Though November is done with us, I’m not done with November. I’ve fallen in love with writing everyday and I’m intoxicated by the muse and chasing that sacred specter wherever she leads each day. I’ve learned more about friends and I’ve learned more about myself and I’m not ready to give that up just yet.
So, what’s next? I don’t know. Suggestions are welcome, as are prayers.
I didn’t write yesterday. Well, I did write but a tonic of self-consciousness and seeming-insincerity kept me from posting.
Today, I’m under a similar malaise so I’ll post a few pictures of today’s hike. It was literally the most excruciating, exhausting hike of my life and truthfully, I don’t know when I’ve ever been in as much pain as I am right now.
The truth is, we were foolish to go. We should have listened to the two men with snowy beards and ice axes when they told us not to summit. We should have listened to the man with the flap of skin hanging from his forehead as he “thanked God for the log he hit” and told us not to go.
But, we didn’t. We thought of our own strength and sure-footing and we ascended anyway. Two out of four of us made it to the top, the smart two took a ski-lift down to safety while we struggled to find the home trail under the snow.
I won’t end this with any kind of poetry. The only lesson learned was that you should always listen to men with snowy beards and ice axes. It should also be noted that said snow-beard must only be listened to if he has an ice axe in his possession. It’s a package deal – if he has only one or the other, it’s a good idea to run.
If I’ve learned one thing about humanity, it is that we are a chronically forgetful people. Not the “where’s the car keys?” kind of forgetting, but of a more devastating brand. A kind of historical-spiritual revisionism shows up in my daily life as I reflect upon the past and attribute the true, and absolute providence of God to my own ambition.
If I’m honest, I spend most of my life believing that it’s up to me. That it’s my job and it’s my future wife and it’s my friendships and it’s my weaknesses and it’s my life. So, it’s not that I simply forget about God – it’s that time, distance, and a liberal helping of my own pride steal the authorship of my story. So, maybe the word “remember” shows up in the bible over and over because God is infinitely attuned to our finiteness.
The Bible is literally full of historical accounts of God doing amazing things through regular people, them forgetting about it and God pouring grace into their doubt as a way to say “Remember that time I completely changed your life?”
Today, I’m reminded of this offer, this gift of freedom composed of sacrifice and soaked in hope. The offer is this – “Believe in who I am, remember who you are and stop being afraid.”
The truth is, freedom is terrifying
If we’re doing it alone.
But,
We’re led out of Egypt, remember?
We’re reborn, remember?
We’re free, remember?
If you’ve joined us in writing for the past few weeks, there’s undoubtedly been one (or 23) nights where the words don’t come as easy as you want them to. I struggle for ideas every single day. Sometimes I’ll be at the gym or in the shower and I’ll be suddenly seized by some kind of inspiration and by the time I get home to capture it, it’s escaped me. So I’ll sit there with this impatient, insistent cursor blinking at me, tapping her toe and mostly I go a little crazy.
So, I always wonder where the best ideas come from. Where do the truly great thinkers go to find them? Most of me thinks Oregon is full of great ideas. I’m tempted to think they come only during showers or just before sleep and while those are two of my favorite places to be, they are coincidentally the least conducive to writing. So, what then?
One of my favorite authors/thinkers wrote brilliantly today about exactly this struggle. I realize this comes toward the tail end of NovemberBlogfest, but I’m still happy to share it in hopes that it inspires us to keep writing, keep chasing the ideas and keep refusing to believe in coincidences.
Ok, I’ll admit to copping out. Last week, I suggested to David (NovemberBlogfest Fellow) that he write on what he wants to be when he grows up. I told him that I’d write on the topic as well and I invited a few other friends into the idea. And everyone came through.
That night, I struggled to corral my hopes into a “job description.” First, I thought “writer” but then, I thought “teacher,” and I thought about a lot of other fun nouns with the –er suffix. I confess to coming up empty-handed, so I wrote about details than dreams. I wrote about the hopes that occupy my mind rather than the occupation I’d like to have. So, I apologize for only going halfway.
Given my admission, I’m still a little lost. I want to write, I want to teach, I want to communicate, I want to be in relationship and… I want to somehow convert those desires into a reasonable income.
My friends at the law offices of Myers and Briggs LLC. gave me some career suggestions – telling me I should be a teacher or a sales representative or psychologist or consultant and, to be honest, those sound fine. I have some experience in some of those and I think I’d have great fun being a psychologist but my heart didn’t leap at any of them.
I think I’ll always struggle with how much emotional real estate to give my career. I wrote before about how we aren’t our jobs, and I still believe something like that is true. I think it’s a sad thing to hand our identities over to our careers. There’s a great many great careers out there, none of them large enough to contain our stories – or maybe, our lives shouldn’t be so small that they fit inside our careers. Bob Goff, who is, from what I can tell, is living the best kind of story (read A Million Miles in A Thousand Years for more about him) uses his day job as an incredibly successful attorney to fund his passion for being a voice for the voiceless in Uganda.
