Into This Dark Night: What's Also Happening Here

In a previous post in this series, we talked about what’s happening in the night of the senses: God is growing us at the level of the spirit in our connection to him.

But there’s something else happening here too: 

We are growing in virtue and love.

Early in his description of the night of the senses, John of the Cross names seven “imperfections” that plague a beginner’s soul without her knowledge of them being imperfections. These include spiritual pride, spirtual greed, spiritual lust, spiritual anger, spiritual gluttony, and spiritual envy and laziness. 

And he says of the beginner’s journey:

“Remember when she used to seek God through those feeble, limited, and ineffectual manipulations? At every step she stumbled into a thousand ignorances and imperfections! Once the night quenches all and darkens the discursive mind, it liberates her, bestowing innumerable blessings. The soul grows vastly in virtue.” 

Before the night descends, we are inclined to think the things we do and the consolation we experience in our spiritual lives has something to do with us. We love God, yes. But we also love ourselves. And we tend to love ourselves more than we love God or our neighbors. 

The night of the senses is meant to purify us — to make our love more pure and our actions more full of true virtue. 

And so we lose sight of ourselves. And we lose sight of God.

We come face to face with our cravings for good feelings and experiences. We notice how much we want distraction. We see how much we based our self-concept and sense of okay-ness in how we were feeling and how our experiences and activities compared to those of others. 

In short, in the night of senses, stripped of all those other fetters, we begin gaining accurate self-knowledge. We start to see the truth about ourselves. 

And it’s humbling.

This affects the way we begin to relate to God.

We become more humble and respectful. Less demanding and presumptuous. Less familiar and more awe-filled. 

We begin to love God more for who he is and less for ourselves. 

And through it all, as we remain faithful to God and receptive to the truths of ourselves being revealed, we also grow in virtue. John of the Cross says that we grow in patience toward God and ourselves. We become more generous toward others, no longer looking to them as a point of comparison but as people from whom we might learn something. We become more enduring and strong as we cope with the hardships of being surrounded by darkened senses but keep persevering. 

The night of the senses accomplishes many good things, even though it doesn’t feel good — and even though we can’t perceive these good things are happening when they are.

How do you respond to this?

Finding God in the Daily :: At Home, at Work, in Relationships

Noticing life.

As we’ve been working through this series, I’ve been wanting to provide you with a sample list of questions you can hold in the different areas of your life to help you notice God’s activity and presence, as well as your own formation process. And so that list — broken up by categories — is below.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but it’s a good set to consider when you’re wanting to be intentional about noticing God in the details and how those details can contribute to your ongoing formation. 

At Home

• In what area of your home do you experience the greatest felt presence of God? Why do you think that is? 
• Enter each major area or room of your home and offer a prayer over the people and activities that populate that space.
• In what ways do you experience God in your home? 
• In what ways do you wish you experienced more of God in your home? How can that desire become a point of prayer and a place of intentionality for you?
• Imagine Jesus’ presence with you in every activity you engage (making meals, driving in the car, cleaning the house, watching TV, engaging with those you live with, etc.) through the course of one full day. What do you notice about his presence?

At Work

• What conflicts do you experience at work? How might these become opportunities for prayer? 
• Do you become more or less like your true self at work? Why do you think that is?
• How do you experience the strengths of who God made you to be in your experience of yourself at work?
• What spirit pervades your workplace? Is it a spirit of laughter, joy, freedom, comaraderie? A spirit of fear, divisiveness, apathy? Notice the spiritual undercurrent of your workplace, and join in the spiritual battle through prayer as you work.
• Which fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control — is least fruitful in your work life? Allow the cultivation of that particular fruit to become a point of focus between you and God.
• Is there anyone who could use your words of encouragement today? 

In Relationships

• Where do you experience joy and freedom in relationship right now? What dynamic allows that to be your experience in those relationships? 
• How are the people in your life reflections of the different attributes of God?
• Is there a pattern to the struggles you experience in relationships? How can that pattern be an entry point for growth in you? What might be God’s invitation to you in that particular struggle?
• How can you be a reflection of the heart of God toward the people in your life right now?
• What do you most fear in the context of relationship? Share that fear openly with God and listen for God’s words in response to you.

What questions would you add to this list? 

Living a Rhythmed Life (Online): Choosing What We Ingest

I’ve been looking forward to this short miniseries-within-a-series about living a rhythmed life online.

Mostly that’s because the places I’m called to work are in the online arena. These are my stomping grounds each day and the place I am called to love and serve others, and so I am continually thinking about this and learning what a healthy interaction and rhythm looks like for me in this area.

