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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”.
I really enjoyed this article from the Atlantic Monthly. It compares the British and America methods of traffic regulation. The basic premise is that America’s traffic regulation system with its many signs, is actually distracting to the driver which is very dangerous, and doesn’t teach drivers to make good decisions on their own.
After reading this article, I have new respect for the idea of roundabouts and other British methods, such as putting the “stop” sign right on the ground in front of you where you should be looking. I have also noticed many many redundant or confusing signs around me when I drive. For example, by the library there is a little roundabout which I always slow down for in case traffic is approaching from the right, only to find out the other day when I came down the crossroad (from the right) that it has a stop sign and another sign that says “through traffic does not stop” – what was the point of the roundabout then, if it’s really just a two-way stop?
I totally related to the frustration of four-way stops on quiet neighbourhood streets, the unnecessarily low speed limits on certain roads etc, and I really liked his proposition that we need to teach drivers to take more responsibility for figuring out what is safe rather than depending on so many signs to tell us.
This was definitely one of those articles that made me stop and really consider a subject I had never thought about – always fun!
Just as a warning – this is pretty much “verbal pinata” as my boss likes to call it. It isn’t organized and it definitely doesn’t have a thesis or a three point outline. It’s just me trying to figure out a lot of underlying frustrations . . .
To love people is to love God. We separate the two and say “Here is my relationship with God” and “Here is my relationship with people.” And this separation causes anxiety – we say we need to work on being better Christians and getting to know God better but don’t see that when we’re loving the people around us, getting to know them, seeing God in their lives, we are loving God and getting to know him better.
Sometimes it seems like we’re trying so hard to be good Christians that when we call someone we know needs comfort, we say “Can I pray for you?” instead of realizing that just by calling we’re being Jesus to them, that listening to them is already enough. Not that praying for them is bad, but we shouldn’t be so focused on these overt mechanisms of Christianity, that we lose sight of what it means to just live it. We all know the famous quote “Preach the Gospel always, if necessary use words” but we don’t know how to actually live this way. Words, specifically narrowed Christian terminology is all we have, the standard set to show us how to be spiritually mature.
Mark Buchanan wrote that the point of spiritual disciplines is to grow in love. Like Paul says, “If you have not love, you have nothing” – we focus so much on the task – read your Bible everyday, make sure you pray, where instead we should be focused on the outcome of these. Are we able to love our husbands better because of the time we spend concentrating on verses and seeking to understand them? This is the question we should be asking. Not, how many times this week did I read my Bible for 15 minutes? It’s hard for us to imagine that spending an evening with friends playing board games could be an act of praising God. We find it difficult to change our thought patterns to think that one good conversation with a friend or playing volleyball to the best of our ability can be spending time with God in prayer. Again, the dichotomy appears – the separation of our relationship with Christ from our relationship with our spouses, families, close friends and co-workers. The Westminster Catechism – the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. How do we enjoy God except through the people he places in our lives? And we do glorify God through our daily actions and our social activities. We live out our faith through community as Mike Mason talks about in Practicing the Presence of People. Jesus says, “In as much as you do this for the least of these, you do it for me” and “So whether you eat or drink or WHATEVER you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
And this is another pain point. At this point we decide as Christians that if we are going to do whatever, we must make it very clear to our fellow Christians HOW it glorifies God. Again, this narrowly defined language enters the picture and we feel it necessary to explain how and why we are acting for God’s glory. Why don’t we understand that as Christians this should be self-evident? If we are living to honor God, we should assume that whatever we do that is not sin obviously, glorifies him. We are not confident of this, it seems. Even though we all know and love Chariots of Fire and Eric Little’s great quote, “When I run, I feel his pleasure” – we don’t find this in our own lives. We don’t give ourselves the freedom to just enjoy pottery painting or photography as acts of worship. We have to find a way to define these activities in the language of fellowship or encouragement or opportunities to witness or even the necessity of using one’s gifts. It’s a priority of purpose – the best is if your activity witnesses to someone, or at least encourages them. But God looks at the spirit in which we do things. Does he need us to constantly be defining how what we do works in his favour? I doubt it.
This is why I have a hard time going near Christian fiction and music. As desperately as they may try to be authentic, to serve God’s people through what they write or sing, the language is still narrowed. And there’s always a definitive point. We tend not to stop in the hard places in our testimonies. We want to reassure everyone that we’ve reached some sort of safe conclusion, that we’ve neatly wrapped up the messiness of growth, challenge, pain and emotion into a nugget of wisdom to share with the group. It’s all so neat and tidy, that it becomes inauthentic even though it is sincere.
