how to brush your teeth like a revolutionary

March 4, 2013

March

The greatest pursuit is not to chase a dream, free the slaves, build the wells, feed the hungry, save the children or fight for equality.

The greatest pursuit is Christ.

And it isn’t even my pursuit of him, but his pursuit of me.

Let yourself be captured by the love of God, so that you may chase your dream, free the slaves, build the wells, feed the hungry, parent the children and fight for equality.

But even the revolutionaries have to brush their teeth.

Christ is not just with you, but he lives within you. And together you make the bed, wash the dishes, finish the paper, pack the bag, work on the taxes, comfort the baby, and take out the trash again.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together – his energy empowers the radical endeavor as well as the morning conversation. There is no big or small – there is only Christ in you, your hope.

“Feed on Christ, and then go live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells only the truth, that fights the battle and that wins the crown.”

Phillips Brooks

26 Comments · Filed Under: art, faith, lifestyle

one thing we’re waiting for (and why it’s time to stop)

January 24, 2013

Real talk. Last night I had a dream that the people in charge of the Women of Faith conference called (in my dream, they were called Women of Courage, but I’m going to go ahead and make an assumption) and they wanted me to join their lady tour.

And y’all? In my dream, I really wanted to do it. As in, I called up Jennie Allen and was all Wussup, girl?! Because I’m cool like that.

When I woke up and realized it was a dream (and also Women of Faith, not courage) I took a little time to figure that dream out.

I realize there’s a risk in telling you this dream because now I worry you all think I harbor a secret desire to speak in arenas.

I do not. But there was something about that dream that I couldn’t shake after I woke up.

I met someone once who is all dreamy (as in, she studies dreams, not that I want to date her) and she said the main thing to pay attention to in a dream isn’t so much every detail, but the overall feeling of the dream.

And so when I woke up after that Women of Faith dream I was struck with the feeling that lingered with me — it was the feeling of being picked.

Sometimes don’t we just want to be picked?

I know you think I’m gonna be all, But God picks you!

I’m not. I mean, God does pick you. He totally does. But there is sometimes a disconnect for me between God picking me as a child he loves and God empowering me to make an impact in the world around me.

My husband went to hear Seth Godin speak in Tribeca this past summer and you know what the theme of his talk was?

Pick yourself.

It’s an important message to me. Because even though I know as a believer that my identity is solid in Christ, if I don’t decide to believe it for myself then it won’t impact the way I love, the way I live, or the way I work.

This past year I’ve struggled through the writing process more than I’ve ever struggled before. I’ve been working through a lot of self- doubt and discouragement and it’s affected my writing voice – somewhat here on the blog, but more so in the book I’ve been working on.

Two years ago, Seth wrote a post called Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked:

“Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound. No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.”

When I filter that statement through the reality of my life in Christ, it becomes even stronger. Have I been given a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind? Yes? Then what else could I possibly be waiting for?

Last weekend, I wrote this for you in my weekend post:

Go ahead and take time off from your self-doubt for the weekend. May the break be so freeing that you decide to make it permanent.

You know why I wrote that? Because I desperately needed to hear it. And I took my own advice after that. I made it permanent.

I decided that the self-doubt isn’t really working for me.

I decided that this book I’m working on for you is important.

I decided to have courage because really, what have I got to lose?

I picked myself.

What about you?

77 Comments · Filed Under: lifestyle, vocation, writing

4 ways to take a walk like a believer

July 10, 2012

When I am worried or in danger of becoming obsessed with myself, I need outside air like a drug- to drink my coffee on the back deck; to sit on the bench in the front yard; to lean back on the warm concrete at dusk; to chat with a neighbor on our painted porch steps. It’s time to take a walk.

All walks are not created equally. I can walk in worry and in fear. I can walk fast to try to catch up to an expectation – beauty, deadline, stress-relief. There are different ways to take a walk and none of them are wrong. But when I am mildly obsessed with myself, I have to practice walking like a believer.

Carry the questions. If you go on a walk looking for answers, you may come home with two hands filled with disappointment. But oh, the peace to be found in learning to carry around your questions, in learning, as Ruth Haley Barton says, to “be with what is.” Let the day be the day without trying to run away from it.

Open your hands. And whatever is, open your hands to it. If it is the elation of love, delight in it. If it is the disappointment of heartbreak, feel it. If it is the boredom of this regular Wednesday, give yourself permission to be unremarkable today. You can wow them tomorrow. Today is for small.

Breathe in love. Love is patient and kind. And then, not a list of what love is, but a list of what it isn’t. Love is not jealous, boastful, proud, rude, self-seeking, easily angered, or a score-keeper. Resist the urge to turn your walk into a rhythm of scores and grievances. Instead, love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. This is what love always does, what He always does. Breathe in the deep color of this love, because it’s as real as oxygen anyway.

