Breaking Into Peace

I was recently weeding my flower bed and it got me to thinking…

Isn’t life a lot like a flower bed? We want it to be beautiful. We want everyone to admire it. We want to be able to sit back and enjoy it.

It’s also apt to get weeds pretty easily.

Some tend to get weeds more easily than others. I’m not an expert in landscaping, but I’d guess this is due to a variety of factors, including the quality of the soil, the surrounding environment, the weather conditions, and a host of other things.

Is life really that much different?

Some are planted in good soil: families with less dysfunction, sufficient resources to access better education, affectionate parents, and a stable childhood to name a few.

Others may find themselves in soil littered with dysfunction, abuse, abandonment, poverty, and other factors, some of which may remain unseen for a long time.

Some are exposed to a good environment: a good education, great job opportunities, and continued support. Others are exposed to toxins such as depression, addiction, missed opportunities, and other issues which may be found in their own lives or the lives of those around them.

I could continue, but I hope at this point you’re getting a picture of what I’m trying to illustrate. The factors are countless and each person’s experience in unique.

One of the problems we face is that each of us, to some degree or another, projects our experience onto others.

“Why can’t he just get a job?” asks the person whose parents helped with college, offered ongoing words of encouragement, and had connections to help her land that first great opportunity.

“Why can’t she just quit?” asks the person who was never abused, grew up in an emotionally healthy home, and never faced the same kinds of darkness.

“What is wrong with that person?” asks the individual who won’t take time to listen, offer compassion, or seek to understand the other person’s story.

Yes, there are people who won’t put in the effort to improve themselves or their situation. But there are also people who have had many advantages – sometimes subtle, but significant – that make their journey much easier.

There are also people working incredibly hard to overcome weeds that were placed in their lives during their childhood, difficulties that may have been present before they were born or even generations earlier.

Each of us is called to do our own weeding. For some, it is facing darkness that may have lurked under the surface for years, but has roots that run all over the place. For others, it is removing people or situations that have brought additional struggle. For some, it may be facing unrecognized prejudices or biases that blind them to the challenges others face.

This is not to make excuses. I have walked alongside more people than I can count in some dark times. It is true that some just don’t want to do the work. However, many others have a desire, but don’t know how to get out of the hole. Every step forward feels like two steps back.

We all need more grace and compassion, both for ourselves and others. We must find it in ourselves to weed our own garden while also helping others with theirs.

While I was weeding, my neighbor came over to talk with me and started pulling my weeds with me. For those few minutes, we shared conversation and work, and she made my burden just a little lighter.

Maybe we can all learn from her. We all have weeds. We all have work to do. But rather than criticizing the other person’s weeds, maybe we should walk over and help them pull a few.

Oh, how different our world might be.

This week I turned 49 years old and began my 50th year of life. My birthday week started with dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse and ended with a gathering of friends and family in my backyard.

Over the week, I have been reflecting on the life I have lived thus far. Highs and lows. Victories and defeats. Good, bad, and ugly.

I could write a book on what I’ve learned, but let me share a few nuggets of what came to mind…

Some lessons are only learned from experience.

I have read more books than I care to count, listened to more sermons than I can remember, spent hundreds of hours in therapy, and journaled thousands of words. But until those words manifested in my life, they were just ideas and concepts.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I tend to get stuck in my head and overthink things. There are moments where I know all the right things to say and do, but they remain in my mind. They don’t become lessons learned until I act on them, sometimes finding success and other times failure.

This is not only important for self-reflection, but also as I deal with others. Often I get frustrated because someone doesn’t seem to “get it,” but I need to remember they may not have had an opportunity to learn from experience yet. I need to step back and provide the opportunity for them to find that success or failure for themselves. Simply preaching at someone or telling them what to do is usually the seed, not the sprout or plant. Experience is what life needs to grow to it’s full potential.

Sometimes life just sucks.

I have spent much of my life trying to control my environment to avoid pain and fear. While feeling better in the short-term, it typically results in stunted growth and emotional and spiritual immaturity. Unfortunately, I have too often learned that the hard way.

My experience of childhood sexual abuse (CLICK HERE to read my blog about that) caused me to develop coping skills for numbing pain and fear. While serving me well in my childhood, I carried those coping skills into adulthood and often avoided difficult situations, bypassing necessary steps in my growth.

Let’s be honest, there are times life is painful, agonizing, and unpleasant. Between the unhealthy extremes of numbing the pain and allowing the pain to overwhelm us, we must seek a healthy place of engagement with the difficult realities of life. It’s not a fun place to be and all of us work to avoid it to some extent or another. But when we can sit with the difficult emotions, we will find growth we may not have even realized was possible.

