What I would have said...

Recently Conversations Journal solicited blog entries for their September theme honoring Dallas Willard.  They invited those of us who had had him as an instructor to submit our reflections.  I'd encourage you to take a look; there's great stuff there. 

Meanwhile, my entry didn't make the cut.  Now that I've read their blog a bit more, I get it.  My style's less refined than what they tend to post.  I'm certainly capable of something more academic, but I do kinda like what I wrote even if it didn't fit their blog.  

And so, I post it here :-)

*******

Dallas Willard told me I should let my 13-year-old daughter get her ears double-pierced.  Actually, should is the wrong word.  It would be all right to allow the double piercing.

We were at the Saint Malo Retreat Center in the Rockies just before lunchtime.  People were filtering into the great room outside the dining area and I noticed Dallas sitting alone, looking calmly reflective and approachable.  Though I feel a bit star struck in his presence, despite his warm hospitality, I decided to mention something from his morning lectures.

“Stop trying to get people to do things,” he’d said.  I had scribbled it down, marked it with a big star and marveled. 

Much of my life and ministry have involved trying to get people to do things.  Trying to get teenagers to come to events or camp or small group Bible studies.  Trying to get adults to volunteer time and money, room and board, even prayers to important causes.  Trying to get people to show up on time.  Even trying to get people to live the with-God life.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to hear Dallas say to stop that.  Even as I write this, I feel my shoulders relax, my breathing deepen. 

This doesn’t mean not to invite them to something larger, better, deeper.  It doesn’t even mean not to encourage them toward better things.  Rather, it is what it sounds like: stop trying to get them to do.  Loosen the grip.  Invite.  Encourage.  Give space.  Above all, pray.

And this is what I bumblingly discussed with Dallas that afternoon in the Saint Malo great room. 

Then feeling emboldened, I decided to also mention my phone conversation with my daughter the previous evening.  As we were hanging up, she’d said, “Tell Dallas Willard he rocks,” and then, “Ask him if I should get my ears double-pierced.” 

She’d been campaigning for extra ear-piercings for some time and I confess, I’d been stalling.  Goodness knows, she could ask for worse, but thirteen seemed a bit young for such things.

So, I asked Dallas her very question.  He chuckled in his warmly amused way.  He paused, smiled and said, “Well, I think that would be all right.”

_______________

 Where is God asking you to loosen your grip on people or outcomes?  What would it look like and feel like to trust God with these things?

 

The Truth of Work Itself

One of my dear Amy friends (and I'm lucky enough to have two of them) sent me the following quote from Thomas Merton:

"Do not depend on the hope of results.  You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.  You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for a specific people.  In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
Zowie, that scratches an itch!

Silence

"One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that is makes us feel so helpless.  We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others.  If we are silent, who will take control?  God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him.  Silence is intimately related to trust.

"The tongue is our most powerful weapon of manipulation.  A frantic stream of words flows from us because we are in a constant process of adjusting our public image.  We fear so deeply what we think other people see in us that we talk in order to straighten out their understanding.... Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.

"One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier.  We don't need to straighten others out.  There is a story of a medieval monk who was being unjustly accused of certain offenses.  One day he looked out his window and saw a dog biting and tearing on a rug that had been hung out to dry.  As he watched, the Lord spoke to him saying, 'That is what is happening to your reputation.  But if you will trust me, I will care for you -- reputation and all.'  Perhaps more than anythign else, silence brings us to believe that God can care for us. -- 'reputation and all.'"

- From Richard Foster's chapter on "Solitude" in Celebration of Discipline

Nationals

I'm at the National Forensics League Tournament with my daughter and six other freshmen-to-be.  We're here with a few kids from our high school and two coaches.  The high schoolers have already begun competing.  This afternoon, they'll learn if they've made the first cut from around 400 competitors per event to the sixty continuing on.  Tomorrow, the middle school competition begins, and so, our fun hang-out-a-little-and-work-a-little pace will shift.  Adrenaline will begin to pump.  The drama will commence, literally, figuratively.

