:: desmerizing ::words sometimes have meaning

On at least two separate occasions, a friend of mine has told me that I “march to the beat of a different drum.”  Both times, I’ve resisted the pursuit of whether this was intended as complimentary or otherwise.  Mainly, this is because I have realized that I no longer care about the intended purpose when I hear things like this.   Granted, it may be easier since I doubt very much that my friend would say anything to intentionally hurt me.  Nevertheless, instead of defaulting to deciding it was derogatory, I took it as an objective statement of fact.

And I took some pride in it as well.

So much of my teenage and early adult years have been about marching in lock-step with others around me, albeit superficially.  There are plenty of reasons for this – most of them deal in some way with the blind ferocity with which I approached my then-church. This time of my life, from which I am emerging, was about blending into the crowd, playing each beat where it was expected and where each was much less noticed (imagine playing in a band where one person played notes where they weren’t expected).

Much changed when I realized my quest to blend in was becoming altogether detrimental.  I have a voice, a perspective on life, an approach to the everyday that is my own.  It has to be. I have to be.  Stepping out meant breaking step with the rhythm that I had known and had formed me.

The disorientation that I felt even when just considering that I needed to change the course of my life was overwhelming.  Much like leaving a subwoofer-endowed room, the beats that seem to pound your chest until your heart submitted and synchronized, the residual beats would often ring through. It would neither be easy nor always pleasant.  I also knew it was precisely the right thing to do.

Finding that my voice is my own and not merely an echo of a higher-up has been more liberating than any metaphor can justify.  Finding that voice to be informed, loving, graceful and accepting is surprising; near miraculous some would argue.

I’ve also discovered a vitality in the process, a rekindling of the belief that there is movement beneath the superficial waves of life that is more conducted than dictated, that there is more to explore than what can be seen or read or heard.  Encounters with food and friends are sacred.  Resources enable generosity more than they can provide comfort.  Those that remain in lock step (willingly or not) are people too, they are voices in their own right, that can be heard when listened to closely enough.

I don’t crave being different.  I don’t carry the tattoos or piercings or style that all non-conformists seem to carry.  My offbeat-ness is not about confronting “the man” or making a statement.

My offbeat-ness is who I am, the feelings I was created to have, the words and thoughts I was created to express.  My offbeat-ness is my voice being amplified over the noise; I now realize my voice has both value and an appropriate place.  My offbeat-ness is a recognition of what I truly value about life.  My offbeat-ness is a pursuit.

It’s who I am.

As a 25 year-old in 2005, I was part of a life-changing undertaking.  Only on rare occasions since then have I spoken about it or, honestly, given it much thought.  Yet, there’s not a day that goes by, some six years later, that I don’t feel or notice some effect from what I learned over those few months.  Tonight, I was reminded of it again.

At the time, I was working in a pseudo-ministry role and attended the church for which I worked.  Kristy and I both we part of a small group of young adults that looked, sounded, and acted alike and so, as was the style at the time, began meeting with them for regular Bible studies.  As we studied, we made sure (as in the words fo Cathleen Falsani) that all of the doctrinal t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.  It was important to have the correct answers.

Also in style at the time was the notion that it was OK to criticize our church, nay, even our movement as a whole for not being the change they wanted to see in the world.  They (excluding ourselves, of course) were not doing enough to help the helpless, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or save the sinner.

At this point in my history, you must understand that I had been fully won over by the truth.  I had the answers, or at the very least knew where to find them.  I could tell you with pinpoint accuracy the eternal destinations of those in a line-up in front of me.  I had it together.  Jesus may as well have slipped me a copy of the Lamb’s Book of Life.

On one particular night, however, when the fault-finding was particularly succesful, something cracked – like the first kernel of corn that explodes in the microwave.  The details are sketchy; I certainly don’t remember what part of the Bible we were studying.  All I remember is thinking that I’d had enough of the criticism and  someone saying, “Why don’t we do something?”

Astounding in its brilliance and its simplicity, I knew that “doing something” was the answer.

