – and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, but in a descriptive sense – point of view that doesn’t entirely reflect an accurate portrayal of what happened.

And this is what trips us up as peeps. I’ve always wondered – and I imagine (I hope!) this doesn’t just happen in my family – how five people could have such different recollections and memories of our lives together. We don’t remember the same things and the things we sort of remember the same in terms of happening, we don’t recall them happening the same way.

I used to think I was crazy or that I just checked out somewhere along the way and all this stuff happened while I was gone. Now I realize that is how we processed and now in retrospect approach the past. And that’s why our versions are so incredibly different.

I, for the most part, deal with the factual past. It’s not that I couldn’t deal with the emotional past, but why would I if I know it’s going to cause me anguishing pain? Self-protection says rehashing the emotional part of it will only hurt me if it’s negative and going through that once was enough. I suppose it’s because I tend to remove or neutralize emotions as a way of life that I’m more able to process the past objectively.

I think part of my tendency to deal with the factual past also comes from watching people close to me deal with the emotional past and watching how much damage it continues to do to them even though the events and situations around which these emotions are wrapped are in a very distant past. Yet, the emotional component of of each of those lives and breathes to this day and, in many ways, continues to reopen the old wounds and create new ones in the present.

It’s one of the saddest things I know – it is one of those unfixable things and it bothers the fixer in me because I know there is nothing I can do – and  I realize and, sometimes have a really hard time dealing with the fact, that my relationship with them is impacted by those emotions they have never been able to let go of.

I think the past we deal with affects us spiritually too. It’s hard to forgive someone if you are always dealing with the emotional past, because emotions tend to override both reason and righteousness (the right thing to do). It’s also difficult to separate people from actions (e.g., love the sinner, hate the sin). The emotional past bundles these so intricately together that there is no human way to separate them, and perhaps this is one of the hardest battles we face in becoming like Christ.

Satan deals with the emotional past. He is still seething at “how God made him feel” when He skipped over the angels and decided to make us puny mortals part of His family. Jude’s description of the demons in verse 13 captures the emotional past the demons live in. Every word of Satan’s that is recorded in scripture gives evidence of how the emotional past has bearing on everything he does, thinks, says, is. You can literally hear the implied wrong that he believes was done to him in every conversation.

Christ, on the other hand, deals with the factual past. In fact, the only time we see emotion is in the present or when he’s contemplating the future. It is geniune sorrow, sadness, and love. When the past is recounted in scripture by God, it is always a factual, inarguable past. (Emotional pasts are arguable pasts because they are subjective pasts: if I say “you deliberately hurt me 10 years ago to make yourself feel better,” I’m recounting a subjective past and ascribing both intent and motive to someone else; if, however, I say “a few years back, ‘X’ happened between us and I felt bad about it,” that is an objective recollection of a past event that states facts and doesn’t throw around wild accusations, making it inarguable).

Walking in the footsteps of Christ means we all have to strive to leave the tendency to see the past through an emotional lens and develop the trait of seeing it through the factual lens that God does. That is the take away of the, I suspect, long conversation that Christ had with Cain in Genesis 4, when He counseled him that “sin lies at the door and its desire is for you, but you shall rule over it.” Cain couldn’t let go of his emotional past, though, and with Satan jumping right on the weakness and exacerbating it, he ended up killing his brother.

Good lesson. I think instead of spending our lives continually digging in the dirt, we should learn to walk away and leave the emotional fields fallow, giving them the equivalent of a Sabbath rest so that God can heal, nourish, fix, replace all the places where we’ve been hurt.

Learning to Fly

“A soul in tension that’s learning to fly
Condition grounded but determined to try
Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I”
Learning to Fly – Pink Floyd

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I fly life. I’ve realized how much I unconsciously switch on auto pilot instead flying manually in the present situation, and I’m beginning to understand how dangerous that is and how it could permanently ground me if I don’t learn to do it.

Auto pilot is programming, and my case, old and outdated programming. It functions in a vacuum, not able to factor all the current conditions and factors that may make it the worst possible choice right now. Auto pilot assumes a lot of variables that may or may not be in evidence. Auto pilot also makes a lot of presumptions that may or may not be true.

Auto pilot in humans begins being developed at birth. The problem with auto pilot is that it is written and developed at a stage in our lives where we have the least amount of knowledge, the least amount of understanding, the least amount of wisdom, and the least amount of experience to code it correctly. So it ends up being extremely faulty programming.

Auto pilot is ironically the result of flying manually, but a lot of it comes from a single experience on a single flight, and we code it as a truism for life instead of a singular event with a singular response. Some of auto pilot comes from repeated exposure to the same kind of events, but often if we’ve failed the manual flying of that event the first time, we keep trying different manual techniques until we find something that, still in our inexperienced, unwise, unknowledgeable lives, seems to effectively address the event – or what we perceive to be similar events (often they’re not) – and we write that to our auto pilot program.

Some of my auto pilot is funny. It’s not all bad, but a lot of it is. I am not afraid of very many things in this physical life. I just don’t scare easily when it comes to stuff and things.

However, I have anacrophobia that’s pretty extreme. I see the smallest spider and I panic. Give me anything else – snakes, other insects, rodents, reptiles, whatever, and I’m cool, but put a little spider in front of me and I’m a basket case. It’s my auto pilot kicking in from when I was about 4 years old and I put two things that I knew or experienced together and the fear was developed.

When I was about 4, we had just moved back to Asheboro, NC from Texas, and had this wonderful house with woods and a huge basement.  I can remember the oak built-in cabinets in the den and the large rooms where we kids played. It is, of all the houses I’ve ever lived in (and there have been many), my favorite house of my life. I don’t remember a fireplace, but we must have had one because there was a lot of wood stacked and stored in one section of the basement.

My mother, ever the protector and unknowingly in the process sometimes the fear generator for us kids, warned us when we were playing down there to be careful around the wood because of black widow spiders. She told us we could die if we got bitten and we wouldn’t be able to see them until it was too late. She told us that they liked dark places and they wouldn’t normally come out of those dark places during daylight unless they were provoked. That was not what made me afraid.

It was a singular experience. I don’t remember it happening another time in my life. I had done something – who knows what? – or I had gotten into some kind of funky attitude and my punishment was to be separated from everyone else and I was sent to the basement while everyone else was upstairs. It had to be a weekend because Dad was home and I figured, as usual, he was my best hope for an early release.

I don’t really know how long I was down there – time to a 4-year-old seems like forever no matter how short it is – but I do know I was sent down in the late hours of daylight in the summer. I was okay until daylight turned into pitch dark and I was alone in the dark with the  wood and with the black widow spiders.

I remembered what Mom had said about black widows and the dark and all I could think was that they had been waiting for me until it got dark and now that it was dark they were all coming out to get me and I couldn’t see them but they could see me.

I was terrified. I can still remember the depth of that as if it happened a minute ago (and it’s the same response I have now when I see a spider).

I panicked hard and silently, literally asking God to hurry up and get Dad  down there to get me before they did. Somewhere else, in my auto pilot, I had programmed that you never surrender and you never show fear, no matter what. I’m not sure if that was the first panic attack I ever had, but I do know that it made a lifelong impression that haunts me to this day.

Dad rescued me and I never said anything about what happened, but he never could understand my phobia. I didn’t even make the connection until a few years ago, when the two things suddenly came together and clicked. I remembered thinking, although he’d been dead for about five years, that I needed to tell him why. One day I will be able to tell him, “Dad, it was just some really bad programming, but it’s all fixed now.”

That fear may always be an auto pilot response. But as my relationship with God develops and as I read His word, I realize that much of what I do in auto pilot is at odds with what He is and what He wants me to become, so I realize that if I really want to become perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect, the old auto pilot has to be shut off and I have to learn to fly manually so that a new auto pilot can be created.

Manually flying life means being in the moment, listening to the instruction of my Pilot and Co-Pilot and then taking the controls and applying what I’ve learned. And that’s the hard part.

Because the old auto pilot is still there, and I fall back on it far more than I apply the instruction I’ve been given. It’s a strong crutch and it’s hard to let go of, because it “works” for me. But intellectually, I realize that although it “works,” it doesn’t change anything. The same problems, the same impasses, the same unresolutions, the same crashes, the same deaths are still there.

So, I spend my life switching between flying manually and flying on auto pilot. Flying manually challenges me spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically. It is uncomfortable because it doesn’t feel natural yet and it forces me to confront, without the old familiar, things that I’m not comfortable dealing with and that I know I don’t know well enough to get right.

But as comfortable as the old auto pilot is to me, I know it’s outdated and I know I can’t really fly here and now with it. What a dilemma! The rational me that knows that and the subconscious me who still doesn’t quite believe it. How can those two mes coexist?

They don’t coexist well. There is a constant struggle and tussling and fighting that seems like it will lead me to self implode if there isn’t a resolution soon. There is fatigue, weariness, frustration because the conflict just doesn’t end.

And yet it must end. I know that. I am committed to that.

But life pops up unexpectly while I’m flying manually and instead of staying with it and listening to the two best and most experienced Pilots in the universe, I often instinctly ignore the instructions in my headset and revert to what I’ve always done, knowing ultimately that it will probably temporarily avert the immediate danger, but it will also take me off course and make lose my bearings for a while and I may run out of fuel trying to support my decision, and we may have another personal aviation disaster that They have to clean up and mend me from.

All I can hope is that one day, flying manually will not be so hard for me. That I will have finally developed enough trust to listen to my headset and do that instead of bailing out and listening to my past, which has lost its relevancy and context, but which I still, in stark contrast with my normal pragmatic, logical, present way of doing thing, rely on more than I should.

Until then, I’ll keep recovering from the frequent and sometimes violent and painful crashes and get back in there and keep on flying until I get right all the time.

Everybody’s Talking at Me

“Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can’t see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

I’m going where the sun keeps shining
Thru’ the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone.”

Everybody’s Talking at Me – Harry Nilsson

This has always been one of those songs that spoke to the drifter in me – well, perhaps not so much to the drifter, as the runner. I heard it the other day somewhere and all I could think about was getting away from the cacophony of stuff that’s all around that bangs on and overwhelms my brain at times to some place quiet, silent, peaceful.

The ocean’s always my first choice, but not in person this time of year, so I go there in my mind and start sorting through what it is that is bothering me about all this stuff that’s bombarding me and making me want to run.

When the urge to run gets this strong, it drives me crazy, because it always gets stronger and more persistent until it becomes the goal, the purpose, the quest of my life, and I am constantly looking for a way to make it happen.

I don’t want to run to anyone or anything. Because the weight of life gets so heavy that it seems as though I’ll be crushed by it, I instead want to run away from everyone and everything. That’s a battle I’ve fought all my life and when I get overwhelmed, it’s the hand-to-hand combat I deal with every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month, and yes, sometimes, of every year for two or three years.

This battle comes around so often that I should be used to it by now and I should better know how to handle it and win it. But I don’t. It doesn’t surprise me when it shows up, but I am surprised that I have no better skills, no better weapons, no better experience, no better anything to fight with than I had the last time it came around.

It’s seductive and, oh, is it attractive! The thought of just going completely off the radar screen. The thought of being completely anonymous. The thought of being completely disconnected, literally and figuratively, from the world. And the alluring thought, shockingly, although being responsible is very much a part of who I am, of not being responsible for or to anyone or anything else.

This urge to run, I suspect, came from my biological father, whom I know nothing about. He ran and never came back. My biological mother’s family is too settled in Texas, Colorado, and Kansas to have been the source of this trait. It is one of the striking differences between them and me, and in fact, between my twin sister and me. She burrows in and stays. I’m always looking for a way out.

Since it’s here, I’ve decided to try to deal with it and figure out, if nothing else, why it’s here. I don’t know that knowing why will make it disappear for good. In fact, I highly doubt that because I think a certain amount of longing for change – and that is really the root of this – is good and it’s necessary, especially for someone who has committed to becoming less like me and more like  God. Without that longing, there is no impetous to do anything differently.

I think David had the same longing. Every time I read “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me;’ indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You.” in Psalm 139, I hear a runner speaking.

But why? I’ve asked myself that question a lot as this desire has grown so strong in me that past couple of weeks. What happens that brings me here?

This time is different because I’ve recognized it early and I’ve chosen to try to figure out what’s behind it. What is going on in my life that makes this urge, desire, need to run so strong and so in my face every waking moment?

To recognize that something has changed internally, you have to be aware of yourself in relationship to other people and other things. That’s sort of a new step for me. I am not always good at this and often don’t have that kind of self-awareness. That may be an Aspie symptom.

But this time, I noticed first that I simply starting tuning people out and have little patience for the sound of voices. I noticed it with my mom first and I actually felt bad when I realized how hard she was trying to keep the lines of communication open the only way she knows how while I am with equal or more effort trying to shut them all down.