But I’ve also been looking forward to this part of the series because I know it’s something we’re all learning in the midst of this new internet era. Right? 

So, yesterday we talked about cultivating rhythms of generosity in online spaces, specifically Facebook and Twitter. Today I’d like us to think about being intentional about what we ingest. 

There. Is. Just. So. Much. To. Ingest. 

Isn’t there? 

As I mentioned yesterday, it can get quite overwhelming. And that’s one of the most adverse effects of the internet on our daily lives. There’s such an onslaught of information brought into our awareness at all times, it can totally upend us. (At least, it can upend me.)

It can upend me through the subtlety of distraction.

First I’m doing one thing, like checking my Twitter feed, and suddenly I’ve clicked over to a New York Times article, which leads me to another New York Times article, which leads me to a Google or Wikipedia search, and then I decide to go check Facebook and my email because it’s been about 15 minutes and maybe something new has happened since then, and then suddenly I can’t remember what I was trying to do in the first place.

Crash and burn. Ineffectiveness in total effect.

It can also upend me by disconnecting me from who I am and what I’m here to do.

This connects to what I said yesterday about so many voices clamoring for attention in the online space. On the one hand, the internet is amazing in that it breaks down message barriers and allows each of us to connect to people we would never otherwise be able to meet or reach, and if you’ve got a business or a social cause, that is especially incredible.

But man, it’s like the internet has made the world both vastly huge and microscopically tiny at one and the same time. Now we know everything that’s happening all around the world every second of the day — which not only makes India and Syria and Kenya feel like our next-door neighbors but also makes our minds and hearts practically explode from all the information we learn about what’s happening in all those places. 

It’s hard to hold it all, and it’s especially hard to know what to do with all that information. 

And lastly, the internet can upend me because the voices I hear in that space can affect my interior affect.

If I tune in to snarky, sarcastic banter through the blogs I read or the people I follow on Twitter, I become a bit more sharp-edged too. Or if I choose to ingest too much — subscribe to too many blogs in my feed reader, for instance — I start to feel like I’m constantly behind and a sense of obligation and dread creeps in. I feel pushed to read and read and read, just to catch up. 

And so, we need to be intentional about all this. Don’t you agree?

So, I’m going to lay out for you what living a rhythmed life in the online space has come to mean for me. I’ll tell you what my rhythms and parameters look like, and you may find these to be helpful guidelines for yourself as you work out your own relationship with the internet in your daily life. 

Here goes.

1. It means giving myself clear parameters for my online time.

Sometimes I’m just catching up on Twitter and Facebook for the relational aspect — to see what my friends and family and acquaintances are doing — and so I’m clear within myself that I’m not going to click on a bunch of links to read “extracurricular” material. Sometimes, though, I’m settling in for an hour-long spell of blog reading, so anything that catches my eye to click over and explore (bringing with it the possibility of getting lost in the internet maze) is totally OK. 

What this looks like for me: Usually my relational check-in times happen in the morning, at the end of the work day, and before bed. My open-ended blog-reading and browsing sessions only happen about once or twice a week and usually take place after dinner but before Kirk and I settle in together for the evening.

2. It means unsubscribing from lots of email newsletters.

You know how you buy something once from a company and suddenly end up on some newsletter list? Or how you care about an organization and a cause so you sign up for their email updates?

It’s really easy for me to unsubscribe to those business newsletters, but it’s been tricky for me to navigate the newsletters that come from organizations on causes I care about. I used to care about receiving all those emails, reminded each time I got one that I cared about the work represented by that organization. But I noticed over time that I hardly ever read them — and if I did read them, it was after they sat in my inbox for several weeks and I just wanted them archived already.

In regards to this, I’ve recently re-discovered the amazingness of the “unsubscribe” button. Done!  

What this looks like for me: I don’t sign up for business newsletters when I buy something. If I get added to a random list anyway, I unsubscribe immediately. When getting emails from organizations I support for causes I care about, I wait and see how I respond to the experience of getting the emails. If they sit in my inbox for a while and I only read them it in order to archive them, that means I don’t really want to be on the list — so then I unsubscribe and move on.

3. Unsubscribe from blogs and unfollow Twitter peeps. 

This one’s been historically hard for me. I’ve been reading blogs for about 6 years now, and reading them in a feed reader for about 4 1/2 of those years. There are some bloggers I’ve been following that entire length of time, and I still really love reading their stuff. But there are others, over the course of those years, whose interests slowly diverged from mine, and I read their content with less and less enthusiasm. 

