Present Day Haunting

Traditionally haunting is associated with the lingering ghosts of those who die with unfinished business. Somewhat less fantastically, I find myself haunted by my own unfinished business.
Projects, waiting for attention and hidden unobtrusively at the bottom of the pile, subtly apply an unrelenting pressure like so many bricks balanced precariously on my shoulder.
The relief, of course, comes through action. But such a straightforward, simple principle naively overlooks the dominant reality of the mysterious and complex recesses of my psyche where few dare to tread and comprehension consistently defies all.
I suppose it comes down to how badly I want the haunting to end. Which is worse? Sitting down to the task or carrying the bricks? Yes, many choices for me come down to deciding between negatives, which, interestingly enough, may be an important clue for facilitating change. What am I completing the project for? What is the positive, construction outcome that will be the fruit of the follow through? More than the reduction of the haunting, I may derive action-propelling motivation from the prospect of the completed business.

Practicing Hope

The morning chill threatens to extinguish the fire stoked back to life so recently. Flames are as fragile as they are powerful. A night's sleep can provide needed rest for renewed vigor or a loss of momentum and an opening for fear to creep back in.
It is no small thing that our stories are bounded on all sides by hope. Challenges, difficulties, obstacles, and complexities are significant realities with which life in this broken world confronts us. Hope is a flame fanner. A fire stoker.
We don't need to avoid or fight all that comes against us as much as we need to nurture and practice hope.

Get Out There

It feels good to put myself out there where the rubber meets the road. Act on the ideas I've been developing for so many years. Test them in the crucible of other peoples' realities. As an outcome of working with me, will people make more and better decisions? Experience a greater sense of peace about the decisions they do make? Come out of hiding and give the gift of themselves to the world? We will see. The initial feedback is good. The only way to find out is to put myself out there.

Grieving the Compliments

Later this morning my youngest will proudly graduate from elementary school. This year the milestone is not only hers, but mine as well. Ending my involvement in the elementary school will be a big transition for me. No more board meetings, search committees or messy school politics. I'll miss them. More significantly though in this particular season, it's one of the few remaining communities of which I am a part where my contribution is openly valued and appreciated.
Fortunately, I'm not back to the situation a couple of years ago of having only myself to encourage myself about myself. Not to minimize the importance of believing in oneself and living out of a confidence grounded from deep within. And, at the other end of the spectrum, I definitely could never return to the dependent days early in my career when I sought my professional validation almost entirely from the feedback of others.
But there's still nothing quite like a genuine, "Thank you", "You're amazing", "We couldn't have done it without you", or "You make it look effortless."
It's a transition. I'll miss the collaboration and comaradarie. Yes, and today I'm grieving the loss of compliments. But in the bigger picture it's onto the next contribution and the richness of partnering with whoever those people will be.

Confronting Reality

I find that holding certain assumptions can result in avoiding certain realities. The assumptions may be reasonable, but when the outcome is the denial or defiance of developing facts on the ground then those assumptions need to be questioned.
How and when to invest money in the building of my consulting practice is just such a quagmire for me. I assume the investment must decrease the longer it takes to become financially self-sustaining. Time being unquestioned negative feedback about my prospects.
But if the intial estimate of time required was an incorrect assumption, then to interpret what by nature may be a long process negatively is an enormous error. I need to be learning and adjusting as I go. The sooner I learn something, the sooner I can adjust.
Successful living and working requires the willingness to confront reality early and often, think through the implications and make adjustments accordingly. Am I listening?

Tamper Proof

A lot of people out there defending tamper-proof world views. Striving to define reality correctly rather than navigate it responsibly. It is the difference between getting it right versus getting it alive. Do we need to be photographers who capture everything in the scene as accurately as possible in order to understand how to best live in that scene? Or do we need to become the co-authors of an ever-emerging, never-stationary, always-embodied experience which becomes real only as we make each choice along the way?
Such choices do not take place in a vacuum. The choices of those who have gone before provide valuable resources from which we can develop compasses, maps, directional and warning signs. It is when we step away from our own culpability in the development of the human story, that those compasses and maps become tamper-proof world views. Instead of insightful clues helping us craft a more meaningful future, they become blinding manuals that reduce the future to awkward encores of the past.
As I have said on other occasions, I find myself willing to risk getting it wrong in order to get it more alive.

