What is to become of the survivors?

Photo credit: Kristin Foss

I watched from a respectful distance, tears pooling in my eyes as the ritual unfolded. Into the box went all the contents of her desk, all the pictures that inspired her, all the instruments that brought her craft to life. A respected journalist, a seasoned author, a gifted observer of life, she was leaving this job because she was caught in a wave of layoffs that seemed to sweep away the veterans in favor of young, but agile, purveyors of digital thought.

I wonder about the loss.

Industry moves at the speed of light, multiplied by the speed of sound. All communication speeds along these days. Everything is quick and getting quicker. And it’s all young and getting younger. The rewards and the riches seem to go to those who can process information internet-fast and make a mark in fewer than 140 characters, the ones who intuit the internet. They are fresh-faced and unscarred. What is to become of a society where everything is new and moves too quickly to listen to the wisdom of experience?

What is to become of the survivors? Life has a way of teaching all of us. That’s not a bad thing. During the slower days, before the lightning fast communication superhighway, people learned things. They worked hard at their jobs, to be sure, but they also worked hard at learning about how people work. They built businesses and grew families, made friends and mended fences. They bumped up against one another, tested new theories against old ones and gathered valuable information about human nature. There was time, at that slower pace, to make mistakes and learn valuable lessons from them. The lessons were enduring ones, ones that left their marks — deep and wide scars that glisten white now, faded with the passage of years.

Almost daily, I talk with people who have the scars and they shake their heads in dismayed wonder. We have a new class of elderly, a generation dismissed by young adults because they aren’t as agile online. They are not old. They are middle-aged, an age at which previous generations found themselves managing younger people. They are moms whose children are nearly grown and gone, looking to take on the awesome and beautiful responsibility of Titus 2, but finding themselves cast aside because in this carefully curated, photo-shopped new world, there is no value in scars or age spots or gray hair. Instead of mentoring and wisdom-sharing, valuable human resources at precisely the place where experience meets expertise in terms of almost every human interaction are being cast aside for the quickness of action that is the future.

Quick carelessness. Quick dismissiveness. Discarding wisdom, even disdaining it, in favor of slick images and the rapid repartee of Twitter.

Here’s the thing: the scars are wounds that have healed, the age spots come from days turned toward the Son, the gray hairs are countless sleepless nights spent learning hard lessons that come with bumping up against human brokenness again and again. Together, these are the things that make us real to one another. These are the experiences that sensitize us to the humanity of one another. They are the wisdom intended to be passed down in order to preserve and protect mankind.

With those scars, comes humility. It is the learned understanding that we don’t know what we don’t know, that the world is vast and the human soul bottomless and we’re all still learning, changing, and, hopefully, growing. Humility says, you’ve been here before me, please share what you learned. Ironically, humility is often learned in the trenches of experience. It’s the veteran who knows the value of asking honest questions and seeking hard-earned wisdom.

Maybe lift your hands from a keyboard. Maybe look someone in the eyes. Maybe instead of FaceTime or Google Hangout, you opt to sit down together at a table. Break bread. Share space. Real, actual space that is full of nuance and breath and human warmth.

We were made for slow communication with one another.

Don’t be too quick to discard the people who remember a time when time didn’t move so quickly. Don’t be so quick to dismiss the valuable things they know about people — the things they learned before every face was illuminated by a handheld computer that both connects us and disembodies us.

Springtime Surrender

The sun shone and the temperature crept towards 80; I went down to the creek to take a walk. I felt my soul stir, my senses coming alive. Bluebells were in full bloom; their bright colors shouted spring’s glory song. The air smelled like the earth was coming to life.

To think I almost missed it.

I’d looked at my to-do list, wrestling with my desire to draw clean lines through all the items and sigh with satisfaction over conquering the tasks and claiming control. For a few moments, I considered staying home and putting my world in perfect order. Please read the rest here.

What Did We Miss?

Lent, which seemed so long in the dark days of early March, is drawing swiftly to a close. As we enter into the liturgy of Holy Week, we are called to weep in community, and then to rejoice with one glorious voice. Palm Sunday is a moment of beautiful liturgical significance. It’s also the Mass most likely to find mothers and children in tears. Combine the longest Gospel of the year in a crowded pew full of children with spear-shaped branches that are wickedly sharp, and, well, good luck to you. 

In all seriousness, and with reverence for the solemn celebration, remember our Lord weeps with you. He knows the struggle to gather these children into suitable clothes and buckle them into car seats, and to try to teach them well how to behave in the constraints of the pew. He sees you suffer as you endeavor to bow your head to pray only to be distracted by an errant palm. He knows the tears that gather in the corner of your eyes as the man behind you glares disapprovingly and you feel, yet again, as if you are failing in this most beautiful and important duty. Jesus weeps, too. Please read the rest here.