What developed over the course of the next several weeks and months was an utterly simple and utterly perspective altering exploit.  To the spirit of “being thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” we added the notions of warming the cold, and befriending the friendless.  On a weekly basis, a group of four regulars and several others, would load up a mini-van with hot chocolate, cups, and eventually water, blankets, and various beneficial sundries and park at the Charlotte Transportation Center.  In the center of the facility, we would set up our stations and would plainly and simply hand out hot chocolate to cold people.

In the beginning was the notion that what we were doing would eventually lead to the conversion of souls to Christianity – a priority that had been drilled into each of us from the earliest days of our faith. We knew that people needed Jesus and so the agenda was set and the bargaining chip was steaming cocoa.

When reality began to settle in – when we realized that there are answers other than “Jesus” to many of the questions that people are asking – life as we knew it began to change.

Because of “Hot Chocolate,” I learned that there are many more people out there who aren’t like me than are like me and that relying on tangible similarities to serve as the foundation and sustenance for my relationships  was a losing cause.  Instead, I learned that I can have as much in common with the crass homeless man as the people that were in much church pews.

During this time I learned that I don’t have all the answers.  I began to realize that some questions can’t have neatly packaged answers; that it’s often better than they don’t.  These are questions about life, faith, and practical realities.

What I can articulate now that I couldn’t then was the importance of relationships in our lives.  More than resources, position, status, or notoriety, relationships are the foundation for happy lives.  When these aren’t in place – when relationships begin to fracture – everything from your soul to your mind to your home is at risk.

I am tempted to say, here, that actions speak louder than words.  My hesitation though is that they can still speak a very obnoxious, holier-than-thou, Christians-are-superior message.  Instead, I think I want to say that your genuine interest and acceptance are what people sense and respond to.  When the agendas are put aside, and your mind and heart can be fully-engaged with another human being, real change, real conversation, real understanding can start to enter the equation.

While I suppose it’s completely normal, when I consider my past I often question how “I could think like that.”  It’s not an exaggeration to say that I believed that the answers I had were true and solid, that there was no room for questioning.  And at the same time, my past has prepared me with both a heart for compassion and a willingness to act that seem to be rare to find together.  I’m grateful for this.

These cold nights at the Charlotte Transportation Center sometimes seem silly when I look back and read the accounts from what seems like a completely different lifetime.  The lexicon that we used almost seems like a foreign language to me now.

Our group, which later came to be known as “Delta Force” (even our hipster name for it had the underpinnings of agenda), that started as much out of stubbornness and frustration, cemented lifetime friendships and poked holes in my water tight view of who Jesus is and how he loves.

And despite the campiness and awkwardness of our efforts, some amazing things were born.  Maybe reborn.  It’s odd now to hear names and remember people’s stories, to know which construction sites people slept at, what measures they had to take to keep their families together.

It’s comforting, though, to know that we’re all in the same boat.

If you’re interested, you can read all about our wackiness at the bus station at http://charminultra.blogspot.com.

It would be over-reaching and perhaps insulting to claim that Rob Bell changed my life.

And at the same time as I look back over the past 8 or 9 years I can’t help but admit the stark influence that his teachings have had on me.  When I first heard that a life of faith is more like a trampoline that you invite people too, that has flex and give, than it is a brick wall, I knew that this man had a take on faith that I wanted to explore.

Today, I learned that he is leaving Mars Hill.  I’m sad.  And I’m excited.

For years I’ve downloaded podcasts, I’ve followed his teachings not as a hard-nosed skeptic but as a thoughtful supporter.  I remember being disappointed when Shane Hipps came on staff at Mars Hill because it meant I would get to hear Rob less.  But, if Rob likes him…..

I’m convinced that living graciously is a better way to live.  I believe that living generously is a better way to live.  I believe that a life of faith marked by serious and unanswered questions can be as honoring to God as a life where those questions have been answered without doubt.

To Rob, and Kristin, and the family – your message is revolutionary in that “the way it was always meant to be” kind of way.  Thank you for what you’ve done.  Thank you for whatever is next.

I’ve been doing some more writing.  I nowhere near finished with this, but I wanted to post this little exchange to see what you thought:

“Why don’t you just close the dryer door?!?!” she questioned.

