Humbling

I Will Not Should On Myself

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

It’s 45 minutes before my alarm. I’m awake. There’s no hope of my falling back asleep. Some of you lucky good-sleep people would be able to, but not me. Instead, I get this:

I should do my devotions.

I should get out of bed and do a Twenty Minute Win of writing before I need to get everyone else up.

I should do some yoga. A few sun salutations would work this crick out of my neck and ease the stiffness in my lower back. And it would counteract the complete lack of exercise from the weekend.

I should get to the gym or hop on my bike more in the next two weeks. I’ve got that family reunion coming up and I’m going to have to be in a bathing suit in front of young cousins who look adorable in their bikinis.

I should make a grocery list so I can go straight to the store after taking my son to the orthodontist and then school.

I should get up so I can get lunches ready before I have to get the kids up (yes, my kids still have school).

I should get up and do my Morning Pages. I’m supposed to do them first thing in the morning, before I’ve had time to filter myself. That time is now.

I should bag all this stuff so I can make the kids eggs for breakfast and start their day out right.

What did I actually do?

I lay in bed thinking about all these shoulds until there was only time to make the kids’ lunches and make myself a cup of tea before going upstairs to announce, “Cold reality is back — wake up!” The kids had Frosted Flakes for breakfast. I never did my Morning Pages, nor did I do a 20 Minute Win. I did take a kid to the orthodontist, finish the laundry, do the grocery shopping, drove 40 minutes either way to attend my Artist’s Way group (having not done the Morning Pages nor all my reading), browsed Facebook and Twitter, attended the school sports banquet, called my parents, played a little online Boggle, finally did my devotions (at 10:45 p.m.), and started this blog post.

Other shoulds that floated through my head over the course of the day.

I really should eat the crust of my second 1/2 piece of toast. Then again, there are oh so many people who say I shouldn’t eat toast because the carbs are making me unhealthy, but I think I should be okay because it’s whole grain toast and I really like vegetables and fruits and quinoa and I eat them, too. (Not to mention that the last time I went totally gluten-free I lost 12 pounds in two weeks, but I was constipated for 3 months, which made it officially Not Worth It.)

I should figure out when I can get to the gym this week, because I keep missing my regular classes for other business. I miss cutting loose in Zumba; going on the treadmill is really not the same.

I should get a Zumba DVD so I can do it at home when I want.

I should sign the kids up for their final two camps that I have already promised them they are attending.

I should read and comment on my friends’ blogs. I did read, but I didn’t comment — commenting more was one of the goals I set for myself after the writer’s retreat two weekends ago. So I should get back on the wagon and comment.

I should stop playing online Boggle.

I should tackle my home in-box.

I should work on my synopsis and revamped query letter for It Is You. And go back to my agent research. And do more agent research.

I should stop using those packaged face wash cloths and just wash my face with cleanser and water again.

I should watch my son brush his teeth so he does a better job and the orthodontist doesn’t get on our case anymore.

I should vacuum. This floor is getting crunchy.

I should give the printed manuscript to my friend who has a friend who is a reader for a publisher.

A Should Vacation

And then a friend sent me the image at the top of the post.

I thought of all my shoulds. Some of them are actionable items. Many of them, actually. Others come from outside, societal pressures and not from a personal commitment. Still others are based on daydreams about the kind of life I could live. To take a vacation from telling myself what I should be doing sounded lovely and freeing.

But then … what would a should vacation actually be like? I love that image of the woman caught mid-leap. It’s inspiring and makes me smile. I love to leap. But would I want to live a life free of shoulds? Even for a day?

The more I think about it, the more I connect it to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the idea being that we wouldn’t have strife with each other, if only we didn’t have countries, religion, and possessions to mess us up.

It turns out that I’m too much of a Calvinist to buy that. I think we’d find different reasons to hate each other and kill each other.

Besides, each of those concepts is a mixed bag of benefit and detriment. Yes, countries invade other countries, and teach their citizens that they’re the best kind of people on earth (and all other kinds of people are clearly not the best kind), and discriminate against those in their own country who are not “the right kind.” But countries also learn how to negotiate, how to take others’ needs into account. They can hurt more, but they can also help more. They provide a framework to meet people’s needs and respond to emergencies (as large as a tornado and as small as a house fire). They can inspire people to greater acts of generosity and deeper feelings of unity.

Religion has and does inspire hatred, an us vs. them mindset; it provides fuel for bullies and inspires war. But it also teaches us about love and sacrifice and fuels compassion and challenges us to act outside our comfort zones. It insists on justice for the oppressed, hospitality towards everyone, generosity to those on the margins. It gives us a reason to be one.

Possessions is a harder sell. It’s easy to see the problems of greed, of idolizing stuff. The only deeper benefits of stuff I can think of have to do with attitude: when we have an attitude of abundance (even if we don’t have very much actual stuff or not as nice stuff as those people over there), we will be generous, we will share.

My shoulds are a mixed bag, too. Some I really do need to make happen, either because they are important to the smooth running of my family, or because they tie into my deep dreams and visions for what I want to do with my life. They spur my discipline and move me beyond doing merely the good-for-now, the whatever’s-in-front-of-me. I don’t want to drop my awareness of these things, not even for a day.

