Eyes Off The Ball

So, as you may have heard recently, I missed my son's school registration and failed to get him signed up for his sophomore year of high school. It wasn't just a one-day thing. I missed the entire two-week period of online registration. And when I was done missing that, I missed the day of make-up walk-in registration.

It's not that I wasn't paying attention. I knew he needed to register for school. It's just that I had a lot of other things going on. His older brother was starting college this fall. I was trying to manage housing assignments, book lists, dorm furnishings, parking permits, financial aid, and all the other things that go along with starting that new venture. Plus, on another front, there were all the things involved in moving a child out of your home. The packing. The cleaning. The organizing. For that whole two weeks, it looked like another house threw up inside of my house. And then there are the normal things that go along with starting school for everyone--haircuts, doctor appointments, new glasses, clothes shopping. Every day, high school registration was on my list. And every day, I thought that in another day or another couple of days I would have the time and money to take care of it. And then it was over.

Moms are supposed to be great at multi-tasking, and most of the time we are. One reason, I think, is because we seem to have been gifted with a brain that is laser-focused on everything that needs to be done. You've heard that saying, "Keep your eye on the ball?" Moms are some of the best people I know at keeping our eyes on the ball, even when there is more than one.

But what happens when there are just too many balls in the air? That saying seems like good and necessary advice if you want to hit it out of the park, which is why it's so often used, but let's face it, folks--it's a BASEBALL analogy. And in baseball there is only one ball. I don't know about you, but I have significantly more than one ball in play at any given time.

All the things I listed above are just the extra things that are happening at a snapshot in time. I haven't even addressed all the balls that have to be kept moving every day, just as a part of living. The house, which has to be cleaned, repaired, maintained. The meals that have to be cooked, the groceries that have to be bought, the dishes that have to be washed and dried and put away. The bills that have to be paid, and paid, and paid. The car that needs fuel and insurance and tags and oil changes and new wipers, tires, brakes.

Oh, and then there's work. Just a minor detail.

And while we are doing all this, there are the children, who need more, so much more, than just being housed and clothed and fed. They need someone to encourage them and comfort them. They need opportunities to have and solve problems, to learn how to have strong, healthy relationships, to find their power and their voice as they increasingly step out into the world. They need to be led, launched, listened to. They need to be loved.

So all these balls I have to juggle are not just the trivia and logistics of living, but also the stuff which makes a life. They are the tasks on my to-do list, plus all the things I need to teach, and model, and pass on. And therefore, of course, all the things I need to learn, understand, improve, and heal--all the ways that I myself need to grow. The spinning, flying, rising and dropping balls represent everything I have yet to do and everything I have yet to do better. So where, I ask you, am I supposed to keep my eye?

It's no wonder the school registration ball was dropped.

I don't know if you've ever tried juggling in real life. I have made a couple of half-hearted efforts at it, just for entertainment, and based on them, I can assure you, I'm not a juggler. But I've recently learned from someone who actually possesses this skill what is required to do it successfully. It turns out you have to take your eyes off the ball.

No one, apparently, can actually simultaneously watch that many moving objects. If you try to keep your eye on all of them, monitor them, catch them and release them all at just the right time, you will inevitably lose track of one, then more than one, then try to go back and catch the ones you have lost, and the whole operation will come crashing down and they will fall.

The secret, it seems, is to pick a focal point beyond the balls.

When you focus your eye on a distant point, rather than trying to watch each individual ball, you're able to see the big picture--it lets you pay attention to all the balls at once. You can know where your hands need to be for each one, the perfect time to catch and to release, because you can see them moving together, making up a coordinated whole.

In my life then, with all the many balls that I have in the air, what is the thing I can keep my eyes focused on? 

It can't be the house or the finances or my work. They are still all just balls. It can't even be kids or family or all the people, places, and causes I love, even though those are the things that I live and serve for and that motivate me daily. None of these things are significant enough, beyond enough, to bring order to the whole picture. I am too close to all of them. And "what is essential,"  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince reminds us, "is invisible to the eye."

Being the Beloved, it turns out, is the focal point.

