Life isn’t what it used to be.

In the last year I started a publishing company, moved to a different house, started a new community group, and allowed some significant relationships to just be, even though the cost was the virtual loss of those relationships.  In the past, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make things happen.  This year I’ve been allowing life to take residence in my heart in a much deeper way.  I’ve allowed life to just be.  It has been good in so many ways.

As my life encounters significantly change, I’m feeling the effects of that change. The stress over this last year has been significant.  It’s not easy to change a large portion of one’s life, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone.  But it happened.

In the midst of this experience, I’ve been having a conversation with God about striving vs. diligence.  I’m a fairly ambitious person, so I’m not one to sit on my laurels and do nothing.  My desire to make things happen continually creeps in.  When I’m striving, I want to fashion the world in my own reflection.  I want things to work like I tell them to.  I want outcomes to happen as I desire them, in the way I desire them, with all the trimmings.  And it just ain’t happening. And the cost is a deep sense of disappointment with my internal desires.  It’s easy for guilt and shame to wander in beside me and just whisper in my ear, “You’re just not doing enough.  You’re just not good enough.  They just won’t love you if you don’t get it all worked out.”

I’m learning to sit with that fear and confront it.  The conversations have been hard but good.

But when I sit with my Father, I’m consciously aware of who I am as a child of God.  When I really listen, I’m reminded that I’ve been here before, in the midst of trying to make it happen.  And my Father just laughs.  “Why are you trying so hard?”  I have no answer.

Diligence is a very different internal story than striving.  In the space of diligence, I can’t make things happen.  All I can do is be diligent with the things I have been given.  What I’ve noticed is that even in the midst of my Father, fear is still present.  My Father allows fear to speak to me, which seems counter intuitive to me.  But it happens. Fear immediately runs to what could happen, and it’s usually the worst case scenario.  Everything is magnified ten-fold.

But when I step into the trust space of diligence, keeping my eyes on the One who takes care of me, I have to let go of my belief about what could happen.  And when I do, I feel a strange peace to continue. The worst case is even an option because I’m beginning to remember that even in the midst of that scenario, I am still my Father’s son.  Nothing can separate me from love.

Because underneath it all I’m really just afraid I’m being a sucker for believing in God’s love.  And the only way I can prove myself wrong is to believe.

“The crap is what makes things grow.”

So I’m going through some tough stuff right now in my personal and professional life.  A lot of my life looks very different from just 14 months ago.  This year has been hard emotionally.  In some ways my life has required me to look at some things very deeply and ask some very important questions about my own bullshit.

As I’ve gone through this process, I’ve continually listened to my own heart, and my experience.  It’s something I picked up in college.  I’m like my own personal anthropologist for my human experience.  And what I’ve noticed is that in moments of deep stress and pain, I tend to do something that is destructive.  I project my present emotional circumstances onto the future and assume that it’s always going to be like this.  And if it’s always going to be like this, it’s going to suck. Then I dive into this downward spiral of emotional despair as I ponder a future that looks like the present. For about an hour I fell powerless to stop it.  And in that future, my world looks bleak.  Nobody loves “really” me. God is just playing a game with me. I can feel it in my body.

And then reality sets in.

I sit with my community and remember that its not always going to be like this.  I do have people that love me.  God does care about me but is working out some really important issues in my life.  In order to remove the crap, I have to address it and remove it. And then I become aware that it’s not always going to be hard and stressful. My life is not going to always be like this.  I regain hope.

What is your thought process like during hard times?

Everything complex eventually becomes simple…with enough time. But when it becomes simple, was it always already simple?

This is one o the coolest videos I’ve EVER seen. And I know I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it.

This is going to be one of those random stream of consciousness posts. So it might not even make sense.

“Those who are dead are not dead
They’re just living in my head, oh
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well” Coldplay, 42.

When I was growing up, I vividly remember visiting my mom’s great uncle.  He had a wooden leg, as a result of World War 2. I remember it being weird for reasons I didn’t understand.  It was just weird.  When I grew older, I remember seeing my first artificial arm, and the six-million dollar man further fueled my imagination.  What would it be like to have an arm that could lift a car, or a pair of legs that could run 60 miles per hour?  Imagine having eyes that would never wear out, or knees that never needed surgery.