So instead of not should-ing on myself today*, I will practice self-compassion. When a “should” comes, I will weigh it. Some things will be allowed to stay. But for other shoulds, I’ll talk to myself like I would to a friend who’s being too tough on herself, “Oh honey, give yourself a break on that one.”

It should be noted that I still have not vacuumed.

What shoulds will you drop today? Which will you keep?

 

* Is anyone else hearing echos of those KMart ads, “ship my pants,” and “big gas sale”?

 

 

Practice, Practice, Practice

~ Natalie Hart ~ 12 Comments

I’m going to say this straight out, rather than ease you and me into it, and possibly lose some of you in the process: I believe that God communicated with me with words.

It was last fall, just as I was realizing that all the work I’d put into the David and Saul story was coming to nothing. There were a couple of rejections yet to arrive, but most of them had come in with no requests for more material. My queries were dead on arrival. Even the two publishing contacts I’d made in person came to nothing, as well. Not “no’s,” but nothing; no communication at all. I’d been so hopeful. This was the project that could really go somewhere. It felt so different from any of the other work I’d done, better, right-er. It was the idea I’d been praying for, the idea that brought together so many of my passions. And then zilch.

So I went outside to do some raking and complaining to God. And then this message filled me (I say that because I didn’t hear an audible voice, just a strong impression of these specific words):

“Just because my hand is on you, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.”

On the one hand, this is confirmation: God’s hand is on me.

On the other hand, it’s going to be hard.

God is rarely this clear with me. When he’s communicated something specific before, it’s subject to interpretation. It’s more usual for God to communicate with me by what I call piling on: the same word or idea coming at me from everywhere. Recently it’s been the word “practice” — prayer practice, writing practice, Pilates practice, spiritual practice, practice, practice, practice. A good friend who is a spiritual director and a poet is the one who started it: “That’s why we call it a practice, because we’re not very good at it yet.”

Because I’m not very good at it. Yet.

Indeed, the book project I’d been so dejected about: there was a big hole in it. I needed my winter of whine to make me realize it. So I put in the work this spring. Writing practice.

I recently added something to my prayer practice. Most days, I write my prayers, freeform, but after my friend the spiritual director/poet recited the following prayer at book club and I cried my way through the whole thing, I knew I had to add it. It speaks hard to me as a writer, impatient for success, for publication. For (dare I say it) validation.

The author is fascinating, as well, and I plan to look into his life in more detail: he was a Jesuit paleontologist during the first half of the 20th century. He studied evolution and explored the spiritual implications of that scientific work. Look for something about him in the future here at won*der.

For now, here is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer:

Above all, trust the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on
the way to something unknown,
something new,
and yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability —
and it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually —
let them grow,
let them shape themselves,
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time (that is to say, grace and
circumstances acting
on your own good will)
will make them tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense
and incomplete.

There are so many moments in this prayer that pierce me. “the slow work of God.” “And so I think it is with you.” “his land is leading you.” “accept the anxiety.” “in suspense and incomplete.”

This is hard.

But I’m practicing. This past weekend I stepped out big time to attend a writer’s retreat, the Renew and Refine Retreat for Writers. It was small. Fewer than 20 people. There would be no hiding. I was anxious. Okay, I was terrified. I would have to put myself out there as a writer, with other writers. But I accepted the anxiety and went and met wonderful people. We laughed and cried and prayed and worked together in the kitchen and ate very, very well. I was so deeply encouraged by my time with them, both specifically (after I read my work) and generally, as kindred spirits driven/called to work out our faith and our lives in words that we are driven/called to share. I hope I was able to encourage even one person there as much as I was.

So I’m moving ahead with a little more courage than I was before. Revising my materials. Getting ready to send out It Is You again.

Practicing my trust of the slow work of God. His hand is on me. But it isn’t going to be easy.

What are you practicing? What might accepting the anxiety give you the courage to do?

 

 

 

Rest: It doesn’t always mean what we think it means

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

Early Christians “burned with energy, but did not burn out.”

My minister said that in his Pentecost Sunday sermon and, oh, did that strike me. I am certain I’m not the only one out there who’s gotten burned out from church work.

I’ve cried on the way to church, telling God that he had to take over and make that day’s children’s worship go well because I had nothing left in me to give — and had to do that for months on end. I’ve yelled at my kids because I was so stressed out about how much I had to do at church that morning. I’ve resented the very things that I loved doing and either railed at or withheld myself from people I loved because my burdens felt way too heavy.

After a year of soldiering on during a particularly rough patch, I blew up at someone who didn’t deserve it. It couldn’t have been clearer that, however I was trying to handle my situation, I was struggling. Nope. Not struggling. Failing.

I was like Winnie the Pooh, who hadn’t paid attention to what he was doing while he ate all of Rabbit’s honey until he got so big that he got stuck in the door hole:*

Bear began to sigh, and then found he couldn’t because he was so tightly stuck; and a tear rolled down his eye, as he said: “Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?”

I was a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness and I saw no way to move myself forward or backward. So I met with a spiritual director, whose gentle yet firm direction was exactly what I needed. One of the things she said to me was that God was promising me rest. Which made me cry. I was so overwhelmed. Rest was just what I needed.

But how could I rest? I was the mother of two young elementary-aged children, I was looking for work outside the home for the first time in several years, I was still in charge of both the children’s worship program as well as any dances that happened at church, and the year-long project I’d helmed wasn’t truly over yet, since we hadn’t spent all the money. Where was the opportunity for rest?

