A Mess Worth Making?

I wish I were the kind of person who takes criticism well. Actually, I don’t even really take neutral feedback that well, like when my ESL students say, “Yeah, your class today was OK”.

For me to me to feel good, I prefer a hyperactive, over-the-top, you-just-changed-my-life kind of reaction to everything I do. Someone I talked to recently put it this way, “We want everything we do to be a homerun.”

That’s exactly right: for me it’s homeruns or nothing. In school, in teaching, in any leadership role, in writing, in marriage, in cooking, in friendships, in running…you get the point.

Someone in a small group that I lead confessed that they felt, for a few weeks, that I was challenging everything they were saying, and it caused this person to consider leaving the group altogether. Yeeeowwwww.

This person did consider the possibility that I wasn’t so much attacking what they were saying as challenging the way they were saying it. There’s a lot to this situation that I cannot get into, but no matter how you spin it, I was rattled. Not only was there no homerun, there were some out-and-out bad feelings.

Being the ENFJ people person that I am, I am sometimes deluded into thinking that I know all there is to know about getting along with people. It’s a good thing I’ve been reading this book called, "Relationships: A Mess Worth Making" by Tim Lane and Paul David Tripp.

There’s a lot in the book that would tempt any ENFJ or high EQ person to scoff. Come on gentlemen, we know this stuff like the back of our hands.

But, the book has reminded me of this: any relationship worth being in will get messy because we are all messy, broken people. And typically, when the messiness pops up, when your friends disappoint you, when your spouse says the wrong thing AGAIN, when people you’re trying to serve dislike your style, we just want out. Forget it. Why bother? I worked so hard on that. I don’t care. Whatever. WHATEVER.

There are, I think, two thoughts worth mulling over.

First, on the homeruns: This maniacal fixation on the homeruns is idolatrous and needs to stop. Paul, (as in New Testament Paul) said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.” God made it grow. We do our part, and cannot, in this life, accurately measure the lasting results of our work. God takes the part we do, and makes it grow. This is a real challenge to my faith: to trust that even when I feel like I totally dropped the ball, or worse, that I just had a humdrum, non-spectacular day, God can use my blunders and blah-ness to extend the kingdom.

Second, on the messiness, the ‘whatevers’, and the ‘why bothers’: Because that person in my small group was brave enough to tell me how they felt—our small group will not lose out on this person’s unique contributions. I am humbly reminded that leadership and relationships are never perfectly safe, and that the worst thing I could do would be to throw my hands up in the air and say, WHATEVER. I’m not doing this anymore. Messes happen. But in sticking it out through even the ugliest of messes, lies the potential for glory that will outlast a million, billion homeruns.

The Running Update

This week I got sick and stayed home in bed for a day. It was probably a combination of the hospital germs + a blast of colder weekend weather + hard running. Before anyone is tempted to be impressed by the running, I should disclose that for me, right now, "hard running" is six and a half miles at a time.

Getting sick somehow gave me the motivation to finally commit to an actual half marathon. After the delirium of sickness, I am freakin' scared! But even if I have to walk half of it, I'm gonna finish it (I hope).

November 18th.
Philly. Thanks to the Accidental Runner for the lead, to E-Train for her support (even to the point of injury!), and to Lori A. for signing up with me.

Full-Time Work

I haven’t had a regular full-time job in over a year. At first, this was really weird, and really hard to accept, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

Last weekend we were at a Redeemer retreat about work and how to figure out what our vocations are. I was gratified that the speaker, R. Paul Stevens was Canadian, born, bred, “eh” and all.

One clear challenge we went home with was that in the beginning, in Genesis 1-3, when work was good and not cursed Adam didn’t have one full-time job but at least three:

1) Being in communion with God
2) Community building – fellowship, neighboring
3) Co-creativity - meaningful work, taking care of the earth

Think about this for a minute: our day job IS important to God, but just as much, if not more so is that solitary half hour spent with the Word, paying attention to God's signature on faces and places and moments you experience each day. And just as much so, is the time we devote to fellowship and service to our neighbors whether that means having friends over for dinner, praying for the people you promised to pray for, hanging out with the new kind on the block or...so many possibilities!