My wife is not easily aggravated, unless you are her husband and you are doing something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to her.  Such was the case on this fateful and memorable day.

“What does it matter?” I responded.

Like her, I am generally non-confrontational. Often, I’m the peacemaker, the arbiter, the mediator.  However, it should also be noted that I’m often accused of being stubborn.

“The lightbulb is going to burn out, and there’s just NO REASON to keep it open.”

One of the beautiful benefits of being in a long term relationship with someone is that you become intimately aware of each others character.  Here, Kristy was attempting match two pieces of rationale with my voracious need for the same.  For whatever reason, I want to know that decisions are being made, actions are being performed, and doors are being shut based on rock-solid justification.

“I’ll just replace the bulb if it burns out… It’s REALLY not a big deal.”

Apparently, my brain found a weakness in her rationale.  She needed something more watertight than that to get me to budge.

“Just close it!” she retorted.

“Why?” I crossed my arms, hardly acknowledging her latest blow as if to say, “I shall not be moved.”  She was going to need something far more powerful than that to sway me this time.

Kristy turned to walk away.  At the same time, my internal voice started it’s own little victory march with enough passion that it felt as though he had grown into a real boy and was physically patting me on the back.  Another victory for the good guys.

What I didn’t realize is that there was another bullet in the chamber.  My wife wheeled around and let a curious question fly.

“When you’re using the oven to make supper, and you take the food out when you’re done, what do you do with the door?”

My knees went noticeably weak. The hair on the back of my neck stood up tall.  My lip quivered.

“I…. I guess… I close it.”  It was the verbal equivalent of running up the white flag.  Just like that it was over.  Victory was hers once again.

In a lot of ways, what I do is greatly dependent on rationale.  If you can either justify a behavior with a reason that I agree with, or if you can connect the reason for one behavior with an existing one that I already do, then I’m almost certain to start doing it.   A similar situation exists with viewpoints, thoughts and beliefs.

That being said, for a long time, there have been a lot of things that I have done, things that I’ve participated in, even things that I’ve given a lot of my life to that simply didn’t have any good reason behind them.   There were things that I simply never questioned.

Sometime ago (probably pre-2010), I posted that one of my goals was to have an outline for a book that I had wanted to write.  If I’m honest, I don’t really understand why I’d even want to write a book in the first place, and for a time I thought “What in the world do I even have to say?”

Well, it’s nearly 2012 and I still don’t really have an solid outline, but I think I finally have a message and a clear(er) picture of what I’d like this book to be…

And I think I have a rough draft of a rough draft of chapter x.

Here it is for your reading enjoyment/critical thoughts/some combination:

====================================

My heart had been palpitating off and on, by this time, for days.  More consistent was the anxiety that, if I’m honest, had been rolling around in the pit of my stomach for months. Laying on my bed, the senseless chatter coming from the television a few feet away and the sound of my wife brushing her teeth in the next room provided the soundtrack for my prayer of distress to God.

“Dear God.  I don’t want to die.  I don’t know what’s going on here.  I don’t know what I’m doing here.  But, I need your help.  Please, God.  Just help me.”

There had been several months of this at this point.  The interesting thing about anxiety is that it’s self-reinforcing.  For me, it usually started with some physical symptoms – heart palpitations, for example.  From there, I would often be so convinced that I was going to die any minute that when I would walk my dog (Brody, the wonder Shih-Tzu), I would literally tie his leash around my wrist.  This way, when I my heart stopped in the parking lot of our apartment building, my wife would at least still have Brody to keep her company.

“You can’t keep going on like this.” Kristy, my wife, said. “Can I do anything to help? Something has to change.”  She had come back into the room and her wifey-sense was tingling, set off by my latest bout of irrationality.  She knew something was wrong.  Though experiencing these physical symptoms had become somewhat commonplace by this point, it still amazed me just how deeply in tune she was with me.

Nervously, I resolved, “I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow.  I need to figure this out.”