So for a week Christopher Robin read that sort of book at the North end of Pooh, and Rabbit hung his washing on the South end. . . and in between Bear felt himself getting slenderer and slenderer. And at the end of the week Christopher Robin said, “Now!”
So he took hold of Pooh’s front paws and Rabbit took hold of Christopher Robin, and all Rabbit’s friends and relations took hold of Rabbit, and they all pulled together….
And for a long time Pooh only said”Ow!” . . .
And “Oh!” . . .
And then, all of a sudden, he said”Pop!” just as if a cork were coming out of bottle.
And Christopher Robin and Rabbit and all Rabbit’s friends and relations went head-over-heels backwards. . . and on the top of them came Winnie-the-Pooh–free!

It certainly took longer than a week, but somewhere along the way of my spiritual direction time, God unstuck me with what felt like an audible “Pop!” Discussions with the spiritual director and the practices she guided me to released me from guilt and stress over both long-ago and more recent pain. New volunteers stepped forward to help lead children’s worship. I found a job with the exact schedule I needed. And my co-leader of children’s worship said one little thing in conversation that led me to embrace my role as “the kid lady,” instead of resent it.

None of the responsibilities went away. None. But the Holy Spirit came — it was already there, of course, helping me when I’d cry out in desperation, but I was so twisted up in myself that I couldn’t make myself available to it most of the time.

After The Great Unsticking, I burned with energy but didn’t burn out. I had rest. Not rest from work or responsibility, but rest from emotional strife about that work and responsibility. There were some hiccups after that, but it has remained more true than not.

Sometimes, rest does mean the opportunity to step back. We had that as a family for several weeks this summer when we were between churches. We drove to church together, sat together for the entire service, and rode home together. I heard my husband singing, not through the P.A., but right next to me. It was a glorious gift and I reveled in it.

That was a very brief season. Now we’re back to normal. And it still feels like rest, at least for me, both because I’m not in charge of any of the ministries I participate in at the new church, and because of the lack of emotional twistedness about my role in the church. Neither of those will likely last.

So I’m going to start praying this now, in anticipation: “help me burn with energy, with Holy Spirit energy that won’t burn out.”

Anyone else out there battled church burn-out? How did you get through it?

*Please note that I totally stole this comparison of myself and Winnie the Pooh as a Stuck Bear from a Facebook post of Anne LaMott in March of this year. She, in turn, heard it from her pastor Veronica.

 

I am a recovering snob

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

You know how you can go about your life, not really thinking about a certain thing, until it keeps coming at you from different and unrelated sources and then it’s all you can think about? I had that recently with snobbery.

Book snob

A couple of weeks ago, a great blog post by author Matt Haig was passed around freely and with glee, although mainly by genre writers: 30 things to tell a book snob. A few of my favorites:

1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.

2. Snobbery leads to worse books. Pretentious writing and pretentious reading. Books as exclusive members clubs. Narrow genres. No inter-breeding. All that fascist nonsense that leads commercial writers to think it is okay to be lazy with words and for literary writers to think it is okay to be lazy with story.

 23. Imagination is play. Snobbery is the opposite of play.
30. The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can’t reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

As a reader, I used to be a more of a book snob, but now I mostly read genres of fiction that many people look down on: romance (historical romance, even), middle grade, young adult. As a writer, there are books that it’s kind of fun to look down on with fellow writers, books that are known for their addictive stories but “bad” writing. This post was a good reminder to not let myself revel in that snobbery.

Philosophy snob

Then, after knowing each other for 12 years, a good friend asked me what I’d learned from my grad school experience, i.e., what did I learn from having gone to grad school to become a philosophy professor and then quitting after two years without getting my Master’s degree.

My first answer: I learned that there are phases in life, and that’s okay. I was going to be a philosophy professor until I decided I didn’t want to be one. I’d explored an option that I decided against. No harm in that. And if anyone looks down on me because I didn’t wind up with an M.A., that is not a person I’d enjoy knowing, anyway.

My deeper answer: I began my struggle with snobbery.

Before that, I’d happily called myself a big city snob as I bemoaned the lack of things to do / provincial mindsets / homogeneity in the small city where my college was. In college, I’d expanded my horizons by pursuing friendships with intellectual / culinary / aesthetic snobs. I’d read opaque and experimental novels and seen highly symbolic movies and cooked complicated meals from impressive cookbooks.

This was a direct response to not being taken very seriously by my social group back home. During college I set out to explore that side of me — even if I was one of the few who knew it was there. I hung out with wonderful people, wrestled with ideas, and ate well.

I was also incredibly full of myself and felt superior to people who didn’t do all those things I did — despite the fact that I loved the farming side of my family and that I had a deep dark secret that I knew wouldn’t be accepted and understood by my college friends: I loved romance novels. Heck, I even ratted on a classmate for hiding a romance behind the textbook and reading her Harlequins in class (while praying that nobody found the stash of same I hid in my night table).

Of course, it’s a normal college thing to experiment with your self-image and go whole-hog into new ways of being. And as a shy person, snobbery provided a relatively safe haven because I was part of a tribe of other like-minded folks.

But it started to chafe in grad school.