I've written often in these pages about knowing ourselves as the Beloved of God, and about the writings of theologian Henri Nouwen that expound on this idea as the core truth on which everything turns. I've talked about how understanding this idea will impact all our relationships and all our actions, how it will change the way we see ourselves and all the others in our lives. So it should come as no surprise that it is also the key to the juggling. Knowing you're the Beloved, Henri says, "you can handle an enormous amount of success and an enormous amount of failure." This is true because your acceptance, your value, your Beloved-ness, will never rest on whether you keep all the balls in the air or you drop some. And, strangely, just knowing this will make it easier to keep them in the air. You can forgive yourself (and others) for the failure to love perfectly, or to do perfectly, and just go ahead and love. You can celebrate what matters, and let go of what doesn't. You can focus on being there for others, just being with them; you can stop experiencing them as another thing on your list of things to do. You can even let go of the list from time to time, and just put all those balls down for a minute--if your worth is not measured by your success as a juggler.

In a photo, bringing one object into focus will make the other things fade into the background, blurry and indistinguishable. Focusing on our Beloved-ness will not work that way. Instead of making all the other things unclear and hard to make out, it will let you see them better, more clearly. Looking beyond will sharpen your vision to see things as they really are. You will be able to know where you really need to be, and what you really need to be doing there, what to catch and what to release; you will see the big picture, the coordinated whole. Some balls might still drop. But they will be the ones that did not belong in the first place, the ones that never mattered.

Tomorrow is a Monday, and Mondays are often the hardest day, when all the things I have to do seem to pelt me unmercifully from every direction, demanding to be held and caught, to be coordinated and managed, challenging me to prove my mastery of them or be beaten down to a shameful defeat. I just hope I can remember, even once the onslaught has begun, to keep my eyes off the ball.

Nerd Night

I know I'm dating myself, but there was a time when being a nerd was not cool.

Some of you are old enough to remember the time I mean. (Some of you may be old enough that you just found out being a nerd is now cool. It's OK. Don't worry. But unfortunately it doesn't apply to us, only to cool, young nerds. It's hard to explain.)

ANYWAY. Back to the time when nerds were lame. My pastor at the time, who was also our youth pastor, told all of us high-schoolers that we were going to have a special event called "Nerd Night". Our instructions were to dress for the occasion, to look as nerdy as possible. The picture above is a bit the worse for wear, but you can see some of us ready to go. As you can tell, my friend and I decided to go retro instead of hard-core nerd, and are wearing some old dresses of my mom's that we scrounged up, with some fairly tacky costume jewelry. Not strictly dorky, but definitely not on fleek. And yes, the biggest nerd there in the middle is Brad, our pastor. I'm guessing there was not a pen left in the church.

Brad came to pick us all up in the church van for Nerd Night. Needless to say, we had never participated in a Nerd Night before, and we didn't know what it might consist of, so we were surprised--and not in a good way--when Brad drove to a local hangout, parked the van, and informed us that we were all going inside, and were going to stay, hang out, and order pizza. Then he got out and went inside.

Easy for him to say, right? At least that's what I was thinking, I don't know about you. He may have had a little bit less to lose by appearing in his nerd getup in front of whichever of our friends and classmates might be inside. It's just possible that it may have taken a few people what seemed like a long time to get out of the van and get inside. In fact, if I were to speculate, I would say that one or two people may have had to make a couple of tries--going all the way to the door only to return to the van and gather courage for a second attempt. It's so difficult, isn't it, especially for teenagers, exposing yourself as vulnerable in front of your peers? Eventually, though, we all made it in.