It may not seem like that drastic of a step to make a declaration that I was going to have a doctor look into why my heart was beating 160 times a minute.  The truth is that I was nowhere near dying (I apologize for not prepending this with SPOILER ALERT, but I assumed that since you were reading this you probably under stood that I lived long enough to at least write about it).  Granted, I had no idea what was happening or why it was happening.  In fact, I wouldn’t begin to understand what was happening for several more months.

You have to understand, though, that this was a break through.

The Kind of Kid You Love to Hate
As a child, I had a sense that I was the pride of at least three families.  In addition to being an only child until my sister was born nearly eight years later, I was the first born grandson on both sides as well.  There were loads of love and attention and it was all for me.  Later, when dozens of cousins burst onto the scene, I never got the sense that there was an less love.  This is true even today, thirty years later.

My family’s home is in a quaint, quiet fishing village with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and millions of acres of forest on the other.  I spent hours with my friends playing games, building tree houses, running wild and free in wide-open and safe spaces. It’s the kind of idealistic scene that you would expect to find in a movie about the unspoiled life until some plot twist revealed a dark and seedy under-belly.

During my school years, anything and everything was more fun that doing homework.  I suppose this is true for every kid, in every city, around the world.  The difference for me was that despite my lack of interest in doing the work my grades never suffered.  At the end of every school year, it was pretty safe to assume that I would place near the top of my class.

I was the kid that didn’t have to try because things just worked out.  I was the one that didn’t have to study for tests because I knew it all anyway.  I was the guy that sat on the math team and the english team and the public speaking team and somehow still managed to have friends.  I was the goodie-goodie who wasn’t tempted by the things that even other kids in my church groups were doing.

I was the kind of kid that people love to hate.

Most people would say that I was blessed.  I can’t disagree.  Up through my college years, something about my personality stood out and, whether or not by divine intervention, good things just fell into my lap.  Grades, scholarships, recognition, things, jobs, opportunities all came my way without me ever having to put forth much effort.  In essence, my life more resembled a Pavlovian experiment – my rewards had nothing to do with my own behavior.  Instead, my portion was completely at the whim of the great scientist in the sky.

Whether or not all of these things were blessings, the way that they were delivered was damaging.  I salivated at the thought of being highly favored in God’s eyes but when the dog food was gone, or if it never came, all I knew to do was to sit back, wipe the drool from my chin, and wait for the next blessing from the hand of God.

EKG
“Everything checks out, Mr. Smith.  You seem to be completely healthy.”  The doctor said.

Given the racing heart, sweaty palms, and somersaulting bowels the night before, I had a hard time trusting that the chart the doctor was reading wasn’t for the guy in the next room.  The Sisters of Mercy Urgent Care didn’t seem to be either Catholic, merciful, or urgent.  But it at least seemed credible, so I engaged him.

“Well, what do you think it is then?”

The doctor was probably about 50 years old, balding on the top, and bearded in the front down to about the middle of his chest.  He wore those narrow reading glasses that look like the bottom half of a pair of bifocals.

He took them off and closed my chart.

“What’s going on in your life right now?  Do you have any financial issues?

“No.” I replied, “Everything is good, my wife and I are both working.”

“Anyone in your family sick?” He opened my chart again as he said this, I’m assuming to double-check, making sure that he didn’t miss anything.

“No, everyone is fine.”

“How about work?  Tell me about that.”

At this point, it felt as though my heart had been held back long enough and it wanted to escape the confines of my chest.  It was going to do so by fracturing through my sternum.

“Work is…. work could be better.  My wife and I work together for our church and we really don’t seem to have a lot of support right now.  There’s a lot of confusion – not a lot of direction.”

The doctor began to nod that I-should-have-started-with-that-question nod.  He also smirked that either-way-we’re-going-to-bill-your-insurance-for-the-EKG smile.

Then he said, “I’m going to give you this prescription for a mild anti-anxiety drug and I want you to make an appointment to see your family doctor who will likely refer you to a counselor. Take the pills at least until you can get in to talk to someone about what’s going on.  You’ll be fine.”

He was right.

Counseling

Even though I had studied Psychology in college, I had very little opportunity to get involved with the counseling side of things, other than what was described in the text.  My school was very science heavy and had I thought about it before, I probably would have attended somewhere else.  I just happened to find myself at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

The waiting room was pretty sterile, with just a few chairs and magazines that featured local food and mountain getaways.  It was quiet.  Eventually the large door, painted the same color as the walls opened and I was called inside.

