Humbling

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.

 

My Minor “McKayla Maroney Is Not Impressed” Moment

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I admit it. I enjoy the current meme of putting this image of McKayla Maroney on other photos. I wasn’t all that impressed with George Michael last night, either.

But I also have sympathy for her. Here she is, at the moment she expected to triumph, and that everyone else expected her to triumph, to cement herself as the best vaulter in women’s gymnastics, accepting second best. Of course, second best is pretty darn good. But still, it wasn’t how her story was supposed to end (words that always get us into trouble). And the only one she could be upset with was herself. She was the one who messed up. She’s only 16. It’s the rare teenager who could put a genuine smile on his or her face in that situation.

I was not a rare teenager, either. I was 14. It was at the end of my session at Circle Square Ranch, a Christian horse riding camp in Ontario. I’d spent most of the week in the mildest of romances with a boy — we sat next to each other whenever possible, maneuvered ourselves to be in the same groups, held sweaty little hands now and then. The only thing I remember about him, other than straight brown hair (think early Justin Bieber), was that at one of the evening chapels he sang the theme song of “M*A*S*H,” but changed to lyrics to be Christian in some way. My young heart pounded with love and admiration (now, it’d get an eye-roll).

Mild though the romance may have been, it was recognized and acknowledged by our fellow campers. It was a similar relationship to that of my 3rd grade boyfriend, who I broke up with when he kissed me on the stairs in front of everybody. This camp boy never tried to kiss me, although I may not have minded so much by then.

Circle Square Ranch had what I’m sure they thought of as a charming tradition, an end of the week “formal” dinner. It was required that boys and girls went as dates to this dinner. It was required that boys ask the girls and the girl must say “yes” to the first boy who requested her hand. You may sense where this is going. The right boy got to me five minutes too late. Other kids gasped when they heard about it, so I wasn’t the only one who thought this was a massive disappointment, a violation of how things should’ve gone.

Am I sounding too dramatic? Think back to when you were 14.

But it gets worse. The camp was shooting a promotional video of the dinner. I must’ve stayed for two weeks, because the next week, as a great treat, we got to watch the video. Seeing myself on film has always been galvanizing — the following August, on a family camping trip, my dad brought his newest gadget. He filmed me walking on the beach, from the side, with those grew-tall-too-early rounded shoulders, which I was able to see made me look heavier and depressed. You can thank this experience for my excellent posture.

Lessons learned from the camp video:

1. Do not hunch over my food.
2. Pouting like that only looks good on kids 3 and under.
3. Do not put so much mashed potato in my mouth at one time.
4. To be on the safe side, never allow a photo or video to be taken of me while eating.
5. I was choosing to be miserable — I could easily have chosen to have a fine time with the people at my table.

For the most part, I’ve managed to live by those lessons. This experience may even have been the beginning of my feminist leanings, because, really, the whole only-boys-may-ask-girls-who-must-say-yes was patriarchal and ridiculous, not to mention unnecessary at camp.

So thank you, Circle Square Ranch, for teaching me so many important things, although it was none of the things you intended. Also, just so they feel better, I still remember the memory verse: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man.” Which I would now change to “in favor with God and with people.” Forget about making them feel better.

 

Sputtin’ on Wisdom

~ Natalie Hart ~ 6 Comments

Spotten is a great word from my youth. It’s a warning that the joking you’re doing about church/God/the Bible is teetering on the line between affectionate and offensive. The line, of course, is subjective, but I’ll try not to go too far. [finally got the correct spelling from my father: a Dutch word meaning blasphemy]

In late 2010, I started reading at Genesis 1:1 with the intention to read the Bible all the way through from beginning to end. I had no timetable. Which was good, because two and a half years later, I’m only at Proverbs 9. There were a few hiccups, a few months-long pauses, but with the kids back in school this week, it’s my chance to get back into routine. Sometimes, it’s a pleasure; it was this project that got me going on reimagining the story of David and Saul. And sometimes it’s a struggle to find “the personal application.”

Like yesterday. Proverbs 6 & 7 are all about keeping away from the immoral woman, on and on about the immoral woman. Sure, I turned this into a warning to keep away from ideas or people who will try to seduce me away from what I know to be right and good, but there was a nagging voice in my head, “As if the man would be pure as the driven snow if only the bad woman didn’t thrust herself right up in his face and offer herself to him.” Hmph.

And then today’s selection (Prov. 8-9) had wisdom as a woman standing at the crossroads and city gates yelling at people. I grew up in Toronto and lived in NYC for several years and this description made me think of homeless people I’d see on the street — dirty, smelly, hair matted, ranting. For someone whose fourth sentence is, “Let me give you common sense” (8:3), screaming at passersby doesn’t seem like the most common-sense way to get your point across.