There comes a point periodically where I just have to be real with myself about this and do something about it. And so I go through “spring cleaning” of paring back the subscriptions in my feed reader. I have never regretted this. Instead, it felt like relief. 

Or there could be people I followed on Twitter because I thought I wanted to hear what they have to say. Celebrities and popular bloggers and new people I find because a blogger I like recommended them usually fall into this category. I follow them, but then within a couple weeks — or sometimes a couple months or even a year — I realize I don’t really care what they have to say. Maybe their perspective grazes me, or maybe it pushes me toward becoming a person I don’t really want to become. 

Whatever the reason, I’ve gotten pretty good at tuning in to my interior responses to this and responding accordingly.

What this looks like for me: It’s hard to unsubscribe from blogs I used to love, but interests change and so I periodically do it — especially when I notice that a certain blogger’s posts keep piling up, unread, in my feed reader. It also takes a bit of a “close my eyes and just do it” kind of courage for me to unfollow people on Twitter. If they’re big-name people, I don’t sweat it so much. But when they’re just normal folks, I always feel bad. I just have to remind myself that I only have so much energy and attention to give, and I want to be purposeful about where I give it.

How do you choose what to ingest online? Have you ever needed to set parameters for yourself like this?

Living a Rhythmed Life (Online): Cultivating Generosity

I don’t normally post here on holidays, but since the theme of the July 4th holiday in the United States is freedom, I thought it made for an appropriate time to talk about the freedom to be generous. 

And specifically, the freedom to be generous online.

The seed of this practice, for me, got planted a couple months ago.

Mid-morning one day, I clicked over to Facebook to get caught up on my news feed — the usual morning check-in to see what’s been going on with friends and family since I checked in the night before.

I’ve talked before about the value of delaying this morning check-in until after I’ve spent time in the quiet, and I’m not always faithful to that spiritual practice, but on this particular day I was. I’d been up for a few hours and had spent time writing, reading, and in prayer, and I was ready to engage with the world. 

Normally when I enter into these check-in routines, I scroll and scroll and scroll, tapping or clicking on occasion to “like” or “favorite” a status update on Facebook or Twitter, but not often taking the time to comment. I’m doing it to get caught up, to add my two cents by way of my own status update, and to stop and click on a few updates that I particularly noticed or appreciated. When I do comment, which I’ve noticed has become more and more rare over the last year, it’s usually in response to people I know really well or whose updates connected with me in an unusually poignant or timely way.

But on this particular day, for a reason I still don’t completely understand, I commented on almost every single person’s update that presented itself in my Facebook feed — people close to me and people not close to me, people I talk to regularly and those I very rarely connect with at all. For about 10 minutes straight, I clicked in those little comment boxes and typed out responses to almost every single one of them — an encouraging word here, an acknowledgment there, a question maybe, a “hooray!” sometimes. 

At the end of it, I felt completely energized and overflowing with love for each one of those people.

And a few days later, the same exact thing happened when scrolling my Twitter feed. Again, I clicked and replied to many of the people showing up in my stream, even those I’d never replied to before that day, and I found myself full of energy and love as a result. 

This is unusual behavior for me, and again, I’m not exactly sure why it happened or where the energy and desire to do it came from. It felt a bit like an “encouragement sprint.” It lasted about 10 minutes, and then it was over and I felt nothing but the headiness of love.

Why don’t I do that more often? I wondered. Why do I withhold responses as a usual matter of course? Why do I keep generosity all to myself? 

I think there are several reasons.

Sometimes it’s time — I’m just doing a quick check-in and don’t have time to stop and respond. Hitting that “like” or “favorite” button is a quick and easy way to feel a pulse of connection without asking too much of me.

Sometimes it’s overwhelm. There’s far more information than I can possibly take in. So many people saying, “Check this out! Read this! Go here! Buy that!” I just can’t do it all, and so I tune it out. I scroll, passively, and in that passivity, I’m actively shutting out the noise. I say no to all that noise by scrolling silently by.

Sometimes it’s insecurity. I begin to think and then believe that people won’t want to know me. I think they won’t notice I’m there. I anticipate their judgment. And so I stay small, whispering my own updates through the bullhorn, pouring judgment on myself the whole way through.

And then sometimes it’s judgment in my own heart. There are people in my news feed I just don’t enjoy. Their comments affront my sensibilities and sense of well-being. Or I find them judgy and exclusive, so I judge and exclude them right back. I pass by their updates and, while doing so, push them out of my mind and close them out of my heart. Sometimes I even close them out of my feed completely.

