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Finding the Knives and Who I Used Them On

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“Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.” Ann Lamotte, Bird By Bird

I was surprised at the way it jumped out and wrapped itself around my throat, sort of pulled me to my knees in less than a second. I thought I was finished with that old foe. I guess I’m not.

It all started when a friend of mine made a simple comment about another friend of mine, how well his book is doing, how widely-read he is. And not only that but how he’s such a nice guy with a great smile and a wonderful family.

I went from peeling a mandarin orange to looking for the knives in less than a tenth of a second. To use on who? The friend doing the talking? The friend he was talking about? Myself? Those old insecurities sort of lurched out of the shadows and set up camp in my mind. They were making themselves at home. They figured it would take me a few days to get this all sorted out, and in the mean time they could enjoy themselves.

That’s the problem with jealousy – it brings so many of its friends along for the ride.

* * * * *

I tried to slow down my breathing but before I knew it I was going on and on in an uninterruptable speech about how well my next book would do (I was sure of it, and very convincing). I may or may not have thrown in a few lines about how well my blog was doing and how much money I made last year, how it was my best year. Thinking back on my response is rather humiliating. It was like I had thrown up all over myself and didn’t have the decency to leave the room.

A few weeks passed. A few months. In the mean time I exchanged a few emails with the very person my friend had talked about, the very person who had so inspired my jealousy, and I was able to remind myself of a few things.

He is a nice person. A good person even (at least as far as I can tell). He acts and talks as if I am further along than he is in this whole writing thing (which, you know, what does that even mean?). I sigh. This is getting me no where.

* * * * *

Sometimes the only thing that helps me get through my deepest insecurities is to put one word in front of another. For me, writing is the equivalent of running around inside my brain with a little mason jar and capturing all those flashing bugs of thought, then release them on to the page. It’s not a sure-fire cure, but sometimes it helps, just to look at it. Just to see it for what it really is.

* * * * *

Then, in the middle of writing this post and skimming Facebook and generally procrastinating the start to my day, I read this by Michelle DeRusha:

Once upon a time I knew this. Once upon a time, six years or so ago, I knew the book was enough. Just writing the book was enough, more than enough, because writing it brought me back to God. And how could that ever not be enough?

But then, little by little, it became not quite enough. The book needed it to change someone other than me. The book needed it to make an impact, transform a life, become something more. I needed the book to be more.

The book became about finding an agent, and then about finding a publisher, and then about marketing and platform and promotion. Before I hardly even realized it, the book became not nearly enough.

That’s it, I realized. That’s one of the large roots of the jealousy tree growing inside of me: a desire for more. More money, more readers, more attention. And if someone else has it, due to the false law of scarcity, that means I can’t have it. Just the idea that what I have right now could be enough immediately began to starve the life out of my jealousy. I realized I could breathe again.

I realized that what I have, right now, today, is enough.

Maybe that’s where jealousy takes roots in you? Maybe one day all you wanted to be was a teacher, but now you’re surrounded by the competition of academia. Maybe one day all you wanted was to be a pastor but now you can’t take your gaze off all those huge churches out there. Maybe one day all you wanted was to own your own business, but now you’re obsessed with outpacing your competition.

I don’t know. Maybe the cure for the jealousy inside all of us is to realize that what we have, right now, today, is enough.

* * * * *

How do you approach the areas of your life visited by jealousy?

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What I Found Inside an Old Doc Marten’s Shoebox

pic7On Monday night we took out the old Doc Marten’s shoebox and opened it up. You have to hold it in a certain way so that it doesn’t completely disintegrate in your hands.

“This game is called Settlers of Catan,” I told the kids. They stared at all the pieces as I pulled them out of the shoebox, intrigue and skepticism tugging back and forth in their minds. How could something so complicated, so messy, be any fun? How could something so messy, so complicated, NOT be fun?

So Maile and I started sorting through plastic bags of cards and pieces, all while explaining the rules. The robber. The harbors. We couldn’t remember if it was clay or brick. Oh, well. And that’s how the next fifteen minutes or so went.

Then, at the bottom of the box, I found a blue notebook. I opened it. Inside I saw four names: my sister’s, my brother-in-law’s, Maile’s, and me. Under our names was a long list of scores, a system we had created in order to keep track of who won the most games over a fairly long period of time.

