hello, old friend

I studied in Edinburgh, Scotland in college, during a time of life when my ethic could best be articulated as, Try Everything. Haggis, check. Scotch, check. Backpacking everywhere, check. Driving a car on as many roundabouts as possible, check. From Loch Ness to the Lake District to Brussels to the Ring of Kerry, if anyone offered me a spot, I grabbed my bag and jumped on a train.  It came naturally, then, to agree to join the Hillwalking club at the University of Edinburgh. I like hills. I like walking. I hoped to like the Highlands, which was the location of our first weekend hillwalking adventure. I signed up.

Needless to say, I was taken aback when they handed out crampons and ice picks before we left our mountain lodge for our first walk. 7 hours, a white-out blizzard and some mild frost bite later, I realized that what they meant by “hillwalking” was “ice climbing.” I wanted to walk hills, and previously even wished the club had a more aggressive sounding name, like Mountain Hiking Club. I was ready to walk, to hike, to burn and sweat. But dear reader, I was not ready for ice picks, roping in, or blizzards.

As we ease into 2019 it is helpful to prepare ourselves for the year ahead. Anticipating celebrations of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., many of us will pledge our allegiance to living lives closely aligned with his ethic of life. We will say we are committed to reaching across lines of difference, to pursuing diverse perspectives, to resisting injustice and to responding with non-violent, non-defensive patience in the face of bigotry or hate. Our memory of his work makes it look so easy, and he seems so noble that we want to join him! Many of us fervently believe we must intentionally reach across lines of difference as we big bigger tables with more seats in our effort to build a just society. The work is necessary, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Before we pledge our allegiance, it is useful to understand what we are signing up for. When I say I love diversity and want to pursue it and promote it in my spheres of influence, I am saying I love realizing I have bias, that my privilege has blinded me, and that I am often hurtful and offensive. When I say I want more diversity I am asking to actively decrease my own power and control, to increase moments of discomfort and tension as I apologize more, seeing my deficits and bad assumptions. When I say I like diversity, I am saying I enjoy undermining my own perspective.

I assert these truths as a person who actively pursues diversity, and wants to live and work in environments where diverse perspectives influence culture and policy. As such, I am interested in closing the gap between what we claim to want and what we commit to do consistently. We often talk a good game when we begin a new year or role, but it proves difficult to maintain our commitments when they make life uncomfortable or inefficient. We think our fervent desire for certain values will translate into inhabiting those values within our communities; sadly, when relationships prove difficult or messy, we give up. Because we fail to realize the ramifications of the vision to which we say we are committed, we unwittingly reinforce our own sense of disillusionment and inertia. While some dreams are indeed difficult to reach, much of our failure comes not because the dream is unworthy or unattainable, but because we give up when our naïve expectations are not met.

How can we increase our capacity to stay invested even when the dream proves difficult? Passionate reformers have many suggestions, but allow me to offer one piece of advice: If you want to be a person whose stated values reflect authentic aspects of your practical self and habits, it is vital that you honestly reflect on the commitments you make. If I understand all the decentering adjustments and awkwardness a life committed to pursuing diverse perspectives will ask of me, I can embrace such uncomfortable requirements when they arise.

When we speak honestly about our hopes and resolutions, we anticipate the sacrifice such commitments demand, thus preparing us to stay in the game even when it requires Thor-levels of grit. Such honest anticipation offers us a level of comfort, of familiarity, when the task before us feels difficult. In my own commitment to elevating diverse perspectives, I am sometimes caught off guard by how inefficient such a habit is. Now, when a meeting is not moving as quickly as I had hoped because it takes time and painstaking clarity to hear from and honor many diverse perspectives and notions of “normal,” I have a greater capacity to sit in the tension I feel. When I sense the frustration that often comes from people in this type of setting, when I feel the trickle of sweat begin to form down my back, when I wonder if tempers or accusations might soon escalate, I think, “Hello old friend, I’ve been expecting you.”

If I really intend to be a person committed to making space for diverse perspectives at every level, I must expect this moment with every fiber of my being. Such a move offers us the chance to expect our old friends—tension, misunderstanding and inefficiency—rather than abandoning the task at hand when they show up. Anticipate these old friends, and don’t run for the exit when they appear! Instead, think, “Ah yes, and here you are, just as I thought you would be.” The remarkable gifts of collaborating across lines of difference to find the best solutions are worthy of our honest commitment to stay in the game.