But in this generosity burst? I let all of that go. I chose embrace, acceptance, and the olive branch of friendship. I believed in abundance rather than scarcity. I made room in my heart for connection and care.

And I remembered: that’s the person I want to be. 

And so I’m choosing, more and more, to cultivate generosity in my online life. When I’m tempted to just scroll on through to get caught up, I remind myself how much an encouraging word or a simple acknowledgment of response can mean to someone else, even if it’s just a quick, “Hey. I see you. I hear you. I care.”

And when I find myself getting stingy or closing up my heart online, I know it’s time to practice this in a more focused way. I know it’s time to take 10 minutes for an others-focused “encouragement sprint.” 

This practice opens me up. It connects rather than isolates. And it builds into me more of the person I really want to be: one of welcome and love. 

Can you relate to any of this?

Living a Rhythmed Life: The Gift of Dailiness

So, I am not a person historically concerned with the dailiness of life. I’m a thinker. A writer. A mystic type. I live in the mysteries and questions of life more than the practicalities of it, and I have always been this way. 

This is not quite conducive to real life, though, is it? The dishes need to be cleaned, the laundry needs to be run and folded, and food needs to make its way into our homes, through our appliances and cookware, and eventually onto our tables and into our stomachs. 

I fought these realities for much of my childhood and young adult and even mid-adult years. 

I would rather read a book than cook dinner. I would rather work on a project than think about the grocery store or filling my car with gas. I would rather have a really great soul-deep conversation than tidy up the house. 

Who wouldn’t?

(Ha. I say that knowing full well not everyone is wired like me.)

But the rhythmed life has really changed this for me. 

Now there is a place for things to go and a reason for them to be included and to go where they go. 

For instance, I mentioned earlier in this series that I do my meal-planning and grocery shopping on Monday afternoons. I sit down at my computer and work out a dinner menu for the week, then go through the recipes and add needed ingredients to the ShopShop app on my phone, and then take off for the grocery store. (I wrote more of the nitty-gritty details of this routine in another online space here.)

I’ve found a real sense of stability and even pleasure from having a routine and time of the week for doing this. In that period of time, I’m completely focused on caring for Kirk and our home through the vehicle of food. When I walk the aisles of the store, noticing how familiar they’ve become, I feel so connected to our home. I feel aware that I am a provider of sustenance for us and that doing this for us allows Kirk to remain focused on his own work, not having to worry about how or what we’re going to eat every day of the week. 

It gives the dailiness a greater sense of purpose, a connection to something higher and important to me.

And then there’s just the joy living inside that space.

Putting away the groceries becomes a familiar puzzle of placing items where they normally go in the fridge. Cooking meals becomes a creative and rhythmed dance, with meals coming together with smoother and seamless ease the more I make our favorite meals. Washing dishes at the sink becomes a meditative time of prayer — often a time when you, the readers here, come to mind and I hold you to the light of God, especially when you’ve shared with me some of your concerns and life realities.

When it comes to the dailiness of life, I’ve learned a rhythmed life is immensely helpful for two reasons: it gives these activities a place to go (a time of day and/or week when they get my attention) and it gives them a measure of purpose. 

A place and a purpose. What gift.

How might the dailiness of your life be aided by place and purpose?

Living a Rhythmed Life: The Challenges I Face

Hi, friends. 

So, we’re on the back end of the rhythmed life series. We spent a full three weeks looking at the concept of a rhythmed life from various angles, with last week allowing us to flesh out what this could mean for us individually. (To see a comprehensive list of the posts in this series, click here.) 

This week, I’d like to sew up the series by sharing some final thoughts and perspectives. I’ll share some stories from my own life about living this way, and we’ll look later this week at how the rhythmed life affects our online lives. 

If you have any remaining questions about this subject, feel free to chime in and ask in the comments. I’d love to make sure your questions get answered before the series ends. 

Today, though, I’d like to talk about challenges. 

What hurdles crop up when living this way? 

The one I face most has to do with my availability to other people.

Even though, as I shared earlier in the series, being with people in this approach to life means being more fully present when I’m with them, the rhythmed life — at least in the rhythm I’m meant to sustain — means being present to less people, and often being present in different ways than I would have been before I began living this way.

It means saying no to coffee dates and dinner invites and social parties sometimes. It means only being available in certain timeframes, which may not end up working for other people’s schedules. It means, for me, having to schedule phone dates with people I love rather than leaving things open-ended and spontaneous.

It means missing out on connection sometimes. It means other people might not understand why I said no. Living a rhythmed life means accepting these realities and limitations, and this can be hard. 

