This new “column thing” I find myself doing really started a year and a half ago from short e-mails and texts to my nearest and dearest – regarding the surreal nature of events occurring in my life at the time. This transmission of just-the-facts-ma’am evolved into reflections and the recipient list grew, and now here we are.
I now feel a visceral need to write, in fact, and believe that if my ambition is to make much of Him – and make much less of myself – I just may receive divine inspiration when I’m stuck.
But I am also trying to do my part by being on high alert – to absorb information, encounters and happenings in order to blend them into these letters to the world. So recently, I decided to set my intention whenever possible: to keep reading, praying, reflecting, switching the radio back to NPR from my 11-year-old’s pop craze stations and to start exercising again.
To ease into the latter, I added a 2nd yoga class to my regimen, paltry as it is, which I accomplished on Friday. Lo and behold, the teacher promoted the benefit of a certain pose during which I sincerely thought I was going to face-plant. The benefit was the creation of neural pathways. This is a good thing. A really good thing. Practicing yoga has helped me begin to understand the term mindfulness which was introduced to me nearly 18 months ago.
In my humble interpretation, mindfulness is being present and awake as well as releasing expectations of what life SHOULD be. A story on NPR last week peaked my interest and offers a tie-in here. A Thomas Jefferson biographer-of-sorts was interviewed and confessed to a having had a love/hate relationship with him during her research process.
In her book, Those Who Labor for My Happiness, Lucia Stanton writes about the good things along with the bad, especially that which his ‘fans’ don’t wish to discuss nor recall about him. The primary thing is Jefferson’s treatment of the men, women and children he owned at Monticello as well as other plantations where he was an absentee proprietor much of the time.
I reflected on how there is good and bad in each of us, and how elements of life are good and bad at different times and, occasionally, at the same time. In addition, some of us believe life should be on a ‘straight’ trajectory when it’s really a ‘swing’ between good and bad.
At its most predictable, life is a roller coaster. When we think it should be getting better and have a setback, we despair. Those who think life is only going to get worse can sink more deeply into despair, and some resort to taking their own to rid themselves of searing pain. I would venture to say that many of us have thought about vanishing – at least for a little while. Let’s be honest and talk about what people do not like to talk about. I feel that it is healthy and, potentially, quite healing.
The nephew of a dear friend from college took his life when he was only sixteen. Months later my friend sent me an excerpt from The Healing of Sorrow by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale entitled ‘When Someone Takes His Own Life.’ It was illuminating, raw and real. He quotes another pastor who mentions in a sermon the person having ‘died on his own battlefield’ and ends with this: ‘Only God knows what this child of His suffered in the silent skirmishes that took place in his soul. But our consolation is that God does know, and understands.’
What is the answer? For me – as I have mentioned before – it is faith, faith that God is weaving a larger story. Ravi Zacharias, in another post my sister, Mary, sent me, describes the decision to believe as a departure from one place and journey to another. The underlying implication is that there is room for ‘progressive faith’, a term relatively new to me. He writes: That journey away from the former places and toward the new place is what converts us. Conversion is not simply the acceptance of a theological formula for eternal salvation. Of course, it is that, but it is so much more. It is the discovery of God’s painful, beautiful, ongoing creativity along the way in our lives…The journey away from the former place is hard because we don’t want to abandon the places we think make for wonderful lives.
Is it an illusion – what we think makes for a wonderful life: a big house, fancy car, money in the bank, and even an intact family? Did I just say that? Gulp. I am reading a book which my company’s CEO, Michael Guthrie, recommended who, by the way, really got my attention when he articulated a desire to lead us with a servant’s heart.
Come on, what CEO says THAT…and means it? I thought it was beautiful. The book is Finishing Well by Bob Buford who interviews various people who, he is convinced, have done just that. In the introduction he writes: What we need is the will to live more for meaning than for money, status or applause. We need the intention to serve a higher purpose than fulfilling our own selfish wants and needs. Earlier in the same paragraph he emphatically offers: You are the protagonist of your own life.
I love that. There is a story, and you’re in it, baby. The story is good and not-so-good, messy and not-so-messy, wonderful and not-so-wonderful. And sometimes you may want it to end…prematurely…kinda like the grandson in The Princess Bride. In keeping with the abridged version of the aforementioned book-turned-movie, please consider the following:
Is there a Larger Story, and who is the author?
These may be two of the most significant questions of your entire life.
