:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

Taking Root is a series of meditations I’m writing and editing for Central Vineyard Church during the season of Lent. You can download a podcast for each day of Lent by subscribing to my church’s podcast or visiting the podcast blog for each day of the series.

Strawberries only grow in the summer up north. That’s nothing all that shocking, but if we can understand the implications of this, we are on the verge of planting a seed of an idea that can change our lives.

It really all starts with strawberries.

It never occurred to me that strawberries have a limited growing season. When I realized that my winter supply of strawberries has always been shipped in from places like California, I had a striking revelation.

In the past, people couldn’t eat strawberries out of season. Think about that. Millions of people were deprived of this heaven-sent berry, a top five fruit along with blueberries, for ten or eleven months of the year. A bland honeydew or tart apple doesn’t get the job done like a strawberry.

How in the world did God think it was a good idea to give apples such a long season and to keep the strawberry season so short?

My strawberry theology crisis aside, strawberries have their limits. When weather cools down, strawberries just can’t grow. It’s impossible to grow strawberries in the winter. The plants need their in-season and off-season time in order to produce fruit.

My own distance from farming has kept me from noticing how seasons work with my food, but we don’t need to look far before we start noticing seasons. From the changing of leaves, to the various sports leagues, to shows on network television and cable—our lives are ordered around seasons.

In some respects we are swept along with the seasons of life such as childhood and adulthood, but in my own life I’ve found that two things tend to happen:

1. I fight the arrival of a new season.

2. I fail to notice the need to change seasons on my own.

Either way, there’s a rhythm built into creation. Fighting against the rhythm of seasons can leave us feeling uprooted—a confused chaos of uncertainty and stress.

Fighting a New Season

Sometimes I want to keep things just as they are, fearing a change or even a leap into the dark that a new season brings. While we can fight off seasons in the grocery store and import our strawberries, we can’t stop people from changing, growing up, or moving on. Each change of season brings some losses and fresh opportunities.

Failing to Change Seasons on My Own

Sometimes we can push on in our lives as if we aren’t living in seasons. We can keep working, keep seeking the same entertainment, and keep using our free time in the same ways. Our lives become these predictable patterns that may be disappointing sometimes, but the up side is the predictability.

While some seasons creep up on us and we have to eventually figure out how to survive, these self-imposed seasons are far more challenging. Breaking these patterns and habits can be tough because we don’t see the urgency. Aren’t things working out just fine?

The problem is that our lives are generally moving at the pace of a sprint, running at top speed, trying to squeeze every last drop out of each day, but life is a marathon that demands different paces. Recognizing life as a series of seasons frees us to grow, change, and transition with the different seasons of life. Without seasons, we deprive ourselves of self-reflection and keep pushing on, adding more and more until we snap.

Unless we force ourselves to step back from our well-worn and familiar patterns, we’ll have a hard time figuring out what may be holding us back from going deeper with God. Christians recognized this dilemma, so they created a season before Easter that forces us to do just that.

Indulging in God in the Season of Lent

Lent is a Christian season that aims to point out the ways we’ve drifted from God and gives us the tools to restore a healthy balance. We don’t deprive ourselves of food or pleasure as a religious observance per se. Rather, we’re creating room so that we can splurge on God.

Lent is a season of feasting on Christ’s presence in our lives, and therefore we remove something significant as a way of creating time where God can work in us. We don’t give these things up for all time but merely for a season. Then we can restore our lives to their proper order with Christ in his place as Lord of all.

As you consider how to create space for God during this season, I encourage you to ask God to reveal one thing that gets in the way of your relationship with him. It may be food, a game, a habit, or a lifestyle choice. Even something as simple as turning off your phone or computer for a set period of time each day and meditating in a quiet space can make Lent a productive season of recuperation and rest.

Resting for a season sows a seed within us that starts to hint at what we were made to do and where we are going. If we want the fruits of hope, joy, and peace that God brings, we need to start with this seed of thinking seasonally, of giving something up for a set period of time.

