A Contemplative Life

July 10, 2017

Exit Through the Wilderness

Check out this guest post by my friend Zach Hoag, and then go buy his book, The Light is Winning, a book “for anyone who is anxious about the future of the church and their place in it.”

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In 2008, my wife and I took the plunge that many others like us were taking at the time, immersed as we were in literature and media about “the emerging church.” It required a great deal of sacrifice; it was an all-or-nothing proposition. We mortgaged our lives on an exciting new venture, all for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Namely, we planted a church.

And for a time, it was healthy and growing and effective. I had a ministry background, but the experience was still something new for all of us involved – it was a process, an unfolding. A thrilling one, at that.

And it was a process for me individually and internally too. Towards the beginning of the plant, I broke with the Gospel-Centered New Calvinism that had dominated my thinking for almost a decade. And throughout the church-planting years, new thoughts about the nature and character of God, the meaning of salvation, the work and mission of the church, and the cultural lines of exclusion in my evangelical context rose to the surface. I was captivated by this process and these new revelations, excited for how they might shape and reshape my ministry to our little church and our beloved city of Burlington, VT.

Our church plant, as “cutting edge” as it sometimes seemed to be, was firmly located within the evangelical world. And because of that, some of my emerging perspectives made our more conservative core members uneasy, if not upset. It’s not that I was trying to fool anyone or be a theological rogue; it’s just that I was beginning to see everything differently. And that can pose a problem for folks who want things to stay the same.

More than anything else, I felt a fierce determination to stay on the mission of being a church for our progressive, post-Christian city, not merely in a superficial sense of staying relevant but in an increasingly deeper sense of discerning how to do theology in the midst of God’s mission in our neighborhood, outside the church walls. Part of that process was deconstructive: identifying some of the ways those of us with churched backgrounds might be build- ing barriers in our theology and practice without even knowing it. I was looking for a way to embody acceptance and inclusion, so that our friends and neighbors might experience God and meet Jesus. I didn’t want us to just do superficial outreach or create a program to condescendingly engage “those people.” I wanted those people to be our people. I wanted them to be us.

But then things went south. And as conflicts and decline hit our growing but small and fragile congregation, it only took about a year for it to unravel completely. In the end, when it all came crashing down, this thing I had committed my whole life to—I was completely devastated.

One of the sermon series I preached during the last year of our church was called “Exit through the Wilderness,” a survey of the book of Exodus with a nod to the Banksy documentary Exit through the Gift Shop—because who brilliantly critiques the empire better than Banksy? A sweeping Exodus theology emerges when we see the Scriptures as a story of God liberating all of creation from the effects of human empire—liberation from both the power and control out there, and the power and control tempting our hearts to break bad. Yes, the empire you will always have with you. And prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

The process of moving from one perspective to another that was underway in my life accelerated to the moment of impact in the end of our church. And that end laid waste to not only the faith-structures around me but those within me too. I had no idea what wilderness awaited me when I preached about the Israelites being liberated from the Egyptian Empire only to feel lost in the sojourn that followed. I didn’t know that my necessary suffering would parallel my preaching, that my ego would have to die even as I identified empire business all around me. I was unaware of how deeply I would soon descend into the desert of the real.

Father Richard Rohr talks about the difference between the true self and the false self. The false self is bound up in our outward identity—title, achievement, success, image. But our true self goes back much farther; it is who we really are, who God has made us to be, our bedrock of belovedness, which cannot be changed or taken away. The false self, Rohr says, “will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.”

In one of my final sermons to our dwindling church plant, I talked a little bit about grace:

Grace is surrender.

Grace, really, is giving up.

It’s giving up on self, and it’s giving up on striving. It’s giving up plans and dreams and hopes. It’s giving up your vision. It’s giving up on the purpose and direction that you hold dear and precious, like Paul did when he experienced insults and hardships and persecutions that rudely interrupted his purpose and direction.

Grace is that kind of giving up.