Absence versus Presence

While certainly the absence of disease and dysfunction, what is health the presence of? We are much better at defining what many things are not rather than what they are. We know in excruciating detail what morality is the absence of, but can we say much about what it is the presence of? What about peace? Same problem. Justice? Ethics? Marriage? Life?
We trudge through life with much to avoid and a myriad of voices asserting what we need to prevent. But can we articulate what we are trying to create? Just because I am moving away from something negative does not mean I am moving toward something positive. I'm not hearing many positive, constructive, alternative visions of life being placed on the table for consideration. Seems like a treasure trove of opportunity.

Called by God

Marcus Goodyear takes up one of the passions nearest and dearest to my heart in Hearing the Call this morning. What puzzles me is why, when 99.9% of all those who have declared allegiance to Jesus through the centuries have lived out their discipleship and mission in the context of "secular" strivings, the association of "call" with professional ministry persists.

Talking Less, Living More

It comes down to choices. Making a decision and living the decision.
Research, reflection, and discussion are valuable only insofar as they inform an eventual enacted choice.
Sometimes it seems that people are content to talk and think. It's all noise to me these days. In fact, I'd rather engage with a person who acted without thinking before anyone who thinks without acting.
I'm a recovering thinker myself. Scary the dimensions and depths into which my mind delightedly loiters. The question is whether or not all the processing is leading to richer, fuller, sounder, more loving living. At issue is not processing less, but choosing more.
Embracing change, experimenting with new behaviors, getting involved with others, giving form to faithfulness. Turning creeds into cups of cold water, turning dreams into plans of action, turning personal values into personal change, turning general expectations into specific requests. There's only one command. It involves making a decision to do something.

Repertoire of Frames

Wealth and poverty bind the human spirit. It need not be so. Both in their stark reality-bending consequences for those who cope at the edges, and as insidious frames of reference in which those of us who are neither rich nor poor are oddly content to limit ourselves.
I'm thinking about myself—as usual—and not the world's financially destitute. Wondering how I manage to keep slipping into such a limiting, constricting poverty mentality as I paradoxically explore new frontiers of personal and professional contribution.
So many crucial investments placed out of reach by my own zero-sum mindset. I perceive an absence of options simply because I cannot find a rainforest in the desert. But the desert is infinitely rich and diverse once freed form the rainforest frame of reference.
I need a wider repertoire of frames.

Back in the Saddle

It feels like I've been ignoring a close friend. Dwelling in this special, yet unusual space, letting words spill from a full heart into an formless text field. Was I crazy to allow such a treasure to be crowded out?!
I watch the clock even as I strive to write freely. My first appointment of the day crowding my psyche already.
So be it. Better to set down a few words of pent up desire, than to postpone yet again, waiting for a more luxurious moment to emerge. Not every path in the forest leads to a spacious clearing.

Williamson Inspiration

This piece moves me. I had to pass it on.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous.
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us -- it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

This is My Prayer

I reach out beyond the scarred edges of my own periphery
Fragments of a soul assaulted by unseen powers
Touching down occasionally
But always in uncharted territory, unfamiliar terrain.

Morning prayers stain my cheeks
Gratitude and fear tug along overlapping trajectories
But it's all foreplay and no consummation
The sirens of wholeness are up to no good.

I reach out in hope that someone will engage
Draw me into life, protect me from disintegration
Train me in readiness, embolden me to step forward
Break out in a wide smile when I show up each day
Anoint and bless, sustain and vindicate
Enthusiastically commit to my well-being.

There you have it.