Lent is a Marathon

Lent is a marathon. I think that we often get to the third week or so and start to recognize that it’s a marathon, but that we approached it from the beginning as if it were a sprint. We set lofty goals and we went after them with great ardor. And now, we’re spent. Our resolutions are looking a little rough around the edges. We’re discouraged because we’re not making the spiritual progress we’d hoped to make, but the calendar is marching onward towards Easter. The battle for Lent is being waged in our heads — that’s where most marathons are finished, or not. 

In an effort to throw off the trappings of the world and to put on the love of Christ, we have to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2). Renewal is an ongoing, lifelong process. God wants us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds so that we know and act upon His will for our lives. Did your “Lent list” look like a to-do and “to-don’t” list? It’s helpful to stop now, at roughly the midpoint, and remind ourselves that Lent is not about the checklist. The checklist is the training plan for the marathon. Lent is about transformation. It’s about transfiguration. It’s about becoming more and more like Christ. It’s about uniting our hearts and souls with Him in order to shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father (Matthew 13:43). 

We resolved to get up earlier to do some spiritual reading every day. But around the end of the second week of Lent, winter returned with a vengeance and Daylight Savings Time kicked in, and we stayed under the covers first one day, and then the next. Four days later, we’ve given up on our “something extra” because now it’s a lost cause. 

No it’s not. You lost four training days. That’s not the end. Pick up where you left off. The renewal of your mind is a lifelong process; you will keep renewing until you breathe your last breath. Every day, we have the opportunity to begin again. Every day, we are given the opportunity to ask for the fruits of the spirit —love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control — in order to help us finish the marathon. Think of them as the Gatorade stations along the way. Replenish. Refill. Begin again. Ask Him.

The point of the marathon isn’t to collect the medal at the end, to check the distance off on your daily running calendar (though that no doubt would be very satisfying). The point is to become a runner. The point isn’t to become a Lenten ninja, able to leap out of bed in the still dark morning in a single bound. The point is to become more like God. Learning to leap out of bed is the means to making your heart more like His. 

And it requires His help. 

Struggling with Lenten discipline isn’t failure. It’s opportunity. Every time we struggle, we get to ask for fruits of the spirit. Every time we ask, and He answers, we see the boundless generosity of God. And every time we take the fruits and use them for His glory, we are a few steps further in the marathon of our lives. 

Buck up, Cowboy! and other spiritual exhortations...

The first few days of Lent always find me singing to my children. With every whimper and complaint, I belt out the tune to which we’ve memorized Galatians 5:22-23. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” I put particular emphasis on “self-control.”

The practice of denying ourselves willingly through our Lenten sacrifices is one that calls for self-control. Lent is a good time for self-control awareness, for strengthening our exercise of self-control, because Jesus reminds us that “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Lk 9:23). Everyday life calls for self-control. We will be called to take up our crosses daily and actually carry them. Lent is the perfect time to do the real work of planting the seeds that will bear such fruit of the Spirit.

I also find myself saying, “Buck up, cowboy” quite a bit. It’s not a particularly pious saying, but it’s definitely part of our family vernacular, especially when one wants a cheeseburger on Ash Wednesday. It implies effort. Children need to learn how to exert effort.

Truly, we all need to learn how to exert effort better — more cheerfully, more graciously and with more generosity. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, but we can’t just sit under the tree and wait for it to fall on our heads. Our self-control isn’t ours, it’s of the Lord, but He calls us insistently to cultivate it.

St. Paul offers a metaphor that works quite well in my family of athletes. He reminds us that “Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified” (1 Cor 9:25-27).

Self-control is given to the athlete by the Spirit, but the athlete exerts his will to exercise it. We are to be active in cultivating virtuous habits.

We have to practice virtue in a disciplined manner in order to accept the fruits of the Spirit and use them to live a life alive with faith. God respects our freedom. He’s ready and waiting with sufficient grace for whatever Lenten resolutions we’ve made according to His will, but He wants us to ask for it and to cooperate with it. God desires nothing more than for His Spirit to bear fruit in our souls — not just the fruit of self-control, but all the fruits.

He calls us to receive the grace of the Holy Spirit by faith and to actively live it out. When we do, we see that the Father cares enough to conform us into the image and likeness of God. Cooperating with that grace, we live and breathe in Him, with the blossoming fruits of the Spirit expressed increasingly as we grow closer to our Creator. We are each called in our unique ways to bear this fruit in the world, manifesting the character of Christ with our own lives.

Lent is a gift. If we let Him, God will allow us the grace we need to remove the obstacles between us, to strengthen our response to His fruits in our lives. When we ask and ask again for His grace and strength to keep our commitments and to flex the muscles of self-control, He’s there in the struggle. Often, we find that over the course of the season, He changes us. Our wills conform to His. No longer do we desire the things we did when Lent began. Instead, we desire something better, and Easter bears witness to the fruits of His Spirit flourishing in the garden of our souls.

We can be victorious.