Reclaim Your Joy

My grandchildren saved my life; it is a lot of pressure to put on newborns, but this is the truth of what happened. Their births awakened within me a profound joy. I remembered. I remembered that life was not all work and no play. I remembered that babies grow like weeds and I would only have them for a few short years before I either descend into senility or they get a hankering for their own kind - their peers.

I realized that I was slogging through my one wild and precious life as if someone had attached heavy weights to all my positive emotions, hopes and dreams. I felt stale and stiff and used up. I looked around and recognized that some of the patterns from my childhood were being replayed in my current day reality. This was not good. I was disgusted with these patterns. I was lonely and hopeless. I was sinking fast. I dreaded trying to go to sleep and dreaded waking up to the chaos, confusion, and conflict that infused not only our world, but my community. I read somewhere that dread is anxiety on steroids. That sounds about right. But what could I do? I did not know and so I did nothing.

I believe that I am responsible for every moment of my life. There is no one to blame or pawn my work off on. My life. My work. I needed to get some help but part of being depressed is that we feel helpless. I knew I had a problem - the loss of joy. That did not turn out to be the problem but it was my starting place and although I did not know what to do next, I did know that I wanted to reclaim my joy. Or maybe find it for the first time.

As you pay attention to yourself, notice if you are receiving any clues that something needs to change in order for you to grow and thrive.

Using Your Power for Good

"The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones."

Brandon Sanderson

My highly successful, hard charging friends amaze me. Their focus on their goals, their ability to create an image that is attractive and inspiring, and their capacity for efficiency and multi-tasking is awe-inspiring. Until it isn't. When taken too far these amazing achievers lose sight of their own goals, their own heart, their own desires. This can become a lonely existence and these folks often feel like they will die if they stop achieving. For balance, these folks need to look for their values and try to make more heart connections with the people that they are influencing - because trust me, these folks are influential!

Could this be you? Is it time to evaluate whether your power is used for good...or not?

The Hard Work of Self-Confrontation

So far this blog has just been a bundle of optimism! Rethink loneliness I suggested! Don’t run from suffering! What pain are you avoiding? I inquired. These are the words people seeking maturity and wisdom need to hear. They are not easy words. But they are necessary words.

We will not heal as a nation, we will not unify as a people, we will not deny our baser instincts, unless a few of us are willing to do the hard work of self-confrontation. So. In order to do this work, we need to find a sanctuary.

I cannot tell you what your sanctuary looks like or where to find it. But I can tell you my understanding of the concept.

“Sanctuary is finding a place to regain our bearings, reclaim our soul, heal our wounds and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the story - it’s about spiritual survival and the capacity to carry on.”

Parker Palmer

My sanctuary is mostly solitary, but when necessary, I have trusted mentors who I ask to join me. I do this by inviting them to hear my story. I share my pain. I tell them the things I hope no one ever knows about me, because these truths embarrass me. I’ve made some whopper mistakes when it comes to trusting people but for the most part, as I age, I get a bit better at finding trustworthy mentors.

May we find sanctuary, one and all!

Loneliness is an Essential Part of Growth - Whether We Like It or Not

Loneliness improves concentration and cognitive functions and is actually conducive to self-development, identity consolidation and heightened creativity. Love the poetry of Mary Oliver? She was not exactly a social butterfly but I swear her time spent in the fields with the butterflies and God’s creatures sparked her creativity and has healed my heart with her beautiful writings on many a day when her words were the thing that got me up and going.

The Handbook of Solitude emphasizes that loneliness can help us gain insight into ourselves, have therapeutic benefits and can help us deal with political and social pressures. They report that those who experience loneliness are able to form better and more lasting relationships than those who have not. AND...loneliness can immunize us against future social isolation.

Maybe we are not experiencing an epidemic of loneliness so much as we are experiencing monophobia - a fear of loneliness. Maybe we are incompetently treating what ails us with increasing and intensifying contact with others. Maybe our problem is less about loneliness and more about our inability to cope with alone time.

Consider this: If you are not your own best company, what do you want/need to change about you? If you chase after everyone, how are you nurturing the small cadre of people who have demonstrated how much they want to be in your company?

