“Orderly Spontaneity”
Do you feel as if your life is out of control, chaotic, or at least disorganized? Welcome to my world!
Or, on the other hand, do you feel as if your life lacks spontaneity? Again, welcome to my world!
Perhaps you are like me, and you struggle with both order and spontaneity. Take heart! You might be able to make progress in both directions at the same time.
Here is my 12-step affirmation for today:
“Today, by God’s grace and with His strong help, I am choosing to act in a more orderly way. This frees me up to be more spontaneous, since I am not always immersed in chaos.”
I do not think that order and spontaneity are sworn enemies. In fact, I suspect that they are close friends and traveling companions.
Of course, order can degenerate into rigidity and compulsive behavior. Spontaneity can become chaos. An unbalanced virtue is just a vice in disguise.
On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be so. My wife is one of the most organized (and organizing) people I’ve ever known. After forty-five years of marriage, it occurs to me that this is one of the many things that attracted me to her in the first place. It is still one of the many things that attracts me to her.
But my wife is also one of the most spontaneous, playful people I’ve ever known. And that also was and is attractive. Last night, she got me to play a card game called “Slamwich.” We found the game on a shelf in our rental apartment. She read through the directions, and we played it. It was more fun than I thought it would be. (I won! This of course helped make it more fun.)
Did you catch the order in the previous paragraph? She read the rules and then we played. Order (rules) and spontaneity (play).
I, on the other hand, am sometimes neither orderly nor spontaneous. However, I am doing better these days. And I have noticed that when I am doing better on either order or spontaneity, I tend to do better on both.
There is a wonderful old Christian hymn, based on a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, which contains this exquisite prayer:
“Drop Thy still dews of quietness
till all our strivings cease;
take from our lives the strain and stress
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of Thy peace.”
I believe that God is not simply orderly. I believe that God is the Orderer. And our lives most definitely should confess the beauty of his peace.
However, I also believe that God is wonderfully spontaneous. He is always doing new things (Isaiah 43:19). Perhaps more orderliness would help us all to confess not only the beauty of God’s peace, but also God’s playful spontaneity.
Proverbs 8 tells us that wisdom is God’s oldest creation, there before anything else was there (vss. 22-29). But Proverbs 8 also tells us that the wisdom that God created was “always at God’s side, filled with delight day after day, rejoicing (literally, “playing”) in his presence” (v. 30, my translation). If wisdom was the first thing God created, and if it is continually playful, it is no great interpretive leap to say that the Creator himself is playful.
Wisdom’s play, according to Proverbs 8:31, is also directed to humankind. Wisdom was not only playing in God’s presence. Wisdom was also “rejoicing” (“playing”) in his inhabited world and delighting in humankind” (my translation). The same Hebrew word for “rejoicing” or “playing” is used for what wisdom does in relation to God and in relation to humanity.
So, my prayer for myself and you is this: May you and I have an orderly and spontaneous day, week, and life!
Amen!
“Applauding the Sunset”
“Praise the LORD!
Praise, O servants of the LORD,
praise the name of the LORD!
Blessed be the name of the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore!
From the rising of the sun to its setting,
the name of the LORD is to be praised!” (Psalm 113:3, Christian Standard Bible)
One of the nicest parts of being at the beach on the gulf side of Florida is watching the sunsets. And one of the nicest parts of that is watching it with other people. Kids—especially girls—dance in the sand. Couples kiss. Some older couples dance.
But one of the sweetest things is that many people applaud when the sun goes down.
Why not?! We applaud after a wonderful performance at a concert or a play. Every sunset is a wonderful performance.
I don’t know how many of those who applaud the sunset are Christ-followers. But I do know this: To praise the art is not far removed from praising the artist. There is always still hope for those who appreciate beauty. It is when people are no longer able to see the beauty around them that I am most fearful.
I do not believe that an appreciation of nature will save you, but I do believe that such appreciation holds promise. The world’s beauty may only be a portico outside the house of God, but perhaps if you appreciate the portico long enough, you may ask yourself the crucial question, “I wonder who lives here?” Perhaps you may even see that the door is open, and that there the smells of a truly Home-cooked meal are wafting from the kitchen. Perhaps you will gather all your courage, humility, and faith, and go in to meet the Artist.
“Guilt Prolongs the Problem”
Here is a meditation for addicts that I read just this morning. This is a Hazelden reading from a book by Melody Beattie that everyone in the world should take buy and read until it has disintegrated. We should also put a lot of her good suggestions into daily practice until they becomes part of who we are. Here is today’s reading from her book on Hazelden’s “Thought for the Day” (https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/thought-for-the-day, accessed 02-08-2019).
