Strange Days

“Strange days have found us
And through their strange hours
We linger alone
Bodies confused
Memories misused”
Strange Days – The Doors

Strange days have found us. It started at the end of December, when Mom had pneumonia and CHF again, and out of nowhere asked me if I was in my second year of college. Of course it threw me for a loop, so I just nodded. She then said “you must be 14.” Again, threw me for a loop, and I nodded. She asked me what I was studying and I finally got an honest answer out with “English.”

That seemed to satisfy her, but then an hour or so later, she said “I’m sorry you didn’t come live with me.” I am no good at this, so I said “me too.” Then she asked if my sons took me in. And I said “no.” She went to bed, and I realized a couple of hours later that last conversation was with her favorite aunt, who died almost 30 years ago. A little weird, but I shook it off.

She talked all night in her sleep and picked at everything around her, including me (not picking on, but picking at). Neither of us slept well. She finally crashed around 5 am, but then woke up around 8 am calling me into the living room and telling me, without fear, that something had just run across the computer and I needed to find it. I looked around, ran my hands over everything to show her nothing was there. Satisfied, she went back to sleep for an hour. When she woke up, she sat straight up, looked at the bookcase on the opposite wall, and mumbled something. She didn’t have her hearing aids on, so I spoke in her better ear and asked what she’d said. Clear as day, she asked “do you know those three angels over there?,” pointing at the bookcase. I said “I don’t think so.”

She had an on/off day, without any more hallucinations, but sleeping a lot (and I temporarily upped the melatonin, so that I could get some sleep too) that day, but then seemed to be back in present reality.

And, although physically visibly getting weaker with each passing day, with roller-coaster blood pressure – although the highs have come down some with better med spacing, but the lows, at night, have dipped very low – and continued stability and dizziness issues, Mom has stayed on a pretty even keel mentally until the middle of last week. She had part one of a crown down last Wednesday afternoon (I’ve been through a whole series of self-beatings as to whether it was my fault this past week has been full of strange days, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is disease, and it would have happened regardless because all the signs were already there) and came home exhausted. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, so I know that and this are just coincidental. But it shook me for a couple of days.

She was tired and very weak all day Thursday, but she was lucid. She was asking questions, though, about Elaine and Rachael, and was getting them mixed up. So I sat down with her and went through some family photo albums. She had a hard time recognizing any of us, including herself and Daddy, which made me realize that lucidity has become relative.

Friday, she was still tired and still weak, but seemed to be doing a little better. Saturday, she was up all day and pretty much with the present until dinner time. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner when she looked at me and asked “did you go to college over there?,” pointing into space. I knew she meant East TN State University, so I answered “no.” She then asked where I did go to school. I answered “North Carolina.”

The next question hit me out of the blue again.

Mom: “Is that where your real mother lived?”

Me: “No.”

Mom: “Is she dead?”

Me: “My biological mother is dead.”

Mom: “Did you have a daddy?”

Me: “Yes.”

Mom: “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

Me (after counting on my fingers to make sure I got everyone): “Six…that I know of.”

Mom: “Do you have pictures?”

Me: “Yes.”

Mom: “I want to see them sometime.”

Me: “Okay.”

And then she seemed to poop out. We’ve made a habit, after we eat dinner Saturday evening, of watching basketball and she’s always hung with me pretty well. Saturday night by 7 p.m., she was done and wanted to go to bed. I put her to bed and she was out like a light all night.

She woke up between 8:30 and 9 Sunday morning and ate breakfast and was back asleep by 10:30 a.m. And slept, except for dinner, all day Sunday and all Sunday night. Monday, except to get up and go to the bathroom and eat a little, she did not get out of bed all day. I called Home Health and asked for a nurse to come out. In the meantime, Mom mostly slept and I kept a close watch, lying beside her at times, holding her hand, reminding her that I love her.

Something in my gut said I needed to let Deb and Elaine know what was going on, so I called them both. Elaine said she wouldn’t be able to get back for the funeral, but asked me if I would come to Washington so we could have a memorial service for Mom there. I said “okay,” and she broke down in tears, explaining that she didn’t expect me to agree so readily to that. I was surprised and thought “Why not? I know the cost of getting five people from the Left Coast to the East Coast on little notice is prohibitive, and they need to have the chance to say good-bye too.” Deb was calm – surprisingly – she got the Norovirus making the rounds at the retirement community where she works (the Health Department quarantined all the residents on Monday) during the first phone call, but then started stalker-calling me later in the day when it sunk in.

The home health nurse came late in the afternoon and as I was saying I thought it was time to switch to hospice, he was saying the same thing (just got a call about an hour ago for the hospice consult today). Other than a low-grade fever, her vitals were okay. He suggested giving her Tylenol for the fever (and it broke Monday night and hasn’t returned, so that eliminates the possibility of infection) and said he’d work on getting the doctor to approve the hospice consult. I was insistent that if her PA wouldn’t approve it, then to go to the doctor in the group who has also treated her, been in on hospital stays, and knows her history to get the approval this time.

Mom slept most of the night Monday night (after eating dinner, she wanted to go right back to bed), but woke up around 3 am, bolted out of bed, took off on a tear with the walker (I was right behind, but was surprised at her speed and agility), and slammed the bathroom door in my face (we’ve been leaving the downstairs bathroom door open and the light on at night so she doesn’t get scared). I opened the door and saw the fear on her face. “Is that man upstairs?,” she asked me. I said “yes, no need to worry.”

She got up yesterday morning and was fairly alert and stayed up until after lunch, when she asked me if the man was still upstairs (I told her he wasn’t), and then asked me where the twins and the little girl were. Again, even though this shouldn’t take me aback, it did, and I had no way of answering her. The afternoon degenerated into full-blown hallucinations and R.E.M. Disorder. She wanted to go to bed right after we ate dinner, but she spent the next three hours doing something with the walker (I lock it and put it beside the bed…all I heard for three hours was clicking and every time I went in, there was a crazy conversation about things like wrapping and sending a fork to someone, sending medicine somewhere, sending blood somewhere, etc.). I finally laid down beside her, thinking that would calm her down.

She talked, mostly incoherently, to people all night long, picking at everything around her, including pulling her oxygen off every time I turned around. I doubt she slept. I know I didn’t. She was up and down several times in restlessness, but then kept telling me she was going to sleep. When she got up at 8 this morning, I made the bed (I’d been up since 5 because I was hot and tired of the picking and the poking and the restlessness and knew that sleep was just not going to happen) and when I brought her back from the bathroom, she wanted to go back to bed. She dozed – maybe – for an hour or so and sat up and asked me where everyone was and what we were supposed to do. I told her everyone was at work and she and I were going to stay home and look after the house. Seemed to satisfy her, but then she asked me how many people were living here and when would everyone be home. I shrugged. I’m tired of trying to answer things I don’t know the answer to. And she was okay with that.

Strange days. Strange nights. Strange life. Nothing prepares you for being in the middle of it, no matter how much you read or hear about it happening in the course of this disease. It is never the same as actually experiencing it. Lessons abound. I hope that I learn them well.

Out of the Abundance of the Heart

“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
Christ – Luke 6:45 (NKJV)

I have been thinking a lot about how we reveal our real selves, mainly through our words, in spite of all the sometimes elaborate attempts we can make to project ourselves as something different and, in most cases, better than what we, in stark reality, are. We are quite the contradictions, I’ve observed, and the messages we send between our projected selves and our real selves are quite contradictory as well.

This deals, again, with the interrelated subjects of authenticity and truthfulness, because it seems that the people we are least truthful and authentic with, first and foremost, are ourselves. And once we’ve bought our own prettied-up press about ourselves, we are eager to feed that story to the world as the actual representation of who we are. And we’re lying. To ourselves. To everyone else. And, most of the time, we don’t even see how pervasively dishonest we’re being.

I’ve observed a phenomenon that has emerged with the advent of social media. People really will say and do anything. Until social media came along, most of what ordinary people went unobserved and unnoticed. It was easy to project whatever image of yourself you wanted to and almost no one would be the wiser. But social media has had the ironic effect of removing restraint in many cases and people, in general, seem blissfully unaware that everything they tweet or post or comment or “like” is adding up to a composite, and more truthful – even more ironic – picture of who and what they are.

It appears, to me anyway, that most people don’t give any thought to “what does this say about me?” – and what it really reveals is a total lack of concern or care for how they represent themselves and everything else (employer, family, friends, God and Christ) they claim to represent – when they are using social media. It truly makes me shake my head a lot.

I consistently see people routinely post links to religious organization site articles and then post statuses like “Sarcasm: because it’s illegal to beat the crap out of people.” or “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Hold it for 20 minutes.” And I think of Luke 6:45.

I see people who claim to be following Christ (those who don’t make any such claims are, in fact, the most authentic) like and share things that are clearly in opposition to what Christ believes and does. And I think of Matthew 12:33-37.

The biggest irony – and perhaps most troubling aspect to me – of this phenomenon is that these same people often are the most vocal and the most strident, and not in a good way, in group discussions. They are the first to attack, criticize, and condemn others. They show very little mercy, very little kindness, very little gentleness, and very little compassion. They will chew you up and spit you out for breakfast. And then gloat about it (you can almost see the peacock strut of pride in their words), all in the name of defending, they say, “truth.”

It turns out that truth for them is relative to how they see things. As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, and I paraphrase for grammar’s sake,  ”They can’t handle THE truth.” No wonder. If they’ve lied to themselves about who they are, then it follows that the rest of their lives will be a lie.

Relative truth always includes healthy doses of self-interest, prejudice and bias, and ignorance. It is the result of thinking very small and not having much of a clue about the big picture. It will ignore absolute truth. No matter how factually, logically, or objectively it is proven to be wrong, it remains entrenched, and each attempt to correct it brings out more ignorance and even more commitment to it. It is a paradox that I don’t understand, but I’ve seen it over and over.

Relative truth depends first on self-interest. To cling to an idea as true when it is not, the crux of that idea must show a threat to well-being by an antagonist. This goes hand in hand with bias and prejudice. Two obvious examples of this are the Ku Klux Klan rhetoric, much of which still exists today, more cloaked and more subtle than in the 19th and 20th centuries, but still alive and well, which targets – and demonizes – African-Americans as a threat to the self-interests of white America and the immigration debate going on today.

The immigration debate is interesting, because it really shows ignorance and prejudice against a single group of people – Hispanics. Almost every time I see a comment on immigration or illegal immigration, I see two words in the comment: (1) Mexican (some people are a tad more savvy and say “Hispanics”) and (2) Spanish. And then there is the usual ignorant bashing about laziness, stealing our jobs, higher crime rates, lower property values, and less for all of us who are “entitled” to it and more for those who aren’t “entitled” to it (some of the same arguments made about African-Americans since the end of the Civil War).

And yet every time I see this, I think of Leviticus 19:33-34, and if I have the opportunity, I say something like the following (this is an actual comment I made in response to this recently): “In reality, the only natives to this country, our ancestors – the original wave of illegal aliens – mostly destroyed through disease and murder (breaking God’s law, which supercedes all man-made laws, which are selfish and often reflect humanity’s tendency toward double standards and situational ethics). So unless we have a native American heritage, we’re all descendants of illegal aliens.”

The people slamming this particular subset of immigrants (legal or illegal) never missed a beat and continued to show how profoundly ignorant they truly are. Notice I said “subset.” There are a lot of immigrants and aliens, legal and illegal, from all parts of the world living in this country. I have never heard complaints about illegal European immigrants and aliens, or illegal Canadian immigrants and aliens, or illegal Caribbean or African or Asian immigrants and aliens.

Realistically, these groups together probably make up the largest share of people “illegally” in this country, and yet the focus on one group shows the bias and prejudice behind it and shows the relative truth. The person or people screaming about these things are not, in fact, opposed to immigration (illegal or otherwise) per se, but they are vehemently opposed to this particular group of people. The hate comes out through their words, even though most of them will tell you they love everybody.

There is one more tell-tale sign of this duplicitous behavior – and I spend a lot of time self-checking myself in an effort to make sure this is not my behavior, because Jeremiah 17:9 says we’re all prone to this and prone to ignorance about it, so by pointing these things out, I’m reminding myself that I have to be constantly making sure that who I say I am is who I am – is attacking people instead of problems. When I have an issue with something, I’m very careful with my words to make sure my communication is not directed at the person, but at the issue or problem. When I’m talking within a group about a problem, I don’t bring names and personalities into the discussion, because that’s irrelevant. There’s a problem that needs to be addressed and resolved. Period.

Duplicitous people name names and make people the focus of their discussion. Inherent in this is pointing fingers and blaming someone else and then holding themselves up as being right and righteous and unmovable. They use words like “ever” and “never” to describe themselves. Like the big banks of the bailout that we all paid for, they see themselves as being too big (or right) to fail.

Proverbs 17:9 comes to mind when I see this. It doesn’t mean tolerating or compromising with wrong-doing or sin. What it does mean is not shouting it out from the rooftops, naming names, and then going on to trash the person and/or people personally. That fixes and solves nothing. In fact, it, without fail, makes things worse and usually ends up with a separation of some sort, most of the time permanent.

Why? Because picking on a person or people in a personal way automatically generates “sides.” And once sides have formed, they grow. And whatever the actual problems or issues that needed to be addressed get lost or forgotten by most and the issue becomes about personality (for or against). And the worst part about this is the dishonesty embedded in the outcome: the problems or issues still exist and were never resolved and both “sides” bear the responsibility for that omission (even the side of the maligned person or people should make sure the issues and problems are the focus and not the person or people, but it rarely happens).  And because the heart of the matter got lost, it will crop up again and again on both sides because it never gets dealt with and resolved.

I’ve always heard that you are what you eat. I believe this is a physical truism. A spiritual truism is, then, you are what you speak.

I Will Try Not to Worry You

“I will try not to worry you.
I have seen things that you will never see.
Leave it to memory me.”

Try Not to Breathe – R.E.M.

“I will try not to worry you” is what Mom says on her good days, when there’s a little space of light in the growing dimness as large areas of her brain die because of vascular dementia, now in its final stage, and Alzheimer’s Disease. I know she means it, and when just a short time later, she does exactly that, I know it’s not her, but a brain that has irrevocably malfunctioned.

The last couple of months have been a period of significantly rapid decline. In mid-September, she fell in her bathroom at the assisted living community where she was residing, in the middle of the night. She had three different versions of where she fell and how she fell. I have no idea which one, if any, are what actually happened. But she fell hard enough that she severely sprained her right ankle, effectively immobilizing her for about two and half weeks.

I had issues with how the staff handled the fall. Despite the fact that I had gone on record with them, after a fall several months ago that neither got an incident report nor that I was notified of (Mom told me several days after the fact in a random conversation), that I wanted to be called, day or night, any time something happened with Mom. I was not called this time either. Again, Mom called me early in the morning to tell me she fell and that someone had helped her get up and back in bed, but that her leg was really hurting.

Internally, I was extremely upset for several reasons. The first was that she was moved without knowledge of whether anything was broken (the staff member said “Mom said she was okay,” and my immediate internal question was “Really?!? You’re relying on the accuracy of condition from someone with dementia and Alzheimer’s?!?”). The second was that she was not immediately transported to the hospital for x-rays and the third was that I was not called then and told to meet her at the hospital. Bad judgment all the way around. I had enough time to calm down before going over and was able to voice my concerns calmly and rationally with the Director of Nursing, who agreed completely with me.

I spent the next seven days and nights there with her, to help her get to the bathroom during the night, to help with showers and dressing, to help her move around as she was able. When she was sort of back on her feet, I came back home, but was closely monitoring her.

About three weeks after the fall, I noticed she was having a lot of difficulty breathing, with little to no exertion, and took her to her physician’s assistant that day. He took a chest x-ray and he and the radiologist saw fluid in her lower right lung. The conclusion was that it could either be the onset of pneumonia or fluid from her heart collecting in her lung. The decision was made to treat it as pneumonia and she was given a high-powered antibiotic shot in the office and a Z-Pack.

The breathing issues were not resolved. I had brought her home with me a few days after she finished the Z-Pack for our annual observance of the Feast of Tabernacles, which we did last year and were planning to do this year via webcast. After two days of watching her increasingly struggle for every breath, I made the decision in the wee hours of October 15 (the 13th anniversary of Daddy’s death from congestive heart failure) to take her to the emergency room.

She awoke early. She was gasping for air and said her chest hurt. I told her what we were doing, got her dressed, and drove her to the hospital, all the time thinking about the irony of the date.

At the ER, I got her in a wheelchair, wheeled her in, told the front desk people what was going on, reminded them she had a DNR and living will on file, and they took her, told me to park, and that I could get her checked in after I parked. They wheeled her on back to the ER and I parked. After getting her checked in, I went back to the room and was shocked by the number of people in there scurrying around. I first thought it was because it was before 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and they were just having a slow morning.

After seeing the BNP test (brain natriuretic peptide test – measures the amount of the BNP hormone in the blood. BNP is made by the heart and shows how well the heart is working. Normally, only a low amount of BNP is found in the blood. But if the heart has to work harder than usual over a long period of time, the heart releases more BNP, increasing the blood level of BNP) number (BNP levels below 100 pg/mL indicate no heart failure; BNP levels of 100-300 suggest heart failure is present; BNP levels above 300 pg/mL indicate mild heart failure; BNP levels above 600 pg/mL indicate moderate heart failure; and, BNP levels above 900 pg/mL indicate severe heart failure), which was 1709, I realized that they were all in there because she was in serious trouble.

She was in full congestive heart failure and was admitted so the fluid could be pulled off and a battery of heart tests run. The ER put her on oxygen and she was on it until she was released five. Her saturation when she got there 73%. Her best saturation on oxygen was 92%.

For the next five days, doctors and cardiologists kept telling me everything was “fine” with her heart. When I pressed strongly for an explanation of why she was a death’s door just a few days before and so much fluid was on her heart and in her lungs, I got defensiveness (one nurse practitioner and I would have been nose-to-nose had Mom not been lying on a bed between us – definitely the most unprofessional behavior I have ever seen from a medical person, all because she didn’t like the fact that I kept saying “that answer is not acceptable because it doesn’t explain her condition when I brought her in her five days ago,” and she snapped on me, and I called her on the behavior), non-answers, and a general lack of concern about my concerns.

The doctor who discharged her – with a BNP of 795 – discharged her without oxygen. I questioned that and he looked at the monitor and said “it’s 92%, so she’s fine.” The reason she was 92% was because she was still on oxygen. I was incredulous, but realized that pointing out the obvious, which I’d been doing for five days, was a waste of time as far as they were concerned.

I brought her back home with me – by now Deb had come in – and she slept pretty much through a couple of days and then announced she didn’t want to go back to the assisted living facility, but wanted to live with me. I questioned her quite extensively to try to determine her reasoning. She talked all around it for a while, then finally said “I know I’m dying.” That combined with how much monitoring for falls, dizziness, etc. Deb and I were doing after her discharge from the hospital convinced me that her moving in with me was the right decision.

So, three weeks after another ER visit followed by another vascular dementia step two days later that saw her admitted to the hospital again – by the same doctor who discharged her the first time (way different attitude and demeanor, which was helpful) – then discharged five days later to home health and then the purge/move of all her stuff to my house, I have a new roommate.