By entering a season of rest, we’ll find that God has promised us sweet things for the future. Even those sweet things, much like biting into juicy summer strawberries, will pass away as we enter a new season. Whether it is a season of plenty or a time of want, may our one constant be an abundance of God’s presence in our lives.

The Greenhouse

We usually think about Lent as a make or break time of fasting. It’s like a New Year’s resolution for Christians. Failure seems inevitable. It’s so big and drastic, who can keep it up for 40 days?

While I still encourage you to change a habit or practice in your life so that you can create more space for God, each day of this series we’re going to provide a list of practices that you can test out. Think of these practices as experiments that may or may not work. You’re just sticking these idea seedlings into your life to see what sprouts.

Maybe these idea seeds will grow into something significant, but we’re not interested in creating something huge here. We’re testing some things out, and then we’ll leave the next step up to God’s Spirit in your own life. Here are some idea seeds you can try out today:

Look at the past 5-10 years of your life. Have you moved in and out of any personal seasons?

Look up the church calendar at www.explorefaith.org. Take 5 minutes to reflect on what it means to think seasonally about spiritual growth and discipleship. Write down your observations.

When I think about what I want or what advertisers tell me I want, I usually say something like this:

• Get more done…
• Work faster…
• Find more time…
• Become more organized and efficient…

Speed and efficiency are really, really important for us today.

If someone asked me how I feel, I’d probably say something like “I feel stressed, busy, and worried.” 

In other words, I want speed and efficiency, but I feel awful.

Any chance our desires are related to how we feel?

Starting this Wednesday I’m launching a new blog series called Taking Root for the season of Lent.

We’ll be exploring ways to become rooted in God’s presence in the midst of a chaotic, uprooted culture. My pastor Jeff Cannell at Central Vineyard was key in helping me put this together. We call it a Christian version of the Zen Habits blog.

You’ll be able to read the posts each day of Lent here at this blog, but you can also download a podcast for each day of Lent by subscribing to my church’s podcast or visiting the podcast blog for each day of the series. We had a group of readers record each podcast, and the series logo was designed by Jeremy Slagle.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow as we kick off the series: How Living in Seasons Changes Everything

Back in the days of high school youth group at church, I noticed that we didn’t have a worship leader. So I picked my guitar up after a two year hiatus, played three songs over and over again for five months, and then failed fantastically in front of the 60 students in my youth group because I didn’t realize how hard it was to actually start a song in the right key as the leader.

I played guitar for years. Many of my friends from college knew me as a guy who leads worship all over the place, in small and large groups. Though everybody seemed to have a guitar, worship leading opportunities always sniffed me out.

The more I pitched in, the more responsibilities I received. Soon I was in charge of a worship team at a church with 300 to 400 people in each service (at least it felt like that many people).

Once I was put in charge, things seemed to fall apart in a matter of months. Ironically, that’s a long story…

Being perfectly honest, I didn’t really care all that much about music or mastering the guitar. I felt called to create in a different way. As I stuffed my guitar away in the closet, I began to discover writing. The more I invested in writing, the more it fit everything God seemed to be doing in my life.

I began to realize that I was that same kid who filled his copy book in sixth grade with zany stories.

I was the same kid in seventh and eighth grade who sat at a primitive computer with his friend each day after school rewriting fairy tales from the perspectives of the villains who believed they had received a bum wrap.

As I honed my craft as a writer, I began to notice lame church websites. People in church said they were writing a “blog” when they meant “blog post.” The elitist professional in me cringed.

Maybe I could help?

At one church in particular, I offered to help with some writing projects right when a huge need emerged for someone to handle communications. I threw myself into it and developed a newsletter and kept the basic day to day operations going. I really loved it.

After a few months of this, we began to talk about creating a team, and then one day I had a group of four or five people sitting across from me, waiting for me to lead the communications team. At that moment, something within me clicked, “I am not a leader. I do not want to do this.”

God had been warning me over the past year or so at this particular church to not become a leader. Things were just ducky so long as I could throw myself into my work, create stuff, communicate, and do all of that. However, once I started to lead people, it all stopped being fun.

