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Read a great quote today by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary”
It made me think, does my character come across to others without words? Do I say things to the contrary of who I am? I’m sure we all do but I’d like to always live with my words and action in line with one another.
Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.
As they pass thought the Valley of Baca,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
They go from strength to strength
till each appears before God in Zion.
- Psalm 84:5-7
I am indebted to my good friend Anna, who sent me this one today:
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter: it is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.” (Mark Twain)
Also to one of my favourite comic strips:
This section of Courage and Calling has been making me think all week. Smith goes through Romans 12:6-8 to describe seven different roles that people embrace in response to the world’s brokenness. I’m just going to share some quotes from it:
1. “Some people are prophets (v.6). Prophets see the profound need for people to live in the truth they already know. Prophets call us to behavior that is congruent with our words.”
- I’ve never really thought of prophecy in this way . . . I always put in light of prophesying the future, but when I think about the OT prophets, this is what they did – call on people to awake up and return to what they know is true.
2. “Some are servants (v.7); it runs in their blood to be attentive to the practical needs around them. They tend to think that there is too much talk and not enough action.”
- I think this is where I bog down so quickly – you get told over and over again to “serve” and what does that actually look like? I think of the people that are so quick to volunteer and just feel so self-centered compared to them. While this doesn’t let me off the hook as far as being willing to serve in general, it does mean that I’m free to “serve” in a different way than what initially comes to mind.
3. “Still others are called to be teachers (v.7). What makes a person the kind of teacher Paul writes about is the conviction that the main problem in the world is that people lack understanding; if they could just understand, they would know and live the truth. Teachers believe that transformation can come through learning.”
4. “Others are inclined to think that the greatest problem in the world is the lack of hope; their fundamental orientation is one of encouragement (v.8) . . . they have a deep-felt conviction that encouragement is precisely what is required if our world is going to experience peace, justice and transformation. Some encouragers use words. Others recognize the significance of place, and know that the spaces in which we live and work can either undercut or enhance our courage and sense of well-being; they know how to design spaces of nurture, light and life.”
- I love this idea that encouragement is more than words, this is something I’ve never thought about before, but I know how much I love being in place that are peaceful and quiet and it does do something for my soul.
5. “There are yet others who are active ‘contributing to the needs of others’(v.8). These are usually those among us who recognize that without funding much that is important does not happen. Often they are people who know how to make money, but they are also people who know how to give generously. Without the generosity of those who have the means to give, our lives would be significantly impoverished.”
6.”Then there are those called to leadership (v.8). There is so much talk of leadership in our day that sometimes we think that everyone is called to leadership. But some people have a unique passion for enabling others through administration and management, so that organization flourish, and so that everyone else can fulfill their giftedness.”
7.”Finally, Paul speaks of those who are called to demonstrate mercy (v.8). While all of us are called to show mercy, some people deeply understand that those around them have a central need for someone to stand with them. They mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep. While others may wonder how this solves problems or brings resolution to the issues before us, people who are called to show mercy recognize the transforming power of empathetic identification. They know that the demonstration of mercy is itself life and strength to another person.”
Smith concludes this section of the book with this: “My point is that your vocation will in some fundamental way be aligned with how you see the brokenness of the world. It is imperative therefore that you respond according to your own perception of the world’s brokenness. It is equally imperative that you not judge others if they do not see or feel the brokenness of the world as you do.“
This is equally convicting and reassuring to me. There have already been plenty of times in my life that people have approached me with things they think I should do because it’s such a good cause. I’ve wondered sometimes why I don’t have the same passionate heart for the various causes, and now I understand that we can see the brokenness of the world differently. And convicting in that I have often wondered why people can’t see what I see. They were made differently, gifted differently and have a different role to fulfill in this world.
And the final question is – how do I see the brokenness of the world? I’m not sure yet.
“On Fire”
They tell you where you need to go
They tell you when you’ll need to leave
They tell you what you need to know
They tell you who you need to be
But everything inside you knows
There’s more than what you’ve heard
There’s so much more than empty conversations
Filled with empty words
And you’re on fire
When He’s near you
You’re on fire
When He speaks
You’re on fire
Burning at these mysteries
Give me one more time around
Give me one more chance to see
Give me everything You are
Give me one more chance to be… (near You)
Cause everything inside me looks like
Everything I hate
You are the hope I have for change
You are the only chance I’ll take
When I’m on fire
When You’re near me
I’m on fire
When You speak
And I’m on fire
Burning at these mysteries
These mysteries…
I’m standing on the edge of me [x3]
I’m standing on the edge of everything I’ve never been before.
And i’ve been standing on the edge of me
Standing on the edge
And I’m on fire
When You’re near me
I’m on fire
When You speak
(Yea) I’m on fire
Burning at these mysteries… these mysteries… these mysteries
Ah you’re the mystery
You’re the mystery
-Switchfoot lyrics “On Fire”
Churchill has so many great one-liners:
“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
“The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.”