Interestingly, she is now on oxygen 24/7 since she’s failed two oxygen saturation tests in the past three weeks and tomorrow she will be fitted with a 24-hour BP monitor to record the extremely low and high blood pressure readings (and fainting, dizziness, fatigue that has accompanied it). Her PA says it’s a result of all the damage to her brain from the small vessel ischemia, which is still occurring. The “step” a couple of weeks ago was a strong TIA, which takes out a lot of the brain cells at once, and this pervasive oxygen deficiency have perhaps hastened what might have been a slightly slower rate of declination, but who knows really?

This is where we are. And I’m okay with it. I pray a lot, knowing I don’t have the ability or strength or wisdom to do this alone. There have been many answered prayers already and I have a lot of peace knowing I don’t walk this part of Mom’s and my life journey alone.

So instead of all the years she and Daddy spent worrying about us, now it’s my turn to worry about her, even if she’s trying not to worry me. As I’ve told her often over the past few years, no matter how crazy things got with her, even if I didn’t love her, I owe her that. Because once upon a time she and Daddy chose to do that for me. But the reality is that I do it because I love her.

So, Mama, I will do my best to try not to worry you as well.

Brilliant Disguise

“So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes
Is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise”
Brilliant Disguise – Bruce Springsteen

One of the true voids in every strata of life now, from personal to corporate to national to global, is that of authenticity from the inside out. We live in a society that has been jaded and marred by the realizations and revelations that the people they’ve admired, looked up to, followed, and thought they knew were frauds.

That has destroyed trust and undermined respect for any kind of authority – not abusive, misused and self-seeking tyranny, which is often the only manifestation we currently see in almost every governing structure, from personal to corporate to national to global – necessary to ensure order and progress. And that has led to the deepening chaos and retrograde that we see unfolding today.

I read an excerpt from “Sweetness,” Jeff Pearlman’s new book about Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears’ legendary running back from the mid-1970′s to the late 1980′s, in Sports Illustrated yesterday. And although the excerpt is being criticized for its portrayal of an inner man who was quite different from the outer man, it underscored this point about how important that our inside (who we are) matches our outside (what we do and say), because if those are not in sync, eventually the cracks will appear and we will be unmasked as frauds, pretenders, and wannebes. And no matter how much good we may have effected as a result of our superficial external coating, it will all be scrutinized, dismantled, dismissed, and abandoned, with nothing but the ugly truth of who we really were left as our legacies. 

Authenticity starts early in life. Its foundation is a moral integrity that is absolute – right or wrong, no matter what – instead of relative – right or wrong depends on the situation – and that we do not allow to be compromised nor compromise with. This is the foundation our parents have an important part in laying and we have an important part in building. We choose early on whether to build it or try to get around it by compromising it.

I don’t claim to know all the factors that go into which way we choose. I know that personality and temperament play a part. I know that experience plays a part. I know that what’s most important to us plays a part. But early on, we choose to try to stand on our principles – and suffer the consequences each time we don’t, and the negativity of that makes it less and less appealing – or compromise them.

Compromise is where the inner and outer person begin to part ways and become two separate entities instead of a single whole. The road to living a compromised life starts with seemingly little – although, in fact, they are never little – things. Cheating at a game or on a test. Lying to parents or teachers or ourselves. Stealing something from someone else.

Although getting caught or not getting caught by someone else can certainly encourage us or deter us from pursuing the road to a compromised life – it seemed to me as a kid that I seldom got away with anything without getting caught, and for that I’m now thankful – it seems to me that the strongest determinant is one of conscience. Conscience is what tells us that even if we didn’t get caught it was in conflict with our moral integrity and that dissonance was intolerable so we told on ourselves, made the situation right, and determined not to do that again, and if we did, we repeated the steps of getting rid of the internal conflict by admission, correction, and determination.

If our inner person (conscience) is not authentic, then these wrong acts, because no one else caught them, will not bother us and demand that we admit them and correct them. Instead, exactly because no one else caught them and there were seemingly no consequences – except to our character, which often goes undetected for many years because we become extremely adept at hiding the defects  - they embolden us to make these compromises habitual until they become who we are on the inside. We become liars.

And because we live in a society that mirrors this same behavior, giving lip service to a watered-down and surface version of law and order, but being utterly corrupt and okay with that corruption underneath, we become liars among liars, until there is virtually no truth, no authenticity, no honesty in any of our systems and the people who lead those systems.

I could write a book alone on the number of people I’ve worked with who were in leadership positions who lacked authenticity. I can hold up one finger on one hand for one man who was authentic inside and outside. He stands all by himself as someone I can say I truly respected and truly trusted and who was the best leader I ever worked with.

My dad was another authentic person in my life. He lived what he believed and who he was matched what he said and did. He set the example for me of what being authentic, real, and genuine looked like in every day life. For that, I am both blessed and grateful, because I grew up with the real deal and that made an indelible impression on and, I believe, helped me to determine which path I would embark on and stay on.

I am not perfect at being authentic 100% of the time, but that is my goal, and every time I see something, inside or out, that doesn’t match up, I undertake changing it until they do. It will be a life-long process for me, but I trust, with the help of God, that, when it’s all said and done, this will be one that goes into the win column.

New York Minute

“In a New York minute
Everything can change.”
New York Minute – Don Henley

I talk very little about 9/11/01, even though I was there, mainly because that is an event I processed after the fact mostly internally while dealing with the day and then moving on and helping others in my sphere of influence try to move on starting the next day.

(Inset statement: Having been there and been a part of it, I must admit that I’m always bemused and bit taken aback when I hear people I know who were not there and did not experience it first-hand talk about it as if they did. Whatever the rest of the nation outside of the areas of 9/11/01 experienced was nothing compared to being there in person.

I think the thing that bothers me most is projection: somehow equating a personal response as a citizen of this country to the response of those directly impacted. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Not in this lifetime nor in any lifetime. How or if we move forward is the bottom line, which is what this post is about, but to equate a peripheral experience with a direct one always strikes me the wrong way.)

But I have been reminded of it this week in an in-your-face kind of way as I’ve read and seen all the promos for marking the 10th anniversary on Sunday. And that has gotten me to thinking in a big-picture way about the last 10 years for this country and for its citizens and for us individually.

9/11/01 was the day America truly lost her way for good. We left the main road to find an elusive tree in territory we knew nothing about and became so micro-focused on finding that one tree that we were oblivious to the fact that an entire forest was growing up around us, with stronger and bigger trees than the one we were seeking, and each step was taking us deeper into this strange forest and we were getting more lost by the minute. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, we weren’t even smart enough to try to leave a trail of crumbs to find our way out.

The greatest chance for recovering from being lost is early on. The longer we are lost, the greater the odds are that we will get more lost and there will be no recovery: we will either disappear off the radar or we will die. Either way, we become irrelevant to the world around us.

We’ve spent the last 10 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives running around in circles chasing ghosts. Our focus has been on the past, not the present or the future. While we as a nation got lost to a moment in time, the rest of the world moved on. And we’re paying the price for that – and will continue to well into the future – now.

People who get lost and stay lost eventually just accept their circumstances when all hope of finding their way back or being found disappears. They end up impotent and lethargic. Their worlds become smaller and the little things in those small worlds become larger until they become their world.

As I look at this country today, that’s exactly what being lost for so long has done to us. No matter where you look – education, politics, religion, media, military, culture to name a few – there is no force, no power, no strength, no conviction, no determination. Focus has been narrowed to little fringe things and those things have taken center stage, while the big and important things right in front of us have become invisible. 

We’ve spent 10 years at war and for what? Invading Afghanistan was ridiculous and we knew that once upon a time, especially after the Russians had spent about the same amount of time we have there and had to withdraw in defeat. Bin Laden probably wasn’t and hasn’t been there since we invaded, but if we’d really wanted peace and needed a statement to get it, we should have used the killer weaponry that every taxpayer has spent in their lifetimes a ton of money building and blown a hole in the planet where Afghanistan is. And then gotten on with our lives with the assurance that any other country would think long and hard before attacking us.

But we were already very lost and didn’t realize that being lost made us and would continue to make us make really ignorant decisions.

Like invading Iraq. Any thinking person knew that this war was to settle a personal grudge match and had no legitimate basis for us. But when you’re lost, you quit thinking logically and start thinking emotionally. And emotional thinking and decision-making is fatal – to a nation, to its citizens, to us as individuals.

So, bogged down in two wars, with limited, at best, or no clear-cut goals, ends, results, we found ourselves needing money to finance them. So, we went to China and borrowed it cheaply. And borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Our thinking was so myopic – a result of being lost – that it never occurred to us that we were moving from the position of being the world’s lender to being the world’s borrower. We became credit-happy as a nation.

And the nation’s credit-happiness became personal credit-happiness. Banks sent out applications to everybody for credit cards. Students borrowed huge sums of money to pay for undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. Technology offered new, bigger, better gadgets and gizmos continually and the push to stay current meant unrestrained spending on anything and everything. People who could not afford to buy homes suddenly found they could buy homes.

When you’re lost, only today matters. The future isn’t even on your horizon. When you live in a world that tells you that boogeymen are around every corner and you never know when this day will be your last day, this day becomes the only one that matters and your mentality becomes one of instant gratification. 

And that became – and is still largely – the American mentality. Which is why the global financial collapse hit us hard and took anyone who was looking for the elusive tree and hadn’t noticed the forest growing up around them by surprise.

And here’s the irony. It should have been at that point that this nation, collectively and individually, woke up and realized we were lost. But that moment came and went and here three years later, we’re still following the same lost path, deeper in the woods now, and powerless to do anything or know how to get back to the main road. The politicians don’t know. The economists don’t know. The educators don’t know. The media doesn’t know. And the preachers, by and large, don’t know. We are thoroughly and utterly lost.

Fortunately, we have the promise that we have a Dad and Older Brother who know exactly where we are and will intervene to get us on the right road and help us to learn what we don’t know now so that we won’t get lost again. May that day come quickly!

The Choice to Grow

“The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.”
George Eliot

In my post, A Chain is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Link, I referred to two essential tools every leader should use to “grow” every team member, including him or herself: the performance development plan and the annual performance review.

This post will discuss what these tools are, what their purposes and outcomes should be, the requirements of fully and successfully utilizing them, and their effectiveness with have-to’s and want-to’s.

A performance development plan is an essential part of the team-building/project-management process. What this tool does is provide a framework for building on established strengths and implementing tangible and obtainable steps for improving areas of weakness. The scope is all-encompassing: interpersonal skills, communication skills, work-related skills, and personal skills.

Its title, though, must be the focus: 

• Performance - The action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function, with special attention to the word “process,” because this is an on-going process
• Development – This implies a set starting point with the goal of moving forward in one or multiple areas
• Plan – A concrete and well-laid-out set of steps to achieve these goals

A performance development plan assumes that changes need to be made for the benefit of the individual, the team, the project(s), the department, the business unit, the corporation, and ultimately the planet. How often do any of us think in terms of our individual impacts on the the big picture (e.g., the planet)? And, yet, to really grow that’s exactly how we need to think, because the reality is that every choice, every decision that you and I as individuals make affects others on a much larger scale than most of us ever think about.

If we understood our individual accountability and responsibility in the spheres of influence in our immediate lives and how those intersect with other spheres of influence and so on, I think we would be more careful, more thoughtful, more deliberate about what we do and say and are. A well-done performance development plan is a step toward that conscious care, thought, and deliberation because it focuses the individual’s attention on the big picture and how that individual fits into it and how he or she can improve to add value at every level from personal to global.

Performance development plans should be formulated interactively with full participation and input from both the assessor (the leader) and the person being assessed (the team member). This gets buy-in from both parties. What I always do is hand a blank form to each of my team members and ask them to assess themselves as to what their strengths and weaknesses are, what they do well and what they need to improve or change, and what development goals they want to accomplish. I explain to them that I will be completing the same form for each of them, and then when we have our first meeting to get the plan in motion, we’ll review both assessments as part of the planning session.

The reactions to this always surprise me, even though it’s the way that makes sense since I can’t possibly know enough about anyone to do a performance development plan by myself nor can I understand where anyone sees him or herself in the context of a formalized process. I have to have the other person’s input so that we – not just I – but we can develop the plan together. This invests the team member in the process and gives them accountability and responsibility for ensuring that the goals, which he or she have jointly formulated with me, are met. 

But the reactions and the subsequent input from each team member reveals stark differences between the have-to’s and the want-to’s.

Want-to’s have a hard time understanding that someone is asking for and wants their input and initially they shy away from this part of the process. But in the meeting where the performance development plan is formulated and a review schedule established, want-to’s consistently rate themselves lower than I do in most areas of the plan, are well-attuned to and honest about the areas where they need improvement, and their goals tend to be modest, concrete and achievable.

One want-to in the journey of my career stands out when I think about performance development plans and how necessary they are and how powerful the results can be. She was a little Italian lady, old enough to be just about every team member’s, including me, mother. She was a legacy employee who’d been working for that organization for a long time and had been retained and reclassified when a huge technology shift was made into a technical classification she was not trained for. In every team meeting with that particular business unit, at some point she’d say “I’m not technical,” as both an apology and defense. It drove me crazy every time she said it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

But I watched her work and realized, with a little time, that she had her finger on the pulse of the business unit and took personal responsibility for making sure the administrative resources that were needed for the business unit’s success were always available. None of the “technical” team members did that. And I realized that she saved the business unit manager and me a lot of grief by just taking care of all these little details in an organized and seamless way. I realized she didn’t need to be “technical!”

When we sat down to formulate her performance development plan in my office, I got up from my desk (where I sat for these with the “technical” people, who by and large had egos to spare, so it was a subtle way of conveying that when it was all said and done, I made the final decisions about what would and would not happen) and went over to sit in the chair beside her. I purposely did this so that she would feel at ease and so that she knew I was on her side and this was a partnership between her and me.

Her relief was almost palpable. In a give-and-take fashion, we went through her self-assessment and my assessment. She, as I expected, gave herself much lower ratings in just about every area (ours agreed, predictably, in the technical skills area) than I did. But we talked about each area as we went through them, and I pointed out tangible things that she did to ensure the business unit ran smoothly and was able to draw a picture of her value and contribution to the team that she was not able to see before.

She made the “I’m not technical” statement at some point, and I told her that phrase needed to die right there that day in my office. I explained that every time she said it, she devalued herself to the other team members and it created a vicious cycle of her feeling inadequate and the other team members seeing her as inadequate, when in fact, if she hadn’t been doing the things she had been doing, none of the other team members would be able to do their jobs. I told her I didn’t need another “technical” person, but I did need a resource manager, and she was my pick.

We did a performance development plan based on these responsibilities, which she had already independently taken on, and we addressed the technical deficiencies with a plan for her to take basic software classes that were offered at no charge by the organization. I asked her to pick a class from each quarter’s schedule and I’d ensure that she had the time to go and we’d use her completion scores to assess how well she was meeting that performance development goal.

I had a changed team member from that day forward. She was aware of her value and contribution to the team and she took her performance development goals seriously and went above and beyond to improve in every area. I never heard her utter the dreaded phrase again. And after completing and doing well in several software classes, which she enjoyed to her surprise, she was able to contribute to the team technically as well.

It was a beautiful thing to be a part of as I watched the transformation and, quite frankly, of all the diverse responsibilities I’ve had in leadership and project management in my career, this area, when successful, brought me a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment because I saw the power of a performance development partnership when both parties committed to participating in and working together to complete our goals (her goals were my goals as well, so I had a responsibility to make sure she had what she needed from me to make those goals a reality).

With have-to’s, you can almost see their chests swell with swagger and the exaggerated sense of self they have when given this opportunity. They grab the form out of your hands with eagerness and stop listening at the point it’s in their hands. And in the meeting where the performance development plan is formulated and a review schedule established, have-to’s consistently rate themselves higher than I do in most areas of the plan, have no areas of deficiency, and their goals are nebulous, unrealistic and unattainable.

From the same business unit, my most memorable have-to took his copy of the performance development plan with a smirk and said “this will be easy.” Ironically, I liked this team member as a person, just not as a team member. He had a good personality and he was intelligent. But he had a flagrant disregard for rules and authority (mine included and when I finally had to come down hard on him because reason, logic and gentleness wasn’t working, I came down very hard and gave him no choice but to be terminated or resign and he resigned, never understanding what he’d done wrong) and he had one of the most inflated egos I’ve ever encountered.

In our sit-down meeting to review his and my input, he predictably rated himself higher in most areas (we agreed on the technical skills part of the plan) than I did. He had no deficiencies listed and his one goal was “to have your job.” 

I purposely did this performance development plan differently than the one with my newly-titled resource manager because I already knew this team member was a have-to. He was a flatterer, but like all flatterers, I’d already seen him bypass the rules, the business unit manager, and me and do what he wanted to do.

So in his planning session, which was not interactive – have-to’s don’t partner and they don’t invest, I asked him to give me his input. Behind my desk – he was sitting across from me – I listened and made notes to counterpoint some of his statements while he talked. And talked. And near the end, he gave me unsolicited performance development plans for just about every other team member and the business unit manager. He, surprisingly, had the good sense not to offer one for me.

When he finished, I gave him my input for his performance development plan, highlighted his deficiencies and areas that needed improvement by taking his statements and showing, by example, where they were not true, and outlined the goals that I expected him to accomplish (having my job was not one of them) by the time we got to the annual performance review, reiterating that we would be reviewing, as I did with all team members, the performance development plan to chart progress at the end of each quarter to chart progress, make adjustments, and ensure that we were on the right path.

While I listened quietly while he talked, he interrupted me continually while I talked, arguing with every example I gave for my assessment and improvement plan and arguing about the goals. I reminded him several times that I didn’t interrupt him while he was talking, and I expected the same professionalism from him while I was talking. He kept interrupting and arguing until I finally stood up, leaned over my desk, looked him straight in the eye and said in a firm voice “I will not ask you to be quiet again. You need to shut up and listen.” And it took him aback so he did, but it bothered me that it took that kind of directness and force to get through to him.

And those same behaviors were what he came to projects and the team with and although, more slowly than I wanted, we continued to make progress on the project plans and team-building, I spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with issues both on the projects and among the team members that centered around his behavior. He was a constant disruption and obstacle to meaningful progress in both project completion and team-building efforts. And any leader will tell you that the more energy you have to expend on this kind of person and behavior, the more exhausting the overall work becomes.

But a performance development plan is on on-going process. There must be regular and in-depth and quality assessments, input, reviews, and course corrections during the execution to ensure that the goals are being met. I usually met quarterly with most team members, but I had some, because of where we started the process and how much we had to accomplish to meet the goals of that year, that I met with monthly, bi-weekly, and, in one case, weekly. The bottom line is that it’s not a one-time shot and frequent review and feedback and change is part of the process for a performance development plan to be effective and successful.

The annual performance review is a review of how the performance development plan was executed. The things discussed in this review should be known (neither participant should be surprised by anything discussed here if the performance development plan was executed properly), in-process, and either noted as complete or progress toward completion noted. This is also the meeting where the next blank performance development plan should be given to team members to be completed and the new cycle of performance development meetings scheduled because things will be left over from the previous development plan and new things will need to be added. 

Done correctly and with diligence and commitment by everyone involved – both the leader and the team member have a responsibility – this on-going process, which admittedly takes a lot of time, but in this leader’s opinion is worth every bit of it, even with the wrench of the have-to’s (because there are many and good lessons to be learned there as well) thrown in, has the power to make positive and lasting changes for individuals, teams, departments, business units, corporations, countries, and the world.

