God is conspiring in our favor.
A woman living in transitional housing on the west side who lost her house to a fire, and everything in it. Yet, her life is now the richest it’s ever been. Oddly enough, she always says.
A 43-year-old man with grown kids who discovered his marriage wasn’t all it seemed to be these years, but post-divorce he’s found out what it means to be loved unconditionally for the first time.
A college friend who moved to a foreign country to do amazing work, but has never felt so alone. A hole in his heart as he describes it. The process has taught him what it really means to trust and be in a relationship with God.
A young woman who came out one year ago, forcing her out of her lifelong church. Twelve months later she’s grasps better than ever what the real church is, not walls but love. And she’s found so much of it in her life now.
Not to say that God does or doesn’t ‘put us through’ these things, I’m not sure that even matters. But if He is for us during our worst of circumstances, who can be against us anymore?
Franklin D Roosevelt once said that the freedom from fear is one of the four essential human freedoms. (Go ahead and ignore the grounds on which he said this, it’s besides the point for now.) But according to my Facebook, the freedom from fear is likely the most under-exercised of freedoms we have.
It started as a fear of the dark. The fear of losing a parent in a supermarket, or at the mall. The fear of not fitting in at school. The fear of God, often put into us by losing a parent at the supermarket or mall. The fear of not being liked as much as our friends, whatever that meant at the time.
As we grew taller, so did our fears. Not because of anything that happened to us, but just because that’s how life is. We see that other people have fears, and we somehow, maybe in a need to help them, absorb their anxieties. The fear of losing our parents to a tragic accident or Alzheimer’s or some wildly-envisioned scenario. The fear of not being able to stand out in our career. The fear of not being as successful as our friends, whatever that means.
When I was barely old enough to see up over the dashboard, we crammed into the widest car any of the grown-ups owned. Usually it was my granny’s beloved Buick LeSabre, which was almost wider than her garage. If the car was built for five, we’d fit seven.
We’d stack ourselves until the level of comfort was reasonably questioned. Then we’d buckle in and drive out of the darkened driveway with headlights pointed towards our neighbors’ houses. Unless we couldn’t buckle in, in which case I just grabbed mom’s seat belt and held on tight. Hoping for the best was our safety net.
Each December, we always packed into that car. It was the annual tour of Christmas lights before it was ‘the thing to do’. Mom and Jess had spent hours rummaging the newspaper and NewsChannel5 with a running list of all the must-sees inside a driveable radius. Sometimes they even heard through the grapevine (ahem, from the church ladies) that there was one rather smallish house that had been completely covered from mailbox to backyard doghouse in an elaborately computer-programmed sequencing of lights that portrayed an entire narrative. And somehow it was always for a man or a girl or a 3-year-old boy who had some terribly awful disease. Most usually cancer.
His family or neighbors made him the display to raise money or smiles or maybe it was for prayers.
As we gawked at what seemed like a billion tiny lights, we secretly were afraid that one day we’d be that man or that girl or that 3-year-old boy and we’d be dying. And someone would need to build a Christmas lights show to cheer us up, and to help us forget that we were withering away.
But it wouldn’t work.
Because we were afraid of dying and we knew when we finally almost did, we’d be expecting a monumental front yard display of affection bidding us farewell, like Hong Kong’s New Years. But that particular year that we were prepared to die would have been a bad recession, and the nice man and nice woman who were set to host our tribute on their house would certainly decide that the electric bill was just too high and they would need to pull the plug. Surely, we’d understand.
And we’d end up dying in the dark. Add it to the list of our fears.
We feared getting the same diseases, sometimes talking ourselves into panic attacks, not realizing that we already had the worst of them. The disease that is fear. Now pictured as the fear of growing older, or the lesser fear of dying. The fear of being alone. The fear that decisions that we made yesterday, or last week, or last year have somehow led us to a place that isn’t quite what we expected. That they now haunt us as we’re running out of time.
Not realizing that everyone has these same fears, despite phase or circumstance. We had big plans to conquer the world by thirty. Instead the world has us in this chokehold of angst.
Eventually I traded the holiday lights for the glow of Times Square, an all-season alternative. But nothing could or will ever replace the colorful glimmer that comes from Woodway in the middle of December. Sometimes I doubt whether my memories actually describe what really happened. But I write them down anyways, because they remind me of how I feel.
Grateful.
Now when the winter days are long and filled with a creeping anxiety, I think back to all those lights. I think about how each year, some things changed. But more, how they remain the same. About how each year brings a new fear they say should weigh us down. And yet, how each time, I’m shown a larger undeserved grace. A grace that never ceases to surprise me when it shows up.
Never something I’ve earned. But I do think it’s something my parents taught me to uncover within any circumstance, a certain faith that we’re gonna be okay even if today we’re not. You can’t expect that life will be easy or always the most fun.
But you know as well as I do, easy doesn’t equal happiness. And true joy looks more like vitality, not pure bliss. Life thrives through growth, not getting everything you want.
So, this new year when I’m blueprinting my intentions, I’ll remind myself that there are no wrong choices. No real fears to keep me cowering down.
Of course, it’d be easier to make a paper fortune teller that could give us a blindly chosen answer. Or if all those times we played M.A.S.H. as a kid had really decided our future. Mansion, married to Josh Hartnett, 12 kids, and a Librarian.
To drive around the neighborhood, or to stay in and watch movies instead. To start a new relationship, or to get better at being single. To move to New York, or to stay put in Nashville. In the end, nothing is a wrong decision. There are only those dreams which we choose to not fully chase. So no matter your decision, don’t beat yourself up, or sentence yourself to an infinite period of indecision.
I used to love the choose your own adventure books. Go to page 76 if you want him to take the bridge instead of a boat. What a stressful type of reading now that I think about it, that we might hold the fate of the characters in our very hands. But of course we didn’t care. If we didn’t like the ending, we’d just redo it all again.
Real life doesn’t have redos. But neither does it need them. The lessons we need to learn can be devoured with the taste of any circumstance. It’s up to us to find the moral of the story.
If we truly believed that there are no wrong choices, only different ways to grow deeper into ourselves, I believe our lives would be dramatically different. More enjoyable, and probably more successful, too.
If 2014 taught me anything, it’s surely that God has rigged this thing called life for our benefit. Not that we might be the smartest, or richest, or most beautiful, most popular, and surely not the best at tennis.
Instead, He’s fixed it so that we might love each other, through thick and thin. When our minds are strong, and when they aren’t as well. When it’s easy to love each other, and especially when it’s not. When we’ve had a similar experience, and when we can’t relate at all. He’s rigged it so that when we’re finally worn out and realize we can’t do it by ourselves, we’ll figure out how to finally trust. There is such opportunity in this world, too much room to breathe to be suffocated by fear.
One day, when I’m done running, I hope to plop down into that field that Rumi so fondly talks about: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
It’s easy to get lost in all that could go wrong when we think about the future. But in this moment, this day, and for as many days as I can remember, I choose to focus on the grace I’ve been so mercifully given already. That feels right.
Happy 2015, y'all!