Thankfully, I didn’t languish in a leadership role for long. Circumstances provided an easy way to pass off leadership to someone with those gifts. She’s doing an amazing job because she knows how to work with a team and get the most out of each person. I, on the other hand, work great on a team, but I’m not the person to lead it.

God has made it abundantly clear to me over the past year: Do not lead.

I create stuff. I don’t lead people.

I’ve been trying to unlearn that since I was 15 years old.

What Are You Passionate About?

There’s an old trick that pastors learn. When someone comes to a pastor and says, “We should have a ministry like _____,” pastors know to respond: “You’re passionate about that idea. How about you lead it.”

I can certainly relate to pastors who get everything dumped on them. They need to hand off responsibilities to capable people or they’ll lose their minds. However, passion does not make a leader. Passion just means you care about something.

Over and over again, I stepped up to help with ministries that I cared about. I was passionate about worship and creative work, but I always ended up in charge and completely miserable.

I’ve worked in the nonprofit world long enough to know that passion does not lead to competent leadership.

After so many false starts and dead ends, I’ve learned two things about belonging in a Christian community.

1. If you do what you think you should do, you’ll burn out.

2. If you serve within your God-given limits, you’ll find a lot of joy.

When I think about serving others through my writing, I honestly sort of write it off in unguarded moments. It’s like, “Nah, it’s just fun. It’s not a big deal.”

When I think about leading a team of creative people, I want to buy the most expensive MacBook Air on the market and beat myself over the head with it.

God has called me to write. I’m not a leader of writers. I’m just a writer. There may be writers out there with leadership gifts. I’m not one of them.

There is freedom and peace in knowing our boundaries. When we know who are and what we’re called to be, we can just settle into our spot in the body of Christ. The more we realize what we can’t do, the more essential the fellow Christians around us become. Before we know it, we’ll become a living, breathing, interdependent, nurturing community.

Best yet, I’m not standing up there on Sunday mornings to botch the opening lines of the songs. Everybody wins with that one.

Did you know that everything in world history has been converging on a little point known as right now? Today is the most important moment in world history. Everything hangs in the balance. If we fail, the world will be ripped to shreds, not unlike a pillow factory attacked by an army of rabbits.

This is the chosen generation. We’re part of a great turning point, a time of transition. We are responsible for the great reformation of today.

The moral fabric of society will unravel if we fail. Floods and famine will destroy the earth. Life as we know it will cease to be (as in, we won’t be able to go shopping on the weekends and watch TV for thirty hours each week).

And then again, maybe not.

The clichés, alarmist rants, and calls to action shared above are common statements we run into on a daily basis. I’ve heard them from people coming from a variety of perspectives. They may advocate different views and priorities, but they all share a common belief that “now” is the most important time.

Maybe there are some urgent needs that we face today, but we don’t know when God is returning to set things right and we lack the insight to judge whether today is truly the most urgent or important point in world history. Most of the above statements are some kind of rhetoric aimed at stirring up the masses to take action. The sources of these statements are not necessarily the most detached, unbiased observers. That prompts me to ask a tough but important question…

Read the rest of this entry »

I know I have a problem when I’m walking for less than 10 minutes from the café to my house, and I’m trying to remember to tweet something clever.

I know I’m a little unbalanced when Facebook has quadruple the visits of my invoice program.

When I’ve checked my inbox more times than I can count in a three hour span, I know that an intervention is needed.

Nagging questions come to mind: Am I too focused on creating an image for myself? Am I consumed with the minutiae of my day? Am I obsessed with self-promotion? Am I simply contributing to the noise and clutter of the world?

Over Christmas vacation, I kept a very low profile on my trinity of distraction. I left e-mails unanswered. I avoided Twitter like the plague. I even stopped myself from scanning Facebook for distractions.

Instead, I tried to focus on single activities such as writing a little, reading a book, or jotting down ideas in a notebook. Here are a few things I learned in the process:

Twitter Can Bring Out the Worst in Us

At its best, Twitter is a really efficient and low pressure way to communicate information with a broad group of people. At its worst, Twitter is a soul-sucking cesspool of self-obsessed minutiae where I scream out, “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!”