But, in the big picture, it’s always important to remember that no matter how good these tools are and how effectively they’re used, they are still humanly-devised instruments used by imperfect humans and so the outcomes, though good if done well, are nothing compared to the eventual outcome we await from the perfect Leader who has the perfect performance development plan, the perfect methodology to execute it, and the absolute and perfect transformation as a result that the whole universe needs.

We human leaders should remember that and stay humble and be focused on, committed to, and constantly participating on our own performance development plans with the Leader of leaders. Otherwise, our efforts will crash and burn because we’re talking the talk (with our team members) but we’re not walking the walk (with our Leader).

A Chain is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Link

In my post, The Mind is Its Own Place, I ended with the following questions. So what happens when both of these mindsets (“have-to’s” and “want-to’s”) exist on a team? How do they interact with each other and with the team leader? How do they respond to performance development and performance reviews? How does this affect the outcome of projects? This post will answer the first two questions. The next and last post in this series will answer the last two questions.

In every project there are two major components that really matter all the way through. One is, obviously, project design, development, management, and completion. But the second, which is actually more important – after all, this team or some variation of it will be working on future project development, management, and completion – is that of people development, oversight, and enhancement. At the end of any project, the people that worked on the team in that project should emerge with more maturity, more skills, and more value. The ultimate goal of a good leader should be to develop good leaders and there are a set of processes that parallel the completion of a project from inception to finished product that make this possible. 

So what about the team? It is the rare case when a leader gets to hand-pick (read: hire) and form his or her entire team from scratch. That would be ideal, but it just doesn’t happen. Instead, leaders form teams from what they have to work with, which is a mixture of legacy employees (read: they already work there and the leader just inherited them) and the occasional new hire here and there. New hires are generally not going to be complicating factors for the team or the project because they have been selected based on very specific criteria that indicates they will add value to the team and the project.

Legacy employees are generally where a leader will have issues not only in terms of teaming-building and project-management, but also in performance development and performance reviews. When new leaders come in, the first project is the trial period for both the leader and the team. Everyone is sizing up everyone and there is generally a series of tests that both the leader and the legacy employees will put each other through to see what they’ve all got. That’s the nature of most human relationships and is to be expected. When leaders fail, they fail because they don’t anticipate this coming at them nor do they do the same by getting to know their team members by individually and collectively engaging, listening, watching, and assigning tasks that show strengths and weaknesses.

The reality is that as a leader you cannot get buy-in nor can you do quality performance development and performance reviews unless you do this first.

Ever had a performance review from someone who speaks to you maybe twice a year and that’s just to grunt “Hi?” And the performance review is negative? It’s happened once to me. I refused to sign it because the person doing it had no clue even what my job was, and the review didn’t even describe any of my job functions (I suspected at the time that he’d put the wrong name on the review because he had no clue who was working for him and really didn’t care, but had the same formulaic method of “grading” that my college biology teacher did – X number of people got “Exceeds,” X number of people got “Meets,” and everyone else got “Fails to Meet”).

He got really angry that I wouldn’t sign it and started on the “you have to sign it” mantra. To which, because I was a bit less tactful than I am now, I replied “the only thing I have to do is pay taxes and die.” And I walked out. Nothing ever happened the rest of the time I was with that company (another month), but I went home that night and started a new job search.

Ironically, the chairman of the Board of Directors of the company, who did know who I was and knew what my job was, came to me when I turned in my resignation letter and said “I’m really sorry you’re leaving. You’re a real asset to this company.” My response was “Really? I guess you didn’t see my performance review.” He said he hadn’t and asked me about it. I explained what had happened and he was genuinely surprised and asked “why didn’t you come to me?” I told him that nothing had been done in the intervening month so I figured that he was on board with the review and this was just the way the executive management at the company operated.

I could tell it really bothered him when I said that, but I hope that he learned the bigger lesson of the experience. And that is you have to be involved, no matter what level you are in the company or business unit, with your team and your projects day-in and day-out and in a tangible, coaching role. You can’t check out and assume everything’s going to go well and you can’t smother everybody and assume everything’s going to go well. There’s a balance and a right way.

One of the first things an involved leader will find out is which of the team members are want-to’s and which are have-to’s. It’s obvious right from the start. It’s up to the leader to initiate the conversations that begin this unveiling process. I always start with one-on-one meetings with each of my direct reports and ask the same big-picture questions. What’s the mission? What are you responsible for in the mission? What do you see as things that are working well in completing the mission? Why? What things aren’t working well in completing the mission? Why? What things are missing that would help better complete the mission? What ideas do you have for making the whole process work better? Are there things that you like to do or would like to do within the mission that you have not had the opportunity to do?

I use this for a two-fold purpose. I always take a job knowing that I won’t be there forever, so part of my purpose is to immediately start looking for potential successors – someone who can take the vision, the changes, the improvements and continue them and improve them when I leave. It is always better to pass the mantle on to someone who has participated in a successful team/mission transition to ensure continuity of what works than to bring someone in from the outside who starts all over again. Time and again, I hear from want-to legacy employees that lack of continuity in leadership style and skills is a key morale buster. 

And the second purpose is to identify my have-to’s and want-to’s, because they handle this initial conversation totally differently. In fact, their approaches from the outset are totally different. Want-to’s are thoughtful and usually surprised that anyone is asking for their input especially on the big-picture level. But they usually have a lot of insight and good ideas about how to improve things that aren’t working and what needs to be added for the things that are missing. They tend to present a balanced and objective picture, but they don’t hesitate to give you the full picture, warts and all, in general terms, never finger-pointing or name-calling. They’re invested. These conversations are give-and-take and quite enlightening. Listening to them is vital to gain a real understanding of what you’ve walked into.

Have-to’s do one of two things. Both are equally annoying, but again, it’s important to really listen, using judicious comments to ensure that they know you’re the one in charge and not them. Have-to’s seldom have any kind of insightful or expansive knowledge of the big picture. They simply don’t care. They are also snitches. Their “analyses” are always full of finger-pointing, blaming, and name-calling.

The first kind of have-to you’ll encounter is the flatterer. They reek of insincerity when they walk in the door. Instead of answering the questions, they’ll regale you with stories of how awful everyone before you was and how they were never recognized for their talent and ability, but they’ve heard “great” things about you, so they know you’ll be able to see how valuable they are and that they deserve more money and responsibility. Seriously. They do this in the very first face-to-face meeting.

The second kind of have-to you’ll encounter is the complainer. Their hostility is the first thing you notice when they walk in the door. They don’t answer the questions either, but they spend the entire meeting time complaining about their lives, their team members, their workload, and the fact that nobody has ever appreciated them and they don’t expect you to either. Seriously. They also do this in the very first face-to-face meeting.

The next step is to see how this group of people work together with you and each other as a team on a project. This is vital because it will reveal where the problems and obstacles are going to be every time this group of people has to work with you and the rest of the team members. It is also instructive, from a leadership standpoint, in identifying and working to eliminate the weakest links in the chain.

In a group setting, with all the team members present, you, as the team leader define a small, easily-accomplished project that requires everyone to work together to complete it. You define the scope (parameters), milestones (project steps), and outcome (what the end result should look like). You assign concrete tasks to each team member (based on their strengths and skills) and then remind them that your function is that of a coach, which means that you will not hold their hands every step of the way, but are available if they hit something they can’t handle (lack of experience, lack of authority, lack of needed resources) to help them find a solution so they can continue, and that you expect them to use their minds and their talents to complete the project. I also, in this same discussion, tell my team members not to come to me with problems or issues unless they also have suggestions for a solution.

Body language tells the story at this juncture. Everyone is usually surprised, because in American companies, this approach is novel and unexpected. You can see in the want-to’s the initial surprise turn to thought and anticipation as they realize they are being given an opportunity to prove what they’re made of.

The have-to’s are a different story. The flatterers give lip-service to what a great idea it is, but they immediately start trying to get you to tell them every detail of how you would do it and they try to engage you from the get-go in hand-holding. When their attempts fail, you can see the panic and defeat on their faces (but they will keep coming back and trying to lure you into hand-holding, using different angles, the rest of the way through the project). The complainers start complaining about everything, and generally there is some mention of fairness at this point. But when they leave the room, they’ve already made the decision that they are going to do what they want to, whether it’s related or not, and they don’t care what you need, the rest of the team needs, or, in fact about the project itself.

And there’s an essential truth that lies within this scenario, and it’s one of the things that everyone tends to overlook or minimize (I’ve seen this in both corporate organizations and, more curiously, in religious organizations). If everyone on the team is not on the same page – in complete agreement – with the team leader, then they are never going to be able to work together on the team. There has to be a buy-in from everyone at the outset. If there isn’t, every team and every project will be riddled with interpersonal problems that will lead to the failure to build a team and the failure to complete projects efficiently, accurately, and on time.

Performance development plans are designed as a tool to help rectify some of these problems along the way. Want-to’s thrive and grow with these. On rare occasions, a have-to will actually become a want-to (usually because initially there is some benefit to him or her, but as the changes take place, the focus changes to the benefit of everyone), and as a team leader, that’s an incredible thing to see and experience. But for the most part, have-to’s and performance development plans are an oil-water mixture that never ends up producing much more than a lot of headaches, conflicts, and, in most cases, elimination from the team (termination).

Annual performance reviews should be just that. Most companies use these to explain to employees what the criteria for their jobs are, what the parameters of successful job performance are, and then evaluate them on these things in the next breath. This does no one any good because the employees don’t know what they’re being evaluated on until this meeting nor do they have a chance to work on it before this meeting (you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken).

So, in the next post, I’ll talk about these two valuable tools, how to use them correctly (not as a hammer, but as an avenue for growth and change), and how effective they are with want-to’s and have-to’s.

For those of us who examine ourselves year-round (performance development reviews) and then see how well we’ve executed the action items on those performance development reviews (annual performance review) before Passover, I hope that this discussion, which has a parallel connection to our spiritual jobs, teams, and project, will give some practical application that we can all benefit from.

Dark Side of the Moon

“All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy, beg, borrow, or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
Everyone you meet
All that you slight
Everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

Eclipse – Pink Floyd

This and “Brain Damage” plays through my mind with regularity these days when I think of the last few years with Mom. I started this a week after she was diagnosed last year and it has taken me a year to be able to finish it. My dear friend and sister in every sense of the word, Denise, better than anyone else I know, completely understands why. But now, I think I’m ready. We’ll see.

This is very long, but it takes a good bit of time to get to the dark side of the moon.

Mom was diagnosed via CT and in-person in June of last year with vascular dementia. The non-medical summary is that through a lifetime of frequent mini-strokes (TIA’s), the blood vessels in her brain have and are dying off because they are blocked and cannot get the blood and oxygen needed to sustain them.

Sudden and dramatic degradation, such as what I witnessed up close and personal from the beginning of May until July 11 (after a sleepless night in which I literally begged God all night to help because I just didn’t know what else to do) last year when I got the call at 7:15 in the morning from a mental health person at the hospital who told me they were doing an involuntary commitment to a geriatric psychiatric hospital in the area, to which I agreed (the answer to my prayer), is one of the hallmark symptoms of a vascular dementia “step.” Generally, the pattern is a step of decline, a period of stability, then another step of decline. 

There was a gradual decline for several years, punctuated by sudden episodes of anger, delusion, suspicion, and outbursts, but Mom was still able to, for the most part, function pretty well on her own. Because I live nearby, I was the easiest and most frequent target. Deb, who visits regularly, shared the wealth when she was here. The worst episodes, until last year, were during her hospitalizations in 2008 and 2009. Her last hospitalization in 2008 and her mid-summer hospitalization in 2009 were my previews of what May, June, and the first 22 days of July 2010 would look like for her and me.

In August of 2008, just a month and or so after Mom was hospitalized for pulmonary embolisms, we had about a week and a half of emergency room visits because, except for one episode in which she was vomiting violently, of her blood pressure. Each time, I’d take her after I got off of work, we’d spend until 2 or 3 am there, they’d stabilize her, I’d go get prescriptions if necessary, take her home and get her in bed, then stay up and just go back into work the next day. The last visit to the ER for blood pressure was the one that almost killed her.

Her blood pressure was dangerously high when we got there around 6:30 pm. The doctor on duty gave her blood-pressure lowering medicine every hour without significant changes for several hours. They had the alarm activated on the monitor, and that sound became etched in my memory as it went off every 15 minutes or so each time a blood pressure reading was performed. By 2 am, I was concerned about how much medicine they had given her with no measurable results and told the doctor I thought they should admit her. She said “we’ll do one more hour’s worth of treatment, and if that doesn’t change anything, then we’ll admit her.”

In the following hour, they managed to get it down to high normal (less than 200 systolic and less than 90 diastolic), so the doctor said they would release her. I made sure my objections to the release were on file before I left, because it just didn’t seem like a wise decision to me. We were on our way by 3:45 am, and I got Mom home and in bed, and went home myself to make coffee and get ready for work. At 9:30 am, I got a call from the retirement community where she was living to tell me that her blood pressure was dangerously low and I needed to get her to the hospital right away.

I left work and took her to the ER. Not only was her blood pressure dangerously low, but her heart rate was also dangerously slow. The attending doctor, nurse and I discussed the situation for a couple of hours and they made the decision to admit her. I did not have her living will and DNR with me – since I’d come straight from work and they were at home (a situation I rectified the day after she was admitted) – and I told the nurse I was going home to get them after they took her to a room. The hospital was 5 minutes away, so I ran home and got the documents and by the time I got back, they had given her a heart stimulant (which the DNR and living will would have prohibited) and were moving her to ICU.

I got the documents on file, got her settled in ICU, and went back to work for a few hours to finish some work that had to be finished that day. As soon as I got done, I went back to the hospital into ICU, where a shift change had happened within the hour. Mom had been quiet and docile all day, but now she was fussing and angry. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and was furious because she hadn’t had dinner. I went to find a nurse – who promptly told me she was overwhelmed and didn’t usually work in ICU, but she would see what she could do – and within 10 minutes, dinner appeared. Mom was suspicious of it and angry because it wasn’t what she wanted (silent !?! on my part). I finally managed to get her to eat, but she was still fit to be tied by the time I left around 10 pm.

I had talked to Deb earlier in the afternoon to let her know that Mom was being admitted and called her after I left with the update. I went home, ate, and got some much-needed sleep.

I had been up for a couple of hours, planning to run by the hospital and then go to work, when the overwhelmed nurse from the night before called me at 6:30 am to tell me that I needed to get there and get Mom calmed down because she’d given the entire ICU staff a fit during the night. You’re going to get used to seeing a variation of this phrase and/or symbol combination denoting my responses: silent !?! was my response (you are nurses, so isn’t your job to know how to deal with agitated patients? If you don’t know, what in the world makes you think that I know?!?!?).

I was at the hospital before 7 am, and Mom seemed calmer, but was not making any sense when she talked. A cardiologist came in around 7:30 am and was trying to ask her questions and she was all over the place. He looked askance at me and I shrugged my shoulders because I didn’t know what was going on either, and started answering the questions. He explained some tests and medicine that they were going to put her on, since her blood pressure was still very low as was her heart rate, and then left.

Deb got there around 9 am, and we began to be inundated with about 8 hours of the most bizarre experience, to date, that either of us had had with Mom. She spent 90% of the day looking out at the nurse’s station and commenting on what was going on. They ate cake a lot, and at times there were animals, and there was even a plane crash. Initially, Deb and I looked out to observe, but after realizing that nothing she was saying was happening was, we settled into a realization that she was hallucinating. We decided, in a conference during a break from the madness, to just go along with her and not try to correct her.

There was a flash of anger and paranoia just after lunch when she jumped all over Deb and said “Don’t give me that look of hate,” which really upset Deb, but it passed quickly. The afternoon was filled with her seeing letters being written and tracing them with her hands and more plane crashes and exotic animals at the nurse’s station.

But just after dinner, she turned the corner into complete anger and agitation. I went to the nurse’s station and asked for something to calm her down. The nurse there said that older patients tended to get disoriented and agitated with hospital stays and she would call her doctor and get some anti-anxiety medication for the night.

I don’t know how much they gave her during the night, but she was mostly unresponsive the next day. The blood pressure and heart rates were unchanged, but she was mostly “asleep” with sudden bursts of lucidity and conversations about death and Daddy, throughout the day. She had little to eat or drink. Deb and I were convinced it was the end.

But, once again, around 7 pm, she was wide awake and angry and paranoid. I will never forget her looking at me and screaming that I had put her in a nursing home and had not even talked to her about it. She was furious! As the tears stang my eyes and I struggled to control my own anxiety attack, I calmly told her where she was and what was going on. She called me a liar.

I really had to fight my anger and the temptation to completely go off on her, but I went to the nurse’s station and I asked them to move her to a private room. They, to my surprise, said okay, and moved her, which calmed her a little bit, and I got her settled in for the night, and then took the empty bed in the room to stay with her through the night.

By the next morning, she was completely calm, but weak. I had looked at the urine from her catheter, and it occurred to me that she was getting dehydrated. While I was waiting for coffee, I went to the nurse for the floor and asked her if we could give Mom a hydrating drip. She agreed.

Coffee came but the drip was nowhere to be seen. Mom ate a little breakfast, but was weak and soft-spoken, albeit coherent. About 11 am, the nurses finally came to attend to Mom. They asked us to leave the room while they changed the catheter, etc. The door was halfway open, and we heard the shouting, so Deb and I went in, and Mom had collapsed and was in bed. Her blood pressure and heart rate were the lowest they’d been and she was whispering that she was ready to be with Daddy. I told her it was okay to go.

At that point, there were several nurses in the room and a doctor right in my ear telling me we needed to get drugs in her, and I said “No.” As medical POA, my job was to honor her wishes. I said the only thing I had agreed to was hydration and if that corrected the problem, then fine and good, but if it did not, then it was Mom’s time to go. The doctor couldn’t ultimately do anything I didn’t agree to because of the living will and DNR, but she spent a lot of time trying to convince me to take extraordinary measures.

She almost died. The nurse told me after the fact that we were about 30 seconds away. But the hydration worked and she left the hospital within a week.

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Mom’s health outwardly stabilized after that – and I realize now that she was having more frequent TIA’s, but because they were either when she was sleeping or when I was not around, I was not aware of how pervasive they had become – but her mental health was more obviously more iffy. There were more frequent and unexpected sudden outbursts of anger and paranoia against Deb, when she was here visiting, and me on and off on a continual basis. Deb came for Thanksgiving in 2008 and we agreed, after a funky Thanksgiving day, when she went off on both of us, that we would give her the option to spend time with us and if she said “no,” we’d accept it and do our own thing from that time forward.

We reminded each other not to take what Mom was saying and doing personally, and I will never forget Deb saying “If Mom knew what she was doing, she would be absolutely appalled.” I struggled to remember that in the May to July period of last year, but it was never so far away that I didn’t eventually, no matter how bad, how draining, how painful, how difficult an encounter with her had been, bring it back to the front of my memory.

Things started changing more dramatically in December 2008 (I didn’t realize it then, but hindsight is truly 20/20). Mom started just randomly with no reference point trying to push me away (and at the time, I believed trying to provoke me into abandoning her). She was brutal and harsh and it hurt.

But I had a promise to keep to her and to my daddy and to God, and the reality is that I loved her enough that I couldn’t leave her, especially if she was going – as I believed at the time – insane – vulnerable, unprotected, to the whims of strangers. In many ways, her descent in this disease made our bond stronger. I reminded myself daily that she and Daddy didn’t walk off when we kids were helpless, sick (I was seriously sick enough the first couple of years after they adopted us that Mom and Daddy were not sure I was going to survive), and completely dependent on them for everything. They both set the example for me and now was my time to step up to the plate. I took a lot of deep breaths, prayed almost non-stop, and made a quiet, but determined, commitment  to never quit her.

