Reflections and Explorations

It has been awhile since I have written anything.  Earlier today I read over something I had written over three years ago and I was caught off guard with how much it still resonated with me; how I was actually inspired by it.  God was at work in me that day and it spilled over into my writing, something that I love to do. As I reflected on that I returned to a thought that has not been far from my contemplation lately – I am doing too little of what I love to do.

A couple of weeks ago I sat in a spiritual director’s office, embracing the silence and space he provided, and wept as all the dissonance and turmoil settled and I came face to face with God who was ever ready to listen to everything I had to say, yet I had such little to say. I can’t put words to so much right now.

I know that God is at work.  I know a deep – very deep – peace that I cannot explain, even as I also know an ache, tension, sense of loss, and uncertainty to degrees I have also never known before.  How is it, that in the midst of that, I know I am right where I am supposed to be? How is it that feeling these things actually seems right to me; that for me, they are evidence of life at work, shaping and forming me in ways I cannot describe yet know are true?

Today, the journey was accentuated as I ended up face to face with someone I had not seen for awhile and miss so much.  It was a connection I had been longing for but did not expect; in fact, I had every intention of avoiding it as much as I could believing it would be unwanted by that someone.  Then, when it came, I didn’t know what to do with it and I found myself disoriented and flustered, challenged long afterwards to think with focus and be attentive to what was present to me.

In this, I am reminded that so much remains unsettled within me; also, so much has died within me over the past three years.  This is not a bad thing.  It is a dying that makes room for life to have a greater say in and through me than what it has had in the past – “unless a seed falls into the ground…”; echoes from the other that make sense to me in a very personal, life-giving way.

written by Paul Field, Henk Pool, Ralph Van Manen, Robert Riekerk

All the colors of the rainbow
All the voices of the wind
Every dream that reaches out
Reaches out to find where love begins
Every word of every story
Every star in every sky
Every corner of creation lives to testify

Chorus:
For as long as I shall live I will testify to love
Be a witness in the silences when words are not enough
With every breath I take I will give thanks to God above
For as l shall live I will testify to love

From the mountains to the valleys
From the rivers to the seas
Every hand that reaches out
Every hand that reaches to offer peace
Every simple act of mercy
Every step to kingdom come
All the hope in every heart will speak what love has done

Chorus 2

Perspective is not everything but it is something important.

I am in the midst of an easier stretch in my life.  That doesn’t mean I am free from challenge.  As I reflect, I realize it means that some of the challenges of other seasons definitely are absent but also, I am doing better at putting present challenges in their rightful place in my thinking.

I had an epiphany of sorts recently as I considered some of those challenges – most of them begin and end in my mind.  How do I see people?  How do I interpret my circumstances? What do I believe about others?  What do I believe about myself?  This speaks to more than just perspective.  It reveals an overall orientation toward self and others and this world.  I have some work to do.

~~

Not all desire is good.  Good desire must be fed.

I have been taught that sin is the illegitimate response to a legitimate need, so I need to take a good look at what is being revealed in my responses; it will lead to the real desires that are good but have been distorted.  I followed this line of thinking for awhile and have discovered it is a subtle trap.  How can sin be merely the bad fruit of something that was good?  If a tree is good its fruit will be good also.  If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad also.  Not all desire is good.  Some of it is just bad to the core and needs to be moved away from and replaced with what is good.

~~

The fear of hypocrisy is a deception that keeps us from doing good.

I was encouraging someone the other day to develop and feed a hunger for God’s word by simply reading it.  He knew that he should read it but didn’t want to and thought that reading it without wanting to would be hypocritical. Such deception was keeping him from doing a good thing. A man that has not eaten for awhile will stop being hungry for food. He has to learn to be hungry again, not by waiting to get hungry and wanting to eat but by eating even though he doesn’t want to. So it is with many things that are good. We will not hunger for what we do not choose to feed. There are many things we do because they are the right thing to do, not because we want to. We grow our hunger for good things by doing those good things even when we don’t want to.

~~

Whether something is good or bad cannot always be determined in the moment.

Friends of ours recently lost their business in a fire.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  It is indeed a loss, but there are some things that are good to lose!  How many of us have heard ourselves saying that some “awful” circumstance in the past turned out to be one of the best things that have ever happened to us?  I could write a long list of these.

~~

Closure is a myth and a hindrance to healing.