I started to think about what I wanted to tweet and what I saw others tweeting. At a certain point I grew weary of it. Twitter is a “what have you done for me lately” kind of service. It can be a grueling taskmaster that fragments ideas and chews up huge chunks of time with little to show in return—that is, if used for the purpose of distraction.

The Immediacy of Communication Enslaves Us

While reading a book or jotting ideas in my journal, I often thought that it would be nice to know if I had any e-mails in my inbox. I mean, my agent could have sent an e-mail saying that a big time publisher wants to pick up my next book!

Unfortunately, I can’t use that excuse 30 times a day, or however often I want to check my e-mail. OK, I try to do that. Saying no to myself is hard. The immediacy of our communication can be extremely convenient and also maddening. I can do something now, and putting it off until later feels like I’m doing something wrong.

What could possibly go wrong if I put off checking my e-mail of Facebook until later tonight? I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out. I heard a story once about a musician who missed a pretty sweet gig in Europe because he hadn’t check his e-mail first thing in the morning, and now I live my life tethered to the internet, fearing that I’ll miss… something.

When everything is important, we lose balance and perspective, treating everything as essential. This weakens us to the point that we can’t give our best energies to the most important things.

We All Grow Weary

My calling in life is to write. It drives me every day. If I can string together a few thousand words in a day, I go to bed feeling like I’ve accomplished what I’m put on earth to do—even if it all gets scrapped the next day.

Despite my love for writing, I needed a break from my blog and my books. I still jotted down ideas and even figured out my April Fools prank while on vacation, but as to my regular writing schedule, I needed to step back from it for a few weeks.

If my blog was allowed to continue making demands of me and my time, I would have wearied of it and treated it like a chore and not a joy.

The thing about seasons of rest is that we often don’t realize we need them until we immerse ourselves in the peace of silence and stillness. I have learned to recognize when my mind is spinning too fast for its own good, but I can only detect that if I stop long enough to diagnose what’s going on.

We take seasons of rest on faith, trusting that we need them and that God can work on us if we stop long enough to ask for his wisdom and healing.

I have this persona that I adopt on vacation that my wife and I call, “The Clam.” If you’re not familiar with clams, they don’t do a whole lot. They mainly sit around and say nothing. That describes both my ambition and my “action” during vacation.

I have a restless personality. I always like to have something going on. My journal is full of ideas. If some people don’t know what to write, my problem is picking which idea to pursue.

I push myself hard until the inevitable crash, which often happens during vacation—hence, the clam.

Clams don’t make for good company. You wouldn’t want a clam as a friend or a spouse. They just sit around and take up space. My new goal of late is to prevent myself from a severe case of the clams. My remedy? A season of rest.

Defining Rest

I was praying about rest in church yesterday, and I sensed that rest for a writer means not forcing myself to think hard about what I want to write. In other words, if an idea hits and I jot down a few pages about it, that’s easy and even enjoyable for me. However, work is something like this: telling myself, “OK, you’ve got to write something now, start brainstorming, outlining, and writing in order to hit a word count of 600 words.”

We leave tomorrow for a trip out east to visit family throughout Maine, Vermont, and Philadelphia. It’s going to be busy with all of the family we need to see, and as I thought about a season of rest, I decided that it was time to give this blog a rest for a few weeks. However, rest doesn’t mean that I’ll write nothing. It only means that I’ll be posting more irregularly and only when the “Spirit moves.”

Irregularity is a big “no, no” in the world of blogging. You’re supposed to schedule guest posts or set up a schedule of blog posts. As much as I love the idea of doubling my work load before vacation, I have a few reasons for making a full stop season of rest, despite the challenges it creates:

Rest Means the Discipline of Forcing Myself to Stop

There is a battle for control going on. Am I creating a cycle of activity that ends up crushing me? Rest takes me out of that cycle and lets my mind clear for a season.