Even if you love academic philosophy, you have to admit that there is at least a vein of snobbery in a discipline that once called itself the queen of the sciences. There is an assumption that if you don’t think deeply about things in the way we teach you to think deeply then you haven’t truly dealt with those things. I may be embroidering this memory, but I believe one of my undergrad profs actually said this — without the caveat of “in the way we teach you to think” that my feminist-thinking self must add. On the contrary, I don’t think I have to read a philosophical treatise on suffering to know how to be with someone who is suffering or to endure suffering myself; it may help, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

I am not saying that every philosophy professor is a snob, or even that any individual prof is a snob. In fact, one of the least snobby people I know is a philosophy professor, highly respected by her colleagues and loved by her students and curious and interested in a wide range of things and I like her very much. I’m also not saying that thinking philosophically isn’t valuable — it certainly is. Neither is philosophy a bad pursuit that nobody should do. It’s a marvelous pursuit and I love that there are people whose lives have meaning and purpose because of philosophy, that it exists for the people it energizes. I’m even grateful for the ability I have to analyze an argument and a text that philosophy helped me hone.

It’s like this: philosophy, for me, is like an antibiotic. Many people can take it and are helped tremendously. I am allergic to it, so I have a bad reaction, a reaction that philosophy didn’t intend, perhaps, but the possibility for that reaction is part of it.

True confessions time. I am ashamed to admit it, but I was very freshly married at the time, and was occasionally embarrassed that my husband was not academic.* Nobody at school ever said anything remotely negative about my husband (except for the idiot who told me he’d be a better man for me because he’d have a photo of me in his wallet; the same idiot who was later kicked out of the program for harassing female students). But those fleeting thoughts taught me more than anything else that this academic philosophical world wasn’t for me. I wasn’t strong enough to resist the pull of snobbery.

So I left.

A recovering snob

Did I leave snobbery behind? Sadly, no. It’s a struggle, but the older I get, the less of a pull it exerts. The more different people I meet, the more I discover that there are many great ways to live a fulfilling life, that the way I’m familiar with isn’t automatically the best way. Being part of a multiracial church hammered that lesson home continually, because to make a truly cross-cultural ministry in which people from very different backgrounds all have power and agency, you can’t assume that your traditions are “right.” You gain so much in return, but you really do have to give that up.

A recent writing job reminded me that I still have a ways to go. I wrote profiles of 15 churches in my area, and the approach I took was to highlight what was great and unique about each of those places. Before I started, I assumed most of the churches would be similar, but they weren’t at all. Each one had something wonderful, something that surprised me, something I could learn from and be inspired by.

I’ve gotten to a place of acceptance of different points of view and ways of life, but I’d like to take it further and approach more of my interactions from a place of active curiosity. Do you like a genre of fiction I don’t — what do you love about it? Do you like a different worship style than I do — how does God speak to you through it? Do you like really dark TV shows — why?

This doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned value judgments, because there is injustice, there are lifestyles that are unhealthy, and people do treat each other cruelly. I am a Christian, and there are certain tenets of my faith that are not negotiable. There is still good and evil, right and wrong. But most of my daily life is lived in between those two poles, in the realm of preference. And in that realm, I’d rather be big-hearted and curious. I’d rather play. I’d rather hear a story, maybe even yours.

 

* Just so nobody thinks I’m actually dissing my husband here, let me be clear: the man’s musical intelligence and sensitivity is off the chart, his emotional intelligence is something I rely on regularly, and he excels at his intellectually demanding job. As a student, he couldn’t habitually not study for tests and then ace them, and he didn’t generally get all jazzed up about purely academic subjects or arguments with little relation to regular life — that’s what I mean by “not academic.” A tiny drop in the bucket of the awesomeness of my husband.

 

Promises Cut Both Ways

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

This promise from Romans 8:28 is one of my favorites:

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them (NLT).

I repeat it to myself a lot when things aren’t going well or when terrible things happen to people I love. Depending on the distance from and severity of the event, it’s either encouraging or almost offensive — or both. The idea that trauma can somehow work for good is offensive — why not remove the trauma and figure out some other way for the good to come about? But there it is. In the Bible. And I’ve seen it in my life. I have a friend who can acknowledge the good things that happened in her family because her father died when she was young. Another friend went through a horrible illness, yet in the process of needing so much care, came to know in her bones that her father loved her — something she’d felt insecure about before. So there is pain in this promise, but also hope.

I’ve been part of churches that had to cling onto this promise by our collective fingernails. In one church, there was a situation that halved the membership. It was traumatic and upsetting and terrible. And yet. There were some of what is called, “blessed subtractions” — people who’d become negative voices in the church left. Which meant we could move ahead in different ways than we could when they were there. It took some time, but we were stronger and more unified and built a firmer foundation for growth.

I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. It was, in fact, one of the worst years of my life, at the end of which I blew up at someone who didn’t deserve it, had to apologize to her and ask her forgiveness and accept it when she gave it (yes, it was difficult to accept forgiveness). It was awful. But what came of it was deeply good, both in the life of the church and in terms of my spiritual growth.

Despite knowing what it felt like to be one of the remnant, I left that church last year. It was hard. I’m still sad about it. But I can see things working for good in my life and my family’s life because of it.

And here’s the kicker: I can see it my old church, too. My leaving made people sad, but it did not devastate the congregation. In some ways, it set people free and things are better because I’m gone.