Causes are numerous and simultaneous. The first is hitting brick walls at every turn and the brick walls come in the form of a combination of everything I’m dealing with not making sense. And no matter what angle I try to approach them from, they still don’t make sense.

The second is a little harder to explain, but consists of trying to get answers to questions and the answers are either non-existent or they have nothing to do with the questions I’m asking.

And the third is that everybody’s talking at me at once and my brain can’t handle the onslaught of this with everything else and has simply closed the gate.

If any of these happened separately, I’d be able to cope better. But faced with all of them together, I’m overwhelmed and it seems as though I’ve been trapped in a corner with no way of escape. And that is one of my worst fears, so it makes the running urge more and more prominent. If I can just leave it all behind and get away, then I’ll be okay.

The day-in, day-out ability to patiently listen is, as always, the first casualty. My brain says it can’t take any more of that kind of input, and I either shut down and don’t hear at all, or, if pushed by insistence, get frustrated and push back and away, sometimes rather harshly and rudely, hoping the people who seem to be the pushiest and most insensitive will back off.

But the most clueless still keep at me, which makes this cycle of back and forth just intensify to the point where I am pissed at myself most of the time because I realize after the fact how rudely and how harshly I’m reacting. I’m also frustrated because I don’t understand how the people I’m being rude to and harsh with – not intentionally, but it’s my primary learned defense mechanism of how to get rid of people -  don’t get it and just back off and give me some room. That makes no sense to me. But it feels like running is the only option left to truly make it go away.

Hand in hand with that is most things – even things I can normally take in stride for a long time – annoy me. Noise annoys me most. The sound of people annoys me, especially in a group situation, with all the pitches and all the degrees of volume. High-pitched sounds of any kind hurt my brain – there is a sensation of “pain” and “too much” that just kind of piles in on me. My jaws stay clenched all the time because I’m trying to block it out and ignore it. I don’t know what causes this higher sensitivity to noise, but it definitely feeds the running fever.

I don’t like being annoyed most of the time. I don’t like the fact that almost everything gets on my nerves. I don’t like the person I am and I suppose in some ways that is part of the running too. I’d love to run away from the person I become under these circumstances. And I know the right change of venue will leave that unlikable person behind.

I thought about this a lot today when Bob Dick gave point 7 of his sermon on critical points to consider in the work of disciple-making we’re collectively and individually involved in as mandated by Christ. Great sermon, but this was to me a most profound point and one evident of a spiritually maturing mind and understanding.

It was, IMHO, the point we all forget and miss far too often, not only in our relationships when we’re not overwhelmed and trying to find a way to run away, but our relationship with God. He said the God loves even the most unlikable person unconditionally, and that, taken personally, means He loves me even when I’m at my most unlikable – right now – and He’s going to make sure, because He can, that I grow into the shoes He’s set before me, even though right now it looks as though I’ll never get there.

I’ve asked for the help and it hasn’t come yet, but I know it will. But, I also know there’s a reason for this. Even though it strikes me as a touch of insanity because it’s not normal – I’ve never known anyone else who acts like this, thinks like this, gets to this point – obviously I just haven’t crossed paths with them yet, but when I do, I will be able to comprehend, empathize, and be compassionate because I know first-hand how it rips you apart from the inside out.

And that’s what it’s all about – not me, not here, not this temporary now, but humanity, then, eternity. It’s hard to think outside of my box when I’m here trapped in it, but hopefully, somewhere, somehow, some way I can hold on to the big picture and even if I lose the battle this time, eventually, with God’s help, I will win the war.

The Mind’s Eye

“People say believe half of what you see,
Son, and none of what you hear.”
Barrett & Strong – Heard it Through the Grapevine

I have been analyzing and thinking for about six months about how I process things – all things – from the inside out. I have examined the landscape of my mind to see what is there that incorporates “other-than-God” thinking, that has been dotted with pillars and altars that I’ve allowed to both be built and to stay because I don’t place the same value on getting rid of them that God does. How far have I gone to fulfill Deuteronomy 7 spiritually and mentally?

The answers, of course, are disappointing, because I see, as Paul did, all the places I have failed and I do fail. But, the failures have taught me lessons and now that I am more aware of who I am and how much of a gap there is between who I am and who God is, understanding that I alone cannot close that gap, but it is Christ that will ensure – by not letting me fail as long as I’m committed to letting Him lead me – the gap is closed.

How we perceive, reason, choose, decide (input) and then act (output) has a lot in common with many elements of photography, both in terms of how we capture information (the camera and its accessories) and then what we do with it (editing in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or any other photo editing software) and then it’s final version (the edited photo) that we put up for God and the world to see. I have modified the lines above from Heard it Through the Grapevine to “believe none of what you see” because we’ve come to the place where it’s possible that no picture is real or geniune (in fact, it is my opinion that Satan has accomplished his ultimate goal of distortion of truth among humanity and we live in a Wag the Dog world where it is impossible to tell whether anything humanly-speaking is real or true).

I’ve never had much interest in or ability to do photography. I think it’s a combination of this unique color-blindness I have and the poor vision that has plagued me all my life with the severe astigmatism in my right eye, which, already very weak, bore the most severe damage of Graves’ Eye Disease.

I could never see through a camera lens what other people saw. I could see it with my eyes, sort of, but that minute detail, that perfect picture, that perfect moment never came into my line of vision. I marvel at it, but it is not an ability I possess.

Cameras, though, have a lot of accessories that are employed to capture minute detail, the perfect picture, the perfect moment. I have learned this because part of the work I do requires me to because not using these accessories can make editing and using the photograph a real challenge.

There are filters that colorize and polarize. There are telephoto and wide-angle lenses. There are speed and aperture adjustments. There are hoists and various kinds of stands from which or on which to mount the camera.

Any or all of these can be employed to get the exact picture a photographer wants.  So in effect, the final picture is not what was really there, but a carefully and consciously constructed version.

I have discovered that my mind works the same way. In my work, which includes taking photographs and turning them into something else (I have PhotoShopped pictures, by enlarging, twisting, angling, and cropping, on LCD screens that look like they were actually playing on that screen) on a regular basis, I’ve found that despite my artistic lack of creativity and imagination, I have compensated with mastering technique.

And in my mind, I can do the same thing, except that I use all the accessories, all the editors, and all the techniques to come up with my final version. And in that arena, I’m an expert.

I have a whole complement of lenses that I apply to what comes into my mind. I use color lenses to change the input to something that is more pleasing to me. I use polarizing lenses to cut out the light that would reveal the flaws or imperfections or wrong angles.

Depending on the input, I switch quite automatically between a telephoto lens, focusing on some minute detail that catches my interest, and a wide-angle lens, which enables me to just skim over the details and not worry them.

I am quite adept with adjusting speed and the amount of light that I apply. Sometimes I am on overdrive and sometimes I am on stop. Occasionally, I’ll open the aperture all the way to let the maximum amount of light in, but more often, I’m closing it so that only a little light comes in.

Hoists and stands round out my processing repertoire. Angles and views are quite important to me. I tend to prefer tripod shots because they appeal to my sense of logic and balance, but many times, I’ll go above and all around something until I find the “best” picture, often skewing (which I also do with my mental PhotoShopping) and obscuring and angling the whole thing in the process.

And if the accessories of my mind’s eye don’t produce the picture I want, I have my mind’s version of PhotoShop to finish the task. Like all good software, it has tools and actions, layers and filters, plug-ins (acquired from other sources and written specifically for it) and adjustments, all of which are at my disposal and which I’ve become quite adept at using to get that “perfect” picture that I settle on and upload for God and the world to see.

Am I aware of this? Sometimes, but usually not. It has become such a habit – this editing, filtering, layering, manipulating, adjusting  - that it has become my autopilot and I’m not even aware of it. But God’s word and God’s spirit are intended to and do, sometimes with me resisting fiercely,  shut my autopilot off and force me to fly manually. And they are intended to get rid of the accessories and software I’ve become so proficient with and replace them with God’s accessories and God’s software.

And therein lies the battle. I’ve come to rely on my accessories and my software. They are old friends, prized possessions, my stash of valuables that I don’t want to lose in a move. If they’re gone, where is my safety net? If they’re gone, what will replace them? Will it protect me? Will it take care of me? Will it keep me safe?

Fear is faith’s biggest enemy and faith is the only means of letting go of what rationally and realistically I know needs to go if I am going to be the express image of Christ who is the express image of God.

If the plane that crashed in Buffalo a few weeks back had not been on autopilot, the pilots would have realized that the wings were not deicing as quickly as they should have been and could have manually intervened to compensate for that and likely would have been able to land the plan safely with no lives lost. Here’s the interesting part: what they did by flying on autopilot was within the FAA guidelines, but had they gone above and beyond that, using their collective flying experience and the experience of the tower and the manuals they had on board, it would have just been another routine flight that took off and landed without incident.

From that perspective I have examined my own life. How many of my missteps, my detours, my crashes have come because I technically or obstensively stayed within God’s guidelines, but I let the flight go on autopilot, instead of manually flying and depending on and utilizing God’s word, God’s spirit, and God’s help to ensure a successful flight? The answer is more often than not.

And that must change. It’s produced a dichotomous reaction in me. First, it’s a little scary because it means giving up what is comfortable, what is familiar, what I’ve come to rely on and depend on within myself. But I realize that my accessories and my software are deficient and they haven’t served me very well – in fact, they’ve hurt me far more often than they’ve helped me.

But God and Christ created the universe. Everything was made by Them and belongs to Them. They made the laws of physics, of gravity, of time, space, distance, relativity, of everything. And They’re willing, no matter how big or how small, to apply that unlimited power, that unlimited goodness, that unlimited perfection to me, to this life that They created from the strands of DNA that they picked and wove into a cohesive helix to form me (I am reminded of David’s words in Psalm 139:13-16) for the purpose and plan of including me in Their family.

As David also says in Psalm 139, I am too limited (and that’s the recognition that the devices I employ are limited) to fully comprehend and appreciate what They want to do and will do if I trust Them and not myself, if I follow Their lead and not my own, if I am willing to allow Them to be my accessories and my software.

That is my prayer and my intent.

The Dark Side

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.”
Yoda to Luke - Return of the Jedi

I have had some emails this week from someone I used to work with and they have, as our previous email correspondence has always done, gotten me to thinking, especially as I am doing my annual spiritual job performance in preparation for the Passover in just about a month.

A few years back, I took my customized experience of doing highly-individualized performance evaluations for many employees with the backdrop of the entire department/organization in mind – the process of identifying strengths and weaknesses, identifying assets and liabilities, identifying attitudes and mindsets that were constructive or destructive both invidually and collectively, coaching through the year, setting objectives, reviewing progress before the actual evaluation to provide the time and tools to improve in deficient areas, and then the actual formal meeting and applied it to this annual review.

Just as I put a lot of time into those employee evaluations – and I deviated from the norm by having them participate with self-evaluations at every juncture of the process, from which we would draw up a plan of action together (it always amazed me how the majority of people evaluated themselves much more poorly than I did – perhaps in the same way that I evaluate my progress, because I really focus on the negatives, what I haven’t done, and what I haven’t yet overcome, versus the way God evaluates my progress) – I spend a lot of time each year doing a prayerful, comprehensive, brutally honest written evaluation of myself prior to the Passover.

I’m in the process now, so it is with that in full focus that this correspondence with a former co-worker hit me somewhere in my core.

There is a part of me that likes a part of this person. She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known. She has the capability of having an absolutely delightful sense of humor. But there is a stronger part of me that dislikes most of who I have watched this person become over the last four years. The things I dislike outweigh the things I like and I try to keep as much distance between us as possible because I find the things so offensive and repulsive.

Yet she has always considered me a friend and she often presents me with her soul,  with which she has admittedly chosen not to struggle with: “I keep waiting for the hand of God to come down from the sky and point me in a direction, but then I realize you have to be looking for the arrows along the way and I’m not. I just keep walking the same path like it’s some sort of short cut to where I’m supposed to be.  I understand all of this but am unwilling to do anything about any of it. ”

This admission floored me, but I’ve seen the evidence of it coming as she started the walk down the dark path.

Some people are needy and the spectrum ranges from slight neediness to extreme neediness. Needy people need constant approval. They need constant attention and usually try to be the center of attention. They need constant external validation. They need to constantly please. They need to be constantly and always liked. They need to be constantly and always needed.

Of and by themselves, the roots of these needs are not wrong nor are they bad. But when they become the constant and everpresent catalysts of who and what a person is, then the dark side is always waiting in the wings to feed these needs.

Sidebar: sin and evil lurk everywhere, not just in these specific areas, so I’m not generalizing to say this is the root of all evil. As Jeremiah and Christ say, the heart – mine and everyone else’s is where the roots of evil begin. This is just one example of how that has manifested itself in one life.