Rest Means Facing Who I Am

Each day I face the tension of straining to cultivate a quiet inner Spirit that is sensitive to God, while staying on task and pursuing life-giving leisure activities. Once I remove work from the equation, I have a surplus of time to face who I am and what God wants to do with me.

Rest Means Risking the Loss of Momentum

The risk of rest is that I could lose momentum in my projects, readers of my blog, and focus. It will most likely be hard to jump back into the swing of things and to reassert my work schedule and rhythm.

Having said all of that, here are some benefits that I see coming from a season of rest:

Rest Reminds Us That We Have a Choice

When I am removed from the cycle of activity, I can reevaluate my choices. I can see myself in different circumstances and then identify the sources of stress. I can even cultivate new habits that will help my lead a more balanced life when I get back to work.

Rest Reminds Us That We Aren’t Defined by What We Do

Bank accounts and praise from colleagues are important, but rest removes me from those good things that I can raise to unreasonable heights of importance. I’m not defined by what I do each day, but by what God is able to do in and through me.

Rest Reminds Us That a Step Back Can Be a Step Forward

Our culture prioritizes progress, accumulation, and growth. Rest is resistance to these idols—or rest-istance perhaps. When we pull ourselves out of the race, we may be terrified by the unknown. Can rest really bring benefit?

When I have successfully stopped myself, I have found that I often return to my work with renewed focus and energy. Work can be a wonderful blessing, but when allowed to grow too large for us, we’ll find that it can become self-defeating.

There’s a certain inevitability that we all face with rest. We will all need to rest at some point. The difference will be whether we choose to stop or whether we shut down involuntarily, turning into clams that are unable to handle even the simplest interactions.

Choosing rest while we can will save us from the worst of “the clams” and ensure that there’s something left of us for our loved ones during holidays and vacations.

Last night something began to flicker in my mind. Ideas assembled and took shape. Order emerged out of chaos, and I knew what I had to do.

Turning down the heat and yanking the chain on my desk lamp, I closed every window on my computer save for Word, and I started to write late into the night. Well, I stopped sometime around midnight, but that’s mighty late for someone who aims to be in bed by 9:30 most nights.

I had forgotten what it’s like to be completely immersed in my writing. I’d hit a burst of inspiration that I’ve been missing for many months. In fact, I hadn’t felt that good in four years.

It was like I rediscovered a part of myself.

Last night reminded me why I love the chaotic, uncertain, freewheeling life of writing. I really needed that moment of excitement and pure joy where the words flowed onto the page. Never mind the editorial bloodbath that awaits them. Such is the fate of all first drafts.

I don’t care what becomes of those words. I only care that I was able to string them together with such clarity of mind and ease.

How easily we lose sight of our first loves. There are so many things that can eat up our time. So many distractions can help us forget.

I’ve been fighting to regain my writing time, jumping on any opportunity to ride a wave of inspiration. The wave that hit last night carried me quite far—so far that I’ve been reminded why I love writing so much.

My one regret is that I didn’t ask myself sooner: “What do you love and what is keeping you from it?”

In case you’re wondering, I always turn down the heat when I write late at night so that I only stay up if I still have good ideas. It’s too tempting to stay up late on Facebook or ESPN, so crank down the heat, keep my fingers moving, and go to bed with my mind empty and my body shivering.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I’ve prayed for less of a good thing. Can I even count one time I’ve ever prayed such a prayer? Who knows?

All I know is that more of a good thing is always better. It’s conventional wisdom that growth = health. So when you pray, pray for more. Pray for more people to get saved, more power, more love, more Holy Spirit, more peace, more protection, more… provision (A.K.A. money).

Ah, the money prayer, how many times have I recited you?

All of the requests listed above are good things, but there’s a problem when we always ask for more. We can become fragmented and frantic, checking to see if those prayers have been answered, always looking for growth, always assuming that we don’t have enough.

Sometimes we need to just say thank you. And sometimes we need God to yank things out of our hands.

Over the past few months I’ve been busy with some extra projects that are over and above my typical workload. As a freelance writer, I always welcome more work. You never turn down a legit job that pays well. That meant I had to work some late nights just to keep up with the extra work.

