How Far You’ve Come
[Border Collie – I]
I always liked dogs when I was younger. Not in an intimate way.
They were nice to have around, like a piece of furniture or a handsome fixture in the yard. As long as someone else trained, potty-trained, fed, and exercised them, I would pet them occasionally and maybe even play fetch (if they were trained to bring the ball back). If forced to decide one way or another, I’d choose to go without.
I genuinely love our current dog, a Border Collie named Pepper. In an intimate way.
I’ve done half the training, a lot of the potty-training, all of the brushing and feeding, and some of the exercising. She’s not a fixture, but instead is an integral part of the family, a worker on the farm, and a friend to my children. I couldn’t imagine not having her. If forced to decide one way or another, without a doubt, we’d keep her.
What could I tell my former, younger self, that would convince him dogs are more than fixtures? What would I have to say to the 15 or 20 year-old me for him to believe a dog could be an intimate part of a family?
There’s no argument convincing enough.
The slow encounter with life changed my perspective. No amount of information and argumentation can augment or speed that process up. The best I could do to my former self is gently affirm the life that I lived as it came.
Stop arguing your way (or someone else’s way) to a different future. It’s futile.
Instead, narrate and affirm the future that is slowly emerging. As you see it. In your terms. (As a reminder, consider how far you’ve come . . . and how you got here.)
Weekly Roundup: Things I've Learned from Blogging 500 Days in a Row...
July 27 – July 31, 2020
Monday: If I’m lacking motivation, self-confidence, deep curiosity, or drive, I need to take a hard look at the “calories” I’ve been consuming. I usually find the cause right away.
Tuesday: Writing (or any form of communicating) is risky. In private, it allows me to examine my own thoughts. In public, it allows others to examine them, too. Both are essential steps to having influence.
Wednesday: Life is a long lesson in how to manage ongoing change. Writing is no different. If done with sincerity, it’s merely the words I have here and now. Tomorrow they will be different because, God willing, I will grow between now then.
Thursday: All of our time is accounted for. Every minute of every day.
And "making time” is a meaningless phrase. We all have only 24 hours. The question is not “How will I fit it in?” The question is “What will I replace to fit that one thing without which everything else is deficient?” There’s more to lose when I’m honest with myself.
Friday: Here are a few small writing lessons I’ve learned and keep in my pocket as reminders. They are true for any creative endeavor, I think: 1. The inner critic/editor is the most critical. Ignore him . . .
Are you interested in the whole reflection? Click on any day, and it will take you there.
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Less is More . . . and Other Lessons
Here are a few small writing lessons I’ve learned and keep in my pocket as reminders. They are true for any creative endeavor, I think:
1. The inner critic/editor is the most critical. Ignore him.2. Writing begins with listening closely. Listen, observe, learn.3. Writing is better in community. With people. For People.4. Creativity is inevitable but not predictable. I need to show up.5. Less is more. Less is always harder.6. Writing uncovers the True Self. Talking often hides it.7. Without calling, writing is a burden. Keep discerning.8. Building an audience is terrible inspiration. It shows.9. Writing is a type of prayer. It’s a dance with the Divine.
It’ll be interesting to see how this list and the previous week’s reflections change in the next 500 days of blogging.Stay tuned. And be creative.
What Will I Replace?
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
I posted a question on social media the other day, "At roughly 90 seconds per day on here . . . I'm spent. How do y'all do it?” One friend immediately replied, “60 seconds per day.”
Obvious yet brilliant. Sometimes the difference between health and unhealth is 30 seconds.
I’ve learned in the last 500 days of blogging that the inverse is true, too: sometimes the difference between unhealth and health, surviving and thriving, merely existing and doing your one necessary thing is but a few seconds.
Maybe its five minutes in the morning or ten minutes before lunch. Perhaps it’s an hour at night in the basement after everyone is in bed.
All of our time is accounted for. Every minute of every day.
And "making time” is a meaningless phrase. We all have only 24 hours.