Grace is often the death of what is most dear. Sometimes, grace is the death of your life’s work. The death of the thing that you have poured every waking moment into, for years. The thing that has caused you to stay awake for countless sleepless nights. The thing that you dedicated every ounce of who you are to build, every drop of blood in your heart expended until you have nothing left. Grace is watching that work fall apart, assailed and attacked until it comes crumbling down bit by bit, stone by stone.

Grace is the very soft place of defeat and death.

Our church had to die for deeper health to come to those involved, including myself and my little family. And while it has taken a good deal of devastation, darkness, and deconstruction for my heart to accept the words I shared that day, I finally have accepted them, and I feel free.

At the bottom of it all, I was meant to discover my own belovedness. And who I really am. Through this experience of death, I was meant to finally choose life and start living.

* * * * *

You can find out more about Zach at his website (where you can get a free chapter of The Light is Winning) or find out more about the book HERE.

July 6, 2017July 5, 2017

Glimpses of Eden at a Funeral

There are a few really good souls in this world, and Caleb Wilde is one of them. We met a few years ago when he won a writing contest I held on my blog and, in lieu of the reward, he asked for coffee with me. Nice guy, right? I think he was at least 30 minutes late for that first coffee, but since then he’s become a good friend. Caleb does what few of us would be able to do for a living: he deals with death. And he manages to do it, day after day, with care and kindness and more than a sprinkling of humor.

Caleb has a book coming out this fall called Confessions of a Funeral Director. Take some time to read this post by Caleb, and then preorder his book. You won’t regret it.

Last week we had a funeral here at the funeral home. I was outside parking cars in the procession line, like I usually do, when a hot rod truck, with yellow racing stripes and a flare-side bed pulled up into the procession line. Our parking lot is laid out in such a manner that the only people who just “pull up” in the procession line are the one’s who have done it before. Although I didn’t recognize the truck, as soon as I saw it pull into the procession line without any need of my direction I was pretty sure I’d recognize the face of the driver since he or she was probably a regular at the funeral home.

It was Donnie Smith. Donnie stepped out of his truck, we shot the bull for about 20 minutes. He told me that his dad (Donnie Sr.) had been running low on health while he’s been running high on the idea that his dad might be needing us in the not too distant future.

There are some people that I know only through funerals, and Donnie’s one of them. We buried his daughter a couple years back, and being that Donnie knows half the people in Chester County, he finds himself at funerals nearly as much as I do. I’d often ask him, “You gonna start having your mail delivered here?”

At this particular funeral– after he was done talking with me — we put him to work as the door tender and he was greeting everybody that came through the front door with his genuine smile and warm presence.

Sunday came along and I saw a note on the desk when I got into work: “Donnie Smith’s body is at the Hospital: not released.” I figured it was Donnie, Sr., being how Donnie Jr. was telling me about his dad being low and being unsure how much time he had left.

When we take a death call, we usually write the age of the deceased on the “first call” sheet and I saw in the upper right hand corner something that confused me: I saw “57.” I thought, “Donnie Sr.’s got to be in his 80s … that ’57′ must refer to something unrelated to the death call.”

I was wrong. The deceased at the Hospital was Donnie Jr., age 57.

No warning, no time for his family to say “good-bye”, no time to tie up loose ends. He told me how he was taking care of his dad, looking out for his dad. Nobody expected this. He didn’t expect it. In life, there are few things that are worse than a loved one leaving without saying “good-bye.”

Today we had the service. Probably close to 300 people came through the church during the viewing.

Before we began the service, we invited the family upfront to the casket to say their good-byes., one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your life. At this point, I usually stand at the foot of the casket and observe what is often one of the harder moments for a bereaved family to handle: the last moment you have to touch, look at and speak to the deceased. After the family said their goodbyes on a day none of them expected to come so soon, we close the lid.