Not being a needy person myself, I have a very difficult time understanding and relating to people who are. I can take the mildest of needy people in very small and widely-interspersed doses, but I will run away quickly and permanently from excessively needy people.  Neediness and all that accompanies it just grates on my last nerve.

I don’t like arrogance either – and God certainly knows how often in my life I have been and still on occasion am guilty of that – but I prefer quiet confidence and assurance that isn’t constantly screaming “Look at me! Pay attention to me!”

This co-worker was a slighty-needy person when she left the mortgage lending business at the time when banks were started to push subprime mortgages (I knew she’d been in that business and in fact she gave me some invaluable advice and guidance when I was buying my condo, for which I’m grateful, but I didn’t know why she left until a couple of months ago). She had an ethical issue with it. Admirable.

She came to work for one of the companies in the group of companies that I worked for. She worked first for me and I didn’t do things the way everyone else did and to this day, she says that everyone should have had to work for me before they were ever put in another job selling. I never gave anything away and I never negotiated or threw things in for free and I never went against company policy. To this day, the owner and his sister will say to me “I know everyone else did it, but you’d never give anything away for free.”

She once asked me why. I responded that it wasn’t my company, my inventory, nor my money so I had no right to give away what wasn’t mine to give nor to deviate from a policy that would harm the company financially. It seemed like a foreign idea to her that someone would think that way, which never made any sense to me because how else would you work for someone?

She eventually moved into working on an independent project for the owner and his  sister in which she was developing a publication to advertise the area. She had a sales person who was lousy at bringing in paid advertising (another “give it away for free” person) and the publication was struggling to break even. Because I was the defacto technical advisor on the project, I was pretty well aware of everything going on.

She sent me an email one day about three years ago with an ethical dilemma in which  she said “I’m asking you this because I know you are the only person who will be honest and look at this objectively in ‘the-right-thing-to-do’ way instead of the ‘quick-we’ll-worry-about-the-consequences-later’ financial gain’ way.”

This publication was a family-oriented, tourist/travel book. She had gotten an offer, for a full back page ad in the publication, for a substantial amount of cash – which would have put the publication well into the black – from a local adult entertainment company, and she was having a hard time deciding whether to accept or refuse and wanted my input.

I gave it and she ended up refusing and kept telling me “something in my gut just tells me you’re right.”

I’m guessing that’s the last time she ever had a real gut check, because she moved from that venture into working directly with the owner and his sister and some of that work involved manipulating facts and falsifying documents to the company’s favor, in addition to other things that were just clearly wrong. She got in deep and that’s where she is today. So deep that she literally cannot extricate herself from it.

When I became aware of it, as alluded to in some of my earlier posts, I knew I could not continue working in all the capacities I was working in for this company. I was sickened by it and repulsed by it and I, perhaps for the first time in my life, understand in a deeper way how much sin sickens and repulses God. I finally got it and that was an important and needed turning point in my spiritual development.

I remember her saying to me that the owner would have never asked me to do any of that because he knew I’d say “no.” I told her people went to federal prison for things like that and she laughed it off and asked if I’d visit. I never answered, but the answer was/is “no.”

The change in this person has been remarkable. There is a physical change that reminds me of the change between Chancellor Palpatine as he’s revealed as Darth Sidiuous and Anakin Skywalker as he re-emerges as Darth Vader in Star Wars III.

There is a physical consequence of choosing the dark side and this person has grown old and her appearance has become angry and hostile and and bitter and profane. She has become those things as well, but it literally shows in her demeanor, in her face, and in her being.

Where once she may have shown some qualms about her deception and lies, now it has become standard operating procedure. Any guilt or remorse is gone. In fact, now she is proud of how good she’s become at it and is always awaiting the next opportunity to “up” her last instance.

And yet she recognizes that something in me is different. I am never sure whether, however, whether I’m being baited or she’s being sincere. That’s one of the problems with dealing with someone who’s always dishonest and whom you know isn’t trustworthy, because you never know what’s real, what the real motive and intent is – good lesson.

So if I respond, which often I do not, I respond carefully.  She had asked an interesting question: “I pondered whether or not you had prayed for work and your prayers had been answered just as you put them out there instead of asking for work you enjoyed with people you liked.”

I responded to her email with: “I’m not praying for anything specific other than God’s will and I’m trusting Him to show me what that is. Right now, I’ve got enough work that I’m able to  pay the mortgage and monthly bills and Mom’s stuff and keep my savings shored up. And if somewhere down the road, it all goes away and I lose everything, it’ll still be okay.

Life is really day to day in its physical sense and temporary and in the end not what is really important. This has been good in that now, in the peace and quiet of reflection, Bible study, and prayer, I now have permanent lines in concrete (not sand) and I am even more committed to becoming like God in my character, integrity, and core of being, so every decision gets filtered through that OS [operating system]. If any part of a decision/choice is inconsistent with that, then it’s not an option. I operate best in that kind of decisive ‘yes’ or ‘no’/'black’ or ‘white’ and my prayer is that I will continue to move forward growing so that this is my only SOP [standard operating procedure] consistently all the time.”

Her response to this evoked a lot of thinking: ” You have a peace that you haven’t had in quite some time. Working here does not allow black or white – it’s all a shades of red. Every time I’m asked for something, I get a sick feeling in my stomach. Then there’s the agony in knowing that if it doesn’t work out I will somehow be blamed.

You know all about it, the difference is you have moved onto a place that allows you absolute control of your domain. There is something to be said for the peace. There has to be some level of joy in knowing that you made money that you wisely saved, that you are not, nor will you be destitute. It may make you uncomfortable to dip into savings, but you saved the money for ‘just in case’ times like now. You are not a slave to things. I’d rather have savings and peace, control over how I spend my time, the ability to make my own rules and decisions, the ability to say no when I wanted to than all the things I have.”

There is some complicated, albeit somewhat erroneous, thinking going on here, as well as a recognition of “something different” about the path I have chosen.

She’s right about the peace. I’ve been more at peace since I’ve been gone than I was there and there is a lot more peace because I’m consciously aware that I am depending every day on God to take care of me. His will, not mine. Consciously and without ceasing.

However, the rest of the slope gets slippery. She rightly recognizes (and knows) that I am not a slave to things. She and almost everyone else who works there is always buying some new – and usually outrageously expensive – thing. They spend money like it’s water.

I have – and this is a gift from God – the kind of personality that is pretty immune to “stuff.” I’m a minimalist, so I prefer very little stuff in my world. I also, thanks to God, have the ability to either say “no” to something I might want because I realize I don’t need it, or to wait until I have the cash to pay for it and then usually decide I still don’t want to waste the money on it!

But while she says she wishes she had the same thing, she implies that she has no choice, that she’s the victim of circumstances. What she doesn’t realize is that everything in life is a choice, a decision, and even not making a choice is a choice and a decision.

I shook my head at the comments about  ”absolute control of your domain” and “control over how I spend my time, the ability to make my own rules and decisions, the ability to say no when I wanted to than all the things I have.” This is how she sees my life and it’s a lens that is flawed.

God has the absolute control over my domain ultimately and when I’m working for someone, they still have some control over my time and my work. I have more flexibility in deciding what I will do and won’t and when, but I’m not all of the sudden outside of the boundaries of control.

It occurred to me that this is one of the most insidious and seductive arguments of the dark side. It’s Satan’s argument: you don’t have to answer to anyone; you can decide for yourself and make your own rules and decisions.

But even Satan, as much as he’d like us to believe otherwise, is subject to God. To this day. He can do nothing unless God allows it. The book of Job very clearly shows us this. There is nothing in the creation that is not subject to God and not under God’s control. That is, I think, what Paul was thinking when he wrote Romans 8:38-39 and it is something I remind myself of daily.

The same is true of rules. I don’t make them up – God gives me the parameters within which to live. The ironic thing about her statement about making her own rules is that I am almost certain that comes from her observation that I have an absolute rule about not working on the Sabbath or the holy days and it’s not negotiable, no matter what.

She has seen and heard me say “no” without hesitation to things that were in violation of or at the least I personally felt were in conflict with God’s law and I stood my ground, handling it in a way that appealed to logic and reason and ended up not getting any kind of backlash or negative response.

And because I stood by and lived my beliefs instead of just going along with everyone else, it seems to her that I make up my own rules. But I don’t. They’re God’s rules and He’s the one I ultimately answer to.

But something, now that she is fully entrenched in the dark side, has obscured her vision from any kind of true picture of reality. And right now I don’t think she could operate independently of what she’s become.

There is a mindset – and some sort of warped sense of fulfillment – from the life she’s chosen. It’s dishonest, mean, manipulative, accusing, gossiping, and destructive – there is a sense that’s she’s always on the prowl looking for new prey and I always pity the person who crosses her path because I’ve watched too many people get ripped to shreds and it’s ugly – but that is so much who she is now that I don’t think she can operate outside of that, no matter how much she says she’d like to.

Good lesson for Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread. We become what we do, for good or for evil. I think that was the thinking behind James’ exhortation to be doers of the word and not just hearers. If we hear God’s word, but we do something else, we will not be like God, but we will be what we do. (And those are inconsistent with each other – James calls it being “double-minded.”)

But if we do God’s word, we will become like God. That’s very encouraging, especially to someone like me who sees all the stuff that I’m still struggling with and against and asking God to remove and replace with His way and His thinking and His doing.

Someday I’ll see how, with God’s invitation and initiative and life raft, once I started down the path of light, forever will it dominate my destiny, and consume me it has. And that is all good.

Training Camp

“In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade,
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down,
Or cut him ’til he cried out in his anger and his shame,
‘I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains.”

Paul Simon – “The Boxer”

I was laid off just about a month ago – and then hired back in less than two weeks on a contract basis to continue all the IT work I was doing.  No one wanted to lay me off. As the owner of the company said “It was a last resort,” and asked me if I’d be willing to come back full-time when business picks up.

The past month has been, for me, a break “from the road,” and a return to training camp, where my Trainer (Christ) and I are reviewing my progress and working on not only the areas where I falter and am weak, but on new skills that I will need when I “hit the road” again.

This was an answered prayer. I continued to see answered prayers and I see that this is necessary to prepare me for the more ominous times ahead. I needed this “time-out” from the 70+ hour work weeks I was putting in, where everything, including prayer and Bible study, was neatly and rigidly scheduled to fit it all into a 24-hour day.

It has been a shock to my system as I try to deal with finding a routine in the flexibility this has given me. It’s good for me, as uncomfortable as it makes me because of my OCD desire for a clear and visible plan of action (one of my better life skills, as long as I remember that everything exists inside the parameters that Christ laid out in His prayer outline in Matthew 6: God’s in charge from beginning to end) and logical and rational order.

Because it has totally messed with my comfort zones of knowing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and when I’m supposed to be doing it, it has made me realize even more consciously that I am completely dependent on God. And, by taking me out of my comfort zones, God can work with me more effectively because, all of the sudden – well, from my point of view, which in fact is not accurate at all – I am not in control and not in charge.

The point is I never was, but sometimes in the rut of a routine, we come to believe that we are and sometimes it takes a big jolt to get our focuses back on the reality that this is all God’s domain and we exist in it by His will and for His plan and purposes. And He and Christ will do whatever it takes to ensure that each of us fulfills the purpose for which we were created and to fit perfectly within the big-picture plan They have of creating a family.

I’ve been here before, but I’m not the same person I was the last time I was here.  As I told my most treasured friend about a week ago, Christ has done a lot of one-on-one training with me throughout my time on the road the last four and a half years and now that I’m back at training camp, carrying more scars, and more reminders of the fights I’ve had during that time, He’s doing a progress evaluation.

Have I learned the lessons from the fights I’ve won and the fights I’ve lost? How willing  have I been to follow His coaching instructions in the middle of the worst of those fights? Do I still rely on myself more than Him? Do I trust Him? Where am I in my individualized and unique training/fighting career? Where do I need to go next to up my endurance/skills/aptitude for this war?

Athletes always need an off season, forced or unforced, to be evaluated, trained, and strengthened. This is my forced off season. I meditate sometimes on what the next season holds. I look for signs of answers as to where we are going next. So far, I can’t find anything definitive to set my sights on, physical life wise, but I am seeing a lot of things that I had been too busy to see before.

Mom is clearly more in focus, and although, all in all, she’s doing as well as can be expected for her age, I see little things that I have not really had the time or the focus to see before. I see more and more of that terrorized and frightened child that she spoke of so often as I was growing up. She sees trouble where there is none, threats that are not real and she perceives an atmosphere where physically she is not safe. Her M.O. is defensive as a result, and I now understand why, at times, she reacts so strongly to something innocuous that I do or say.

I have learned to stay physically engaged with her, no matter how rough it gets or how strong my urge is to give up and walk away, until the situation is neutralized or calmed down. This is fine-tuning skills I don’t naturally possess, but that Christ is creating in me (obviously, I am going to need them in the future), and it is a total paradigm shift for me not to bolt when the interpersonal stuff gets intense.