So I’m not starting off in a terribly holy mental place. It didn’t get much better with, “Good advice and success belong to me. Insight and strength are mine. Because of me, kings reign, and rules make just laws. Rulers lead with my help, and nobles make righteous judgments” (8:14-16). This is fine when about wisdom generally, but put in the mouth of my mentally imbalanced woman ranting on the corner, not so much.

How about our crazy lady coming out with this? “Unending riches, honor, wealth and justice are mine to distribute. My gifts are better than the purest gold, my wages better than sterling silver!” (8:17-19). And then she gets all trippy: “I was born before the oceans were created, before the springs bubbled forth their waters….I was there when [God] established the heavens, when he drew the horizon on the oceans. I was there when he established the deep fountains of the earth….And when he marked off the earth’s foundations, I was the architect at his side” (8:27-31).

So I was constantly fighting with myself, smirking at my mental images and trying to rein them in so I could find the message in there.

And then came this, which smacked me between the eyes. “But the wise, when rebuked, will love you all the more. Teach the wise, and they will be wiser. Teach the righteous, and they will learn more” (9:8-9).

The typical image of the wise person, or the person with the gift of wisdom, is of someone with something to say that you need to listen to. The person may come across as haranguing (see above) or as gentle, but he or she always has a message to improve your life. This is utterly different. This is the wise person as the one who is teachable, the one who is open to correction.

Someone recently told me that I had the gift of wisdom, which really surprised me. I think of myself as having an analytic and occasionally perceptive mind. Now and then, there’s a flash of insight or connection and I do have something to say. But my faults are ever before me. The things say are not always well-thought-out and are sometimes hurtful in ways in didn’t intend. My desires and plans so far outstrip my actions that it’s embarrassing. I have so much to learn.

And that’s where the 9:9 passage gets me: I can pursue wisdom by being teachable. And Christianity being what it is, it won’t be information I’ll be seeking. It’ll be my way of life, my ability to follow through, my regular practice of opening myself up to what I read in the Bible and what I hear from God in all the ways He communicates with me.

So even when my snarkiness gets in the way of what I’m reading, God can still sneak in and teach me.

Humbling: Being the Problem

~ Natalie Hart ~ 7 Comments

In the summer of 2007, I was freelance editing this book: A Practical Guide for Life and Ministry: Overcoming 7 Challenges Pastors Face, by David Horner. It was a good project, pretty well-written and well-organized, with engaging stories about church life and what seemed like good advice. I was well into Section Five: Learning to Grow Through Your Troubles. I was shaking my head at all the terrible congregants who make life difficult for their pastor. At least I wasn’t one of “those.”

Until, of course, I was.

Right smack dab in the middle of editing that section, I lost it at church. I’m not saying I raised my voice or snapped at someone. I went ballistic: high-pitched, barely intelligible screaming and crying to one person on the phone in front of someone else. I wrote an impassioned email to my pastor. Because I was right. And because I’d worked so hard at the church for so long, I had no doubt that he’d see my rightness, too.

Thank God he didn’t.

A little background. One year earlier, our church administrative assistant and my partner in the dance ministry was arrested for and charged  (later convicted) with embezzling money from the church and from our pastor. This was a serious sucker punch for me. I’d thought she was my friend. We not only danced together, but I also trusted her guidance when she told me God wanted us to “flow” in a given dance, which means we don’t choreograph it, we go where the Spirit leads us to. This was not in my tradition, but I prayerfully did it, and it was a tremendous and intense experience. We’d prayed and cried for and with each other. And we’d laughed so much.

The church didn’t handle it particularly well. As often happens in multiracial churches, everyone “went to their corner” and most of the white people voted with their feet, including almost all of the other children’s ministry leaders. We talked about leaving, too, but after a discussion with the pastor, decided to stay. The correct phrase for my attitude would be soldiering on. I went back to leading the children’s worship program (which I’d been about to hand off to someone else who left). Being one of what were now only two teachers, I was downstairs with the kids half of the time, two weeks on, two weeks off. We were also back to having all the kids together, age 3 through second grade, which leads to less worship and more crowd control.

I also wound up taking over the administration and leadership of our church’s Calvin Institutes of Worship grant. I went to the opening retreat/conference mostly because I was available during the day. The language on our grant application (done by the embezzler) was so garbled and jargony that I couldn’t understand what the grant was about, and I had to talk about it repeatedly. I was in tears or on the verge of tears almost the whole few days. But as the conference went on, God inspired me to really take charge of our group.

It was a tough year. We were all hurting, but gritted our teeth and pushed ahead. It was also a good year. Through studying multiracial worship and church life, we were drawn together and encouraged that what we were doing was worth it.