“Friday, February 8
Letting
Go of Guilt
Feeling good about ourselves is a choice. So is feeling guilty. When guilt is
legitimate, it acts as a warning light, signaling that we’re off course. Then
its purpose is finished.
Wallowing in guilt allows others to control us. It makes us feel not good enough. It prevents us from setting boundaries and taking other healthy action to care for ourselves.
We may have learned to habitually feel guilty as an instinctive reaction to life. Now we know that we don’t have to feel guilty. Even if we’ve done something that violates a value, extended guilt does not solve the problem; it prolongs the problem. So make an amend. Change a behavior. Then let guilt go.
Today, God, help me to become entirely ready to let go of guilt. Please take it from me, and replace it with self-love.”
(From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©1990, Hazelden Foundation.)
I was especially struck by her statements that “. . . extended guilt does not solve the problem; it prolongs the problem. So make an amend. Change a behavior. Then let guilt go.”
When I choose to prolong guilt, rather than choosing to make an amend to someone and to change my behavior, I am simply adding one more wrong thing to feel guilty about—my guilt. Guilt itself becomes one more wrong behavior whenever I do not address honesty the wrong behavior that gave rise to the guilt. Prolonging guilt is merely a way for me to avoid the hard work of trusting God, asking for forgiveness, and doing the next right thing. Real guilt is good. Prolonged guilt is not.
“Sand in Your Shoe”
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
A good day yesterday! A very good day!
What was so good about it? Everything in particular!
Isn’t it strange how we have the expressions “nothing in particular” and “everything in general,” but we do not generally switch it around, except in very particular cases.
But why shouldn’t we speak of “everything in particular”?
Some folks say that we are troubled by little things (the particulars), because we are pleased by little things.
There may be some truth to that, but I suspect that there is another way to look at it. Could we not be pleased with little things, while at the same time turning a blind eye to little things that displease us? I have been practicing this art of late, and have found that even when I don’t get it perfect, the practice makes me happy I don’t have to wait for joy until I entirely succeed.
It used to be very different with me. I used to be irritated by everything and everyone in particular and in general. The list of irritations went on and on. I updated and added to it daily. I was irritated by such things as
- people who tailgated me on the highway,
- people who drove too slowly on the highway, and were in front of me,
- food that wasn’t exactly what I wanted,
- gaining weight,
- eating good, healthy food,
- Democrats,
- Republicans,
- independents,
- religious people,
- atheists,
- Caucasians,
- races other than Caucasians,
- having my sleep interrupted, and
- my own tendency to be so easily irritated.
Nowadays, however, there isn’t much that irritates me. Why? Because I practice a simple discipline: I stop, take off my shoe, and empty the sand out.
What do I mean by this, you ask? Simple! Have you ever had a grain of sand or a small piece of gravel in your shoe? Of course, you have. What do you do? Do you keep walking, and curse the sand or gravel?
Well, maybe you do keep walking and curse. But if so, you are not walking in wisdom. If you are wise, you sit down or stand, empty your shoe, put your shoe back on, and go on walking.
The same thing works for irritations. The only difference is that it is your mind that you need to empty.
“But I’m not the problem!” I hear someone scream. Yeah, I used to believe that, too. It was those people who were the problem, it was these circumstances. The whole world was out to get me. If I wasn’t paranoid, that was only because I didn’t go to a psychiatrist for a diagnosis.
But these days, I am coming to an increasingly clear realization: My irritations belong to me. My irritations are not caused by any external grain of sand. I need to take a grain of sand with a grain of salt. I need to examine my thoughts and expectations. Those are what are killing me, not the grain of sand or the tiny piece of gravel in my shoe.
Let me illustrate. I like watching reruns of the T.V. show, “The Big Bang Theory.” I’ve watched almost all of them, probably several times. Last night, at the time when the show was about to come on, my wife (who almost never protests about what I like to watch on T.V.) said, “I’m going to watch ‘Jeopardy’ or something. You’ve seen all the ‘Big Bang’ shows several times.”
I was surprised, but not terribly upset. “Oh, okay,” I said, and went over to my computer to listen to AccuRadio and grade papers. “Just keep it turned down,” I requested.
Now, years ago, I would have turned my wife’s reasonable insistence on watching something else into a very big hick-hack. I would have apologized later, but the damage would have been considerable.
