Suffering is not Strength…

During my five years of intense suffering, I ultimately learned to surround myself with people who could focus on what was working, not ONLY what was broken. Maybe you need someone to kick your ass and get you into gear. I did not. The world was already kicking my ass. My father was already breaking my heart into a million pieces. My community, thanks pandemic, was in a state of flux and not everyone handled that well. All of it was TOO MUCH. But even in the midst of a fair amount of bad behaving, little lanterns of light were present.

This is a moment where I want to be brutally honest with you. I honestly have come through this tunnel with the strongly held conviction that no one needs an ass whooping. No one. I do not think it works. So maybe you think you need that, I would ask you to reconsider. I once had this young woman in my life who went off to college and came back....different. She had found a church near her college campus and she was thrilled with it. She reported to me saying, "You know, I realize that I need to go to a church where the pastor makes me feel ashamed each week so that I can be inspired to do better during the week." My heart sank. These were the days before I myself was a pastor, but even in all my ignorance, something about that just felt off to me.

This is a powerful human in her own right. She is assertive and strong and hears the cries of the marginalized and hopeless and DOES SOMETHING to alleviate their suffering. If anyone could take a licking and keep on ticking it's her. But this is not sustainable, in my opinion. One day, she will feel her vulnerability. And when that day comes, she may need something quite different. And if I may be so bold, she needs something quite different even when she feels strong and in control. Because all this shaming and her certainty that she can rise to the challenge actually strengthens her weaknesses. It makes her less vulnerable. It makes her more judgy and critical and I could see my younger self in her intense and sincere features. So I went home from our coffee date and cried.

Fail Often, with Great Joy

This is important. No one has perfect judgment. No one can, should, must, ought, or needs to be responsible all the time. No one can avoid mistakes. No one can live up to their own expectations or the expectations of others. In fact, assuming too much responsibility is more linked to trauma than it is too sainthood. I wish I had learned this earlier in life and I will spend the rest of my life giving other people permission to do what I could not allow myself to do for most of my life - fail often with great joy.

Fail at being 100% available.

Fail at avoiding pitfalls and mistakes.

Fail at trying so darn hard.

And notice, in the midst of all this failing to achieve, that everyone else is also failing.

Normalize failing and practice non-shaming responses. If we can pair those two principles together, then we can create an environment that is less traumatizing. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Armed with what we know - failing is not bad but it is inevitable - share failings aggressively. This serves several important purposes. It de-stigmatizes our shame and it encourages others. When Pete fails, I do not think he is a failure; I sigh with relief that maybe I do not have to be perfect either. It provides me a chance to remind him that we all fall short, so what? It helps to share with safe people, and that may require some additional failing along the way. I'm amazed at how differently humans respond to my own confessions of shortcoming. Sometimes I share and then feel that I made another mistake in sharing; I want to lie and hide from my limitations. But others get curious, ask questions, help me turn my failure into an experience, and remind me that I am not a mistake - I made a mistake.

2. Be the person other people can fail around. This doesn't mean that we never give feedback, we can and do (with permission). We just figure out how to be a safe person in the midst of recovering fromfailure.

3. Notice that the only way to avoid failure is to stop learning, growing, and leaning out over our skies a bit. It leaves one with a very, very small life.

How is fear of failure holding you back?

No More Pretending…

My husband and I work hard to say no and hear no from one another. This is not how we started marriage. The first eight to ten years, we kept trying to guess what would make the other person happy and do that. It created a lot of suboptimal situations and resentment.

We would decide to go out to eat and hem and haw about where we wanted to go. I'd try to pick a place I thought he loved and later I found out he was doing the same. Often we ended up at a place neither one of us really wanted to go. When we went out to play tennis, in an effort to make me feel better, he would return a ball I hit out without calling it out. This infuriated me. It felt patronizing and besides, if I saw the ball go out I was never in any position to return the shot he sent back over the net. Finally, we got sick and tired of this little game of guessing and decided to get honest - even when it caused conflict.

It has taken quite a while for us to get on track with this, but it is a much more fun way to live. We have more initial conflict over burgers versus sushi, but ultimately if we end up with a third but equally satisfying option to both of us, it's ultimately a big win.

In what ways have you tried to create intimacy in a relationship by pretending? It really does not work well, does it? Today, I am extremely secure in my marriage because I have empirical evidence that my husband loves me for who I am, not who I pretend to be in a vain attempt to keep us happy.

A Friendship with Jesus…

In the gospel of John, Jesus invites us into his circle of friendship. In this circle of love we can expect the following: love, honesty, loyalty, mutuality, intimacy, companionship and more. We’ll get to the more in a minute, but first, consider this:

A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.

You are my friends, if you do what I command you.

I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father.

You did not choose me, no, I chose you.

John 15:13-16

After the initial rush of gratitude for all that friendship offers, we need to pause and count the cost. Jesus was offering friendship with conditions. In human friendships following commands should NEVER be part of the equation! But with Jesus, he is saying that friends of his have common values, listen to his voice, and follow him. When we accept friendship with Jesus we are also surrendering to know everything Jesus learned from God. We are signing up for the kinds of friendship God endorses.