It’s still such a struggle for me not to do that and the staying and dealing with it is exhausting for me. It literally sucks out every bit of energy I have and the result is that I back out of interaction with people for as long as it takes to recharge. I can’t explain why because there are no words to describe why in a way that would make any sense to anyone else.

Mom’s never been one I wanted to go head-to-head with. She tells me I did it a lot as a small child. Somewhere along the line – and I don’t know the exact moment this happened – I realized that emotional distance was my best offense. After all, if you won’t fight and won’t engage, then there’s no choice for the other person but to find someone who will.

That’s my primary way of avoiding conflict. If I don’t like someone or find them trying to “gotcha” me, I do everything in my power to systematically avoid them. Some people thrive on conflict, picking, a constant state of siege. I do not. In fact, I hate being in any of those situations. I will walk away, one way or the other.

Interestingly, with Mom, I have learned not to literally walk away. But emotionally and mentally, I’m out the door. Once those parts of me walk away, then I can’t be hurt, so I can objectively and calmly bring her back into some place she feels safe. My silence is often my greatest strength.

That’s one thing I’ve learned in the past 4 1/2 years. Do I do it perfectly? Of course not. And the running monologue in my head that is answering her occasionally makes its way to my mouth before I realize it and can stop it. Each time it does, I want to kick myself in the butt because I know better and it just escalates everything into this big spiraling-out-of-control mess that I very quickly try to stop by whatever means I need to.

I have developed a greater appreciation of and more respect for my dad. It’s not that my mom is a bad person or not converting. But there is so much psychological damage, compounded by her increasingly worsening physical disabilities of hearing and eyesight, that will not be healed until Christ does that final transformation for her. And until then, it’s a test for her and it’s a test for me. My dad has already passed the test. I know he died with the belief that I would pass it too with the same Help that he passed it with.

I’ve been through Hebrews, James, I and II Peter, and now am finishing up my study of the first five books of the Old Testament. I’m really reading, thinking about, praying about the spiritually and critically important things in each book that God tells us.

I’m not much of a “beget” and “begotten” person and I tend to skim over the tedious details of Leviticus – chapters 11, 16, and 23 are the ones I pretty much know by heart – but I realized, for the first time in my life, why the details are there. They show us how intimately God is involved in every aspect of human life. It gives credibility – as if any of God’s word needs credibility (Sandra!) – to Christ’s statement that God knows how many hairs are on, at any given time, each of the approximately 7 billion people who are alive today.

He didn’t just say “Hey Noah, build an ark. See ya. Catch you in 120 years.” He told Noah in great detail the dimensions, the materials, and what was to go in the ark.

The same is true with the tabernacle in Leviticus. One of the statements that struck me this time was that God gave the different people involved in the construction of the tabernacle the particular skill needed to do that part of the job. Lesson? We are able to do what we’re able to do, not because we’re so great or we’re so talented, but because God gives us the skills. Everything comes from God and it’s His to use as He sees fit, not ours to decide how we’re going to use it.

Deuteronomy is always grounding for me and it is also encouraging. In no other book that I am aware of, except for perhaps Isaiah, does God so many times remind us that He’s always there, going before us, imploring us to listen and obey and follow His way and His lead. Deuteronomy 6 comes to my mind often as I remember that my life is not a life I created, my blessings are not blessings I earned, my calling is not a journey I initiated. They are all God’s gifts to me. And each step of this journey, whether an easy stretch of the road of relief or a steep and exhausting mountain of testing, is a gift from God. For His plan and purpose and for my good.

He’s always doing what is best for us – not what we think is best for us. We live in such a limited perspective – which is why Matthew 6:33 really has to be at the forefront of our minds all the time and is exactly what Christ’s prayer outline focuses on – that we don’t have a clue what we need to become like God. We sometimes think we do, and we try it it only to fall flat on our faces (like Jonah refusing to warn Ninevah).

Christ has been given this job. This is His focus, His work. It should be ours as well. Because we have a participatory part. We have to purpose to cooperate, follow, obey, surrender, and then we have to follow through on that intent, with the help of God’s spirit, in each decision and choice we make for the rest of our lives.

The saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” should actually be a quite sobering warning for each of us. It’s the equivalent of James’ warning about being a hearer of the word and not a doer. Intent without action is useless. We will not change, we will not overcome, we will not be transformed into the express image of Christ (who is the express image of God) just because we want to.

We must be in action all the time, whether we are in the ring fighting ourselves, Satan, or the world, or whether we are back at our training camp, being evaluated, strengthened, coached, and prepared for our next season in the ring.

I want to be ready for my next season.

Anatomy of Answered Prayers

I’ve heard a saying all my life about prayers: “Be careful what you ask for.” It’s usually said in response to someone saying he or she is asking for some quality or attribute he or she is lacking. The unspoken thought behind this saying is that God will answer, but the answer may not be in the form or the way the asker expects and the answer will be much more challenging than the asker could have ever imagined.

Prayer is part of our daily dialogues with God. A lot of thought should go into our conversation with our Creator. After all, this is the supreme being in the universe that we’re seeking an audience with. He is also our Father. The fifth commandment should always be very much on our minds when we talk with our Dad.

And that means, for me, checking my attitude before I start the conversation. It also means comparing my list of things I want to talk about with what He tells me is acceptable and unacceptable to Him, what He says is right and wrong. That usually whittles the list down to what is really important and, eventually, what matters most to God.

And that has become a daily refocusing shift for me. I know what matters to me on a physical level, but when I compare that with what matters to God, I often find that my focus and my perspective is not only limited by my physicality, but it is often going off in a totally different direction than the direction that Christ says it should be going in Matthew 6:33.

I’d like to believe that I’m seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness 24/7, but often what I want, what I think, what I think I need is all about here, now, and it wants to ignore outright disobedience, the temptation to accept sin as being okay (one of my rationales that I’ve discovered is “well, it’s not my sin, so can’t I be excepted from the consequences?”), and the temptation to compromise to achieve the outcome I want.

I’ve been learning over the past few months as I’ve been scrutinizing my innermost attitudes and motives as well as looking into the mirror of God’s Word to see how much of my reflection I see, that I’ve got so much more work to do to be constantly and consistently in the mindset of God and Christ. The reality is that, in very blunt terms, it really doesn’t matter what I want. What God wants – and that is His holy and righteous character being developed in me – is what matters. And that is how God answers my prayers.

I was thinking early early this morning as I was up wandering around because I couldn’t sleep – apparently my twin sister and I both do this, except that she does it in her sleep and over the weekend broke and slashed open her little toe (enough to need sutures) while sleep-walking – that God can answer a prayer with both “Yes” and “No” and not be at all inconsistent.

I like clear, obvious answers. I don’t do well with nuances, with hints, with indications, with subtleties. I do not tolerate non-answers or roundabout answers well. I am a simply “Yes” and “No” person. In fact, I care less about what the answer is as long as I know definitively what it is. 

The way my brain and/or personality works is that I need a clear path. If a door is shut, it has to be slammed, not quietly closed or left slightly ajar. I don’t know how to relate to anything but a decisive slam. I may not like the slam, but it tells me when something has ended and that something new needs to begin.

God made me and He knows this about me. He’s certainly heard a lot about it here lately. He’s heard a lot about a lot of stuff lately. And it occurred to me in my nocturnal wanderings that I often pray in such a way that His answers have to be both “Yes” and “No” to the same prayer.

In this case, the “Yes” is what’s important to Him (and ultimately to me, because I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to Him about it the last four months or so), but to answer “Yes” to my request (which was for His character and His righteousness to be increasingly developed in me and for His perspective to become my perspective), He had to answer “No” to another one.

Because the one He answered “No” to (job-related) presents a clear and obvious possibility of actually not only impeding, but destroying my spiritual development. It’s a hard “No” to take because I don’t know what’s next. The prospect of being unemployed – I’m applying for jobs almost daily, but the job market is so bad right now and right here I realize I’m going to have to take whatever and even then I may not be able to make ends meet and I could lose everything (but even under a bridge, with only the clothes on my back, I have the assurance that God would be right there with me) – is scary.

But I know that God opened this door for me and now He’s shut it – no, slammed it so I wouldn’t be confused or unsure – and He will open another. It will not be what I expect, how I expect it, or even when I expect it, but it will be the perfect thing, way, time.

One of the good benefits of this trial – and it has been a trial – is that it’s got me thinking about a new career. Something completely different than what I’ve done since I graduated college. I’ve tried to do some self-education in this field – programming, specifically – and I have discovered, which I’ve always known in my heart of hearts as a jack of all trades and master of none, that I am not interested in it and, in fact, I really hate it. It reminds me of the same reaction I had to accounting in college – the prospect of doing this the rest of my life makes me want to find the closest firing squad and let them go ahead and put me out of my misery.

I also know that I do not want another job that involves sales of any kind. This one was indirect sales – people ordered off websites – but dealing with the public and this present consumer mentality goes so against who and what I am as a person and in temperament. There is an underlying dishonesty, manipulation, and deception that has crept into the way businesses run now – both from a business standpoint and a consumer standpoint – that is completely at odds with who I am and what I believe. I cannot, with a clear conscience, be a part of what’s emerging.

And the footnote to that is that I have been yelled at, cursed at, harangued and harassed for the better part of four and a half years now and, although I have learned a lot of lessons about human nature – my own included – and I have made progress in overcoming – though not nearly enough – my own quick temper, defensiveness, and trigger-happy attack response, I am done with it.

So, what next? I’m chomping at the bit to go now that I know that’s the answer. But practically I need to stay until I have another job or I get the layoff. I definitely need to go back to school – I am leaning toward a helping profession: public health (research of some kind) or one of the therapies: speech is the first that comes to mind, but physical therapy, which my dad did, is also an option.

I’ve also considered becoming a deaf interpreter full-time. Mom and I have worked on sign language (mine’s been sporadic; hers has been steady and consistent) and I have a knack for it. Considering her hearing loss, pursuing that would have a personal element for me.

I’m leaning toward public health, though, because I’m thinking about what will be needed in the kingdom. All diseases will be healed so there will be no need for deaf interpreters, speech therapists, occupational therapists, or physical therapists. But public health will always be needed. Combined with my industrial engineering background (I don’t have the degree, but I have the experience and this is actually my true passion, but businesses see it in only manufacturing terms, while I see the application everywhere, so I’m going to have to defer that until the universal need for it becomes obvious), I think that it might be the best fit long-term.

Who knows? It’s a little scary, but I’ve faced the unknown and uncertain before and it’s ended up all right. With the promise of Christ holding my left hand and the promise that God knows every hair that is on my head at any given time, then it is with this assurance and faith, that I begin the next stage of this journey with heart-felt thankfulness and gratitude and hope.

The Turmoil Within Me

I have read and reread Psalm 40 – Psalm 51 this week as the words that David wrote capture my current state of being far better than my own clumsy attempts to describe my present mental and emotional health ever could.

Psalm 42:5 and 11 and Psalm 43:5  (ESV) sum up the questions I ask over and over as I travel through a very bleak mental and emotional stretch of road in my life, where smiles are few and tears – no, not just tears, but painful and prolonged sobbing – are plentiful: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?”

While I am sometimes able to deal well with others when they are going through times of emotional and mental stress, I am horrible at dealing with my own emotional and mental conflicts. I immediately try to suppress them, stuff them down, and dismiss them. I can’t even find words to describe them so they seem stupid, ridiculous, petty, weak, and immature. I think of all the times I’ve heard through the years, and which I now repeat to myself, “just get over it.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

I am at an impasse in the road of life. I don’t know what to do. I am not comfortable not knowing what to do. Metaphorically, the road has just ended. There are no worn paths ahead of me that I can see and take. There is just a jumbled and thick expanse of trees, rocks, bushes, vines before me – that I obviously have to get through, because I can’t just stop here, but I don’t have a clue where to go, how to go, how to continue on.

I have asked – no, I’ve begged and pleaded because I am that distraught internally – God to help me, to show me, to lead me, but I’m having great difficulty being patient – Psalm 46:10 (NKJV): “Be still and know that I am God” – and waiting for Him, which objectively and rationally I know is part of Him answering (e.g., “Do you really trust Me unconditionally?”).

I’m doing a lot of soul-searching and finding myself incredibly deficient in every area of my life. I hate what I see because I see someone who, on my own, is an absolute failure at everything. I have recounted all the missteps, all the would-haves, could-haves, should-haves and I have beaten myself up over every stupid decision, every bad decision, every ignorant decision, every mistake I’ve made up to this point.

I am weary from it all. I want to go on, to move on, to move forward. I also want, at times, to quit – I have prayed for death more than once in the past few weeks because this turmoil is the worst pain I can imagine. I would rather someone beat me to a pulp than to go through this emotional and mental pain that seems as though it will never end and that rips and tears me open internally.