And suddenly I was there, in that second floor apartment in Great Missenden, England. I was there when it was just the four of us playing, and I was there when it was the four of us plus two very large stomachs (Maile and my sister were pregnant at the same time). And I was there when we played Settlers while rocking two newborns in their small bouncy seats or on our laps or while the girls breastfed and refused to trade wheat or sheep.

We spent many an entire Saturday there, in their apartment, playing Settlers for ten hours straight. We were hooked.

Those England times were long days. Long years. There was the time we opened our first store in Victoria Station – we were so full of hope, and I worked 33 17-hour days in a row. Then there was the time, three years later, that we closed Victoria Station, my brother-in-law and I packing up the shop, removing all the equipment, slowly lowering the clackety-clacking storefront shutter one last time, then walking through the empty, late-night train station, wondering if we could have done something different, something better.

“Check this out, Maile,” I said, holding up the book. She smiled.

“No, seriously,” I said. “Look at this.”

I held the book closer to her and she peered in at it. Then she took in a small breath.

“Wow.”

The date of our last recorded Settlers game was eleven years to the day. January 6, 2003. That seemed ironic. A lot can happen in eleven years. Four children, two miscarriages, one on the way. One job, three businesses, two of which ended without much fanfare. Ten books. A lot of white hairs.

A lot can happen in eleven years.

The passing of time reveals itself to us in the most random, powerful ways. Which means you can’t always be on guard or prepared for how the next thing you stumble on will remind you what you were doing ten years ago, twenty years ago.

Eleven years ago.

What would I have thought if eleven years ago God or an angel or someone, anyone, would have told me what I was about to go through in the next eleven years? What if they could have walked me down that path, in advance, preparing me for what was to come?

I’ll tell you what would have happened. I would have been terrified. I would have seen the challenges, the despair, a few of those long, difficult years, and I would have wondered how in the world I was going to make it.

We have no idea where we will be in eleven years. No idea what disasters and triumphs will come our way. And what a blessing that is, our lack of foresight. For all of my impatience, all of my striving to bring the future into the present, seeing that list of scores and the date, January 6th, 2003, gave me an incredible sense of peace, and a resolve to live in this moment.

The future will take care of itself.

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What Happened When We Told Our Kids a Baby Is On The Way

IMG_0462In mid-November we decided to tell our four kids that there was a fifth on the way. Their reaction was not exactly what we had expected.

“Everybody come up to our room,” I shouted downstairs. “Mom and I have something to tell you.”

The sound of eight little feet pounded up the steps, slip-sliding their way into our room. All six of us crawled up into the bed. The kids eyes were large and curious – that is where we have the most serious of conversations, in our room, sprawled on the bed. This is where we talked to the littles about, as Sam calls it, “private-cy.” This is where we read together. It is, in other words, Holy
Ground.

I found myself getting more and more excited to finally tell someone. Anyone. We had been keeping everything quiet, keeping our hope caged up like a small bird. But here it was: a chance to tell. I wondered what it would be like. I wondered if, in saying the words aloud, it would seem more real to me.

“Mom and I have something to tell you,” I said quietly, anticipating their cheering and shouting. I paused for a moment.

“What?” they all said. “What is it? Tell us!”

“I’m going to have a baby,” Maile said.

The response was not what we had expected. Let me rephrase that. The response of our oldest two children (ages 10 and 8 at the time) was not what we had expected. The younger two leaped to their feet and cheered. Sam screamed with delight, over and over again, “I’m not going to be the youngest anymore!” Abra grinned, her blue eyes wide and full of hope.

But the older two. Ah, the older two. I keep forgetting they are full-fledged people now, with their own hopes and dreams and expectations. Cade’s eyes filled with tears and his lip got all trembly. Lucy openly wept. Maile and I looked at each other. What had we done?

“What’s wrong?” Maile asked, on the verge of tears herself.

Cade spoke first, his voice wavering.

“I…don’t…really…want…our…family…to…change,” he said, balling up his fists and rubbing his eyes.

I leaned over and put my arm around Lucy.

“And why are you crying?”

In the most mournful voice possible, she replied.

“I don’t want another baby to die,” she said, through those hiccup-sounding sobs, then burst into tears again. Lucy had taken the previous miscarriage very hard. She had been seven years old, and very much looking forward to a baby to treat as her own. For her, the possibility of encountering that pain again was a scary, overwhelming thing.