However, I know now that I kept a little part of my heart hard. I nursed grievances. I expected problems. And when my calculations for the grant disbursement didn’t match those of the money team, I lost it, utterly and completely, to one of our financial managers over the phone, screaming and getting nasty and personal in a way I will be ashamed of forever.

The pastors let things calm down for several days and then called a meeting. Nobody was treating me like I was right, so I wasn’t hearing anything until the woman I’d screamed at faced me and said, so simply and quietly, “I feel like you’re accusing me of doing what embezzler did.”

That’s exactly what I was doing. I’d never gotten the chance to confront my old friend, never gotten the chance to be upset with her, never dealt with the betrayal at all, so I took it out on this other woman. Everyone knows what it’s like to be blamed for something you didn’t do. It’s a horrible feeling. And I’d just done that to her at my highest possible decibel. I was the problem.

I cried and apologized profusely on the spot. I apologized to the man who’d witnessed my end of the phone call. And then a few months later, I confessed this story and asked forgiveness of the woman in front of our Women’s Fellowship group. She gave me her forgiveness, something I’ll always be grateful to her about.

And all the while, I had to edit these chapters about what it’s like for the pastor when there’s a problem person. Unsurprisingly, this is one of the defining moments in my church life. I am a better congregant, a better leader, a better Christian for having failed so spectacularly, for being forced into the humble position of asking for forgiveness and being granted it.

This experience also informed my recent decision to leave the church that had taken such good care of me in that low time of my life. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision done in a blaze of emotion. It was the culmination of a six-month period of prayer and conversation with my husband and with others. Even so, it’s breaking  my heart. This is the week of “lasts”: last praise team practice for my husband, and for me, the last time dancing with one of the kids, last time giving the second grade “graduates” their Bibles, last time leading children’s worship. It might be the last time I’ll worship with some people I love. I’ve been cleaning up my office and straightening up the story materials, finding old photos of now-big kids back when they were little, wallowing in nostalgia. I’m just plain sad. Grateful for how important this place has been to me, but sad.

No pithy ending for this longish post. It just isn’t in me today.

 

Humbling: My Inner Pharisee

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

Ten years ago, the church women’s group I went to studied a book called 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me). The premise is that all those dozens of daily explosions of irritation at people in the grocery story line, drivers on the highway, etc. make you like the pharisees: you are putting yourself above those other people because you’d never do what they’re doing, except of course, when you do, except of course when you do it you have perfectly legitimate reasons for doing it. It was initially striking and convicting. By the end of the book the message was diluted, because it seemed like everything you thought made you a pharisee. Still, it has stuck with me all these years.

I had a not-so-recovering pharisee moment last week and I feel like I’m paying for it now.

Last Friday, I was pulling into a parking lot to do a little grocery shopping. I had to wait what seemed like forever for two women to move diagonally and painstakingly slowly across the aisle and through the spot I was aiming for. One woman was older, but she was speedy compared to the younger one, who hobbled and shuffled like a woman in her 90s. There was nothing visibly “wrong” with her and she was laughing at the older woman ahead of her. I am not proud of it, but I said unkind things about that woman in my head. I was smug about my relative physical fitness and vigor. Classic pharisee.

Classic enough that I recognized it immediately and changed my mental script. I reminded myself that she might be recovering from an injury, or knee surgery, or have a chronic illness, so that the speed and manner in which she walked may be an enormous victory for her. I tried to be glad for her. Still, it gave me a vague sense of, “I’m going to pay for that original attitude by being forced into something similar.”

And I was.

At 3:30 that morning, I awoke with pain every time I took a breath and terrible pain in my neck and shoulders. I thought it might be heartburn or asthma, so I took some Tums, some Advil, heated up my neck roll and deep breathed myself to sleep. Same thing at 5:30. Woke up for good at 8:30, and after the pain increased every time I moved, and I was breathing more and more shallowly to avoid the pain, I woke my husband up and had him take me to the E.R. They plopped me in a wheelchair, rushed me to a room, two people slapped a dozen 3M stickers on me and hooked me up to an EKG machine and who knows what else.

There is no place else in this piece to also mention the relatively minor indignity of having to ask my young male nurse to escort me to the bathroom so I could change my periodical supplies. Yes, while having this emergency, I had to deal with that.

Thank the Lord, it was not a heart attack or a blood clot. It was pleurisy, inflammation of the lining of the lungs. Scary and painful, but not life-threatening.

They sent me home and told me to rest and take Advil-type stuff. I did. Usually, when I’m sick, I hate being hovered over and cared for, but I was a good patient on Saturday. I stayed mostly in bed with my laptop and a bunch of books, sending chat messages to my husband when I wanted something. Sunday, I was okay. If it had been any other Sunday, I would’ve stayed home from church, but it was our 2nd last Sunday there, and my last chance to say an official good-bye to our pastor, so I went. Then I rested and went to an evening event, where I lasted an hour — looking totally normal, but feeling tapped-out.

