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It’s the sheer speed of things. Technology. Progress. Breakthroughs. Change. Life.
Less than 24 hours following the 2012 Oscars, Angelina Jolie’s leg had 7k followers on Twitter. It’s close to 50k now, in case you’re curious. If you don’t know the story behind the leg, a quick Google search will get you caught up.
Whitney Houston’s tragic death was reported by a Twitter user more than half an hour before any official news media outlet.
Technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented clip. The Internet is a great example of this phenomenon. Remember when you had to wait for the morning paper? Or the nightly news? Or even the online news alert? Now news, even trends, come and go overnight.
It’s like that with life in general. Our food is fast. Our entertainment is on demand. The answer to all questions is a wiki away. You can buy/sell/trade anything at anytime from anywhere. From Fandango to FastPass we are on the verge of eliminating the need to ever wait in another line. Making a friend is as easy as sending a request. Literally everything in our life now is geared to feeding our innate human desire for instant gratification.
For me, this makes it tremendously challenging to exercise patience in my walk with God. With everything else in my life being fast-tracked and the space between want and have being all but erased, it sometimes feels like my faith walk is moving at the speed of paint drying.
It’s so hard with everything else being at my fingertips to remember that there is no app for quickly delivering a deep enriching relationship with God. No social network that will put me in instant community with Him. No status update that will provide me total insight into God’s will in 140 characters.
It can feel frustrating and disenchanting when the pursuit takes longer than I’d like. But I have to resist that feeling and recognize that the society around me is wired for rapid movement, resolution in a nanosecond, gratification in an instant. And not the reality of sitting still with God and deeply uncovering what He has for me.
Wanted to share these lyrics with you. They are from the song I Am Not the Same by Aaron Keyes.
Just heard it for the first time. This song sums up how I feel about where I’ve been and where I’m going.
Great message!
You restored the wasted years
You build the broken walls
Your love replaces fear
Your mercy makes us whole
Adopted healed and lifted
CHORUS
I am not the same Iʼm a new creation
I am not the same anymore
I am not ashamed I will not be shaken
I am not the same anymore
I am not the same Iʼm a new creation
I am not the same anymore
I am not ashamed I will not be shaken
I am not the same anymore
I bow before your cross, A broken life made new
Amazed at all You are, And who I am in You
Adopted healed and lifted
Forgiven found and rescued
Amazed at all You are, And who I am in You
Adopted healed and lifted
Forgiven found and rescued
BRIDGE
You have overcome, it is finished, it is done
Now my heart is finally free
Every chain undone, by the power of the Son
Risen Saviour, Reigning King
Abandoned.
Not banished.
Or sentenced to solitary confinement.
Just left alone when you are in your greatest hour of need.
Empty inside. Miles separating you from the world around you.
Abandoned.
It’s a cold, lonely word. It suits the condition it describes quite well. You’re left to deal with reality on your own. The person, people, things that you trusted have all but evaporated. They didn’t storm out, or even announce their departure. You open your eyes, and they are just not there.
And so you sit in desolation, a wasteland around you. Not knowing where to turn. Whether to scream, or cry and so you sadly sit there, huddled in a ball, trying to breathe, trying not to think, trying to sleep until it doesn’t hurt any longer. You feel hopeless, betrayed, neglected…you feel…abandoned.
Deep down you know it isn’t fair; it isn’t right. You know it doesn’t really define you. But you won’t let yourself believe all that. Your mind needs it all to make rational, logical sense. You won’t admit how you feel. That would just make you weird or weak on top of everything else. And you don’t need to feel worse about yourself.
So you just pack it down inside of you and force a brave smile. Longing for the day when you grow numb and possibly don’t even remember how this felt. Questions bubble up in your head, but your mouth pops them before they make it out. It’s hard for you to trust. To feel stable. To depend on others. To let them in. Isolation is the offspring of abandonment.
