“Each of us is a mixture of fact and fiction, a weaving of tales in our real bodies.”

Imagination is not an idle pastime, but real work I believe. What we know about and what is true about ourselves is not “just the facts.” The truth of the line from a pretty weird novel, Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel that begins this post comes to my mind often.

That is what I am, a mixture and that is messy. That is why it is so hard to pay attention to my life sometimes. I don’t always know “what” to pay attention to really. For the past few days I have been working with focus in my professional roles. I realized this morning that, that has been a gift. The work is difficult but not overwhelming. Instead of just thinking about what I need to do, I am actually getting words down on the page (the job at hand). When, I get stuck I do something to help myself like walking the dog, centering prayer, cleaning something small or even re-imagining my work in different ways—that has been productive. Imagining leads me to actions that are true.

Someone told me today that God whispers.  She was right.  I even listen sometimes, but don’t always follow through.  Have you ever had an impression or maybe a fleeting idea that you knew deep inside was right? Maybe that is how God whispers with glimmers of possibility.  Unfortunately, when that happens, I think my way out of it.

Oh, its too late now to call _____.  

I don’t really have time today, I have to get _____ finished.

That will never work because…. (and I insert all the reasons here).

What would they think of me if I did that?

But today I paid attention. I heard the whispers in the kitchen when I was chopping vegetables. So, right then, before too much thinking went on,  I called my friend Sam who was expecting medical news a couple of days ago. The conversation was long, I listened, and realized what a gift she has that I was able to affirm.

Earlier in the morning, I had already planned to visit Ella, another friend, who is sometimes challenged to remember who I am. After the unexpected long phone conversation with Sam I started to think that it was too late in the day to go. What you think isn’t necessarily true and this was one of those times– so I went.  She showed me around her apartment, one large room, as if I’d never been there before. She acknowledged through her smiles and hugs, though, what she cannot always summon from her failing memory.  That was a joy to experience.

I didn’t do any of the professional work that has been pressing on me…I still feel a twinge of worry about that but I know for certain that it will be there in the morning waiting patiently.  And I will show up in the morning too, refreshed and ready.

Maybe you, but not me, would argue that words are not important here, helping or supporting. Supporting seems to be truer or maybe more equitable than helping. To me, supporting means I am honoring the other person. In my role as a teacher I want to be supportive more than helpful. I don’t want to be the knowledge bearer; we all learn and teach each other in relationship.

In an online class I taught a few years ago, a young woman struggled to remember to post her contribution to the class discussion each week. Her midterm project (that was work that progressed toward a final paper) reflected her lack of engagement. She asked to meet with me about two weeks before the end of the term. She didn’t blame circumstances for her failures. She fully accepted her lot but wanted to do the work she had neglected and fully engage in the inquiry that would result in the final project. And she did. She revisited those “lost” weeks when she didn’t show up in the discussion online and created her own discussion—even though I had made it clear that it wouldn’t “count” for her grade since she wasn’t part of the original time sensitive encounter with others in our class.

She took the suggestions I made on her midterm and went beyond what was required. Her final paper was exemplary. I did not expect such insights, given the circumstances I witnessed. Given another opportunity and some constructive feedback, she rose above the expected. I did very little “helping”. In fact, my efforts maintained my professional role and allowed possibilities. Going alongside, celebrates both our efforts.

The change from helping to supporting, it seems to me, is about intention. And it is about attention. Attention to another person. To see that person as God sees us, not in “need of help” even though we surely do, but to see us in the light of what is possible.

My professional work in the coming week seems especially lonely. This past week I was reminded of being attentive to other people, their gifts, their struggles, and the ways our lives depend upon and draw from one another. Helping, supporting, and being a catalyst are a few of the ways I enact being attentive to others. As I try to more honorably love others and myself, I ponder what these words mean for me. Because…when I am self-conscious and sometimes afraid to be myself that robs me of joy.

Helping is relatively easy for me to do, but not always honorable. Just out of college, a young twenty something; I began dating a guy I met at church—honest. I had recently moved 1000 miles from home for an internship. My monthly salary was the same amount as my monthly rent on a one-room efficiency apartment. Needless to say, I lived frugally.

This guy, Jim, was from a wealthy and prominent family in my new town. We had only been dating a few weeks when his parents were having a party for their anniversary—I think 25^th, a grand affair. I donned a passable dress I had made myself and accompanied Jim to his parent’s home. After a short time greeting his parents and a few guests, I quickly found my niche. I saw a need—helping the “help” in the kitchen—a few women who were washing all the dishes by hand. Most of the evening that is where I was, washing dishes, refilling trays, whatever was helpful to keep the party going.