If we can let go of fear of loneliness, we can perhaps pay more attention. Are there people in our life who we need to let go of? Maybe the relationship has run its course. Or maybe, upon reflection, the mutual relationship was perhaps not as solid as you thought? Remember that some folks have more to take and less to give. Sometimes that person is us. But we absolutely do not have to feel obligated to live in one-sided relationships. And each of us gets to decide what that means to us, depending on our own temperament, maturity, and capacity for wisdom.

Now, the exception clause. Sometimes people you love are suffering and unable to pick up the phone and call or respond to your reach outs. This is not personal and no offense or judgment needs to be expressed. Our work is to decide, after long and hard consideration, prayer and soul searching, if this is the end of a relationship or a time to hang in with your friend. It can go either way. But if this friend has been a good friend in the past, maybe this is the time when we extend them the grace they have so often extended us. After all, no one has a friend for a while without having to extend grace. In situations like this, we try not to be a stalker and we work hard to manage our own feelings of loss. We find ways to reach out that are not too burdensome to our friend. We do the best we can. They do the best they can.

Just remember: there are worse things than loneliness.

Love one another.

A new year offers us the opportunity to reflect and consider our future selves. Inevitably, we all have different perspectives on resolutions and such. After the year our world has just experienced, it might be hard to muster unbridled enthusiasm and optimism for 2021. Good.

We don’t need it. The endless possibilities; the big dreams; these are not the things that build character and resilience. In the future, it is far more likely that the suffering of 2020 will stimulate creativity and spiritual awakenings the likes of which art camp and retreats could never accomplish.

Suffering is an essential part of growth - whether we like it or not. I am not suggesting we seek out suffering - that’s masochism. But I do hope this allows us to think of our suffering as something we walk through, not run from.

Do you have regrets? A boatload of remorse? Ok. Tempted to blame others? That’s normal. Trying to pretend that you DON’T feel these painful things? Sounds about right.

If 2021 is going to provide us with growth and maturity and wisdom, there is one crucial question we must ask ourselves: What pain are we avoiding? T. S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

But some humans learn that bearing reality is actually a super power.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness. Cheryl Strayed

Let’s pray….

Jesus said this one time to a group of people. Read these verses and imagine him saying this exact same thing to you:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30 NIV

Quality Versus Quantity...

In 2019 a team at Trinity College Dublin researched 1,839 adult Americans between the ages of 18 and 70. They found that the quality of their relationships had a far greater impact on their mental health than the number of their relationships. Those with toxic relationships turned out to be far worse in terms of mental health than those with very few relationships - those whom we might call loners.

We have other research that shows the risk of heart disease increases for women in bad marriages and hypertension is more frequent among couples who assess their marriage negatively. All this is still correlational data - so we have to take it with the same grain of salt we apply to the studies on loneliness. But at a minimum, it should give us pause.

There are many potential benefits to this added perspective, especially during a pandemic. Maybe we should focus more on the relationships we have rather than fretting about the gatherings we are temporarily losing.

Let me get super vulnerable here for a minute. I hate not being with my community several times a week. Like most pastors, I literally am at our church almost every time the doors open and often when I have to unlock them to gain entry. I like my life this way. But this was my pre-pandemic life.

At some point I had to grow up and realize that nothing was stopping me from having connections and human contact except my own lethargy about picking up the phone. Has contact with all my relationships survived this loss of personal contact? No they have not. But I suspect there is much for me to learn here about the nature of those relationships. Did the pandemic cause me to lose these relationships? Not really.

What about the ones I’ve gained and strengthened? Nothing like a good pandemic to find out who your friends are!! And it is instructive to examine ourselves and notice who we have been inclined to contact and who we have not (and vice versa). This reach out and touch someone is a two-way street.

Before you assume that I am going to encourage you to make contact with everyone in your phone list - stop. Don’t go there! We’ll unpack this more in tomorrow’s blog post.

We live in a world that defines us by our “isms”. Don’t buy into that nonsense. Spend time today and every day in gratitude for you being you - warts and all.