How I didn’t in those intervening months is a testament to God’s guiding hand and intervention along the way. If I never believed in miracles before (I tend to be of the doubting Thomas ilk: “I need to see it and I’ll believe”), I certainly became a believer in those subsequent years and months.

We rocked along, in every since of the word, in 2009. The year began fairly quietly, but things picked up pace in the spring. Mom ate the noon meal where she lived and her doctor had ordered a low-fat diet, based on her blood pressure, which meant the kitchen had to fix her a piece of baked salmon, cod, beef, or chicken every day instead of what was on the buffet. Mom gradually complained about how slow her food was coming out compared to everyone else’s. I got a call one day from the Director of Residents saying Mom was sitting in the dining room, very upset, and wanted me there.

So I went, and apparently she had made quite a scene after her food didn’t come for an hour and one of the kitchen staff popped off to her in a disrespectful manner and Mom was still madder than a wet hen when I got there. And after listening to the way the dietary manager talk to her, I was convinced that there was some reason for her to be upset, but I was also aware that she had overreacted. She was redder than a beet and shaking from elevated blood pressure. I calmly told the dietary manager that he needed to remember that if it weren’t for the residents he and his staff wouldn’t have jobs there, so they needed to be respectful and responsive, especially to something they are already knew about and that was not an unreasonable request.

He started to get attitude with me and I quietly but firmly told him he was picking the wrong person to go down that road with. I guess something in my voice and/or my demeanor (I wasn’t angry, but everything about my body language told him I meant business) got through to him, and he started backpedaling and apologizing. I told him that he needed to apologize to Mom, not me. He did.

The Director of Residents asked me how we should proceed. I told her that I needed to get Mom back to her apartment and she needed some time to calm down and for us to talk about it. So we agreed that she would come down and discuss it with Mom and me in an hour. I managed to get Mom calmed down, but her decision was simply to cook all her own meals and not eat in the dining hall anymore. When the Director of Residents came in, we gave her Mom’s decision.

When I was on the way out, she came and asked if she could talk with me. She explained that the monthly rate required that the residents eat one meal a day in the dining hall and that couldn’t be changed. I realized even trying to explain that to Mom would be useless, so I told her (they were taking some charge off…not sure what) to just make the adjustment and let Mom do what she wanted without telling her she had to pay for one meal a day. That worked.

Over the next several weeks, Mom started getting in arguments with another resident whom she had known when they lived at the same apartment complex. It got pretty vicious and Mom got downright hateful and she developed an intense dislike and suspicion against this lady. Within 8-10 months, it would be an all-out war.

In July, we went to visit Deb over the 4th of July, and she was fine for the first few days, but we both noticed that her breathing was labored and she was sleeping a lot by Sunday. On Monday, she was dozing most of the day. On Tuesday, when I got up and went downstairs to get coffee, she was waiting for me and said she was sick and needed to go home (we were not supposed to leave until Wednesday). She dozed most of the way home. I asked if she wanted to go to the doctor and she said she didn’t. I got her into bed and told her I’d be back early the next morning and if she wasn’t any better, we were going to the doctor.

I got over to her place around 7 am the next morning and she wasn’t any better, so when the doctor’s office opened, I called, explained what was happening, and they gave us an appointment in the afternoon. Long story short, she was in full congestive heart failure and we went straight from the doctor’s office to the hospital where she was admitted. I notified the family and told everybody just to wait until we got more info about what the doctors were going to do. Her cardiologist recommended a pacemaker, after some of the fluid had been pulled off, and Deb came up for the surgery.

The trouble began right after she had the surgery while she was in recovery. And this was the hospital’s fault because their communication sucked, but she ended up getting transferred to three different rooms in a very short amount of time, and it threw her for a loop. She was already getting in a “mood” the next day after the surgery, because she’d already been moved twice. I remember the look she gave the nurse (who was not “Miss Friendly” to begin with) and then the anger at Deb and me that came out of nowhere. We realized where it was going and telepathically made the decision to leave because it just wasn’t going to be good for anyone. I will never forget booking out of the room and running straight into the arms of our minister who had come to visit and blurting out “she’s all yours!” We talked for a bit and I told him what was going on, and he went in and we left.

Deb and I decided to go get some dinner and just as my food came, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but then Deb said it was probably the hospital, so I started calling back. Well, the hospital central desk had no clue where she was (they had moved her a third time that afternoon), and gave me a nurse’s station that had no clue who she was and transferred me back down and the transferring to nowhere went on about 10 minutes. While I was waiting for another transfer, my phone rang again and I picked up the call.

The nurse explained who she was, then said “your mom wants to call the police to report that we are holding her against her will and she wants to talk to you. I think you need to come over here right away.” I immediately said that I wasn’t coming, because it would only make things worse, and then told the nurse to get the doctor on call to prescribe some anti-anxiety medication (and not tell her what it was or she wouldn’t take it) or they were all going to be in for a long night. She spent about 20 minutes trying to convince me that I needed to come there, and I kept repeating what I’d already told her. Finally, she agreed and I told her that I would talk to Mom on the phone if she’d transfer me into room. That seemed to calm the nurse down some. She transferred me and the phone just rang and rang with no answer.

I hung up, told Deb the part of the conversation she didn’t hear, then started the hospital phone tag again. I remembered the nurse’s name, so they finally got me, after another 15 minutes or so, to the right nurse’s station. The same nurse answered and said the phone in Mom’s room wasn’t working, so they were getting it replaced. In the meantime, she told Mom that she had called me (she had been trying to call while I was trying to call) and I hadn’t answered, so I was probably busy (which I didn’t know). I told her to go into the room, call me from that phone, and I’d talk to Mom.

She did, and when I answered, she told Mom I was on the phone and tried to hand the phone to her. All I heard was Mom say “well, if she’s too busy to talk to me, then I don’t want to talk to her!” The nurse got back on the phone and I asked her where that came from and then she told me what she’d said to Mom. I groaned and said “you’ve got a long night on your hand.” She never understood what she’d done wrong, but by that time I was so used to Mom twisting, either because of hearing or because of the mental changes, everything she heard into something negative. She was calmer the next day and was “back to normal” by the time she was discharged, but I had already decided to talk to her doctor about prescribing anti-anxiety medication as part of her daily medication, because it dawned on me that anxiety was a large part of the rest of what was going on (including TIA’s).

We had the follow-up appointment with the doctor a week later. When I set up the appointment, I talked with his nurse and asked if I could talk with him alone before he saw her with me in the room and explained why. She whispered in my ear as we were walking back that she would come and get me and we’d go to another room to talk. Which we did. Her doctor agreed that anti-anxiety medication was needed.

But the nurse and me going out of the room together triggered Mom’s paranoia and when we came back in, she was livid and ordered both of us out of the room and demanded that she talk to her doctor alone. I remember Annie, the nurse, looking at me and shaking her head. Her doctor prescribed the medication and I took over making sure that her meds were portioned out every day on a weekly basis.

In the fall I began to notice that doses were randomly getting skipped and I realized she was having a hard time keeping up with them day-to-day. It was late that year when she announced to me that she was tired of taking all the medication and she just wasn’t going to do it anymore. She had, since the follow-up to the pacemaker, not allowed me to go with her to her regular doctor with her (although I took her to the cardiologist and to the emergency room when she needed it, because bowel impactions were becoming a frequent occurrence). She told me that he had said okay based on the diet changes (she got obsessed with curative foods and food-combinations around the same time) she was making. The end of the year were days of things being fine and things not being fine. I noticed a real obsessiveness about random things developing and most of it was harmless, but it, from my viewpoint, was not worth jumping into the fray about.

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January and February of 2010 were snowy, icy, and rocky months. Some days were fine. Others were a disaster. But an interesting – and life-changing for me – thing happened then. Instead of considering Mom the source of the problem, in her more frequent rampages of accusations against and condemnations of me, I began to look deeply at myself and ask God to show me how I was contributing to and making the problem worse. At the same time she was going into the life-changing steps that would change all our lives forever, I also was going into life-changing steps that would examine, test, and change me. For that I am grateful. I’ve always tended to turn inward and look at myself first when things go wrong, but nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before in my life. It was something that I grew and learned from, even though it was sheer hell all the way through the process.

March brought significant changes. Mom started getting dizzy, falling, and passing out. She had now been about four months without medication and doing the diet thing to manage her health. She became even more obsessive about that and about money (she had always been a bit obsessive about it), convinced that everyone, including her doctor and the pharmacies were trying to rip her off. I decided not to fight her on anything.

But when she fell a couple of times – and called me right away and I went over and spent hours with her ensuring she was no worse for the wear or taking her to the emergency room to get checked out or admitted – she began to get a bit more clingy to me. We still had the tense moments, but she was reaching out and I wanted to be there.

April seemed to be the fulcrum. I started noticing the TIA’s while I was around. We went to a church one day, and in between services, while we were eating lunch, she had one and recovered, and as soon as we got back to services, she had another one. I took her home and stayed with her during the afternoon. She did not remember them and thought I was overreacting.

May brought more changes. More paranoia. Less ability to articulate and communicate (I got emails and have seen hand-written documents that make it clear this was another steep and definitive step). The more I tried to help, the more defensive and offensive she would become. The angry outbursts became a fact of life and there was no reasoning with them. She began to take off in the car randomly when I was supposed to pick her up, and that was what began to prod me into stronger action. It was one thing if she died because she was ill. It was another thing if (a) she got in the car and got lost (I already realized that directions and keeping up with the present were a problem) or (b) she killed someone else.

In early June, after another time of just randomly getting in the car to go somewhere when we were supposed to go to church in my car together, I had had enough. I realized she didn’t need to be driving anymore. I called Deb to tell her that Mom had taken off. I got to church and she was there and the car was parked somewhere she would have never normally parked it, and after church when I  went down to where she was parked, she said, angrily, she had stopped for gas and she’d hit the passenger side door mirror on something. I looked at it, with the glass completely broken and gone, and prayed that it wasn’t a person she’d hit. I told her I’d follow her home the back way. It was the second time I had done this in almost as many weeks and it was the most nerve-wracking drive of the two. She had no idea how to stay in her lane and was constantly drifting into either on-coming traffic or the left lane of traffic on a four-lane road. I even made her stop at one point and asked if she was okay, but she got so angry and defensive, that I decided to pray us the rest of the way home.

I called Deb back and told her what had happened and we both made the decision she needed to stop driving. We also made the decision that her doctor had to be the one to tell her, because it would never work coming from us.

Deb called the next morning to say she was coming up and asked me to call her doctor and make us an appointment to talk with him. I made the appointment on Monday and we met with him on Tuesday, where he told us that she was showing all the signs of vascular dementia and he’d ordered a CAT scan to confirm it. We told him that he needed to tell her to stop driving. He agreed, based on the history (I had ten pages going in there), and on what he had seen.

On Thursday of that week, with all of us there, he told her that, as a result of chronic small blood vessel ischemia (which produces TIA’s), she had vascular/multi-infarct dementia and it was significant (he showed us the CAT scan and Deb and I could see how much of her brain had been affected), and she needed to stop driving. She was reluctant, but agreed. Of course, as soon as we got home, she started stashing all the car keys in a drawer and told Deb and me we could not take them (we did anyway).

Unless someone has been through this, it seems almost too bizarre to explain. It is bizarre, but usually the person with dementia (and, for Mom, an accompanying diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease – one destroys the vessels inside the brain, while the other shrinks, by killing off cells, the outer structure of the brain) can keep it together among people for short periods of time. Mom lost that ability in mid-June, when another dear friend, Martha, came to visit for a few days on her way back from New York, and Mom lost it while we were driving around site-seeing. She lost it, interestingly, at her grandparents’ and aunt’s old home place. 

Daddy (and most of the rest of Mom’s paternal side of the family) is buried in a little church graveyard just up the road from the home place in one of the two plots that one of Mom’s favorite cousins, who was like a brother to her, gave them several years before Daddy died. Mom and I had gone there on Memorial Day (after the Sunday in which she told Deb I was stealing from her and I hated her and Deb called me all upset at her, and I unloaded a month’s worth of frustration of which I had to repent pretty quickly), because that is where she wanted to go. After going there, she wanted to go by her grandpa’s house. Hearing her call it that hit my mind as odd, because she had always called it (as we kids did and do) Aunt Tildie’s place until that day.

On that day in the middle of June, we decided to go out to Daddy’s grave. As we were driving down the road to the cemetery, a car behind me was riding me. This is a little and narrow two-lane curvy mountain road that is unforgiving of mistakes, so I got my hackles up about this car riding right on top of me. I contributed to what followed by saying something, out of fear and not anger, about it. To get away from the car, I turned down the road that Aunt Tildie’s house was on. The car turned with me and stayed on top of me. That made me more tense and nervous and I said something about it. To get the car off my tail, I turned into the driveway of Aunt Tildie’s house, and to my consternation, the car turned in after me. That got me even more tense and nervous, because I didn’t know what to expect. I said something about the car following us into the driveway.

Mom went ballistic. I had the car running, not sure what was going to happen next, so all the doors were locked. She started screaming about her grandpa’s house and slamming herself up against the door trying to get out. She became someone I did not even know. She yelled at me and demanded that I let her out of the car. Martha and I both tried to calm her down and tell her it wasn’t a good idea. She grabbed my arm and said “YOU LET ME OUT NOW!” She then started flinging herself harder against the door, screaming at the top of her lungs at me, and instead of letting her hurt herself, I turned off the car, the doors unlocked, and she got out to go and confront the other driver. I prayed. Supposedly it was someone who knew the cousins that now owned it and the driver was fairly calm in spite of Mom’s in-your-face confrontation. Eventually – and frankly I don’t remember how – Mom got back in the car and we left. I decided then that would be the last time we would go back out there as long as Mom was alive (we did go back out with friends from North Carolina a couple of months later, but Mom had been stabilized with medication, and it went off without a hitch).

That really shook me. As Martha and I talked about it (her mother had several devastating strokes after a heart procedure and developed dementia, and Martha, as the sole caretaker for nine years after her father’s death from congestive heart failure, understood it all completely), she said, much to my surprise, that I had handled the whole thing very well. I, on the other hand, believed that if I hadn’t said anything about the driver and had been calmer, Mom wouldn’t have gotten set off. I blamed myself for the escalation. I remember Martha trying to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but I was convinced that it was.

Mom was furious at me the next day, but as had become my habit when I saw that she was on the dark side of the moon, I simply told her I loved her and that I’d see her the next day and left. This had become my way of coping with the insanity. I simply made sure she knew I loved her and left, determined to try again the next day. In between were many tears and many prayers for God to help me change so I didn’t set her off and to help me to know what to do.

By the following day, I believed we had returned to whatever normal was. What I did not know was that Mom had taken off the night before, gotten as far as a Marine recruiting station, went in and accused me of stealing all her money (she had gotten really paranoid about money and I was taking her to the bank every other day so she could check her balances), and demanded that they call the police to arrest me. Instead they called EMS and she spent the night in the hospital undergoing a toxicology screen and psych evaluation. Why, in retrospect, they released her and didn’t send her to the geriatric psychiatric hospital that night is beyond me.

I found out a few days later what had happened. Deb called me on the following Sunday and told me that Mom had told her she spent Saturday night at the hospital. I said it wasn’t true. She suggested that I try to get Mom involuntarily committed because of the delusions (she was seeing Daddy and she was seeing people come in and out of her apartment on a regular basis by then). I called the psychiatric hospital and told them Mom had vascular dementia and they said they couldn’t commit someone just because they had dementia. I called Deb back and told her and she suggested that I just drive Mom down there and commit her. I told her there was no way in the world that Mom would get in a car with me and voluntarily go to be committed to a psychiatric facility. In fact, I said “it will snow in hell first.”

We talked a little more and I decided to go over to Mom’s to check on her. I pulled into the parking lot into an empty spot beside a police car that was running. I don’t how I knew it but something in my gut said “Mom.” She had called 911 to have the police arrest me for stealing her money. One of the nurses where she lived met me at the door and told me. I waited until she and the cop came back up front and I followed him outside and asked if everything was okay. He said it was. When I went back to her apartment with her, I told her I loved her and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. She cried and said she knew I did and she was sorry.

The following Wednesday, I picked her up to do our weekly early morning jaunt to the local farmer’s market. She was fine going, but as soon we left, I saw the mood change. She demanded that I take her to the hospital so she could get “some documents.” I asked what hospital and what documents. Well, that set her off and she started yelling at me. I went to the major hospital, let her out at the emergency room door, and asked her if she wanted me to come in with her. She said “No!” and slammed the door shut. I figured she had just imagined something and they’d turn her around and send her right back out, so I sat there with the car running for about 15 minutes and then decided to go park.

A million thoughts were going through my head, but I prayed for calm. I had been sitting there in the heat for about 30 minutes, with the windows down, when I saw someone who looked like a security guard walking out from the ER door toward the parking lot. Something in my gut told me that she was looking for me. She headed straight to the car and asked “Did you bring an elderly lady in here?” Inward groan and “yes, that’s my mom,” and she asked me to come with her. I had no idea what I was walking into so my trepidation level was pretty high.

The guard took me back to the intake room and the circus got rolling. I guess apprehension heightens your senses because I was aware that all the desks were occupied with ER patients and, perhaps to sort of deal with Mom sitting at a desk with an intake nurse with several people around, I intuitively tuned in to the conversations around. On my right, a younger guy was being asked whether he used drugs, and at first he said “no,” then he said “well, I smoked some pot last night. Does that count?” That’s the conversation I remember as I was thinking I was in some kind of surreal dream that I would wake up from because my mind was just having a hard time taking the moment in.

Mom was sitting down at the desk and I could tell she was livid. The intake nurse told me that they weren’t sure why she was there, and although her blood pressure was extremely high, they really didn’t know what they could do for her. I told her I didn’t know either, but that Mom had told me she needed to come in and get documentation. The intake nurse asked me “For what?” I said I didn’t know. The intake nurse looked at her computer and said the last admittance they had for Mom was June 17.

All of the sudden the pieces clicked together in my brain that this was the “night” she had told Deb about that I thought was a delusion. I asked what time, why, and how long. When I got the answer, I asked Mom what she wanted to do.

She refused to look at me, but loudly announced to the entire intake room the following: “Okay, you can just take all my money, because that’s what you want. You planned this all along. I hope you are happy!” I tried to be rational and she further went on to scream that I was stealing all her money and that if I wanted it that badly, I could have it. She also said that I hated her and wanted her out the way. I was speechless and embarrassed. I didn’t even respond to her accusations, but said quietly, “Mom, we need to go.”

After saying this several times, she got up, turn on her heels, and stomped out ahead of me. I followed quickly and she stopped outside the emergency room door and started yelling at me again, telling me I could take all her money and all she needed was $1000 to fly to South America. (All this time, my mind is reeling because I have no idea what to do.) I told her we needed to get in the car and leave. She refused to go the car with me and started yelling me about her money again. (Just to clarify, she had set up a living trust that only reverted to me at her death or if she became mentally incompetent. At that time, I had no access to any of her money. That Friday, though, I called the attorney who set up the trust, explained what was going on, and had him do the legal paperwork to turn the trust over to me.)