The question is not “How will I fit it in?” The question is “What will I replace to fit that one thing without which everything else is deficient?” There’s more to lose when I’m honest with myself.
For me, writing replaced something else.
What’s your thing? And what will it replace?
People Change
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
I am a different person than I was in high school. (Thank goodness.)
I’m a different husband than I was when I first married.
I’m a different blogger than I was 500 blogs ago. I’ve grown, to be sure.
Different from last month? Likely.
Yesterday? Sure.
Life is a long lesson in how to manage ongoing change.
Writing is no different. If done with sincerity, it’s merely the words I have here and now. Tomorrow they will be different because, God willing, I will grow between now then.
To write in a way that’s not detached from my experience is always to write provisionally. That doesn’t make it untrue or less meaningful. Quite the opposite. It makes is more real, more embodied, more truthful. No matter what I say, beneath it is the message, “World, here I am today, and here are the words I have found. They may change—in fact, they will change—but for now, this is what I’ve got.”
Communicate with grace, knowing tomorrow will be different. You will be different.
Listen and read with grace, too.
People change.
Two Risks for Influence
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
Writing is risky work. (Insert any form of communicating, really.)
The first risk is giving thoughts form. In my head they are safe. They can remain jumbled and disconnected. They can swirl around with no commitment and no consequence. As soon as I articulate them, I subject them to the limitations of words and the rules of writing. But the risk has a payoff. As soon as I get my ideas on “paper”, I can see them, there in front of me, from a new perspective. One of the gifts of writing is that I can now legitimately hold and examine what once was safely tucked away and ephemeral.
The second risk is that it invites others to hold and examine those ideas, which is to say that writing is always an invitation for criticism. It takes courage. But this risk has a payoff, too. While it opens my thoughts to criticism it’s also an invitation to dialogue. When I write, I’m always implicitly saying, “Here’s what I have now; take a look, and tell me what you think.” It’s dangerous because it's relational.
Writing is risky.
In private, it allows me to examine my own thoughts.
In public, it allows others to examine them, too.
Both are essential steps to having influence.
Input and Output
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
I’ve noticed two correlations between “reading” and writing over the last two years.
There’s a negative correlation between scrolling and writing. The mindless consuming of “content” online—whether it be pictures on National Geographic, my social media feed, or YouTube shorts about “How to Get Chiseled Abs Without Eating Veggies”—demotivates me to do the hard work of finding the right words to articulate my perspective. If writing is a creative appetite for words , those sources of food are not nourishment.
There’s a positive correlation between reading and writing. When I feed my curiosity with literature—whether it be Robert Frost’s poetry, a long article in The New Yorker, or a full-length book—I’m compelled to write. My eagerness to do the work is significantly higher. Immediately. Substantive material is like healthy fuel, regardless if I agree with it or not.
The correlation between what I am consuming and my creative impulse—the input and output equation—is not immediately obvious and rarely linear. In other words, I don’t read about something and write about that same thing. It’s deeper. More cellular. More in the depths of my psyche.
If I’m lacking motivation, self-confidence, deep curiosity, or drive, I need to take a hard look at the “calories” I’ve been consuming. I usually find the cause right away.
We need more—not fewer!—people like us that are unwilling to continue in ways like this. Which means we need folks willing to create and build and write and speak. But are they willing to critically look at their consumption habits?
Sunday Reminder
Each Sunday I'll find an older post pertaining to the current week's theme, polish it up, and re-share it.
Here's today's "Sunday Reminder"
Learning Backwards
[September 16, 2019]
Soren Kierkegaard famously said “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Life is only lived in one direction—straight forward, head on, looking through the front windshield. Understanding life, however, only comes with reflection on what has happened, looking in the rearview mirror.
Most of our real, lasting, meaningful lessons are learned backwards, after the fact.
But we plow forward with no time to stop, even for a moment, to process. In the spirit of efficiency, we sift out all the slack, the space, the downtime, the breathing room in our schedule. Consequently, we make the same mistakes a second, a third, a fourth time (which ironically adds to our inefficiency).