There’s also the challenge of how life just happens sometimes.

People get sick. We can’t get to sleep. Plans fall through. Our work goes through a busy season. The car breaks down.

As I shared earlier in the series, this isn’t about rigidity. There’s always room for grace and the unexpected here. This is about rhythm and intention, not schedules and rules. 

About once a month, for example, I have a work commitment that keeps me in the office all day for three days straight — sometimes into the late hours for each of those days. On those days, my morning routine and my evening routine must flex to accommodate. 

And that is totally okay. We let life be what it needs to be, and then we shift back to usual rhythm when we can.

Lastly, I face the challenge of comparison.

I just can’t do as much as other people can. I have a very low tolerance for stimulation and noise. I lose energy quickly in large groups. I need to take things slow. I need a lot of silence. 

It can be easy to judge myself for these limits. It can be tempting to goad myself to do more. 

But the reality is, I’m made the way I am in order to do the things I’m meant to do. The life I’m called to lead and the work I’m invited to offer needs slowness and great cadences of silence. I can’t do what I do without those things, and so my personal make-up become a proper fit for my life. 

Rather than compare, I have to remember who I am and the life that’s mine to live.

What challenges do you face — or anticipate facing — in living a rhythmed life? 

Living a Rhythmed Life: Having to Say No

Today we’re turning a corner in this rhythmed life series that allows the reality of a rhythmed life to show up in our daily world. 

We’re going to talk about having to say no. 

Ouch! So hard. (At least, it is for me.) 

And yet, as I share in the video below, saying no helps us be able to say yes to what really matters. 

If you can’t see the video in your e-mail or RSS feed, click here.

As I mentioned in the above video, I’ve gotten some practice at saying no of late. It started back in 2009, with my original decision-making tree of discernment that I shared with you early on in this series, and in the 3 years that have elapsed since that time, I’ve continued to learn how to better flex that “no” muscle. 

I’m not fond of flexing that “no” muscle at all, but I’ve learned something important about this: 

The more intentionally I live my life, the easier it is to say no. 

Because I’ve created a rhythm for my life that’s based on my values, my way of being, my sense of calling, and the realities of finite time and personal limits, it’s become easier and easier to tell when something does or does not fit into the life that Kirk and I share together and that I feel called to live.

Do you want some examples? Here are things that have gotten my “no” recently: 

• Maintaining three separate blogs
• Offering spiritual direction by phone
• Making plans on Sundays
• Being the coordinator of a spiritual formation blog
• Freelance projects that aren’t purely editorial
• Grocery shopping on the weekends
• Making appointments before 1PM
• Creating a new online course

Some of these have to do with my sense of calling. Some of them have to do with values Kirk and I have for our home life together. Some have to do with the reality of my limits. Others are purely practical and made in the interest of my sanity (hello, crazy shopping world on Saturday afternoons!).

Where do you have to say no right now?

Living a Rhythmed Life: When Your Life Is Not Your Own

So, I’d love to hear from the mamas and the papas on this one. 

Living a rhythmed life is such an intentional approach to life. As we’ve seen so far, it starts with learning our natural rhythm, looking at what is, and then considering the finite resource of time and the limits of our own selves. 

And then it’s about making some decisions. (We’ll be speaking to that next week.)

But what if you’re a parent, and you don’t have the luxury of so much intentional structure in your life?

What if you don’t know whether your young one will sleep through the night so you’re rested and ready for what tomorrow holds, or when she might need her next feeding, or if they’ll have a meltdown day (or if you’ll have a meltdown of your own)? 

What if you’re running to soccer practice, dropping off at piano lessons, picking up from school, and helping out with homework? Not to mention making dinners, packing lunches, and getting everyone woken, dressed, fed, and out the door?

From what I hear from my friends who are parents (speaking as someone who is not one), life can feel like a a sprint and/or a marathon every single day. 

Where does a rhythmed life fit into all that? Where do limits and natural rhythms and finite resources of time go?

And does a rhythmed life even matter if you’re a parent? Is it just a luxury for those who aren’t?

These are such good and legitimate questions. And I’m stepping onto what I know is holy ground here to even address them — especially since I am not a parent.

But as someone who majors in the subject of formation and how it shows up in our real lives, and as someone who has thought about (and lived) a rhythmed life for some time now, I will offer some perspectives for consideration.

(And then I’d love for the mamas and papas among us to chime in with their thoughts.) 

I’ll say first of all that you can, of course, choose or not choose to live a rhythmed life. 