Bette (as she insisted I call her) had an office that was decorated simply and without the traditional couch that is the hallmark of counselors the world over.  It was in an old part of the city that made everything feel more quaint and genuine. She always sat in the corner chair, but let me know that I could sit anywhere I wanted.  She also would make me some lovely herbal tea from a vast collection prior to our sessions.

I assumed she wasn’t a particularly religious woman, based on her obvious comfort level with curse words.  Coming from a rich, religious tradition I wondered how this would work.

My life at this time was shrouded in a cloud.  It was not a dark, gloomy cloud of sadness.  Instead, it was just a thick, pale cloud.  It was one of uncertainly, unknowing, confusion.  Honestly, I don’t remember much of what Bette told me over those several sessions.  I just know that the cloud began to lift. In the sentiments of Johnny Nash, I could see clearly, the rain was gone.

There was one concept, however, that Bette shared with me that will forever be a mile marker in my journey.  Her insights on this will be one of those things that I teach my kids and grandkids, a cause that I will take up, a lesson that I want others to learn.

“I have another client that comes to see me.  He’s a college professor, about 45-50 years old, who has never been married.” She said.  As a 27 year-old with a mostly useless Bachelor’s degree and who had been married for three years, obviously I could relate.

“He spends most every night at a local bar.  Ladies will come by and will often pick him up.  They’ll go home.  They’ll have a fling for a few days.  Culture says that this is every man’s dream: beer and beautiful women.  But this man is depressed.”  She said. “Why do you think this is?”

In order to fully gauge my thoughts at this point, you have to understand that I was raised in a teetotaling family and was taught that alcohol in all it’s forms was evil and that sex outside of the bonds of marriage was even worse.  To me, this man was bound for the fires of hell and nothing more.

Since Bette wasn’t a Christian counselor, I thought, “Because he’s lost in sin” wasn’t probably the best response.  As an aside, it turns out that things that you have to check yourself from saying to a non-christian are probably things that you shouldn’t be saying at all.

“Uh, because he’s not finding what he’s looking for?” I sheepishly suggested, not fully understanding the point of this.

“He’s not even looking for what he’s looking for.”

Of course, I thought.  That makes perfect sense.

She continued, “Every night he goes and he sits and he waits on someone to come chat him up.  Maybe that person doesn’t come some evenings.  But, more often than not, somebody comes by, sits on the stool next to him and starts a conversation.  She may ask what he does and he probably response half-heartedly that he’s a college professor.  She might ask what he likes to do and he probably mumbles some things related to work but never really answers the questions.  Eventually, after they’re drunk and horny, they’ll go back to her place or his, they’ll have sex, break up, and the cycle will start all over again.  He never says what he wants.  He never gets to be the one pursuing the girl of his dreams.  He sits and passively waits for someone to come by and check him out.  He never pursues for himself what he wants.”

I don’t remember if either my eyes were welling with tears, my jaw was gaping to the floor, or perhaps both.  Clearly, I remember that my mind had just been blown.

Almost the entirety of my existence was marked by my passively wandering through life.  Grades, and jobs, and friends, and blessings, and life had come to my end of the bar, chatted me up, and asked if I wanted to take them home.  Usually I did.  I meandered through college because that’s what everyone else did.  I moved what still seems like halfway around the world because someone simple offered me a job.  I stayed in that job even when I was miserable simply because nothing had come along.

What’s more the things that I was happiest with in my life were the things that I actively pursued and engaged. For instance, my wife and I are together because I somehow summoned the courage to tell her that I liked her for a long time and that I just thought she should know.  In the months following that January declaration, I continued to pursue her even though she had started dating a couple of other guys off and on that Spring.

My experience with counseling has been that often it takes one mind-blowing moment to change at least some vector of your trajectory.  This moment – this reveleation – of pursuing life actively is a mile marker on my journey that I will never forget.

