In the Pause: Come take a walk with me

Last week, I posted some thoughts to my Instagram stories that I want to capture here—and I want to expand on those as well.

There are people who thrive on social interaction, on crowds, on constant information and stimulation. I thrive in the quiet. I thrive out-of-doors. I thrive when I am in motion—but gentle motion, like a brisk walk with lots of permission to stop and take photos or smell lilacs. When Beautycounter shut down, we all listened to the same message. Some people heard a call to action. I heard only the word “pause.” In hindsight, I should have just sat with my word—the word that most stood out to me. I should have listened to the word.

Instead, I tried fix everything all at once. I saw a need. What will people do? How can I serve the people I’ve loved these last three years and find something else that encourages self-care so well? How can I replace lost income? I heard so many messages, read so much information, received and opened and examined the contents of so many boxes! It was all happening so fast—so many moving pieces and people. But I wanted time: time to thoughtfully order products, time to receive them, time to test them and to see how they fared over time. I could not keep up.

And here, despite listening so very carefully to so many people in the “health space,” despite being so determined to find only the cleanest of clean products from household cleaners to skin care to nutritionals, I found myself early Tuesday morning staring at a smoothie made of the stuff of anaphylaxis. Thoroughly tired and still hurrying, I had made it for myself from products sent to me by a new company. I perused the labels as I prepared to sip. Every single packet—every flavor—has banana powder in it. When I was 10, I ate a banana and ended up in the ER becoming acquainted with epinephrine shots. How did I miss the banana? Even though it seems objectively good, this product line is not for me. I am limited by my allergy, something outside my control. Today, I am grateful for the Gift of Limitations (both the book and my actual limitations). I’m grateful to have hit a wall, to be hemmed in, to be able to choose to embrace the pause however uncomfortable it may be at first.

There has been such a fruitful conversation lately about what phone use and social media is doing to our kids. That generation doesn’t have a monopoly on anxiety. The barrage of information and the “crowds” are overwhelming. Grown-up brains are not immune. They can grow and change, too. Neuroplasticity is not just for the young. My brain is tired. My children are watching. For a long time now, I have felt like I cannot keep up with the speed of social media. I was feeling overwhelmed all the time, completely sucked dry of any creativity or ease. And the whole Beautycounter plight accelerated everything to a speed that made me physically ill.

The fences went up. Whether I wanted to keep trying to keep up or not, I could not. Body, mind, and soul—all three begged me to please hear and heed the call to pause.

Like every other person who posts anything to the internet, I only expose a fraction of my life. This is not nefarious. It is only what is possible. No one can reveal her whole self, and some of us have learned just how much is good. We likely learned it the hard way. My life is full of challenges that limit my time to write, my time to research, my time to market, my time to create. And more often than I would care to admit, these challenges have frustrated me to tears. What could I be or do if only I were not limited by the realities of the impediments to my larger-than-possible imagination? This whole Beautycounter crisis? It amplified for me the incessant noise already creating a dissonant cacophony in my head. I had no choice but to see that there was indeed a hedge around me, separating what was truly possible for me and grandiose ideas that were not. I cannot keep pace with the social life of the internet and remain healthy.

And yet.

Writing (and sharing what I write with safe people) is one of

the most life-giving things I can do.

I know this about myself.

As I walked in the early morning, I tried to puzzle this all out: how to hold on to the good, the true, and the beautiful here inside my fenceline? How to inhale deeply and also exhale completely? How to be authentic and life-giving and healthy and whole? How to practice self-care that cannot be packaged in a pretty pink jar or foil lined bag? How to fully lean in to who I was created to be, at peace with all the other iterations not available to me?

Can I do that? In a world full of opportunity, where information is so easily accessible, can I limit myself because it’s in the limits that I will truly flourish? What does that look like? If that is genuine care for myself, how do I open that bottle?

I intend to find out.

I sat to put this post together and I scrolled through my camera roll, looking at the images I’d taken on my many sunrise walks in the last week. I live in an extraordinary neighborhood. Around every corner in the early spring mornings, the air smells like lilacs and the landscape is one breathtaking shot after another. Perusing photos with this post in mind, I noticed something: nearly every picture had a fence in it. Some were picket fences. Some were iron fences. Some were old stone walls. In every picture, the fences added dimension and interest and beauty. The fences were beautiful!