We stood outside that door for an hour, with her yelling at me, making crazy statements, and accusing me of stealing from her. All I did was try to explain to her that we could not stay there all day and we needed to get in the car and go home.

She finally told me to take her to the bank (that was after telling me to take her to the library so she could find a job). We got in the car and I drove her to the bank, which had become almost a daily ritual by this point. She was in there a while, but she came back out with a piece of paper with all her account balances on it. I took her home, her still seething, and told her the same thing I said every time we had one of these: “I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow.” She told me not to tell her I loved her because it wasn’t true and walked inside.

I started sobbing and praying on the way home asking God for help. And things kind of calmed down for a week or so. Mom was seeing Daddy, people folding towels in her room, and young boy and girl walking into her room every she left and stealing things (things were constantly disappearing and I’d have to search high and low to find them), but she wasn’t angry at me.

Elaine came into town the Wednesday evening before July 4th weekend. She took a flight, then rented a car, so she was running late to meet us at Mom’s for dinner. I went to Mom’s to wait around 5 in the afternoon and Mom was in her nightgown, in bed, sleeping. I thought it was odd, but I didn’t wake her until Elaine called me to tell me she was almost there. We had an appointment with a psychologist that Mom’s doctor had set up right after the diagnosis the next day in the morning and then an appointment with her doctor that afternoon.

Elaine didn’t see much of a problem the whole weekend. The psychologist, after talking with Mom for a while and then me, told her that she needed to trust me to help her with financial matters, and Elaine didn’t understand why. The appointment with her doctor went about the same way for Elaine. She’s been around Mom very little since Daddy died and because she’s lives on the left coast, getting back here has been limited to three trips in the last 12 1/2 years. So, she’s pretty much out of the loop in the day-to-day. We talk a few times a year, so she just doesn’t know what’s going on. Elaine left on Saturday.

On Sunday, I took biscuits and coffee over to Mom’s for breakfast. Things initially went well, but at some point she got agitated and then went into a full rage and started threatening me with a knife (just before that she’d thrown a small toolbox at me). That was my last straw. I told her that she needed to sit down and calm down. I remember saying “you are out of control!” to her. She threatened me again and I took the knife away and ordered her to sit down and be quiet. She did, not happily, but she did. I got her calmed down and I left. That gave me great pause.

I went back the next morning and we had a pretty good day. But by Tuesday, the tide was turning again. Nothing over the top, but I could tell we were back into dangerous territory. By Wednesday, it was a strong storm. By Thursday, it was full-blown. She banished me from ever seeing her again and in the afternoon began stalker-calling Deb and accusing both Deb and me of conspiring against her and stealing all her money. Deb called me and she was shaken.

I went over early Friday morning and when I got to her apartment, the door was slightly ajar, with a big plastic bin sitting in front of it, and her sitting in a chair across the room watching the door. It reminded me of someone sitting on a porch with a shotgun waiting for intruders. I asked what was going on and she accused me of stealing one of her notebooks (which I found stashed behind a dresser after she was hospitalized) and she told me I needed to get out of there before the cops came to arrest me. I searched that room from top to bottom (except behind the dresser!) looking for that notebook. I went outside and called Deb and told her what was happening and to see if she had any suggestions on where to look and she suggested even more bizarre places to look.

I couldn’t find it and Mom kept getting angrier and telling me to leave if I didn’t want to get arrested. I left, and she started stalker-calling Deb with the same statement and more accusations. I dismissed the whole arrest thing until I went to talk to the Director of Residents and she informed me that Adult Protective Services was doing an investigation to see if I was stealing money from Mom because she had told her that I was stealing her money. Then I realized the seriousness of the whole thing. I told her I would be back that afternoon with a full financial record for Mom that would prove I hadn’t touched her money.

I went home, called our minister, and tearfully told him what was going on from the diagnosis since. I told him I felt like he needed to know in case I got arrested. That was divine intervention. No doubt in my mind. Mom, meanwhile, was alternately calling Deb and me to give us grief. Deb had called me to tell me what she was doing and we agreed that neither of us would answer. I got the records together and took them back to the Director of Residents, who took one look and said “This is a closed matter. What this tells me is you’ve done a great job of helping your mom stay on a budget because there is very little difference between the amount she came in her with and what she has now. I’ll take care of Adult Protective Services.”

I went back home, called Deb and told her what had transpired, and then finished the work I had to do that afternoon. Mom continued to call and I ignored it until about 5 pm when I finally picked up the phone. She had burned herself out and she was very quiet and very docile. I told her I loved her and I’d see her in the morning.

The next morning my mom was back. It was as if we’d erased 10 or 15 years. She was happy, polite, loving, and a joy to be around. I was shocked. But when I went back later that afternoon to pick her up for church, I saw that the dark cloud had returned. I didn’t say a word on the way to church and we sat separately – she at the front so she could hear and me in my usual place in the back. The tirade began as soon as we began driving home and she worked herself up in a full-blown rage. One of the things I learned along the way was not to fuel the fire by answering. I learned to practice silence. I didn’t answer her this time either and it made her angrier, but I refused to do it because I knew it would only make things worse. I let her off at her place and said “I love you and I’ll see you in the morning.” She said “Quit saying you love me because it’s not true!,” slammed the car door and stalked into her place.

And I went home. Mind racing. Stomach churning. Realizing that this was all so far out of control and not knowing what to do. I paced and I prayed until my phone rang at 10:30 that night. Mom had called some fellow church members and wanted them to have me arrested for stealing. The wife talked with me for almost two hours as I spelled out what had been going on and her diagnosis and assured me that she understood (which I have no doubt of) and that she thought her husband had gotten Mom calmed down. During our conversation, our minister had called and told me that the same two people had called him about Mom and he told them to call me and that if I needed him to come down to let him know.

I spent the rest of the night pacing and praying. I told God that this was bigger than me and He needed to help me because I just didn’t know what to do. I remember standing outside in the wee hours of the morning on my patio, with my hands outstretched, pleading with God to take over and take care of it.

I was on my second cup of coffee when the phone rang at 7:15 on Sunday morning. I just knew it had something to do with Mom. When I answered, the woman on the other end identified herself as a counselor at the local mental health facility. She told me that Mom had called EMS around 3 am and they’d transported her to the emergency room and the decision had been made to involuntarily commit her to a geriatric psychiatric hospital. She asked me if that was okay. My answer was “Absolutely.” I called Deb and told her what was going on and she agreed that it was the only option at this point.

Later that day, after I’d cleaned her apartment, found the notebook, and gotten together the clothes the lady told me to bring, I went to the hospital and changed the commitment from involuntary from the hospital to voluntary by me. The hospital, the next two weeks are for another post. Let me suffice it to say that nothing changes you like an experience like that. But to recount that here is more than I have in me right now as this has taken a lot out of me already.

The final diagnosis, which we’re still living with today, was mid to late-stage vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Today, with an effective combination of psychiatric medications to stabilize her moods and anxiety, Mom is living in a memory-care assisted living facility here in town. Though I see the mental decline on a daily basis and evidence of mental filters disappearing and the continued presence at times of delusions and hallucinations, I am thankful that the extreme emotional roller coaster, at least for now, is over.

It may come back if something else doesn’t take her life first (the health problems continue). I keep wondering where you go after you’ve gotten to the dark side of the moon. I hope neither of us has to find out. 

The Mind is Its Own Place

“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven.”
Paradise Lost, Book 1 – John Milton

The next several posts will be about the interactive relationships involved in teamwork, project management, and leadership. They will analyze, in a building block fashion, the components and processes, and then will analyze what factors – and they can happen anywhere and, sometimes, everywhere in the relationships – determine success or failure in the big picture.

As initially tedious and uninteresting as this may seem, there are actually a lot of life lessons, physically and spiritually, to be gleaned from this discussion. This post will deal with the people-as-individuals component, both as team members and leaders.

But first, a brief overview of the big-picture and the responsibilities from a leadership standpoint.

In any organization, there are discrete business units (departments or divisions), and those business units have projects and goals they are expected to complete accurately, on-time, and within a budget. Depending on the size of the organization, a business unit may have only a single team and single leader or it may have many teams and many leaders, each of which is working on just a part – that will be combined with those of the rests of the teams upon completion to form “the project” – of the business unit’s projects.

A leader’s function is to macro-manage his or her project or part of the project. Let me say that not all leaders are good managers and not all managers are good leaders. That is a sure way to hinder any team-based endeavor from the start, and it happens a lot of the time. However, some teams manage to coalesce and thrive in spite of poor management and/or leadership, and why that can happen is really the core of this post. I will use my own method of leadership, which I’ve developed from my own experience – and frustration – with poor management and poor leadership, which has proven to be effective most of the time, as the model for how this process should work.

The first thing that a good leader recognizes is that you manage things – money and resources – and not people. People manage themselves. A good leader should provide an atmosphere that encourages investment, growth, and development, in which people learn to manage themselves in a way that meets or exceeds the core values and principles of the business unit (the leader sets the example; more often than not, in the 21st Century, organizations as a whole are the most abysmal examples of good core values and principles, so this leader stands out in strong contrast to a general environment of dishonesty, corruption, and bottom-line greed). In other words, by the end of a project, team members should be co-owners and they should have demonstrable growth in both competency and value to the organization.

A good leader is also responsible for providing the framework for the team and assigning tasks to each team member, making sure that the task and the person are suitably matched (another pitfall of poor management and poor leadership) to ensure the best result. That means the leader has to actually know and understand his or her team members, know their strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to shake things up and move people and responsibilities around to maximize the productivity of the available skill set and also to avoid setting anyone up for failure (everyone will fail from time to time, and some people will fail all the time, but to not even have a chance to succeed is a leadership failure). “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is the one answer I will not accept as a reason for why something is being done a certain way, because that answer tells me that the job or function is being performed on archaic or non-existence data that may have made sense back in the day, but is totally useless now.

A good leader shows what the end result should look like, but does not micro-manage the process and the team members every step of the way. There is a saying that there are many ways to skin a cat (I don’t even want to think about the context from which that saying came to be). But, using that phrase, a leader’s job is to recognize and communicate acceptable guidelines and definitive outcomes, then let his or her team take the ball and run with it. I’ve learned my way is not always the best way, the smartest way, the fastest way, or the most efficient way to do something, and I’ve actually learned a lot along the way from my teams. So, not only does this invest them, but it provides growth and development for everyone. 

A good leader guides, advises, steps in to help or intervene if the situation requires it, and provides feedback along the way. The feedback mechanism, which is the informal process of day-to-day interaction and involvement with each team member as well as the formal process of regularly-scheduled performance development reviews, will be discussed in the next post, along with the annual performance review.

But let’s talk about people, the core component of teams and leaders. The driving force that determines how every person thinks, is, and interacts with everything else he or she comes into contact with is attitude/mindset/motivation, hereafter referred to simply as mindset. When you strip away all the layers of complexity we humans are both designed with and develop, there are two basic mindsets that we approach life with. One is “have to.” The other is “want to.”

Although at times, we all switch between the two – there are routine “have-to’s” that are associated with life that we may not necessarily want to do – each of us has a predominant mindset, because it’s become how we relate.

And the success or failure of both teams and leaders is directly tied to these two mindsets. The first thing that a mindset tells about a person is how they see themselves in relationship to everything else. One of the key differences in these two mindsets is that a half-to will do something because it benefits him or her, while a wants-to will do something because it benefits everyone. So the have-to mindset is all about me, while the wants-to mindset is all about us.

Want-to’s tend to thoroughly immerse themselves into whatever they’re involved in. They go beyond what is spelled out and clarify and question until they understand the totality of what is required of them. Want-to’s are living, eating, breathing whatever they’re involved in. They are totally invested. Want-to’s will spend whatever time and effort is required to achieve a successful outcome. They usually delivered better-than-expected results.

Want-to’s are in tune with the world around them. Because they think in terms of “us,” want-to’s will, without prompting or threatening, do something simply because it needs to be done or because someone needs help. Want-to’s are background people who don’t demand or want attention and the spotlight on them. They need affirmation in a personal and quiet way that they are on the right track or that their contributions are helping everyone, but they prefer attention-wise to fly below the radar.

Want-to’s see and understand the big picture. They understand that what they do is a key element in how well the whole turns out, and they also understand that helping others when they’re able is also a key element in the final outcome. Want-to’s understand that “we all stand together or fall together.” A want-to’s mantra is “what can I do?” They, interestingly, are also interested in fairness, but from a completely different angle than a have-to. Want-to’s address fairness head-on when they see others being treated unfairly. King David, the patriarch Abraham, and Christ come to mind when I think of want-to’s.

Have-to’s are letter-of-the-law. Their involvement in any part of life tends to be superficial. Have-to’s never see the big picture. They are the proverbial tree-watchers. Have-to’s are good actors, and will usually talk a good game, but they never deliver the results. They will do exactly what is spelled out and no more. Have-to’s are attention junkies. If something isn’t about them, they will find a way to twist it around to make it about them.

Have-to’s are clock-watchers, never giving more than the absolute minimum required in time and effort. They will not volunteer to help anyone else and tend to be disdainful and condescending in their relationships. The only time have-to’s will take on anything outside of their codified scope is if they believe they will gain something in return. And even then, the first thing a have-to will say is “that’s not my job.” This is a half-to mantra.

Have-to’s are not invested in anything but themselves and their entire lives revolve strictly around themselves. They do not build and apply knowledge and carry it with them through life. Have-to’s are never wrong. If something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. Have’to’s, additionally, spend an inordinate amount of time with the issue of fairness - specifically to or toward them. “You’re not being fair” is the favorite phrase have-to’s have about fairness. They also talk a lot about their rights. The Pharisees, as a group, are a good example, as well as Judas, of a have-to mindset.

So what happens when both of these mindsets exist on a team? How do they interact with each other and with the team leader? How do they respond to performance development and performance reviews? How does this affect the outcome of projects? I’ll examine that in the next post.

A Little Life Lesson

No pithy quotes, meaningful lines from a poem or song for this post, which is a first (and likely last) occurrence for this blog. But a little event this week made me think I needed to write this so I can remember it in the future when other similar circumstances occur.

I was working on my main computer Monday night when it suddenly flickered, I saw a flash of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (hereafter, referred to by its techie acronym – BSOD), and the computer rebooted.

I didn’t panic. After all, I deal with this kind of stuff for a living, so stuff happens.

The computer rebooted to the familiar “Windows unexpectedly shut down” screen, where I had several options to restart. I chose the most obvious, which was to restart with the last known good configuration (always assume that even if you weren’t changing anything, something got changed).

The computer rebooted, flashed the BSOD, and went back to the same screen. I still didn’t panic. Sometimes the registry can corrupt itself and I knew if I could get into a safe mode (which were the other options), I could likely repair the problem.

I chose to restart in “safe mode with networking,” because I wanted Google handy in case I needed it.

The computer rebooted, flashed the BSOD, and went back to the screen with restart options. No panic, but concern.

I tried rebooting with every option on the restart screen, all with the same result. Still no panic, but in the back of mind, the realization that this might be the end of the line for this computer, which I’ve had for six years, and me.

I turned the computer off, unplugged the wireless router and cable modem and went downstairs, where I set the laptop up, got them hooked up, and went to Google to see if the next steps I was thinking of were reasonable. All the techie sites I used were in agreement. I decided to call it a night (it was almost midnight by then) and try them first thing on Tuesday morning.

I did. They failed with the same results as Monday evening. By now, I had accepted that, whether the timing was good or not, I was going to have to buy a new CPU. I took the computer down to a techie friend of mine to see if he could get to the hard drive to get my data (at that point, I knew something critical had failed, but not exactly what it was) off.

Most of it I was not particularly concerned about because I do regular backups and I knew I had fairly recent (as of Sunday) backups of both my work folders and my important personal folders. However, I’d changed both groups on Monday and so there was that day of data that had not been backed up.

My real concern was my Outlook .pst file that I have imported from computer to computer for the last 10 years. The last backup I did on it was three months ago (I usually do a quarterly backup of it), so at best, I’d be minus three months worth of emails. 

And then something interesting happened. After I dropped the computer off, I started making peace with a change that I frankly have known some time was going to come, either because I was forced to (as in a catastrophic crash) or because I have recognized that I needed to bite the bullet and do it.

You see the old computer was running Windows XP and I was using old Office programs (Office 2003 and FrontPage 2003 for some web stuff – I started using Dreamweaver a couple of years ago, but never found its interface as intuitive as FrontPage, especially for quick and dirty changes to several web sites at the same time, which is about 1/2 of what I do with web development/maintenance), and all the software I had installed worked perfectly in that OS.

Here’s the irony. As a chief technical officer, two of my primary functions are strategic planning and change management, so when we decided to upgrade all the computers at the company I work for, I recommended Windows 7 Professional and Office 2010 as the platform. I like Windows 7, but I hate Office 2010 because I find it clunky on an intuitive basis and the learning curve, even when going from an earlier Office installation, is high. But, from a business perspective, it made sense.

From a personal perspective (both in terms of functionality and financial cost to make the change), it did not. And, yet over the past several months, a niggling thought in the back of my mind has been that I needed to go ahead and do it because the longer I stayed where I was, the harder the change was going to be ahead.

I made a conscious decision to wait until I had no choice. And that day came yesterday.

I was more calm about it – it’s always easier to spend someone else’s money and get it right than it is to spend your own limited financial resources, stay within a minimal budget, and get it right – than I expected to be. I figured out why during my habitual middle of the night, wide awake, let’s review life time earlier today (it was about 2 am this morning) and therein lies the little life lesson.

Yesterday, though, was a series of whirlwind analyses, research quests, and final decisions because although I’d thought of this in big-picture terms (“I need to do this at some point”), I had never figured out the details of how. Under the gun, I had no choice but to get it all together.

My first decision was hardware. I realized my laptop has most of the same software as my old computer. I considered just transitioning to it and keeping the status quo with no cost. However, a critical piece of software I use a lot is not on my laptop and my laptop doesn’t have enough memory to run it. So that option was out.

Then I had to decide between buying another laptop or another CPU. I pretty quickly realized that most laptop screens are too hard on my eyes to be considered a viable option when I have a 27″ monitor upstairs in the office that at times even strains my eyes when I spend too much time staring at it during computer-extensive projects. So the decision was a CPU.

I found the perfect one at Best Buy for a price that was very reasonable. Decision made.

Then I had to deal with software. Best Buy loads all their systems with Windows 7 Home, so I knew I had to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional. I got a price on that.

Then I started scouring eBay for reasonably-priced copies of Office 2010 and Expression Web 4 Professional (the FrontPage replacement…that took about an hour just to figure out what the differences were between the professional version and the ultimate version…I decided I could live without being ultimate after realizing there was a $500 difference between that and being professional). I had to check to make sure that Office 2010 would run on Windows XP (which is the OS on this computer I’m on and the laptop), since I needed to have the same version on all three computers.

I found academic versions (Office 2010 with 3 licenses, which is exactly what I need) of both and was able to get those for far less than I expected to pay.

I got the call late last evening from my friend who was looking at my computer and he gave me the post mortem. The hard drive was good and he was copying all the data. The rest not so good. A couple of components had failed and the Windows XP installation had gotten corrupt as a result. My only option was to start from scratch.

No choice but to move forward.