It’s also hard to keep things in perspective. To seek the lessons you are supposed to learn from all this. To positively respond to it. To make good out of it.
Abandoned.
That’s the word I’ve been searching for, the internal condition I’ve been trying to describe. For a while now, I have been calling my wound a need for affirmation. While that’s true, I needed to peel back the onion one more layer. The need for affirmation… What is that and where is it coming from? In my case, I’ve just realized, it’s abandonment. Just the sound of that word in the air is like a live grenade for me right now. It shakes me at my core, exploding through walls that have been in place forever, exposing a core challenge I never really knew was dwelling beneath the surface.
There have been several times in my life since childhood when I’ve felt abandoned. Not physically. But emotionally. And spiritually. Those wounds have festered for the longest time. And they have left an ugly, decimated legacy.
I read this quote last week on a site (abandoned.ru) that features photographs of abandoned buildings and thought it was both fascinating and poetic:
Future is waiting for us. With hollow skeletons
or downsized ugly creatures with bulgy eyes – it’s not important.
Important thing is that there will be a footprint left.
Footprint of civilization. Cement, metal and dust not claimed by anyone.
They are eternity.
The site’s author goes on to say that,”We’re not that different from abandoned things. The Abandoned have some sort of a strong and complicated connection with our souls; some people get scared and try to escape their impressions, some fight with them and try to destroy or rebuild or just leave their own footprint on the abandoned site to prove that they’re stronger than this world. And some do not try to do anything – they just look and listen to the Abandoned, enjoying those impressions, feeling the real meaning of time. I am one of them.”
I’ve been abandoned. We all have at some point in our lives. Some of us get scared and try to escape the memories or the feelings. Some fight and try to prove they are strong enough to power through it. And some don’t do anything at all. In denial, they just smile and admire the view.
I’ve become overly positive about my past pains recently. I’ve become slightly obsessed with finally laying it all at the feet of my God and having Him guide me on how to best use it for good. How to heal myself. How to help others. How to build a healthier relationship with Him. How to turn my abandonment from an eyesore or a statue of a failed and broken man into a monument of redemption and a signpost for the path forward.
Abandoned.
A word I won’t mind leaving behind.
They are eternity.
I hate running. Turn me loose on a basketball court, baseball field or any other venue where there’s a ball and competition, and I’ll stay in perpetual motion for hours. Ask me to lace up my running shoes and take a jog, and I’m sucking wind by the time I pass my own mailbox. I hate running.
I may hate it so much because there’s nothing to distract me from the intense burning in my lungs and the pointlessness I feel when I’m running just to run. Or I may hate it so much because I’ve been doing it for so long. For 25 years, that was pretty much my thing. Run. Run. Run. Like Forest Gump, I just couldn’t stop. Running from mistakes I’ve made, bad things that have happened to me, wounds that I’ve endured. I’ve tried to outrun sin. Sprinting, trying to make stuff happen. I’ve just been running. Exerting effort. Trying to distance myself from the past. Trying to race toward some future I’ve created in my mind.
God asks us ALL THE TIME throughout the Bible to stop running. To “be still.”
Why does He repeat this so often? Because He knows we need the practice. If you have kids, ponder the following. Have you ever asked your child to be quiet and still when you’re…
- In church
- At karate class
- In a library
- Talking on the phone
- Sitting with a friend
- Driving in a car
- Stressed out
How many times have they listened the first time you asked? Or the second? Never? That’s what I thought. If you don’t have kids, just look around the next time you’re in a restaurant or another public place and laugh as parents try in vain to silence and contain their little bundles of joy. The harder they try, the more chaos ensues.
But running is pointless. Says so right in the Bible.
Isaiah 30:15-17 (with commentary and translation sprinkled in)
In returning and rest, you shall be saved; In quietness and confidence shall be your strength….
God has it covered. There’s no need to run. I just need to be still.
But you would not, and you said, “No we will flee on horses.”