Monday, more activity, but moving slowly and looking normal. Tuesday, more activity yet. I even went on the treadmill at the gym: a totally healthy-looking woman going at half her normal effort level and quitting after only 20 minutes. Even that was too much. I had a lovely and fun day, but I pushed myself too hard, and today I’m paying for it with a little pain back in the lungs.

Have you caught the theme: I look totally normal, especially with the full armor of make-up on, but I move like a sick person. The woman in the parking lot has her revenge.

There are people who would tell me that God sent me pleurisy as a punishment (after all, it’s unusual for a perfectly healthy person with no cold or bronchitis or pneumonia to up and get pleurisy), but I prefer to think of God using this event to teach me to be kinder in my thoughts, to engage the fabulous imagination he’s given me to spin narratives for people I see who might initially annoy or puzzle me, to give people the same benefit of the doubt I give myself. To get off my f^@&ing high horse, because I really have not earned the right to be there. To be more humble.

 

Humbling: Kids’ Opinions

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

In honor of a humbling experience this weekend (Saturday morning trip to the ER with piercing pain on breathing, diagnosis: pleurisy), I’m going to do a few posts on humbling experiences.

Number One: Asking kids for their opinions of my writing.

I’ve written the first in what I hope to be a series on novels based on the biblical story of David and Saul. I’ve tried to aim it at the middle grade audience — mostly at my son, who was 11 when I started writing it, just turned 13 now. I’ve never written for that age group before, so when I finished all the drafting and after my two mothers read it through and I’d incorporated their comments, I recruited my son and some of his friends. The deal was, if they read it and answered 9 or so questions, I’d give them a small honorarium and I’d put them in the acknowledgments if this thing was ever published.

I’ve gotten five response sheets back so far.

They were mostly good news. All the boys said it held their interest from the very beginning, they mostly understood the passage of time (it being B.C.E., years run backwards), they all enjoyed the level of poetry/psalms included, and they found the ending generally satisfying and believable (given that it’ll be a series; as a standalone, it’d be a bad ending).

After that, there was little they agreed on. I let all the comments percolate for awhile, and I hadn’t even thought about making changes until this weekend. It’s fascinating how, even among this small group of 5 guys, age range of 11 to 14, certain responses split by age. The younger two liked the battles, including killing Goliath and the lion, best and got a little bored when David played for Saul and when he was shepherding. They weren’t as into Saul’s story, which makes sense for their age group: the drama of grownups isn’t as interesting as the drama of kids. They wanted to know more about the battles.

The older three didn’t mention anything about Saul being an issue. One of the older boys got bored during a family dinner scene during which David interacts with Merab and Michal for the first time (Saul’s daughters, each of which had just been offered to him in marriage). There is plenty of tension in that scene, some of which is David fighting his sense of place and his sense of Michal’s crush on him and his growing attraction to her. I don’t think I’ll mess with that scene too much, because boys that age can have their own tension about more romantic scenes, and, on the other hand, one of the adult women who’s read it wanted to know more about the stuff between Michal and David. Although this is a book written for young people, their parents may likely read it as well. I certainly read a lot of what my kids do, including other middle grade and young adult stuff for my own enjoyment. How to balance those two interests? Should I even try?

There were a couple of points the older boys made that I am going to work on: one scene of David’s early days at Saul’s fortress was a bit slow to get going and another piece of character motivation wasn’t clear. I’ll look at the battle and army scenes to see how I might expand them a bit to show more detail.

But what to do with Saul?

I’m going to keep him and stop calling the book “middle grade” and call it “young adult.” Saul and David are perfect foils for each other. Their stories start out identically, but because of who they are and what they bring to the table, their stories diverge dramatically. All that time David spends playing for Saul and overhearing Saul’s ramblings teach David a great deal about how not to be king. The interplay between the two is where the story is meaty for me. If the older kids didn’t object, I think I’d do better to keep Saul and stop aiming it at the younger side of the age range.

Maybe that might even entice potential agents to ask for a full. At my stage in publishing, I’m querying literary agents with a descriptive letter and however much of the manuscript they like to see in order to get someone to ask for the full ms. I haven’t gotten even one request.

Humbling: Repeated rejection.

On the one hand, this isn’t surprising. Rejection is par for the course. I’ve been rejected for other projects many times without it bothering me this much. Except that I know this book is good. Not perfect, but good. Really good. We’ll see whether calling it YA will garner any more interest. If not, I’ll be doing a lot of research on self-publishing and searching for a good cover designer.