I am also fighting wanting to just disappear into complete anonymity for the rest of whatever life I have left. The urge is extremely strong and very compelling and fighting it, saying “no” to it over and over, as I’ve done so many times before when I reach these impasse places in life,  takes so much out of me.

Rationally and objectively, I know this will end. I don’t when, I don’t know how, and I don’t know what shape I’ll be in when it does. The shape I’m in now sucks. I’m trying to live what I believe and there is an equally opposing force within me that is trying to undermine it all. It’s all-out war inside me.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Lincoln, who also fought the same kind of all-out wars within himself, perhaps came to this profound realization in the middle of one of these wars. It took its toll on him and it takes its toll on me. Do I survive them? So far, yes. Will I on my own? Never. I’m just not that strong nor am I that able.

The second part of those verses that I quoted above is what I’m trying to hold on to: “Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God.” That’s the only shot I have at getting out of this alive and on a new path of His design and making.

The Familiar Stranger

My thought processes are in chaos now. It’s as though I have an extreme form of the ADD I see in Mom and keep threatening to get her a Ritalin prescription for.

I try to take a thought to a logical conclusion and I can’t because another thought jumps in and takes over, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I go back to one of the previous thoughts and the process repeats itself, adding new thoughts along the way.

My brain has become my enemy. It just keeps bouncing from one thought to another, never completing the previous one enough to put it away for good.

This is how I react to extreme amounts of stress and it drives me crazy, because it is not how I think normally. I start questioning my own sanity, my own mental health, my own propensity toward craziness.

Rationally, I realize that it’s the effect of cumulative life stress (not just Mom, but everywhere in life right now) and then the intense stressors of the last couple of days that have ratcheted up the brain chemicals that send my thyroid into high gear which in turn sends my body and my brain into hyperdrive until it becomes this vicious circle of one feeding the other.

But, as it has been my whole life, it seems like I’m going completely crazy and it always brings out the familiar fear that this will be the time when I won’t ever come back.

The mom I knew prior to September is gone. Logically, analytically, rationally, I know that. Whatever happened in those six days permanently changed her. There are flashes of the mom I knew, sometimes for even two or three days in a row, but they don’t last.

And when they’re gone, the familiar stranger – that person I knew from less frequent visits during my childhood – returns. She looks like Mom, occasionally acts and talks like Mom, but she isn’t Mom. She shows up unexpectedly and often replaces Mom in the blink of an eye. I’m the kind of person who needs time to prepare for company, and who likes plenty of advance notice of plans to visit. While I can deal with – and, in fact, welcome, non-emotional life changes as fast as you can throw them at me, sudden life emotional upheavals completely throw me for a loop and recovery is slow, if not impossible (i.e., it’s very difficult for me to “reset,” to go back to “before”).

Although I love Mom unconditionally, I intensely dislike the stranger. She came on Thanksgiving Day, after a sudden drop in Mom’s blood sugar (her diabetes has worsened since the last hospital stay and her “normal” levels are 50-75 points higher than they were before, and her highs are really high and her lows are really low) while Deb, she, and I were playing a game waiting to go to our reservation at 2:00 pm.

As soon as Deb and I realized that her blood sugar had dropped precipitously, I scrambled to get her something to eat. Deb suggested a cookie, which I probably should have done (I’ve second-guessed that one a few hundred times since then), but I decided that fructose would be better, so I got some raisins out of the pantry and she took a small handful. Deb told her that she needed to eat some more to get her blood sugar back up.

I’ve never seen any of “The Exorcist” (and don’t want to), but I have seen the commercial where this deep voice comes out of this girl. That was what the stranger sounded like. “No! with a threatening and vehement tone was the answer. The steely gaze of her blue eyes landed on both of us and I could see what looked like pure hate in them. It made me shudder. Deb walked out the back door, leaving me alone with this univited guest.

I’ve known enough diabetics to know that this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing is pretty common, so I thought she’d be okay if we could get a little more food into her and get the blood sugar stabilized. I had no clue that the stranger was there for extended visit. I went to get an orange out of the refrigerator and got a knife to cut it up and I heard the enraged threat behind my back “if you cut that up, then you can just take me home and cancel the whole thing.”

It stopped me dead in my tracks and without saying a word, I put both the orange and the knife away. I looked at the clock and thankfully we had only 10 minutes to go before we needed to leave. I made myself as scarce as Deb had. Mom/the stranger were shaky and wobbly going to the car, and I checked myself on trying to help her in.

One thing we learned as kids was to become as invisible as possible so we didn’t exacerbate the anger and we didn’t bring any more of it down on our own heads. It’s amazing how fast we both, without ever saying a word (we talked about this afterwords when we were alone) to each other, immediately went back to being those anxiety-ridden little kids wondering what in the hell we did so wrong and how long it was going to last this time, all the while desperately, continuously, repeatedly scanning for a sign of a break in the siege, each scan becoming a little more panicky, desperate and hopeless than the one before.

We drove to our Thanksgiving meal in silence. When we got there, the crowd for the 2:30 pm seating was waiting for tables to be cleared and a lady older than Mom offered her a seat while we waited. Rudely enough to make me take a couple of steps away from her, Mom barked that she’d been sitting all day and didn’t want to sit anymore. The look on the lady’s face was as if someone had slapped her. I knew it was going to be a long meal.

We finally got our table and after we ordered drinks, Mom got up to go get her food. I got up too to go with her and as I tried to direct her toward the shortest path there, she curtly informed me that she knew where the food was and I didn’t need to help her.

So I didn’t. I got my plate and went back to the table and then Deb went and got hers. Mom came back and then Deb and we all started to eat. I decided that the silence was ridiculous, so I tried asking Mom some questions that I figured were safe. When the stranger’s around, though, nothing is safe. Everything got turned around eventually to something negative, at which point I’d change the subject and try again. Quite exhausting for someone who’s not the best conversationalist to begin with and hopes that throwing out a topic will keep everybody else going and I can just listen.

After making it through the meal, Deb and I took her home. She looked tired and upset. I think we both hoped a good night’s sleep might be all she needed.

Deb, of course, hasn’t seen this day in and day out like I do – makes after work a real challenge when I stop by because I never know what I’m walking into – and she was upset. I tried to explain to her that Mom is not doing this intentionally, that it’s something that’s wrong that’s taken all the filters away, and that she probably feels really crappy most of the time and that is probably part of it too. Deb said something interesting that I think is true: Mom would be really appalled if she knew she was doing that.

On Friday, we had decided to finish up death/funeral stuff. We made a list in September of what needed to be done before and after she died. Since I’m already handling most of the financial paperwork for her (she doesn’t even bother writing most purchases in her checkbook anymore since I go through and verify everything online once a week), I’ve gotten also gotten all the financial information together so that credit cards can be cancelled, accounts closed, insurance policies, cds, and treasury bills redeemed as quickly as possible so there’s no time for any kind of external fraudulent activity. We went to the bank to get an account open to put all her financial resources in and we pulled together all the funeral home and headstone information together in once place.

She said she wanted to do laundry, so we went over to get her and laundry. She had gone to the dining room and was sitting there waiting for it to open when we walked up. She saw us, but it seemed that she didn’t even recognize us. Deb sat on one side of her and the man who was sitting on the other side offered me his chair. We sat down and asked if she wanted us to eat lunch with her and then take her back to do laundry. Normally, she’s all over that. But not on Friday. She said there were no tables for us and, after lunch, she was busy with meetings all afternoon so we just needed to go on. We got the laundry and headed back to my house.

I worked for about 4 1/2 hours and ran downstairs every hour or so to help Deb fold laundry, get some more water, and stretch a little. Deb and I both were a little discombobulated by then and we talked about how she seemed to be disconnecting like she had in the hospital. We literally were strangers to her that morning – there was no connection at all.

We were taking stabs at logic – something I finally told Deb we just couldn’t do – you can’t apply logic to something illogical. Deb said “maybe she knows something we don’t know.” I said “well, maybe God was just waiting for us to get the stuff we needed to do done, and now that it’s done, she’s on her way.” We talked about the disconnecting, because it bothers both of us. I ended that conversation with the statement that maybe she thinks disconnecting is making it easier for us, but I was going to tell her in the resurrection – certainly not now! – that it didn’t make it easier, and, in fact, it made it harder.

After I finished up work and we had her laundry together, we decided to go back into the lion’s den. We both talked about that knot in our stomachs that made us feel like we were three again and had just done the most horrible thing that had ever been done in the world. We had plans to go to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. I told Deb we’d ask once and if she said no, we’d just leave it at that and go by ourselves.

She was not quite as disconnected when we got there, but she was a little agitated. I sat down at the computer to get the information she said she was looking for and Deb and she talked. Deb said she never made eye contact with her, which I noticed when we leaving. We asked if she wanted to go to dinner and without even thinking about it or any hesitation, she said “no.” We left and as I hugged her good-bye, she just didn’t really hug me back. Isaid “I love you” and she said “okay.” She does it often enough that I should be used to it, but that drives me crazy.

On Saturday, Deb went over in the morning and Mom was back. When I picked her up for church,  she seemed okay. I held her hand on the way there and, although we didn’t talk much, she seemed to be in good spirits.

We went to dinner and had a good meal and good conversation. When I dropped her back off, Deb said she would walk her in and say her goodbyes. I waited and waited and waited and Deb never came out. I finally parked the car and went in and as soon as I opened the door, even in the silence, I could tell the stranger was back.

Deb told her goodbye and as we walked out to the car, she broke down in tears and said it was like a light switch and Mom had lit into her about random stuff from life. I said “I get it – this happens a lot.” For a while she was upset at me – I’m not really sure why because I said little except “I understand how you feel” several times – but eventually she calmed down. I told her that she had to let it go because it’s just the way it is now and holding on to the hurt feelings only hurts us.

I don’t get so hurt now. I feel sad for Mom. As I always wish when someone I love is suffering, if I could take all her pain, all her suffering, all of whatever’s going on onto myself and go through it for her, I would. I would rather be going through this than knowing she’s going through it. And in the process, maybe it would finally make sense to me and I would understand and we’d both have some peace.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”

“The mind is its own place, and, in itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

These two quotes are both from Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book I, after he has been thrown out of Heaven after trying to overthrow God. They reflect the truth that we are, we become what we think and they serve as a caution, a warning, a red flag that we need to be constantly vigilant about where we allow our minds to go either spontaneously or deliberately.

Paradise Lost presents a three-dimensional look into the mind of Satan. The first time I read it, I was struck at how much his thinking and reasoning seemed familiar. And then I realized that is because we’re still listening to him, just as Adam and Eve did, and he presents a very compelling and persuasive, albeit false and erroneous, case that, unless we’re on our guards, is very alluring and appealing to us on a deep gut level.

I try to reread Paradise Lost every 18 months or so to put back and keep both of these quotes at the forefront of my mind every day. Actions are just thoughts put in motion and whether those actions are good or bad, sin or righteousness, godly or ungodly are determined by what we’ve allowed to brew in the thought process that created them.

As we go through life, we become the culmination of our thinking – our critical path – of our decisions and choices, which become our experience. Some of us are outfitted initially with better hardware – perfectly formed brains free of defect – and better software – perfect chemical balance – than others. I am not one of those people. I suspect hardware issues because the evidence strongly suggests it, and I know for a fact that I have software issues, brought on by genetic flaws that tell my brain to overproduce some chemicals and underproduce others. I constantly fight with and struggle against this imbalance.

This is not intellect. I have no idea what my IQ is. My parents got the results of all the IQ tests from elementary school and from when I was accepted to Governer’s School, but in retrospect wisely decided not to share them with me. And out beyond the cutthroat competition for things like Governer’s School, college scholarships, Dean’s Lists, etc., it really doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, because the measure of your life is far more than a snapshot taken in a narrow framework.

In reality, it’s about how you use what you’ve been given. It’s about choices and decisions. It’s about focus. It’s about heart. It is about how you relate to God and to everyone else. It’s about how willing you are to submit to God rather than rebel against Him. It’s about perspective, focus, the grasp on the big picture.

We have all been given gifts by God. All of us reflect, in our personalities, our interests, our strengths, our abilities an aspect of our Creator. But, all too often, we diss God because we: (a) fail to see the gifts He has given us; (b) see the gifts, but fail to use them or fail to use them as He intends; (c) compare the gifts to the gifts given to others and come to the conclusion that God’s shortchanged us and refuse to use them as a way of expressing our displeasure with God; or (d) believe that the gifts are all our doing (i.e., don’t even acknowledge that God gave them to us) and arrogantly and proudly parade them as if they were our creation, using them as weapons, not gifts.

These four approaches to the gifts that God has given us are all attitudes and mindsets. They are, admittedly, fashioned by outside influences and experiences we accumulate from birth, but as we become adults, they become choices. The worst things a child can experience is extremes: “you’re the worst” or “you’re the best.” Both end up having a negative effect and both end up causing the child to be completely self-centered, self-absorbed, and selfish.