Literature and secular music dig down into the marrow of life and experience every part. They don’t try to reach the lesson learned until they’ve taken the journey. Here is where I see truth. This is where I want to experience God. It the raw, real language of our experience. Listen to the psalms. They are full of the real experience of a man seeking to live with and for God.
Part of my struggle with this, is that I never quite know what to do when people talk about being “on fire for Christ”. I’m on fire about a lot of things – education, justice, self-care, books, etc, but I sometimes feel like a lesser Christian when I listen to people talk about how Christ is the most important thing in their lives and they talk about him all the time to everyone they meet. I don’t do this. I don’t think about Christ enough, it seems. It makes me wonder if I don’t fully grasp his ultimate significance or that I don’t truly think he’s the most important thing in the world. BUT I know this isn’t true. I know Christ as my saviour, I know my whole life is wrapped around serving him because I know that I will find no joy or purpose if I do not follow his calling for my life. So why I don’t I spend time thinking about him? I’ve said before that sometimes I feel like God is my backbone- influencing everything I do, holding me together, impossible to live without, and yet rarely concentrated on. Everything I do flows out of the fact that I know God and have been raised to live in accordance with his principles. And there’s the catch – there’s a difference between always thinking about Christian things, and actually just spending time getting to know God.
So then we ask – how do we get to know God? And the standard answer is through reading the Bible and prayer. These are both great and necessary but we forget that as totally unique human beings each of us will have a totally unique relationship with Christ. As unique individuals we must ask ourselves then, how do we personally get to know God, what are our valid expressions of worship? We each know God in a different way from any other person but we shy away from this. Too easily, we let ourselves believe that our individual relationship with God should follow the pattern of our communal relationship with God. Our communal method for relating to God is not bad, there must be a common method when groups of believers meet, but it does mean other methods of worship are lost.
How do I get to know God? Through finding truths about humanity in what I read, through conversation with friends, through walks and appreciation of nature – God’s artistry which I relate to because he also made me an artist. How do I get to know God? Through language – finding and creating beauty with the words at my disposal. Through sports – using the muscles he intricately created me with, to allow me to play volleyball with skill and power. I get to know God when I find things, products and systems that I see as good and healthy. When I see what needs to change. God inspires me with passion over many things. I don’t even know how Burt’s Bees or Chiropractic care point to God but I don’t want to be too concerned about forcing the connection. I know that these things are good. Period. Truth wherever it is found, is always God’s truth.
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
***
I am steadily running out of clothes to wear again. Between our dryer (which stains our clothes with rust marks) and the plain fact that many of my clothes are 2-3 years old, I’m finally having to chuck the clothes that hang in my closet attempting to make it look full and complete. I’ve left them hanging there for long past their expiry dates because it’s scary to see how little is really there when I remove them.
I know, I know. What kind of girl am I? Why should the idea of going clothes shopping elicit groans rather than squeals of excitement? Well, there are a few reasons . . . and probably the main one is just that I’m picky, but here’s my reasoning:
First, I’m not very good at visualizing what will look good on me, nor am I always good at getting the right size. By the time I’ve tried it on and realized it’s the wrong size, I don’t have the drive to really go back and find a different size. I think “Did I really like it that much anyway?” and easily convince myself it’s not worth it.
Second, I have a hard time spending money.
Third, I don’t really like a lot of styles and materials. It’s seems like so much of the clothing out there today is cheap and plasticky. It looks like it will fall apart, pill, bag out. Or I know I’ll hate how it feels. But I have a hard time going only for high end clothing because of reason number two.
Fourth, I don’t want to look like everyone else. Shopping at Old Navy means I’ll see my clothes everywhere. I don’t mind with t-shirts and sweaters, basic items that look the same no matter what store you buy them in, but when it comes to cute dresses or more “unique” tops, I get bummed thinking about how many other girls are going to be wearing this “unique” shirt.
Fifth, a lot of the current styles don’t fit me properly which makes shopping depressing. Whether it’s the empire waist shirts which make me look pregnant or the pants that somehow don’t get that you can have a small waist and larger hips, it’s frustrating that flattering clothes seem so hard to find.
Today I thought I could do it. I had sufficient mental prep, John had approved spending $200, I thought I could go and refurbish my wardrobe in one attempt. I started off on a good note. At Old Navy I managed to spend $60 and buy four t-shirts and a sweater. But that’s where it ended. I went to Nordstrom’s Rack, Kohl’s, Target, Express and The Limited and at each store succumbed to one of my bad habits: shopping cart abandonment. I came home grumpy (and hungry), mad that I wasted four hours shopping.
These kind of days remind me why I think I should learn to sew . . . and stick to my strengths – buying books and furniture!!
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