Instead, she apologized—quite unnecessarily—and we watched “The Big Bang Theory” together, despite the fact that I said I did not have to watch it. Not expecting to get your way all the time is a wonderfully freeing mental discipline.
Is there external injustice and wrong-doing in the world? Yes! And I need to be aware of that, and striving and praying to change things for other people for the better.
But there are thousands of irritating grains of sand that get into my mind on a daily basis. And I am responsible for emptying my mind of those grains of sand, so that I can keep walking as I should. Maybe then, I would have more energy and focus so that I could make more progress in helping with external injustice and wrong-doing.
“Tragedies: One Way they Happen”
Recently, a young man who was pretending to be suicidal lured some local police officers to his apartment. He shot two of them, one fatally, while live-streaming it over the internet.
What causes a young man to go so terribly wrong? There is probably no point in asking the question. We will likely never know the answer.
However, I will tell you one way in which people can go terribly wrong. It is the way that I went terribly wrong a few decades ago.
Now, I did not kill anyone, so set your mind at ease about that. However, I was a walking time bomb, filled with lust and rage and bitterness. And while the bomb has been defused, it is sometimes good to remember how messed up I was. It might be good for you to hear how I got that way. Maybe you can, at least in some measure, identify your own tendencies to go wrong. I hope and pray that your tendencies aren’t as strong as mine were. Still, the bottom line is that it is always possible for all of us to go terribly wrong.
Were there some external factors? Probably so. But I want to focus on how I myself contributed to my own demise.
It was really quite simple. All I did was this: Whenever I came to two possible decisions about how I would live my life, I took the slightly worse one. Having had eight beers, I would switch over to double shots of whiskey. I would not allow my friend (who had stopped with three beers over the course of the evening) to drive. No! I was going to drive.
I could date this girl or that girl. I would choose the one who was slightly worse for me.
Was there someone at work who was irritating me? I would surprise them with a right hook to the face.
I was a mess. It got to the point where there were no good choices to be made, only the choice between two evils. And the evils were getting more and more evil. I was quite close to making a final decision that landed me in prison or the grave.
Is this always the way terribly wrong decisions bear their bitter fruit? Perhaps not, but I suspect that this is the way things go down more often than not.
Nowadays, when I come to the point of choice, I try to make the slightly better choice. God has made some progress with me in that regard. Therefore, I often get to choose between two good things.
We all have choices every day. Oatmeal, or pancakes. Leave on time for our appointment, or speed. Call a friend who can hold us accountable, or call an old lover.
Great evil comes from little choices. And little choices grow up in a hurry.
Great good also comes from little choices. They usually grow more slowly than bad choices, but they do mature.
Choose wisely today! I will try to do the same!
“No Regrets!”
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” (John Greenleaf Whittier)
Today, I wrote the following in my journal, right after listing 50 items on my gratitude list:
“Today, God, no regrets! Just praise, humility, obedience and gratitude!”
Like virtually every other human being who has lived more than four years, I have regrets. In fact, I probably have more than the average member of my species. Regret for the things I’ve done and the things I haven’t, regret for the people I’ve harmed, regret for not living out my own principles.
But these days, while not minimizing my screw-ups, I try to not wallow in regret. While I have regrets, I try not to let the regrets have me. The truth is this: Regrets have no beneficial effects, and many harmful ones.
How are regrets harmful? Let me count the ways!
First, they can’t change what happened or what I did. The past is a pretty stubborn critter. I may reframe it or look at it differently, but the picture itself is not going to change. I can learn from it, but I can’t teach it a single thing. In terms of the Serenity Prayer, the past is one of the things I cannot change. Therefore, I need God to “. . . grant me the serenity to accept the (past) things I cannot change . . . .”
Second, regrets harm my ability to move on, to grow, to become a better person. What gets my focus gets me. If I am focusing on the past, I am very likely to go back to the past. In any case, as long as I am filled with regrets, I am refusing to live in the present. And, the last time I checked, the present was the only time when I could live. To live in the past is to die before my time. I am a walking dead man when I regret my past.
Third (and related to the first two harmful effect of regret), regrets are an insidious form of self-deception. When I regret, I am pretending that I am taking my past seriously. I am not. I am trying to substitute feeling bad for doing what is good in the here and now. Allowing regrets to dominate me compromises the very positive qualities that I listed in my journal: “praise, humility, obedience and gratitude!”
