Life Plans

Ten years ago I made a life plan. Really, more of a to-do list of things I expected to do by the time I reached 31. It was part of a spiritual retreat my college campus ministry did in April 2005, and I came across this list the other day. (It’s the same list from which I pulled my “FiveYear Plan” that I blogged about…five years ago.) The 10 year plan reads as follows: 

• have kids and/or be having kids 
• be upper level management with a recreation department 
• definitely owning a home 
• $70K/year income (???) 
• visit Africa 
• have knee surgery

Those of you who know me will be able to tell which of those can be crossed off. But we’ll get back to assessing the list later.

Last Saturday two people knocked on my door, obviously from some local religious institution although I couldn’t tell you where. They were a pleasant couple who didn’t ask if I’d “found Jesus” (as though he were lost!) but who simply invited me to the “worldwide celebration of the remembrance of Jesus’ death next Friday.” (Their words.) They gave me a little track that told about the trial and death of Jesus and had some facts and figures about how we’re all sinners and Jesus died to save us from certain doom. I thanked them, because let’s face it, even though I deeply disagree with their theology and even question their practice, I’m certainly not the one ringing doorbells at 9:00am on a Saturday to speak about the power of my convictions. I’ll give them their props there. I told them I was already involved in a church, but thanks anyway and have a nice day.

It wasn’t until days later that I was able to articulate my theological discomfort with the emphasis of remembering Jesus death. Sure, Good Friday is an important day in the Christian calendar, but the information they gave me—and other encounters I’ve had recently and in the past—said nothing about the Resurrection. They don’t mention Jesus coming back. For me this is odd at best and disturbing at worst because, quite frankly, Friday doesn’t mean anything without Sunday. Death doesn’t mean anything without Resurrection.

It doesn’t take anyone special to die. Anyone can do it; in fact, we all do. No one gets out of this alive. It didn’t take a special divine act to nail a guy to a cross. It didn’t take an act of God to have him die, either. The important part of the story is that Jesus didn’t stay dead. Now that’s a nifty trick. That would take something special, something unique, something…divine. Everyone dies, but not everyone refuses to stay dead.

And maybe, if you stretch it, the real miracle is not only that Jesus was willing to die but that he was also willing to come back. People say death is scary. Death isn’t scary, it’s pretty straight forward: you cease to be as you once were. Life, however, is frickin’ terrifying. Life is wildly unpredictable and full of challenge and change and turmoil; it’s painful and seemingly random and no one’s in nearly as much control as they think. But life is also spontaneous and full of opportunity and growth and joy; it’s beautiful and vast.

It doesn’t take much to believe Jesus died. It takes a lot to believe he didn’t stay dead but instead chose to come back to this mess of a life.

Which gets me back to my ten year plan. I haven’t done a thing on there. For some of this I’m grateful (managed to not have knee surgery,) for some I’m not (I really would like to own my own home,) and for some I’m comfortable still waiting (I’m happy borrowing my friends’ kids when my maternal instincts kick in.) Quite honestly, it would be easy to die to the despair of having done jack-all of what I thought I would do; to wallow in the misery of lost chances and forgotten dreams. It wouldn’t take anything special. But this is all life. It’s been messy and painful and wildly unpredictable, but it’s also been joyful and fun and beautiful.

No, I haven’t done a thing on my “to-do list,” but I’ve done some other fantastic things I never dreamed to put on there in the first place.

So yeah, Jesus died. But he also came back to life, and back to live. So I haven’t done any of what’s on my ten year plan, so what? I’ve done more. And this is life. I’ll keep coming back as long as I can and see where it takes me. 

Love and Ice Picks

In the continuing vein of having a “happy not crappy” Lent (see my post on “Giving Up Lent”) I’m writing about stuff that makes me happy. This story makes me extremely happy. But first, let me paint you a picture of what life has been like for the past few days.

I live in East Tennessee. It’s currently unseasonably cold here. Like, break-out-the-waffle-weave-longjohns, stock-up-on-firewood, freeze-your-nose-hairs-together cold. It hasn’t gotten above 20 degrees in a week (which for us is cold) and the windchill has put the temperature repeatedly into single digits. As I write this—sitting by the fireplace—it is currently 5 degrees with a windchill of -8. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, that’s cold. Our people and our infrastructure just aren’t built to handle this kind of cold.

All this weather has come because of some “arctic blast” which brought snow with the cold. The same system that’s been pounding the Northeast quadrant of the US finally made its way south. However, due to a nice “warm” front pushing up from the Gulf, here in East Tennessee we didn’t just get snow. We got ice. We got sleet. We got a day of freezing rain followed by snow. This means everything is coated in ice with about an inch or two of snow on top of that. School has been closed for a week, businesses are running shortened hours, and TVA (our electric company) has asked everyone to turn off non-essential stuff to try to conserve power. It’s been…fun.

Despite all this, my mother has been hard at work. Her office is also her home so there’s none of this “Oh sorry! I can’t get to work! I’m snowed in at the house!” business for her. Her car has been sitting in the driveway for four days where she parked it upon getting home from the grocery store just before the icy portion of the arctic blast hit. She’s been hard at work. Her car’s been accumulating various forms of freezing precipitation.

This morning, she was scheduled to leave for a weekend getaway with her sisters. This would involve chiseling her car out of the glacier it had become. Two days ago, it took me half an hour to carve my car out of the ice, a feat which involved a snow brush, an ice scraper, a small ice pick, and a few swear words. (Side note here: the main roads have been clear for days, and the sun has been shining, so driving in general is not a crazy death-wish adventure. Driving is fine as long as you take it slow and allow extra time. And you’re not trying to take a loaded school bus down back county roads.)