This series isn’t meant to be prescriptive. It’s meant to be descriptive. We’re exploring the advantages of a rhythmed life in response to life’s often overwhelming realities and helping you consider what that might look like in your own individual life.

The second thing I’ll do is ask a question: 

What might it be like to model a rhythmed life for your children? 

What if they learned from you the reality of limits? 

What if they learned from you the value of yes and no? 

What if they learned from you that being tossed about by whims of culture and expectations and even peronal compulsions doesn’t have to be their unqualified fate? 

What if they learned from you how to live intentionally? 

What if they learned from you how to tune into their own natural rhythm and how to honor the natural rhythms of others?

I ask these questions quite honestly. What do you mamas and papas out there think?

PS: Have you signed up for the Cup of Sunday Quiet yet? The inaugural version goes out Sunday! Would love to have you join me in this special invitation. xo

Living a Rhythmed Life: How It Cares for Others, Too

There are a couple of ways that I’ve found living a rhythmed life actually increases my care for others.

First, it makes me “really there.” Living a rhythmed life means fully committing to the ways I spend my time. It means saying yes to some things and no to others.

Which means that when I do say yes to someone or something, I’m really saying yes — no concerns about what else I ought to be doing at that time. I’m giving those in front of me my full attention and presence. I give them the best of me when we’re together.

Second, it models reality. There’s a subtle but pervasive pressure around us to do all things and never say no. We live in a time where limits are spurned and confrontation is feared. But as we’ve already learned, those pressures don’t live within reality. Limits are real. Time is finite, and we are finite too. 

When we live within the reality of ourselves and the reality of time, we model the truth of that reality for others. This, in turn, accords them an opportunity to live in reality for themselves, too.

It can be rather counter-cultural, really, all in the name of truth and love.

How might you better care for others by living a rhythmed life?

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Can Consider Forgiveness

It took me a really long time to get to forgiveness. 

I knew forgiveness was pretty important — Jesus makes that really clear in the Gospels. But I also had gone through enough of the process of learning my heart to know what was really in there. I couldn’t fool myself into believing I’d forgiven when I really hadn’t.

Besides, I knew that wasn’t what Jesus wanted, either. He’s the one who taught me the importance of the heart. He’s the one who helped me learn that our hearts are the key players in relationship with God.

I couldn’t just play lip service to forgiveness. Neither Jesus nor I would be fooled. 

So what do you do when you know forgiveness is important but you just aren’t there? 

You ask God to help you get there, and you be with the truth of the mess in the meantime. 

I’m serious. This is what I did. For years — literally, years — I consciously asked God to help me learn forgiveness. And then I would look at the reality of my heart and know that forgiveness wasn’t in there yet. I was still reeling. Still in shock. Still picking up the pieces of brokeness. Still learning what happened because of all that brokenness. 

Still learning what Jesus could do with all that brokenness, too. 

I read so many perspectives on forgiveness over the years, and none of them penetrated me.

Forgiveness is a choice, they said. It’s a choice you keep choosing and choosing and choosing each day. Or they said, Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying that it’s okay. It means wilfully choosing not to hold that against someone anymore. Or here’s another one: Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the other person to die. 

These things may be true, but none of those declarations or platitudes meant anything to me. They just didn’t compute. And they annoyed me. 

What got me to forgiveness was being with the pain. Examining it. Learning from it. Figuring out how it had formed me. Allowing Jesus to take me on the long journey of reckoning. 

And then getting to a place where I saw new things. 

The thing that helped me the most with forgiveness was having been with Jesus through that long season of darkness and scratches at healing. That long season helped me realize Jesus could handle everything that had happened to me. Even more, he could bring me through it — teach me new things, make something new.

I became more identified with Jesus and what he was making of me and my life than with the broken circumstances that had brought me to him in the first place. 

That’s when I could finally consider forgiveness.

When I didn’t need to hold the wrongdoings so close to my chest anymore. When Jesus had given me something more.

A Turn in the Suffering :: No One Reason Fits All

As we begin our turn in the exploration of suffering, I want to share right from the outset that I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all response to it. 

I’ve noticed this on even just a small scale in my own experience as I’ve been holding this exploration in my heart the last few weeks. I’ve gone back to key moments in my life history that created shock-waves of suffering, and here is what I noticed: 

• The way those situations impacted me often differed from one to another.
• The way God met me in the suffering of each often differed from one experience to another.

Each experience of suffering meets us in a unique way.

Each time, the effect of suffering has to do with an amalgamation of so many factors — our life history up to that point, what certain relationships meant to us, what we believed about the world at that point in time, what we believe about God, our specific hopes and dreams, and so many other factors, too.

