fading into the narrative.

“...He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.”Mark 10:17-22

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Eyes slowly open.  Feel around for the snooze button ...again.  Roll out of bed, breathe in deep, sigh, feet on floor, morning.  New day.  From one to the following, every day a new day.  Grace.  The chance to wake to a blank slate, another try.  Restart.

Did you wake embracing grace, ready to start new, unbound to all behind or roll out of bed already tired, still reeling from yesterday or last week, behind pace, day running steps ahead from the start?

All of us continue into each day heavily influenced and shaped by our past.  What we value, our ethos and all that makes us and learned and accepted habits, we hold to them and honor them with how we live.  We find our way and navigate through life maintaining our narrative, recorded in days done and extending ahead.  Your narrative.  Mine.  All of us live in routine.

We nurture what we know, see the world and situations similarly each day as we look into the mirror each morning and see the same person.  Little change, only slight variances, but for the most part, no deviations.  Safely, we maintain what has carried us this far.  But to what end?  The gaze telling, always hinting at more buried in the forming lines on our faces and in our lives.

He looked into future eyes seeing the greatest deviance conspiring against all he held high.  The dry wind blowing between them, all history hanging.  Eternity inviting.  A man of wealth and worth and noble accomplishment, owning more than enough, but belonging to an emptying story lacking life meaningful.  Looking into the mirror, seeing the same man as the day before holding to what he had and all that he held, fading into the narrative, his, owning him.  Jesus’ reply welcoming him to deviate from his story holding, "There's one thing left: Go sell whatever you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come follow me."

The man heavy in heart, fading into the narrative, walked away bound to a path of the past, locked on course always lacking. “He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.”

Your story is not yet complete.  That needs to hold high, defining value in your story unfolding.  Blossoming in each day is the opportunity to write your narrative based upon how you choose to live now.  History behind you supporting, not defining.  Define yourself by the words you write today.

i am not.

I am a mere speck, a glowing flicker, a passing moment.

Make much more out of it and the world gravitates around me.  My hands outstretch with expected readiness to receive all that life somehow and for whatever reason seems to owe me.  Me.  Diminish this truth to an ignorable, insignificant value as if I do not matter in the grander scheme of life unfolding, and no recognizable worth blooms.  Fruitless seed barren.  Miscarried dreams.  Me.  

The truth sets outside, apart from us.

In my life floating, freely successful by my account, God became more of a tame, latent, distantly ambiguous form in days mostly uneventful and unneeding of his activity.  Very simply, much of my life did not demand faith or trust or belief in anything outside of what I could control or withstand.  Each day unfolded compartmentalized and organized into a sort of list defined and measured by goals, expectations, desires, dreams, fears and so on.   Heaven a packaged, rationalized part of my consciousness.  I, the center, shaped my world with moral cues creating boundaries and cause and effect like expectations.

Do this and expect that.  Don’t do that and get this.  

A simplistic conscious driven mental eco-system influenced by Jesus, but mostly led by me.  Smeared footsteps in the mud of life’s decisions, predominantly mine, determined by what seemed right through my filtered, earthen understanding.

I AM. i am not.

I will never grasp the full depth of God’s continually active love for me or the width of grace with which he finds me.  Lying low in dust collecting old on the floor broken, mishandled by my own doing, lost again, a sight of sure pity, a mound of a mess ...again, his grace races deep all the way below me and rises.  Barnstorming straight ahead sure of conquer and success when the day is mine, my spine straightens with pride, eyes glaze confidently, my glass raises hastily, he waits knowing fully that I will need him soon completely ...again.

In his rescuing and reaching and my lifting and lostness, a shift occurred moving me from the center of all, me as the holder of life, to the peripheral of me, the beginning of God.  This is one of the main running themes in the book I am writing: God as the unmovable center faithfully maintaining, always unchanging.  Tragedy awakened me.  Love found me.  Grace did the lifting.  It was the shifting of God out of my life as ‘my god‘ and the re-entry of God into my context as the center and source of life sustainable.

Here is an excerpt from one of the chapters I am writing called, ‘Epilogue’:

If he is merely the god of my life, he is subject to accountability and my judgment.  If he is only my friend, he exists only for my comfort and entertainment.  If he is only ‘he’, then I am much more on my own in this universe left to fate and chance and a cosmic swelling tide than I ever imagined.  However, if he is indeed the God of the universe, if all is subject to his existence as the source and creator and author of life, then I am a piece of the fabric of his cosmic creation.  I am sustained as part of all that he is sustaining.  I am well taken care of no matter the terrors that threaten.

