The "Ah-ha!" Moment

The "Ah-ha!" moment.

The "Light bulb going off" moment.

The "It just clicked" moment.

These break-through moments of clarity are what many of us hope to see happen in our work.  We want the epiphany to come so we can finally have our success.  Jealousy may even set in when we see others come into their moment with relative ease.

But please don't be fooled.

The "Ah-ha" moments are actually few and far-between in life (the rarity is what makes it such a marvelous spectical).  If you keep waiting for the "light bulb to go off" before you to get to work, your art will never be realized.  The "Ah-ha!" is only possible because of all the preceeding grunt work; that's what gives birth to its brilliance.

The visionary artist isn't someone who lives in a continual state of brilliant epiphany, they are the ones who are trudging through the darkness because they can't escape the gnawing, haunting feeling that 'something' lies ahead.

Your real work doesn't begin after the "Light switch went off", it began long before it; when the room was dark and it was impossible to see.

Filler For the Masses

If you are concerned with gaining a following your art will suffer.  Your over-concern with what you think others think they want will leave you second-guessing, cutting corners, and selling-out.

Continue on this path long enough and your art will cease being art and become cheap-filler, white-noise, bland and uninspiring.  You may get others to sign-up and sign-on, but each time you do it will be a death a thousand times over to the true artist within.

Self-Fitting Custom Frames

“Letting go of self is an essential precondition to real seeing”.

- Freeman Patterson

When we hold onto self, our seeing is blurred by all of our baggage, treasures, fears, joys, failures, victories, successes and insecurities.  Life is viewed as either an idealistic possibility that can be reached via self-achievement or as a dead-end road that is ever-constricting until it finds its abrupt end.

From a self-seeing perspective people and creation become just another commodity (objects to our own end; something for us to engulf) or the competitor (afraid they will detract or “take-away” from us we look to destroy).  In either case this vantage point is neither life-giving or creative.

Through our hyper-individualized perspective we lose sight of the big picture.  As a result, we become enthralled with our own achievement and wrecked by our own failure.  This myopic grid, in which we view the world around us, says “it is about you”; about your success, about your joy, about your failure, about your sadness.

But it is not.

It never has been and never will be.

To really see, the myopic grid, the glasses of “self” need to be taken off.  Yet here in lies the problem; we believe we can remove our own glasses.  This, however, is the old self talking. The truth is we cannot remove the self-fitting-custom-frames on our own.

They must be taken off for us.

Like Jesus’ interaction with the blind man, grace must meet us in the most unpredictable of ways and in the most peculiar of forms.  Saliva-made-mud is an unlikely ointment (the antithesis to seeing would be "mud in your eye").  It could be in the form of rejection, a diagnosis, or a heartbreak, but grace will come to you.

In being placed upon you, your likely reaction to the paradox will be, "how is this going to make me see?!?!?".  But the seeing doesn't happen when grace comes (as if our "seeing" could be forced or coerced).  Our seeing comes when, like the blind man, we respond to being sent.

"Having said this, he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes.  'Go,' he told him, 'wash in the Pool of Siloam' (this word means 'Sent').  So the man went and washed, and came home seeing."

May you, when grace comes, stop clinging to your old glasses wishing they could bring the fullness of life into focus.  May you in courage, "Go", "Wash" and be given a vision big enough to take in all you were meant to behold.

Proof-Reading

I trust the Author of Creation to pen the story of my life,

it's just that…

I need to look over his shoulder to make sure he is dotting his “i’s” and crossing his “t’s”.

He probably gets annoyed with my hovering,

however…

He doesn’t know how lucky he is to have me as a tutor.

The Disappointment Myth

I’m not sure what it was that opened you up to the world of disappointment.  Perhaps your first taste came when you realized Santa didn’t always bring everything you asked for.  Or maybe it was when you realized there was no man in a red suit and it was your parents all along.  Worse, maybe it came when your Santa-playing-parents told you they were splitting up.

Over the years I’m sure your disappointment has taken on all shapes and sizes.  Some disappointments are very small, like the pickles placed on your “plain” cheeseburger.  Others are incredibly large, like the hole in your heart when a loved one left you.