At the end of the evening, before Jim took me home, we said goodbye to his parents. His mother gushed, “What a gift you have given us!”

I was a bit confused; she continued saying something about my hard work behind the scenes for the success of the day. I did feel honored that she had noticed and appreciated my efforts, but I never thought of what I did as a gift. Honestly, I felt self-conscious and out of place as soon as I arrived. Helping in the kitchen gave me purpose and kept me from having to talk to people I didn’t know. Not very noble. Helping, as I did on this occasion, is often more about me than the object- unfortunately a word that fits—of the action.

For me, helping is sometimes more about doing something to feel useful, than about building community. Sometimes helping means doing something that someone could easily do for themselves but I want to feel needed. Often, helping gives me control of the situation and that is not helpful. To be continued…

It’s simple, right? If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.

For a couple of days I’ve been working on a blog post that took on a different life. The writing became an achievement, the words working too hard  to say something that someone would want to read. I was striving for those kinds of words I read in other people’s writing that are healing, illuminating, and just beautiful so that they cause me to see the presence of God in the world anew. The reason I began to write this blog was to focus on what is joyful—not to gloss over what is difficult—but to see more wholly.

So today I will pay attention to what is worthy of praise, the grace that breaks into my discontent, my fears and uncertainties. About a month ago I received reviews on an article I’d submitted to an academic journal. Reading reviewers comments is always challenging and of course I focused on the overwhelmingness of the task they put before me.  I had six months, the first editor said, to complete the revisions and resubmit. No need to fret… until last week, when I got another email asking if I could have at least a draft of the revised article in 3-4 weeks. I said sure.

As I began the work, I lost my sense of what was possible. I held too tightly to my own part, what I can do on my own. Even in my failure to lean on God’s provision I continued to write my meditative “morning pages” and read devotionally. Feeling overwhelmed and inadequate, the words “bird by bird” evoking Anne Lamotts’ book by the same title, came up in my morning pages reminding me that I only have to work on one tiny part at a time. It is my choice to either focus on the impossibilities and what if’s instead of actually doing something.

I’m also not alone. Cease striving, and know that I am God. Before me, God’s grace provided this prayer from Martin Marty’s book, When True Simplicity is Gained: Finding spiritual clarity in a complex world.

Be near to me so that I may not feel the heaviness of labor, nor sink under adversity. St. Gertrude

 The title of the reading for the day was “focus”.  The photograph that anchored the reading was a simple cupola against a black background that made the off-centeredness starkly apparent- an apt metaphor for my misaligned focus as well.

I’m struggling today with the idea that I firmly believed yesterday that Joy is grace.

I do know that it is the truth. For several months I’ve been plodding along with Brother Lawrence as I read The Practice of the Presence of God and attempting to think less about the outcomes of what I do and to do the work that is before me that day. It is summer, after all, so some days, work might be a relative term. Even though I try not to, though, I do find ways to let outcomes sneak in. Admiring my kitchen floor that I finally cleaned, counting the number of days I’ve faithfully written my “morning pages”, viewing emails that report that someone downloaded an article or viewing how many blog views I had today. Achievement is insidiously measured and does provide a momentary feeling of accomplishment. There’s nothing inherently wrong here —I’m sure I’m normal. But do I want to linger here, that is the question. Because tomorrow my kitchen floor will be dirty again and I will write my morning pages in a hurry and I have the daunting task of major revision of a new article and you see where this is heading, My achievements are never enough.

More than once during the last 24 hours I have encountered Anne Lamott’s wisdom:

“I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

I might co-op her wisdom to say the same thing about joy, the kind of joy that Jesus talks about in John 15: As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

Joy does not come from focusing on my achievements but on the One who completes my efforts that are never finished or enough on their own. The grace of joy is that I am enough.

“I wish I gotten you up so you could have seen it, the firestorm!”

I was already asleep that night when Mitch let the dog out. The next morning he added, “The lightening bug show in our backyard was incredible. I can’t even tell you what it was like.”

Okay, I grew up in the Midwest. I’ve seen lots of firefly filled nights in my yards. I remember when I lived in Texas and drove back to visit my family in Indiana. I felt like I was at home when the moon was bright and firefly lights peppered the stand of corn for miles down the road.

My backyard now isn’t typical for city living. A dense stand of evergreen bushes, over 10 feet high block the city park lot next door. On the other side of the yard my neighbors’ house lies a mere 2 feet from the property line; I can watch TV in their family room from my bedroom window. A row of leafy lilac bushes and a garden shed frames the yard on that side and blocks the TV’s glow.