Maile and I looked at each other. I was hugging Lucy and she was holding Cade’s hand. After ten minutes of assuring and reassuring and explaining and encouraging, the four of them went back downstairs, returning to their busy childhood lives.

I turned and looked at Maile.

“Well, that went well, don’t you think?”

* * * * *

Anxious about change.

Scared of death.

I realized that the reactions of my oldest two children pretty much sum up the foundational fears of most of humanity. Most people I know avoid change because it’s scary and unknown and makes us feel insecure, like a soft-shell crab. And you don’t have to look far in our culture to find the fear, or denial of, death. We flock to any remedy that keeps us younger, our hair less gray, our skin less wrinkled, our age less apparent. We want to be young forever.

We surround ourselves with noise because at the heart of silence lies an awareness of our mortality. Noise helps us forget the steady, onward march of time and the inevitability of our passing.

Change.

Death.

The reaction of my oldest two children has me thinking about the coming year. Because, a baby! It’s not that both of them won’t be ecstatic to have a baby in the house. But the fear of change and the fear of death steered them away from wanting this new thing, this new adventure.

What changes are you avoiding because you’re afraid?

What potential deaths (failures, mistakes, the end of a relationship, potential discomforts) keep you from moving into an area of life where you know, deep down, you want to go?

* * * * *

Related Post: Miscarriages, Waiting, and “Do Not Be Afraid”

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What Are You Looking For This Year?

It was late spring, 2008, and I was on a mission to find one thing. I got out of the van and walked through the unusually hot day, across the parking lot, and into the air conditioning. I stopped and took a deep breath. Then I looked around.

I started at the front, checked the new release table. Nothing. Then I walked back, past the beloved fiction section, beyond the self-help. I turned left off the main aisle and slowed down, my eyes sweeping the shelves. Thousands of books. Thousands of authors. Then I saw the business section. Of course. I should have gone there first.

That’s when I saw it.

Or perhaps I should say, I saw “them.” A pile of about fifteen books in the middle of a table, surrounded by similar stacks. A small sign said “New Release – Business.” I looked closer and there it was, my name on one of the books: “with Shawn Smucker.”

I was standing inside the largest Borders Books in the area, staring at my first book.

So why did I feel so underwhelmed?

* * * * *

I was thinking about this moment the other day as 2013 came to an end. I realized that if the payoff for this life I am living was simply seeing books with my name on them, it wouldn’t be enough. Not for me. It had to be about something else.

It had to be about the writing. It had to be about the audience – you folks. It had to be about a conversation, a sort of relationship. It had to be about stories.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, make sure your New Year’s resolutions are for something that will truly give you meaning. Make sure you’re targets are set on something that will give you more than what I got when I saw that book with my name on it in the middle of a sea of books.

What if you lose the weight? What if you find the right person? What if you read 1000 books? What if you stop smoking or start exercising or read your Bible everyday?

What are you really looking for?

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What I Found On the Journey Home

photo-18There’s something fitting about starting a long journey on January 1st. There’s something that feels right about 1023 miles to go, heading north, heading for home. The gray sky leans in and the rain starts to fall and it feels like maybe you’ll never get there, and maybe that’s okay.

The small bumps in the highway form a rhythm, like the back-and-forth swaying of a hypnotist’s locket, and I snag a pillow from the back, tilt my seat, and lean over against the window. Out of the corner of my eye, the road blurs by, mile after mile.

* * * * *

Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed North

* * * * *

We sit on the beach and I watch my 4-year-old son Sam stand where the waves break, jumping over them again and again. Small, broken, white shells spill all over themselves. He focuses on the next wave, the next wave, and he jumps, and sometimes he falls and sometimes he lands but no matter, he gets up every time and waits for the next wave, waits.

Three of the other nephews and nieces dig and dig, a deepening hole forming in the sand. The sun comes and goes, and the wind forms small swells out beyond the sandbar. They dig. One more scoop, one more rake. Deeper they go, on their way to China.

One of my nieces, two years old and bursting with life, rolls in the sand, then lays on her stomach and stares at it, listening for a message I will never hear. Then she slowly lowers her face until the sand coats it. She looks up at me where I recline, clean and dry on a beach chair, and she smiles, then laughs loud, as if my cleanliness amuses her.