We like to think of ourselves as setting people free from their insecurities, pretensions or anxieties by the wise and insightful things we say or our warm heart, or the intentional way we live. But sometimes we need to leave.

My previous church is experiencing a glorious renaissance in dance. I was a dancer there. Although I’d always been happy to dance under someone else’s leadership (and three of the best dances I’ve ever done were under someone else’s leadership and choreography), the last several years there, I was the sole one who organized and choreographed group numbers. I loved doing it, and did some wonderful work with kids and adults there, including my favorite, the Lord’s Prayer dance in the picture to the left. But I was also the sole one left doing children’s worship, as I had been off and on for many years. I was burned out.

People would encourage me to dance more, always out of enthusiasm and an appreciation for my gifts, and the kids who loved to dance always wanted to do it more (including my own child), but I had no “more” to give. I’d politely evade the request/comment, while inside I was a stew of stress, guilt, and exhaustion.

Somehow, I never said to anyone that I didn’t have to do all the dance stuff, that if someone had an idea, they could go for it. It would have been easy to say. So easy. It wasn’t like I thought I needed to hang onto control of the ministry, but that was the result. I feel bad about that now, because I held people back. One woman in particular only got to dance a couple of times while I was there, but I’ve seen her in church videos many, many times now, almost weekly for awhile, and I haven’t been gone a year.

When I first started seeing this, oh the guilt I poured down on my head. But I’ve gotten to the point now that I can recognize that it’s God, making everything work together for good. It’s embarrassing to me that it took me leaving for my church to get really into dance, but I’m happy for them. And grateful that God used me, even if it in a negative way.

Anyone else out there brought positive change to a group or organization by leaving? Or am I the only one?

 

The Insidious “They”

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

This post would be so much better if I could find the article that prompted it, but my Google-fu has failed me, and the piece remains floating out there in the aether of the internet. So instead of a concise summary, you get my memory of it.

Last summer, a friend alerted me to an article about the use of the word, “they.” The author, who was proud of his concern for the poor and the downtrodden, found himself making pronouncements about what “they” needed to do to change “their” situation. At some point (during or after the conversation) he became aware of how unbearably smug he sounded. How, by his use of “they” in that repetitive and sure fashion, he was presenting himself as The One Who Knows Best, although he did not grow up with the people he was discussing, did not live in that neighborhood, and had not talked with the “they” in question about their own analysis of their situation, nor had he talked with them about any history of attempts to address their low socioeconomic status. His language revealed him as exactly the kind of person he didn’t want to be, and he vowed to stop using “they.”

Although we can’t really remove “they” from our vocabulary, because it is the grammatically correct pronoun for a group of people that doesn’t include you, we can work on removing the sureness that we are right and if only “those people who can’t understand themselves” would only listen to “the one with the correct interpretation,” all would be solved.

Because often “they” know better than The Experts.

There’s a TED talk to cover every topic, and this is no exception. This one is about an international aid guy, Ernesto Sirolli, who refused to swoop in as an “expert” about what people in impoverished situations needed, and, instead, listened to the people in those situations. He hung out in coffeeshops and gave small amounts of money to local entrepreneurs who, in turn, made huge changes in their lives and fortunes. The talk is, perhaps unsurprisingly, called, “If you want to help someone, shut up and listen.”

Here’s an example, not from that TED talk (although the TED people are on to this kid). In Kenya, lions are a major tourist attraction, but they kill a lot of livestock, and then people kill lions in retaliation. There are fewer than 2,000 lions in Kenya now, down from 15,000 ten years ago. People were looking into this problem, and the best solution they found was for property owners to install huge and prohibitively expensive fences. Then they heard about an 11-year-old kid, Richard Turere, who discovered that lions stayed away from his family’s cattle at night when someone walked around with a flashlight. He rigged up several flashlight bulbs, wired them to a motorcycle indicator box, and powered them with a car battery and solar panel. The lights flick on and off all night to imitate a person walking outside. No lions have attacked his family’s livestock in the two years Lion Lights have been installed, and now families all over Kenya are using them. At a cost of about $10 per installation. Very cool.

That doesn’t really have to do with the topic at hand — I’ve just been wanting to share that story.

So back to us and them

The article about the guy not wanting to use “they” anymore stuck with me, because, when I read it, my husband was being courted for a job at a new church, which meant we’d be attending said new church as a family. It was quite different from the church we’d been part of, and we were full of talk about what “they” needed, and what “we” could bring to “them.”

On the one hand, this was correct. They wanted to hire him because of what they thought he could bring to them, and my husband wanted the job because, with his unique blend of gifts and experience, he felt he could make a difference there. But there was more than a hint of smugness in our conversation. And it didn’t sit well.

It takes time for “them” to become “us.” I moved to the U.S. from Canada when I was 18, and, although I was granted American citizenship before arriving, it took several years for me to say “us” and “we” about my adopted country. I had to drop my Canadian disdain for how much America loved itself, my Canadian distrust of how much power the U.S. wields. I had to recognize that I wasn’t moving back to Canada: I chose to stay during the summers, I kept dating American boys, and I didn’t even look for a job in Toronto after graduation. I was an American. So I started talking like one. And feeling like one.

It’s taking time at the new church, too. But it’s happening. The more people we get to know, the more we worship and pray together, the harder it is to maintain the separation necessary to see these wonderful and complex people I worship with as “they.” Which is how it should be.