The best thing I have heard in a long time is that closure is a myth. The speaker proceeded to explain that closure is pursued with the idea of “getting over” some deep loss and getting on with life. Do we ever get over some of the greater losses or do we merely learn to live in light of them, putting them in their rightful place? She suggested that closure requires exactly that – closing that chapter of your life and moving on without it, almost as if it never happened. But that is not love. Whether that person is with you or not, you do not stop loving and because you do not stop loving you do not stop remembering and because you do not stop remembering you also cannot stop feeling the pain of loss. In fact, the only way to stop the pain is to stop remembering and loving. What you need is not closure but healing – the capacity to carry your losses well and in such a way that they enrich your life not hinder it. I agree.

dry riverbeds that provide solid ground to walk upon

flowing rivers that can’t be entered, only watched;

tall mountains that tower silently, imposingly, ambivalently

the same ones that tremble when he speaks;

even the wind and the waves obey him,

what am I doing;

like the dry and flowing rivers that left each other at the fork,

I am divided in heart and mind;

a friend’s words picturing me in the prison of Joseph

not guilty but not innocent either

needing time and change;

waiting, 

not knowing, 

the unbelievable turn of events yet to come,

still very unbelievable;

the word – alone living and active

penetrating

dividing 

judging the thoughts and attitudes

of the heart

nothing hidden

it is time to give account

what can I say

he alone knows

the matters of the heart.

On Friday, I was high up in the hills of Peru in a town called Andahuaylas. When the plane first landed I was greeted with a stunning view of mountains terraced to their tops, the enigmatic sign of a people scratching out a living – barely. How could such beauty speak also to such hardship?

Driving down into the valley and then walking up into the foothills, I was, once again, caught up in the rugged scenery; I felt at home here and that says a lot because I have been to a lot of countries, and walked a lot of terrains. There are very few places where I feel at home.

I have seen many forms of hardship, and tasted a measure of its bitterness. It never grows old or familiar. In every place, it has its unique expression with the same results…people living far short of what is fair, just and right. I am involved in a work and way of life that seeks to change that.

Earlier in the day, I had listened attentively to a 16 year old young man enthusiastically share the love of God in the good news of Christ. It has changed his life! When I took this picture I was walking a path that would lead me to four teens hidden in the hills, getting drunk. After, I sat with four young adults being asked to do what was completely counter-cultural and leave our “home” to make room for younger children and I could see the pain burrowing deep into their beings. Our own work was itself, enigmatic. What was meant to help and had in so many ways, was also hurting and the wounds were deep.

I found my thoughts returning again and again to the image of these trees and the view that had captured my attention enough to cause me to pull out my camera. As I stood beneath them and looked up, what was going on around me was put into perspective. We live in a world of beauty and harshness, of life-filled excitement and destructive excess, of helping and hurting. What is fair and just and right is within our reach but not so easily grasped. It is above us, bidding us to be attentive but also reminding us we play a small part that will never fully satisfy. What we can do will help but often, if not always, at a price.

We must stand tall and stretch to reach high lest we get swallowed up by what brings us low. And we must be open to the moments we are given to embrace the beauty that is all around us, pointing upward to the One who gave it, and Who has all that is around us well in hand.

Today is a day of Sabbath for me.  That means a swim at the gym, a short meeting and then the rest of the day to rest, reflect and reorient.  I am tired from too little sleep, a little cold from the day not being as warm as I would like, and a little muddled about present situations.  At the top of the heap is the mixed emotions surrounding the  death of someone I knew.  To me (and many), more than a someone; a “patriarch” and inspiration, if you will, of the most generous, respectful and merciful kind.  I met him and his wife  ten years ago.  The two of them were an incredible encouragement to me as they crossed generational boundaries and shared the long story of God in their life with me and others.

In the course of time, I had more opportunity to spend time with him.  Whenever I visited, we would inevitably spend more time than originally planned talking and soon, he would be sharing another round of stories with me.  But they were more than stories to me.  At times, they were connecting points, filling in the gaps of my own history as he spoke of people and places that I had also known as a child.  He broadened my perspective way more than he ever knew.

There was also something extraordinary about him.  He defied all the misconceptions of popular “church” and generational boundaries.  He loved God and understood His mission; and that it was HIS mission.  He had been gifted with skills and resources that he used to join God in that mission.  To him, it was never a program or project; mission was a way of life.  I heard it in the conviction of his voice as he spoke to me; I saw it most in his family relationships.  A man of mercy, who understood each person and loved them well.  A gift and example I am slowly growing into.