Regardless, each time disappointment breaks in we feel as though something has been taken from us; a robbery of the worst kind.  It steals our innocence, kidnaps our truest self, and holds for ransom our best assumptions of others and this world. 

Once we are introduced to the world of disappointment many of us never leave.  It becomes our permanent place of residence.  We live in a state of perpetual disappointment for fear that something might capture our heart and affection only to have it swiped from us yet again.  Our instincts for self-preservation kick in and we decide no longer to attach ourselves to hopes, desires, and aspirations.

After all, if dreams are just a lure for the snare of disappointment, then skepticism might just keep us alive.

But that is the myth.

Skepticism may feel like a blanket of security, but it only suffocates the potential for new life to breath.  The strange reality is that the only true way to move out of the world of disappointment is to put yourself back out there; to aspire and hope again, and…

to run the risk of further disappointment.

But, this is where the nature of disappointment is revealed.  Disappointment is not the enemy or adversary.  Instead, disappointment is a gauge…

a barometer of our hope.

Disappointment is the proof that we are a people who take risks; that we are a people who dream.  Proof that we are a people, who in a broken world, believe healing is possible.

May you never be lost in the world of disappointment again.  May your disappointment reveal to you and others that you are someone who believes in the possible.  And may your disappointment be engulfed by the courage to dream again.

Giving Up On the Game

“How are you, young man?  No doubt you’re expecting a lecture, but I promise that’s the last thing I intend.  Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely.  I can even understand and sympathize.  Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in your bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like and exercise in expedience and venality.  I understand that brand of despair better than I wish.  But it’s a different decision you’ve made that troubles me more deeply.

I mean your choice to give up golf.”                        - The Legend of Bagger Vance

Idealism, promise, expectation, hope.  These are all good things.  These elements do more than get us out of bed in the morning; they propel us into each day with the anticipation that something remarkable and worth while will take place.

We are a burst of energy in which no obstacle is too big.  Exhaustion never even gets a chance to yawn because we are awakened to a mission bigger than ourselves.  We embody the change we want to bring to the world and we believe we can do anything.

Then…

Challenge flanks us in a manner totally unexpected; completely blind-sided.  We see a side to the Opposition that we never saw before and we are left disarmed, disrobed, and disheartened.  The ideal, once fuel for life, offers nothing but the bitter taste of “what could have been”.

Cynicism encroaches as we question the work, the calling.  “What’s the point?”, “Why bother?” “Where’s the meaning?” become just a few of the rhetorical questions we feast on.  We come to a grinding halt.

We give up.  We are sidelined.  We are beaten.  Something within us dies.

And we are left with a choice:

Fade away until nothing is left.

or…

Keep playing.

May you, in your moment of defeat, your season of disillusionment, be filled with just enough promise to believe that giving up on the game is never an option.  And may you have the courage to keep showing up to the life no one else has been gifted to live.

Life of Discontentment

Our pursuit of meaning and purpose in this world has become big business. Go to any bookstore and spend time looking through the "Self-help" aisle and you will find books on how to achieve "Your Best Life Now", how to live a "Purpose Driven Life", and what it takes to get "From Good to Great".

Many of these books are written by pastors trying to encourage "ordinary people" to step out of whatever "rut" they may find themselves in and become "extraordinary human beings". While these books may have their place I'm wondering if they do more to perpetuate feelings of discontentment than actually help an individual live a full life in relationship to God within the parameters of their current reality.

We spend time frustrated that we want more out of life in such a way that it pushes us further and further into to future. "When my life reaches a certain point then I will be satisfied". As a culture have we become so future focused that we can only feel despair in the present? In our "future focus" orientation are we missing out on what his happening around us now?

Within the self pursuit of purpose we are not only removed further and further from the present, but we are propelled further and further into a sense of hyper-individualism: "When will I be satisfied?" "How can my life find meaning?"

The Scriptures speak of a God that is continually relating to his people (plural) in the present; trying to shape them in an understanding of what it means to be a people of God in the midst of their current situation (even if that situation seems to lack significance or meaning). What does this mean for those that may be discontent with their present situation? How can one better listen and be shaped by God and find meaning and purpose today?