Today in this calm before the storm, I ruminate on my own Nationals story, one perhaps better described as a non-Nationals story.  A story I have told few people, because really it's not that interesting to anyone but me.  I am tempted tell my story to people here, because here causes me to remember, but this is not the place for telling.  Now is not my story.

Still, it's a story that has shaped me.  One that bubbles up in my consciousness from time to time accompanied not so much by sadness, regret or bitterness, but more by bewilderment.  We all have these stories, stories we seldom tell but that make us who we are.  Occasionally, we take them out, turn them over in our minds, examining the many facets, ruminating.

____________
I participated in a number of high school activities, but Debate and Forensics were my passion.  I was pretty good, so the passion was not misplaced. Though I dabbled in a variety of forensics events, Original Oratory (a ten-minute persuasive speech) was my favorite.  I did well in this event.

As a sophomore, I placed third in our region's national qualifying tournament.  The top two advance to nationals.  To have done so well at this age was impressive at the time, and it felt like a promise of great potential.  One day, I would undoubtedly be competing in Nationals.  That seemed certain.

The next year, I encountered controversy early in the season.  While preparing to write my oratory, I had flipped through several old Vital Speeches magazines seeking topic ideas and I had chosen as a springboard a speech about fear of failure.  Because the speech was from several years earlier, I was surprised to discover at one of the season's first tournaments that a competitor from another school had consulted the very same article.  In fact, she had not only consulted the magazine, she had plagiarized almost the entire speech.  (Interesting that she chose to plagiarize a speech about fear of failure.)

I told my forensics coach, but as far as I know, he did nothing.  The girl attended the school where he had just worked as an assistant coach before taking the head coaching position at my school.  I'm sure it was complicated for him.  Perhaps he did say something and the coach at her school did nothing.  Either way, she continued to compete with an unchanged speech throughout the season. 

She was a good speaker.  I was a good speaker.  Because we had the same topic, when we competed head-to-head, the person who delivered her speech first usually fared better.  We traded victories back and forth throughout the season.

At the national qualifying tournament, our duplicate speeches became problematic.  When she spoke in a round before me, she got the better score, and vice versa.  The stakes were higher now, though, so I mentioned it to my coach again.  An investigation followed.  Ultimately, she was disqualified from the tournament.

Even so, the damage was done.  I place third in the tournament.  Again.

The  next year the pressure was on.  The season proved promising.  The national qualifying tournament proved promising.

In the finals round -- the round determining who would proceed to Nationals -- one of my three judges was the coach of the competitor I had outed the previous year.

I placed fourth.

____________
Here I am now, at the destination I so deeply aspired to all those years ago.  I've learned it's slightly easier to qualify in high school now.  The top three rather than the top two places go to Nationals.  Had this been the case back in the day, I would have gone as a sophomore and junior.  If that had occurred, would my life be much different than today?  Would I have chosen a different college, career, path?

I am here with my daughter, who is quite good.  I say this as a mom, of course, but also as a reporter of what many other people have said.  Nevertheless, I am throwing her to the wolves tomorrow when she competes in the middle school tournament.

She will perhaps learn that though these events have judges, justice is not guaranteed.  She might also learn that what others say is true -- she is indeed a gifted young woman.  Or she might have the chance to begin to learn that she is not what she does.  That accolades and accomplishments and awards are nice, but she is so much more than these things. That there are lovely portions of her that cannot be rewarded and often are not even recognized, except by those who can truly see.  Some that only God sees.

And I, her mom, am glad I am here.  Though it dredges up past disappointments and lessons, perhaps because it does so.  I am glad to be here while she lives her own story, regardless of the outcome.  Ready with a mom-hug either way.

Self-portrait

We are all such complicated beings that if each of us were to create a new self-portrait each day for a month, what we would create might very well change dramatically from day to day.