While this family was still having their final moments around the open casket, I noticed something right in front of me. Sitting in the front pew of the church were two little girls –one a blond, the other a brunette (which is how I’ll distinguish them from here on out) — both about the age of seven. One was wearing what appeared to be her white Easter dress, her hair combed straight and her shinny white dress shoes fitted to feet that were dangling back and forth off the floor. Next to her was a little blond girl, dressed in black pants and a black shirt. I’m guessing they were Donnie’s granddaughters.

As most the adults were crying, the blond reached her arm across the back of the brunette and held her, at which point tears started to roll down the brunette’s porcelain face. They didn’t know I was watching them, and as far as I know I was the only one looking at them, as all the adults were huddled around the casket; but I was taking in this little slice of life like a parched plant taking in the sweetness of a desert rain.

The blond got up, walked back to the second pew and opened an old Phillies cigar box that she was using as a kind of purse. She opened the lid, reached into the box, pulled out a tissue from the stack she had neatly placed in the box and rushed back over to where she had been sitting only seconds before, catching the tears as they ran down the grief-filled face of her friend.

At this point I got emotional. There’s a certain sense of hardness that creeps in after years in this business. And I’ll be the first to admit that few things bother me … few things touch me anymore. Death makes us into altogether different creatures … we can become like rough skinned rhinos who need something incredibly poignant to piece our outer shell.

I watched this compassion from this young girl for a couple minutes and then I saw my grandfather nod my direction, causing me to switch back to my job at hand, which by this time was the task of closing the lid.

Who taught this young child to do such a thing? Sure, she may have learned it from her mom, or maybe from Donnie himself, but nobody told this child to love. She just loved.

I sought the little blond out after the service was over and I asked her if she wanted to take any of the leftover flowers from her grandfather’s funeral back home with her. She pointed to the big casket spray. Being that the florists fill the back of the casket spray with water, I got it for her because it was probably nearly as heavy as she was, and I carried it to the bed of her dad’s truck. I guess when we witness the pure heart of children, it inspires and multiplies kindness.

Because sometimes we see glimpses of Eden through the veil of death.

You won’t want to miss Caleb’s book, Confessions of a Funeral Director. Preorder it HERE today.

July 3, 2017July 2, 2017

When I Tried to Teach My Son to Ride His Bike

It is a warm day, the day he turns eight years old, and he eats his birthday waffles and drinks his birthday coffee – decaf – and while the morning sun in North Carolina burns off the nighttime rain, he begs to go out and try his bike for the first time. I push this new two-wheeled beauty out through the front door and the morning heat is a blanket and we’re both sweating before he so much as sits on the seat. His mouth is a straight line and his eyes are unblinking. The houses are lined up and quiet, sleeping in. The woods behind the line of houses is still, a mid-summer green, and the shadows lurk dark, like sun spots.

We begin with long runs back and forth on the dead end street, him pedaling and wobbling while I hold the back of his seat and jog alongside. There are very few cars on this Saturday morning. Back and forth we go. His little legs pump. His hands white-knuckle the handlebars. He fights to get it. This is Sam. He is a fighter. He does not quit, yet it is hard to imagine how he will go from this wobbling thing to a balanced rider gliding on two wheels. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to see the what-might-be.

I realize, at some point, he will never learn unless I let him go, unless I pry my fingers from the back of his seat, so I do, and keep jogging with him, holding my breath, and then he is riding! Riding! He glances over and sees I am no longer holding him up and he jerks to the left and the wheel catches and he falls to the macadam.

Dad, he shouts. You can’t let go.

You have to keep going. Even when I let go. Keep looking straight ahead. Don’t look at me.

Back and forth we go again. He grows more confident with each pass, and I let go again, but this time I hang back so he doesn’t see I’ve let go and he rides all the way to the cul-de-sac and squeezes the brakes and I catch up and he grins at me over his shoulder.

I realize, in that instant, that he will learn nothing about riding bike until I let him fail. In fact, the more I let him fail, the faster he learns.