Friendship involves suffering. It requires humility. It invokes the opportunity for patience.

Over twenty years ago when I signed up to participate in Northstar Community I had one of those rare moments when I sensed God explicitly giving me directions and offering me the opportunity to be his friend and follow him. It was a warm summer night in 1998, the sun had set, and a group of us had just left a meeting with our beloved Pastor James Pardue. We paused under the portico that stands between the church and the parking lot. It occurred to us that permission might indeed be granted for us to launch this new pilot project. It came to me in a flash of insight that this might “work” and perhaps it would last longer than 8 weeks. I did not want to be gone from my routine, the weekly spiritual food found in Jim’s carefully crafted sermons, my tenth grade Sunday School class that I loved teaching with my friends Rob and Jean, being on the same schedule and in the same building as my kids. But deep down in my heart, I knew something else. I knew that if we started this new thing, I had to be willing to stay for the long haul. Creating space for suffering folks would mean, for me at least, that if they gathered, I could not abandon the effort. I think I said to Pete, “You know, if we join this effort, and if it works, we have to be committed. This is not the kind of thing you enter with half a heart.” I had my own baggage and a certain lethargy in my feet about taking on this kind of project. But my heart had other ideas about spiritual friendship knowing that God invites us to lay down our life for not only our friends (the families of this church we had been in for decades) but HIS friends. I believe that once we experience being chosen by God for friendship, it becomes necessary to be the kind of person who chooses others - whether or not it suits our preferences.

Today Will Pass...

Bravery is acknowledging your fear and doing it anyway.

Cheryl Strayed

In a recent meeting I attended a very smart psychiatrist gave a great presentation on the topic of neuro-feedback. He had graphs and a powerpoint; it was awesome. We asked him to share during our Family Education Program about the latest research in this field as it relates to treatment of substance use disorder and other mental health challenges. He believes in this practice and has years of experience. It was both a humble and informed conversation.

At the end, one of the parents said, “Do you think this would be helpful for my child?” He replied, “Well, maybe. It’s expensive and time consuming. You could try this, or she could practice mindfulness and meditation.”

I’m not sure if he meant that the two were equivalent. But he clearly believed that some of the benefits of his skill are mimicked by the practice of mindfulness and meditation - which, for the record is free and accessible to all. Heck, you can research it on google or youtube if you want to know what that entails.

Sometimes it takes practice of sitting quietly, alone with ourselves, to become aware of our thoughts and feelings and motivations behind our actions. I personally consider this a way that I daily give homage to God. It is my small, humbling way of admitting that He is God and I am not. No distractions. Just me sitting at the feet of a big God.

I appreciate the value and right we have in this country to share our opinions and even peacefully protest as a way of expressing our beliefs. But I want to suggest to us that equally important is a deep dive in search of clarity about the “why” underneath the “what” and “how”. And our “why” cannot be found in busy “behaving” or even passionate believing. It isn’t found in doctrines and certainty. It is found, uncovered, laid bare, only when we are brutally honest with ourselves about our fears and insecurities, our doubts and prejudices, our wounds and our tendency to wound others.

So in this month of political upheaval and for many, personal crisis, I offer this simple prayer of protection:

The light of God surrounds me.

The love of God enfolds me.

The power of God protects me.

The presence of God watches over me.

Whenever I am God is, and all is well.

Amen

Feel protected, surrounded, enfolded, and watched over? Awesome, now pray this over the scariest, the meanest dude you disagree with and judge the most in the world.

One of the ways to unlock our habitual ways of thinking and seeing is through shock and awe. Either something amazing happens that gives us a glimpse of the majesty and splendor of our loving God, or perhaps something so scary that we are shocked into wakefulness about ourselves. Maybe we are given a medical diagnosis that scares us to death or someone we love dies. Something happens that disrupts our unconscious ability to believe that we are immortal or that life is fair and understandable. Whatever it is, we end up completely shocked and find ourselves disoriented and confused.

I for one try to avoid discomfort and confusion at all costs. But I have learned, recently, that discomfort and confusion are necessary companions if I want to live a meaningful life. Some days, I confess, I am not interested in meaning. I just want to enjoy a good hot chocolate beside a roaring fire and read a mediocre novel about a sad story that ends up all sunshine and rainbows.

But on days when that doesn’t happen, on most days, this kind of sugar rush and spiritual numbness is not fulfilling. So what’s a girl to do? If we are going to rise above our temptation to numb, ignore, or rationalize away the reality of life lived on life’s terms, how do we manage the pain and discombobulation that is inherent in such a life?

Here’s a quote that helps me:

This is not how your story ends. It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.

Cheryl Strayed

I appreciate the discipline of knowing that today will pass. Shock inevitably gives way to other emotions, but eventually we find a new equilibrium. What I am suggesting is this - if we can find a way to calm our initial freak out over the shaking of our foundation with the knowledge that our journey continues and the world is not coming to an end, then we may be able to stay with the suffering long enough for it to do its work in us, rousing us to more maturity.

Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.

James 1:2-4 The Message

It is a good thing to know our true colors. It is a requirement in order for us to not judge the true colors of everyone else.