"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you."  John 15:16

merging islands.

No man unto himself or within himself lives completely.

It took a long time for me to know I was okay.  Really okay, not only in moments lifting up, but in days going by and ahead.  Okay meant something simple but deeply telling.  The warmth felt as dawn swallowed the horizon cold and bare.  A new day slipping quietly into familiar calm rather than void.  Broken pieces magnificently laid into place.  Seams torn by tragedy joined fittingly together.  And all I did most of the time was watch in happy, joyful disbelief.  How can one experience happiness ...no ...joy true and pure in days overshadowed by death and loss of one loved?

I remember being lonelier than ever before.  All the same faces, but mine darkened.  I withdrew and stepped inward to make my life smaller.  Most days, I simply did not have the words to hang my heart on.  Some days, I had no idea what was going on inside.  I woke to each day in the same place, going much of the same way except much different.

These words I recently rediscovered turning through pages of my journal in months still young and a heart still reeling.

And so for me, being alone is really about independence rather than reliance.  If I am honest, being alone and independent is really about not being disappointed.  Lonely overprotects my heart from losing again.  It is a barrier that I preserve to keep people at a loving distance, close enough to be in my life, but not too close at the sake of being disappointed.

Nearly two years later after my wife’s death, I am different, my daughters are different.  Our lives are different.  I will always stand astonished in ways beyond the grasp of easy understanding how truly and deeply good the difference is.

Gratefulness births and nurtures joy abundantly in my life.

The sign signaling health and stability and strength anew and different, my heart opening again.  Some days it burst open in tumultuous emotion no longer containable for another second.  Other days I opened my heart purposefully, intent on letting those close see inside.  Whether it was my doing or not, in the mess and rupture of life, every time my heart opened again healing waters rushed in.

No man is an island of itself.  The brightest lights have been those lovingly charitable hearts who counted themselves responsible to the deepest depth of my sinking in clearing their shoulder for me to lean into their lives.  I needed them, to share my weakness and hold to their strength.  Merging islands holding and reaching in the tide pulling.  The greatest weakness is not the horror of tragedy or loss or death and the abiding loneliness, but independence valued greater and sought after more at the cost of relationship and life lived together with those whom your life both intersects and interacts with.

Simply put: you need those around you far more than you often give room to believe.  And they need you.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. -John Donn

Love bears all things, believe all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  1Corinthians 13:7

down the trail.

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Words, emotions, actions, all lit by the heat of the moment.  Right there.  Right in front of us both.  Regrets pile high once dust settles and calm returns.

Losing sight of who they can be and how to get there with them easily falls victim to all busy schedules, sticky details and chunky events of life unfolding. She lied again.  Again.  

Didn’t she learn from the last time I punished her and raised my voice emphatically?  Apparently, what I say does not matter enough to direct her to making the right choices.

What else would be the cause? She doesn’t respect me anymore.

Standing there looking back at me lying again.  In her eyes rest a distance.  I’m not getting through to her.  Control her every more and response.

“Stand up straight when I am talking to you!”  “Don’t you walk away from me!”  “Sit still, right there.”

In the immediate, I am blinded.  Nothing behind or ahead hold value, only now right there in the heat of the moment.  And there I lose touch with her.  That is the reason a distance rests in her eyes standing there looking back at me.  We stand apart in two different locations, a gap ever widening.

As a single dad and only parent to my three little daughters, I have become much more insecure.  With all of my heart, I only want them to grow healthy and robustly from little girls to young ladies secure in who they are and into loving and wise mature women set on a purposeful course in life.  The fear of not getting them there tangles and trips me.  The fear is now.  It is all I see.  And that is precisely the problem.  I react quickly and out of context losing sight of my ultimate desire.  In quick reactionary parenting, I am just being bounced between little details isolated and void of the overall beauty and full potential holding instead of seeing those little details as not isolated but parts of the whole and opportunities to get her there.