Soon, I let him start off on his own, and the first five tries, the first ten tries, are false starts and swerves into mailboxes and frustration after frustration but soon he is kicking off on on his own and wobbling down the street, pedaling and swaying and swerving at things. But doing it. Riding his bike with a grin on his face and sweat at his temples that clumbs his hair into straw.

You’re doing it, I shout. You’re really doing it. And at about that time he starts going towards a mailbox and I can see him leaning away from it, wanting not to hit it, but so focused on it that the bike doesn’t know where else to go. He brakes. He hits the mailbox. He looks over his shoulder at me again and shakes his head as if to say, Why couldn’t I escape its magnetic pull?

And this, too, I learn from teaching my son to ride bike, that if we focus on something, we will go towards it, even if we don’t want to. What we focus on becomes our target.

* * * * *

Thanks to my friend, Seth, I’ve been thinking a lot about failure, about honesty, about what it means to own up to the journey we’ve had. Teaching my son to ride bike has taught me a lot about failure. I am reminded that it’s possible, crucial even, to learn to fail well – it’s the difference between falling on your feet or falling on your face. I am reminded that failing fast is the best way to do it.

But I’m also reminded that if you focus on something too much, you’ll ride right into it.

June 29, 2017June 29, 2017

Embracing the Revolutionary Act of Trying and Failing and Trying Again

Yesterday, my friend Seth blogged about failure, and he penned one of my favorite lines I’ve read this year:

“I’m making this request to the formula-peddling self-helpers (Christian and otherwise): Don’t just sell me your answers; show me your work.”

Now, I hope I’m not a formula-peddling self-helper (Christian or otherwise), but I think there’s something crucial about this charge that goes beyond just those peddling self-help. I think we all owe it to each other not just to post the glorious destination where we currently find ourselves, but to be honest about the work, and the failure, it took to get there.

Can I tell you about being a self-employed co-writer? There are many formula-peddling self-helpers out there who are happy to convince you that YOU TOO! can make a living as a writer and what a glorious living it will be, sitting at your desk with a window overlooking the lake, the checks pouring in, a well-trained, non-shedding dog curled up at your feet. All you have to do is build your platform by successfully and dutifully accomplishing x and y and z. All you have to do is wake up early and BUY THIS BOOK and PAY FOR THIS COURSE.

Well, here is the life you are buying books and courses for. I’ll try to be brief.

* * * * *

I make a living by having three to five customers per year. Sounds easy, right? Simply find three to five people who’d like you to help them write, and sometimes publish, a book. I’ve been doing this full time for about eight years now. Just for the record.

Most of those years have gone smoothly, income wise. Some years I’ve made more money that I ever thought I would make. But when you need three to five customers, some years you get two customers. What would you do if your income dropped by 50%? I’ve opened a baked goods table at a local sports complex to try to pay the bills. I’ve painted the mullions on old house windows in the almost-winter for extra money. I’ve worked at farmer’s market stands. My wife got a part-time job. I drive for Uber and Lyft and get really big tips, only to be reminded that money isn’t everything.

This is not a complaint. These are only the facts. We’re fine right now. Please do not send money. Well, I mean, send money if you want to, but not because you think we’re struggling. It’s been a good summer.

* * * * *

In my first year, when I was inexperienced and didn’t communicate properly to an editor, they brought in another writer to finish the book I wrote. Do you know how humiliating that is, when you’re a beginning co-writer trying to make a name for yourself? Recently, someone took a load of work I did up front in good faith and walked away with it. I made $0. This is my fault. I knew I was taking a chance.

I was unreasonably angry about that one. I may have sent unruly emails I now regret.

* * * * *

And then there are taxes. Sometimes, once you get into debt, you use every extra penny to pay down that debt, but then you haven’t put enough back for taxes, so you get a big bill from the President and – Presto Chango! – you have new debt. Or you have a big year and don’t account well for it, and this is followed by a slow spring, so you don’t have enough to pay the President again.

