All Comfy Cozy

 Sometimes I don’t want to wake up.  Now don’t freak out, I don’t mean it like I meant it 6 months ago, I mean it like the bed seems to just be so comfy, and cozy.  The pillows ever so softly supporting your head, the body pillow smooshed into just the right position, sleep music gently wafting through the air.  Today was one of those days that I just didn’t want to wake up.  It was one of those things, the bed said.  “Come on you know you wanna just stay here.  You can read, you can color, you can nod off and on throughout the day, shoot you can even call for Zoey to hand you the remote and the controller and you can, if you have the gumption, even play video games.”

That is what the bed said today, and oh how I wanted to succumb,  to just be the lump in the bed.  There is of course a problem with that.  It can become a pattern if I’m not careful, a pattern of just not doing.  For the record I am up, have been for several hours.  I’ve walked the dog, made coffee, texted Joyce, talked to the work guys and set up photo storage for the family.  I’m getting ready to head to my counseling appointment, then it’s on to the day.  Cleaning upstairs and then downstairs, prepping for the outside project I want to tackle, calling the dentist, and insurance.  Sending out apps with Indeed. 

Which is the point of this whole entry.  Sometimes what we do is not about what we want to do, it’s not even about what we have to do, it’s about what we choose to do.  More and more as the days wind by I’m realizing that all those things that I taught are more than a little bit true.  We have so many choices in life that we don’t realize are choices.  Maybe it’s because we have gotten into a routine and forget that we are making a choice.  Sometimes things become second nature.  Ingrained in us in such a way that we just do them without thinking, and yet they are still something that we must choose. 

I remember being told I had to learn an instrument.  What started with the Piano (something I never did learn,) ended with the Saxophone.  I was given the choice and I chose that particular instrument.  The lessons that I took were important, the music sitting on the stand as I sat in the instructors den or whatever it was. Moving through the pieces one at a time.  Reading note by note through them.  I hated practicing at home, but to be honest I’m not sure what kid actually likes to practice when there is so much more to do, especially an 80’s kid that had all of the outside to enjoy.  I took lessons for quite a while, I don’t actually remember when I stopped, but then something happened. I chose to start playing my own stuff and by ear.  I started to listen to songs a couple of times and then I would play along, I would find the dead spots and fill in, adding some depth to the music.  I did this all through college and even afterwards.  Playing that particular type of music that is fun and free, that sounds good.  I was no longer chained to the bass or treble clef, pages of notes didn’t bind me.  I chose a different type of playing, and to be clear it made it much easier in many ways to play with different people, different church bands, or even for myself. The freedom that comes for that type of playing can really make you feel important, or talented, or needed.  Here’s the thing though.  In making that choice, the one to play by ear, I didn’t realize I had also made another choice.  I made a choice to forget how to sight read.  The choice to not use physical music was a choice to lose something, and each day that I played by ear instead of opening the book or folder with the notes, was another step down the path of losing a skill, and each time I told a keyboard player or guitar player to play through the piece twice, usually how long it took to learn it, I was making the choice to not know how to read music.  Even when I didn’t think about it, even when it just became second nature, it was still a choice and it had consequences. 

To this day I can hear a song and pick up the sax and play, adding filler where it’s needed, or just playing the melody for myself.  What I can’t do is look at a sheet of music and remember what finger placement should be used to play a given note or notes.  

This plays out in other areas of life as well.  The obvious ones, of course for me anyway, but also in the not so obvious ones.  

As I move through life I realize more and more the beauty and curse of free will, because sometimes, just sometimes the mitigating circumstances around any given choice can make it seem less like free will and more like a liability.  There comes a point when the choice is harder and harder to make, not easier and easier.  

Take the addict.  No one sets out to be an addict.  No one chooses that path.  No one really knows what it is that will fuel their personal addiction, and let's face it everyone has a potential addiction.  Free will is what starts the addiction process.  There is a point where that person makes a choice to do something that for others is no big deal and in making that choice they have no way of knowing the path that they are about to set their feet too.  Each time they make the choice to feed the thing it sets them further down that path.  Sure at any time they could make another choice, they could choose to turn aside from whatever it is that pulls them inexorably down that path to further and further need, but they have, in many cases, given up the reigns of their free will to their need.  Now the addict is making hard choices each time they give into their need.  It’s moved from desire to need and needs have a way of changing the game.  The reason it’s hard to make the need choice is because humans tend to not think of needs as choices.  They are by their very nature something that has to be. It’s hard to make that kind of choice, the one that says “I know this is bad, I know I’m not healthy or doing what I should be doing, I know this thing is slowly killing me physically or emotionally or spiritually but that doesn’t matter I need it. At any time the addict can choose a different path.  There will of course be consequences to that path.  The actions of the addict before making the choice to not be one any more will enact their own special vengeance.  The thing after all wants to be fed and nurtured and allowed to grow in importance.  Changing course, using the free will to make the easy choice, the one that says “I’m no longer going to give into this need, because what I’m realizing is it’s a desire, a desire blown up to proportions that are inexplainable and have somehow dwarfed what matters.” That choice is easy, what’s not easy is the aftermath of that choice, and so the hard choice is made to stay with the overinflated desire.