Breathe out thanksgiving, for those two feet carrying your whole body around. Two tiny feet! You are a miracle. And those trees you pass under with branches that could send your spirit straight up to heaven if they chose the right time to fall? Breathe out his faithfulness. Praise God for the invisible hands that hold those branches in place. You are alive and the sky is not falling. At least not today.

41 Comments · Filed Under: breathe, lifestyle

3 ways to leave an honest legacy

May 30, 2012

This is a guest post by Jeff Goins, a writer who lives in Nashville and works for Adventures in Missions. He just published an eBook called, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One). You can check out his blog, follow him on Twitter, or connect with him on Facebook. His wife just gave birth to their first baby (four weeks early!) last week. You can see the baby here. You know you want to.

When I was in college, I spent a semester studying in Seville, Spain. Every day, I was surrounded by beautiful art and ancient architecture. It was both inspiring and intimidating.

One day, my friend Martha and I took a trip to La Giralda, the impressive tower adorning the world’s third-largest cathedral.

After we ascended the staircase, we looked out the window and stared down at the city, watching the thousands of passersby. We could see everything: La Torre de Oro, the Guadalquivir River, so many parks and places to eat.

As we walked back down to the ground level, we went into the sanctuary, which was ornately decorated with intricate paintings by Murillo and historic landmarks, like the alleged burial place of Christopher Columbus. That’s when Martha said it: eight words I’ll never forget.

“I wonder what kind of legacy I’ll leave,” she said. And it hung in the air for all to hear.

We were surrounded by over nine centuries of art, and my friend wanted to know which of her creations would last this long. Which one would stand the test of time and still be standing in another thousand years.

For the first time ever, I wondered the same.

We all want to do something meaningful with our lives. We want to create and share work that changes people. This, I believe, is hard-wired into the human spirit, this need to make art.

So what do we do? How do we begin this journey of leaving a legacy?

1. Admit who you are.

All activity flows from identity. If you don’t believe you are something, you can’t do it. Just so you know, whether you realize it or not, you’re an artist. A craftsperson, a writer, a stylist. Anytime you do something that requires skill and creativity (and let’s face it — everything does), you’re creating art.

2. Expect resistance.

We all want to put a dent in the universe. But tragically, most of us won’t. Why? One word: resistance. That unseen, malevolent force that prevents us from making a difference. Often, it disguises itself as procrastination or fear, but it’s something far more sinister.

This evil, personal force wants to steal, kill, and destroy your art. It’s circling you like a lion, ready to devour. So what do we do? We let it control us. We sabotage ourselves with seemingly humble words like, “wannabe” or “aspiring.” We tell ourselves we’ll pursue our passion… some day. All the while, our enemy wins.

3. Live.

Stephen King once said, “Life is not a support system for art… it’s the other way around.” In other words, it’s not the job of your life, your family, your friends to help you write, sing, play, or work. Those things come from the depth of the life you live.

In other words, if you want to create more beautiful art, live a better life. Go for walks, swing on the swing set, eat ice cream (with a cherry on top) — relish the moments, the gifts, the freedom we’ve been given.

Then, dear artist, you can create. And you will leave a legacy.

51 Comments · Filed Under: art, faith, lifestyle Tagged With:

one thing that will make your soul explode

May 24, 2012

They announced the winner of American Idol last night and when they did, the winner did not jump up and down or fall down on his knees. He did not make number one signs with his hands or scream into the camera. He was almost nearly silent. Still. They gave him a guitar and asked him to sing. And he did, but he didn’t make it far. Because when the sparks started shooting out of the screen behind him and the confetti started to drop around him, it seemed nearly too much to take. You can watch it here if you didn’t see last night:

A sentence went through my head, one Jon Acuff said a few weeks ago during a backstage interview at Catalyst (I watched online). He quoted someone awesome whose name I can’t remember, but the quote has been rolling around in my head for weeks now.

“The human soul was not made for fame.”

You could see it, as he stood there overwhelmed with his own success and attention, like his soul was turning inside out and he didn’t know how to handle it. When he started to cry, all he could do was put his head down and walk straight into the arms of his family. He disappeared in them, like he was hiding in the comfort of his own smallness.

The crowd and the cameras were cramming importance into him by the truckload, but it seemed he didn’t want to receive it, couldn’t receive it.  How wise.

Only a fool would open up his arms, tip his head back to the heavens and take it all in, a place meant for God alone. And whether you watch the show or not, it is a fascinating study of how we mill about here on earth, putting our stars on certain people, lifting them up to places they never asked to be lifted up to.

They share their art and we want to hear it, but soon, if they get too big or too much attention, they become the object of our narrowed eyes and pointy fingers. If we can’t win, then neither can they. 