Seasons change and our connection became sporadic and limited to crossing paths occasionally and greeting each other quietly, though warmly.  In the past few months he had not been well.  Because of my travels, I didn’t know until well after the fact.  And while travelling yet again, I received word of his declining health.  On this past Sunday, though I was 1900 km away, and driving along a coastal highway, I was thinking about him and in my heart I sensed it would be his last day.  I returned home the next evening and received an email that such had indeed been the case.

I am careful these days to not get lost in what I call the “dramatic wanderings” of my mind; careful to not make more of something than what it is, but also just as careful to not make less of it than what it is.  So I sort through not having had the chance to say good-bye to someone who meant more to me than anyone would know yet realizing I hadn’t spent time with him in over two years.  His influence in my life is clear. I am encouraged in my own  journey to continue to believe in and to look for the best in everyone, offer myself generously, and share words of life – the stories of God –  that speak to understanding what a well-lived life looks like; that of embracing the tenderness and hopefulness of a powerful mission of love and grace initiated and sustained by God.

Mmm…

So, farewell for now, dear sir.  One day, I will join you at home and we will share together in the complete story; mission completed.

I’ve been writing this in my journal a fair bit lately – nothing is at it should be. The phrase has become my touchstone when my idealism and longings crash into reality and what is right in front of me.  This touchstone serves as a stabilizer, not erasing my idealism but providing evidence that there is an eternity being manifested even now through every longing for things to be as they should be.

I heard a great message last week about waiting for our hope eagerly; with anticipation.  As I pondered that this week, I grasped that this does not call us to endure what is now, but in the now, to be ever watchful for the harbingers and tokens of eternity that are popping up all over the place.  In the midst of all that is not as it should be, we get glimpses of God’s invitation to long as he does for the fulfillment of all of his promises.

So today, when I received an email telling me a group was not in a position to support an initiative my organization is trying to spearhead in Guatemala because they are trying to first meet their commitment to an initiative in Niger, I heard the invitation to trust God with our need and check out what he was doing in another place.  As I did, I was so excited by what was happening that I emailed those leading the ministry on the ground to find out how their work could be supported.  In the midst of things so not as they should be in Niger, God is shining his light and bringing an opportunity for self-sustaining lives of dignity and faith; he is bringing eternity into the present.  Check it out for yourself and consider giving to support what they are doing:  http://nvoc.ca/about-us/

As I broaden my thoughts beyond this one situation to the overall picture of my life, what I once thought of as only the pangs of loss, I have now come to understand to also be the longings for a time when all will be as it should be: when the crossing of borders will no longer mean war; when the meeting of strangers will no longer mean one overpowering the other; when the rhythms of relationships will no longer include us being broken, wounded and wondering if we will ever stop being afraid of one another; when we will invest all that we have and are and will have no thought to what we get out of it or what we need to protect.

…

I met with a friend this week, to share a vision and to invite her to consider how she might be a part of it.  The meeting was rooted in remembering her words many years ago as she, in a moment of angry frustration with me, shared her deepest dreams.  I never forgot her words, and now I was in a position to bring them to the fore and maybe do something about them.  She was excited at the possibilities, and that I had even remembered her dream.  At a time when nothing was as it should be between us, a dream burst forth from her lips and landed in my heart, and years later we had come full circle, giving witness to the lessons learned, the reconciliation won, and the opportunity to dream together.  Isn’t this too, a token of eternity – evidence that we are on its threshold?

I think so.

And this is what keeps me grounded when my longing for things to be as they should be starts to feel a little too overwhelming, and I can ask for eyes to see the “pop-ups” and tokens that what I long for is not unrealistic at all; in fact my longings fall short of all that God has in mind.

I spent the first week of 2012 on a bit of a hiatus.  It began on January 1 with a friend emailing me and asking me about the condition of my soul. “It is well”, I replied…with a little more elaboration.  Two hours later I sat in church and heard the same question and I immediately took notice.  Perhaps my friend’s question had not been an idle, how are you doing, though he said he didn’t know why he was asking.  Perhaps that’s why I took notice.  There was some mystery in the question, and its repeat suggested that the God who is Mystery was the one who was really asking the question.

So I pondered, and then asked God what his answer to the question was. “How is my soul, God?”  As the week unfolded I realized I was breaking away from my usual routines.  Easy to do since I was teaching and had to start my days rather differently in light of that.  Yet, in the breakaway, I also noticed a sense of freedom.  Glad to not be doing the routine.  Glad to be doing something different.  I also noticed that the “wellness” I believed I had was indeed there, but not in the way I had thought it was there.  I discovered a whole mixture of emotions…mostly a weariness… yet underlying the mixture was a certainty that God had me in his attentive grip and that all was well between us in that regard.