A few months ago while racing down a single track path through a wide open prairie on my mountain bike, I severely misjudged a turn.  Over the handle bars and through the air I tumbled landing squarely on my head and sliding through the dirt and dry grass on my back.  In the adrenaline rush, I popped right back up to my feet.  Everything blurry and spinning.  My stomach tightened and knees weakened as I reached for the ground both signs of a concussion.  After a couple minutes, I climbed back on my bike, cracked helmet and bleeding, for three more miles to finish the course.  The wreck and the injuries incurred were my doing.  One of the most dangerous things to do while mountain biking is to look down right over your handle bars.  In doing so, you miss what is right ahead.  The path is only right there, but there is so much ahead.  And you need to see the whole path ahead to anticipate response.  Turns, logs laying in path, roots, creeks, switch backs, hills and more all ahead on the course.

The danger of looking only right at the moment is to get lost in the immediacy of details unfolding and forget all ahead.  Life holds only immediate value.  Preoccupied and controlled by the moment only, you are left to only reacting.  Life is about much more than flinching, wincing and reacting.  So is parenting.

When I stare into the moment and lose sight of who she can be and will be, all ahead fades into the distant forever.  Both of us sink into a moment rushing, emotions running high and now bleeds like forever.  In this way exactly, parenting shares a parallel with mountain biking.  Life intersecting life.  Truth pedaling and parenting.  In both, eyes must lift out of moments heated and sticky and stay fixed ahead.

I am learning to securely parent my three little daughters in looking down the trail, anticipating response and proactively participating rather than waiting to react in moments and details.

God in context.

I went away alone for a four day writing weekend to make progress on finishing my book, the first one that I’m writing.  60,000 words or so all dripping with life, mine.  A view fixed from my eyes at life all around and life all within.  Memories resurface bringing great comfort and pain and irreplaceable joy and sadness still.  These words piece together only fragments of my life still unfolding like tiny picture scenes positioned carefully to make a bigger picture standing at a distance.  And what you begin to notice more than anything else is God.  In everything.

My brother died at age eight.  Me being five, I didn’t really get it.  God.  Finding God through fear in high school.  My hero dad leaving my mom in the slowest, clumsiest way, God.  Off to college lost and drifting, God.  Meeting the one who would become the one and the joy and finding involved, God.  Defying my odds and yet somehow landing where I always thought I would in ministry as a pastor.  God.  Family.  God.  The birth and acceptance of the three greatest treasures in my life.  God.  Learning to be a father.  God.  Leaving all to pursue the thinnest of dreams together as a family.  God.  The death of my wife.  God.  Life collapsing.  God.  Holding my daughters breaking in the dust settling.  God.  Awakening to a new day.  God.  Finding new life.  God.  Writing.  God.  Epilogue to Prologue, ending to (re)beginning, in the most precise redemptive strokes and causing all to meaningfully making sense.  God.

Below is an excerpt from a chapter that I am writing.  It is not finished.  Maybe it never truly will be.  As of now, the chapter is tentatively entitled, “A Crumbling Wall”.  In writing this chapter, I have a specific vision and imagery guiding the words and their piece together.  A wall battered down, eroded by life and circumstance, especially loss and grief, and how these served to rebuild and reform faith and trust stronger and more solid than before.

There was a street performer that I would see most times I visited the French Quarter as a kid.  For some reason, he made me think about God.  He was a mime in the character of a robot.  His movements were odd, mechanical, precise and a bit predictable.  Even in the sweltering heat and heavy summer air, he dressed in a full suit painted silver from head to toe.  As both natives and tourists passed him by, he never broke character.  It may have been his commitment to character or his quirky, precise gestures that caused me to think of God.  Then again, it could have been his silence and distance from people moving closely all about him and the way in which his actions and movements were cause for attention, but not direct interaction.  And of course, maybe it was the brilliance of his silver skin, suit and hat, that glowed and stood out in the unbelievable heat and humidity of the New Orleans day and how it never affected him that reminded me of God and what I perceived him to be.

Many people are enchanted by God and the thought that He is out there somewhere, somehow holding it all together and keeping the world from tilting too far out of control.  Comfortable with the distance yet calling to somewhere in the sky when in need.  Some are disillusioned by him and his perceived and felt inactivity in broken and horrific parts of their lives.  God exists exactly within the context of your life.  It is in the awakening to God as you are, just where you are, that you find him.  Or more precisely put, God finds you.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own,t and his own peoplet did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.  (John 1:9-13)