The best “them into us” moment came the last time I led children’s worship. I’ve written before about how worshipping and sharing Bible stories with kids has become a real passion, a calling, even. At the old church, I knew all the kids so well. I was more comfortable talking with them than with many of the adults. And we did talk and interact outside of our children’s church time. We had real relationships. At the new church, I don’t have that yet, although I’m getting there.

Last month, at the end of our time together, we were singing their favorite silly song about Joshua and the Israelites blasting their trumpets and the walls of Jericho coming tumbling down. We’d done about four rounds and were all in a good mood. I was still kneeling on the floor when the quietest little girl came up and gave me a hug. It was so sweet. And then her sister joined her. And then another kid. And then all the kids left “the wall” and piled on me until they knocked me flat on my back. We got up, and they did it again. And then again.

It was one of my happiest moments at this church so far.

I love that they felt so free with me. It suits how I am with them — a little less formal, a little wackier than the other worship leaders. It gave me hope that I’ll get to the point of knowing them and them knowing me.

Their dogpiling of me was like the Kool Aid man busting through a foam brick wall in those old TV commercials: now there’s a huge hole in the wall of “they.” And the warmth of “us” is shining through.

I’m not saying I want them to do it the next time. That might be too much of a good thing. But God sure did use those kids that day.

 

Kool Aid man image found here.

Ask the tough questions and then get to work

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

Last month, I was singleminded about getting my physical house in order, and only seven of the original 50some bulleted tasks remain. I did it. But I didn’t do it for its own sake. I took the month off from all my other obligations so I’d be set free to throw myself into my writing as I haven’t in several months.

So yesterday, I was terrified.

I’d had the build-up. Now it was time for the pay-off. And I choked. I retreated for the entire day in laundry (9 loads, no joke), groceries, bill paying, household filing, and kid wrangling. My heart thumped hard and I was as jittery as if I were about to go on stage to dance. All day. Because I had to return to normal life after my big task was over. No more complete focus on one thing; now I have to negotiate all the needs and schedules and emotions and move ahead.

I have a number of friends going through something like this, but on a far deeper level. They are past the intense period of caring for a dying loved one, which has such a purity of purpose that normal life can’t hope to compete. They’re past the all-consuming period of public grief, when family and friends gather around and cry and laugh and hold each other up. They are at normal life. Without the woman they love. They’ve got to go back to negotiating a variety of needs and schedules and emotions, all while being constantly reminded of who is missing, because she was part of normal life, too, once.

That’s hard. Way harder than my task.

But none of us can avoid it. Oh, we can. There are all kinds of ways to avoid how hard it is. Let’s use the 7 deadly sins as an organizing factor:

Lust, gluttony, and greed: throwing yourself into an other (whether person, food, drink, or thing) to distract you from what you’re feeling.
Sloth: this one can be either checking out and retreating, or becoming so busy that you flit on the surface of everthying.
Wrath: it’s easy to let everything feed your sense that the world has wronged you, especially when you have been horribly wronged; anger at yourself fits here, too.
Envy: after all, it’s so easy for all those other people (is it?).
Pride: the temptation to act as if everything is fine, that you’re handling it all, that it isn’t hard so everyone will look at you in awe and wonder.

I can check the “done it” box in each of those categories. The flitting busy-ness version of sloth, oh, just yesterday. I’ve even consciously embraced some of them as a temporary coping or reward strategy, and encouraged others to do the same — temporary being the key. They don’t work as long-term strategies.

All of which keeps bringing me back to the homily given at my friend’s funeral last week, in which we were encouraged to ask the tough questions, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.

In my anxious state, what are the tough questions?

What am I so anxious about?
Am I afraid that the work will be hard? That what I produce will suck beyond my ability to fix it? That I’ll never be published? That I’ll never validate all these years of working at my writing? That my husband’s stress as the sole breadwinner will have been in vain?
That if I decide to self-publish, nobody will buy it?
That my discipline won’t be enough?
That I’ll drop right back into the spiral of discouragement and frustration and self-recrimination I wallowed in this fall?
That I can’t untangle the lack of concrete success from my sense of self-worth?

Now I’m getting somewhere. That last one brought tears burning at the back of my eyes. What makes me worthy? Is it publishing success? Number of page views on this blog? Acclaim as a school volunteer? A clear sidewalk and driveway, even though I shovel by hand? A well-run household? Thriving children? Financial stability? Following through on my intentions? All of the above? None?

I’m a religious lady, and I know the “right answer”: I’m a child of God. That is enough. Should be enough. Also, I’m not worthy. I cannot earn what is most important: it’s all grace.

But how to get to a point where the above answers feel inspiring and freeing? The only strategy I have is to not shy away or distract myself from asking those questions. Repeatedly. And then to roll up my sleeves and get to work. To do Barbara O’Neal’s 20-minute win. To keep the momentum going. To look for places to go deeper with my characters and my writing. And myself. To trust my vision. To keep up my spiritual practices. To talk over these things with friends, family, fellow writers.

And, right now, to make dinner so we won’t have to eat at Wendy’s after my daughter’s volleyball game this afternoon (a too-regular occurrence during my son’s soccer season). I’ll do a 20-minute win while I wait in the school pick-up line later this afternoon. I hope to get back to work this evening. That’s my negotiation today. Tomorrow’s will be different. That’s normal life.