My appointments with Bette started in March and by September I had successfully negotiated another job in a city I loved, getting paid for something that I had enjoyed doing since ninth grade, and finding great personal success in various accomplishments.  Even though I still had no idea who I really was, I suddenly became the expedition leader.  In one afternoon, I started to understand the idea that I needed to take ownership for my journey.  My physical symptoms had vanished.  I rarely darkened the door to my medicine cabinet.

Something had changed.

This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don’t carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,
This train is bound for glory, this train.

Woody Guthrie

In the south, if you hold my beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible up against the average “Joe the Evangelical” I have no doubt that “liberal” would be the cleanest word that you would come up with.  In an age where every Christian has their own personal version of God, their own personal interpretation of what doctrines are worth believing, what ceremonies are worth practicing, and what songs are theologically acurate – I literally couldn’t care less.  Instead, when I say that God’s greatness is well beyond any of our grasps, what I’m thereby asking is “Why bother spending so much time deciding which version of God we want to hold to today?”

I read the transcript of an interview between Christianity Today and Francis Chan following Chan’s response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins.  The interviewer went on to say something to the effect of “Well, I consider myself A, but I’m really open to hearing a good argument from side B.” This illustrates how incredible frustrating Christianity is to me and how uninviting it inevitably becomes.  For those us us convinced that the great commission is about getting numbers up at our Sunday AM meeting, this is not how to do it.

Friends, until the good Lord comes back on a cloud with Gabriel’s jazz trumpet be-bopping in the distance we’re never, ever, ever going to know with any certainty the answers to these questions.

As a kid, I remember hearing about how big God is.  I remember hearing about how his love is wider than the sky and as deep as the sea.  He created the whole universe and yet he’s small enough to fit inside my heart.  Let me go on record as saying that I don’t dispute any of these claims.

What I’ve seen, as an adult, is a humanity (or perhaps a Western Christianity) that is obsessed with finding concrete answers to the questions about God in an effort to create the most (funny,appealing,powerful,destructive,scornful,angry,aloof) divine caricature.  We either lie to our children (God is in fact NOT bigger than the universe and therefore can be squeezed into our finite minds/hearts) or we don’t believe what we tell them.  Instead, we spend hours studying theology, finding the facets that best suit our caricaturized Mr. Jesus Head and dolling him up to put on display.

“My caricature can beat up your caricature.”

“No man may come to the father except by my caricature.”

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten caricature….”

Somewhere in history – most likely the 20th century – we’ve moved, unaware, into a era of faith where personal Jesuses are everywhere and unless you pledge your allegiance to my version of truth then you’re lost and evidently you’re in need of my brand of salvation.

Perhaps it’s wrong, but I think I blame Woody Guthrie.  Granted, it’s not just for him to shoulder all of the blame – but apparently, his “train don’t carry no gamblers, Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers.”

My train does.

My train is bound for glory and is carrying all kinds of wacky people.  I’m not walking the aisles checking people’s tickets – that’s not my job.  I’m not reporting rowdy behavior to the conductor.  If I’m honest, I’m not even sure where the train is going.  I don’t know what’s going to happen when we get there.  I don’t know if someone is going to get thrown out halfway down the tracks, I don’t know if people are going to stow away, and we may even stop and pick up some more stragglers, rustlers, or hustlers along the way.

I just don’t know.

I’d go as far as to say that I CANNOT know.

There are answers that will always be elusive.  I would be very cautious if you find yourself thinking, “I’ve got this answer nailed.”  It’s these moments that reduce our need for faith, for pursuit.  It’s these moment’s that reduce our longing for the unknown because it’s a little more known than it was before.  It is in the answers that we find the biggest threat to unity.

And I really, really want to be able to blame Woody Guthrie.

Tomorrow, I’m heading off for a mini-getaway before heading out of town for work after this weekend.

I burn it pretty hard, I’m realizing.  I used to think that I had it in me – where it is both the energy and desire to keep pushing through, keep producing, make some cool things.  Though, I’m not sure I’m convinced I have either any more… at least not to continue with this pace.

The most frustrating question behind the issue is “Why am I doing this?”