I am a terrible hill walker, mostly because I gave up after that one measly blizzard terrified me. If I had anticipated the cold, the blinding snow, the burning fingertips, or the uncertainty of losing our bearings, then I might have smiled inside as the winds picked up. “Hi old friend, I’ve been expecting you. Let’s walk together as I figure out which step to take next.” Let us not talk falsely now, but instead pledge our allegiance to ideals only when we have gazed them full in the face, ready for all they might bring.

I want that! (No, I don't...)

Sunday mornings, for parents who also go to church, can be the worst. These mornings often involve grumpy children, yelling parents, and breaking speed limits. Exacerbating the delays, the tension, the meanness, is often a subtle despair that Sunday mornings should not be like this!! On the way to church, for goodness’ sakes!

And yet, things are often not like they ought to be. My family’s Sunday tradition involves getting donuts on the way to church. Yes, it unfortunately means having to leave earlier, but yes, it also means no breakfast making is required, so it’s a win overall. A few years ago my kids were on the trampoline, in pjs, wrestling, on Sunday morning. I, using my I’m-an-amazing-mom-gently-reminding-you-that-we-need-to-leave-soon voice, calmly yelled out the back door that if they wanted donuts we had to leave in ten. 

“We do! We do want donuts!”  Wrestle-mania continued.

Three minutes went by. Still wrestling.

“Hey savage ones! If you want donuts get in here and get dressed!”

“We do! We do want donuts!” More Bouncing. More wrestling.

Three more minutes went by.

“You have lost your everloving minds if you think I’m getting you donuts if we are not pulling out of this driveway in 3 minutes. “  Less gentle. Less amazing.

“We do! We do want donuts!”

“Really? Cause I can’t tell AT ALL. You say you want donuts but you are doing NONE OF THE THINGS REQUIRED to get donuts. At some point you have to move your bodies toward your closets if you actually, in fact, want donuts. You can’t just keep saying it while performing pile drivers on each other.”

And just like that, 4 little bodies tumbled out of the netting, onto the grass, up to their closets, and into the car. Donuts received, along with tardy slips from Jesus.

As we slide into 2019, there are lessons here for us. Like children—especially when it’s resolution time—we wholeheartedly claim to want things we have no intention of pursuing. The kids adamantly asserted their desire for pastries, but really they just wanted to play. Last week I suggested we do the self-reflection required to tell the truth in the new year. If we want to share meaningfully engaged lives with others, we must work to stop our subtle practice of defending ourselves, seeing only our best intentions, and revising history to make ourselves seem noble in every encounter.

Extending that thought, it is helpful to recognize that we often say we want certain realities in our lives without taking steps to realize them. Some examples are easy:

We say we want to be healthy, but we like Doritos more than running.

We say we want a good night’s sleep, but we drink too much or watch TV late into the night.

We say we want to be less busy, or to have less distracted kids, but we overcommit everyone we care for without blinking an eye.

We want to be people who read, but we pick up a book and then pick up an iphone…and then an hour disappears.

For the next few weeks I’d like to slow the tape for us, offering time to think about how we talk about the things we hope for.  Approaching middle age, it is easy to imagine one day looking back on a few decades of failed attainment. I never got the rhythm of rest and work down. I never got my kids to put their phones down. I never got the whole family dinner made at home thing to work. I never had the relationships I wanted with my neighbors.

My fear is that this narrative of failure is coming for all of us, and rather than understanding how we got here, we will revise history to make ourselves seem disciplined and intentional, while painting our dreams as idealistic or impossible. In other words, we will easily assume we all live in a circle of failure because it is too hard to be the people we hope to be. We tried, and repeated for years that we hoped for X. Since X never happened, it must be that X is impossible.

Our tendency to assume our unrealized hopes are impossible is another way we lie to ourselves. For instance, I talk and teach a LOT about neighboring. This is a clunky word, but it conveys the idea that we want to care well for the people we know. We literally want to be good neighbors to our neighbors. We want to be people and have people to call in a pinch. We want to share meals and watch babies and walk dogs. Nevertheless, for many of us, we say we want this while we actively chose our own agendas at the expense of those very relationships.

 For years, I said I wanted to be a good neighbor. However. When a knock came at an inopportune time, or when a never-ending chat in the yard made dinner late, or when being outside somehow beckoned a visit, or when a big party landed cars in my space or noise in my ears, I got annoyed. Without realizing it, I longed for friends-like-family neighbors while actively avoiding such relationships. The truth is that I only wanted amazing neighbors when I needed a favor, or on the one night a year when communal grilling and cocktailing seemed like all I ever wanted in life. I said I wanted to be a good neighbor while sort of hating all the things neighboring requires.