Work in time to reflect, to process, to learn backwards. Moving forward will be richer (and more efficient).
The Gift Before the Gift
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
Writing everyday is a gift I want to keep giving the world. I wrestle for words to name things that I can see up close, that I’ve explored and examined. And I’m compelled to share that. Not for my own sake, but instead because that thing that I see makes my life, your life, and the world better.
But behind my gift is another gift that was first given to me: the gift to see.
Not vision. Vision is a natural ability that I have by virtue of properly functioning eyes.
I mean seeing beyond, beneath, and behind.
In other words, I was taught how to perceive.
I was taught to notice.
To inquire and examine.
To critically engage.
To ask questions.
These are gifts that have been given to me by teachers, mentors, and counselors. All of my writing and sharing and giving rests on a gift that came before. It’s no wonder I’m compelled to share. Someone first shared with me.
If you see what others don’t—at your work, in your class, in your community, or anywhere—be thankful for the gift of perception. Now, your job is to turn and give it away.
I am the Audience
Things I’ve learned from blogging 500 days in a row . . .
Writing is fundamentally about finding the right language—for me. The primary audience is always the writer because words are merely the tools to better understand and name one’s reality. That is to say, the right words succeed if they are the right words for him or her who writes them and not if they’re the right words for a secondary audience that might give a five-star review.
Lacan said that a letter always reaches it’s destination because the intended destination from the beginning was the sender. Even if it gets lost in the mail, it arrived. (That sounds weird!)
All writing is a type of journaling, and that’s why it’s so important. Your voice must be cultivated over time to best articulate the world you experience and the world you dream about. Not because someone needs to hear it but because you need to say it.
It will only be as meaningful to others as it is meaningful to you. And it will only be meaningful to you if you fumble to get it out, chew on it, rework it, try it again, rearrange it, throw it in the trash, pick it back up, wrangle it back to the ground, and eventually own it.
We need your writing.
We need your voice.
But you need it first.
Batting 1000 (or 250)
Baseball is a game of small numbers. As expansive and gaudy as the fields are—oh, and the salaries of the players that man them—one might think that it’s a sport about being big. But it’s not. It’s a sport about infinitesimally small figures, measurement, and details.
The difference between a fly-ball and a homerun is a less than a sixteenth of an inch where the ball contacts the bat. The difference between a successful carrier as a starting second baseman and floundering in the minor leagues might be two or three errors . . . in a hundred-plus-game season.
Baseball is the one sport I know where scoring an F can still be a wild success. If a player succeeds a quarter of the time he is a batter, he’s good. A third of the time, and he’s very good. A few more than that, and he’ll make millions endorsing shoes.
Batting 250 or 350 or 500 (which is unheard of at higher levels, really) is baseball jargon for a decimal written to the thousandth digit. (Remember, it’s a game of small numbers.) 250 really mean’s .250. 350 is .350 and so on.
Today marks my 500th blog post in a row. 500 blogs in 500 days. In batting average terminology, I’m batting 1000. (Where are the shoe deals?)
Confession: I'm not batting 1000.
All I’ve done is step up to the plate 500 times in a row. Sometimes I strike out. Other times I hit a fly-ball to the right fielder. Occasionally, I make good contact and get on base. Maybe a quarter of the time. Probably less.
By baseball standards, I’d say I’m batting close to 250, or .250—25% of the time I get up, something meaningful comes out. Every once in a while I hit a homerun. Batting 250 is not going to win me any awards, but I’m also not going to sit the bench. Blogging and baseball are similar in this way: an F, or succeeding a quarter of the time, is success.
I think I’ll keep playing.
Here’s to the next 500 reflections on vocation, social change, and the deep faith of people like us that are unwilling to continue with the way things are.
Parables for Dreamers
Parables are fundamentally disruptive.
Sure, they are allegorical. Narrative. Artistic. But fundamentally parables are meant to challenge and disrupt the current belief structures. Employed in parables are common experiences, tropes, metaphors, or symbols, woven together to convey an otherwise difficult truth about a reality waiting to hatch.