But that is not how God intends us to live and as adults, we often, because they are comfortable and familiar, choose to continue to live in the unreality of those extremes, both of which put us in a mindset of being the center of the universe, which is Satan’s mindset.

We all struggle with this somewhere or lots of somewhere in our lives. I have struggled with authority my entire life. As a child, I used to console myself with an everpresent thought: “I can’t wait until I grow up and nobody can tell me what to do.” I smile as I write that with these adult hands because now I have more people telling me what to do than I’ve ever had in my life.

I still wrestle with not bristling when the intensity of those demands on my time, my energy, my life, me gets really strong. I fight not to just explode and annihilate everything in my path just to get it out of my head, my eyes, my ears so that there’s no sound but quiet, no continuous movie that won’t shut off but instead the solitude of an empty beach in the winter or a grassy field in the summer, nothing obscuring my view to the future.

And when those moments pass, I can understand why Satan’s reign in Hell seemed preferable to him than serving in Heaven. Serving others is hard way. It means giving up something of yourself for the benefit of someone else – their needs and their wants. It means sacrificing. It means it’s not all about me. It means I’m not the center of the universe.

I don’t think we come to this knowledge in a concrete and conscious fashion. Instead, it is something that gradually dawns on us. The point of conscious realization is a shock. And it’s hard to accept. I often think that must have been the point at which Satan began to rebel.

He was one of the three archangels covering the throne of God. There was no one higher than him but God and Christ. Michael and Gabriel were peers. All the other angelic world was, it seems, subordinate to the three archangels, who naturally were subordinate to God and Christ.

Being at the throne of God, he was privy to the conversations about what creative project God and Christ were undertaking next, and it was a real kick in the stomach to him to hear of the plan to create finite beings without angelic superpowers that God and Christ would work with to bring into their family. None of the angels were created for or offered membership in the God family and here these lesser, inferior creatures God was planning to create were going to be offered and invited into God’s family.

I imagine the first thing that hit Satan’s mind was “that’s not fair.” The next thing was something along the lines – I know because I’ve thought similarly as I’ve walked through the journey of life – of “Look at everything I’ve done for God…I deserve…I bust my butt and this is the thanks I get…” The problem with his attitude, which is described in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, becomes apparent quickly.

All of his focus was completely on himself and completely off of God. Just the statement about what he had done for God shows his complete self-absorption. He stewed on this continuously, much the same way Cain stewed on Abel’s sacrifice being acceptable to God and his not – for perhaps, in our reckoning of time, centuries or even millennia. The more he thought about it, the more upset and rebellious he became.

In our venacular, he obsessed about it. He thought about it and talked about it all the time. How do I know that? One third of the angels joined him in the epic confrontation with God that cast him out of heaven. It has always made sense to me that each of the archangels would have had authority over an equal proportion of the angelic realm. The ones that followed Satan then would have been the ones God put him over.

None of them could accept that they were not the center of the universe. Satan, of course, had in the process of persuading them created an alternate “reality” that began as a fantasy and eventually became real in each of their minds. To this day, Satan and those angels who followed him still believe they’re right, they’ve got a better way than God, they deserve to be God, and that they will defeat God. If they didn’t, they would have surrendered a long time ago. No being does anything unless they believe the outcome they seek is doable.

Not long ago, I listened to a sermon by a good friend that talked about unconditional surrender – without any terms giving up control in favor of another, which is the goal of our surrender to God. He made an interesting point about what this surrender involves and it is what Satan, at some point, no longer did.

He pointed out that there are two ways of processing information: (1) the head, which is by logic, reasoning, and facts and (2) the heart, which is by emotions and feelings. None of us processes information all one way or the other. Instead we’re dominant in one area, but it doesn’t mean the other doesn’t exist. God and Christ are the perfect balance – 50/50 – but just as we were created with a propensity toward one way or the other, I suspect that the angels were too.

Satan seems to me to be heart dominant and by allowing his heart – instead of God’s will – rule him, it completely corrupted his thinking. I am head dominant and if I allow my own reasoning and thinking to rule me, it can completely corrupt my heart.

My friend brought up the challenge that we all face as we come to the realization that it is not all about us, that everything’s bigger than us, that God’s way and will is perfect and ours is not, and that is our willingness to completely and unconditionally surrender our dominant way of processing information to God.

If I surrender my heart, I retain control. But if I surrender my head and heart, then I give the control to God. The more I relinquish control to God, the more balance between the head and the heart (growing to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ) God gives me.

That, ironically, appeals to the logical, rational, factual way that I process information. I can, based, on how much more dominant my heart is becoming, see how much I’m relinquishing control to God. That was a “wow” moment for me. Because I do see tangible evidence that although I’m still head dominant, I’m not as much so as I was 10 years ago, or 5 years ago, or even 6 months ago.

I’m becoming more convinced each day that it is better to serve in heaven than to reign in hell.

The Comfort of Reality

The parallel (and antitheical) thought to the title is the discomfort of misperception, illusion.

We live in a physical world that is comprised of atoms, protons, neutrons that appear to be solid objects (“real”) when in fact they are not, in a universe kind of way (God way). C. S. Lewis spoke of this in Mere Christianity, as he attempted to explain the limitations we have in relating to God and His creation and what God has enabled in us to be able to relate in a small way within our finite existence. It is a way to build our relationship with Him.

But, we also live in a world of spiritual, mental, and emotional perceptions and illusions. These were not intended nor designed by God. They are the way Satan, from the very beginning, has tried to destroy our relationship with God. And it’s been very effective, because he throws in just enough of what sounds like truth to completely derail us and deceive us until we are in perpetual discomfort, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally, because we don’t know what is real and what is illusion and God made us with a desire to dig down to the deepest levels of understanding to determine reality.

The problem is that we can’t do it without God’s help, but that reality has been supplanted by a lie that we’ve come to believe is the truth.

Genesis 3 and Matthew 4 (Paul’s discussion of the 1st and 2nd Adam in Romans is borne out by these two pivotal events in humanity’s history) are turning points to the discomfort of misperception and illusion (and disillusionment) in the first, and back to the comfort of reality in the second. Satan’s in both places but the outcomes and distortion of reality is obvious, but so subtle because it is the word of God tweaked or misused.  It is the outcome of the first that we all suffer from now and it is the outcome of the second that we hope in for the future.

The OT is a summary of the first 4000 years of humanity’s existence on the planet (the NT basically covers 100 years in actual time of the writers), and there is a lot of that we miss (I suspect this too is part of Satan’s “smoke and mirrors” to obscure what is obvious if you think about it) because we read it as a summary, instead of thinking about what actually happened.

Knowing how God works, it is absolutely absurd to think that Christ created Adam & Eve, spent one day with them keeping the Sabbath and instructing them, and then Sunday morning (the 8th day), walked off and said “Good luck. See ya.” That’s the way it seems to read, but that is totally inconsistent with how God and Christ work, so it’s only reasonable that Christ spent quite a bit of time instructing first Adam, then Adam and Eve, in the basics, including God’s way of life. They had a firm foundation.

In Genesis 3, the very first statement is that the serpent was the most subtle of all animals created. That is a summary statement based on experience (a being that is unfamiliar and unknown has no defining characteristics) that indicates a friendly, non-threatening, even comfortable relationship between Satan and Adam and Eve. This was not the first time they’d talked. Eve didn’t jump out of her skin and run like the wind when this snake came up and started having a conversation (most of us would have high-tailed it out there as soon as we saw the snake!). Instead, it seems to be a continuation of an on-going conversation they’d been having.

It doesn’t at all seem implausible (because this is how Satan works now) that Satan followed them around Eden for quite some time, talking, discussing things, asking questions, doing research to see how to best execute his plan to thwart God and His plan.

I always shake my head when Satan says to Eve (and here is beginning of discomfort, doubt, illusion, misperception), because this is how Satan does it, “oh, God won’t let you eat ANY of the fruit of the trees here, right?” This is the ultimate distortion – a lie (John 8:44).

Even though Eve corrects him and says “no, that’s not what God told us,” she distorts (lies about) what God said as well.  This shows that Satan had already started working on her. God said not to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; she repeats this and then, as if picking up somehow on this “God’s withholding something” sentiment that Satan presents, she adds (which God didn’t say)  “we can’t even touch the tree!” Her first lie and really this was the beginning of sin – before Eve, and then Adam, rejected God’s instruction and decided they could make their own decisions and choices because – as Satan’s believes about himself – they were just as smart, just as good, just as wise.

Satan’s next step reminds me of a comment by Obi Wan as he’s talking to Luke in Return of the Jedi after Luke confronts him about whether Darth Vader is his father and why Obi Wan had told him his father had been betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader. Obi Wan reasons that what he told Luke was true from a “certain point of view” and then goes on to to tell Luke that “many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

Satan tells Adam and Eve that unlike what God said, they will not die “in that day” that they ate of the fruit. Satan has the advantage of knowing what a day means to humanity (24 hour period of time) and that a thousand years is as a day to God (in fact, God is not bound by time – He created it to give us in our limited state a sense of order).

So, what he says to Adam and Eve is true from a “certain point of view.” In their accounting of what a day meant, they would not die (which would lead humanity to believe God wouldn’t do what He said). But it is profound to note that not one human has lived to 1000 years (Methusaleh is the oldest recorded and that was 969 years).

Satan does the same thing to Christ in Matthew 4. I find it hard to believe that Satan left Christ alone for 40 days and nights and never bothered Him until this culminating temptation that is recorded when Christ overcame the world and Satan. My guess is that Satan dogged Him day and night and banged on Him 24/7 for those 40 days and nights. This was not their first encounter. That is was makes absolutely no sense.

And yet Christ saw through the illusion, the misperceptions, the “from a certain point of views,” and He never allowed His focus to be diverted from His purpose for being here and God’s plan. This is our example.

We are surrounded by illusion and misperception and “from a certain point of views.” Occasionally, I’ll catch CNN’s “Truth Squad” analyzing statements in the current presidential race. Comments fall into five categories, three of which are “from a certain point of view,” with “misleading” being the worst offender. These tend to make us uncomfortable, just as our own ways of obfuscating the truth can make us squirm on some level unless we’re completely devoid of our consciences or we just decide to turn off that internal “truth squad.”

And, in the same vein, if we just pay attention, sometimes we can feel the discomfort when we’re succumbing to the temptation of making choices and decisions by leaning on our own understanding instead of choosing what God says is right. It’s there, but sometimes we don’t stop long enough to pay attention. Or we dismiss it or try to shake it off. In my experience, sooner or later, the discomfort of not only the wrong choice, but the consequences comes full force on us (I think of David when Nathan came to him and confronted him about his sins against God and that “in-your-face” effect that I can completely relate to when the reality of the gravity of how profoundly you’ve sinned against God crashes in on you).

That is when the comfort of reality is wrapped around us as we repent and we are forgiven by the sacrifice of Christ. We all are in desperate need of this comfort, whether we realize it or not. And our purpose is to be comforters, which means that we’re not living in illusion or misperception, but we are living by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Deuteronomy 8:3).

Paul says something interesting in Phillipians 4:4 – this is to be an identifying sign of someone who’s following Christ – “let your gentleness be known to all.” Not your temper, not your shouting, not your great intellect, not your superb negotiating skills, not any of the illusionary things that we often use to get what we want.

Instead, we are to be known for being gentle, compassionate, merciful, kind, humble, and comforting. Those are the identifying characteristics of someone living in the reality of a relationship with God and walking, footstep for footstep, in the the path of Christ. Because these are the characteristics of God, of Christ. How merciful are They with us? How gentle? How kind? How compassionate? How comforting?

Christ says in Isaiah 41:13, “For I, the LORD your God, will hold your right hand, Saying to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” He promises throughout the Old and New Testament to never leave and never forsake us.

That’s real. That’s sure. That’s true. But a promise like this requires an agreement, a commitment, a covenant between the promiser and the one being promised.

Christ can’t hold our right hands if we’re constantly pulling our right hands out of His and insisting on walking alone and unassisted or running away.

Christ will never leave or forsake us, but we can leave or forsake Him. If we’re really struggling and feeling forsaken it is because we, in some way, have left or forsaken God. Usually temporarily, through neglect, or the idea that somehow we’re too busy to spend time with Him, or just human nature, but even a temporary abandonment is a failure on our parts as the ones promised to.

I talked in an earlier post about personal responsibility. I guess I will keep going back to that because it’s that important. We have a personal responsibility to God, to Christ, to others.

That’s reality. And in that reality lies great hope and great comfort.