What amazes me in all of this is the promise we have from scripture.   We can read more than once the desire of God to have us realize that the grace offered by Him is more than adequate.  

This is how Paul says it in Corinthians.

But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.

In this particular verse Paul is talking about his thorn in the flesh.  There is speculation over what that could have been, but it’s not so much the thorn that matters, it’s more the fact that Paul didn’t like it.  He wanted it gone, he wanted whatever that weakness was to be gone.  God said no.  At that point Paul had a choice.  He could lean into that grace for whatever that thorn was or he could choose to walk down a different path.  Working to purge the problem all by himself.  Paul talks about other things.  He talks about his struggles in rather candid ways even going so far as to say this in Romans.

For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.

He spends several verses talking about this concept, and I mean this is Paul the one who wrote a rather large chunk of the New Testament and is responsible for all of humanity having a shot at redemption and relationship with God.  

Free will, choice, amazing gifts from God and at the same time one of the worst gifts humanity can have, mainly because of what Paul says in Romans, but also because the proof is in my life and in yours if you’re honest.  Leaning into grace is hard because I don’t believe I should be given grace, and if I’m honest with myself the truth is I don’t.  That is the beauty of Gods love and desire to know me.  Thats the beauty of grace.   If I didn’t need grace then it wouldn’t be grace at all,  grace can’t exist without failure.  

And so dear reader.  I put it to you.  Make the easy choice and fall into Gods grace for the hard consequences or make the harder choice and go it alone. 

See you around the blog…

And it was GOOD...

Today's Post was started on the 7th and completed today.  Enjoy... 

Today is going to be one of those days.  I know that sounds fatalistic but it's not meant too. It's just what is.  it will be one of those days because well that's what it's going to be.  I'm not upset about that just resigned too it and you know sometimes that’s okay, sometimes that’s just how it’s going to be and trying to think your way out of it is silly.  Started the day finding a crack in my MacBook Air’s screen.  No clue how it got there.  I can still use it though, just have it plugged into an external monitor.  If I wan or need to do editing on the road I have my iPad and a Bluetooth Keyboard that is working well.  There are also other laptops in the house if I find I need one of those,  I’m not really sure I will.  The things I have are more than enough and I can get things figured out when it comes to multitasking with Accordance and other things as needed.  I am surprised at how well I am able to type on the somewhat smaller keyboard.   It seems a bit cramped but all in all it’s working just fine.  My fingers have already adjusted to the size difference.  And the MacBook is more than usable on a much larger monitor.  That much is a good thing. 

There are of course other things going on in my mind.  Trying to figure out the other day.  I just don’t know what’s next.  I guess the real issue for me is the idea that I am not ever going to pastor again.  I mean that’s a given at this point, but how do I navigate that.  How do I stop preaching, stop leading, stop all these things that I have been doing, and to be clear that I am good at?  I think that is one of the things that gets me the most.  I’m good at it.  I am good at leading, good at teaching and preaching, good at sharing and promoting vision.  I am good at talking to people, relating to them, helping them see things from a different perspective.  And while all of those things area true, that truth is not really something that matters. 

I have been thinking of doing some teaching and preaching on a podcast. Just pop it up on facebook and on the Bad Pastor blog but will that be looked at as self serving.  Will it be looked at as overstepping?  I just don’t know.  It’s been five months and I have so much that I need to move through and away from and toward.  

So what happens now?  That’s the thing that I have yet to really figure out.  What I do know is I’m going to start writing some fiction.  I want to explore all there is to explore about my creative side, I want to keep moving in the healthy direction.  I am doing so but having figured out all the things that I have and am figuring out at the moment is rather enjoyable.  

I know that if I do end up preaching again it wont look the same as anything that I have done.  Or, perhaps it will end up looking very much like it did before I fell apart.  

I wonder at so many different aspects of life.  I wonder at the ability to create and be creative.  I wonder at the singing and the living that I am now doing and it feels more real now than it did before for some reason.