Did you know you can pay the income taxes you owe in installments? It’s kind of depressing that I know this.

We are figuring things out slowly. This is something you have to look forward to, when all the money you’re spending on self-help books and courses pans out and you become that self-employed-self you’ve always wanted. Unless, of course, one of the books you buy is about properly planning for taxes.

Then, you’ll be fine.

* * * * *

There are, of course, the other failures writers don’t want to talk about.

There are the books that don’t sell that well. The constant reminder you get every quarter or every six months or once every year when the royalty statement arrives from your publisher and reminds you that the book didn’t do as well as anyone hoped and you are, at this rate, 71 years from paying back your advance.

There are the times you show up to do a signing and one smiling person is in line and you sign their book and they walk out and now you have 59 minutes and 10 seconds left in that lonely hour. Plastic smiles are difficult to keep up.

These will all feel like failures. Some of them ARE failures. I’m starting to be okay with it. Not settling for failure, mind you, but embracing the revolutionary act of trying and failing and trying again.

* * * * *

Some people will tell you there’s no such thing as failure. Anything, they say, viewed in the proper way, can be seen as a success. Any seemingly wrong turn, when viewed through the lens of months or years or lessons learned is not a failure at all!

I think this kind of thinking is part of the problem because it perpetuates the failure-avoidance instinct we all have.

I have had to, in the past, put groceries or car repairs or medical bills on a credit card.

I have written books that didn’t turn out the way I had hoped.

I have had disappointed clients.

I have not always made enough money to buy my children the things they want.

I have lived with my parents twice, six months each time, when I was in my 30s. And married. With children.

It’s okay. You know why? Because failure has become dull to me now. When I first started out, failure was like fireworks. Loud explosions, deafening booms, blinding. It shook me and made me question the path I was on.

Failure hasn’t yet become fun. Maybe someday. But it’s settled into something less than fireworks, something more like when a car backfires in the city and at first I think it’s a gun shot. I flinch. I duck. I feel a little embarrassed.

And then I get on with my life.

* * * * *

What do you think about failure?

June 28, 2017June 27, 2017

The Main Obstacle in Releasing a Book

The heat in Carolina is the kind that the trees can lean against when they’re tired, which is most of the time, because the heat will do that to you. Thunderstorms bookend the sky every afternoon, sometimes sailing past to the north, sometimes rumbling in on us so that the neighborhood pool is emptied and the kids scatter back through the neighborhood like ants disturbed. Most mornings, we wake up to find it rained in the night, a rain that spends the rest of the day slowly evaporating, filling the air with heaviness.

In my mind I’m going to Carolina
Can’t you see the sunshine
Can’t you just feel the moonshine

Last summer, Maile was expecting Poppy any day, so we didn’t make the trip down. Two years ago Maile had a part-time job for the summer (that’s another long story). Three years ago it was Leo about to be born. It’s good to be here again, in the heat of the summer months, good to slow down and live life with family we don’t often see, good to enter a new rhythm of writing, good to go to the pool late in the afternoon, watch movies almost every night.

This is what summers should be, I think. I know I am fortunate to have this. I know this life we live in America is not normal.

* * * * *

This is the summer before the release of my first very-own-book, and it is turning out be one I have big thoughts about. In some ways, September 5th (the release date for The Day the Angels Fell) represents the culmination of an at-least-17-year journey. I’ve written about the difficult in-between times – they are long and often dull and usually feel like they’ll never end.

But I’ve left those in-between times behind me, at least for now, and this new phase of writing comes with its own challenges. There is the new concern for preorders. There is the building pressure of hope as the release date approaches. There is the swirling mixture of mind games (What if no one buys it? What if everyone buys it?)

There is, during the lead up to a book launch, the increasing temptation to see myself at the center of many things.