“I am easily satisfied with the very best.”
“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”
One of our family favourites growing up was,
“He’s a modest man, with much to be modest about.”
And some more serious ones:
“We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities . . . because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.“
I think the last one is my favourite right now. So many meetings and sermons are too wordy and that the words used are not properly defined, the phrases ambiguous or taken for granted. I know most of it is probably just my impatience with having my time wasted, but when language can be such a precise tool, I get frustrated with the vague and often aimless wandering that we think counts for “talking”.
Here’s a quote that struck me in the introduction to this book Courage and Calling. I’m finally reading it after meaning to buy it for two years – ever since the author, Gordon Smith, spoke in one of my classes in fourth year. He gave an amazing talk about the importance and meaning of Sabbath. This book is about what it means to have a vocation and calling from God. For him there are three calls: 1. The general call to follow Jesus, 2. The specific call: your unique vocation – your mission in this world and 3. The immediate call which is the tasks and duties God calls you to at the present time.
About the last call, he writes this, “these may be the duties and responsibilities to which God calls me today. Not all of the immediate and legitimate needs that I face are necessarily my responsibility. I may be “overhearing” God’s call to another. The danger is always that these daily and immediate needs would crowd out our capacity to respond to our unique vocation.”
This resonated deeply with me. I feel like this is where most of us get stuck, in doing all these perfectly legitimate and even good things that, nevertheless, end up taking us away from our vocation. It’s easy to think back to BFA and my mom explaining to me that it’s important to say no to the things that we don’t feel called to do, because in a missionary community, it becomes so easy to be constantly busy serving the Lord, and to become guilty when we’re not, even thouh he may not be requiring any of it from us.
I think many of us do not understand what our vocation truly is and why it’s so important to pursue it. It also comes around again to the ideas I’m still currently wrestling with about how we each have a unique relationship with God, worship him differently, find him in different activities etc. This was in the introduction alone – I am so excited to keep reading this book.
This is something I wrote in my first year of college. I thought I’d post this today, because I again find myself facing my discontent with the status quo, the way things are.
Discontentment
n.s.w.
November 2003
What is it you fear most? A sign asks you in the street. It halts you. You look around, trying to think. What do you fear? Underwater animals, snakes, someone grabbing you in the dark? You shake your head. These answers do not satisfy – they are distant fears – fears you have not come face-to-face with. You turn to carry on, yet this question has caught you and won’t let go. It wants an answer from you. You wade through the seaweed in your mind, searching, until a glimmer of light reaches you. What do you fear? The answer lurks there in the darkness of your mind: Discontentment. You snatch it up and write it in the blank space. Stare at this word caught in the air and feel that you have written one of the profoundest things about your life. You fear being discontent.
“Why?” you can hear a puzzled voice ask. Because you want to be happy. You know you do not have the money to sate your desires and that you never will. You know that the desire for more is unending. You would rather be happy with what you have. You can feel, though, that there lives a little poisonous thought in you, which you consciously work to ignore day in and day out, a mocking whisper which says “but you are not happy – you are not happy at all.” And you don’t know how to change that – you don’t know how to be happy and you can’t admit that.
***
discontent n (1591) : lack of contentment: a : a sense of grievance : DISSATISFATION b : restless aspiration for improvement.
***
You realize that you are vastly discontented with your life no matter how hard you try not to be – maybe not materially, not physically, not in any concrete area. You are discontented because you cannot say what your mind yearns to say. You feel you cannot be all that you could be, should be. You try . . . and fail. And every effort leaves you discontent, unfulfilled, unhappy. Your masterpiece, your self-expression never blossoms into full flower. The trash is full of shredded, crumpled and torn papers that have felt the violence of your frustration. The writing that never fully expresses, never fully captures and leaves you staring at a blank wall, with coffee mug rings defacing the desk, and a cruel clock telling you that it is five o’clock in the morning and you have nothing to show for the night.
So you suppress desire, sacrificing your happiness so that you do not have to deal with the pain. That healthy (but you don’t know it is healthy) discontentment that made you search for more, strive for life, is starved slowly by your iron will and you think, “Now I will be happier” and never realize you will never be happy again. With no desires you have no hope, with no discontentment you reject what you innately know: that you were made for something greater. That is no life.
Every man dies, not every man truly lives.
- Braveheart
***
You do not even know how to describe the sudden fleeting memory that you barely catch as it goes by in your mind. It is a whiff of a delicious smell you have known, the unexpected constriction around your heart, the return of a long forgotten pain that tells you, if you let it, you once had dreams. And even if the memory was a happy one, you can only feel the pain because you have lost the intensity that moment held. You wish, as you continue on to your routine 9- 5 job, for a return to that place, to experience it again, be real again. But even as you reach after that memory, it is gone, like reaching for something underwater and only pushing it farther away with your movement. Like reaching out for something over the edge of a cliff and just as you get your fingers on it, you lose your footing and the earth falls away.