The Personality Compass

This is just a brief aside. Amazing thing about personality types. No matter how much I work on changing how I relate to God and people, there is a core essence – perhaps that unique identifying stamp that God imprints on each one of us – that doesn’t change. I’ve taken these personality type tests since high school when it was a requirement for entrance into Govenor’s School in North Carolina. And in spite of the odds of time, experience, work on growth and change, the results are always the same:

The Multiple Intelligences test is more accurate than I would have previously thought given some of the Aspie characteristics that I have discovered I have (the kinesthetic characteristic always surprises me, but I am a hands-on person and I do learn by doing, not by reading about doing and that was the emphasis in the questions on this test), but the basic personality type test is right on the money.

As I read through the details of what an INTJ personality type looks like, I found myself nodding and agreeing with it.

I was interested to see that both Vito and Michael Corleone were INTJs – perhaps that explains why I enjoy “The Godfather” movies so much. I’m fascinated by the strategizing, but always get this gut ache when I see the decisions to take it down the dark, destructive, dangerous path. No matter how many times I see the first movie, I always inwardly say “No!” when Michael makes that one decision to leave his very promising and legitimate future by agreeing to be the one to avenge the attempted assassination of his dad.

So, like all things, and in a quite unintended tie-in to one of my earlier posts, this core and this essence can be my greatest weakness or greatest strength depending on how I use it.

God says “I don’t change.” I’ve often wondered if this is a part of us that He created to show us what that means in a way that we can relate to. I also wonder if this is the part of us that is what responds to His invitation to “this is the way, walk you in it.” It has to mean something or God wouldn’t do it. I just don’t know what.

The 500-Year Itch

The world has undergone a radical change. Not the normal generational changes, but I think the full-tilt period of global crisis that Strauss & Howe describe in The 4th Turning. It’s here. It’s now. And it represents the same kind of upheaval previous periods of global crises have featured.

Interestingly enough, the change has taken place over the last three decades. The hangover from the tumultuous “you say you want a revolution” 1960s turned into the self-absorbed “it’s all about me” social and moral free-for-all of the disco drugged directionless 1970s. Ethics and values followed institutionally and politically in the “end of the innocence” 1980s. Rule and law took up the beat in the “gangsta’s paradise” of the 1990s. And every other aspect of society capitulated as the world moved into the naked and raw “I get money” greed and lust of the new millennium.

For anybody paying attention, all the signs were there as each phase came on board. Complete shifts like this – like 8.0 earthquakes or Pompeii-type volcanic eruptions – never happen suddenly. Like the prelude to a life-changing (or ending) earthquake or volcano, there are little jolts or eruptions that should raise red flags, but they tend to blend in with the landscape and life goes on and hardly anyone takes notice. The culmination takes almost everyone by surprise with its force and scope and “suddeness.” Those who survive are never the  same. Those who don’t are probably more fortunate than it would seem.

Ironically, even after the big jolt or eruption, those immediately affected don’t grasp the magnitude and scope of what’s happened. History tends to pull all the warnings, the red flags that were missed, the milestones together to point to the culminating event and they give the event a name: “the Dark Ages;” “the Renaissance;” “the Reformation,” etc.

These are all 500-year itches. We at the turning into point of another one now. i wonder what, if time should go on longer than I anticipate, what future historians would label this one. I think Strauss and Howe got it right. This turning we’re in is historically a period of crisis following a period of unraveling. Perhaps this itch will be called “the Unraveling.”

As I’ve thought about how the global economy is grinding to a halt and all this “stuff” is just disappearing – as “stuff” does because it’s temporary – and I’ve listened to all the bemoaning about “lack of trust,” it occurred to me that this is always the end result of putting trust in anything temporary and physical. It goes away eventually. That is the lesson of the Bible – from Genesis to Ecclessiastes through the prophets and the New Testament all the way to the end of Revelation. If we miss that in relation to this and the lesson isn’t etched in our hearts, souls and minds, then we’ve missed the point all together.

In God we trust is the only truism that is true. It’s the only reality. Believing or doing anything else will fail. As it always has.

As we reflect on God’s word and God’s plan – and tonight we began the fast for the Day of Atonement – we see a clear distinction between God’s way and the human way, which is corrupt in itself with the corruption exacerbated by the influence of our enemy and God’s enemy.

Satan allowed himself – one of the archangels created by God – to be persuaded by irrational, unprovable, and untrue thinking that he was first greater than all the other angels and eventually greater than God. He turned on his Creator and became his enemy, foolishly attempting to overthrow Him. Christ said in Luke 10:18 that He saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. That was the culminating act of his unsuccessful bid to overthrow God.

But in spite of that defeat, he remained convinced that he could overthrow God. He remains convinced of that to this day. From that point, his goal was to destroy everything God created to prove that he was God’s equal.

Humanity, created in God’s image, has been the main target since God created us because God’s plan is to include us in His family, something never intended for nor offered to the angelic world. If Satan can destroy us, then I can imagine him going to God and getting in His face and saying “See? I told you so.”

I can imagine the disrespect and contempt he constantly shows God. Because those attitudes and that way of thinking is what he broadcasts to us. Any time we think we know better than God, we’ve got a better way than God’s, we don’t have to listen to God, and we don’t have to do what God says, then we are reflecting Satan’s mind and attitude.

The Day of Atonement reminds us that like everything else created, God’s plan is that it won’t always be this way. Satan will be revealed for the deceiver he has been, as God’s and humanity’s archenemy, and he and his influence will be removed as an obstacle between humanity and God. The door for reconciliation for the entire human race will be opened.

That is another example of how much our Dad loves us. Beyond giving His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins, His plan ensures that every possible measure will be taken to bring every human being who has ever lived into His family. It’s a depth of love that I can’t even fathom. But I know it’s true even if in my frail humanity – which the Day of Atonement also reminds us of, as well as that we are completely dependent on God for everything – I simply don’t have what it takes to grasp it fully. I want, though, to grow up to be just like Him.

Trains of Thoughts Looking for Tracks

I have lots of stuff swirling around that I’m thinking about and, inevitably, each is not a completely formed idea or conclusion, but each has lingered long enough to become a train looking for a track. I want to at least get the trains running and when I have a place to take them, I’ll come back and get them on a track.

This is in no particular order and at first glance may seem random because the ideas are not even related. But from a big-picture point of view, I think the lessons I’m learning, the understanding I’m developing ties them together. I’m not sure that I have a way to express those lessons and that understand in a phrase yet that will make sense, but I keep going back to Ecclesiastes and Solomon’s juxtaposition of the physical versus the eternal, so with time I’ll find a way to express what I’m now trying to pull together from all these disparate places.

This is the frustrating thing about how my mind works. I know there are connections because I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about things that don’t matter. That may sound harsh. I don’t mean for it to. But I don’t know how else to say it. There’s a lot of garbage out there that can suck up a lot of time and energy and thinking and it is all for nothing. But then there are things that should have time and energy and thinking devoted to them because it is all for something.

Generally, I prefer that those come one at a time, not several at the same time, because I am not a good mental multitasker. I end up with trains of thoughts looking for tracks.

Train 1

This was the first one to materialize this week, so it gets top billing. Our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses. Which they are depends on how we apply them, use them – why we are doing what we’re doing.

At my best, I’m determined and unmovable. At my worst, I’m stubborn and obstinate. At my best, I’m focused. At my worst, I’m oblivious. At my best, I’ll fight to the death for my God, my principles, my loved ones. At my worst, I’ll just fight – to win, to prove I’m right, to refuse to be the first one to blink. At my best, I’m fiercely loyal, protective, committed. At my worst, I can be mean, hateful, rude, and completely disconnected and dismissive.

These are just a few examples. There are a ton more. And they are all different sides of the same coin. Which side does God want? Which side do/am I more consistently choosing? That’s a gut check question and I see I make progress some days and completely lose all ground on others.

Train 2

Comfort zones and the status quo versus moving out of comfort zones and growing. I hate ruts so I tend to want to be out of my comfort zone more than I am in it in most things. Social interaction is the only real exception to this part of my personality. In social situations, my comfort zone is next to non-existent anyway, so any little slice of that I can find I will stand there and not move until the end of time. Push me out and the worst anxiety you can imagine will materialize.

Most people aren’t comfortable with constant change, constant upheaval, constant motion. It just rocks their worlds. Although I find it exhausting, I find it equally exhilerating because I’m doing something and not just rotting in place, bored and boring. It’s just my personality and I know it’s a bizarre one because it’s not the normal human modus operendi or preference.

It reminded me of when I didn’t have double, blurred, and partially non-existent vision and I played a lot of softball and a lot of pool. (Sidebar: I literally sobbed the first time I realized I would never be able to play pool again – that game gave me hours of thinking time, concentrating time, praying time when I was in my own world and the stress of everything around me just faded in the background as I cleaned up table after table after table, pulling together this beautiful combination of power, knowledge of geometry and knowledge of physics. To quote Bob Seger, “I was something to see.” )

In both games, I had “sweet zones,” the sports equivalent of a comfort zone. The difference between a great athlete and a good athlete is that a great athlete doesn’t depend exclusively on his/her sweet zone but ups his/her game to adapt to any zone, while a good athlete excels in his/her sweet zone and, in fact, tries to “create” it, and attempts to adapt to any zone, but never does it consistently or effectively.

In softball, I was a good athlete. I was an excellent fielder and quick on the field, but not a quick base runner (two different stances and types of inertia to overcome), unless I was already in motion and then I ran like the wind.

As a batter, I was powerful and if I connected just right, either the ball was out of the park or you could watch the field part like the Red Sea because of the force of the line drive coming right at their faces. But most batters (if not all) have a sweet zone and it is there they are always looking for the pitch.

My sweet zone was not in the strike zone. In fact, very few batters’ sweet zones are in the strike zone. It makes sense because the strike zone is in actuality the most awkward part of the body to get any kind of power or momentum from. That’s why you see batters all contorted in strange stances at the plate. They’re trying to get their bodies adjusted to make their sweet zone in the strike zone.

My sweet zone was a ball, low, far outside corner at the back of the plate. I rubbed out more batter’s boxes trying to get a little more room away from the plate because the further out I could extend my arms and the more I could get just on the low backside of the ball, the harder and farther I could hit it.

And just this week it occurred to me how much time I wasted trying to create and wait for my sweet zone when I could have instead been adapting to all the zones. I settled for good instead of having the vision to go for great.

That is the same thing we do in life when we try to maintain our comfort zones.

Train 3

The global financial mess. As I’ve surveyed the bailouts by the central bank of the US – the Fed, which, BTW, is NOT part of the federal government – an excellent book on the why and how the Fed came to be is The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin – of Fannie, Freddie, and AIG, and their refusal to bail out Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers and other failing giants, I have been repeatedly thinking “this is in-your-face proof that obeying God works and not obeying God doesn’t.”

Of course, bailouts don’t address the underlying causes that create these kind of financial crises every 25 – 30 years. Greed, covetousness, lying, cheating, stealing. The fruit of temptation was dangled in front of everyone involved and instead of backing up to the big picture to see what the long-term consequences could be versus the short-term promise of gain, as humans tend to do, they took the fruit and devoured it.

The banks are not the only ones at fault here. So are the people who took out mortgages on houses that they never had enough income to pay for. It was a seductive drug that beguiled everyone and blinded them to reality.

This is the most obvious example I see right now of how we all – myself included – pick that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I have heard people really rip Eve and Adam for letting Satan convince them that all that God said wasn’t true and for their making the choice to eat it.

And yet each one of us does exactly the same thing when we sin. We would have done the same thing then. To think otherwise or to have the audacity to believe or feel that we are somehow superior to them is foolish. We’re all “tempted when [we are] drawn away by [our] own desires and enticed.” (James 1:14) To believe anything different is to deceive ourselves.

Watching this financial fiasco unfold has made me examine my life more closely. Where am I tempted? What things are being dangled in front of me that I haven’t rejected for the fraud and wrong that they are, but instead that I’m keeping in my line of vision, considering from time to time? Why haven’t I rejected them? It has given me a greater sense of urgency of removing those temptations for good now because I’ve seen once again what the fruits of disobeying God are.

It had never occurred to me in this way how widespread the effects of sin are. No one I know is in banking. No one I know has bought a home with an ARM, bought a home they couldn’t afford, is being foreclosed on.

But we – they and I – along with all the other people who have had nothing to do with this are paying for it. We’ll fund the bailouts of Freddie, Fannie, and AIG. We’re paying higher prices for everything. Our jobs may be in jeopardy as the economy continues to shrink toward recession and depression. We’re subject to the consequences without even being involved in the behavior.

That’s a good lesson to learn for me. I can never take the small view of my attitudes, motives, thoughts, words, actions, way of being. Not only can it affect my relationship with my Dad and Brother, but it is something that can affect a lot of people way beyond my immediate circle of influence. And that can be really good or really bad.

The choice is always mine.