How something affects me at 5 years old is different than how something else will affect me at 25 years old — even if both are real experiences of suffering.

Who I am, how I take in the world, and what I understand about myself and the world around me will be different in each instance because they happen at different points in time. My understanding of reality has changed in the space between them.

Therefore, the way each instance of suffering impacts me will differ in both.

And the same holds true when it comes to making meaning out of the suffering and finding healing in some way. 

Each case is unique — and this holds true inside the scope of our own suffering experiences as well as from another person’s experience compared to ours. 

In this series, wherever we range in the exploration of suffering and how to hold it, I want you to know this is my heart toward you and where I’m coming from. I will share some of my own meaning-making and healing experiences with you, but these will not be meant to be prescriptive — just descriptive. Descriptive of my own unique experience and what helped me understand or led to healing, and descriptive of just one of the many possibilities that exist in the realm of suffering and how we might hold it.

This is my heart toward you: making room for your own unique experiences and needs. 

xoxo,

Christianne 

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How We Are Alone In It

I’ve been thinking about the loneliness of suffering. 

The reality is, no other person can be completely inside our experience.

One of my best friends lost her son at 16 days old. Sometimes I sit and think about the reality of the loneliness of her experience. No matter how many other mamas she meets who also lost children to congenital heart defects or for any other reason, no matter how many friends will sit and be with her for as long as she needs to talk or simply cry and cry and cry, there is a fullness of suffering specific to the particulars of her own heart that no one will ever fully know but her.

It hurts my heart to know that.

There’s always separateness between us and what others know of us in our suffering.

I felt a loneliness like that when I went through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004. I was the only person among my married friends who knew separation and then divorce, so I felt like an awkward, sore thumb sticking out among all of them. I had many close friends who were single, and here I was, having moved into marriage and then beyond it.

Even those in my life who did know divorce didn’t know my experience of it. They had their own particular experiences of it, their own process of living through it to the other side, their own sense-making process for their own experience that was not my own.

I walked through that experience carrying a whole world inside myself that no one ever fully knew.

Do you know this aloneness in your own suffering?

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Shuts Us Down

At ages 5, 6, and 7, through a string of unrelated events that felt like they were cut from the very same cloth, I learned two things:  

1. The world is not safe.
2. People will harm you in your most unguarded, vulnerable moments. 

I don’t need to go into the details of what happened. Just imagine the innocence of a 5-year-old girl, put her in a natural, commonplace setting, and then introduce cruelty, manipulation, and humiliation aimed directly at her.

And then imagine the same thing happening to her at age 6. And then age 7.

I was a pretty quick study, and so I wisened up after that. In what I’m sure felt like an incredible act of maturity at having learned a thing or two about the world, I shut my heart down completely.

Closed. Out of business.

No unguarded moments. No vulnerability. No trust. Just caution and vigilance. 

No freedom. No joy.

The collateral damage was pervasive. I grew into a young woman who lived more like an automaton than a vibrant, alive, healthy human being. I couldn’t let people in. I kept myself small. I stayed invisible. I didn’t know the first thing about being honest with myself or others about the truth of my experience of life.

I was completely shut down, for the world had shown itself cruel. 

Suffering teaches us many things. One of the things it teaches us to do is to shut down.

Have you ever experienced this?

On Not Being Alone

Yesterday was a bit of a doozy for me. 

I struggled quite a bit through the day and into the evening with feeling alone. Alone in the work that I do, specifically. All the little gremlins crept in and whispered all kinds of meanness in my ear: What you’re doing doesn’t matter. Who even cares? 

Oh, those gremlins. They are so sneaky, so subtle, and so effective in their work against me sometimes. 

So today, I’ve been thinking about loneliness as a universal experience. It’s pretty common for all of us, isn’t it?

The tough thing is, it’s hard to talk about. Hard to admit. Vulnerable to say out loud. I feel alone. 

This is a space where I hope you find it safe to be with what’s true. To be with it and also feel not alone in it. To be with your truth while being with other sacred, courageous pilgrims who are being with their truth, too.

You are not alone in this space. We are here, together. And the light of Jesus, shining with gentle and unending invitation, is here with us too. 

Do you ever struggle with feeling alone? 

Where Is the Strength in Your Life?

In the early days of dating Kirk, he shared something that really stuck out to me. He said:

“If you’re the strongest person in your whole world, you’ll get really exhausted.”

It’s so true.