The awareness of my weariness caught me off guard.  I guess it’s kind of like when you physically keep going and it’s not until you stop that you realize how tired you are.  I had been doing a lot of good and right things.  Each day was filled with a mix of personal quiet time and caring for family and doing my job.  But I had shifted into automatic pilot and a weariness had set in…subtly but certainly.  Weary of the routines.  Weary of the late nights to pick up kids from work (or wherever) and early mornings to let our puppy out the door.  Weary of not always knowing what I’m doing at my job, or not getting what I do know done without having to pass through numerous hoops.  Weary from carrying relational losses for which the hurt seldom seems to lessen.  Weary even of the patterns of that precious quiet time.

Though none of it was ineffective and unfruitful, it had all become predictable and routine.  So that first week, when circumstances demanded a break in the routine, it was like a breath of fresh air.  Like being in a room with stale air for so long you don’t notice until someone opens a window, God opened a window and the freshness that I felt awakened me to the staleness I had drifted into.

Now that the first week has passed and I’m not teaching, I am back into the previous routine in terms of general activities.  I still get up early to let the puppy out; I still get to bed late most nights waiting to bring a child home.  I still go to work and have many moments where I really don’t know what I’m doing, and other moments where what I am doing seems to take ridiculously long to do – going through hoops.    I still feel the losses; in fact, I am more attuned to them than ever.  I have come back to that precious quiet time.

But there is a shift.  Something happened in me that week to reengage me.  I’m flying the same route but with the automatic pilot off.   And something is happening between God and me that is meaningful though right now, kind of hard to explain.  I feel the challenge – like he has thrown down the gauntlet and dared me to step into a deeper faith in his power, a deeper belief in his love, a greater capacity to see his truth.

Years ago, God used a friend to challenge me to “live”.  That challenge has so many facets to it, but the most immediate again is to live engaged, not just coasting in automatic pilot.  To be engaged, actively watching the instruments and holding onto the yoke…that yoke that Jesus said was easy.

I remember when I was a child and my dad arranged for the two of us to go up in a little twin engine plane with a qualified pilot.  My dad let me sit in the front, in the seat beside the pilot.  The pilot let me have a go at handling the yoke of that little plane once he instructed me about how to keep the plane level by watching the turn-and-slip indicator and keeping it level.  I did well for awhile and then was distracted by something outside my window and down on the ground.  My handling of the yoke followed my eyes and the next thing I knew the pilot was getting me off the yoke and righting the plane.  Apparently I had come close to rolling the plane in a downward spiral.  I laugh at the memory now though it kind of freaked out my dad and the pilot at the time and I couldn’t quite grasp what I had done.

That’s the difference between being engaged and having the automatic pilot on.  Even if the overall flight plan doesn’t change, things happen.  Challenges rise up.  Memories are carved out.  Lessons are learned.  Sleepy and weary souls are awakened.  God does a lot of “righting” though with less surprise than that pilot had.  We do a lot of growing in faith in his power, belief in his love and capacity to know his truth.

I’m glad He had me turn the automatic pilot off.

I’ve been meandering through the airport in Amsterdam waiting for my connection to go home.  The time has been good to sift through books in the bookstores, check out a little Amsterdam history on the IPads in the library (yes, this airport has a library with usable IPads), catch up on a few emails, and think through some of the key themes of my time in Kenya and Zambia. 

If anything, I have had affirmed once again, I am not a front-line person. I deal with systems – human and organizational.  I like negotiating partnerships and helping others develop strategies so that they can effectively do what they are called to do on those front-lines.  I like making sure people feel valued and have the resources they need to do what they want to do.  I like elevating the resources they maybe didn’t even know they had, and putting what is usually deemed most important, money, in its rightful place; necessary but not primary.

So, as I walked and pondered, and spoke in a quiet conversation with God, I wasn’t all that surprised to hear me voice frustration.  I feel like I have stepped into a context of perpetual front-line crisis.  In fact, I think that the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself if it ever got out of crisis mode;  always looking for relief to rear its ever evasive head.  I think those who give and those who receive are both caught in the crisis; the former finding their identity in their capacity to give, the latter finding their identity in their need to receive.  And, it would seem that the only alternatives to this scenario for either party are either a turning of the tables, or a separation.  The discovery and embrace of interdependence is at best an idea, at worse, evoking a response of incredulity.  The system is really rather parasitic – one feeding off the other.