What would it be like if we reordered our priorities so that walking with God, building our community AND meaningful work were ALL our full-time business?

I have to say, I've been getting much more ok about not having normal full-time work.

The speaker’s thoughts on “passion” as it relates to work:

-drivenness is passion gone bad, focused inwards to meet unmet needs for acceptance and approval, performance oriented and addictive rather than life-giving

-passion is God’s inspired and life-giving energy

-passion is discovered by: What do you dream about? In what kind of activity do you lose all sense of time? When do you feel fully alive? What are the things you obsess about, daydream about, wish you had more time to put energy into? What needs doing in the world that you’d like to put your talents to work on? What activities reflect deep and consistent interests?

New York Year 1

New York was the last place I ever thought I’d live. Growing up in Toronto, the word on the street was that Toronto was the New York of Canada, run by the Swiss. If I were ever going to leave Toronto, it would not be for some crime-infested, foul-smelling American city. But Forrest Gump warned us all: you never know what you gonna get. And New York was what I got when the hubs matched here for medical training.

My face was glued to the passenger-side window when we drove into the city last Labor Day. We were going to live in New York! To go “home” meant driving towards the Chrysler Building, not away from it and heading rapidly to the outlet malls on some bus tour with all your parents’ friends and all your friends, their kids.

D pointed out what landmarks he could: the Pepsi Co. sign, the Citibank building in Queens. I figured out Times Square on my own. From my Toronto-centric understanding, it was kind of like Honest Ed’s had exploded over onto ten blocks in all directions including up.

A year later, the thrill of it all has not worn off. New York run by the Swiss or not, I’ve never held my head higher, or corrected my posture faster (because I feel like I’m on a movie set) in Rosedale as I do whenever I happen to be walking across Park Avenue. I still get an absurdly prideful feeling when I tell any delivery person that they’ll be delivering to our home in Manhattan. I’m still not bored of taking the 5th Avenue bus past Rockefeller Center, or driving across the Brooklyn Bridge at night, or running around the reservoir in Central Park.

Of course, there is the nastiness, the unpleasantness and the commuter-ragefulness of New York life. There’s no getting around the stench of urine in sweltering summer-time subway stations. Yesterday I climbed over chicken bones and barf on my way out of one such station. There’s no avoiding the clamor of “DVD DVD! Rolex Rolex!” along Canal Street. There’s no satisfactory explanation for why certain women choose to primp INSIDE the stall, AFTER they have flushed the toilets in the public bathrooms of Union Square when the bladders of the fifteen others in line are about to burst.

Of course, I miss Toronto. I miss Swiss Chalet and almost all the President’s Choice products. I miss good, decent, supermarket-checkout-line chocolate that’s not made mostly of high-fructose corn syrup. I miss the U of T campus. I miss abundant and affordable GOOD Chinese food. I even kinda miss those stupid Marineland commercials. I definitely miss the CBC, CBC Radio, and when CBC radio announces that school is cancelled due to snow. Driving on the Don Valley in early October. Money that comes in different colors--but I guess that's a Canada thing. Oh, apprently no one outside of Toronto knows about Stella Ella Ola!

People always say, “It’s the people I miss most about fill-in-the-blank-former-place-of-residence. Home is where your people are…" People. We’ve got some peoples in New York now. Our two Redeemer small groups. The Village Church girls. The random Cornellians that pop up NO MATTER WHAT DARN CITY WE’RE IN.

As for Toronto—it’s still home home. The burning question though is: how to keep the people connections alive so it stays home? Maybe you can't? Most of my childhood/teenagehood/university people are in Toronto. What will our friendships look like another five years out? I always hated hearing that it’s hard to keep up with even close friends—after marriage, after babies, after moving. What can be done? Facebook is not the answer!!