Deep and Silly

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

It was at one of those sunny Fuller Park play dates. We were gathered at the upper part of the park, since our normal meeting time often coincided with the mowing schedule. Tash came striding up the hill with her daughter, the sun bouncing off her pretty-well-grown-in, spiky blond hair, and then slowed down when she saw me. She sauntered towards me on those long legs, her smile both beatific and mischievous, and said something about reading such a [great] book. (In an ideal world, I’d remember the exact adjective she used, but I didn’t know yet that I needed to hoard memories of her.) Clueless, I asked what book. And then she began to describe my manuscript, even quoting some of my own words back to me.

Validation. Encouragement. Relief.

She was the first non-family person to read my earliest noveling attempt. It was the summer of 2004 and Book Club had a weekly play date at Fuller Park. I’d written a romance novel during my son’s year of preschool. I can’t remember now whether Tash offered or I asked her, but she wound up as the person I trusted to read it and tell me whether it was good enough for anyone else to see. I truly believed that she would tell me, kindly, if it sucked, but looking back now, she was such a big-hearted friend, I’m not sure.

But it meant the world to me at the time.

My friend Natasha died last week. She fought cancer for 9 years, had “mets” (as she referred to metastatic cancer) for 6, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was a horrible shock. You can prepare your head, but you can never prepare your heart for such a loss.

I’ve been hitting Facebook hard for the last several days, soaking in all the tributes to her, rereading her great obituary, as well as this amazing post  on a friend’s blog. She was a bright light of a person, fierce in her love and support of her friends and family, but also, because of the cancer, forced to be able to accept love and support. We were in a book club together for 12 years, the kind that always chooses a book, but doesn’t always read it, although we always met, because, after years of dealing with kid-rearing, divorce, miscarriage, and cancer, we were more about us than about the books.

The moments I keep going back to are not the deep moments, although there are plenty of those. They’re the silly ones, the ones that made me smile. Her imitations of her mother. The poem she wrote and recited for us once, at Fuller Park, about how to make her husband happy (yes, it was a funny and sly, yet classy, poem about what we shall call here, marital relations). Her smile that almost always held a hint of mischief managed. The family stories she told. I have a vague memory of an attempted kitchen table exorcism story that I’m kicking myself for not writing down.

One of my favorite stories is one she wrote down in her blog.

This fall Dad made and installed 30 custom storm windows (mostly interior) for our leaky old house. Dad is well acquainted with storm windows having hauled them around his own house every year. When Dad was painting his own windows with his perfectionist eye, I was only 4. He would pay me a nickel to tell him stories while he worked. One day, Mom snapped this picture:
dad-and-me.jpg

Back when I was still trying to write romance, I stole that little story. Who wouldn’t fall in love with both the man who paid his daughter to tell him stories and the irrepressible little girl who needed an outlet?

I sure loved that little girl when she grew up. My world is a little dimmer right now.

Go Ahead, Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

Good riddance to you, 2012.

Not that you were all bad. I started this blog, which (this 3-week break notwithstanding) I’ve really enjoyed. I finished the first manuscript in my David and Saul series. I read a number of really good books. I took many great trips with my family. My children are thriving. I laughed a lot.

But I also cried. A lot. This has been a year of too-soon deaths, cancer diagnoses, scary health issues, church angst, lack of success in my publishing journey, and personal issues I’m despairing of ever turning the corner on. And compared to some of my friends, I had a pretty good year.

This doesn’t sound related, but I think it is: I’m annoyed with the Old Testament. In my goal of reading the entire Bible, I got from Psalm 116 to Isaiah 37 so far this year. Lots of great stuff, but also so many promises to be faithful and all will go well with you. “Trust in the Lord and do good. Then you will live safely in the land and prosper. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires. Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him and he will help you” (Ps. 37:3-5).

Which sounds great. But what if you feel you were a pretty faithful servant (given your usual failings), yet things did not all go well? Was I just not faithful enough? Not trusting enough? Not delighting enough? Can I ever be faithful or trusting or delighting enough to earn things going well with me?

Phfft. Of course I wasn’t faithful enough to “earn” no strife and no difficulty and no pain. There is no such thing. I’m a New Testament gal, with New Testament expectations that I will suffer, but that God will be with me in my suffering. Also, I am living safely in the land and I am prospering in many, many ways. There’s nothing like complaining about emptiness for making me realize how full my life is.

That’s what my head tells me. But my heart has been reading the Old Testament for the last three years, and has stored up all those promises. So my head knows that it is very, very, very hard to get traditionally published, but my heart cries out, “I’ve felt God’s hand on me and on this project from the beginning, how can it not be happening yet?”

This is similar to the difference between my 3:30 p.m. brain and my 3:30 a.m. brain. My 3:30 p.m. brain can take an issue and look at all the sides of it rationally, and recognize a good course of action. For example, it can take a loved one’s cancer diagnosis and look at the current research and agree that waiting and seeing is a right thing to do. But my 3:30 a.m. brain is incapable of this, and it swirls round and round in an ever-tightening noose of fear and anxiety. I’ve been waking up at 3:30 a.m. a lot this year.