I cringe at so much sand covering skin. The grittiness. The thought of getting down and rolling on the beach, well, it’s simply something I would never do.

But then I think that her rolling in the sand is about as close as it comes to living completely in the present as one can get, no care for what it will take to get clean, no worry about sand in the hair that will not come out, no concern for the thin film of grit that will soon fill the minivan.

When have I rolled in the sand? Too long ago.

* * * * *

One foot in and one foot back
It don’t pay to live like that
So I cut the ties and I jump the tracks
For never to return

* * * * *

Maile and I in sea kayaks, the shore receding behind us. Small green and yellow buoys, the size of cantaloupes, bob in the water, five digit numbers handwritten on them in black marker. I stare down through the blue-green and sometimes spot the sandy floor, eight feet below us. It is rippled, like dessert sand, or pond water after a small boy throws in a large rock. Water within water. Messages within messages.

Faraway boats we cannot see send us their voices in the form of waves, and we crest and drop, crest and drop. Water trickles down the oars and we pull ourselves through the water, getting wet, the wind in our face. I fight the temptation to go further out, further out, further out, until the shore is only a thin line and I am the only thing in the world, the only thing.

Reluctantly we turn towards the beach, and though I paddle less hard, the wind and the waves drive us back to reality. No matter how far you go, there is always the returning. Except perhaps once in life, when there is no going back.

* * * * *

Dumbed down and numbed by time and age
Your dreams that catch the world the cage
The highway sets the traveler’s stage
All exits look the same

Three words that became hard to say
“I and Love and You”
“I and Love and You”
“I and Love and You”

* * * * *

Roll in the sand.

Say the things you’ve been wanting to say.

There’s no going back.

* italicized lyrics from The Avett Brothers song “I and Love and You”

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Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Are Stupid (And Why Mine Involve Being Less Judgmental)

This photo has nothing at all to do with my post. I simply thought it was funny.
This photo has nothing at all to do with my post. I simply thought it was funny.

Day two on the road and we’re looking at about 600 miles before we arrive. It’s still early in the morning. Maile’s listening to a book on tape, and I’ve been reading Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Pastrix. The sun is just starting to creep up over the tree-lined highway here in South Carolina, and all the shadows are long and slant hard to our right.

The approaching New Year has me inevitably contemplating resolutions. I love any opportunity for a fresh start, a clean slate, and during the week between Christmas and New Year’s I usually find myself trying to decide how I’m going to improve my life next year. What will I change about myself? What will I start doing? What will I stop?

This year a new thought hit me. Why are all of my New Year’s resolutions centered around being more productive? What if, instead of making resolutions that reflect the judgment I feel towards the areas of myself that I perceive as lacking, I made resolutions full of grace and kindness?

“Essential to the work of reconciliation is a nonjudgmental presence. We are not sent to the world to judge, to condemn, to evaluate, to classify, or to label. When we walk around as if we have to make up our mind about people and tell them what is wrong with them and how they should change, we will only create more division.”

– Henri Nouwen

To illustrate the difference, let me first tell you what I would normally resolve after a year like this one: 1) Exercise daily, because I’m obviously turning into a slob 2) Stop eating sugar, because my teeth are rotting and I’m on my way to diabetes 3) Read my Bible every day because God will love me more and things will go my way. Rules, rules, rules, and probably the reason my New Year’s resolutions rarely last through the first week of the new year.

So what would a kinder, more grace-filled resolutions list look like? Well, I’ve been thinking that I should allow myself some time to read during the day – that seems like a huge luxury, but it’s something I love to do, and it would help my writing. So grace-filled resolution #1 is to allow myself the freedom to read for one hour during the day.

Another resolution I’d like to suggest to myself for this coming year would be to set aside some time (I’m still sure how much or when) where I allow myself to be completely unproductive. I grew up in a culture that stigmatizes laziness to the point where people are sometimes scared to admit that they relax. Because this is so deeply ingrained in my psyche, I know I need to work hard to eliminate that kind of legalistic attitude towards work from my life.

Finally, I have a deep desire to be less judgmental. Why do I feel I have to classify every person I meet, every experience that I have, into these categories of good and bad, right and wrong, Christian and unChristian? What purpose does it serve me or anyone else? I want to work even harder this year at judging less.

“Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, ‘Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.’”

– Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix

Do you usually make New Year’s resolutions? Are they binding or freeing?