I really think what is happening is a part of grace.  That part that God allows when humanity can’t offer it.  It’s like Gods tangible proofs of grace is the returning of things that you have always appreciated and enjoyed.  That point where, after finally coming to our end and falling fully into his merciful arms, even when, no strike that especially when the fall has caused that breaking that requires so much of Him to put us back together.  He shows up in the return of our less than spiritual gifts, well less than what people in the club of Christianity think of as spiritual gifts.  

I am learning that the gift of creativity, the gift of listening, of being present not just in my own life but in the lives of those around me.  The gift of collaboration, and conversation, of making and doing and exploring what there is around me, is more spiritual than some of the best services I have been in.  Brings me closer to God than some of the most intense prayer meetings that I have attended.  Lets me see who he is and gives me insight into what that means for me, and possibly others in greater ways than some of the most intricate studies I’ve done in preparing to preach.  

Don’t get me wrong, all of the things I talked about that are considered spiritual gifts are wrapped up in it.  I would never, if I were to preach again, just “wing it.”  That’s never been an option for me, and I do love digging into words and historicity and context.  I like the challenge of it, but there is space for the other things that I am talking about.  More space than I ever could have imagined.  

Perhaps it is because the act of creating something from bits and pieces, thoughts and feelings is a decidedly spiritual act in itself.  No where can I relate more to the God who created me, than when I’m creating, and while I can’t “creatio ex nihilo,” like God, “creatio ex aliqua” is possible and happens all over the world on a daily basis.  For me, as you know if you have been reading lately, you will understand how horribly hampered my creativity was.  Now it’s thriving and the ADD side of me is bouncing with ideas and thoughts and desires when it comes to doing more.  

The other day I spent hours in the shop at my mother in laws house to produce a dice box that is shaped like a dice bag.  I ran the wood through the planer to smooth it out and square it, used the band and scroll saw to get the basic shape, sliced the lid for it with the table saw then using the router hollowed out the center.  My first attempt was sad but I learned from it and went into the second attempt with a bit more success.  It’s not done but I just finished shaping it a bit more and have added the ridge to the top of the box to keep it in place.  I’ll shape the lid after it has dried which will be tomorrow then it will be carving the strings and adding some artwork and well.  We will see what happens with that.  

In all of this, I’m asking for opinions and thoughts.  Creating and listening and talking and being still in the work.  It’s interesting that there is so much more to being still than just sitting still and being quiet.  There is a stillness that comes from getting my hands dirty.  A stillness that comes from seeing a completed piece or project and realizing that I made that.  That I did that, and I did it as what I believe is an expression of the image of God working and living and breathing in me.  

I know that same God wants to live and work and breath in others.  I know there was a time when I was tasked with sharing with others the ways to do things to pull them closer to God.  Things that help them realize the importance of the stillness that comes from the not so spiritual, spiritual gifts.  I know the calling that I was living in, and while I sit here in this space and look at that calling I realize that I don’t know how it manifests any more in my life and by extension of that calling in the lives of others.  

Who knows, perhaps this space is helpful to people.  Maybe people read this and it builds them up, or makes them think, or gives them some semblance of spiritual sustenance.  Even if it’s only snack size.  And perhaps it doesn’t, perhaps this whole thing is just an exercise in writing out my demons, as it were.  If that is the case then I can add one more thing to the not so spiritual spiritual gift of creativity.  This prose that so often give me the opportunity to look back and see how far I’ve fallen, but also how many inches I’ve climbed back up the rope, my divine gym teacher standing there holding it steady so I can climb and when needed pushing or pulling me in the right direction even as my feet and arms get tired and lose their strength. 

Be well.  Live and move and have your being in the One that made you. Seek opportunity to create, to connect, to give.  Allow yourself space to reflect on the One that set the stars in the sky.  To hear and see His voice in those things you do but more importantly in those that are brought into your sphere by the Creator of all that is. 

20 go to 10

 It’s been a while since I wrote.  Not because I’m not writing, not because I’m not still working on being who I am not who I became, but because we have been living life.  It’s in that living that things begin to come into focus, that day to day being, reading, praying working on the house spending time with family, playing slobber ball with the dog, drawing, coloring, writing, and sculpting with cardboard, photo’s all sorts of things that focuses me on what matters. 

Just about 10 years ago, give or take a few days, I took a trip with Amberly and some of the people in my wife’s family to help one of them move to Idaho.  I was the driver.  We had that special experience of making memories.  I have often thought of writing a book that detailed parts of the trip, I even started it, who knows perhaps it’s time to get back to that, anyway it was a great time and it brought Amberly and I closer.  