How do I take an organization whose sole purpose for existence is to raise funds in a land of wealth in order to meet the needs that are the evidence of desperate poverty measured by far more than  just the lack of material resources, and turn it into an organization that finds partners who will, for a season, invest in a plan designed to foster self-supporting sustainability in a rich relationship of mutuality – each party not feeding off each other but embracing one another as essential to the other in equal measure in order to discover life.

I asked if that is even a right objective.  Then I recalled the many conversations with those on the “receiving” end. They had a dream.  They wanted to move to a new identity.  They wanted to bury their “receiver” identity.  They wondered if those who gave to them would allow them to pursue their dream.  As we spoke together, hope rose within them, in entire groups.  They realised such a move would mean beginning to look at their situation differently, and one man, chair of one of the national boards, saw that to be a huge challenge but one he was willing to face himself and lead others into; in fact, it was a challenge he believed they could not only rise up to but could also excel beyond.

First step?  Fast and Pray.  Look to the One who appointed times and boundaries so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out to him and find him.

That to me is the beginning of change that leads to life; the life we were designed to know deeply.  That is getting out of crisis mode and learning to truly live.  I think they will make it, and I will be one of the first cheering them on and celebrating with them when they do.

It has been two weeks since we took Dickens, our little powerhouse Norfolk Terrier, to the vet to fulfill a scheduled appointment to have him put to forever sleep. He had been fighting hard for a couple of months with numerous seizures that would knock the wind out of him but then, as he recovered from each one he would go back to his curious, mischievous, mooching self.

Even on that last day, he was coming off a tough couple of days that even had the neighbours agreeing, his days needed to come to an end. Yet he was checking out every corner in the vet’s office, begging for attention from everyone passing by, and looking at us with his usual excitement.

It wasn’t until the vet picked him up for one last check up that I too was certain it was time. “No muscle mass in his chest area…he’s in pretty bad shape physically.” We cried. I held him and Dave and Tim each rested a hand on him as the vet gave him his final needle.

After a few minutes, we wrapped him in what would be his burial cloth, along with a couple of his favourite toys, drove out to a friends property in the country and buried him in a place prepared by that friend (thank you James). We cried some more.

In the days that followed we felt the overwhelming absence of our Dickens. Each of us had unique memories connected to the pattern of our relationship with him. Sometimes we didn’t want to talk. But soon we were also starting to laugh at all the antics that proved we had rightly named our family pet:

* the careful, stealthy stealing of three chocolate bars from Ryan’s Christmas stocking left on his bed to Dicken’s hideaway under the chair downstairs.

*all the times he would sneak downstairs when he wasn’t supposed to be there, in order to watch TV (yes, our dog was a TV addict)

*ringing his bells to go outside even when he didn’t really need to go outside; he just wanted to go chase a squirrel or rabbit or the neighbour he saw through the fence.

*his love for Dino and Molly; his toleration of Eatmore (whom Tim is convinced Dickens locked in my office one day on purpose); his terror of Anya, my brother’s huge Leonburger

*his nightly rounds through the house from one bedroom to the next until he had been in each one for at least a little while

*the way he would run so fast that he would lose his footing when you called him to go out on his post, or go for a walk, or to come and eat (which he did by inhaling rather than chewing – I’m sure he could have beaten some speed eaters easily)

*his grouchiness when you tried to move him off Nicole’s pillow

*the way he would sit side-saddle, staring at us like he was royalty; daring us to tell him otherwise

*and constantly under my feet, following me around everywhere from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed; the worst was trying to avoid tripping over him while making meals.

Dickens wasn’t much of a cuddler when he was healthy but we all noticed the last few months he was cuddling a lot more; no doubt partly because as he lost body mass he was feeling colder. But we think too that he knew he wasn’t well, he was slowing down, and he just wanted to be near.

We got Dickens from the breeder as the only one of the litter not suitable for “show” because he had a white patch on the skin of his chest. What do they know – he gave us a show everyday. He sometimes drove us crazy with his scheming and barking and burping and other canine functions…but in the end, he was the dog that taught Molly (our neighbour’s female daschund) how to lift her leg at every tree, and taught us all that life was to be taken with enough seriousness to have a plan and focus, yet not so much that you lose your capacity to just dive right in, come what may.

Good bye you little dickens. I grew up a lot with you. Thanks for a great 13+ years.