It isn’t necessarily that I’m approaching burn-out.  It’s not that I’m loathing pixel or press of a key.

I am, however, beginning to feel as though I’m always working.

Maybe this is over-dramatic.  If I call myself a “creative” then there are thoughts, and dreams, and (dare I say?) there is art that has to come out.  Because at least half of my time is spent at what is essentially writing software, does that negate the art that happens when I’m gazing through the photoshop window at what lives on the other side?

From May until August I wrote exactly zero entries on this blog.  My psyche suffered.  The largest contributor to my lapse of expression was that I simply took on too much and balancing all of the plates meant that something had to crash.

This is unacceptable.

And yet, even as I get ready to head out of town, to relax on the beach – I know that my mind will be on many other things.  It will be on my websites, this blog.

Perhaps, there’s room for both.  I can’t deny the creative spirit and it’s often excruciating to suppress it.  At the same time, just as we need to exhale – to share what’s in us with the world – if we are to live, we must also make time to inhale – to breathe in the people, the places, and the wonders around us.

Many people know that I fill most of the hours of my day in front of various computers.  As a web guy, I spend a lot of time designing, coding, testing, and (once every scattered guilty moment) browsing.  During much of that time, I am subconsciously aware that this path chose me.  While I can say that I actively sought out my current position, the path that led to it was one architected of primarily passive approaches to life.

I’ve often rationalized that my passivity is born out of a “laid-back” attitude.  Even better, it  is from such an abundance of blessings that the universe routinely had thrown at me that I simply chose a card from my hand and played it.

As every good card player knows, though, there are only so many aces that you can pull.  After that, it’s all about the bluff.

I’ve written about this before.  The notion that I had been relying on a passive existence was first introduced to me by a wonderful therapist in my Asheville days.  It was a milestone moment for me.  I will (quite literally) always cite that day as a moment when my life drastically shifted direction.  There was (and perhaps still is) plenty of ground to recover.

One of the struggles continues to revolve around a sense of security in my self : self-confidence, if I’m honest.  Whether it’s volunteering to sing harmonies in a band (something I’ve been doing practically my entire life) or recovering from the disappointment of being rejected for a new position, my “self” suffers a disproportionately large  and long-lasting blow.

Oddly, it’s neither a matter of a fear of failure nor a fear of embarrassment.

I used to think it was a timidness – a “Who me? Put myself out there and do that? I couldn’t do that?”  but I’m no longer convinced that this goes far enough in describing the situation.

Instead, it feels like I have a need to be pursued.  For some strange reason, I seem to ask people to prove to me that I’m at all important to them.  I don’t know where this comes from.

More importantly, this approach doesn’t seem to make that much sense in my adult life.  I wonder if this comes from my background in church communities where you often had to beg and/or plead with people to get them to volunteer.  Now, of course, this seems dysfunctional.  In a thriving community, people readily, willingly, and confidently step up to fill the needs.  In this scenario, you aren’t defined by a functionality that you can provide but by the leadership that you’re able to show – by the personality that you bring to the table.

My communal past (not just my church community past) more resembles the story line in which my friend only calls when a computer needs fixing.  I get frustrated with these “functional friendships” (as I call them) and yet and I give in and fix the computer.  Without fail.  Every time.

It’s not because I’m being pursued – but it provides the illusion of pursuit.  Instead, what is really happening is that my skills are being pursued, my knowledge, some small, compartmentalized component of myself.  Here, my self is the vehicle that delivers the technical knowledge; my personality and being are simply along for the ride.

Now, as I begin to emerge from my cocoon of self-doubt, I’m learning that pursuit requires reciprocation: I’m only going to take so many steps towards you; if you don’t take a step or two in my direction, I’m assuming that you’re not ready, you want nothing to do with me, or you think I’m a creep.

Therefore, consider this an apology.

(To most of you,) I don’t think you’re creeps – and I want to learn more about you, enjoy dinner with you, and help you fix your computer.  It’s just that I’m so used to living my life in such a way that I waited for people and things to come to me that I’m not used to having to step forward myself in return.  It’s the classic, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

And so, to quote, Stuart Smalley:

I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!

But, does any of that really matter?