In order to live, we must learn to die.

Every day I am one day closer to death. Every moment this body grows a little older. Death is an inevitable exit ramp we all must take some day.

My last breath is not my first death, but my last. Every day before that, we must learn to die a little. Die to our pride. Die to our self-importance. Die to our mechanisms for avoiding vulnerability.

Dying to live may seem counterintuitive, but it is precisely the path to living. Deep inside we each contain a True Self, our essence, our core. It is who God made us to be. But life has piled pain, shame, abuse, neglect, rejection, self-righteousness, judgmentalism, and a host of other wounds and callouses over our True Self. It is only through the death of those layers that we can slowly discover that essence inherent in each of us.

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know and how much there is yet to discover. However, this pathway is teaching me to think less of myself so I can think more of myself. By dying to myself a little more each day, I am learning my true value and self-worth, and discovering how I fit in the overarching narrative of God’s redemptive dream.

This weekend I spent 24 hours alone at a retreat center. No phone. No internet. No contact with other people besides the staff.

I read, journaled, prayed, walked a prayer labyrinth, sat silently, reflected, napped, and took a few strolls through nature. I listened to birds, breeze, rain, and rushing water, watched a hawk for several minutes, observed fish swimming in a moving river, and spotted a herd of nearly twenty deer grazing in a small meadow.

It was a day to listen rather than speak. Reflect instead of reacting.

So let me ask something. Have you ever known something but had a moment where it became significantly more clear? I had one of those moments yesterday. Here is my epiphany…

Until we learn to be alone, we cannot truly be present to others.

Most of my life, being alone has been a struggle. I needed noise, activity, an adventure, or another person.

I’m guessing all of us struggle with this to some extent. Being alone, truly alone, forces us to listen to the voices we often want to ignore, the ones that say things we don’t want to hear.

Voices saying things like “you’re not good enough” or “you’re a failure.”

What I’m discovering is those voices drown out the small, still voice beneath the rubble that is our broken lives. They are echoes of the struggles and disappointments we have all faced.

When we can be still and alone with our thoughts long enough, we can start to hear the Voice deep inside of us, the voice that has always been there.

This Voice says “you are loved” and “you are accepted.” This Voice declares your true worth isn’t found is what you did or do, where you live, how much money you make, or how many times you have fallen. This Voice speaks to the inherent goodness breathed into each of us.

This Voice was present in the moments of silence. It was audible in the rushing river. It spoke through the herd of deer. It whispered in the labyrinth.

The challenge is that we each have to hear the Voice ourselves. We can read all the books, hear all the sermons, and see all the quotes we want. But each of us has to do the hard work in our own lives to clear the space inside.

The other voices in our head and the vast access we have to entertaining ourselves are in an ugly dance, a dance that continues to distract us. How many times have you turned on the TV, picked up your phone, or gone somewhere just so you didn’t have to be alone with your thoughts?

I had a significant realization this weekend about my own life, a brokenness hidden deep below the surface. And being alone provided the space to hear it.

I certainly have not arrived on this journey and will stumble more often that I care to admit. But I was reminded in a very powerful way this weekend that the best way to be present to your life in this moment is to learn to be alone and listen to the small, still Voice that dwells deep inside.

It was a warm summer day. The sun was softly shining in the window of his apartment. It was like any other day that summer as I sat in his living room, until it wasn’t.

He started talking about sexual encounters with coworkers. Then he pulled down his shorts. And then my life changed forever…

Shortly before I became a teenager, I became a victim of sexual abuse. A family friend. Someone we had known for years. But on that day, he was anything but a friend.

I don’t know if that was the start or simply the catalyst of a life lived in darkness. Did this day, this moment, drop a match on the gas puddle that had been a childhood filled with abandonment?

I don’t have all of the answers, but I have questions. These are questions I have been exploring for the last four years since I stepped from behind the facade and exposed the darkness to light.

For decades I lived hidden, shame and unworthiness the voices constantly screaming in my head. They handicapped my ability to maintain real friendships. They contributed to the failure of my marriage. They fueled thoughts and behaviors forever etched in my mind.

I don’t share these words for sympathy or pity. There is no time for that. For the last several years I have engaged in therapy, reading, meditation, confession, and a host of other exercises to combat the evils that have haunted me for years.

This is much more to this story to share, but today I’m taking off the mask. I’m shining light into the darkness. And I hope, in the process, that someone else will find the courage to confront their demons and seek the healing I thought I would never find.