Sorry, gotta run! It’s kinda my thing.
…those who pursue you shall be swift!
I can’t outrun my enemies, my wounds, my temptations. They are always just a step behind, pushing me. I will never get relief.
…you shall flee, till you are left as a pole on top of a mountain and as a banner on a hill.
I won’t know when to stop. After a while, they’ll just stop chasing me because they don’t have to any longer. My head will down, my iPod cranked up and I won’t even be looking over my shoulder. Just running as far and as fast as I can. Until I finally stop, and look around. Lost and alone in the middle of nowhere.
But then in verse 18, it provides a picture of how God will respond. Even after I say no, no, no, no and kick and scream and run around all hopped up like a crazed toddler who has had too much ice cream. It says: The Lord will wait that He may be gracious to you.
He’s right there waiting. When I finally stop running, and I realize I’m a banner on a lonely hill, so far away from where I was headed. He’s right there. Probably smirking. Hoping that I notice and fully appreciate the irony of how quiet and still it is.
I hate running.
Maverick and Goose said it best. I feel the need…the need…for speed. And for a moment, I thought I was just being impatient and rash. But everywhere I turn, I only hear that I in fact need…speed.
As I’ve reached out to people I trust and poured through scripture, a theme has emerged.
Among the advice I received was the following:
Call upon the Lord *while he is near* (Is 55:6).
If God calls you to jump…jump fast.
Even scripture seemed to scream it. I was turning back to the passage in Luke 9 that so deeply affected me on Sunday. And then I kept reading, until I landed at verse 59. Jesus calls out to a man and says, “Follow me.” The man replies that he first needs to bury his father. Jesus famously responds, “Let the dead bury their own.” Another man said he would follow but first needed to go and bid farewell to those at his house. Jesus responds. “No one, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
That sounds a bit harsh. But the point was clear, and I think that was the goal. God doesn’t really want to hear excuses from me right now. He doesn’t want to hear that I’ll follow, as soon as I get some things in order. That I’ll be right there, just let me straighten some stuff out first. I’m on my way, I just need to…This could go on forever. It’s been going on for three years with me. It never seems like it’s the right time to fully invest.
It’s been a real struggle. Given my current situation, I feel like I should be quickly securing my family’s finances by finding a stable job, and then figure out what this whole ministry thing is about. After all, there are bills to pay. But a part of me feels like that’s just me trying to bury the dead or say goodbye or put things into place so that it’s convenient to follow Him.
My convictions tell me that finding another job like the one I have is taking the easy way out, and that I need to stand my ground and let God work. That I need to act on my calling NOW. But for the life of me, I just don’t see how that is going to work out. How it can possibly work out. How anything can remotely be okay. I mean, I have no concrete direction or plan. I don’t have even a fraction of the faith required.
I only have this undeniable urge to follow. A gravitational pull that won’t let me stand still. The need … for speed.
What a week!
Less than 7 days ago, I was told my job might not be my job for long. I won’t bore you with the corporate blah blah. Let’s just say that it’s like one of those medical diagnoses where the docs can’t tell you exactly how long you have, but they can tell you the end is near. And there is no cure.
This is funny in a way. Just a few weeks ago, my wife and I had a talk at the kitchen table where I posed the question: “If this job starts to overtake my work/life balance, what should we do?” Looks like that’s a question God doesn’t need me to answer on my own.
I took this job, as you might recall, less than a year ago. It was a step of faith. I was leaving a job where I’d been gainfully employed for 8 years. And while nothing is guaranteed in corporate America, this was a safe job for the most part. It was not where I needed to be, but it was safe. So, I stepped out. And at the time, I understood that the job I was taking wasn’t necessarily what God had for me. It could very well be a stepping stone. The thing that uprooted me from my comfort and forced me to trust Him.
And here I am.