Fast forward ten years and I took a trip with Zoey, oddly enough to move some of Amberly’s stuff to Florida. The day that we left, we did so after a full day of stuff being done.  Got up did the work that it takes to get moving towards leaving, went to counseling, talked and talked, which was a good thing.  Then when it was time to go Z and I loaded into the jeep and headed south.  It was strange to be going again.  To be living in a space where it was doing something that I was doing with the family, and that I was totally present in.  

The trip down was rather uneventful.  Something that’s a good thing on many fronts.  Z and I listened to music and some podcasts and talked about some of the fandoms that she is into.  We talked about school I think, and live in general.  All of these things were good things to do.  As we pulled into this town about an hour outside of Nashville to break up the trip a little bit, we found that the area had been overrun by little leaguers.  There must have been some sort of tournament, we ended up crashing at this Motel Six that had all of 4 rooms left, all of them smoking rooms.  Needless to say we slept and then got out of there as soon as possible.  The sign on the door to the check in area when I dropped the key said there were no rooms left, this was underlined and bold.  No place to lay your head if you didn’t already have a reservation.  Sounds so familiar, or reads as such.  

We finished the trip to Florida the next day.  It really didn’t seem like it was all that bad, or hard to do.  Easier than I had ever remembered it being, until Z reminded me that this time there were not three little kids and an adult woman along that all had to stop at different times for different reasons.  It’s funny how growing up changes how travel happens, funny and melancholy.  My mind would flip to the last time we drove to Florida, that trip played out in my mind as I remembered the times with all three Girls,  the beach and Universal, and Disney for a day.  I still have in my minds eye the picture of Josie holding that HUGE 7/11 tumbler I found a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon turning the corners of her mouth.  I thought of Amberly unknowingly sitting next to a dumpster that was ringed by buzzards, her fear of birds a constant source of entertainment to myself.  I remembered walking out to city walk from Universal sliding into the movie theater and watching with Z, a respite from the heat as well as a cheaper way to get parking, and to get a movie along with it.  

The mind is such an interesting and scary thing.  It can lock away memories and keep them safe, it can let go of things that get in the way, it can rob you of who you really are if you’re not careful…or maybe it lets out who you really are when you least expect it.  It can be beaten into a place of pain hurt and anger, all that mess and ugly building and building till one thing trips the explosion of who you have become when you didn’t realize you were becoming anything.

Scripture talks about taming the tongue, it tells us that man can’t tame the tongue.  We also read that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.  I have always looked at that from the standpoint of course language, crude jokes, stuff like that, and while those things are absolutely a part of what comes out, I’m realizing more and more that it’s not the bad things that we have to tame out of our tongue.  The occasional expletive that has been rendered a bad word simply because a group of people don’t like it is not what really matters. No the things that the mouth speaks are not always just spoken in words.  

Our hearts and minds do interesting things.  They sync up.  The longer our mind fixates on a thing the deeper into our heart, our soul it burrows. Once there it has a chance to grow.  To take on a life of its own, to become something that begins to change who we are.  If we aren’t careful that change will end up being permanent.  It will be taken into the core programming of who we are and the code will be written and instead of being one thing we will then be another.  

The hard part, at least from my vantage point, is when things get into that source code area but there is no commit part on either side of the equation.  

Years ago, and I do mean years like a lot of them, I took a computer coding class in school.  We used Apple II series computers, if you were lucky enough and got into the lab in time you could claim the Apple II C which was supposed to be better.  In that class we learned how to write out in Basic programs that would output numbers, cause the screen to fill up with words, or output basic ascii art,  I believe I did the bat signal if I’m not mistaken.   In writing that code out for any of those basic programs there was a commit phase.  That time when you tell the program to run and then all bets are off.  It’s going to do what you told it to do, and if you told it to do the wrong thing, well you would get the wrong result and have to scrub the whole thing and start over.  There is no commit.

The lack of a commit phase reminds me of what James said in James 1: 6-8

 ⁶ But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. ⁷ Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. ⁸ Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.

I messed this up for a long time, at least my thinking did.  I had it all wrong.  The whole asking God for things is just a small part of what this is about.  It’s about so. Much more.  This verse speaks to the whole importance of the commit that I talked about earlier.  God tells us in Revelation that he wishes people were hot or cold, that they would’t be so wishy washy.  That they would be what they are and lean into it, no matter what it is. 

