If Only I Had Known

Posted on March 23, 2012 by

Verla--head onI’m not sure if we get smarter with age or if we simply make enough mistakes and deal with enough setbacks and failures to learn what doesn’t work. Here are a few things I wish I had learned sooner:

Wisdom doesn’t come in giant bursts. It trickles in, drip by drip–unless, of course, we wall ourselves off from anything but our own preconceived ideas of how the world must work, in order for us to be happy.

No one ever writes on their To Do list: “Think about my life.” Thinking is harder than doing. Besides, the task is never done, so you can never check it off the list! Keep reflection on the list. It will change you and the list.

You can hurt yourself stumbling around in the dark–figuratively and in real life. But mostly it just feels awkward and makes us uncomfortable. It’s not the end of the world. There is both darkness and light in every 24-hour day and morning always follows the night.

When was the last time you felt like your “moment” had passed and your life was now about simply doing what has to be done and staying out of everybody’s way? It’s a lie. Don’t settle for a beige life.

God’s tactics and timetable are flexible but his End Game never changes. It’s so big and so important, it trumps our own plans. That’s not such a bad thing. His plans are much bigger than ours and he invites us to join him…which is more than we can say about how we sometimes treat him when it comes to our plans.

Just because nothing seems to be happening doesn’t mean nothing is happening. An elephant’s pregnancy is about 22 months. Really big things take longer.

Stability and security are not goals. They are a faux shield against what we fear. Pray, instead, for peace in the midst of the instability and the courage to face your fears.

Having answers still won’t prevent bad things from happening.

Careless words can do damage that a simple apology cannot repair.

Change might be more welcome if we were invited into it. But it often shows up unannounced and we don’t get to say goodbye to the way things were. Let it go. You don’t live there anymore.

Smart people are those with important things to say. Often they are children.

Priorities help when dealing with chaos. They make chaos shut up, sit down, and wait its turn. Maybe you’re having a nervous breakdown. But not today. Today you’re on deadline. Move it to Thursday.

Choose carefully the people and things you idolize. Do they love you back? God does.

Contentment means learning to live with unanswered questions.

How we handle interruptions reveals more about our character than how we handle our well-ordered plans.

You may be afraid of God, mad at God, disinterested in God. That’s okay. Start there. He’ll meet you and you can talk it over. He’s got all the time in the world.

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Louder Is Not a Strategy

Posted on March 16, 2012 by

Verla--head on
I’m not a fan of geese, unless they’re flying a few hundred feet overhead in a pretty formation far far away. On the ground they’re loud and messy and territorial, with real anger management issues.

We used to live in a development that surrounded two large ponds. Unfortunately, geese decided it was their favorite convention spot. The word got around in Geesedom and they brought all their friends.

The homeowners association installed tall natural plantings on the banks of the ponds, to make it hard for the geese to stroll on land and use our grounds as their outhouse. One of the property owners bought a loud horn to sound off, which was supposed to scare off the geese, but the geese called in reinforcements to outsquawk the horn. Residents didn’t know whether to shoot the geese or the guy with the horn.

Currently, we’re living in another home temporarily, before permanently relocating in the south. This place also sits beside a small lake. However, the grass along the banks is clipped short and there are even a couple small grassy manmade islands, all of which geese love.

The weather has been unseasonably warm, so the geese come in small bunches to sunbathe, stroll, snack, swim, much like picnickers out for a day at the park. Residents sit on their porches with a beer and a book. Nobody goes postal. It’s actually pleasant.

I’ve been trying to figure out what was different about the two scenes. The weather? The location? The season? Maybe all of the above. All I know is that the current situation is a lot more pleasant for all concerned.

I’m speculating here. But, if I can take a few imaginative liberties, what if this time both sides of Geese Wars realize they’re different and no amount of “push back” by either side is going to change that. Humans have certain expectations of what they want from a lakeside experience. So do geese. We can power up on them to make them behave…but they have a few tricks of their own to even the score. So when does it end?

There’s a spiritual corollary here. As Christians, we have a point of view that affects our values, our tastes, our must-haves and can’t stands. And people who don’t share our worldview see the world through a totally different lens. No surprise there. In fact, chasms exist even between different corners of the Christian world. If blame is your game, targets abound.