In the meantime, I’ve wrestled with a lot of things, questioned whether my heart was in the right place. As I’ve talked about before, I was placing so much emphasis on things that expire instead of things that are eternal. It was all about the kids having their swing set in the backyard, the house, the car note, the “success” in my career, the security, safety and “peace” of a stable income. Never mind what I was feeling on the inside, how I was being convicted.
On Sunday, I stumbled upon a 365 devotion book that one of my kids had received as a present. It had never been opened. It just went straight to the bookshelf. I turned to the first page, and read, “Are you ready for the adventure? Are you ready to do things ‘my’ way this year?” It went on to say that there was so much waiting for me, that I had no idea. Was I ready for the call?
An hour later, I was in a church service where the pastor absolutely destroyed me. I’ve never cried in church. Ever. EVER. But there I was, weeping, as every word was a cut that sliced me to the core. The main passage of scripture was from Luke 9:24 where it says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what advantage is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?”
Just a verse earlier, Jesus says, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.”
My career is built around my desire to “save my life” to create safety and security for my family. To be all snuggled in and feel like we’re provided for and that all is well. I still believe I have a God-ordained responsibility to care for my family. And I’m torn as I write this because I want to follow God, and I want to answer His call. At the same time, I don’t want my kids to ever “want” for anything. And that type of mentality is exactly what will pigeonhole me right back into the life I was leading, where everything was fine as long as we had enough money in the bank and the ability to do what we wanted when we wanted to do it.
Following that church service, I told my wife over lunch that I felt like God was calling me to ministry. And in a full time capacity. What ministry means exactly is sort of a mystery right now. Church leadership? Non-profit? Cause based organization? But I’m trying to be faithful and follow through. Meanwhile, my job hangs in the balance and our “financial security” is tenuously dangling in the breeze. At the very least, a shift in my career to be service oriented would mean a dramatic decrease in pay. What else it would require is still to be understood.
So, I’m talking to people I trust and respect. Seeking counsel. Praying. And praying some more. What a week…
I finally got to see the movie Moneyball after pretty much everyone else in the free world had watched it already. Sort of fits with my journey. For the few of you out there who are not a. baseball fans or b. Brad Pitt fans, I’ll quote IMBD and tell you that Moneyball is, “the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.”
Not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, but what an inspirational story. Billy Beane, after being a major disappointment as a player, finds himself in a no win situation with a team that has no payroll but still wants to compete with the New York Yankees and other big market teams. They have a decent season and then lose all their best players to other organizations. All the veteran baseball people on Beane’s staff try to go back to business as usual and rebuild the team the way baseball people have been rebuilding teams for as long as the game has been played. But what does Beane do?
He says that’s crazy. To try and play by the same rules and go through the same motions. And expect to be successful. Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? So, instead, he goes completely off script and breaks every law and rule in baseball. And what happens? They win. A lot.
I think if Jesus were a general manager for a baseball team, he’d look a lot like Billy Beane. After all, look at the twelve disciples. Not exactly Yankee material. There were no Derek Jeter’s in that bunch. It’s hard for us to remember that God is actually very unorthodox. He does whatever it takes to win our hearts. He doesn’t need a script. He doesn’t bow to tradition and ritual. He doesn’t just keep grinding it out. He adjusts to the situation and reaches for us in very creative ways.
That’s been my story. I had stopped reading my Bible, wasn’t regularly attending church. Wasn’t really actively pursuing God. It took a while, but in the end, He showed up in His own way and reached me with non traditional tactics. I ended up on the road back to Him because He didn’t play by the rules. He played Moneyball.
I’m more spiritually awake than ever because of it. After sleep walking for 25 years, I finally stopped going through the motions. That’s almost as long as it took me to find two free hours to watch the movie. And so, I also am committed not to be chained and restrained by the way things have always been done and the way they are supposed to be. My ultimate role model has demonstrated to me that He doesn’t play by those rules. So why should I? Wouldn’t it be so much more effective for me to simply pursue Him and follow where He leads me? Unfortunately, that feels rather odd to a lot of people in our society today. But I’m with Billy Beane on this one.