So the more I argue with myself (OT vs. NT, 3:30 a.m. vs. p.m.), and, by extension, with God, the simpler my prayers are getting. They’re more basic. Not much more than, “I’m sorry,” “Help,” and “Thank you,” with a few “Wows” thrown in for good measure. Which is why Anne LaMott’s latest book, Help, Thanks, Wow, is so timely for me.

I will end this whine with her words (from p.27):

If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.

That feels so hopeful to me, more hopeful than promises of victory over my enemies, or reward for my faithfulness (such as it is). I am so ruined. I am so loved. I am in charge of so little. Help. Thanks. Wow. And (because I cannot shake my Calvinism), I’m sorry.

I’m going to try to start the new year by nestling these terrible truths and those simple prayers in my heart and in my brain — both the 3:30 a.m. and p.m. varieties. Maybe that’ll help me stop arguing with myself and set me free to really go after my heart’s desires.

How about you? How was your year?

 

High Hopes, Low Expectations

~ Natalie Hart ~ 6 Comments

Parenting Edition

Those couple of years when my kids were 3 & 1 and 4 & 2, my biggest parenting epiphany was this: have no or low expectations for how the day would go. When I had no expectations — i.e. we could go to the grocery store or not, go to the park or not, the children would play nicely on their own while I got things done or the things weren’t that necessary so I could drop them if need be — the day went well and we were all happy but tired at the end. I had hope that things could get done and small people would nap when I wanted them to, but low expectations of it actually happening.

This mostly had to do with time pressure: if I let go of the idea that certain things had to happen at certain times, and let the day flow, everything went smoother. But it also had to do with the level of the hopes: the more time I spent daydreaming about how well a certain thing was going to go, the more out of control I’d feel when it didn’t go as I’d imagined. And then that out-of-control feeling would compound itself into a really bad day.

I was mostly unsuccessful at this, but it was my goal.

Publishing Edition

But this post isn’t about parenting; it’s about publishing. Every time I send out a query to a new potential agent, I play the same game of high hopes but low expectations.

I love to imagine the agent requesting a full manuscript and loving it and offering representation and they’re the right agent and we do some revisions (because I’m not crazy enough to think the manuscript is perfect) and the agent sends it to the right publisher who buys it and everything goes awesomely and the book finds lots and lots of readers and I’m able to sell my subsequent books and even get interviewed on Fresh Air or any other NPR show that will have me. I even imagine hostile interviews with people who might be upset that I’m making stuff up about biblical characters. Seriously, this is what I do while I’m driving. And I do a fair bit of driving.

At the same time, I’m a realist. I send each packet off, either by snail- or email, knowing it will most likely garner me another rejection. High hopes, low expectations.

There is no external time pressure: the world doesn’t (yet) know it’s clamoring for my stories. But I create the pressure, the wanting it to happen now. Which sucks. Especially the more I let my imagination go on the “high hopes” side.

High Hopes = Vainglory?

At Breathe, the Christian writer’s conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, the final speaker, Sharon Brown, talked about sins that can be traps for writers. One of them was vainglory, which she defined as the “need to maintain an image with a high approval rating … compulsively desiring recognition.” This is different from pride. Pride is being all impressed with yourself because of what you have done. Vainglory is the need for others to be impressed with you.

It’s particularly brutal for the unpublished writer, because you can know that you’ve written a good and satisfying story, but if you want to publish traditionally, you need that approval of others — agents, publishers, reviewers, readers. Even if you self-publish, you need readers to approve enough to buy your book, and your next one, etc.

These needs and compulsive desires supplant the sense of self we are to receive from God. We’re ambitious for our own glory, not for God’s. Which is where I’m all tangled up, because the David and Saul novel is telling a story from the Bible, it was written with loads of prayer, and I’d love for it to drive people back to the original stories. But I need that external approval to make it happen on the scale I think it could happen.

Oh. Did you catch that? I’m making my own problem again. Not only do I want it to happen SOON, I want it to happen BIG. I can almost taste how big it could get.

Hello, vainglory. I am Natalie.

The antidote?

A friend who is a poet has an admirable goal in the next year: she wants to get 100 rejections. Because putting her work out there often enough to collect that many “no’s” means that she’s working every angle she can, and not letting herself get stuck when all those no’s come, which makes it more likely that some yeses will come her way.

I’ve gotten fewer than a dozen rejections in six months on It Is You. I’m not putting it out there enough.

Is repeated rejection the antidote for vainglory? I don’t think so. I think it can make the need for that approval more desperate: the longer it takes, the worse it gets. Somehow, I need to move from high hopes, low expectations, to some hopes, low expectations.

Because the thing about vainglory is that it’s feeding my Resistance to working on the next book. After all, how can I work on the next thing if I don’t know the status of the first thing? And all that picturing my future glory supplants the imagining I used to do about my works in progress.

So what can I do about it, other than pinching myself when I go into that vainglorious daydream place?

1. In November, instead of doing the normal NaNoWriMo novel, I’m going to write 15 pieces of short biblical fiction and post them here. I’m going to take a scene, a moment from the Bible and imaginatively retell it. That should keep my brain way too busy to have time for vainglory. (Also, I’m looking for suggestions — let me know if there’s a story you want me to delve into.)

2. Try the prayer Sharon Brown recommended: “Deliver me from the impulse to impress and make me ambitious for Your glory.”

Amen. May it be so.