In the back of the yard, it’s dark, I mean really dark. The couple’s yard behind mine is densely overgrown. It hasn’t been mowed in the four years I have lived here. I can barely make out the shadow of our dog roaming, as he sometimes does, through the grasses and weeds that tower over his almost 80 pound frame. Honeysuckle winds it’s way over and around other bushes shielding any view of the houses beyond even in the daylight.

When I let the dog out last night, I witnessed the firestorm. In my backyard the dark is darker at night. The light of the fireflies’ burst like sparklers you stare into on a family fourth of July except that the light didn’t linger in my eyes. The fireflies’ luminescence pierced that dark only for a moment, not penetrating the darkness, but showing up to awe. The only thing I had to do was to pay attention and open the door enough so the dog could get out and I could too.

Joy is grace, a gift like the firestorm, not an achievement.

Emilie Griffin writes that prayer is resting in God’s provision.

“God wants to draw us in. He wants us to know his affection. Authentic prayer begins when we turn ourselves over to the grace of God. It is not a prayer of making requests, of trying to get things done or figured out. This kind of ‘resting in God’ is not a matter of doing, but of undoing. Resting in the love of the Spirit, we are sustained by the power of the living God.”

During the past two years, I completed my dissertation and applied for many jobs. My prayers have been filled with searching for God’s direction in a world (academia) that I perceived is not so attuned to divine leadership. I have been asking but it seems like more doors are closing than opening. In other words, I’ve done a lot of what one writer of Psalms calls striving. Psalms 46:10 (NASV) says, “Cease striving and know that I am God.” The words “cease striving” in Hebrew mean to let hang down; to be relaxed, slackened, especially the hands.

During the past two months, I have literally tried to rest in God’s provision by taking my “hands off” applying for jobs and imagining what our life might be like in those places. Conflating again my mind and body, I rest on my back at yoga (again) just lying there in the presence of God. Rising up, I have a renewed sense that Mitch, my husband, has incredible gifts that are being honed to lead him in a new direction. Our agreement was that after I finished my Ph.D. I would take the lead in finding a job and he would figure out what to do wherever that might be. Those were my plans, our plans. Last week I again heard, out loud, the words of my beloved Frederick Buechner in his piece about healing, “If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he’s giving you something else.”

Joy is resting in God’s provision.

Yoga is a relatively new practice for me. During Lent this year, I decided to take up, instead of give up, something that would be a little risky and scary with long-term benefits. When I go to the place where I have practiced since February, there is no talking. The few lights are low and candle-like against the darkly painted walls and black ceiling. I lie in stillness, opening to God’s presence physically as I settle on the mat with my heart at the highest point and mindfully as I meditate on a word or phrase that holds my intention in worship for that day. As I centered my mind to begin a “hot” yoga class yesterday, some of that old fear surfaced so the “meditative thoughts” were a bit different. “I can do this—I can endure this—God has given me an incredible body and mind and spirit.” I practice yoga regularly but not in a room with this high heat and humidity. So it is not only the practice, the actual doing that is challenging for me, but the salty sweat burning my eyes and running down my body that forces me to concentrate not on my outward circumstances but inwardly. I pay attention to my movement and breath and center my mind sometimes on a spot on the wall to make it.

That moment before class transformed my thinking to practically disrupt the dichotomy of mind/body and physical/intellectual work that I often struggle with. I enjoy thinking deeply about words and the world, part of my professional life as an academic, but the kind of thinking that often seems consciously selfish to me. The joy of that moment in yoga was the realization that my determination that merges my thinking, feeling and doing self was good. God made me so that my mind that I let roam and second-guess relentlessly can actually work in connection with my body and spirit to focus on good. My mindful concentration, determination, and physical body work together in God’s creative presence. God did wonderfully made my mind— my mind that is attentive and thankful for strength of mind and body.

Attentiveness.  I have thought a lot lately about the importance of this practice. My noticing the “now” keeps me attentive to this moment so that my mind doesn’t wander; fantasizing about how wonderful and productive my life could or should be or engaging in imaginary conversations that would have or will in the future explicate my best intentions for me in the world. In other words, paying attention changes my perspective.

Joy is like that. You have to pay attention. Joy is about perspective. Frederick Buechner reminds us “happiness turns up more or less where you’d expect it to—a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation. Joy, on the other hand, is as notoriously unpredictable as the one who bequeaths it.” For me, one key to joy is another kind of attentiveness—the kind that comes when I pay attention to what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, anything worthy of praise. So that is my intention for a new blog, a space to record sightings, even those only in my mind.