But I can’t think of a single time when bullying, shaming, and name-calling by either side–no matter how politely phrased and slickly packaged–changed anybody’s mind or created lasting change. Louder is not a strategy.

Rules aren’t the whole answer either. You can legislate traffic laws and child abuse and create regulations to keep food safe. But people still get drunk and crash into innocent motorists. Children are still discovered who have been locked away in basement cages by psycho parents. And current news accounts of “pink slime” remind us that there’s a lot we don’t know about what we consume.

Lasting change–in people, neighborhoods and our culture–happens when we are changed from the inside out. Heart change. And that kind of lasting change needs a hand from Someone much smarter than any of us, Someone who knows how our hearts were supposed to work before we screwed up the plan.

Don’t get me wrong. There are always plenty of things we can do to help. Food pantries, tutoring inner-city kids, serving on a school board, taking an elderly neighbor to the doctor, voting. But what about your heart? When was the last time you asked God about the condition of your heart and whether it was still aligned with his or has gone rogue over certain issues or situations?

We live in a time where politics, environmental issues, social justice issues, racial and ethnic divisions, demand a mindset that’s not all about us. God sent Jesus to show us what it looks like and told us what to do: Imitate him.

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Still Hazy After All These Years

Posted on March 9, 2012 by

Verla--head onOn a network talk show yesterday, Miami Dolphins Wide Receiver Brandon Marshall talked about his struggle in the last year to come to terms with a troubled life that had earned him the dubious title, “The Beast.”

While successful on the football field, Marshall has had a history of violence and bad behavior off the field since 2004. The last straw apparently was a domestic battery incident last year–although this time it was his wife who came after him with a kitchen knife, allegedly in self-defense.

Charges were dropped and Marshall later would say his wife was not to blame, implying his own behavior provoked the incident. More importantly, Marshall finally admitted what had been apparent to those around him for years: he needed help. A 3-month intensive therapy program confirmed he has Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP), an emotional disorder characterized, in part, by anger, impulsivity and frequent mood swings.

Marshall says it was like turning on a lightbulb in a dark room. He learned he had no filter for regulating his emotions, no “switch” that made it possible to turn off his aggressive behavior when off the field. When he finally stopped making excuses and blaming everyone else for his troubles and faced himself honestly, change was possible.

He admitted it was tough to be vulnerable and go public about his BPD in the macho world of professional sports. But once he did, other players, Hall of Famers, and even umpires, began to approach him with questions about whether they or a loved one might need similar help. He’s now launched a foundation to increase awareness of BPD. As a touching coda to his turnaround, in January he was named MVP after scoring an amazing four touchdowns in this year’s Pro Bowl game.

A heartwarming story, right? Bad Boy Turns His Life Around? I hate to admit it, but as a somewhat jaded journalist and former PR professional, my first thought was actually, “His handlers deserve a bonus for reframing this guy’s story and saving his career.” A friend chimed in with, ”Here we go again. Another celebrity running off to rehab to get themselves off the hook for their disgusting behavior.”

Why is it so hard to simply accept Brandon Marshall’s story at face value? Why would we not root for all these kind of stories to be true? Do we secretly resent other people getting their act together because we haven’t been able to do it yet? Or do we think they “got off easy” and resent that no one ever cut us any slack? Or how about the argument that  if we could afford 3 months of intensive therapy with the best doctors and an army of spin doctors to rebuild the bridges we burned, we might look like heroes, too.

Ewww. Not exactly a picture of grace and a lame excuse for not addressing our own junk. It’s even a subtle form of spiritual prejudice, as if we have the inside track on the condition of other people’s hearts and have grown hazy about what God thinks of a judgmental attitude.

Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey, says, “We may think we’re judging people fairly, but “our spontaneous thoughts, uncensored words, and knee-jerk reactions often reveal that our prejudices are still there.

 People different than we are, stir up fear, discomfort, suspicion, and hostility. They make us lose our sense of security just by being ‘other.’ Only when we fully claim that God loves us in an unconditional way and look at ‘those other persons’ as equally loved…then the need to prejudge people can gradually disappear.”

Remember the scripture in Matthew 7 where Jesus warns against judging the speck in someone else’s eye without taking the plank out of our own eye? If Jesus were walking around in the flesh today, I picture him saying, “Hey, you wearing the really big Self-Righteous pin! Give it a rest. Did you forget the Self-Righteousness Police were decommissioned two centuries ago with my death on the cross? There’s only one Judge and it’s not you.”