Over the last few years our nation has been divided by a wall. This wall has sparked anger, division, and even hatred.

You might think I’m talking about the wall on our nation’s southern border, but I’m not. There is a wall which is far more important than any barrier on the border between the United States and Mexico.

While it’s become more accentuated in recent years, this wall has existed as long as humans have walked the earth.

Jew/Gentile

Black/White

Rich/Poor

Gay/Straight

Republican/Democrat

Pro-life/Pro-choice

Christian/Muslim

Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter

I could fill pages, but you get the point. There is a lot of division in our world.

My experience has been that we usually expect the other person to move in order to reduce or eliminate the division. For example (and I know I’m over-generalizing), some rich people expect the poor to get a job. Some poor expect the rich to give them money.

Social media seems to exacerbate this problem even more. Trump supporters deride opponents by calling them stupid, unpatriotic, or libtards. Trump opponents attack Trump supporters by calling them racists, jerks, and closed-minded. I’ve even seen friends unload on one another through venomous comment threads that never seem to end.

What has happened to our country?

What we are doing doesn’t seem to be working. And I don’t think our leaders have the power to change it.

I don’t mean they don’t have the ability to influence. They absolutely do. But their ability to bring change has a border (see what I did there?).

The real catalyst for change is our individual lives.

Do you want to see a change? Stop blaming your opponents. Stop calling them names. Stop hurling insults. Stop talking at people.

If you want to build a wall to keep out the illegal immigrants, find immigrants and share a meal with them. I’m not saying you will or should change your political views, but maybe you can see them more as human beings, and less as a problem.

If you think those who want to build the wall are uncaring, find the most adamant supporters of the President and share a meal with them. You don’t need to discuss the merits of building or not building a wall, but maybe you can see their humanity a little more clearly.

If you live in a wealthy community, spend time serving at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Sit down with someone who doesn’t dress, smell, or live like you and look them in the eye.

If you think Christians are judgmental, narrow-minded people, visit a church and stay for a few minutes after and talk with someone.

If you think Muslims are terrorists, visit a mosque or some other place where Muslims gather.

If you feel uncomfortable with homosexuals, invite a homosexual couple over for dinner.

If you feel oppressed by white privilege, grab a coffee with someone who you feel lives in that privileged world.

Whatever makes you uncomfortable, find someone who represents that and spend time sitting face-to-face with them.

We have built way too many walls already in this world. Whether you think a barrier on the border is a good idea or not, I hope we can all agree that barriers between us and our fellow human beings is a bad idea.

If you want to change the tone of our world, do it one brick – or one life – at a time. Instead of looking across the street, across town, or across the globe for someone to blame or attack, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you need to change.

We all have blind spots and weaknesses. We all have prejudices and preferences. None of us are without fault.

Maybe if we could start by examining ourselves before excluding and attacking others, we could tear down many of the walls that divide us and move closer towards a world ruled by kindness, peace, and love for all of our neighbors.

Gluten.

Okay, that’s the easy answer. Gluten has been my nemesis and causes my psoriasis to flare up, so it was an obvious choice. I need to get back to eating gluten-free, and Lent is a perfect time to focus on that.

But that’s not the hard work that lies ahead for me during Lent. Avoiding bread and pasta is child’s play compared to the other challenge I am taking on.

Self-hatred.

This is the other thing I have vowed to give up for this season of Lent. Now that will be a real challenge.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but this is one of my greatest enemies. For most of my life I have been haunted by that voice telling me I’m not good enough, I’m not accepted, I’m not loved.

If I have learned anything over the last few years, it’s that this voice is relentless, hanging on like few things I know, fighting tooth and nail to be heard and refusing to go away quietly.

For years I thought if I read enough Scripture, prayed enough prayers, and did enough good, the voices would go away. The reality is all those things by themselves are an attempt to outshout the negative voices. When things quieted down, the self-hatred was still there.

So this Lent I will do the difficult thing. I will be still and listen. I will sit with the fear, the pain, and the discomfort.

Christ did not overcome evil by overpowering it; he succumbed to it. He suffered pain and death. It wasn’t until he experienced the crucifixion that Christ could experience resurrection.

So how am I giving up self-hatred for Lent? Not by hustling to outshout it, but by being still. By listening to the small, still voice that says I am good enough, I am accepted, I am loved.

This is not a feel-good philosophy bypassing my sin, but a journey through the darkness acknowledging my brokenness while also embracing the goodness. Only when I’m still enough to hear the breath that breathed life into dust will I hear my true worth.

