Wretched and Hope-Filled

What if you are as bad as you think you are?  Let’s talk about that scenario.  

You think you are bad?  You think your life situation is heartbreaking?  Ok.  But here is one other piece of information for your consideration.  There is no need to compare and compete for the worst story.  

But suppose you did compete and won?  Suppose you really do have the worst story EVER?  And suppose you are the villain in the story (at least in part)?

Consider this:

Even if he (GOD) has driven you to the far end of heaven, the Lord Your God will gather you up from there; he will take you back from there.  Deuteronomy 30:4

Our stories do not serve us well when they keep us stuck.  

The 12 steps and the scriptures are in sync on this - we must come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

A sane perspective understands that God is all about gathering up and bringing us back.  Are you willing to be brought back?  Or are there some areas that remain stubbornly resistant to hope?

Stubborn Hope

Hope is not a Hallmark card sentiment for me.  

It is often a fight to the finish.  The battle is between my stinking thinking and the discipline to believe that if God is who He says He is.  When I practice this disciplined way of seeing and being in the world, I have an inspired way of seeing that ALWAYS allows for the possibility of hope - regardless of my circumstances.

Hope is also realistic.  It believes in miracles AND it accepts reality.  When our dearly beloved friend Will was diagnosed with cancer I hoped for a miracle AND I paid attention to what the doctor and Will were teaching me about his condition.  I so wanted the miracle, but I did not indulge in fantasy living - because that is not genuine hope.

Hope can bear the weight of reality and still be hope.  In 2 Samuel 14:14, it says this:  

We all have to die - we’re like water spilled out on the ground that can’t be gathered up again.  

This in no way gives information about the exact date and time of any of our departures.  But it teaches us a limit to our humanity - we are all mortals.  We will all die at some time.  This is a reality limit that must be factored into my hope.

It goes on like this:  But God doesn’t take life away

I didn’t have to spend any energy wondering if God was taking Will (or any of the other folks we have loved and lost in our community over the past 20 years) because he needed another angel, or to pay for a crime he or someone else committed or to punish someone so that they might repent or to teach others a lesson at Will’s expense.  God doesn’t take life away.  Life is finite.  

Furthermore, instead, he makes plans so those banished from him don’t stay that way.

A parent of another young adult who passed away recently is lamenting her daughter’s “lack of faith”; she is obsessively worrying over this thought that her daughter’s addiction “stole her child’s faith”; this is yet one more thing she regrets and blames herself for.

Someday soon I pray there will be a moment when she can see and hear 2 Samuel 14:14 for what it is - a small but powerful insight into how God loves us.  He makes plans for restoration.  This is hopeful.  How he does it, what it looks like, I do not know.  But any situation that I am tempted to wilt over is an invitation for me to remember this:  we all have to die, but God doesn’t take life away, instead he makes plans so those banished from him don’t stay that way.

Hope is a choice; a spiritual discipline; a partner of reality; a gift from God.

Resiliency Limits

Resiliency is not a universally helpful concept.  Perseverance is not always our best move.  Some objectives are not realistic and should be ditched as goals.  Sometimes resiliency means being realistic and giving up.  I do not like saying this, but it is true.

In my lifetime I have had a couple of humongous disappointments.  Both of which are totally predictable based on how I see the world.  I love collaboration and community building in a world that often prefers to compare and compete.  I idealize the notion that if we all work together our outcomes will immediately improve because a bunch of heads thinking, feeling and doing together is better than a solo operator any day of the week.

However.  This has blinded me to the fact that this is not everyone’s reality.  In both of my most life-altering disappointments I can see how my eagerness to collaborate over-rode my instincts about my collaborators.  I hung in too long in the relationships when I should have acknowledged that my goals were completely NOT the goals of others.  This does not make others bad and me good or vice versa; it means we are different.  It is only a problem when one or the other of us (me in this case) expects someone to be someone they are not.

I was wrong.  I unconsciously asked others to play by my rules.  I pushed.  I pulled.  I moved away from my own core value of collaboration and tried to control the situation.  This is all on me.  It cost me and others who love me a lot of time, energy, and angst.  

Today, I am more cautious about this collaboration mindset.  I do not just assume that if you say you want to play nice in the sandbox that I need to go out and get us a bigger box and more sand.  I am learning that resiliency has limits.  These limits are naturally occurring if we pay attention to all 11 skill sets associated with resiliency.  If I had paid more attention to self-care, and less attention to this inclination to build a bigger sandbox, then I would not have experienced the heartbreak I did.  BUT I also would not have learned what I learned either - so you see?  

We end up back at resilience - with limits.  Because learning from our mistakes is what?  Resilient behavior!!

Learning to Be Realistic

My lunch date that I referred to in earlier posts felt like a failure on every level.  Instead of trying to jolly her out of her failure mentality I asked her to go home and list all her failures in a notebook and bring them to me in a few days.  She readily agreed to this exercise in shaming because her brain constantly recounted these failures to her all day and night long.  I understood intuitively that if I had asked her to list her successes she would have acquiesced in the moment but I would have never seen her again.

Instead, she showed up with her notebook ready for me to acknowledge that indeed, she was a complete failure.  But here’s the thing that was so predictable and striking about her list.  Pretty much everything on her list was an item she NEVER IN A MILLION KAZILLION YEARS HAVE EVER SUCCEEDED AT!

Sample failings:
1.  I could not get my brother to stop using drugs.
2. I failed at protecting my siblings from my father’s abuse. (She was the youngest child.)
3. I failed to make my mother love me.
4. I have failed to ever have a normal, happy holiday event where my entire family gathered in peace.
See what she did there?  These are all things that are beyond her control.  But the tricky thing about an unhealthy family is members are often made to feel responsible without any authority or right to actually change anything!

Currently she is working on the following perspective shifts:
1. Change is a process not a crisis reaction.  
2. Process takes time.
3. Mistakes are inevitable.
4. Not all mistakes are mine to own.
5. Goals must be realistic and within the realm of my responsibility.
6. Some things are impossible to achieve without the support of all parties.
7. Resiliency and skills like perseverance are only useful if the objective is realistic.

Any of this sound familiar to you and yours?

Believing God is who He says He is

When I was taught the roles of an addictive family system, I easily spotted my place in the lineup.  Can you say over-achiever?  Master problem solver of other people’s issues?  Guilty on all counts.

Feeling responsible for a lot of people and things that were never mine to feel or think or do anything about was a real joy killer.  I brought all this over-achieving and people pleasing quite naturally and unconsciously into my life with God.  I had all sorts of unconscious inclinations about how much God would expect of me and how little he would offer in return.  Basically, I had the whole God/me thing backwards.  But I also had his word, which I love to read and study and try to apply.  Here’s a verse that gets me every time right in the heart:

Heaven’s my throne, earth is my footstool.
What sort of house could you build me?
What holiday spot reserve for me?
I made all this!
I own all this!

But there IS something I’m looking for:
A person simple and plain, reverently response to what I say.

Isaiah 66:1-2, The Message

So here’s the deal.  God is not asking me to over-achieve so that he can under-deliver.  He just wants to have a conversation with me from a particular way of thinking about the relationship - he wants it to be non-defensive.  He desires relationship with me to be responsive on my part.  Trusting.  No fancy offerings or sacrifices, nothing showy.  Just me showing up for relationship with him.  That’s amazing.  

God is not hungry, angry, lonely, tired, neurotic, needy, or insecure.  He is God.  He is Big.  He is crazy about me and wants to chat.  My job is to show up.  To believe God is who he says he is and to think about that in my daily walking-about life.  This is a foundational truth upon which we can build a resilient life.