One self-portraits I would make would look a little something like this:

Look closely.

A Money Making Opportunity!

When I was thirteen, my dad charged my brother and me with a daunting task: to clear our new home's horse pasture of thistles.  For each thistle bloom we collected, he offered us both a penny.

Bored and greedy, we accepted the challenge.

We clipped 900 thistle blooms that summer morning.  900.  And so, we each earned nine dollars for our efforts.

For years, I thought we had really pulled one over on Dad.  I figured he had figured we'd only collect about a hundred or so.  Boy was he fooled, I thought.

Then just a couple of years ago, it occurred to me that for a mere eighteen dollars, he managed both to occupy his bored children for a morning and to clear his pasture of thistles.

Well played, Dad.  Well played.

--------------------------

(Thanks to my creative friend, Jennifer at http://apoemlife.blogspot.com for the lovely thistle photo!)

Ebb

"We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.  We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb.  We are afraid it will never return.  We insist on permanence, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.  The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now."  – Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea.

I've been wanting to write about this quote for some time now.  I'd even planned to photograph a shoreline at low-tide during a late April trip to Florida with girlfriends.  Alas, my photography skills are sorely lacking, in part because I seldom get around to actually taking the pictures.

Interestingly, this quote appeared to me again as today's Celtic Daily Prayer reading.  This week, I am lamenting a new ebb.  Lamenting.  And trying to celebrate.  Relationships so rich and true  -->– such a high tide experience --> – naturally must ebb.  The sadness of the ebb highlights the absolute goodness of the flow.  The ebb aches because it should.  It was worth it.  

I've been here before, in the aftermath of rich experiences, wanting to cling to the memories and relationships.  Some relationships will continue, flourish, ebb and flow.  Some will not.  Over the years, I think I've learned to hold these relationships loosely, to give people space to engage or to drift away.  The holding loosely is unsettling, but the ongoing relationships are all the better for it.

Meanwhile, the ocean shore even now at low-tide, is still beautiful, uncertain, full.  Life continues in all its mundane routine and mustachioed-robin goodness, in its ebbs and flows.  Laundry to fold, toilets to clean, meals to plan.  Lego creations to admire, teenage dramas to hear, friends to laugh with.  Despite the lamenting, I am trying to be present here because here is good.  And because one day I will look back on this time which feels so much like an ebb and I will lament its passing as well.

For my brother

Oklahoma Land Run Song  -- to be sung to one's brother on April 22 each year, preferably with great enthusiasm, suppressed chuckles and lots of ironic vibrato.

It was April 22
In the Spring of '89
There were settlers by the thousand
They were gathered on the line
And they came from all directions
There were wagons by the score
To stake a claim out on the plain
Is what they waited for

To run, run run run
Oklahoma run
Fifty thousand people
Awaiting for the gun 

For land land land land
Oklahoma land
They came out here to the wild frontier
Across the Cimarron
To run....

There were near two thousand acres
Not enough to go around
If he had no transportation
A man's luck soon ran down

_______________
And that's all I can remember.  Usually I've cracked myself up by now.

Squeal

My daughter called me a pig last night.

But it's not as bad as it sounds.  

She unrolled the print of Michael Sowa's "Kholer's Pig" she'd found tucked away in a dark basement corner.
 

"Mom, you are this pig," she said.  "You've been pushed off the dock.  But you're going to land in that water and it's going to be really refreshing." 

She's right.  A lake lush with trees, reeds and lily pads.  Humidity softening the horizon.  It's gotta feel great in the water.  That pig's no fool.


Leave it God to use my love of whimsy, plus my tendency to procrastinate (never did get around to framing the print for my office), plus my teenage daughter's wise insight to speak a recurring theme to me.

Freedom.

I wrote about freedom here, but I'm feeling it more and more these days.  Maybe it's the early spring with new flowers emerging by the minute and grass so green it makes the heart ache.  Windows open, verdant evening air, coats left in closets.  The sheer pleasantness of it all.