Alas, our capacity for hypocrisy is enormous. We will spend a few weeks here examining the dreams to which we aspire. For now, pay attention to the oft-repeated hopes of your frustrated soul and then examine the ways you approach or fail to approach those hopes. I suspect our problem is not that our dreams are out of reach, but that we fail to understand all that they require. Do not abuse the dream because you lack the stamina to realize it.

Happy New Year. Stop Lying!

A few years ago I decided to stop lying as a New Year’s resolution. This seemed like a reasonably positive development in my growth as a human. I would not have identified as a chronic misleader, or as a person with a strained relationship with the truth; I was certainly not pathological. My resolution was not an attempt to correct some deep character flaw unique to me. Rather, it felt like a worthy goal—and maybe a necessary one if I wanted to enjoy meaningful relationships—to raise my awareness of how I think and speak. I hoped to pay full attention to the way I characterized my actions in order to do the hard work of fully owning my junk.

 When I told others about my plan to stop lying, many laughed, intrigued, but some were appalled. They seemed to be mostly bothered by the implication I left floating out in the air: If I had resolved to stop lying then I was suggesting to others that I had a big problem with lying. They wanted to protect my reputation from me, and urged me to stop describing my resolution in a way that reflected so poorly on me.

In this way, they missed the point entirely. I resolved, in fact, to stop protecting my reputation. It is exactly the urge to protect ourselves that causes us to edit out our mistakes, misgivings, selfishness, and failings. It is our need to appear good that incentivizes us to not look too closely at our selves. I realized I had a tendency to revise my life in real time in a way that helped me seem awesome, with little regard for others. When I openly shared I planned to confront said tendency, some people lost respect for me, a fact that strikes me as absurd.

More than absurd though, such a reaction confirmed for me that most of us are wholly unwilling to even admit all the ways we subtly choose our own narratives over the narratives of others. Put another way, most of us are pretty good at critiquing others, but we often view ourselves sympathetically. The term myside bias sums this up nicely: we are more likely to truthfully and critically evaluate the arguments of others than we are our own. When it comes to self-reflection, it is difficult to see clearly. Indeed, we often even lie to ourselves, and we have to stop if we want to enjoy lasting community with others.

I have often shared my conviction that defensiveness destroys the possibility of meaningful relationships. In a very real way my commitment to stop lying was less about my own integrity and more about my desire to collaboratively create meaning with those around me. Driven by a need to defend ourselves, we cut off the possibility of discovering truth in community. On the other hand, what if we could learn a new way to be that makes self-defense an odd waste of time? What if we disciplined ourselves in such a way that overcame myside bias by actively inviting others to help us in the work of reflection?

Today, as 2019 begins, I’d like to offer self-honesty as a way to make room for meaningful relationships in our lives. For me, as we’ve just discussed, this work begins with a commitment to stop lying. It then quickly requires me to correct these mistakes, to confess and make amends every time I notice my need to revise history in a way that defends or favors me. My hope is that this personal work will impact our communities in transformative ways.

In the Holy Scriptures that record the life of Christ, there is a story of a man sent before the Messiah to prepare the way for the Lord. His job was to get people ready for the Savior who would bring Good News to poor and broken people. He did this in a few ways: First, he realized that the status quo was to live in a way that protected and defended the self at the expense of others. He instinctively knew this way of being in the world was incompatible with embracing the Messiah, so he rejected a lot of society and lived counter culturally. Next, he was crystal clear about his own weakness. He caused a stir everywhere he went, but he continually stated he was not the main event. He helped people realize they could be honest about their own disappointments and even failings because a Savior was coming to rescue them. Finally, and this is my favorite part, he loved to call out people so committed to their own lies about themselves that they could no longer see the impact of their selfishness on the people around them. He called them snakes sometimes, which feels a bit harsh. But he followed that up with this amazing suggestion: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.”

Long story short, this man, John, who lived his life trying to help people get ready for a Messiah who came to create a community of honest people who thrived in their need for each other, knew that self-honesty always led to apologizing and forgiveness, and that doing that kind of self-work always produced fruit. The fruit of honesty is the ability to belong to a community. To be a part of a large and messy we. To stop trying to be right, or well-defended, or exceptional, or deserving. The fruit of repentance is an ever-expanding sense of “us.”

To be a person who fully owns her mess miraculously makes me a person safe for the mess of others.

In 2019, let’s stop lying. Let’s stop revising history to make us look good. Let’s be people willing to see our flaws, to name them, to repent of them, and then to enjoy the fruit John talked about. To enjoy each other, because we have lifted our eyes away from our own reflection long enough to see the beauty in those around us. Happy New Year.