Fourth, when I indulge in regrets, I am harming others. How so? When I am filled with regrets, I am not really available to those around me. And those around me need me. I am focused on myself, when I regret my past. Regretting my past is trying to drive a car, while steadfastly looking in the rearview mirror. It is just a matter of time before I rear-end the car in front of me or run over a pedestrian.
Finally, regret is a form of atheism. I am pretending that I am a competent judge of myself. I am also pretending that my past attitudes, actions, thoughts, and words are too bad to be forgiven. As a Christian, this is a form of heresy, bordering on a denial of the very existence and goodness of God. Living even on the border of atheism is a dangerous place to live.
So, just for today, no regrets. No looking back. No beating myself up. Just living well. Just awareness. Just love.
“On Missing Wonderful Gifts”
I nearly missed a wonderful gift from my thoughtful, creative wife the other evening. It all started with a phone call, and a silly comment that I made.
I had finished a long day of teaching at the university. It is a hybrid class that only meets on campus three days during the semester. Everything else is online.
I felt that the day had gone well, and I was very happy. The students were smart and engaged—an interesting group. I learned a lot. I hope they learned something as well.
I called the restaurant where I normally work as a host on Friday nights. I had requested the night off, and I was pretty tired. Happy tired, yes, but even happy tired is tired.
Nevertheless, I called. To my joy, they said “I think we’ll be okay. Stay home.”
So, I called my wife, and told her the good news. Yes, the class had gone well (I think), and I did not need to host tonight. I would be home for supper. And then I added, “We can just sit together in front of a crackling fire, talk, and watch a little T.V.”
Now, there was one little catch to my proposal. I like our house, but it does not have a fireplace. So, of course, sitting in front of a crackling fire was not an option. However, my sweetheart is, as already mentioned, thoughtful and creative—and she has a very quirky sense of humor.
I was listening to NPR’s “All Things Considered” on the way home to catch up on the news. Thank God! The partial shutdown is over!
I was almost home, and it was about the time when NPR features a couple of folks—one conservative, and one liberal—who discuss the week’s political news. The conversations are often spirited, but not angry. Hearing some intelligent and civil conversation is quite a treat in these days when yelling seems to be the norm. So, I really wanted to hear what these commentators had to say about the week in politics.
So, I rushed into the house, leaving my computer and books in the car, and barely said “Hello!” to my wife. I am not sure if I kissed her or acknowledged how happy our little dog was to see me. I did notice that my wife had set up the card table in the living room. I rushed over to the radio in the kitchen, and turned it on.
“I made you a nice supper,” my wife said, rather plaintively. It still took me way too long to get the obvious point. I was being a jerk. Yes, I was being an NPR jerk, which may be slightly better than a generic jerk, but only slightly. I can be exceedingly oblivious at times.
However, my obliviousity doesn’t usually last as long as it used to last. I walked into the living room. My sweetheart had a little candle on the card table, and the T.V. was on. There was crackling fire in a fireplace from You Tube on our T.V.
I had three simultaneous feelings: dismay, tenderness, and joy.
The joy and tenderness were because of my wife’s creative thoughtfulness. The dismay was because of my insensitivity.
I turned off the radio. I sat down at the table for a nice meal in front of a crackling fire. I also told my wife how nice this was and how sorry I was.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying NPR. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating civil discourse.
But there is something profoundly wrong about getting so invested in my own little expectations that I miss grace, that I miss love. Flexibility is not a native plant in my heart. Perhaps it isn’t native to anyone’s heart. But I need to import it, tend it carefully, help it to grow. Sometimes, the wonder in life comes not from having our expectations met, but by something that blindsides us. As George MacDonald used us say, “The door opens behind you.” And sometimes, the fireplace is in front of us.
“How I Really Am”
“How are you today?” asked the young people behind the desk at Planet Fitness.
And, without thinking, I replied with a standard “I am fine.” Then I added, “Don’t you get tired of asking the same question, and getting the same old answers? I’ll try to come up with something better.”
I then took about ten steps toward the locker room, and stopped dead. Wait a minute! The pastor had challenged us this morning to be bold in our testimony for Jesus.
So, I went back to the desk, and said, “Okay! Ask me again how I am!”
The young man behind the counter obliged. (I think the young ladies were a little afraid of what I might say.)
“I am wonderfully blessed, and madly in love with Jesus!” I replied. “And madly in love with my wife!” I added.