When I was eight, watching the six-million dollar man, I remember thinking there is no way this could ever happen. But it did.  Over the last couple of years, medicine has been able to create an artificial heart. The heart is entirely man made, meaning it has no original organic material to it that was manufactured from the body.  It was constructed with things like plastics. To me this was powerful for several reasons. The heart is arguably the center of the human experience.  We feel more than we construct logic. It’s visceral.  And the heart is also the central pumping system for the human body.  Something foreign, or constructed, is controlling one of the central mechanical objects in the body.

At some point, science is going to begin tapping into the brain, which is the central processing center of the human experience.  And at some point this experience will become virtual.  If we can understand the brain in such a way as to interact with it mechanical, we can control that image.  And that image will become our experience.  But at some point it will become virtual. Singularity is the moment when our human experience gives way to the virtual. The virtual is false.  It’s not true, but we’ll think it’s true because we’re experiencing it in the body. What we see will determine our world, even thought it’s constructed.

Sometimes I wonder how much of our imagination is totally constructed, and much of life is learning to see past it. I struggle with comprehending how God could love me, especially in the midst of suffering.  Yet the moment I see past the BS to see that God actually loves me, the suffering goes away, even when the circumstance doesn’t change.  What changed was inside of me.  True didn’t change.  I did.

So I’m watching LOST with my kids. We’re starting from the beginning and we’re going to watch all the episodes together.

In the early episodes, the main characters encounter the monster.  It’s always in the shadows and is rarely seen.  And it led to a great conversation about fear. My kids didn’t even see it, yet they were afraid.  Their imaginations ran to the possibilities as opposed to what was actually happening.

In the first episode, Jack recounts a moment in surgery when he was overtaken by terror.  It was interesting to hear his experience.  For five seconds, he simply allowed himself to experience fear.  He allowed the fear to do it’s work.  It had arrived and so he gave into it.  But then after five seconds he confronted it, and it went away.

I’ve been asking myself how I deal with fear.  How often do I allow the fear to do it’s work? What I’ve observed about myself is that for the most part, my first reaction is to avoid fear.  And in trying to avoid it, I give it more power.  By avoiding it, I actually empower it with my resistance.  My initial thought is that if I give into it, I’ll be agreeing to it, as thought fear’s message were true.  But what I’m learning is that fear has value.  It has work to do.  Jack’s words remind me that there is a way through fear, but it usually begins with confronting it and allowing it do it’s work.

How do you experience fear?

What is your?

I have a daughter that’s fourteen right now.  And her favorite statement is, “I’m bored.” And while some of her sentiment is self-perpetuated, I get that at fourteen, it’s not easy to engage a fulfilling life.  Sometimes life is boring.

Boredom is often thought of as having nothing to “do”.  We crave stimulation (and my daughter is quite addicted to stimulation) and the down times seem unfulfilling.  But yesterday I had a thought about boredom.The root of the word is bored.  And the dictionary defined bored as, “to form, make, or construct (a tunnel, mine, well, passage, etc.) by hollowing out, cutting through, or removing a core of material.”  At the center of bored is a lack of story.  It’s being hollowed out.  It’s missing something that is deeply fulfilling.

As human beings, we’re seeking a story that is fulfilling.  And love is the only story that can fulfill.

What if the love of God never left us? We just couldn’t see it until we had exhausted all of our own efforts.

Self criticism is so destructive.  I have so many friends (including myself) who are their own worst critics.  We hold up an impossibly sharp standard that cuts anyone who crosses its path.  Nothing less than perfection will do.

So Pink just released her new video for her single exploring this emotion.  The better and more explicit version is here.  Pink, who is the female Eminem in my opinion, likes to grapple with honest reflections of self-doubt, persecution and suffering.  Her honesty with her own failures is fuels her musical career.

And one of the things I noticed about this video is that it’s easy to deal with imperfection by granting a perfect status.  Pink sings, “Don’t you ever, ever feel like you’re less than, less than perfect.  Pretty, pretty please, if you ever, ever feel like you’re nothing.  You are perfect to me.”

But what I’ve come to realize is that God didn’t begin with perfect.  Perfect status is not what we’re after.  We’re wrestling with what it means to be human but instinctively realize that change happens. Perfect would create a state that disallows change.  Which is why I think God began with good, even very good, instead of perfect.

Wholeness is coming to terms with our own brokenness and recognizing that it doesn’t define us.  It never could because our actions or circumstances were never the basis of God’s love for us.  God was.  God’s original declaration of love, which is that we are “very good” was independent of evidence to support it.  It just was.  Nothing can change it.  But we can believe a lie that we aren’t good.

So revel in that unchangeable love.  And if you don’t believe it, then let the lie go.  You’ll be glad you did.