For most of us, our most productive years are traded for paychecks and Scandinavian furniture. I guess I’m just praying that I make the most of the time I’ve got left, whatever my job is.
If I was a pastor, I’d have a message called “The Most Important Day of the Week.” And I’d poll the audience (or people I knew would give the answer I expect) and I’d ask, curiously, “What’s the most important day of the week?” I’d cup my ear with my hand, making a grand gesture of it.
“Sunday!” Some would shout – and I’d partially affirm them – “Sunday. Maybe.”
“Friday” – a college kid might say, and I’d give him the same consolation.
Maybe the right answer is Sunday or Saturday, or whichever day you observe the Sabbath. There is so much rest and healing to be done on those days.
But, I think it’s Monday. I think we’re commanded to keep a Sabbath rest not to recoup a heavy week, but because God knows a heavier week is on the way. If the weekend is for sharpening our swords, Monday is battle. Sundays are for dreaming, Mondays are for doing. Our stories are designed on the weekend but we start to draw them on Monday.
So, it’s no surprise that it’s here where we find the most resistance to our stories. If you’re anything like me, you dream of all the ways that you’ll make the next week better than the one before it. More than just “getting the job done” I become some kind of superhero over the weekend, envisioning a Monday morning full of correctly-made decisions and sore palms from all of the hi-fiving.
But the phone rings more on Mondays and leaves little time to wade through the archives of weekend emails or the residual excitement (and distraction) of students still carbonated from two days off. Statistically speaking, more coffee is spilled on shirts on Mondays (made that right up). Indeed, a cursory glance at your Facebook feed will show a corporate disdain for the day, but Mondays are where life is lived, whether we like it or not.
The truth is, who we are right now, is who we are. We are not our dreams or our plans or our best (or thankfully, our worst) intentions. We are what we do; the people we’ll become depend on our actions, not our anticipations.
Here’s to Mondays.
I’m watching some aging beauty, pull whisky down, drink after drink. Each one smoother than the last. I want to ask her if she’s alone.
“No, clearly, I have a friend with me.” she might say and gesture toward the man on her left.
“No, alone, alone” I might say. As if repeating the word makes my meaning clearer.
I would ask if there was a time in life where she rejected marriage in favor of independence, in favor of opportunity. I would ask her if, when she sleeps, if independence keeps her warm.
I want to be a strong man. I want a wife and a family and I want to love them well. I want a life marked by sacrifice and simplicity. I want to be a man who returns calls and leaves his door unlocked. I want to take my family for breakfast after church.
I want a house that smells like coffee and food and warmth and I want it always full of people. I want to live in community with my friends and their families; we’ll raise each other’s kids, paying special attention to our own. I want to keep tradition; nutcrackers at Christmas. I want to drink champagne with my wife on New Year’s Eve and play football the morning after. I want an old car that I drive on Sundays and I want kids who know who they are.
I want to work hard and do well. I want to communicate and build relationships and I want to buy the first round. I want to laugh honestly and breathe easy and I want to be an agent of hope. I want to live in love and let the world know why.
And I want God’s feet to mark the center, his proud arms holding the weight of all that life.
I guess that’s what I want when I grow up.
When I was teaching, my favorite question was some form of “What do you want to be when you grow up?” – Of course, lots of students were very cool and would dismiss my question as though it’s only appropriate to ask it of a 5-year old who would probably respond with 1) baseball player 2) Train “driver” 3) Um.
So I’d couch the question between college plans and current classes. “What do you want to study?” or “What do you want to go to college for?” I’d ask.
What I didn’t tell them is that there’s a good chance they’d never again be asked that question in earnest. You go to college and people kind of just assume that you’re going to do whatever you’re studying for, or whatever makes the most money.
And then, you graduate. You leave an institution that’s supported your idealism for 16 (in my case, 18) years and you step down out of your warm, controlled spaceship and on to the strange planet you’ve only read about. The “real world” they call it.
And this real world comes with a strange kind of gravity, one that, if you let it, pulls you from passion and gifting and toward precision, safety and efficiency. There are bills, after all. So, you take a job that pays those bills and so begins our slow, quiet drift away from our truest selves.
About the time resignation sets in, we begin condensing our passions into “hobbies” and dismiss them as childish. “I used to be in a band” I say,” but then we had to grow up.” And it’s a good thing to grow up – it’s a good thing to grow. But, I’d argue that we spend most of our lives resisting growth because it’s messy and painful.
Mark Twain once said, “Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.” And I couldn’t agree more. Tomorrow’s post – “what I want to be when I grow up. “
And oh, this insincere sun with all of her drama. She falls slowly, hesitatingly into someone’s ocean only to scream wildly into the next morning.
And we say “There will never be another day like this.”