Hope springs.  Possibilities sprout.  Enthusiasm flourishes.

My husband and I have mostly tried to buffer our kids from the recent painful events.  We've shared a few details with them, but not a lot.  They know we've been disappointed and sad, and they too have experienced transition pains.  But we've tried to shelter them from the brunt of it all.  We don't need them to carry the load for us, or even with us. 

Still, they're rooting for me.  Sweet, kind, encouraging comments.     Like calling me a pig.


It's true.  I am that pig.  I recognize the initial shock, fear, panic of the jump.  The increasing exuberance of flying through the air, weightless, worry-free for the moment.  The anticipation of entering the water, slightly anxious while also hoping to make a big glorious splash.  

Yes, the water is indeed refreshing.

And if you listen closely, you might just hear me suppressing a squeal.

Unexpected surprises

Someday, at the end of a school year, you might flip through your rough-and-tumble son's 4th grade math notebook and come across a few hidden surprises.  Like this:

And this:

And even this:

And you will cut out these unexpected gems and savor them.

Hike

Mountain-climbing imagery.  I've been noticing a lot of it lately. 

Is this truly a pattern to be noticed or is it merely coincidence or the result an over-active imagination?

Really, after the undeniably ubiquitous desert imagery, I am hoping I'm just imagining all the mountain-climbing imagery. After the desert, I want oasis.  Rest, refreshment, shade.  Not a hike, and definitely not one up a mountain.

My husband, king of the Mountain!  At Ptarmigan Pass in 1995

But I do love to hike... up mountains even.  When I was in my twenties (before children) and was spending several summer weeks taking seminary intensives in Colorado, I hiked a few fourteeners.  I even hiked three in one day.  (Actually four, but the dip to the saddle between one of these mountains and the others was not great enough for it to count as a true fourteener.  At the time, it definitely felt like it should count, but I digress...)

These mountains bear noble and slightly intimidating names: Lincoln, Democrat, Princeton, Quandary...  Names you want to work into conversation later.  "Well, when I was hiking Mt. Bross..."  

The reason I like hiking mountains is because it doesn't require a great deal of athleticism and skill.  (Some mountains do, of course, but not the ones I dare to scale.)  More than anything, it demands tenacity and patience and plenty of water.  Camaraderie also helps, as does a readiness to enjoy the journey, even the difficult stretches.

Hiking with small group friends near Breckenridge in 2008

Perhaps this is why I was so captured by Nathan Foster's depiction of hiking with his father in Wisdom Chaser (also mentioned here).  Foster scoffs when his dad speculates that if they hike slowly and steadily, they won't need to stop as often.  So though his father "moved his feet methodically, slow but steady," Nathan recounts:

I brushed off my father's wisdom and raced ahead up the mountain.  After about a half hour of hiking up a steep pitch, I noticed that, with all my painful stops, he was keeping up with me.  I felt exhausted.  Dad didn't stop even once, and he seemed to be gliding up the mountain. 

As is often the case in life, pain made me teachable. That day it was burning lungs and shaky legs.  My father had a lesson to teach about hard work, and I was ready to learn.  I gave Dad's theory a try and joined his ridiculously slow march.  I soon discovered that if I kept going slowly, it was easier not to stop.  I couldn't believe it....

Eventually we summited with grace and precision and a slow, steady pace.  The destination proved more remarkable than I had remembered from our last climb.... I took a bruised apple from my pack and bit in.  It tasted delicious.  (pp. 34-5)

A slow steady march up the mountain.  Eyes to see the surrounding, ever-changing beauty.  Patience as the journey unfolds.  Anticipation of even greater vistas to come.  And big gulps of water.


Okay,  I think I'm in.

Not a bad way to descend Mt. Bross after a long day of hiking -- 1995

Sela

"The Sela, which often occurs in the middle of a Psalm, is meant to signal a meditative interlude." 