Reflection

“For thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

These words have reverberated through my brain on an almost automated schedule through the last week and a half as Mom moves closer to the end of her physical life. These lines always pop up when I hear that someone in the circle of people I know and love has died. They seem to underscore the temporariness of this physical life and how it ends.

I have had the words that Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes echo in my brain too as he describes and comes to conclusions about this brief physical walk that all of us humans take. I inevitably come to the same prayerful thought as I weave my way through these words: thank God that this is not all there is. That this is just the prelude, the overture, the introduction, the first step in a marvelous plan and purpose He has for each of us in whom Christ has breathed the breath of life. Without that knowledge, there would be no hope, no peace, no joy, no solace.It has been an emotionally draining time for me.

I work very hard to rule my emotions and stuff them deep inside so that they do not obscure, dictate, or cloud my judgment, words, actions. I am always surprised at the intensity of my emotions when they come to the surface because they don’t reflect how I see myself. But I also realize that I have spent a lifetime trying to keep them in check, pushing them down, holding them back, consciously squelching them for many reasons. I will continue to do that because that’s part of ruling over myself and I realize that thinking, speaking, doing from an emotional point of view can be not only unwise, but can also be unrighteous.

I’ve had my moments of sad tears (because I see Mom suffering and her suffering breaks my heart), angry tears (at my oldest sister, whom I’ve decided is now getting her next phone call from me as I leave the funeral home from making the final arrangements for Mom, whom I just don’t understand and can’t relate to on any level), and my “this is the way it is” tears. They have come at unexpected times, when I’m alone and am not afraid to cry.

I have had my “lose it” moments, though fortunately they’ve been very few and extremely short-lived despite the intense stress of Mom and then Mom and work as I went back to work on Tuesday of this week. I realize that my temper and my lack of patience are still my greatest flaws and weaknesses and the two things that will always trip me up.

I cringe because when I Iook back at the episodes, I see the normal simmering that generally goes on inside me, that usually I, with God’s help, can keep a lid on and control, but in these instances, the simmering suddenly becomes a rapid boil and the lid is off before I even know what’s happening.

Anger is like a tropical system. Get it over land, where it can’t get any fuel, and it weakens or dies. But, put it in the middle of the ocean with nothing to impede its strength and it becomes a monster hurricane. That is the rage part of anger. That’s once of the things I’m learning. And, my anger tends to quickly intensify once I’ve expressed it and it’s rage before I even know what has happened.

It’s the thing I hate most about myself. That lack of self-control. I find now though that I “edit” myself. I’m in the middle of it and I talk out loud to myself and say “this situation is not anything I can do anything about right now, so I’m not going to think about it or talk about it anymore.” I have to say it several times, but eventually I stop. A minute step of progress, I hope. It doesn’t undo the sin, but I recognize it now and I’m conscious of it.

The irony to me is that the person I see and know myself to be is not the person others see. The nurse who discharged Mom was in the room when she almost died on Saturday. I had the doctor pushing me to do all the things Mom didn’t want and which were expressly forbidden by both her DNR and her living will. I was sitting on the bed with Mom, holding her hand, and telling the doctor in an even tone of voice “no, this is not what Mom wants, and we are not going to do it.” I repeated it several times, not once raising my voice or even getting upset. It was what it was.

That nurse told me on Tuesday that she saw a lot of character and integrity and strength in that room on Saturday. She said she thought I was a teacher, because I was so calm, when everyone else was so frantic. I remember looking around when she was saying all this to me wondering who in the world she was talking to. And there was no one there but me.

I thanked God after that because I know that is Him in me, recreating me in His spiritual image so that I’m beginning to reflect Him. I take no credit because I know me and my heart of darkness and my shortcomings, my weaknesses, my failings, my sins. But I also know Him and where I’m weak, He is strong. Where I fail, He succeeds. Where I fall, He picks me up.

And that is my hope.

What Led Me Here

Beyond explaining the name I use, other things led me here.

Hard things. Life and death. Beginnings and endings. Explanations of the time in between.

This started with an old friend I reconnected with at Lancaster last year. We’ve been catching up with our lives via email and after she wowed me with her description of undertaking homeschooling her two boys, she said ”We’ve known each other forever, but our roads have not crossed again until recently. Who are you now?”

At the same time I was asked that question, my mom went into the hospital, initially with high blood pressure, but then with the diagnosis that she was throwing blood clots – two were in her lungs – and the end of her life seemed imminent. It still does. Is.

We had the conversations that week that would forever change the tenor of our relationship. I told her it was okay to go, that she had run her race, that I wanted her to go gently into that good night. We repeat those conversations almost daily as I know, I see, I understand her time here, now, in this temporary existance is ending.

There is an acceptance that comes with the death of someone you love. It is different, more intense than the acceptance, the desire, the longing for your own physical end. There is a void that is never filled again in this life. There is an emptiness that can never be erased in this physical existence. There is a longing that will not be satisfied until the resurrection when you see that person again. There is a hole in your physical heart that there is no physical cure for. And, yet, in the larger perspective, like all things physical, that is temporary too. It is painful, but not forever.

I have quite different sense of my own death. I don’t dread it. I don’t want to evade it. I don’t want to postpone it. I have prayed, begged, pleaded, entreated God many times for it. I recognize that my life, all of this, is just temporary, grasping at the wind, as Solomon says. I also understand the promises of what God’s purpose is for each one of us, for all of us. How really with that promise on my horizon,  should my goal to be to continue here when that awaits me?

There are so many times when I am so weary of life, so disgusted with life, so eager for the next step when the thought of bearing one more heartbeat, one more breath, one more step seems more than I can bear. I want this to be over, to move on to the next phase, to the next part of the plan. It is an ache, a longing, an unfulfilled desire that cannot be squelched.

And yet I am here. For a reason, I know. I can’t get to that without going through this first. This is a necessity. I am not always joyful about it, as I should be, because I see how inefficient and deficient I am and I am, by nature, averse to inefficency and deficiency. How ironic is that? Perhaps there is some truth to that idea that the things you have the most trouble putting up with in life are the things you yourself are.

But I trust that God knows better than me and He does know what He’s doing even if I don’t always understand it. My challenge is to accept and believe that and commit myself daily to stay engaged in the process of changing from me into being like my Older Brother.

It is not an easy process. I am weak. I am ill-equipped. I am a failure more than I am a success. Yet, this quest, this goal, this end is my only desire and that desire drives me to keep trying, to keep getting up when I fall down, to keep reaching out for the Hand that I so often let go of, to overcome all this insanity, all this weakness, all of this “me” to become like my Brother and my Father.

I sleep poorly at best and in the pacing and thinking of the hours that I spend awake when a normal person should be sleeping, I often think that surely the end of our time must be near. Have we not picked the tree of the knowledge of good and evil bare? Have we not completely rejected our Creator and dismissed Him as a fable, an illusion, if He even exists? Have we not embraced all the idols, all the sin, all the evil that exists and made it our way of life?

Obviously not quite. I certainly see us go at it every day as I hear people with absolutely no shame, no remorse, and, in fact, no consciousness take God’s name in vain as a part of their normal conversation. I cringe each time I hear it and yet I realize they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

I see dishonesty – lying, stealing, manipulation, “spinning,” forging – every day and there is no regret, no sorrow, no chagrin that this direct violation of God’s law is being perpertuated against people and against God.

I see murder in the gossip that destroys character and reputations, known and unknown, and I see the gleeful reaction of people who suck up the dirt about, the flaws of, the failings of, the humanity of, or the unproven allegations against others.

I see justice perverted and that perversion embraced. I see lying and deceit as a way of living, not an anomaly.

I see those same sins in myself, in different manifestations, but still the same at their very roots and cores. And in that recognition lies an important understanding. We – all of us – are more alike than we are different. We all share the failure of obeying God perfectly, of reflecting Him completely. We all share the responsibility for the death of Christ. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” was Christ’s intercession for each one of us with our Dad, not just the people who were right there then. We all share the same genesis, purpose that God has, destiny. The only difference is timing. We all share an intimate connection with each other and with God.

Satan focuses on differences; God focuses on similarities. Differences divide. Similarities unite. Being able to understand and see the bigger picture of our similar spiritual paths, needs, and destinies is hopefully changing my spiritual perspective and helping me to overcome, with God’s help, of course those sins.

I always pray for deleavening/unleavening because there are no voids in the universe. There is no “empty.” If something is taken away, it is replaced with something else (e.g., when water is removed from a glass, it is replaced with air).

Deleavening requires God’s help. Just as my house can’t deleaven itself (I have to do it), I can’t deleaven myself (God has to do it). I, though, choose to cooperate or resist and I am responsible for the choices I make. As I’m deleavened, those empty places need to be filled with unleavenedness, and God also has to do to do that (just as I make or buy unleavened bread and bring it into my house each year – I do wish sometimes it would materialize all by itself since my personality doesn’t lend itself to enjoying the precise formulation of baking). Again, I choose to cooperate or resist the unleavening part of the process.

It has occurred to me lately that we all tend to put all of the responsibility on Satan for our sins. And yet, just as God, while He could, doesn’t force us to obey Him, doesn’t force us to become like Him, Satan doesn’t – in fact, can’t -force us to sin. We choose, we decide whether we are going to do it God’s way or do it Satan’s way.

Therefore, the entire responsibility for sinning lies with us. Christ died for us, not for Satan, because we’ve made the wrong choices, the wrong decisions as to which influence – God’s or Satan’s – we let persuade us in life. Satan bears the responsibility for the influence, the pressure, the non-stop assault on our minds, but we bear the responsibility for the decision not to resist him.

And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in thinking all this through. It occurred to me as I was writing this that Paul – and possibly David – would have been a blogger. This is, for me, a place to set some thoughts down that have no form and give them form.

For me, writing clarifies my thinking. I see throughout Paul’s epistles the same process as he meditates on our calling, on God’s purpose, on what this is all about. I’m no Paul or David, but this is a good vehicle for me to sort of set things that I’ve been not so randomly thinking about before I lose them and their gone for good. In time, I will come back and be able to hopefully see growth and development where now perhaps there is little or none.

That will be encouraging.

Why the title “All the Strange Hours?”

I’ve been asked this question so many times that I decided to answer it fully here. One of the most profound books I’ve ever read was a now-out-of-print book of essays entitled “All the Strange Hours” written by an archeologist named Loren Eiseley.

The subtitle of the book is probably the what resonated most with me: “The Excavation of a Life.” It hit me the same way as Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt.” Life sometimes happens without us thinking too much about what it means and how it affects us personally. We do all kinds of surface things that are somehow related to that inner person, but I by nature am a private person who thinks deeply about the inner person, but rarely reveals much about her publicly.

But that inner person sometimes has to see the light of the day to be understood. Context and the complex mixture of events, reactions, personality, thinking, psyche, and perspective have to be applied to what’s revealed to fully grasp it. And to change what is broken, what is not working. And to heal what is wounded, what is hurt. And to change the all-to-human natural proclivity of repetively walking backward into the past, which can’t be undone, into walking forward into the future, which is to become the exact spiritual image of God and Christ.

Excavating my life, examining it, keeping what was valuable – the lessons, the values, the principles, the character, the integrity, and starting to throw away what was not – the mistakes, the bad programming of habits that formed as defense mechanisms or are just raw manifestations of a very flawed nature, the garbage that I’d allow to pile up until it threatened to overtake me and become me,  was the first step toward the goal of becoming like Christ.

And it is these steps that I continue to take every day.

Excavating a life requires brutal honesty: with myself and with God. It is an ongoing extension of the annual excavation we do prior to Passover. It is tough. It is hard. But it is necessary.

One essay in “All the Strange Hours” helped me in my continuing journey of excavation because it helped me understand me. It was entitled “The Running Man,” and talks very intimately of how Eiseley spent his life as a runner, not in the physical sense, but as a way of living.

I also live life as a runner in the same sense that Eiseley did. It has been, and to some degree is, a secure way of life for me, as strange as that sounds. It helps keep life simpler as well as challenging. I struggle with sameness and repetiveness in jobs, in places I live, but I cherish that sameness and repetiveness in the things that matter most to me – God, family, friends. That dichotomy drives me crazy sometimes, but I know it’s the runner.

I love the ocean – and most of all the Atlantic Ocean – because it runs. I tolerate the mountains, but I don’t love them like the people I know who can’t imagine anything else. They’re static and they feel like a prison, a cage, a trap to me. It sometimes feels like a crowd of people that I’m in the middle of (my worst nightmare) and there is no way out.

At those times, it feels like they’re suffocating me and I long for the solitude of the endless horizon and rhythmic waves of Edisto Beach, the briny smell of ocean air, which smells like freedom to me, and the sight and sound of seagulls swooping in and out of the shoreline.

“The Running Man” taught me that although this runner’s nature is rare, that I’m not crazy – at least in this respect. Others will always be up for debate.

And that is the very long explanation for “why the title ‘All the Strange Hours?’”