Could I look at fences differently, henceforth? Could I see them not as objects of restraint or prohibition or restriction, but as the beautiful boundary inside which to bloom? Could the fence be beautiful and the space inside the fence also be beautiful? There is ample room here inside the fenceline. There is a lot of good here. Let’s see what will grow.

About something that Viktor Frankl wrote, Stephen Covey said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

We have to pause in order to take up that space between stimulus and response. We have to be in the space for a bit. If we don’t—if we just keep responding without pausing—we relinquish our freedom and our ability to truly grow.

The word is pause.

I hear it now.

I’m listening.

Looking for conversation in real time with real people—face-to-face? We deeply ponder things here—things to make us happier, healthier, holier.

Join us this month in the the Take Up community.

What to Give Up

A few days before Lent began, my friend Helen posted a quote that struck and stuck as I was pondering the whole “what to do, what to give up” question. On a stark black background, with no pretty picture or accompanying caption, I read, “Hold loosely to the things of this life so that if God requires them of you, it will be easy to let them go.”

Helen’s life is a testimony to this idea. Several years ago, she and her husband and their big bunch of kids moved from a comfortable home near extended family in upstate New York to rural Florida. There, they began homesteading and built a small farm. They also welcomed more children, including one they adopted out of foster care. By all accounts and appearances, they were living a life committed to faith, family and fellowship with their neighbors.

Then, it all shifted dramatically.

Helen and her husband announced that they were selling the farm and moving to a third-world country to spread the Gospel. I can’t tell you where they went because I don’t know. Helen can’t tell me because they are in mortal danger there. Helen is not even her real name. To be a Christian where they are is punishable by death.

I am ashamed to admit that I watched their plans unfold with not a little doubt. I saw them sell or give away everything that wouldn’t fit in one suitcase per family member. All the farm animals, the furnishings, the house and the land itself. Then came the real sticking point for me.

They said goodbye to her elderly father, not knowing if he’d still be alive when they return. They said goodbye to their adult children. They said a tender goodbye to a newly married son, his wife, and their first grandchild due to be born when they are so very far away.

I thought about how much I’ve whined because my kids are scattered across the country. I thought about a house I miss even as I love the one I’m in. I thought about how I am still so dismayed at the complete absence of adoration chapels in Connecticut when there is one in every town in Northern Virginia.

And now, I cannot stop thinking about that quote.

We hold so tightly. Sure, it’s easy to see how we might hold tightly to material things and creature comforts. It’s easy to see how we don’t want to let go of a favorite piano or a set of heirloom china. Or the house where all your babies grew.

But what about those other “things?” The things that aren’t things at all? It was Corrie ten Boom who uttered the words in that quote. It was a theme she often repeated during personal speaking engagements long after her extraordinary ordeal as a Christian who hid Jews during World War II and later survived a concentration camp. She made sure that people understood she wasn’t only talking about material things. “Even your dear family. Why? Because the Father may wish to take one of them back to himself, and when he does, it will hurt you if he must pry your fingers loose.”

We believe that God is God of all. Everything, but also everyone. As parents, we commit our lives to the well-being of our children. We encourage attachment because we know that it is healthy — both physically and emotionally — to be attached. But we have to hold loosely in order to trust Our Lord completely. We cannot grip anything so tightly that there is no room for the Holy Spirit. The truth is that God is sovereign. He is Lord of all; he already holds all our possessions and all the people we love. He asks us to know this and to willfully surrender them to him.

What to give up for Lent?

Everything.

Finding Silence

Right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent” — a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind and reform your actions in order to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. In order to enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear Our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s powerful book, “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the 40 desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls are similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?

Hope for what hurts

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

It took three decades of the same argument over and over again (with different details each time) before I recognized the pattern. I’m not proud of this slow understanding, but I am encouraged by an intimate knowledge gained over time. It was so easy for me to see my husband’s pattern when we argue, to think I knew what his goals were every time, but it took a very long time to recognize what I wanted every time. Why did I keep repeating the same pattern of argument and what did that pattern have to teach me about myself?

We’ve worked hard to know what we do now. Since I’ve long subscribed to the idea that wives would do well to sing their husbands’ praises publicly and keep the rest to private conversation, we won’t talk about his arguing style; we’ll focus on mine. I am almost always seeking reassurance. I want to know he is a safe person, ours is a solid relationship, and we are a couple that is healthy and whole. During an argument, I almost always want to be comforted.

For me, to be in conflict is to mourn. Peter Kreeft writes, “Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering.” When I open the definition of mourning to this interpretation, and I consider my intense need for reassurance, I see what Christ intended when he promised that those who mourn will be comforted.