Other than this being an unexpected expense that I was loathe to undertake and that took me a while to just accept that there was no other option, the rest of this was a calm and rational process, when realistically it could have all been quite a major upheaval. I remember thinking yesterday morning that there was a reason that maybe I didn’t see today for this happening and that if I lost my 10-year-old .pst file, then maybe it was time to let go of the past and start over. And that was surprisingly all okay for me.

The reasons are a life lesson.

First, I was mentally prepared. I had already seen the handwriting on the wall and knew that I needed to make this change. So the only surprise was that I had to make it yesterday, instead of being able to plan and do it on my terms. And, I suspect that’s probably really a good thing, because I know, primarily because of the financial cost, which has really been what’s held me back from doing it before now, I would have put it off indefinitely.

Second, I was physically prepared. Most techies are the worst at backing up their data, even though they preach it to everyone else. I’ve dealt with so many of other people’s critical data losses over the years (I remember a real critical hard drive failure last year with no backup, and I actually put the hard drive in the freezer overnight to see if the malfunction was mechanical and I could overcome that by constriction – yes, it works! – and get the data off) that backing up my own data has always been a no-brainer. I know the cost of losing it.

Third, I was experientially prepared. I’ve done this very process many times in my career in all kinds of settings, companies, and situations. Usually, at least at the individual level, it happens in crisis mode (the person’s having a crisis and I have to be the level head to manage it, which includes helping them on a personal level and taking care of the problem by providing the best solution), and since I’ve always been the crisis manager, I went into that mode as if I were dealing with my situation, not as the personal me, but the professional me. Makes a huge difference in the approach and in having the clarity to ask and answer the right questions quickly.

Funny how life brings you to these moments where you see the culmination of all that’s been before come together to move you from one place to another…a place you want to go, need to go, and should go, but couldn’t get to without a defining and decisive intervening event that makes that the only possible option.

All in all, everything works together for good.

Everything Matters

“Everything matters, everything we do matters.”
Nelson Wright – Flatliners

Indeed. This movie made quite an impression on me the first time I saw it. It was after seeing it that I immediately drew up a DNR and had my doctor sign off on it. I have kept it with me at all times since then. But my DNR and my reasoning are not what this post is about.

It is a confirmation of Nelson’s statement. This post doesn’t deal with a single topic. Instead, it is a snapshot summary of some of the things I’ve been mulling over the past few months out of those everythings that matter (I am working on topical posts on some of the items on the list below, but since those take me much longer, I thought I’d go ahead and do a synopsis of them). Since it may seem quite random, this title and quote seemed the only way to tie it all together.

Attitude and mindset matters. How any of us deals with anyone, any thing, any situation depends largely on our mindsets and our attitudes. When the 12 spies were sent into Canaan (Numbers 13), there was a stark difference between the mindset of Caleb and Joshua and the other 10. Caleb and Joshua had the mindset that this was an opportunity since God had already said He was going to give Israel the land and they trusted that God would keep that promise, as they had seen that He had kept every other promise He’d made up to then. What their human eyes saw as obstacles got canceled by what they believed, from experience, that God would remove those obstacles. The other ten went in with a mindset of looking for problems.

Israel, as a whole, spent their entire time, before and after the exodus looking for problems and grumbling and complaining about everything. That was the national mindset. We see them complaining, at every turn, during the time just before the exodus. When Pharaoh made them make gather the straw to make the bricks and still meet the same quota, the Israelites complained against Moses and God (Exodus 5). Right after God had delivered them from Egypt and the Red Sea was before them and Pharaoh’s army behind them, all they could see was a problem and they responding by complaining. That was the tenor that prevailed among most of the Israelites, so it is no wonder that 5/6′s of the spies had that mindset and attitude going in to explore Canaan.

In fact it was this very mindset and attitude that diverted them from an 11-day journey to the promised land to forty years of basically walking in circles in the desert, until the all of those who were over the age of 20 on that fateful day when the 12 spies came back and gave their reports and recommendations to Moses were dead and buried. And, even during that 40 years, we see that attitude and mindset prevailed time and again.

I’m always amazed when I think about it that Moses didn’t lose his temper more often than he did and, in fact, often begged God to be merciful, using an appeal not upholding the people’s character, but instead upholding God’s. Very different mindset and attitude in him as well. But I have always related to that one instance where he did not do as God had commanded him (to talk to the rock to get water, instead of hitting the rock, as he had done in a previous instance of the people complaining because they didn’t have water) and I understand why. After more than 40 years of listening to this day in and day out, as Moses recalled their record of complaining while standing in front of that rock, I would imagine he got angrier and angrier as he recalled their lack of faith, their ingratitude, their pervasive attitude and mindset, and I have always suspected that his anger turned into rage and he’d hit the rock in absolute outrage before he had even realized he’d done it. And he didn’t go into the promised land either.

I’ve had several instances of this “problem” mindset and attitude lately while I’ve been putting in new software and equipment. I always note it, but I have found that, for the most part, if I ignore it, and the person/people doing it realize that they’re talking to themselves and it’s not getting them anywhere, then they’ll settle down into a wordless sulk. If looks could kill, I’d have died a lot of deaths here lately. A lot of people resist and fight change, even if it’s the right and best thing to do, and will fight tenaciously to hold on to what they know and what is comfortable, even if it’s wrong and making things much harder for them.

One of these instances, though, stood out because it reminded me of what Moses must have felt when he had these people in his face all the time and they simply would not shut up. I had done the upgrades to an entire workgroup in a set of open cubicles (which meant that I could hear all of them well). I noticed the overt hostility on one person’s face when I installed her upgrades. She was unhappy and made no secret of it. As soon as I left her cubicle, she started complaining. The entire time I was up there doing the upgrades (several hours) for the whole group, she complained loudly, interspersing it with some pretty intense cursing at it, at me, at everything. The further I moved away, the louder she got, so I knew she wanted to make sure I knew how unhappy she was about it. Of course, she got angrier and louder because I didn’t respond and I didn’t go back over to give my full intention to her complaining.

By the time I left and walked back downstairs, I was aggravated. Fortunately, I controlled it, but I told the VP of Operations that she had come very close to getting on my last nerve. The VP of Ops was surprised because she remarked that she had never known me to get aggravated or to be anything other than calm. But I was thinking of Moses and marveling again at his patience and self-control listening to that for 40 years day in and day out. I realized I have a long way to get to that level of patience and self-control. But I also realized that attitudes and mindsets – and am applying this to my own – are very powerful things and are in constant need of checking, calibrating, revising, and, in some cases, trashing, and starting over.

Manna was unleavened. It had to be because God fed the Israelites with it 40 years, and the Days of Unleavened Bread came around 40 times and God didn’t switch to something else.

David very likely took his domino dive into sin during the Days of Unleavened Bread. I read an article earlier this week with the title “Spring fighting season to test gains in Afghan war.” It immediately reminded me of II Samuel 11:1 – “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.” (KJV)

This was the month of Abib, in which God commanded the Israelites to keep the Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12) and codified it as part of His feasts in Leviticus 23:4-8. The first month of the Hebrew calendar is Abib. David remained at Jerusalem, while his army went out to battle. We know David was “a man after God’s own heart” (I Samuel 13:13-14; Acts 13:22), so it follows reason that he would have observed the feasts of the Lord (Leviticus 23:4).

Very likely he stayed behind to keep the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread. And it seems very likely that the sins that God gave him time and space to acknowledge and repent of and he didn’t, the same sins that Nathan called him on in II Samuel 12, could have been sins that he didn’t repent of for several years.

When Nathan came to David, the child had already been born (II Samuel 12:15), so at the minimum this was a little over nine months later. However, the reality is that the child could have been older (I had always assumed the child had just been born, but there is nothing to indicate that is the case). In fact, he could have been up to three years old (the traditional age at which a child was weaned), which meant this was a longer affair than we might imagine.

Many of David’s psalms speak of prolonged anguish and are likely written as a result of going through the whole long ordeal of sinning, not repenting, God finally stepping in intervene – perhaps David’s salvation was at critical mass when this happened – David acknowledging, repenting, and pleading with God, no doubt for his life to be taken instead of this innocent child’s, and then God’s answer.

It certainly adds a lot of poignancy to Psalm 51:5 when David says about his own birth: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.” There is the unwritten acknowledgement to God that David deserved to die for his sin, not his son.

It’s our gut reactions and first responses to everything that tell the whole and true story of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Quick example from my own life. Recently someone near and dear to me said that, in a fight with her husband, she threatened to kill him. My first response was not “oh, you can’t kill someone because that would break the commandment ‘you shall not kill.’” Instead my response was “good thing you didn’t do it, because I don’t have any money to bail you out of jail.” I was struck by my own wrong thinking when she said “you know, that’s the same thing one of my other friends said.” Sometimes, I realized, I can believe I’m further down the road to a right way of thinking and being until something like this pops up and I realize I’m not where I thought I was after all. Very humbling, but also very instructive.

We, as a society, continue to immerse ourselves in dishonesty. Truth has been supplanted in every facet of life. Lying, spinning, angling, omitting, twisting have become so commonplace and so acceptable that unless we are hypervigilant, diligently aware, we won’t even recognize it for what it is and will even begin to do it ourselves and believe that it is acceptable and okay. “The end justifies the means” has become the way we live, the way we think, the way we are. It disgusts me because I literally see it everywhere. There is not one part of life it does not touch. I am constantly scanning my own thinking, my own motives, my own attitudes, my own words, my own actions to see if and where this tendency exists in me, because I think fighting against dishonesty in a any way, shape, or form has become one of the foremost battles we fight. And fight constantly. Within and without.

And I’m thinking deeply about and looking at all of these things – and more – because everything matters. Everything we do matters.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – T. S. Eliot

Well, perhaps not the universe, but certainly my own little corner of this planet. Lots of thinking, analyzing, processing, visiting and revisiting different parts of my spiritual and mental landscape to sync them into a cohesive whole that reflects the mind and will of my Creator, and not my own nor anyone else’s. This is the hardest part of an internal upheaval that turns all the tables upside down, trashes the place, and necessitates a reset.

But, as difficult as the process is, the cleansing and fresh start with a lot of the garbage hauled off as the entire place gets gutted again and rebuilt from the ground up, with even stronger and sturdier materials than were used in the last rebuild, with a Contractor Whose work I’m even more familiar with because I’ve been working side by side with Him day in and day out and Whom I trust completely to handle the parts of the renovation that I can’t do (which is most of it – I am truly still just an apprentice who’s still learning the ropes of the basics, but my job is to show up every day and watch and work and learn), it is both necessary and it is a productive endeavor.

A few thoughts here that I’ve been synching. One tree, lots of branches, and not necessarily in the order in which, if you stepped back and looked at the tree, you’d see when you take the whole tree in. Some branches are thick and well-aged while others are new twigs that have emerged from an autumn pruning, before the winds got cold and the snow and ice of winter replaced the sun and rain of summer. Will they all survive? I don’t know. But I do know that the most important thing is that the tree survives the winter and endures until spring when the full measure of its health will be evident.

Branch 1: Life is uncertain at its best and chaotic at its worst. That’s the deck of cards we play with for as long as we’re in the game. Why is that no matter how long we play, eventually getting the same hands over and over, we still start sweating initially when we get a really rotten hand? Logic says that time and experience should help us cope better with the absolutely lousy hands and memory should remind us that it is only one hand, not the entire game, and as quickly as the round comes, it will be over and the next hand is unlikely to be as bad. But we still have to play the hand we have until the round is over.

No matter what we may feel, the deck is not deliberately stacked against us, even if we do get several lousy hands in a row. And experience should tell us that changing out some of the cards doesn’t mean the hand will be better, and often puts us in a worse position than the original hand did. What I find as a card player, I’m learning to try to apply to life.

Get the hand. Look at it. Remain calm and clear-headed. Think about it. Think about how to best use what’s there rather than making things worse by trying to make them better. Breathe. Don’t allow the other players to psyche you out or bluff you. The odds are good their hands aren’t any better than yours and they could be even worse.

Do the math. The fewer cards you have in your hand, the fewer opportunities for you to improve your hand if you start trading cards. For example, in five-card draw, the maximum number of cards you can trade is three, unless you have an Ace, and then you can trade four. That doesn’t give you a whole lot of wiggle room to go from an awful hand to a great hand. The rest of the deck that lousy hand came from still lies face down with potentially worse cards than the ones your holding.

There’s always that moment of confusion and indecision that you have to wrestle with. In life, I’ve learned to take those to God because there are places where I know I’m stuck, I know I don’t know what to do, and I know whatever I do on my own is going to end up being probably the absolutely worst thing I can do. I need a tie-breaker, and God’s the best tie-breaker I have at my disposal.

I’ve learned that if I don’t get lousy hands on a regular basis, I don’t know how to play them the best I can. I don’t learn anything new – about the game, about the skills, about myself. I also can get very smug about winning all the time and can actually deceive myself into thinking that it’s all because of me – my skill, my ability, my intelligence, my everything.

A regular retinue of lousy hands keeps me humble and helps me to remember more accurately exactly where and how I fit into the big picture of things and it reminds me that I’m not all that. We all need the lousy hands to remind us of our limitations, of our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, and our need for something more than we can ever be of and by ourselves.

Branch 2: There must be a balance between the head (logic) and the heart (emotions) and that’s the hardest balance to achieve, and impossible without God’s help. As I’ve said in a previous post, I’m definitely ruled by my head. I will always be more of a “head” person than a “heart” person just because that’s how I’m built (and definitely where I’m most comfortable). I think there is a need – for the big fit in the plan – for people who are more “head” than “heart” and more “heart” than “head” to achieve the overall balance until we get that precise balance when we are transformed by Christ and then everyone will be in perfect sync.

Until recently, though, I haven’t really been aware of how pervasive primarily “heart” people seem to be. My guess is it’s probably always been that way and I either ignored it or I just didn’t notice it.

But maybe the recognition has to do with a little balancing of my own. I don’t process information, not do I make decisions, based on emotions, mine or anyone else’s. Emotions are never what I would choose as a guide, as a driving force, as something reliable, or dependable. Emotions are necessary, but they have a limited function that is short-lived. Their role is to serve as a brief spark to overcome inertia, but they do not have the stability or longevity to be the engine to keep something in motion. We seem to live in world where emotions have replaced logic and reason as the engine and it’s no wonder we find ourselves in this mess we’ve made because we’ve turned the whole process upside down from what it’s supposed to be.

But, having said that, I think my recognition of the emotional bias that seems to dominant society in how it takes its next step is because I’ve moved a little more in balance in the “heart” area in the last year or so, because I’ve not only had to deal with a bombardment of my own sparks, but with a bombardment of others’ sparks, and in the process, I’ve had to learn how to better deal with them because I just ran out of room to stuff them all down out of the way and suck it up and go on.

I am still a logician at heart. How’s that for an oxymoron? But because I’ve had no choice (well, I had a choice not to, but had I opted for that choice, I would have not survived it) but to deal with the emotional side of things because of the avalanche of them that I’ve had to deal with in my recent past, I have learned that being emotional of and by itself is not awful. I have fine-tuned my understanding of emotions’ role in our lives. Without emotion, we cannot be connected in meaningful ways to each other and to God. Words that come to mind are understanding, empathy, compassion, tenderness, gentleness, kindness, sympathy, to name a few.

The real key is knowing when emotions are appropriate and when they are not. Emotional connections are important and necessary. They strengthen the bond of all of our relationships. Emotional outbursts and life choices are the worst things any of us can impose on ourselves and others. The issue, then, is one of self-control.

Just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I have license to spew the venom of that anger all over any one else. Just because I’m sad doesn’t mean I have license to use that sadness to manipulate and try to control others. Just because I’m happy doesn’t mean I have license to annoy the rest of the known world with pollyanish exuberance and syrupy pronouncements. Paul makes a statement in I Cor. 9:19-23 that helps me put this in perspective – I am to be a servant to everyone, meeting each person and their needs where they are, not where I am. And that really means, for me practically, losing my own self-absorption, self-centeredness, and selfishness. It’s not all about me. Tough to do, but absolutely necessary.

Branch 3: In the postmortem of “significant” situations or events, I continue to be amazed at the sheer numbers of random people who were privy to every single detail of the event: every meeting, every phone call, every email, every conversation, perhaps even every breath taken throughout the entire situation or event. I always find myself wondering, as another random person, how come I never get the same invitations these people got?

Obviously, I’m being facetious. No such thing happened or happens. However, in our new-normal-world of spin and deception, random people, by their absolute and definitive statements on things about which there is absolutely no way they could know even a fraction of the facts, much less everything, about, project the image of being intimate insiders, and therefore, qualified authorities and unquestioningly believable. Unfortunately, for people who’ve willingly surrendered their own abilities to research exhaustively, verify as to veracity, prove or disprove, and put all the evidence together (think) to render an objective summary of the facts, these “experts” are strong persuaders and actually end up doing a lot of damage (and the people who abrogate their abilities in favor of them are just as culpable) with their spin, omissions, half-truths, and boldface lies.

I don’t understand this, so there’s no analysis here. I hope I never understand it. If I do, please end my misery in whatever way you see fit.

Branch 4: I am appalled at what we (the Western world primarily, and “Christians” specifically) do in the name of God and Christ. We seem to be in a modern era of Crusades in the “Christian” sector of the Western world.

I put quotes around the word Christian to make a point: there is little resemblance between a lot of what is being said and done in God’s and Christ’s name that actually reflects either of Them and who They are (which we know from Their word, which is a testimony of Them).

From churches (collectively and individually) that set up protests at every funeral of soldiers or public figures with signs that say “God Hates America,” “United You’ll Fall,” “God Mocks America,” and “God is Your Enemy,” to churches (collectively and individually) that politic, manipulate implicitly and explicitly with every form of dishonesty, and malign maliciously and accuse each other from within until they implode, all in the name of God and in the name of Christianity, the only obvious thing is that God and Christ are nowhere to be found. And they are all guilty of breaking the 3rd commandment – “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” (Exodus 20:7 – NIV) – by misusing (blaspheming, profaning, bring shame upon) God’s name.

God’s not here. Neither is Christ. This is just human nature on steroids in its rawest and ugliest forms. To be an accuser is to be like Satan (Revelation 12:10). To be dishonest in any way is to be like Satan (John 8:44). To malign, to destroy someone else (reputation, character, etc.) by inference or by implicit or explicit means is to be like Satan (also John 8:44 – murder by character assassination is, in my very humble opinion, more painful than someone walking up and taking one’s life). To be unforgiving, or to make forgiveness, which is my responsibility independent of what anyone else does, conditional on another person doing something first, is the total opposite of God’s instruction (Matthew 6:14-16, Luke 6:37, Mark 11:25).

So when we say we’re “Christians” or “God’s people,” we claim the names of God and Christ as identifiers and proclaim ourselves to represent Them. If we’re modern Crusaders as described above, then we again are liars when we say we represent God and Christ and we abuse Their names by who we are and what we do. And we should all be ashamed. For anyone who claims that behavior (speech and action) aren’t all that important (if they’re not, then what is?), then they’re deceiving themselves. Because what we say and what we do (and we all sin and fall short, so no one’s perfect here, especially not me) routinely shows who and what we are on the inside (Matthew 15:18-20) and whether we’re for real or just masqueraders.

We all have a long way to go and a lot of work to do. I have a long way to go and have a lot of work to do. But until I know at least some of the scope of the work, I can’t effectively start doing it. I’ve got a framework now to apply to my own work and, leaving the universe alone for a while, will get down to the business of doing it.