-- Richard Foster in Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home

According to Martin Luther, the Sela requires "a quiet and restful soul, which can grasp and hold to that which the Holy Spirit there presents and offers."

Perhaps...

And amen.

Relinquish

One of my favorite things about yoga is this: If you hold a pose long enough, particularly a stretching pose, at some point your muscles let go and sink deeper into the pose. You think you are stretching your muscles as deeply as possible, but suddenly there's a release and you're able to stretch even further and more comfortably.  Every time this happens to me, I marvel at how tightly my muscles had been clenched without me realizing it and how much more natural the pose feels after they do relax.

Unfortunately, this is not what I look like doing yoga.

For this reason, my favorite yoga style holds stretching poses long enough for the release to occur.  (I'm not so much a fan of holding strength poses for long, but that's a different blog entry.) Sometimes the instructor encourages us to use sinking breathing, to make our exhales last longer than the inhales. It's amazingly effective in helping those muscles let go.

THIS is what I look like doing yoga.

Lately, it seems God's been holding me in a few teeth-gritting "yoga poses."  I haven't understood why entirely.  I was already flexible (I thought), fairly strong (I thought), somewhat peaceful (I thought).  But after holding these poses for several months now, I'm finally beginning to feel my jaw relax a bit and my muscles loosen.  I'm beginning to give in to the pose.  To relinquish...  


This Lenten season is a time of relinquishment for me.  Releasing...

• Reputation – I want to be well-respected and appreciated.  I hate being misunderstood and misrepresented.  (Don't we all?)  But Christ was misunderstood, misrepresented, marginalized.  Should I be different?  I relinquish my reputation.
• Control  –  Though I've never considered myself a control freak (perhaps I'm fooling myself?), I usually make every effort to ensure results turn out the way I think they should.  But hard work and (what I think are) good intentions can only go so far.  I cannot control others and their actions and should not try to do so.  I take my hands off the reins.
• Consequences  –  Consequences themselves are a grace. (Got that from my spiritual director.) Just as negative consequences eventually brought the prodigal son to his knees and to his true home, consequences do the same for us.  If I were to dictate consequences –  my own or others' – they would not be grace.  I choose to let God choose the outcomes.
• The future  –  My dreams, ambitions, hopes, expectations, speculations.  I thought I had found a vehicle to realize many of these, but that was not the case.  I am free from those false hopes.  Possibly, I am also becoming more free from needing to prove myself to myself and to others.  I do not stop walking forward, but I surrender the lead.
• Ministry  –  My usefulness to God, my purpose, my outlet.  So often when I've left one type of ministry, another one awaited. Now I scan the horizon and see only dim, indiscernible shapes. God will make them clearer in time, but until then He'll let me squirm a bit in my "uselessness" as I learn to relax into his unconditional love.

In his book Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home, Richard Foster writes:

The Prayer of Relinquishment is a bona fide letting go, but it is a release with hope.  We have no fatalist resignation.  We are buoyed up by a confident trust in the character of God.  Even when all we see are the tangled threads on the backside of life’s tapestry, we know that God is good and is out to do us good always.  That gives us hope to believe that we are the winners, regardless of what we are being called upon to relinquish.  God is inviting us deeper in and higher up.  There is training in righteousness, transforming power, new joys, deeper intimacy. (p. 52)

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A creative and artistic friend of mine, who writes a really lovely blog recently hosted a group of moms and daughters for a self-portrait-collage-making session using gel medium transfer.  (I feel a tiny bit impressed with myself for that previous sentence!)  For her own portrait, she used a photograph of herself with her arms out, palms up, and from the photo, she collaged butterflies releasing, flying upward and outward.  

I've thought often about her artwork since then.  Is it possible that as I relinquish my tight grip and release these things, they then become things of beauty and freedom? 

I release with hope.

Fire, a poem

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs

packed in too tight

can douse the flames

almost as surely 

as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention

to the spaces in between 

as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build 

open spaces

in the same way

we have learned

to pile on the logs,

then we can come to see how

it is fuel, and absence of the fuel

together, that make fire possible.