Once inside, a funny thing happened. At first it was just as you would expect. Mortifying. We shrunk down in our chairs. Glanced surreptitiously around to see if anyone was noticing us. Looked reproachfully at Brad, who was ensuring that we couldn't escape notice, as he employed full Nerd Mode, sitting up as straight as possible with his six-foot-plus frame in the chair and saying loudly to our server, "WE WANT EXTRA DOUGH. CAN WE GET EXTRA DOUGH ON THIS PIZZA?" But you know what? Amazingly, the world didn't come to an end. Maybe some people looked. Maybe they even stared or laughed. But it turns out it wasn't really that big of a deal. In fact, after a bit, it actually started to be....well...fun. Our nerdiness stopped bothering us. We began to embrace it. In fact, in a weird way, we felt kind of proud of it. When we finished eating pizza, we asked Brad if we could go downtown and walk around, and he was only too happy to oblige. We wanted to prolong our Nerd Life--we wanted to see more people and have them see us; we wanted to flaunt the weirdness of our nerdity in the most public space possible. We weren't ready to go home and go back to being normal, non-nerdy teenagers again. (Well, not intentionally nerdy, anyway.)

What we learned was that there was something freeing in it, in this total disregard of the standards we would normally work so hard to observe. The rules of the teenage world often center around striving for mastery of whatever will make us liked, accepted, envied, and looked up to by our peers--and avoiding whatever it is that will cause us to be judged, looked down on, rejected.

The adult world is not so different.

After Nerd Night was over, Brad took us all home, but first, he stopped in the van to talk to us about how the Bible says that we are aliens and strangers on the Earth, how our citizenship is in Heaven. We should not be afraid to be different, he said, because we belong to a different country.

How different it would be, wouldn't it, if we learned to embrace the things that we fear will bring us rejection, judgement, and shame? Our world honors the smart, the strong, the cutting edge, the pulled-together, the always-rising. But what freedom, what joy there could be, I suspect, in no longer being afraid for others to see our weirdness, our brokenness, our imperfections. If only we could know, with the certainty that would set us free, that we belong to a different king, a different country, and in the economy of that kingdom we are valued, treasured, beloved, none the less and all the more for the things we believe we have to bury away. Maybe it would be best if every night was Nerd Night. Maybe if we tried it, we would find that the judgements of others we fear are just that--our own fears, and nothing more. Maybe it's time to try it and see.

Life in the Hub

"Sometimes I think of life as a big wagon wheel with many spokes.

In the middle is the hub. Often in ministry, it looks like we are

running around the rim trying to reach everybody. But God says,

'Start in the hub; live in the hub. 

Then you will be connected with all the spokes, 

and you won't have to run so fast.'"

~Henri Nouwen, in From Solitude to Community to Ministry

 I don't know about you, but to me, that sure sounds good. Not running so fast. In my ministry to my family, my friends, my co-workers, and the people I actually serve in my work every day, I often feel like I'm running a million miles a minute. There is never enough of anything to go around--not enough time, not enough money, not enough attention, not enough ability--just plain not enough me. I can't make it all the way around the outside of that wheel. And I have been thinking a lot lately about what it looks like, how it would look different, to live in the hub.

It's hard to imagine, and I guess that just proves that maybe I've never been there, in the hub, but I sure know what it looks like here around the outside. It's hard to keep up, and doing so is a full-time job. That means all of the focus has to be on accomplishing the next impossible thing, meeting the next urgent need, leaping the next intimidating hurdle. And the worst thing about the inability to slow down that this creates is that there is never time to take a breath, or to gather your strength, or to say, "Whew! Now that that's finished, what do I need right now?" 

This is largely how I've become the Worst Ever, in the world, at taking care of me. I didn't do it all at once. It took me a lifetime to get there. I know what I need. (That actually puts me ahead of a lot of people, I know.) I need sleep. I need to eat food. Actual, good-tasting, nourishing food, that I eat at regular intervals throughout the day. I need connections with other people that are deep and meaningful and real, and I need tiny indulgences like an extra $3 on something at the store that tells myself from me, "Hey, you are worth this!" and I need time, oh, how I need time--time to think, to read, to write, to plan, to pray. But instead, I stay up late, skip meals, spend more time on work and chores and obligations, worry and stress and find myself too busy or too tired for meaningful connections, and even my time in prayer is simply a chore, another item to be checked off the list. 

I have neglected to prioritize the things that give me life. 

I choose instead to sprint on to the next spoke, always hoping that maybe if I'm just a little faster this time I will make it around. Running around the outside means always dashing to the next place and the next task without stopping, without thinking, without hearing what your body and soul are crying out for.

In the hub, I'd guess you stand still.