Let’s retire our Self-Righteous pins and join the club that Brandon Marshall probably belongs to: Grateful for Another Chance to Get It Right.

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Pardon Me, Ma’am. Are You Somebody?

Posted on March 2, 2012 by

Verla--head onLast night I was once again reminded of the fact that I’m not a big deal.

I don’t have a big ego. I’m not like the narcissist at the dinner party who said, “Enough about me, tell me about you. What do you think about me?”  Still, like most people, I do want to feel valued. I want to be seen as someone making a contribution, not just taking up space on the planet.

Last night, however, I felt like a nobody and I was shocked at how it hurt.

I was invited to attend an event hosted by an organization doing wonderful work in the inner city. They connect resources to people who need them the most. The organization wants to enlarge their mission and vision and they invited people from every sector of the metro area to brainstorm with them about how to do it.

I’ve attended and facilitated dozens of these kind of sessions with clients and account teams over the years as a PR executive, so I was excited to have an opportunity to make a contribution. There are lots of ways to conduct these kind of creative sessions. The challenge is how to ensure an abundance of fresh thought, without it turning into a group grope that produces a long list of ideas that are not remotely actionable.

At this event an unusually large number of people were participating, seated at tables of six. Each table represented a “team.” It didn’t matter if you were a store clerk or a CEO, a single mother in low-income housing or a politician wielding great power, it was a level playing field. It didn’t matter if you had more experience or better ideas. YOU were not the point.

We brainstormed first as individuals, then as a team, and then the top ideas were shared with the larger group. The facilitators synthesized all the ideas onto whiteboards, which later would be turned into an action plan.

Tablemates knew little or nothing about each other, including any experience or skills we each had that might be useful in completing our assignment. We were also given too little time for each part of our assignment. The creative process is always messy but this was messier than most. I kept thinking, “There are too many people in the room to get this done. The wrong people are around the table. The focus is off. This is going to be a disaster.”

Surprisingly, at the end of the evening, several good ideas and themes emerged out of the chaos, including variations of my own ideas which never made the “cut” at our table but which ended up being suggested by others.

I wasn’t upset because my ideas didn’t make the cut or because I didn’t get credit. The goal was not to take care of my feelings, but rather to help the organization advance! However, I did hope my years of helping other clients go through this same process at least would have earned a hearing for my ideas. It didn’t happen. I went home feeling my presence didn’t matter at all. I was just taking up space.

Be honest. Whatever walk of life you’re in, haven’t you experienced some variation of this? …feeling that you work hard for your family, your employer, your friends, your cause-of-choice and it’s not recognized or appreciated?

As I reflected on what happened, I realized this may just be part of the human experience. But it can complicate our spiritual life. When Christ invites us into a relationship, instinctively, we want him to know we bring something to the table. We go to church. We pay our taxes. We help little old ladies across the street. We want him to be glad he invited us to the party and to know we’ll carry our weight. But that’s not the way he rolls. Everyone is invited to his party, regardless of credentials, and we only get in if we understand we have nothing he wants or needs, except ourselves.

Nothing prepares us for a relationship in which it’s okay to come empty-handed but where we’re so highly valued he knows us by name and has reserved a seat for us. When that truth soaks in, it won’t matter whether others know all that we’ve done. Their words and approval or disapproval will have no power to inflate or diminish us. We’re somebody because he said so and he’s the most important person in the room.

Posted in Self Esteem, Surviving in an Unkind World | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Tyranny of Self-Doubt

Posted on February 21, 2012 by

Verla--head onKevin Costner’s moving tribute to Whitney Houston at her funeral offered fresh insight into why Whitney may have initially turned to the alcohol and drugs that ultimately took her life.

Costner said he and the superstar became fast friends because they came from the same background. Both were raised in strict but loving families, where church was the center of their growing up years.

Whitney knew she was loved and accepted, Costner said, and knew her voice was a gift from God. But as a young adult, when complete strangers gave her an outsized success, she struggled with waves of self-doubt. “Am I good enough? Do I deserve this? Will my next project disappoint them?” Costner called it the burden of fame.