You banish your momentary longings, lock them up again because you fear discontentment so much. You do not want to remember the creativity, beauty and power that once surged through you, that spurred you on and made each day better than the last. You want to forget that it has not produced anything, your masterpiece shriveled before it lived, your dreams wilted into a hole in your heart. You craved outer expression of the inner and dreamed of creating something that would reflect your deepest soul. Something evocative, poignant . . . beauty and truth . . . yet here you sit at your desk, covered in the same dust that is spread thickly across the thousands of worthless reports, that always seem so urgent and important, heaped around you. You would all but forever suppress impulse and desire, but for the despairing pain encircling your heart. You want to break free. The envy for the ancient myths is on your tongue. Beauty, Love, Truth – man was made for such a creed. [Humans have always needed heros- have always wanted to be able to be those heros. Why the need to invent stories beyond ourselves – more beautiful than we could ever be – that sigh of discontentment at the end of a moving film for a life so much richer and deeper than ours is.]
This is your life, are you who you want to be?
This is your life, is it everything you dreamed?
and today is all you’ve got now
and today is all you’ll ever have
We were meant to live for so much more,
have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside
and everything inside screams for second life.
The tension is here
between who you are and who you could be
between how it is and how it should be
I dare you to move.
- Switchfoot
(the dam is already straining, why not just let it go, let the thousands of tons of pent up thoughts and emotions pour over you. why are you trying so hard to keep something that wants to get away. You’re scared to let go – we always are – scared to lose control, slip into the unknown) impotent, worthless, frustrated, bursting but no words will come. nevermind. forget it.
In your most secret honesty, you wish only to let go and let the pain seep in, let it flow right through your entire being, envelope your soul – just to feel anything again – but your heart has been stone cold for too long, ruled by your mind, your overdeveloped self-control. You have learned not to involve your feelings. Intensity? Passion? These words burn. They are pain – pain that you thought you wanted no part of, too many times your intensity was suffocated, your passion strangled. You chose to go without and learned to live the indifferent life, tricked yourself into believing that mediocre was better. Now it is easy to slip into the groove of believing that once again. You think that vague resurfacing of your memory is just a passing friction that leaves you slightly unsettled – no more – with an idea that you once had dreams that reached far higher than the 37th floor of the building your office is in.
You dismiss the flashing insight that rebels against you sensible brain, that discontentment is the weight that makes it hard to lift a smile or laugh out loud. Discontentment is the pathetic eagerness to be happy with everything that happens. Discontentment is rolled into every neat pair of socks in your drawer, sliced into every vegetable in every gourmet meal you order, trying to brainwash your heart into believing your life is perfect. It’s causing you to choke on air. Trying to be perfect and painless – you are paralyzed.
Live to the point of tears.
- Alfred Camus
You have smothered all hints that life could be so much more, that you could be living with your whole being, expressing that something deep inside, that has rotted in your soul and contaminated your SELF because it has never been let out. You realize this is why your stomach revolts at phrases like “if only” and “what could have been” and you can almost feel the sting of the slap on your face – because your subconscious has been saying them to you every night as you lie unable to sleep and as you get up each morning with bags under your eyes.
But often in the world’s most crowded streets
But often in the din of strife,
There arises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life:
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking our true, original course.
- Matthew Arnold
“If only” is when a strain of music shatters you with its haunting highland flutes and you can feel beauty with every pore of your body. When you only realize later that the tears running down your face are crying for the inability to live everyday this fully, because it is only in these passing moments that you have meaning. Crying for the music to continue indefinitely just to keep you feeling because you cannot live for real on your own. Beauty has pierced the calloused walls of your heart. Will you allow those hardened walls to be peeled away? Will you let the life in your heart out of its prison?
My entire soul is a cry and all my work is a commentary on that cry.
- Nikos Kazantzakis
The tragedy continues as you return to your “reality,” shrug off and dismiss that cry that continues to echo with your heartbeat (but even echoes diminish), deciding that it is too painful to tear the walls down. You do not seem to have the strength to do it. Instead, you turn your back on your emotions, betray your desire, denounce it as foolish, impossible, not worth it . . . then despair as gongs seem to ring out doom, “it’s too late” “it’s too late” . . . it is too late to change. You shift around, desperately trying to get comfortable in your “normal” self again, jamming unwanted thoughts down to the bottom of your soul, where they wallow in a scum that only others can see taints you. Ignoring it will never make it go away, you know that – let yourself know that. As much as you desire to give your life a second chance, the more you reach toward it, the farther away change seems to be and you despair of grasping it. Is it out of your reach?
It is never too late to be what you might have been
- George Eliot
***
“They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted – twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame.“
This is from Jude (v. 12b-13a).
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