BEN : Fear is a powerful thing . . . .

Fear is a powerful thing. 

      I don’t remember when I first time I experienced fear. I’m just now seeing evidence of fear in my two year old, so I must have been very young when I was afraid for the first time. It was long enough ago that what I’m afraid of has become deeply embedded in who I am, yet fear is not part of the equation of who I want to become.
       Part of this business of making a Rule for our life is outlining our lives as they are today into four quadrants: work; prayer; rest; and community. The order of the catagories is of little concern while the four categories themselves are of paramount significance. Once you’ve divided the things you do in your life into the designated quadrant, you rate how faithful you are to each item as well as identify how important each item is. This helps reveal the contrast between what we are faithful at doing and what we believe to be important. The greater the contrast between the two, the more likely what we are doing is in conflict with what we are called to become.
       As I look at my Rule, the next couple of steps seem to paralyze me. I’m being asked to identify what I’m being drawn to and what do I need to eliminate in order to shape a practice for my life that cultivates who I am being called to be. To be completely honest, I’ve been parked here for weeks.
      The hard part is that nothing I’m doing is bad. Nonetheless, I have to let some things go. I wonder to myself why such a simple task seems so difficult. A friend once told me that discernment is never a choice between good or bad; that’s easy. Rather, discernment is always a choice between two goods.
      While I have sat at these steps for weeks, I have been paying particular attention to the fears that seem to be paralying my ability to continue to move forward. If I were to name them, they would be the fear of being insignificant and the fear of being destitute. Both of these fears are very powerful. I have never been able to name them before, but I’m beginning to understand that these fears are the reason I find it nearly impossible to justify taking anything off the list.
      What if I make the wrong decision? What if I choose the eliminate the one thing that will propel me into all that which I have been called to be? What if I make a decision and end up in a place that is unfamiliar or worse — unsatisfying?
      It seems irrational, which is probably true of most fear. Fear is grounded in perception and emotion; therefore, it must be irrational. The catch is that if I separate my emotions from my rational thinking, I separate myself and will surely leave out something important. A Rule is meant to bring our lives in balance not give us another reason to ignore ourselves so that we might then embody the expectations of others.
      I don’t remember the first time I experienced fear, but I know that fear is the silent barrier between the person I am today and who I am being called to become.

BEN : It was not so much . . .

It was not so much the falling asleep at the wheel and wrecking my car as it was that my young son was in the back seat at the time. We were both unharmed. And considering the encounter my vehicle had with the concrete running parallel to us, the car was relatively unharmed too. I’m grateful we are all OK.
      By the grace of God, my young son never woke up. To my knowledge he has no recollection of the event. I will never forget the sound of the tires popping and metal scraping that woke me from my inopportune slumber.
      I pulled the car, pulsating between two flat tires and two good tires, into the parking lot of an elementary school. I immediately called my wife who, upon arrival, ensured our child was safe and sound. She then looked at me in that quiet voice and said, “I hope it was worth it.”
      I recently took on an extra project at work. It is one of those projects that when they come, you say yes. They don’t come often, so I gladly embraced the opportunity when it presented itself. What she was referring to was the fact that I had been pushing myself beyond my limits the last two months.
      She had been warning me for weeks; I had simply dismissed her concerns.
      In my usual style, I invested more time and energy than I had to give. I was running on a deficit of sleep, only averaging about three hours a day. As my wife gently picked up our child and carried him over to her car to take him home to finish his afternoon nap in the safety of our home and his bed, it occurred to me that she had been right all along. No project or opportunity was worth this.
      When you talk about becoming all that the One Who whispered me into being wants me to become, I stumble and stutter. I seem to substitute what I do for who I am. It’s strange that as often as I was asked ‘who do I want to be?’ growing up, I never really answered the question. The question I answered was ‘what do I want to do?’
      These are two entirely different questions. One is temporal, pivoting on circumstance; the other is eternal, existing within and beyond time and space.
      In that moment, in that parking lot, I began to know that nothing I did, no title I earned, no project I completed really mattered. I am a husband, father, son, and brother. And to answer my wife’s question, no, it wasn’t worth it.
      So it is in the posture of Lent, with my hands open to let go and to receive, where I hope to find the power of the resurrection in another new beginning. Borrowing from the Benedictine tradition, I will write a Rule for my life, a guide that will help me stay focused on my being and prevent my doing from getting in the way.

ROBERT : Life is not a problem . . . .

'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.’ Thomas Merton wrote that. I wish I had.
      In fact, I just wish I had heard it when I was young and wrestling with what I might be if I ever grew up. I spent a lot of years living in the tension between what I wanted to do with my life and what I thought the One Who made me wanted me to do with my life.
      I assumed, like a lot of Church folks do, that what God really wanted was for me to do or be something that I did not want to do or be. And I figured that the trick was to correctly guess what that was so that God would be happy enough to bless my efforts at least, no matter how unhappy the whole thing made me.
      I knew that I wanted to be a writer when I was thirteen years old. I did not tell anyone though, because I thought God wanted me to be a publisher like my father and his father before him. And like everyone around just assumed that I wanted to be as well.
      The Church folks thought it was what I should be, my folks thought so, the grownups that I counted on for advice thought so too. In the absence of a burning bush or a brother who could make snake out of a rod, I just figured God thought that was the plan as well.
      So for most of my life, I made choices about my career under the assumption that God did not really want me to be what it was that I secretly wanted to be the whole time.

Here is the mystery part —
      For twenty years I spent my hours and days and energy and love trying to do work that I did not like a fair amount of the time.
      I thought I was being a good guy by doing God’s will even though I really wanted to do and be something else altogether. I thought I was at least going to earn a reward in heaven. God thought I was just being prepared to be what it was that I had been intended to be all along.
      That secret wish that no one else knew was not something that I made up on my own. It was whispered into me before I was even born, whispered into me by the One Who made me.
      I stumbled onto this wondrous little mystery while lying flat on my back in a room in a psychiatric hospital. I had gone there to recover from twenty years of depression that in many ways was deeply connected to the wrong assumptions that I made about what God’s dream for me might actually be.
      Living your mystery got you waylaid by a candle and some silence. I got three weeks in a psych ward.
      I would not complain too much if I were you.