Think about it. If everyone else looks to you for strength and you’re the one propping your own self up, when do you get to rest? Where is the place you get to go to let go of holding it all together? Where can you just be held in someone else’s strength? 

I’m certainly familiar with this paradigm. I spent the whole of my life being a strong one — both for myself and for other people — without even realizing that was my guiding compass for life. And once the lightbulb turned on and I realized my whole existence teemed with that unrelenting dynamic, I got really, really tired. 

It’s like I suddenly realized I’d been holding up the whole world, a self-chosen and self-made Atlas, and I really didn’t have the strength to do it for one more minute. 

Would anybody ever hold me?

Thankfully, I found Jesus. He now gets to be the stronger one in my life. 

And learning vulnerability with other people — trusting them to carry strength they can offer to me if needed, too — has been a saving grace in my life more and more these days. 

Even though I often slip back into earth-shouldering Atlas mode still today, it’s such a relief to realize I can let go of that burden once I realize I’m doing it and choose, instead, to find strength that holds up the world elsewhere.

Who or what is shouldering the strength in your life right now? Is it God, yourself, other people, something else? What is it like for you to live in that reality?

How Do You Receive Love?

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the intention Jesus has toward you and the way he is coming for you and wants to know you and be known by you.

This is motivated by his deep love and care for you. 

I’m curious to know what that notion of love means to you. Do you have an idea in mind of what it means to be loved by someone? Do you know what it feels like to receive love? How comfortable are you with being open to the experience of receiving love? 

I know that for me, when I began to receive love from Jesus, the thing that changed everything was the way I felt seen and heard by him. There was a moment in time — a distinct experience in prayer (which I look forward to sharing in full detail with those enrolled in the Gospel immersion course this fall!) — where, for the first time, I got to know the way Jesus looks at me and listens to me.

It was completely unexpected. Never before had I realized he looked at me that way or listened to me so intently. And never before had I realized my need to be seen and heard in such an intent, loving, accepting, and safe way in order to experience and receive love. 

I can say with confidence that my experience of Jesus in that moment changed the way I began to receive and experience love from that point on. It not only changed the way I experienced my belovedness before God, but it also began to filter into my daily life and the way I experienced myself in the world and in relation to other people. 

When you think of the notion of receiving love, what does that look like and feel like to you? What would it take for you to feel completely safe and vulnerable before another person, in order to receive the experience of being loved?

Do You See the Person or their Actions?

This afternoon I stumbled on a quick, free version of the Enneagram test, which is a personality indicator test, and I decided to complete it. I have always wondered what number I am on the Enneagram but had never before had a chance to find out. (For the record, I appear to be a 2.)

One of the 36 questions on this free, 10-minute version of the test asks you to determine which of these two statements better represents yourself:

• I have been more relationship-oriented than goal-oriented.
• I have been more goal-oriented than relationship-oriented.

Later in the afternoon, after completing the Enneagram test, I opened Henri Nouwen’s Desert Wisdom book and read the following:

Some old men came to see Abba Poemen, and said to him: Tell us, when we see brothers dozing during the sacred office, should we pinch them so they will stay awake? The old man said to them: Actually, if I saw a brother sleeping, I would put his head on my knees and let him rest.

I couldn’t help but recall that Enneagram question when reading this story. Although being goal-oriented or relationship-oriented doesn’t call for a value judgment — one is not better than the other, by any means — in this particular story, being one or the other has implications.

If someone is dozing in church, what would be my response?

• Would I worry about that person disrupting the service? (goal-oriented)
• Would I judge them for not paying attention to God or the pastor? (goal-oriented)
• Would I get worried about their spiritual life? (goal-oriented)
• Would I care about their need for rest and simply want them to have what they need? (relationship-oriented)

I have to admit, I’ve been in the shoes of those old men in the story before. I’ve sat beside others dozing in church, or people who were simply a distraction from the normal mode of behavior in the service. In those moments, I became acquainted with panic. I wondered, Should I wake them? Should I try to get them to be quiet? Will others behind me get mad?

But upon reading Abba Poemen’s response in the story above, a calm and relief descend. I can feel my shoulders loosen. I feel my brow relax. I get back in touch with my true center and values.

I want to be Abba Poemen.

The truth is, I’m not always Abba Poemen upon first blush.

When I’m in touch with my true center, I would care about the person more than they impression they make. But when I’m going about my day without stopping for breath or stillness, I get caught up in myself and more easily become aggressive or judge-y.

Then I need to be reminded of what matters most: my neighbor and their well-being.

What about you? Do you tend toward one response over the other? Do you wish your response were different than it is?