Around the outside, there's not a moment to spare.

In the hub, there's no hurry.

The last few months have been a time for me to think a lot about that--about how I can walk right down one of those spokes to the middle, and about what changes I would need to make to do that. Tonight, forcing myself to take the scheduled time to sit, read, think, and rest that I put on my calendar a couple of months ago, I opened up to these words:

"He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,

Which yields its fruit in its season,

And its leaf does not wither;

And in whatever he does, he prospers."    ~Psalm 1:3

  

I thought about what it means to prosper--the dictionary says, "to become strong and flourishing; to thrive." I've heard this passage so many times, but it's amazing how different things can sound when you slow down. How I needed to hear those words tonight, to see this picture. The roots drinking deeply from that slow, continuous stream of life-giving nourishment. The fruit appearing slowly, seasonally, in its own good time. The tree that experiences and is touched by everything around it, but is not shaken or moved from its base, and is never deterred from its primary task-- to grow. Thrive. Bloom. Bear. Rest. 

Oh, how I hope I am learning to be like that tree, and how I hope I am leading my sons this way too, leading them to the hub where I am slowly learning to find grace, peace, rest; and may they reach it sooner than me, because it is taking me a lifetime to get there.

Just Like the Baby Jesus

I recently took a spiritual development class which culminated in a day-long silent retreat. We spent an entire day in silence, including eating our meal together without speaking, only exchanging glances as we chose our seats, ate our fill, and cleared our places to return to our work. It might surprise those of you who know me well, but in a full day of silence, refraining from talk was not the most difficult part for me. Lunch actually provided the greatest challenge, with all the sounds of eating, so conspicuous in silence--the clinking of forks against teeth and plates, the chewing and swallowing, the parting of lips to take another drink or bite. None of these things bother me in others, but because of my own personal history, it's very easy for them to trigger self-consciousness, embarrassment, and shame in myself. (This is one of the reasons why, if you have a lunch meeting with me, you might notice that I don't eat much. Well, that and I'm probably talking too much.) But at a silent meal, there was no place to hide. I simply had to be present for the experience of my own eating, in the company of others.

However, it made me think about the purpose, the propriety, of food and eating. How we are actually made for this, messy and earthy process though it is, and it is made for us. And how it's nothing but pretense and self-deception for someone to act or believe as though they are somehow above it, or it is below them, because eating is one of the common identifiers that marks the human experience, part of our shared identity and mortality, along with the other functions of our physical human bodies.  As a result, we can know that shame is an inappropriate reaction.

In fact, on Christmas, we celebrate the fact that even the very God of the Universe took on this human frame--the vulnerable, messy, real, imperfect, and amazing body that eats, sleeps, drools, bleeds, and that he himself created. He not only thought us up, put us together, and graced our humble, fleshly selves with his blessing, but dignified our human carriage with his divine soul for the years of his earthly walk among us. The Incarnation is nothing more and nothing less than the eternal Creator, "robed in flesh", as the old hymn says.

And the markers of our flesh are so much more than this, than the bodily functions that make up our life. The Psalms tell us that this Creator, this infant Jesus, "knows our frame"--he understands that we are only made from dust. His expectations for us, and his acceptance of us, never hinge on more than that.

In my preschool teaching days, when someone expected one of my students to be able to sit still, or know when to shout and when to whisper, or not to pick their nose, my work was to help people understand that these expectations are not developmentally appropriate. They will learn these things in time, of course, as we all grow to maturity when the time is right. But for the time being, no child--no person--should ever feel that what is expected of them in order to be accepted, or to be acceptable, is something beyond what is appropriate for the body they are in.  Little children should never feel shame for their preschool-ness. No more then should we for our humanness, from making sounds when we chew, to sometimes forgetting to pick our noses in private, to laughing when it turned out not to be a joke, to spouting off angry before counting to ten, to not knowing when to speak and when to SHUT UP.

We are not who we will be, it's true, when we reach our destination someday; and that day is coming. But for the time being, this imperfect world is made for us, and we are made for it--us and the bodies we are in--imperfect but loved, exactly and appropriately as we are.