 

















We only need to lay a log

lightly from time to time.

A fire

grows simply because the space is there,

with openings

in which the flame

that knows just how it wants to burn

can find its way.

- Judy Brown

Trying to Understand

Such a strange day and not an easy one.

An email received.  Venom thinly veiled in terse official language.


The ongoing struggle to understand, to make sense out of inexplicable decisions, actions, words.  Maybe it's because of this...  Maybe it was that....  Could it have been because of this....?


Scenarios imagined.  Explanations speculated.  Stories replayed and replayed.


I don't think we're going to get to understand.  I think we're to walk in faith and dignity and gentleness in the midst of the fog.  We're to find peace in the confusion, peace that flows only from faith.  From a faith that is stretched to capacity, but lengthened and strengthened because of the stretching.


But I did read something interesting this afternoon while waiting in the carpool line, something that resonated with at least one of my speculations.  Nathan Foster writes in Wisdom Chaser of his experience hiking Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, with his father, Richard Foster:

Somewhere in the haze of our strenuous activity, I remembered a day from the past.  After not being allowed to attend my best friend's birthday party, I had thrown the biggest fit of my life.  I remember standing on my bed, screaming at Dad.  He countered me, doing the stern father thing, and we went back and forth, fighting for power. Then my father did the strangest thing: he knelt down and closed his eyes.  This act enraged me all the more.  I demanded that he get up and fight me.  But his only posture was silence.  What was he doing? Was he being weak?  Shutting me out?  I didn't understand it, but eventually it stopped the fight. (p. 19)

An explanation?  A challenge?  Merely something to consider?  I'm not going to try to know.  


No that's not true.  When my husband arrives home, I'll read the passage to him. And we'll talk and rehash and try to understand.  We'll stay up too late.  Again.


But maybe we'll be that much closer to a posture of silence.  And peace.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through 

to illuminate a small field 

for a while, and gone my way 

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl 

of great price, the one field that had 

treasure in it. I realize now 

that I must give all that I have 

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after 

an imagined past. It is the turning 

aside like Moses to the miracle 

of the lit bush, to a brightness 

that seemed as transitory as your youth 

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

~ R. S. Thomas ~

Jagged

It is a jagged wound.  The type that doesn't heal quickly, that smarts at unexpected times even as it heals, that tears again easily.  


That is honest.


And yet you wonder why I am not ready to jump off another cliff, to play tackle football, to risk.  You see it as an indication that I am not taking responsibility for my own healing.


On the contrary.


I could patch it with a band-aid and a fake-Christian smile, to appease you.  But I am not longer interested in appeasing.  That's what got me to this situation --  appeasing in this situation, appeasing in life.  I intend now to be as honest as I possibly can.  Kind.  But honest.  


If you indeed want me to be responsible for my own healing, you need to allow me the space to be honest, to listen to God's guidance, not yours, to protect healthy boundaries.  You want me to be extremely vulnerable, but that would be irresponsible on my part.  I will be vulnerable to God, not you. You call me dangerous and immature.  You view it as a weakness in my character.  Perhaps.  But I'm pretty sure God is telling me it's okay to protect my heart, to protect the process.  


I will not hurry.  That is disappointing to you, I know.  I once had a seminary professor who said, "Maturity is knowing whom to disappoint."  I am willing to disappoint you.  


I am trying to offer you grace.  I am offering you grace -- just not as much as you are demanding, as you have demanded. 


I am engaging in the process not because of you or your pressure or your attempts to shame me, not even because I am a good person.  It is because God continues to show me that He is present here with me.  He is with you too.  This is not the end for either of us.  But neither of us can or should dictate the journey forward.

********************
Isaiah 41:10
Fear not for I am with you.
I will strengthen you.
I will help you.
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.


Psalm 27:13-14
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage; 
wait for the Lord.