It was pretty overwhelming–a skinny, mischievous kid from New Jersey called “Nippy,” catapulted into the stratosphere of superstardom. In rapid succession she racked up seven consecutive No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 Hits, eventually selling over 170 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. Seven studio albums and three movie soundtrack albums all earned diamond, multi-platinum, platinum or gold certification. Even her version of the National Anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991 became a best-selling recording.

Theories abound as to when things started to go terribly wrong. Bad choices, bad companions, addictive personality, fear of failure. The problems snowballed. Drugs wrecked her voice. A new album underperformed. Once adoring fans booed her offstage in Europe. It must have been excruciating to experience and it was equally painful to watch. I make no excuses for any of it, but it’s tragic nonetheless.

Over the weekend I heard a couple of Christians discussing Whitney’s story. They talked like the Holy Spirit bullet-proofs believers from making such destructive choices, as if true believers never experience such a downfall. That’s ridiculous. The Holy Spirit certainly has the power to help us overcome addictions. But our self-will and brokenness can insist on doing life our way first and there are consequences.

I’ve known several wonderful, talented people who’ve made a solid commitment to God who, nevertheless, fell hard for dozens of reasons–bad choices,  genetic predisposition, addictive personalities, and, yes, self-doubt, low self-esteem, and fear of disappointing others. They are brave people who have worked hard in Twelve Step programs and with the help of the Holy Spirit to get their lives back on track.

You may never have struggled with a serious addiction. If so, thank God. But that doesn’t mean self-doubt will never tap you on the shoulder. At some point in life, if you do something extraordinary or, conversely, if you suffer a major failure, there will be times when you, too, will be plagued by the same question, “Am I good enough?”

Psychologists say common sources of self-doubt are: 1) significant past experience(s)  when you tried something and didn’t succeed (or saw someone else fail at something), 2) someone important to you made crushing statements about you and you believed they were true, and/or 3) you have a melancholy temperament that tends to see the downside of things, including yourself.

What will help?

Identify the wounds that have cut deep and how they have shaped your attitude toward life. Name the lies you’ve believed about yourself as a result. Reject them–especially those perpetrated by our culture, such as you’re too old, too fat, not smart enough, not normal. Dig into scripture and replace the lies with God’s truth. The Bible is God’s love letter to us all.

Yes, the Bible says we are all sinners. But that’s a description of our spiritual condition and our need of a Savior. It’s not a statement about our worth. God says we’re made in his image. That makes us eternally valuable. Jesus thought we were worth dying for. The Holy Spirit loves us so much he promises to take up residence in our hearts to help us handle anything that gets thrown at us, if we ask for it. That’s a pretty profound posse’ of supporters.

So poke your thumb in the eye of self-doubt and dare to be fully you!  God’s counting on it. He has no understudy to play your part. In fact, he has celebrated you since the day you were born.


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Raise Your Hand If You’re Normal

Posted on February 1, 2012 by

Verla--head onFrom the time I wrote my first term paper on Dolly Madison in middle school, I’ve enjoyed reading and writing about people in the public eye. As a kid, the lives of famous people seemed glamorous and exciting, with wonderful perks and lots of toadies to do their bidding. What’s not to like?

Now, as an adult I read biographies and memoirs for different reasons. I assume the famous person’s experience and influence may have given them more insight into how to live well or how to handle setbacks. Sometimes I’m just curious. Ironically, once you get past all the window dressing that goes with a public life, they look strangely like the rest of us. They struggle with doubt, insecurity, failure, feeling misunderstood, relationship issues, physical and emotional heartaches. Life, it turns out, is a great leveler.

Recently, I read a spate of personal memoirs by well-known Christians. Billy Graham, accustomed to speaking to millions of people around the world, talks in his book Nearing Home, Life, Faith and Finishing Well about his struggle to make peace with his now-marginalized life dealing with Parkinson’s disease and other ravages of aging.

Eugene Petersen, in his memoir The Pastor, writes about his frustration when, as a young pastor, he had to deal with denominational leaders who required him to produce voluminous monthly reports he was sure nobody read. He confirmed his suspicions with some subversive mischief. He included horrific fictitious things allegedly going on in his life in the reports–things that should have evoked an immediate crisis response! None ever came.

Mother Teresa, before her death, wrote not only about her battle with depression but ethical dilemmas like whether she should accept large donations from organizations like casinos, if it meant being able to save the lives of thousands more people who were dying on the streets of Calcutta. Her conclusion? She took the money as long as there were no strings attached that would compromise her work. She left the judging of the organization up to God.