Ash Wednesday reminds us from dust we came and to dust we will return. But the breath of God brought that dust to life. That same breath reminds me I no longer need to hate myself, for at my core, I am created in the image and likeness of the One who brought it all to life and holds it all together.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 18 years today since I stood in a delivery room and watched my son enter the world.

It feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. From diapers to steps to school to driving…just like that.

While I look back and have many wonderful memories, I also see moments squandered and opportunities lost. Times I was busy or distracted, missing out on seemingly inconsequential details of life.

I smile when thinking of all the moments we have shared. Well, except for maybe the time I accidentally threw him off the bed or when I gave him a concussion playing football.

I also mourn those days that will never come again. Things I wish I had done. Times I wish I had paid better attention. Moments I wish I could have a second shot at.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a pretty good eighteen years. I know I’m far from the perfect dad. But I won’t let those lost moments shadow over so many great memories.

I share these words to remind each of us to cherish every moment we have. You will never live this day again and before you know it, your child will suddenly be an adult and your brown hair will be turning gray.

The other night, my son and I attended a Toledo Walleye hockey game. With seats near the ice, we had a close view of goals being scored, pucks flying by, and players slamming one another into the glass.

There were thousands of people sitting with us, watching a handful of people skating around the ice, playing hockey.

On any given weekend, millions of Americans sit in stadiums and arenas around the country or in front of their televisions watching various sporting events. Others binge on Netflix, play video games for hours, or scroll through their Facebook feeds.

None of these things are inherently bad, but I wonder how often we trade living our own lives for watching other people live theirs.

I write these words not with an accusatory finger pointing out, but with a reflective glance in the mirror.

When I spend a few hours watching a football game on TV, I could use that time walking in nature. When we spend hours streaming TV shows and movies, we could use that time to sit with family and friends and visit. When we fill our time with video games or social media, we rob ourselves of time to be still.

This is about balance, not asceticism, priorities, not prohibitions. It’s about making sure we don’t entertain ourselves right out of living life.

This is a very real struggle for me. There is nothing wrong with moments of rest and recreation involving television, a sporting event, or some other form of entertainment. But there are times it’s too much. And if I’m honest, there are times I use the noise to drown out the negative voices from real life.

That’s often the issue, at least for me. It’s easier to submerge myself in someone else’s life and avoid the difficult parts of my own. But in the process, I sacrifice the good stuff as well.

I don’t think it’s a coincedence that depression and anxiety have increased as our options and opporutnities for entertainment have grown. The more we can escape, the more we either bury our difficult emotions or increase them by comparing ourselves to others.

At the hockey game, there was a glass wall between us and the action on the ice. So often, we place some kind of glass wall between us and reality. Looking back at my life, I don’t want to find myself just watching too much. I likely have less days left to live than days already lived, and every day that ratio becomes even larger.

I don’t want to spend the rest of life watching; I want to spend it living.

This year I started with a goal to read 50 books. With the book I finished yesterday, I have read or listened to a total of 60 books and audiobooks. That’s 17,240 pages and somewhere in the range of 4,500,000 to 5,000,000 words.

There were a wide variety of authors and subjects, including fiction, religion, psychology, spiritual growth, business, and biography. I didn’t agree with every author and everything they wrote. Some of what I read caused me to look hard in the mirror. Much of it challenged me to grow in what I think and how I live.

I invested a lot of time in reading in 2018, but I know I am a better person because of it.

Next year, I plan to read fewer books and invest some time in books I’ve already read. 2019 will be a time to dig a little deeper and examine previously discovered writings.

Reading is not meant to solidify our confirmation bias. Good reading will often force us to consider what we already believe and open doors to ways of thinking we never imagined.

If you are looking for something to read, please consider the list below. I encourage you to pick up a book, expand your mind, and hopefully become a better version of yourself.

• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
• The Servant by James C. Hunter
• Razing Hell by Sharon L. Baker
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Gender Roles and the People of God by Alice Matthews
• Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God by Brian Zahnd
• On Religion by John D. Caputo
• The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
• Small Victories by Anne Lamott
• Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin
• Suprised by Scripture by N.T. Wright
• Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
• The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
• Confessions of a Funeral Director by Caleb Wilde
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
• The Jewish Gospels by Daniel Boyarin
• Love Wins by Rob Bell
• The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• Loss, Trauma, and Resilience by Pauline Boss
• Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud
• Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett
• Healing Together by Suzanne B. Phillips and Dianne Kane
• Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Sensible Shoes by Sharon Garlough Brown
• The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse
• The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
• The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
• The Path Between Us by Suzanne Stabile
• How Jesus Became God by Bart D. Ehrman
• What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell
• The Great Spiritual Migration by Brian D. McLaren
• Two Steps Forward by Sharon Garlough Brown
• In the Footsteps of St. Paul by Richard Rohr
• Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
• Inspired by Rachel Held Evans
• What is the Bible? by Rob Bell
• Emotional Agility by Susan David
• How to Be Here by Rob Bell
• Everybody, Always by Bob Goff
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Barefoot by Sharon Garlough Brown
• Teaching of the Twelve by Tony Jones
• Receiving Love by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
• Strength in Stillness by Bob Roth
• David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
• A Flexible Faith by Bonnie Kristian
• Jesus’ Plan for a New World by Richard Rohr and John Bookser Feister
• The Cloud of Unknowing by unknown
• An Extra Mile by Sharon Garlough Brown
• Trauma and Addiction by Tian Dayton
• It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way by Lysa TerKeurst
• Another Kind of Madness by Stephen Hinshaw
• How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims
• Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To by Lillian Daniel
• Surfing for God by Michael John Cusick
• StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• Returning From Camino by Alexander Shaia

Someone recently commented that much of what I have been posting on Facebook and writing in my blogs has sounded like I am depressed. I have been thinking about that and it’s part of what led to what I am sharing today.

This is a challenging time of the year for many people. While many celebrate with family, shop for gifts, watch feel-good movies, and attend festive parties, others sit alone, thinking of what they have lost. Friends and family who have died. Jobs lost. Empty bank accounts. Ghosts of Christmases past. Shattered dreams. A host of other reminders of this broken world.

When I write, I often struggle to find a healthy balance between vulnerability and oversharing. I strive to be honest with those who read, but I want to avoid the trap of saying too much, leaning into victimhood, or treating social media like a therapy session.

On the flip side, I never want to come across like I have it all together or that life is all good. This has been my struggle for years, not just in social media, but real life as well. For a long time, I hid behind laughter and jokes, creating the impression that life was one big celebration and there wasn’t much wrong. In sermons and Bible classes I would share some struggles, but they weren’t the deepest, darkest ones. They were the ones that were “safe” to say in public.

I no longer want to live in that world. I want to live in a world where I expose my darkness, not to exploit it or gain attention, but rather to be honest about how difficult and painful life is and can be. In a world where we use filters to make pictures look even better and carefully crafted posts to create the best, most edited versions of ourselves, we need a little transparency.

This is a dark season for me. Today, December 22, is my mom’s birthday. December 5 is the day my dad died. January 1 is my dad’s birthday. In the midst of all of this sits Christmas, a holiday my father never liked and tolerated for the benefit of his one and only child, and later his grandson.

So Advent holds multiple layers of meaning for me. In a season of life where I have experienced more loss than I would wish on even my enemies, I struggle with sadness. I wrestle with pain. I fight against the darkness knocking on my door. But Advent reminds me to wait and wait expectantly.

This is not an expectant waiting where everything will suddenly be perfect or turn out just the way I would like.

I remember as a child I would get the J.C. Penney and Sears catalogs and circle what I wanted. Without fail, everything I circled would show up under the tree. And as much as I appreciate my parents buying me so many gifts each Christmas, I wish they had been better at teaching me about disappoiment.

You see, my parents each had their own darkness they were trying to conceal. They had demons they seldom if ever talked about. They did all they could to hide them from me, and Christmas was one of those times when they worked at it the hardest.

These last few years have allowed me to see the world differently. I have strived to live in the tension between darkness and light, the non-dualistic world where suffering, pain, and disappointment live at the same address as hope, love, joy, and peace. It has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, but it has helped me appreciate the coming of Jesus in a new way.

Advent reminds me to wait, not for everything to be perfect, but for light to enter darkness. To hope for a better tomorrow, even when today sucks. To love myself and others, even when I feel unloved. To find joy, even in the midst of sadness. To experience peace, even when life seems like a living hell.

So I wait. I wait expectantly. I do not sit back and wait, but rather I join with God in the work of making all things new.

I cry. I laugh.

I scream. I rejoice.

I suffer. I comfort.

I doubt. I believe.

I no longer try to conceal the darkness, and that has taken away much of its power. But darkness still is and always will be part of my journey. Whether shadows from the past or present suffering, darkness will continue to be my companion on this adventure called life. But as we travel through Advent towards Christmas, we remember that God is coming, not just in words, but in action. Not just in thought, but in body.

I find it fitting that my mom’s birthday is the first day after the winter solstice. It reminds me that even though darkness haunted her and was passed on to me, better days are coming and the light can be a little more present every day.