A Certain Point of View

Luke: “Obi-Wan! Why didn’t you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father!“
Obi-Wan: “Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.“
Luke: “A certain point of view?!“
Obi-Wan: “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.“
Return of the Jedi

The first Star Wars trilogy (episodes IV, V, and VI) intrigued me from the first movie (which I reluctantly decided to finally watch several years after it came out because I refused to be swept up in the mass hysteria its debut generated, assuming, in a rare misstep in this arena, that anything that popular had to be something dumbed down and would be a waste of my time) through the third one because it gave me a lot of food for thought about human nature – my nature – about, believe it or not, my spiritual walk. The quote above has been very much on my mind lately and I’ve realized now why this particular quote struck me pretty deeply even the first time I heard it.

We expect the “bad guys” to lie to, mislead, spin, and deceive us. Sadly, we live in a society where that’s the norm and the “bad guys” abound. We have easily-identifiable “bad guys.”

A politician, for instance, is inherently a “bad guy,” because he or she has to be a skillful liar to get votes, They all are dishonest (with dishonesty, it either is or isn’t, there is no “kind of” or “sort of” – the truth is the truth and anything else is a lie). Americans seem not have a problem with that, which astounds me, and excuse it with “well, I’m taking the lesser of the two evils.” Evil is evil. Like dishonesty, there are no degrees. To choose any evil means a rejection of good.

Wall Street and most financial institutions, after the 2008 economic crash-and-burn, has a lot of “bad guys.” No one trusts them because they’ve shown themselves to be untrustworthy with our money, and while we’re stilling reeling from the real economic losses, they are somehow posting record profits and still paying themselves outrageous salaries at our expense.

Big oil companies are “bad guys.” Again, while the rest of the country and world has taken a huge personal economic hit, they’ve consistently posted record profits. Now that BP is denying more claims than it’s accepting in the wake of last summer’s oil spill, they too have just posted a profit in the last quarter.

I could go on about all the easily-identifiable “bad guys” are, but the list would be all this post would be about, so I will stop here. However, when we know who the “bad guys” are, we know automatically not to trust them, not to believe them, and, in fact, to steer as clear of them as possible. And that knowledge is what makes Obi-Wan’s statement so devastating to Luke…and to us, not only in this context, but in the larger context of what it represents.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader makes the stunning statement of “I am your father” to Luke as he is overtly trying to get Luke to join him on the Empire’s side. Darth Vader, a “bad guy,” is being honest and transparent. He has no hidden agenda. He states the facts exactly as they are.

When Obi-Wan, a “good guy,” tells Luke that truth is relative, depending on one’s point of view or perspective, he casually dismisses his dishonesty with an implication that it’s for the greater good (Luke’s and the rebellion’s). But is it?

By lying to Luke, he does several things. First, he makes Luke question everything, including his loyalty to the rebel cause and the integrity of the “good guys.” When Luke – and we – go back to Star Wars, Obi-Wan’s relativity with regard to honesty and transparency are obvious. Although C3P-0 and R2D2 lead to the meeting between Obi-Wan and Luke, everything that follows afterward is designed to bring Luke (whom Obi-Wan knows is Darth Vader’s son), unknowingly, into the ranks of the rebels. Even Han Solo is manipulated into participating in an in-your-face move against the Empire when they all go in to rescue Princess Leia.

Another thing that is withheld from Luke (and from his twin sister) is that Princess Leia is his sister, which makes their kiss at the end of Star Wars really gross and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how this could have easily caused a huge problem had a romantic relationship between them developed. The weak explanation that Obi-Wan gives for this omission doesn’t cut it and again points to a character flaw that includes spinning and omitting the truth and justifying that it is okay because it’s for a greater good.

The second thing that Obi-Wan’s “relative truth” statement does is erode Luke’s trust. If this is not the truth, then is anything else that the Jedis and rebels have told him true? It immediately puts him on guard and forces him to analyze everything they say to him for veracity.

The third thing is the most damaging because that it totally throws conventional wisdom (the generally accepted belief or opinion about something – in this case, who is trustworthy and who is not) out the window. Conventional wisdom says “good guys” are honest and can be trusted and “bad guys” are dishonest and can’t be trusted. Here, the “bad guy” is honest and the “good guy” is dishonest and the result is that it’s hard to know if either can be trusted.

While this discussion of a trilogy of movies may seem irrelevant to real life, it in fact is not. Because we find ourselves in this situation continually in life now. And the “good guys” participate in this as freely and as willingly as the “bad guys.” I’ve seen this most of my life and, as a result, like most Thirteeners (http://www.fourthturning.com/), have developed a natural mistrust of most things most people say, especially those in positions of power and authority. Everything strikes us as “Wag the Dog” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/synopsis).

We know, for example, that Roosevelt’s New Deal was actually a series of testing competing financial theories that Roosevelt, who was actually not qualified by education, experience, or intelligence to lead any country out of economic depression, took a gambling man’s stance on. We also know that he was severely handicapped by polio, a fact deceptively hidden by everyone during his presidency. We know the facts about the Korean and Vietnam wars and how America got into them. We know the facts about Watergate. We know the facts about the Gulf War, about Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We’ve had bellies full of lies, perspectives, spinning, omissions.

Let me hasten to add, though, that although we have the ability to be (not that we often take advantage of it) savvy to the deception and dishonesty of others, we have not yet conquered our own individual self-deceptions and self-dishonesties. That is the heart of the matter because that’s where these bigger lies and dishonesties come from. Each of us has a responsibility for them and a blame in them.

So, how much of our lives is lived, viewed, decided upon from a certain point of view? How much of what we know – or think we know – has been shaped by “a certain point of view?” How much of what we believe to be true is only from a “certain point of view?” Do we know? Do we care? Are we willing to go beyond what we see, hear, think we know – outside the comfort zone of our lives’ experience – to ensure that what we base our lives on is unshaded, unskewed, unmanipulated truth?

These are the questions each of us must ask ourselves. How we answer them depends on how willing, even at the risk of having closely-held opinions and illusions shattered, we are to be completely honest with ourselves. The return to honesty, truth, and accuracy begins at the individual level. We must be willing to look at ourselves critically and impartially. We must be willing to listen to ourselves for where the roots of our own tendencies to spin and manipulate truth lie. We must be willing to examine, analyze, and think through our own webs of deceit and correct them. Then we must be willing to take on all the rest of the webs that are around us.

It’s a painful process and it can reveal things that we may not want to know about ourselves. It takes hard, diligent, continual work to unravel all our own webs and then ensure we don’t create any new ones. Unraveling the webs around us is even more daunting and tiring, but it is, in the end, the only way to get to “truth.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and everywhere I look, I see spinning, angling, half-truths, half-lies, a certain point of view that any thinking, any logical, any rational person – if he or she has not been anesthetized, by society, by culture, by boredom, by laziness, or by indifference – can break down and unravel in a heartbeat. And, yet, almost no one does this anymore. I shake my head within myself and ask “why not?” I also ask “how can you not see what is so obvious?”

But there are no answers in return. The silence is a sound that is deafening. We have accepted spin, perspective, the careless or conscious construct of information so that it supports our own personal opinions, ideas, and agendas wholeheartedly, with no regard for whether it is honest, truthful, accurate (see http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/10/truth-and-the-art-of-the-social-network/64701/ for a very insightful article from September 2010′s The Atlantic into this subject).

And now the “good guys” are doing it just as much as the “bad guys,” so we’re thrown into chaos and confusion that leads to the question “can I really believe any human being?”

The answer is “no.” To be more precise, the answer is “no, not without independent and impartial verification of truth.” If none of us mere mortals is predisposed to tell the truth, then where is the independent and impartial verification of truth that must be used as the ultimate source of truth?

Fortunately, we have an irrefutable source of truth and that is God’s word. While it doesn’t go into every situation we may find ourselves uniquely in, it does give us principles to apply to discern credibility and truth.

It has occurred to me that one of the prevailing flaws, even among those who God said such things about as “he (Abraham) is my friend” and “he (David) is a man after my own heart” is the lack of consistent honesty. Abraham lied about Sarah being his wife. Isaac lied about Rebecca being his wife. Jacob lied about so many things I don’t have time to recount them all here. These were overt acts.

But Jacob and David are more like the spin we see today.

Jacob actively manipulated every situation in his life (we see the same trait in Rebecca, who was a distant cousin of Isaac, and Laban, Jacob’s uncle and Rebecca’s brother) until God started working with him. We see him manipulate Esau, manipulate and lie to Isaac (with Rebecca’s help), even try to manipulate God (“if you will take care of me, then I’ll give you a tenth of everything”), then manipulate his uncle and his wives. The chickens came home to roost when Laban tried to manipulate him both in marriage and in livestock. This, I think, was where Jacob understood how God saw his dishonesty, his spinning, his manipulating. We don’t see it after that in him, but we see it extant in his children.

David sinned. To cover the sin, he tried to manipulate Uriah into a position where it would never be discovered. When Uriah didn’t cooperate (he didn’t know!), then David sinned again by having him killed. And apparently, until Nathan came to him and got in his face about it, felt absolutely no remorse or guilt about it.

But David was a man after God’s own heart! How could it be that even a twinge of guilt isn’t apparent? Because the people we spin, manipulate, use “relative truth” on the most are ourselves. Jeremiah was absolutely right when he said the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Each of us has the tendency to justify our thoughts, words, and actions because we learn from the time we’re able to think how to make everything fit and be okay, even if it doesn’t and it is not.

What’s the remedy? Well, unless God intervenes and shows us our own dishonesty, our own spin, our own “relative truths,” our own omissions, our own faulty perceptions, there is no remedy. And God promises that for all of us – not all now, but at some point in time. But, for those of us for whom He has intervened now, this work of excising spin, dishonesty, “relative truth,” faulty perspectives, omission is a paramount part of our lives. When we slack off, quit caring, or allow the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life (e.g., greed, power, money, competition, pride and arrogance, etc.) to get in the way, we not only hurt ourselves and others, but we also hurt God. We disappoint others and we disappoint Him. And we move away from being in sync, at one, in harmony with Him.

The further away from God we either deliberately go or carelessly drift, the closer we move toward the attitude and fruits of Satan: accusation, condemnation, willing to say or do anything (outright lying) to get what we want, chaos, confusion, war, eliminating anyone and anything that stands in our way, no humility (although we may occasionally give lip-service to it), and no self-control.

We’re all guilty of this from time to time. I am guilty of this. It’s such an easy thing to get sucked into because it’s part of my human nature. But the tale of the tale is what I do when God helps me to realize it, because I have a choice. I can either recognize it and ask for God’s forgiveness and help to change it – moving back to being in sync and at one with Him – or I can ignore it and keep going my own way. If I choose to go my own way and continually refuse to change, no matter how many opportunities I have, there will come a time when I simply won’t realize or care that it’s wrong. It will have become so much a part of who and what I am – my character – that there will be nothing else to turn back to. At that point, I will be exactly like Satan – in full rebellion against God. As Yoda says inThe Empire Strikes Back, “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice [Darth Vader].”

That’s the sobering part of all of this to me. Just because this nature is in me and just because this is now the essence of the world – geopolitically, economically, socially, culturally, and religiously – I now live in doesn’t make it right or acceptable.

So there’s the battle. The challenge for me is whether I fight or surrender. I choose to fight.

Fragile

“Six thoughts at once I can’t focus on one
Seven days a week but my life has just begun
So caught in emotion and I’m overcome
As I’m falling down I come undone

Sometimes I feel like I’m alone
Sometimes I feel like I’m not that strong
Sometimes I feel so frail so small
Sometimes I feel vulnerable
Sometimes I feel a little fragile
A little fragile

In six thousand years what will this mean
Words from the heart or a melody
So caught in emotion and I’m overcome
As I’m falling down I come undone”
Fragile -Delta Goodrem

 

I never realized how fragile Mom was nor how fragile Deb is. Maybe that it why I couldn’t understand why they have affected me as profoundly and deeply (bothering me to no end constantly)  as they have, as they always have, as they do. Maybe the lesson of all of this – Mom’s entry into a world that is so bizarre, yet so familiar, because it is a past I recognize, even when in the present she sees me when I am not there and she looks for Daddy and Deb’s now-diagnosed PSTD – probably past and present – because she, I think, has always had a most delicate psyche…much more so than mine…to my surprise, because I always thought of her as being stronger, psychologically, than me, and now I realize that I am the stronger one. She draws her courage from alcohol and sedatives (which she, I believe, needs), while I deal with everything as it comes, relying on God, aware that the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications she is now taking never worked for me, because my issues are not only thyroid-related, but ultimately pituitary and hypothalamus-related, and nothing, so far, will touch that.

People have always remarked that they believed Mom and I were most alike in our patchwork little family of five that life, circumstances, and, ultimately, God put together. Nothing, as I’ve learned, could be further from the truth. Do we have a strong bond? Absolutely! Just as I have a strong blood bond with Deb. But my bond with each of them is not one of temperament nor of personality. I dare say our bonds, instead, are forged from sheer tenacity because we all refused to abandon the quest to form and cement them.

I’ve realized, surprisingly, over the past few months that it was really Daddy and me who were most alike in many, many ways. Perhaps he recognized that long before I did, and it was why, in what we both knew would be our last face-to-face conversation in this life, as we held hands sitting at the kitchen table, that he asked me to promise him that I’d take care of Mom when he was gone.

I’ve made a only a handful of promises in my life. Because of my personality and my natural predisposition to keep my commitments to a minimum and most relationships at an arm’s length so I can walk or run away guiltless if it gets too intense, too much for me to handle, too uncomfortable, too strong, too unbearable, I realize, perhaps more than most, the seriousness behind promises and commitments. They are not to be undertaken lightly, without thoughtful consideration, without, as fully as a person is able at any point in time, understanding what they mean.

Because that level of agreement is a reflection of character, reliability, and dependability. And if there’s any doubt in my mind in any situation as to whether I can reflect those three things consistently and continually, then I won’t do it. It’s that important.

There have been many times in the last year or so that my promise to Daddy has been severely tested. There have been many times that I’ve felt I let him down because no matter what I did, I couldn’t make things right for Mom. I have, in the solitude of my car and my house, sobbed and apologized to him and to God and my failures to keep things on an even keel, to provide the calm and reassurance that were Daddy’s gifts to Mom and to our family nagged at me and sent me deep inside myself to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. I begged, pleaded, cried for God to help me because it was clear I was losing ground and everything was spiraling out of control, and I suddenly realized it was all bigger than me and my abilities.

I remember walking outside about 2 am on a Sunday morning in July after days of increasing hell with Mom, knowing something drastic needed to be done, but knowing I couldn’t do it. As my stomach churned with anxiety, my head pounded with a non-stop barrage of thoughts, and my heart raced as I tried to slow my breathing, get some much-needed oxygen in, realizing that I would not sleep that night, I simply said “God, I need your help. Something needs to be done. I don’t know what to do. I’m not even sure if I did I could. Please intervene.” And a little over five hours later, I got His answer of “Okay, I’m on it.”

The time since then has been a time of adjustment, analysis, watchfulness, and review. Not just of Mom, but of myself, and my siblings and how we’ve dealt with it. Which is how this post came about.

We all five had fragile hearts, easily shattered. But, in many ways, it is from there that our individual paths diverged. Mom and Deb also had fragile temperaments, which they always tried to mask with defensiveness and – I won’t go as far as saying bullying – but it was certainly a hammering away at people until they capitulated by mentally or literally walking away. In that way, they were always able to have the last word, and, therefore, the feeling that they were right and they’d won.

Those two things were important, and in their pursuit of them, they could inflict a lot of pain. Daddy and I, I guess, could take a lot of pain. We’d both take the broken, shattered pieces of our hearts, put them back together as best we could, ignoring the gaps, the fragments we couldn’t find, aware that the image they now projected was marred by the breaks and our own inability to repair them completely, then we suited up again mentally and walked right back into the war we’d just lost the last battle in. Like Daddy, I wonder if this heart that I’ve buried, the storms of life that I’ve just sucked up and gone on in, the endless “stuff” that I’ve pushed down and away will be what betrays me at the end when it, I simply can’t physically take any more. Who knows?

Elaine was/is different from us all in her temperament. Growing up, Elaine seemed to have the strongest bond with Daddy (being the oldest, and for seven months, only child) and I seemed to have the strongest bond with Mom, while Deb, being the literal middle child, seemed to be somewhere in between them and, depending on what was going on among us kids, either allied with Elaine or me against me or Elaine. I realize now that had to have been hard for her, useful only when a majority was needed, and bought with the best offer. When I look at the things I did as a kid – the bribing, the threatening, the wheeling and dealing, the games – I am ashamed and appalled that those things were ever a part of who I was. Whoever says kids are innocent and pure didn’t see me in action with Elaine and Deb. Of course, knowing that was there then has made me hyper-aware and hyper-vigilant about making sure that no vestiges remain in my adult self because I see, I know, I understand how wrong it all was. I have asked for forgiveness from both of them.

Elaine took her fragile heart and and at some point just chose to hide it away for good, where it couldn’t be reached, couldn’t be touched, couldn’t be broken anymore. What is left is someone who simply makes connections – not permanent – as a means to an end. And I don’t mean to disparage her in any way. It’s just who she’s become as life as gone on. Every relationship decision is based on “what’s in it for me?”

That’s not a criticism. It’s simply an observation. We all cope differently. But, in hiding her heart away, she has become very polarized in how she responds to things.

Elaine and I had a conversation last week and she has cast me as being the extreme “good guy” in all of this. I always gently point out that I am not doing everything alone and there is much credit to give to other people, including Deb, who while she has not taken on a lion’s share, offers to help and does try to get here on regular basis to see Mom.

She immediately lambasted Deb for something she’d done a few weeks ago – which I also got upset about – and dismissed her completely. I tried to explain the gist of this post to her (it’s been on my mind since Deb’s visit in August) and explain that although I knew there were controllable, complicating factors, the reality is that Deb’s just not as psychologically and emotionally strong as we are, and instead of anger, I actually felt great compassion and empathy and could not wait until the time when Deb was healed and we could start over and move forward.

Elaine didn’t budge and didn’t agree, but I see the connection between how Mom and Deb are built – Mom, who has been irreparably, in this lifetime, scarred and damaged from a childhood that I can only describe as a living hell and Deb, who must have gotten the less sturdy and less resilient temperament and genes that I see in my youngest brother (my oldest sister, who in temperament, approach to life and people, and resiliency I am most like, lost her oldest and youngest sons in their 20′s and is a great example of survival and bouncing back) – and from the great empathy and compassion I’ve developed for Mom, I’ve been able to apply that to Deb. It doesn’t mean I agree with, endorse, approve of her outbursts and attacks, but I understand better that it comes from a deep place inside that she didn’t ask for, but ended up with anyway.

When Daddy felt vulnerable or threatened, he just put one foot in front of the other, biding his time until he could try to right things again, if the relationship mattered to him. Interestingly enough, I’ve found I do exactly the same thing. Mom mattered enough that each day I would leave when things escalated and I realized it would only get worse and me being there would make it worsen, I’d always say “I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow.” And no matter how upset I was with the cumulative and unfixable spiral, I’d go right back in the next day and start over.

When Mom and Deb feel vulnerable or threatened, they attack. The more they feel it, the worse the attack. They actually, unconsciously I think, try to provoke other people into getting so angry and so upset that their response validates what Mom and Deb believe, and it gives them the sense of rightness about their feelings of being threatened or vulnerability. It’s a weird thing that I don’t understand, but as I’ve come to realize that’s what’s going on, I’ve worked very deliberately to talk myself down when either of them are doing it and willing myself into not being sucked in. Silence is my defense and it initially elicits a lot more anger, a lot more obvious provoking, and much deeper and well-placed attacks. But, if I can outlast them, eventually they quit because they’re not getting what they need to close the loop internally.