I need to think of more creative ways to deal with simple, routine questions. But even more, I need to live a consistent, kind, and holy life. The folks at Planet Fitness will be watching. And, of course, so will God.
But this one time, I was bold. Who knows? I might get in the habit of doing this sort of thing.
“Happy Birthday, Spiritual Self!
Thursday, January 24, 2019
“You must be born again.” (Jesus Christ, to Nicodemus, a religious leader who needed to start over)
It was January 24, 1976 when I realized that I was lost. Well, I wasn’t exactly lost. I just didn’t know where I had been, where I was going, or where I was. Other than that, I was in pretty good shape.
I would like to tell you that I cried out to God in my despair. However, the truth is that I only had the emotional energy to whimper. Fortunately our multilingual God understands the language of whimper.
I would also like to tell you that, once I had invited Jesus into my heart and life, my life was never the same. The truth is much messier. The truth is that I have had to come to terms with a terrible addiction since that day. The truth is that I still struggle daily with my runaway mind and heart. The turning point in a war doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of battles still to be fought.
Still, these celebratory moments are good. It is good to pause and consider how much love God has lavished upon me in the past forty-two years. It is good to remember that God has never let me down. I have let myself down repeatedly. I have let others down. Yes, I have had to repeatedly started over. There have been times when God seemed conspicuous by his absence.
Yet, while I have at times been a sorry believer, I have never been sorry that I am a believer.
And increasingly, I get it right. I am growing into a better man, the man I always longed to be , and thought I never would be.
So, happy spiritual birthday, self! And now, may you begin again!
By the way, you can also have a spiritual birthday. If you can’t cry out to God, at least whimper.
“Knowing What I Don’t Know”
It is so easy to go amiss in my judgments. In fact, even making judgments in the first place may be my first mistake.
Let me illustrate with a fairly recent incident that you may have heard about. At a Right-to-Life march in D.C. an American Indian, an older Viet Nam veteran who was participating in another march, felt threatened by a group of teenagers from Kentucky. Some of them were wearing “Make America Great Again” paraphernalia.
When I heard about the incident, I immediately sided with the Indian. Why? There were several reasons. Some of my reasons may have been rational. Some, probably not.
For one thing, the slogan “Make America Great Again” belongs to President Donald Trump, and he has made quite a few anti-Indian comments in the past several years. This was probably my best “reason,” which shows how weak my case is. To immediately think ill of the young people was crazy premature of me—as my wife wisely pointed out. (I sometimes wear shirts from Goodwill. This doesn’t mean that I endorse everything that is written on them.)
Another reason that I sided with the Indian (Mr. Phillips) is that I was a short, scrawny kid when I was growing up. I couldn’t have fought my way out of a paper bag. I was teased and taunted and bullied by bigger kids—which was just about everybody in my class, and many who were two grades behind me in school.
Teenagers were a special terror to me. I remember (I was about 13 at the time) a kid in about the 11th grade, picking me up by the neck for no reason that I could discern at the time, and holding me off the ground until I nearly passed out. He was all by himself. I can understand how a crowd of teenagers could be intimidating to an older guy, or any person for that matter.
We all respond to things and people out of our own autobiographies. However, it is best to be skeptical about interpretations based on our own experience.
So, I began to ask myself questions, trying to get past my own prejudgments. Do I know the teenagers who were involved in this event? Did they have a prior history of taunting? Do I know Mr. Philips? Do I know who really provoked this confrontation? Were any of the participants really aware of their own motivations, or the motivations of others? Am I aware of anyone’s motives other than my own? Am I even aware of my own motivations? Even when there is lots of videos (as there were in this case), can I be sure what was going on?
All these questions have the same answer: I don’t know. Having asked the questions, I now know what I don’t know. Or, at the very least, I have a suspicion as to what I don’t know, and it is a lot.
Now, of course, my ignorance cuts both ways. I don’t know that the teenagers were guilty of anything. I also don’t know that they are innocent.
But there are two things that I do know, beyond any doubt. The first is that I need to not jump to conclusions, one way or the other. The second thing is that I need to think about my own actions, words, and attitude. In what way might I make other groups or individuals feel threatened or disrespected? Do I give enough attention to how my attitude, words, and actions might be taken by others, no matter how I may intend them?
It isn’t the evil outside of me for which I am primarily responsible. It is my own evil. I am afraid in my zeal to condemn evil (as I perceive evil) out there, I have neglected to address the evil in my own heart. I need to know what I don’t know. Even more, I need to know—and deal with—what I do know.
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