We do it with our athletes and our movie stars and our professional Christians, too. We know better than to worship them, but we put them up slightly higher than ordinary. We forget (or maybe we never really understood) that He holds all things together, all things that were created for him and through him. He is the firstborn over all creation. All. Creation.

Our souls were not made for fame. Our souls were made for the Famous One. O God, save us from ourselves.

129 Comments · Filed Under: art, faith, lifestyle, vocation

so different we’re the same

May 2, 2012

We sit at the bar at the little cafe in the quaint Brooklyn neighborhood. We’re looking for breakfast even though it’s lunch time. I’d rather not think about food. It’s 2007 and I’m pregnant.

My college roommate and I are in town visiting friends, but they had to work so we went exploring. We get the menu and just when I’m trying to figure out how to hold my nose from the smell without looking four, I catch a glimpse of our surroundings.

Everyone is in gray, black, or muted earth tones. The guy who just walked in has lots of piercings. The couple by the window look dark, intense, content. I think one of them might be a man. The girl with the earbuds wears a black tank top, black pants and combat-ish boots. Her face is turned toward the window, but her eyes are closed. She sits alone. I look towards the door and just know that any minute, Neo and Trinity are gonna walk in.

I look at Faith sitting next to me. She’s wearing pastel. I have on pink lipstick. We do not blend in.

She realizes this the same time I do. One of us says, “Do you get the feeling that everyone is so extremely unique that they end up all looking exactly the same?”

I agree with us. And if you walked into a Starbucks in my hometown, you would say the same thing. Our collective same-ness would look different from this Brooklyn cafe, but you could draw the same conclusion.

I thought of that scene in Brooklyn last week as The Man and I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in California. It’s like a different country over there. The trees look freakishly strong, like they worked really hard to grow and they have the twisted, gnarly trunks to prove it. I had to keep reminding myself, water on the left means we’re headed north. My head was spinning by the time we got to LA.

But there we were, on the whole other side of this huge country we call home, and I couldn’t stop watching the people. Same language, different life. It’s tempting to fill in the blank of their identity with just one label. The less we know about a group, the easier it is to do that.

We do it all the time in lots of areas.

We are complicated and multi-layered. They are just one thing.

We are deep, thoughtful and ironic. They are cheesy and irrelevant. 

We see things the right way. They are narrow-minded and small.

So where do you fall? In the “we” or in the “they?”

Guess what? You don’t get to say. Because no matter what, you are someone else’s they. And there’s nothing you can do about it. So just be you. Do your thing, rock the cheese, drop the labels, and dare to see.

37 Comments · Filed Under: art, friendship, lifestyle

You might be a good girl if you …

August 24, 2011

“She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created.”

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

We had plans for the night but the plans fell through. Still, there was a sitter. When you get to be married for 10 years and you have a sitter, it matters little what you do. We drove downtown with no plan but a camera.

In the past three years, I’ve learned a lot about the way I’m made, how I’m created to worship, what brings me back to my true center. Having a camera around my neck helps me see. I used to be embarrassed about that, worried that I always looked like a tourist even if I was in my own town.

Our life is always speaking, but we rarely have the courage to listen. What are those things, it says, that make you come alive? Good girls are afraid of those questions – afraid because what if those things our life speaks of are not the things I think I’m supposed to be doing? We stay busy should-ing and ought-ing and trying to do life right.

And we’re so busy doing life right that we let it pass right on by.

I remembered that last Friday night when The Man and I had nothing to do but wander. I remembered how our lives speak to us in similar ways. I remembered the slow pace we prefer, the margin we long for, the community we crave.

We passed people from other seasons of life whom we haven’t seen in years. We lingered on the sidewalks. We laughed and connected and took slow steps. I paused to take a picture of a light post. This feels like worship, I thought to myself. God made us to glorify, and  when we slow, laugh, savor, linger, listen, and become – we worship. What else would it be?

You might be a good girl if you think worship is something you do in a building.

***

I’m writing at Bloom (in)courage all week and today, I’ve posted an excerpt there from Chapter 1 of Grace for the Good Girl. The books are, as we speak, shipping to bookstores all over the country. I got a box full just yesterday. Hallelujah.

36 Comments · Filed Under: Grace for the Good Girl, lifestyle

the importance of staying small

July 10, 2011

There is a map of the world hanging in an office some 9,000 miles away from my front door. At first glance, it looks as though the continents are in the wrong place. But after a bit of study, you realize it isn’t wrong at all, but simply drawn from another perspective. Standing in the Compassion International office in Manila, Philippines, our team stared hard at that map. And seeing Asia in the middle with North and South America shifted way to the right didn’t cause one entitled huff or puff. Instead, our entire team breathed a collective sigh of relief.