Elaine, when threatened or feeling vulnerable, just shuts down and shuts everyone out for good. I can actually understand that on one level, because initially I do the same thing, but once I get past the initial need to protect myself, if the people/relationships are important to me (I have had people/relationships, especially in my career, where I shut down for good until I could get out because it wasn’t going to change and the potential for damage was greater than the odds of repair), I realize I can’t stay shut down and have any kind of meaningful interaction with the person. Elaine, it seems, only has an on/off switch, and there’s nothing in between. And that makes me sad because I know she too is the product of something she didn’t ask for, but, for now, is stuck with.

The point? We’re all fragile. We’re all damaged. None of us handle any of this with anything near the right way, near the perfection of our Creator. And I think that’s the lesson: we can’t, we won’t do it without help. We don’t know how. All that we’ve learned and adopted in this human life hasn’t solved a thing. Something bigger, smarter, righter, stronger than us – Christ – is the only hope we have of any real change, any real repair, any real progress.

My prayer continues to be for His imminent return, not just for me, not just for my family, not just for my friends, but indeed for all humanity, because we are just a microcosm of what the entire human race is suffering through right now. If we look and we’re aware, it should be obvious that Solomon’s assertion that there is nothing new under the sun is true and, although we’re unique in many ways, we share the overriding similarity of the need for restoration to the original specifications that God created us with and intended for us to have, until we decided we knew best how to design and develop ourselves.

What a mistake! And what an awesome fix awaits us.

Numb

“I’m tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless lost under the surface
Don’t know what you’re expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)”
Numb – Linkin Park

I’m sitting here reeling, unable to stop the snippets of all the words that have been hurled at me in the last few days in what truly felt like a siege that I am relieved is physically over, but in my mind and my soul will not be over for some time. I am battered, wounded, questioning whether I have ever done anything right and whether I even know how to do anything right. Right at this moment it seems that my entire time on this planet has been a waste because I have heard nothing but how much of a screw-up I am for the last four or five days.

All I’ve heard about is the past three years and every single thing you believe that I have done wrong – and you were quick to point out that you were right and badgered and belittled me at every turn with the point being that “you need to admit all the things you’re wrong about and all the things I’m right about” –  and been wrong about. I have not had a verbal beating like this – even from Mom at her worst – in a very long time. It was effective. You opened deep wounds in my heart and in my soul and the blood is still flowing unchecked.

They are not fatal wounds, but the scars and the pain will be there the rest of my life, reminding me of this battle – one that I tried to avoid, one that I kept sidestepping, one that I knew was lurking waiting for the alcohol to open the door for you to attack with all your fury.

I hate what alcohol does to you, but I also realize that it brings out the real you. All of your perceptions of how you’ve been wronged, you’ve been treated unfairly. It brings out all the anger you hold just below the surface and the hate – yes, hate – you harbor against me, against Mom, against Elaine. In your inebriated version of yourself, you are the injured party, the unheralded hero of everything true and good, the one who deserves adulation and credit for being right while everyone else is wrong.

In short, you are perfect and we – Elaine and I – are dismal examples of the worst imperfections that human beings can possess. No one recognizes this, of course, and that is partly why you’re angry. The other part of your anger comes from your belief that people are giving us undue credit and attention because we are deceiving them into thinking we’re “all that,” while it is really you who alone is “all that.” The reality that you bombarded me with again and again over the past several days, which no one sees and you can’t understand why, is that we are simply nothings and nobodies who shouldn’t even be wasting oxygen on the planet because we fail at everything.

Your anger and indignation over the past you perceive drives who and what you are. It simmers right underneath the surface, awaiting the key of alcohol to bring it to the surface in a full, rolling boil. And there is nothing that can assuage it. Silence makes you angrier. Reason makes you angrier. Logic makes you angrier. Perspective makes you angrier. Attempts to set the factual record straight make you angrier. Frustration, of which I was finally guilty last night because I allowed my emotions to overtake my reason, makes you angrier. There is no resolution for you – even if, in the sobriety of daylight, you say it’s over and done with and admit that you can be “too harsh.”

Because the next time we’re in the same place and you’ve spent half the day and half the night drinking, just as it has been all our adults lives both with the distant past and in the past couple of years, the recent past, you will initiate the same battle all over again.

Nothing is ever finished with you. There is never closure, finality, an end. There are just lulls in the war, and we – Elaine and I – are weary, wary, and unwilling combatants. You have never understood this. Perhaps you never will in this life. But it is one of the primary reasons we, time and again, distance ourselves from you. It’s just never completely safe to be around you.

You make strong and sometimes unreasonable statements and demands when you’re drunk in one breath. They come as all-out assaults after warning shots that are clear indications that is going to be the final result. Once you’ve moved into full attack position and begin to pound me, no one and nothing exists but you. When and if I acknowledge valid points or statements, you attack me and my character. You accuse me of being selfish. You accuse me of being unable to change. You accuse me of lying. You accuse me of pride. You accuse me of always being wrong.

Even when I say nothing, you accuse. It’s an untenable situation.

I will always love you, but I often don’t like you. You want glory and recognition because you believe that you know it all about everything and you’re right about everything (and continually demand and try to coerce admissions from Elaine and me that we are clueless and therefore always wrong). You believe that taking care of Mom is all about who gets credit and, in fact, made sure this time to give me a long laundry list of everything I am currently doing wrong, that I don’t understand, and made sure to tell me several times that I’ve let her down and am letting her down because I didn’t recognize the dementia soon enough and I allowed her too much freedom and independence to make her own decisions for too long, and therefore, I am solely responsible for any bad and unwise decisions that she may have made.

The thing you will never understand and I’ve given up trying to explain to you – besides my only statement that I’ve said until I’m blue in the face: “the past is the past and it can’t be undone so all talk about that is meaningless – what we can do something about is here and now and the future, and that is the only thing that matters,” which just brings a fresh rehash assault of everything you believe I have done wrong for the past three years – is that, unlike you, I refuse to try to take control of someone else’s life.

You accuse me of wanting to fix things and believing Mom will get better. Neither, in this case, could be further than the truth. You accuse me of not accepting reality. That too is untrue. Then you proceed to tell me that you “should have taken control” three or four years ago and forced me to let Mom move to Charlotte. You literally said that I kept her here and implied that I was controlling her.

You obviously don’t know Mom and you don’t know me. You are projecting your own need to control other people, by whatever means necessary (hence the alcohol and the indefensible attacks). No human being, not even Daddy, ever told Mom what to do. She made her own decisions. Being of a very similar temperament, which is one of the deeper connections she and I have, I’ve always understood that and I’ve always treated her the way I wanted to be treated. The minute anyone even looks like they’re trying to control me, I either fight or run or both. I simply will not give that right, which belongs only to my Dad and Older Brother because I recognize how much I need their help, input, and character to exercise self-control, to another human being, And neither will Mom.

Mom asked Elaine and me to promise a long time ago that she would never end up with you. She has expressed that to me on more occasions than I can recall and has reiterated it often in the last several years. She watched (and I saw) the way you and Yvette treated Yvette’s dad and the anger and hostility and total control you both openly expressed toward and forced on him as he descended further into Alzheimer’s and Lewy Body. It made her very angry to see the way you mistreated him, and she emphatically said again and again that she did not want to end up with you two in Charlotte.

Her fear of losing me since she knows I have a lot less heartbeats than I should have because of the Graves’ Disease and it is an illness that some day very likely may (and today, I would not mind that as long as I just barely outlive her) escalate into my early death and her ending up with you was something that she talked with me about often. That fear is prominent in my mind, and as long as Elaine or I breathe for a living, we will be the ones who ensure that Mom is taken care of. I would move Mom to Tacoma in a heartbeat if I realized I wasn’t going to be able to outlive her. If her money runs out, then I’ll figure out something somewhere other than Charlotte. That is her express wish and I’m going to honor it.

Of course, I’m saying that here and you’ll never hear it because you can’t handle the truth. All that exists for you is your reality and it’s a reality that is shared with no one else in your family. You have alienated Elaine and she has figured out a better way to avoid dealing with you altogether. You increasingly are alienating me. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, but the whole “blood is thicker than water” thing just isn’t true. I trust my inner circle of friends, who have become and are family, with everything. I know, as sad as it is and as hard as it is for me to accept and remember, that I can’t really trust you at all. While I recognize that some of this is beyond your control, it still is a present reality I have to not forget. I want, when Mom’s gone, to be at a safe and mostly unreachable distance from you where my exposure to your attacks and accusations is limited, because it’s not physically, emotionally, or spiritually healthy for me.

One of the most profound statements that I’ve ever heard is “forgiveness takes just one person, but reconciliation takes two or more, and forgiveness does not mean reconciliation.” I have forgiven you unconditionally. But, I realize you and I will not be reconciled in this life, nor will you and Elaine be reconciled in this life. That’s the reality.

I’m not angry. I’m sad. But, even in my sadness, I know not all hope is lost. A day is coming when you will have the first steps of healing (and I will be finished being healed because I have not yet mastered the right way to handle your attacks all the time) and when our breaches will be repaired. I can’t do either now. As long as your thinking is what it is and alcohol retains its supreme grip on you (it is your god and, right now, nothing can replace it), there is no path to resolution, no path to reconciliation. But, I have the faith, the hope, the knowledge, that at another place, another time, which makes the fall holy days so real to me, this too shall pass.

Mad World

“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very mad world”
Mad World – Tears for Fears

Odd song. Odd choice. Oddly out of character for me to refer to a song by a group whose music I find, in general, superficial, trite, and over-synthesized. This song was included on a CD that a friend from NY made for me. In the note that accompanied the CD, he explained why he’d chosen the songs he included and specifically said about this one “I know you strongly dislike Tears for Fears and I understand all the reasons why, but you need to listen to this song, to get past the music, and listen to the words, because I cannot hear it without thinking of you.”

I cringed the first time I listened to it because I couldn’t past the music. But, I knew I had to figure out what was so compelling about it that it reminded him of me. I Google’d the lyrics and I got it. The lyrics did sound like me in my more introspective and sometimes darker moments of this life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these words for the past couple of months or so (writing is a very lengthy and intricate process for me because I develop the ideas, key points, and structure mentally before I go to the keyboard, and if all I’m doing is rehashing, rephrasing something that’s already been said, then I won’t do it because it doesn’t add anything or bring anything new to the table) as many things have crashed simultaneously into my brain from every direction, creating an intense cacophonous mental maze that I’ve been forced, because I don’t tolerate chaos – the “circles” these lyrics refer to – anywhere in my life very well nor for very long, to sort, process, and as best as I am able, extract the meanings.

This is a incredibly mentally labor-intensive, sometimes-frustrating, always-exhausting necessary “thing” that I find myself compelled to do when these kind of crescendo events happen in my life. On one hand, I hate them because they are so disruptive, but on the other hand, in hindsight, I see their necessity in my life.

Fortunately, they’re not a non-ending, one-right-after-another – usually – part of my life, but they’re always big and they’re always protracted beyond what makes me comfortable. Each of them hits me like a ton of bricks that initially buries me in its overwhelmingness, but eventually, as I dig my way out, while not always making sense or being logical, reveals some big-picture insights into who I am, what life is, and why this life, this world, this human condition – mine and everyone else’s – needs a total rebuild from the inside out and needs the one Being in the universe who has promised He will do it and who alone can do it.

I am not completely free of the ton of bricks yet, but I’ve come far enough to understand some of the meaning of the ones I’ve left behind as I continue my journey out.

The madness abounds all the time, but it seems that its impact, in terms of it being everywhere, in everything, in life itself, on me is stronger at some times than it is at others. I am more acutely aware of how broken everything – including me – is and how there is nothing that I or anyone else who, as a very close friend of mine puts it, breathes for living can do to fix what is really broken and that’s the human heart, the human mind, the human soul. Those are bigger than me and bigger than us.

We live in a cacophonous world, exacerbated by the 24/7 barrage of disparate, conflicting, manipulative, slanted and spun information thrown at us from every direction. The mere fact that we’re not all categorically insane is in itself a miracle. I’ve considered, as part of my winding my way through this current maze, how people process information. In many ways, it is an extension of who we are, individually, uniquely – our personalities, our temperaments, our mindsets, and our strengths and weaknesses. And that needs to be addressed first because not everyone processes information the same way.

To me – perhaps because I’ve been in technology all my life in one way or another – it’s very analogous to the combination of computer’s CPU – the how: intellect, personality, temperament, etc. – and hard drive – the where: the brain. Not all CPUs are the equivalent and not all hard drives are the same (reliability, speed, size, etc.)

Some people’s CPUs are such that they absorb everything. They soak up life by jumping right into the middle of everything. They are participatory. These people tend to need to take in as much external information as possible in every situation. They talk to everybody, listen to everything, get their brains filled up with all the opinions, ideas, thoughts that come from that, and, from my point of view, end up with a mess.

The result that I observe from this constant overload of information is often a lack of context, which creates confusion, paralysis, indecision, and being worse off than before all the information gathering. It makes chaos more chaotic. When these people are younger and have less information on their mental hard drives, they can generally – through an unnecessary long and drawn-out and inefficient system – work their way through it and keep what is useful and throw away what is not. As they get old and their mental hard drives become maxed out, the process becomes, at best, extremely sluggish and, at worst, just crashes somewhere in the middle.

My CPU is the exact opposite. I don’t absorb anything. In fact, I’m naturally resistant to absorption, wary of unwanted and unmanageable bits of data that will obscure instead of enlightening. I am increasingly wary of the increased dump of information (most of which has no substance or quality and is unwanted and uninvited) on humanity. In the words of Kurt Cobain, it is my “known enemy.”

I fight against this by constantly and strictly imposing limits on it. I consciously gain information through both cursory (if it doesn’t apply directly to information I need or want) and focus (when I need or want it) observation. I employ a mostly solitary, very logical, very methodical path to decision-making and do not seek people’s opinions, ideas, thoughts, philosophies.

I know I have my own foibles in reasoning, thinking, and drawing erroneous conclusions, and I know I share this trait with the rest of humanity. So humanity’s thinking, reasoning, ideologies, philosophies, politics – in fact, anything thing that comes from human information processing – I know is flawed and not to be absorbed nor trusted. We share the same fundamental defects, regardless of CPU or hard drive type.

I, therefore, have an instinctive “off switch” generally for all external information (this is distinct and apart from the very deep give-and-take conversations with my inner circle), with my CPU filtering everything at the gate, ignoring any information that is unnecessary, irrelevant, irresponsible, and just plain wrong, without every giving it any space on my hard drive. It reflects the same minimalism and efficiency I see in my personality and temperament. Sometimes I miss things, though, that I probably should have not filtered out, but for the most part, this works pretty well for me.

I have become increasing aware with time that my CPU type is quite rare and I also find that I’m often coming at life from completely different angles than most of the people I interact with, either personally or professionally. The gap surprises me still. The madness of the world, though, and the relative oblivion to it, has only recently become more obvious.

Was humanity ever objective? Have we always been disposed to vicious polarization and division in every facet of life? Were we always this irrational, this full of venom and hatred, of ridiculously absurd and see-through false accusations, ready to attack anything and anybody we disagreed with, minor or major, armed with malicious and menacing labels, threats, and even actual weapons? Have we all gone completely mad?

Or are have we simply reaped what we have sown: an accelerating madness that we have not only inherited, but have both perpetuated and taken to a whole new level?

I believe that the answer to the first question is “no,” while it is “yes” to all the rest. And what we’re seeing is an increasingly exaggerated version of what has always been there in our nature. It’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. It makes no logical or rational sense, but it will only become more increasingly illogical and irrational.

And as we continue to reject any commonly-agreed upon limits and boundaries by which we as a species define right and wrong while simultaneously embracing the idea that each person can determine those for him or herself, independent of everyone and everything else, we descend faster and faster into a state of perpetual madness.

I hear the lunatic fringes of human ideologies, philosophies, and politics becoming the loudest and most prevalent voices of national and international positions on just about everything. The spewing of some of the most vitriolic (and untrue, because no one deals in facts anymore, instead resorting to a good lawyer’s spin to make everything fit into a narrow and misleading perspective to “win” at all costs) and character-assassinating rhetoric has become the norm, not the exception.

I filter most of this out for the nonsense it is, but I am always disgusted at see the sides lining up and taking aim with little or no provocation. And I am surprised when I see people who, as Hebrews 11 characterizes those who are seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness, say they are confessing that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth, seeking a government that is founded by God, embracing human ideologies, philosophies, and politics, and often endorsing the most extreme and dishonest people, groups, and things in these new lunatic fringe groundswells.

Both things can’t be true. It’s a mad world.

I watch patterns of behavior, some of which come out in the most innocuous ways. I see people who seemingly either don’t make the connection or simply disconnect from what they believe in subtle ways. One of the most popular games on Facebook – Farmville – has “celebrated” Christmas, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and now Easter with holiday-specific gifts and prizes. In the five farms I manage within my family, I’ve ignored them all. I’m thinking the only two times I will be able to participate are 4th of July and Thanksgiving.

Now here’s the madness. I have a very close friend who, while not sharing my beliefs, knows them (she grew up with them and that environment is where we became friends in our early teens) and shows me that she respects what I believe by not asking me for or sending me gifts during any of these holiday events. That has made a huge impression on me and I appreciate her very much for that. On the other hand, I have watched other people, who profess to share my beliefs, quite eagerly participate in each holiday event and even send me requests to participate as well.

Belief is not relative or conditional. It is absolute and it must fall completely on one side or the other. Anything else is dishonest. It’s a mad world.

These are a just a couple examples of many that would take me days and many pages to document, but these are pretty representative of our collective madness.

There is individual madness as well. I struggle daily to be different than I am – to be like Christ. And I fail more than I succeed. But I keep getting up and trying, with His help, to move forward. This has brought a level of awareness and consciousness to me that is always testing and measuring what I’m thinking, what I’m doing, how I’m doing it against my perfect example. It’s always on my mind, but what I end up doing, saying, thinking, being sometimes is totally different – and inconsistent – with what I want to do, say, think, be and what I intend to do, say, think, be.

I don’t match what I say I am. It’s a mad world.

And the overwhelming bombardment of suddenly realizing, all at once because of a certain series of circumstances or events that happen to coincide, the extent of this pervasive insanity from its broadest levels right down to me is 1/2 the ton of bricks (the other half is just life above and beyond all this at its most intense).

And I realized I’m done with all the madness and I cannot wait until it ends. I realize that there is nothing that I or any other human being can do to fix this. It’s beyond any and all of us.

I think of death quite often as the fulfillment of the promise of humanity’s – including me – redemption from its insanity by the return of Christ which will begin the restoration of all things, including sanity, to the way they were before sin entered the universe. I think of the sleep I’ve missed that I’ll finally catch up on and the peace that is elusive when you’re doing battle 24/7 that will finally come. And then, as if we all just blinked our eyes – and this will be the experience for everyone who has ever lived because time stops at the grave and only the living continue to mark it – a change or a chance.

And the beginning of the end of a mad world.

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 of 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 about 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 often don’t realize – and that is because I do all the analysis internally – 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 trusted, long-time friends 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) need 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.