I finally hit a point a few weeks ago where I realized my priorities have been out of balance.  I’d failed to invest in some key projects and writing communities that mattered the most to me. The more urgent, higher paying work had crowded out some key parts of my writing ministry.

It was as if Ann Voskamp had broken into my house, shoved a bullhorn up to my ear, and shouted, “Life is NOT AN EMERGENCY!”

So, I cried out to God for help—with my problems, not Ann Voskamp.

When I pray, I try to avoid suggested solutions. I want to let God do as he pleases so I can just follow along in my place as a disciple. However, that didn’t stop me from having expectations…

I expected that God would give me amazing clarity and focus so that I could get a super-human amount of work done.

I expected him to help me do more, to give me more abilities, to help me continue to increase my work.

I expected more.

Instead, God’s provision was less. One of my regular clients wrote to say he won’t need anything for a month or two. A few weeks ago, I would have seen that as a tragedy. Now, I can see that as God’s provision. I’ve had such peace since reading that e-mail.

God has given me less. He placed a desire in my heart to use my writing as a ministry, and that desire is what began to kick and scream against my pace and priorities. I needed God’s intervention. I never would have chosen this solution, but when I read that e-mail from my client, I knew that it was part of God’s plan. I knew my prayer had been answered.

God has given me less, and I’m so grateful for it.

Do you ever feel like you’re always plugged in? It’s like sometimes my life is so tied to the internet that I can’t escape it.

I work through the internet. I keep in touch with friends through the internet. I watch hockey through the internet.

The hard part is that even my leisure can begin to merge with my work, and if I’m misbehaving, my work can be slowed by my leisure. In order to make the most of my time in either category, I need to be fully present with one or the other.

And yet more and more, I find myself fighting against blurring lines. Time leaks away from work, or work tries to invade my quiet Sunday afternoons.

A gift I’ve received from God lately has been permission to fully rest. When I’m relaxing on an evening or weekend, I have permission to just focus on a full period of hockey without checking my e-mail—unplugging from my work. If I’m taking a walk, the phone stays turned off. If I’m eating dinner on the porch, the computer, Nook, and phone stay inside while I watch the sunset swirl with reds, oranges, and purples.

I keep hearing this whisper over and over again to be fully present where I’m at. This is so different from my frantic, multi-tasking tendencies, that I can only say it is something that God is impressing on me.

This week has been particularly busy. I’m going to the Indianapolis Christian Writing Conference on Friday, and I picked up some extra projects. I’ve worked some long days. I could have worked even longer days.

Despite my overwhelming to-do list, last night I sensed that I needed to eat dinner on the porch and spend a little time in the living room with the rabbits while a hockey game played in the background. These aren’t things that I do naturally. My wife is often shocked to see me sitting on the couch, just relaxing.

These short, simple pleasures were gifts. I would never give myself permission to stop. I can always find another project, another e-mail, and another chore.

God’s gift to me has been rest—permission to unplug and enjoy an evening at home. Rest is just as available and unlimited as my projects and work, but I need to choose to receive it.

Read more posts about God’s gifts today at Faith Barista: The Book that Would Not Go Away

These two men were responsible. They had business to take care of, and they were not idle in addressing it. One was fixing his nets along the shore of Galilee, the other had to take care of his father’s burial.

Culturally speaking, the man tasked with burying his father was especially living in careful observance of the law. He was in the right place, doing what mattered.

The difference between the two men came when Jesus called, saying, “Follow me.” This wasn’t something that could be delayed. Jesus literally wanted them to drop what they were doing and to reorient their lives around him.

One man knew when to stop, dropping the lower priorities for the person who mattered most.

The other man asked for time so that he could wrap up his obligations and still follow Jesus.

Learning how to stop is difficult, especially when you think you’re doing everything right. Other priorities can interfere when the most important call comes to us.

Can we stop?

Are we cultivating practices that help us stop daily to hear God’s voice?

Are we ready to stop and respond when the call comes?