He promised reassurance. He is the reassurance. He is the deep certainty, the safest of safe people, the most solid of all relationships, the truest expression of wholeness. The Father sent his Son into our suffering — all of our suffering — in order to satisfy our deepest needs for intimacy, understanding and reassurance. He promised that our suffering has redemptive value.

Jesus is with us when we weep. He’s there when we mourn in the most conventional use of the word, but he’s also there in the many struggles of our everyday lives. Certainly, he is also there when it all becomes too much to bear and we despair. Jesus came to earth to sit with us as we open a bill for which there are no resources, as we answer a call that brings terrible news, as we lie seemingly alone on a medical gurney. God knows what it feels like to be rejected, to be betrayed. He knows the grief of broken relationships and prodigal children. Knowing all, he entered in. Every pain we suffer, he suffers too.

He was wounded when he walked the earth, and we wound him even now. But he doesn’t turn away. Though we cause him pain, he stays. He reassures. His presence comforts us in a way nothing or no one on earth can. Even more astounding, he endures our sins. He is steadfast when we are not. We turn away from him over and over again, with every sin, big and small, and he stays.

Emmanuel. God with us.

The redeemer of our suffering comforts us in the sorrow. When life is crushingly hard, it is the Jesus of the scourging who absorbs the blows for us. He pours himself into us and we are strengthened. With that strength born of suffering, we have strength to offer others. He is risen and we are his body here on earth, blessed and broken for others. So, we stay. We enter into the sorrow. We offer ourselves.

We reassure a hurting world that there is hope.

His name is Jesus.

To: The Dear One on Your Way Home for a College Holiday

Re: Managing Expectations

I have been counting the days until you return. I’ve missed having you woven into the dailiness of life in our house. You’ve been so busy, especially these last few weeks. At the beginning of the semester, everything was new. You navigated new places to eat, and sleep, and study. You met hundreds of new people at a time. Living away from home, you learned so many things about life in the world; you’ve been fully responsible for your daily life. And of course, you learned a lot of things taught to you in lecture halls and between the pages of a book. You’re tired. I hereby promise that even though I want to talk with you and hear all about all the things (and solicit your help with kitchen duties and Christmas lights), I will bide my time and recognize that what you want most in the world at first is just to sleep — in your own bed or in the corner of  the couch you wore into the shape of you during high school. I’ll let you sleep. And then, let’s catch up.

Late nights studying, added stress, crowded planes and trains to get home; you may walk through the door feeling quite ill. I won’t be surprised. Though I surely hope you will stay well, if you are sick, we’ll adapt. You’ve been working hard (and probably playing hard, too), and it takes its toll. I’ll remember that and help you heal. I’ll feed you well, and offer you a break from institutional food that doesn’t quite nourish the same way homecooked meals do, no matter how good the meal plan.

I know that just as I’ve been counting the days until I see you, you have been counting the days until you can hang out with your high school friends. Let’s strike a balance, shall we? I won’t take it personally when you want the keys to the car almost as soon as you’ve arrived, if you will take a moment to sort your laundry before you go. And as we settle into the season, remember that I’ve missed your friends, too. Invite them to our house. I’d love to see them again.

While we’re talking about the car and going out, please remember that this is not a college campus. The people who live here get up in the morning to go to work, or they have work to do at home. They go to sleep at reasonable times and wake before the workday begins. We also eat in the kitchen, put the toilet seat down, put dirty clothes in the hamper and clean clothes in the closet. It might take us both more than a minute to get used to sharing space again. When (if) alcohol is served, it accompanies the rest of the evening’s food and entertainment. It isn’t the star of the show. I guess what I’m saying is that this is our home, and we function a bit differently here than from where you’ve come. Please bear that in mind as you re-enter our world and adjust as needed to being at home again. We can talk about old curfews and new considerations. There’s a way for us all to grow together, especially if you don’t assume that none of the old habits are necessary any longer. Some of those habits are just part of living together well. They’re here for the long haul.

This is not my first time to welcome someone home. I learn something new every time. One thing is certain: that college break goes by in a blink, and I’ll be sad when it’s time to hug you goodbye again. What I want you to know before it even begins is that sometimes I let my idealistic notions of the perfect holiday get between me and you. This time, my plan is to let experience temper my expectations, to let go of the ideal, and to cherish every moment of the real time I have with you.

I am so glad you’re coming home!

Love,

Mom