I was reading a powerful piece of fiction this weekend called “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. In the following passage, the narrator is examining the effects of time as he looks back on youth. I took it as a deeply insightful symbol for my life, specifically my pursuit of God’s will.
“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
My last post was about fear. I suppose this one is about how I rationalize it. How I cover it up and tell myself it’s not so much that I’m afraid but that I’m just doing “the right thing” and not being irresponsible, spontaneous and rash. How I perpetually postpone God’s requests because I’m not in control of what happens if I follow through.
The narrator closes the passage by saying, “Give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.” I can surely imagine a future where I look back and say, “Wow, what a flimsy, irrelevant collection of excuses I had for not doing what God called me to do, for not being obedient.”
I was just introduced to a great quote that sums this up rather well. I don’t know where it originated as a phrase, but Nike has used it on billboards. It’s short but brilliant.
“Yesterday, you said tomorrow.”
When I read that for the first time, it was as if God were speaking directly to me.
Ouch. That one hurts.
A few weeks ago, my wife’s grandmother passed away after a decade-long battle with heart failure. As we drove from the funeral home to the church for her memorial service, I was unusually alert in the back seat, taking in my surroundings. I logged the following notes in my iPhone. Here they are, verbatim.
Procession through Cleveland streets. To Collinwood. Chilled air. Leaves sneaking from trees. Windy road. Color coded homes. Faint yellow, bright red, baby blue. Even orange and pink. More colors than the falling leaves. Long line of cars in a stately march, crawling toward Holy Redeemer. Purple flags with crosses flapping. Headlights like candles lighting the way. Solemn sadness separated by the occasional cracked smile or relief filled giggle or nostalgic belly laugh. Flashes of anger and fear. Disbelief. Numbness. Mixture of emotions creating an intricate recipe, bursting with flavor and complexity. Combinations. Colors. Emotions. A swirling world around me.
I share that to share this. Never lose sight of the complexity of the world around us. It’s subtle, but if you are alert, you’ll see an incredibly detailed design and a wildly diverse range of factors intertwined with one another. Polar opposites knitted together, competing and complementing one another. Vibrant and dynamic. Rich and textured. Highs, lows, triumphs, tragedies. This day is every day. And there are so many days when I am numb to the complexity around me. When I disregard the blessings God has laid before me. When I don’t embrace the swirl of life for the magic it is. We’ll miss you Gram. But thanks for reminding us of the vibrance and richness of the world you left behind.
I just finished reading a great blog post by a media company, examining the societal trend of consumers ditching ownership for access and consumption. The material things that used to give us identity and personality and serve as symbols of status are all but out of vogue for the current generation of young adult consumers. (And yes, that is an altered picture of the famous Nirvana album cover. If you click the link, it will all make sense.)
The central argument the blog makes is this. “The pride of possession and sense of identification that an album/book/movie collection used to give has been supplanted by the ease of access and availability that Internet services provide. But this paradigm transcends mere media consumption habits and traverses into all areas of life. From Zipcar to AirBnB, people are slowly letting go of the reigns of ownership in favor of a social, access-driven share model that satisfies demand.”
How cool would it be if we could spiritually apply this trend? If we extracted the value we have long placed on “owning stuff” like cars, houses, clothes, etc. and replaced that with a pursuit of access and consumption to feed our inner desires? What if that focus on access and consumption was aimed toward God and the things He wants to share with us? The gifts He wants to give us. What if we could really shift our paradigm to view the things of this world as rented and replaceable and the things that are of God as owned and eternal? If we could view “things” as ways to facilitate our journey and not be the destination for our journey?
The blog author closes by suggesting that those of us in previous generations could learn a lot from these new consumers. I agree. Both in terms of our material existence, as well as our spiritual health.
the way to (t)here 
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