* * * * *

We are potty-training Leo here at my in-laws house. It’s become a strange kind of tradition, getting our children out of their diapers while we are in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Leo has been great through it all, quite the character. The first few days, if he started to pee, he’d shout, “It’s leaking!” and spring for the bathroom. But he’s doing great now.

Yesterday morning, I was using the restroom, and I heard someone walk up behind me. I looked over my shoulder. It was Leo.

“You’re doing a great job, Dad!” he said, enthusiastically.

I’m not sure why that story came to mind in this train of thought, but I’m sure a good reason will come to me later.

* * * * *

When I spend my time thinking about preorders for the book and book sales and advances and contracts, it is me at the center of this raging maelstrom, frantic and striving. Great concern pulls down around my shoulders. There is weight to those thoughts, and the rumblings of doom.

But when I let go of that, when I relegate promotion to its rightful place somewhere down the ladder (still on the ladder, mind you, but not at the top), my mind clears. I sit down with my next story or blog post and there is relief, a sense that this is what I’m meant to do, and there is, for the first time in a long while, a sense that I am free to do it. My friend Alison recently recalled this line from Chariots of Fire:

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

* * * * *

I was speaking with a good friend a few weeks ago about this book, how I could promote it, and he paused for a moment.

“Can I be honest with you for a second?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. Knowing this friend, I expected to get the equivalent of a 2×4 to the head.

“You have to stop being so damn humble. You worked hard on this book. You need to get out there and tell people about it.”

I know he’s right, not necessarily about the humility, but about my reticence to self-promote. So, I will do what I can do. I am sending out books to over 100 people, sharing the news far and wide that this book, this book I worked so hard on, this book I believe in, is being born into the world. I started a Facebook group to help me spread the word (you can join us HERE). I will do what I can do, and many of you have said you’ll help me.

But I also recognize this temptation to put myself at the center – it is the fruit from the tree, it is the Ring of Power, it is the promise of position offered to Edmund. It is an empty promise, a brilliant soap bubble that bursts the moment you touch it.

So I will write my books, and I will do what I can do, and if they sell, they sell, and if they don’t, well, I will keep writing them, because when I write, I feel the pleasure of God.

* * * * *

“You can praise God by peeling a spud if you peel it to perfection. Don’t compromise. Compromise is a language of the devil. Run in God’s name and let the world stand back and in wonder.” Chariots of Fire

June 27, 2017June 26, 2017

The Girl Who Couldn’t Speak #RideshareConfessional

She gets into the backseat of my car, a tiny thing, with limbs the wind might blow away. She is smiling and has had too much to drink but something about her seems unfamiliar with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she held her hand out in front of her face and, with fascination in her eyes, started reaching for invisible things.

“Did you have a good night?” I ask, smiling.

“Oh, yes…Very…wonderful.” She says her words slowly, deliberately, as if spelling each one in her mind before speaking it. “I’m moving. West…Next week…Girlfriends took me out…for a drink.”

She looks out the window. This catches my attention because so few people look out the window these days.

“That’s cool,” I say. “Where did you grow up?”

“I drew…I drew…” she pauses, takes a breath. She is frustrated with her inability to speak. “I…grew…up in Philadelphia.” She smiles, happy to have gotten the sentence out successfully. “But next week my boyfriend and I move west…to Colorado.”

She stares out the window again, the city lights strobing on her face as we drive under them. I decide to give her some peace. But she starts up again, stuttering her way through explaining what she’ll be doing, what her boyfriend will be doing, how fortuitous it all was, landing jobs so quickly in the same city, finding a place.

I drive her to a dark neighborhood outside of the city, one of those sprawling neighborhoods of three-level apartment buildings with insufficient lighting.

“Here’s good,” she mumbles, and I let her out. I’m relieved. She looks like she might be sick. She doesn’t say good-bye or thank you – she’s very much focused on her feet – and I watch as she goes down the sidewalk. I make sure she gets through her door.

I guess we are all coming and going, all of us, here and there. It’s nice to think that we, even as strangers, can watch out for each other, from time to time.