I write parables for cynics. Mostly because I find religious cynics to be justified in their cynicism and yet struggling to find joy.
I also write parables for dreamers. My experience is that the concepts and language we receive from church are inherently restrictive rather than inspiring.
Actually, for years I was a dream-stunted cynic. I needed disruption. I found the parables to be a helpful antidote.
This is why I’m writing Disrupting Faith: Parables for Cynics and Dreamers, which will be a compilation of modern parables and thoughtful interpretations.
Some of these parables will be at becominghuman.tumblr.com.
Air BnB Surprise
It all started with an Air BnB rental.
With the wrong people.
At a time that made no sense.
Accidentally Sacred: On Finding Church in the most Unlikely Place is a memoir about finding the kind of community that both challenges us to be better and yet is safe enough for our soul to relax and be nourished. It’s a story about how a four-day stay in a rental cabin ultimately forced us to redefine community, family, and church.
This is not a blessing-in-disguise kind of feel-good story. It’s a challenging look at all the parameters and expectation we’ve put around God’s "delivery system" known as the contemporary church. What emerges is an understanding of community that is not easier but harder, not simpler but more complex, and not diluted but more challenging.
What emerges is holy.
What emerges is an accidental church.
Organic Reflections
I believe Wendell Berry is a saint.
I grow a huge garden, drink lots of goats milk, and build a lot of compost.
I believe self-interegation is at the center of a life worth living.
And I believe a robust faith must drive any real, lasting social change.
If one of those resonates with you, then, at the very least, our worlds intersect in a profound way. If you connect with two of those statements, then we could really have a lively conversation. (Let’s do it sometime.) If three or four resonate with you, then we are kindred spirits . . . and we should be friends and co-conspiritors in changing the world.
But first, let me get an important book to the world: Growing Prayer: Reflections on the Intersection of Land, Food, and Christian Spirituality.
This book is less about how to make all those convictions work together and more about how I found them all to be contained in the same holistic dream I didn’t know I always had. In a way, I didn’t discover those pillars, rather, I stumbled upon them and they helped me discover true health.
In this book you can find everything from notes on the contemplative practice of weeding garlic beds to the radical implications of sabbath keeping to the relationship between the microbiome in the soil and the biome in one’s gut. It’s part food diary, part theological memoir, and part agrarian manifesto.
Casseroles on Every Table
If there’s an official cuisine in the American South, it’s got to be the casserole. Every potluck: too many casseroles. Every dinner party: casserole. Every holiday: casseroles everywhere.
Cuisine is not just calories; it’s not only fuel. Cuisine is a story about a people and place. No, this book is not about casseroles and what it tells us about the South. (If it’s not already written, some one has a golden opportunity there.) But it is a book about food and what we can learn about the people that prepared it and the place it’s consumed.
I wrote Left Overs because the meal stories in the Gospels are so telling about the followers of The Way. Even further, the meals give us a vision of how Jesus imagined his earth-altering ministry would continue on. So, the meals not only reveal details about the people and places where they were originally consumed, they tell us about the type of people we should be now.
Left Overs: And Other Meal Stories that Changed Everything I believed About Church brings together my obsession with food—growing, cooking, and eating!—and Jesus’s obsession with the table as a symbol for social change. This book is part theology, part memoir, and part manifesto on how to change the world.
Celestial Obsession
Some scholars believe the Gospels are written backwards, making the birth narratives the most mature articulation of the Good News (which is the life and work of the one called the Messiah).
Here’s why I like this theory: There is a cast of creative characters, delinquents, outcasts, and foreigners at the beginning of the Gospels that were intentionally kept in the story to tell us something. The few that come to mind right away are the enigmatic characters from the East. Who are the Magi? And why exactly are they obsessing about a star in the sky?
The birth stories are bursting with surprises. To ignore them is to ignore the radical, cosmically influential, and transformational nature of the Good News.