Needless to say, Mom was not looking forward to finding her car. But here’s where the happy comes in. As I shuffled, pajama-clad, into the living room sipping my second cup of coffee, some movement caught the corner of my eye. I walked to the window looking out over the driveway. And there was my father. Jeans tucked into his boots, ski jacket zipped up to his chin, scarf wound round his face, toboggan cap pulled low over his ears, looking for all the world just one red snow suit away from being Ralphie’s little brother (“I can’t put my arms down!”) painstakingly clearing off my mother’s car. He chipped methodically away at the ice around the doors, scraped the windows, and pried the truck loose so Mom could load it. He started the engine and put the heater on full blast so it would warm up. He even turned on the seat warmer.

It occurred to me, as I watched my father carve a sedan out of an ice block on a negative-8-degree morning to help prepare for a trip he wasn’t going on, that this was love. True love was right here in the driveway. And it was holding a small ice pick.

My parents just celebrated their 40^th anniversary this past December. They bought each other a card and let me take them out for a quiet dinner, but nothing more. They all but forgot about Valentine’s Day, and rarely—if ever—do they partake in mushy-gushy romantic stuff. Their idea of “date night” is to order a pizza and watch DVRed episodes of Blue Bloods and White Collar, which they do with seemingly tedious regularity. I often roll my eyes at their predictability, and yet, I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Love isn’t a sappy card or heart-shaped chocolate. It’s not all passion and romance all the time. It’s not even saying, “I love you” for the first, fifth, or thousandth time. Love is being able to rely on someone with almost tedious regularity. Love is chipping your wife’s car out of an inch of ice on a cold, windy morning without being asked to do so, but doing so because you want to.

It’s clear to me that 40 years together hasn’t even begun to quell the love my parents have for each other. This is sometimes mystifying, sometimes intimidating, and always inspiring. And definitely makes me happy. 

Giving Up Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday. It is the day in the various manifestations of the Christian faith where followers of Christ traditionally choose to give something up for the 40 days between now and Easter Sunday. This is typically a time for spiritual reflection, a time for people to give up a distraction in their lives in order to get closer to God. The idea is that if we’re not doing something else, we are actively trying to seek out what God would have us do. This practice is supposed to represent Christ’s time in the wilderness, where, according to the Christian scriptures, Christ spent 40 days in the Judean desert fasting from food and drink, sitting in the dirt, being tempted by Satan, and being served by angels. It’s really not a bad idea, but I’ve never been particularly good at it.

My faith tradition doesn’t have much to say about “fasting” in its various forms for Lent. If you want to, fine. If you don’t want to, that’s okay as well. I gave up chocolate one year (my friends made me swear to never do it again,) and one year I tried giving up biting my nails. I tried adding in painfully honest journaling, and I’ve attempted a devotional a time or four. Each time I felt there was something missing, something I wasn’t doing right. I felt less like I was getting closer to God and more like I was fighting with myself (which I do enough without any holy season’s help, thank you very much.) As I was reflecting on today’s multitude of Facebook and Twitter posts—“What are you giving up for #Lent ?”—it suddenly struck me what it is about this season that makes me feel a little…lost.

The 40 days of Lent are supposed to mark Christ’s time in the wilderness, but how do you faithfully remember someone’s time in the wilderness when you often feel that your whole damn life is spent in the wilderness?

Now, I don’t mean to say that I feel lost and directionless and that I have no momentum in my life. I have a great church community, wonderful friends, fantastic family, and a meaningful career; but I do have WAY more questions than answers and I often feel like I can’t see the forest for the trees. The good part is, though, this is okay.

I’ve been realizing for some time that somewhere along the way I got the idea that being a good follower of Jesus meant that I would feel mowed over most of the time; as though doing God’s will meant I should feel like I was plodding uphill in the snow wearing 60 pounds of gear headed for a destination I despised. That if I was enjoying something it must be inherently wrong. This is not only bad theology and mildly delusional, but is also absolutely incorrect.

Yes, God calls us to do hard things that will feel like we’re plodding uphill in the snow, but God will also ask us to do fun things and amazing things and hopefully we’ll get to feel like we’re making a difference in the world. Jesus didn’t say, “I came that you may have a life of misery and awfulness.” He said, “I came that you may have life and have it to the full!” Yes, “to the full” means that you have to take crappy with happy, but there should also be plenty of happy with the crappy.

Which gets me back to Lent. I’m giving it up. Sort-of.

I finally decided that if Lent makes you feel crappy, you’re probably doing it wrong. Practices in Lent are supposed to make you feel closer to God, and if I read the book correctly getting closer to God should not make you feel crappy. A lot of emotional reactions are associated with meetings with the divine—everything from cower-in-a-corner scared to dance-naked-in-the-streets joyous—but crappy isn’t one of them.

So, what am I giving up for Lent? I’m giving up crappy. I’m giving up feeling like I’m living wrong if I feel joyful. I’m giving up assuming that God wants me plodding uphill. Sometimes life just happens. As Frederick Buechner said, “Welcome to the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”

In order to give up the crappy, I’m taking on the happy. I’m taking on impromptu dance parties to my favorite song-of-the-moment. I’m taking on sending encouraging texts to friends. I’m taking on not feeling guilty for naps. I’m taking on more runs. I’m taking on writing blog posts about what I’m taking on in an effort to remain accountable to the universe. I’m taking on getting closer to God.