My mind, my heart for the longest time was in this space of no commit phase because I just couldn’t see a way to do it that made the most sense, and that promised some sort of relief.  In thinking that I  had to hold it all together, to take care of everyone around me, to ignore my own mental and spiritual health I fell hard.  This is not anything new.  It’s not some secret either.  What is interesting and what gives me hope, is actually the fact that I didn’t have a full commit phase to the messed up me.  No one will ever really understand just how close I came to not existing any more, no one but me.  They may see it and they may feel bad about it, they may shake their heads and look down on me for it.  It’s okay to do so.  I have looked down on myself for a long time. The thing is when your brain is the problem, it’s very easy to look down on yourself,  it’s easy to feel like no one loves you, no one gets you, no one will ever see you, no one will see that you are hurting and that you are lashing out and that you just want to feel something, anything but how can they see, really see the extent of it when you don’t let them in, when you lock them out of anything meaningful.  The worst thing is that even when people did see it, even when people did reach out, I denied that there was that big of a problem, all because of that stupid I part of me.  The Big one that’s up there that is full of pride yes, but also full of fear.  Fear of losing everything, fear of losing the creation that had been Frankensteined together for the sake of self preservation and the twisted desire to shield people from what I knew was going to happen eventually.  

Why am I writing this now?  It’s been a long time and I’m in a much better place,  I’m getting back so much of who I really am.  The person that leans into God, and Family.  That enjoys being creative and that likes to spend time with people.  

I wish I had a better answer then; “I’m processing and this is where I am right now.”   I’m sure that it has a lot to do with the meetings that are happening over the next couple of days.  The breakfast with old friends that I find myself keeping at arms length.  The meeting with denominational officials that I’m struggling with out of a place of fatalism that says “what’s the point?”  

And yet there must be one.  That thrice born person that I am has to follow through with this whole thing.  I’ve moved in my faith from, initial faith, to blind/brittle faith, to gnarled and weathered faith.  In my estimation that last kind is so much more important, authentic, and real.  I’m glad that I’m in that space now, well usually, there are times that I wish for the others.  The excitement of initial faith, the care free blind faith that in reality is brittle, easily rocked and broken when life does what life will always do, go south, sometimes horribly south . 

My mind, my mental state was in such tatters that there came a point when I cared but couldn’t if that makes sense.  I cared about what was going on around me, about the things that I was doing and saying, about the person that I had become.  I cared but couldn’t care at the same time.  I didn’t want to be there but I was because I was unstable.  I was working hard at being in God’s camp, while at the same time being so angry at God, so jealous of those that seemed to have a better grip on the bad things, so very sad, feeling so betrayed that, I cared and I couldn’t all at the same time because God deserved to be punished for my hurt, my pain, my choices.  The crazy thing is he was.  He had been over 2000 years ago he was punished for the broken thing that my life had become, for the shattered thing that the earth had turned into.  God never promised me that things would be easy, on the contrary he said very clearly “you WILL HAVE TROUBLE.”  I just never took Him at his word, not really.  I gave lip service to it, but  the truth of what I had been holding in my heart,  that second born part of me came out when the doctor told me Josie was gone.  “But I serve you God.”  What I meant there was simple.  I serve you vocationally, therefor there’s this contract that I’ve written in my mind that says you’ll keep the really big bad things away. The strange thing is, there had already been tons of really bad things and I had internalized them, they fed my depression, my PTSD, my nightmares,  I just didn’t recognize it, or maybe I did and just was sticking my head in the sand so that I didn’t have to face the fact that I was trying to jam the square peg of my faith into the round hole of my broken messed up mental state and bad choices. 

What all of this means now is hard to explain.  Maybe because I’m still coming to grips with it all, and will be for the foreseeable future.  I know that this gnarled faith that I now have is better than the other two.  It’s letting me lean into the hard things and realize that I have someone and something to walk with me through them. Yes I’m putting God into the something category but not because I don’t believe, respect, and love God, I put God in the something category because I will never understand or be able to grasp what and who God is.  Not really, see we are made in the image of God.  But it’s just his image.  And while that may sound like I’m being dismissive I’m not.  If we were made just like God then we would be God.  We would not have need for anything that happened to repair the relationship that was broken between God and Man.  The fact that we did and do need that atoning work.  Shows that being made in the image of God, while amazing, does not mean we have the same attributes or power that God has, and while that my be an elementary view of all the things that God is and that I am.  Sometimes we need that elementary view to inform us. 

I still have no idea what the weeks and months and years ahead hold.  I am getting a picture of what they don’t and that’s going to be okay not because I want it to be, but because it has to be.  There is nothing else for it.  We fall down, we get up we walk a bit more and then we trip and fall again and get back up again.  The bruises and scrapes serve to teach us, the scars they leave remind us and so we become more of what we were meant to be and less of what we are.  

Stay safe my friends.