I’ve thought of that moment a lot, wondered why we all had the same reaction to that map in that moment. Perhaps it’s because traveling the world helps you realize you aren’t the center of it. And there is a great relief in remembering that it isn’t all about us.

My dad used to watch our kids as toddlers and say under his breath, We teach them when they’re babies that they’re center of the world, and they spend the rest of their lives realizing they’re not. It’s true, we do it. We have to tend to them as though their world depends on it, because it does. They are so small. But so are we.

Still, we spend a lot of time working hard to keep our world spinning ’round–write the proposal, plan the meal, pick up the girls, deliver the brownies, ask him the questions, give them attention, and on it goes. We have to do these things, as they are our living, our livelihood, our art. But our living and our art can quickly cross over into our burdens even as we will them not to.

Instead of living and loving out of a place of fullness, we grasp for meaning and worth out of a place of need. Call me important! Tell me I matter! our actions cry out. There is a voice that whispers, You are and you do, but not because of all this activity.

Celebrate your smallness today. Lay back on the wide green earth and let the world spin the sun right up above you. And breathe a sigh of sweet relief as you realize you had nothing to do with it.

63 Comments · Filed Under: breathe, lifestyle, thankfulness

10 ways to make art in less than an hour

June 21, 2011

Find that extra hour or two in the day that belongs to nobody else but you and make it productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough, and magical, life-transforming things happen eventually.

-Hugh MacLeod, from Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity

It’s summer now, and these slower days bring pool bags filled with watermelon, vacations, wet bathing suits, and lots of  children. And we love to be with them, to have less structure, to do the pool and the beach and the lazy days thing. But we can’t help but wander into the still, quiet places of our imaginations. We can’t help but long for shreds of alone sometimes.

We tend to think we have to have weeks to re-charge, endless open days to plan and prepare, a retreat to re-center and re-focus. Those things will help, for sure. And if you get them, soak them up and roll around in the blessing of them. But most of us don’t have the luxury of wide open days or weekend retreats on any type of regular basis.

So what’s the alternative? Never write the book? Never plan the proposal? Never paint the living room? Ignore the artist voice?

What do we do when all the time we get is in whatever drops are leftover after wringing out the day? I wouldn’t write this if I didn’t believe it, but Hugh McLeod is right: magic happens when we take those drops and begin to fill the bucket. Or in his words, put the hours in, keep doing it, and magic happens. At first the bucket looks empty and I’m tempted to think nothing is happening. But that would be a mistake, because every drop saved is one drop closer to full. Here are some ways to fill the bucket in less than an hour.

Find the drops from your wrung-out day. Launch a relentless pursuit of the art.

Write for 30 minutes. It is not a waste of time.

Take a walk with your camera and see what you can find.

Dare to believe you have something to say but remember it’s because He said it first.

Sit in the quiet just because. A lot more may happen there than you might think.

Savor the moments to talk through the dreams, to sift through the disappointment, to pray for the miracle.

Do the work you love when the early morning lifts up her head with a smile and a high-pitched song.

Sit at the table and make your art when the evening sky fills up the yard right outside your window.

Don’t do it because you have to. Do it because you can.

Then? Open wide your eyes and see what happens. It may be the littlest things that change a life, and the magic is in the details.

65 Comments · Filed Under: art, family, lifestyle, vocation

the artist’s secret

June 14, 2011

“In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace.”

-Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

When my friend Melissa lost her mom to cancer, she says she didn’t cry much if at all. She couldn’t find the emotion to go along with the heartbreak of losing her mom. She couldn’t reach it, grab hold of it, and move it up to the surface. It was too deep. And so it came as a great surprise to her when she discovered herself in a heap of blubbering, slobbery emotion during You’ve Got Mail. You mean to tell me she could easily find tears to mourn the last days of the Shop Around the Corner but she could not manage to locate them for her mother?

image source

Yes. That is it exactly. And Madeleine L’Engle puts into words that very simple truth of being human — art makes it possible for us to remember, both the beauty and the banal, the lovely and the loss. Art numbs the wound just enough for us to be able to access the source of it, to reach down into the depths and pull it up to examine.

The beauty of art is that it separates us enough from our own pain in order to make it safe to approach. This movie, this novel, this musical, this song isn’t my story, and so I can freely let myself identify with it. And in the freedom, the tears have permission to fall. And in the tear-fall, I realize that this movie, this novel, this musical, this song holds pieces of my story after all.

Art is a gift, and the artist’s secret is that she carries in her hands the tools of a healer. You might think just the opposite, think you have nothing to share until you are whole and well and put together. We may admire your wholeness, but we can touch your brokenness. Are you still trying to talk yourself out of your art? Please don’t. We, a broken and hurting people, so desperately need it.

46 Comments · Filed Under: art, grace, lifestyle Tagged With:
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