And that’s why I wrote Starstruck: And Other Birth Stories that Changed Everything I Believed about the Good News. This book is very much in line with what one of my friends said: “If it’s not Good News for everyone everywhere, then it’s not Good News for anyone anywhere."
Skunked at Life
Having wrestled with the Gospel stories for several decades, I noticed something new recently: when I slow down and allow myself to sit with the details, old interpretations don’t work anymore.
Hold that thought.
I'm drawn to the short vignettes of the disciples after the death of Jesus, when by all measurements, they would have been deemed utter failures. So much truth emerges when notoriety and success can no longer be the mask we wear in public.
Hold that thought.
Now, let's bring those tow thoughts together. In the form of a two questions.
What does it mean to be the early adopter of a revolutionary movement, and what might we learn at the moment when the early adopters all thought they made a mistake?
I sat with these questions for some time and stuff started to emerge that challenged everything I believed about the Jesus Movement. I captured those observations in Skunked: And Other Resurrection Stories that Changed Everything I Believed about Christianity.
This one’s a zinger. I can’t wait for you to read it.
Spit is Disgusting
Spit is a bit of a contradiction. It’s disgusting outside the mouth, but no one thinks twice about it inside the mouth.
Jesus, like all humans, had a mouth full of spit. No big deal. But then it was disgusting when he took it out, mixed it with soil and put it on some guy’s eyeballs. And allegedly the man could see from that nasty encounter on.
This story has always fascinated me. Not because Jesus healed. Not because a blind man got a new set of eyeballs. Not because putting dirt in someone’s eyes is torturous. It fascinates me because we never stop to question the sanity of the one that thinks it’s acceptable to spit in someone’s face.
So many of the stories about Jesus are like this: we read details that are offensive, shocking, and even revolutionary, and walk right on by as if everything's normal. Medicinal Spittle: And Other Short Stories that Changed Everything I Believed About Jesus is where I stop doing that.
I ran into a problem, though. There were too many stories in the Gospels to all fit in one book. That’s why Medicinal Spittle is the first book in a four book series. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about book #2.
Hope Is On the Menu
As a reminder, I will be spending the next handful of days sharing about my longer writing projects, some that are complete, others that are somewhere in the middle, and a couple that are only outlined.
My father passed away a few years ago. I was blessed to be with him the last four days of his life. We talked and cried and confessed and reconciled. Someone emerged that was more than the man I knew as a distant dad; someone emerged that was tender and honest, vulnerable and open.
I processed that experience for over a year through journaling. Eventually, a few themes emerged. I sewed those themes together to form something of a manuscript. When I realized what he and I experienced at the end was deep hopefulness, I knew I had a story that needed sharing. I polished up the manuscript, and it has become a book, soon to be published: Consuming Hope: Faith, Risk, and Four Days to Live.
Approaching 500
Mile-marker.
Milestone.
They share the same etymology and are often used as synonyms.
Each refers to the measurement of a distance on the road from a given starting point. But they’re quite different. A mile-marker is less significant, merely measuring progress on the road of life. A milestone names a significant achievement; it connotes an arrival at a destination worth celebrating.
I’m approaching a mile-marker and a milestone.
Mile-marker: A couple days from now will mark my 500th blog post in 500 days. That’s right. 500 days in a row I’ve reflected on social change and vocation. It’s a mile-marker because I'm pushing right on through to 1,000. At this point it has become integral to my morning routine. At the end of the month, I will be sharing what I’ve learned in the process and making a few announcements about the future of the blog.
Milestone: I don’t know if you know, but I have a book being published (finally!) with Klug Publishing. We’re only a couple months away from getting it in your hands. In light of this milestone, I’d like to tell you something I haven’t told anyone else: after this first book, I will roll out four more! (No, I don’t write all day. I’ve been chipping away at them for years.) Over the next week, I’m devoting my blog “space” to share about those projects. You’ll get a sneak peak at the working titles and a blurb about the content.
If there was ever a time to share this blog with someone like us that's unwilling to continue like this, now is the time.
Just below this line are a few sharing options.