The memoir that most wrecked me, though, was Brennan Manning’s new memoir All is Grace. I’ve always admired Manning’s shameless honesty about his failures–like his lifelong battle with alcoholism and how he left the priesthood to marry and then botched his marriage. No glossing over the hard parts for him.

However, in this final book Manning takes honesty to a whole new level. In fact, I found myself wishing he had saved himself a little face. After all, the man has impacted hundreds of thousands of people and is now a mere shell of his former self, battling “wet brain” syndrome and near blindness. I kept thinking, “Brennan, you don’t need to tell us all this. Spare yourself the humiliation! You’ve done so much good with your writing and speaking. Don’t do this!”

But again he insists on waving the banner of God’s outrageous grace, at his own expense—not as an excuse for his failings, but because his spiritual poverty drives him to God. And what he finds in God’s embrace is worth whatever humiliation his sins have cost him.

Manning knows there was nothing cheap about God’s grace. It was obscenely expensive. It took the death of God’s only Son to cover our tab. But he’s positively giddy about the fact that because the sacrifice was so enormous, the amount of grace available to us in God’s bank account is equally enormous–big enough to cover our most destructive behaviors, all our falling downs and getting ups. Our part is simply to offer a repentant heart and make a humble request, “More grace, please.”

It makes me uncomfortable—this wild God with stockpiles of grace, enough for us all, followed around by a broken old man with a checkered history who tells anyone who will listen, “He’s crazy about me, you know.” It’s not normal.

On the other hand, normal is overrated. I hope whatever he has is contagious.

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Jesus and the Spin Doctors

Posted on January 15, 2012 by

Verla--head onThe 2012 Primary and Caucus season is barely underway and the mudslinging is already so heavy the candidates need waders. The candidates, their PACs and Super PACs, reportedly spent $16 million dollars in Iowa alone (Rick Perry backers spent the most–$475 per voter. Rick Santorum spent the least–$19 per voter, with the other candidates falling somewhere in between.)

Now the push is on in South Carolina, a make-or-break state for candidates and a state where politics is a contact sport. More millions spent. Attack ads increasingly ugly.

I’ve been watching all this with special interest since I spent many years as a journalist covering local and state politics in Chicago. I also worked on the other side of the equation in public relations, where reputation management, “impression engineering,” and corporate positioning is an art form practiced on behalf of clients.

One of the sad things I learned in both journalism and PR was that often the truth isn’t nearly as important to people as their perception of what is true. Thus, in politics, if a politician and his or her handlers feel threatened and can’t make a convincing case for themselves, they will try to change your perception of their opponents. Truth may be a casualty.

The Pharisees were the reputation management experts in Jesus’s day. To make sure that only “their kind” gained any position of authority, they had hundreds of rules for what it took to be a Pharisee-in-good-standing. They were notorious for going on the attack to discredit anyone who didn’t “get with the program.”

Then along came Jesus, who didn’t give a rip about all their posturing and silly rules for putting people in their place. He cared about people and the condition of their hearts. The Pharisees felt threatened by Jesus. He challenged their position in society, so they crafted a disingenuous plan to undermine his reputation. (Sound familiar?)

They brought him a woman caught in the act of adultery and tried to drag him into a legal debate about how the woman should be punished.  They weren’t interested in justice, the correct application of the law, the woman or Jesus’s answer. They just wanted to trap him and hurt his credibility.

Jesus didn’t take the bait (which is a valuable lesson all by itself). With a simple observation, he re-framed the whole discussion. After the Pharisees had blown off their steam, he calmly said, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” In other words, “Hey, you with the holier-than-thou attitude, take a look in the mirror. It isn’t pretty.”  As the truth soaked in, one by one the Pharisees slinked away.

Then–because Jesus is always more interested in the truth than in taking sides–he turned to the woman, who had her own issues. Gently he told her he, too, didn’t condemn her, but she still needed to face her own junk, her adultery. He urged her to use her reprieve as an opportunity to live differently in the future.

Every day we–as individuals and collectively as those in the family of faith–are being ranked and evaluated by family, peers and the “rule-makers” in our culture. Sometimes they tell the truth about us and sometimes they promulgate a faulty perception that has little to do with the truth. Jesus promised they will be held accountable.

However, the guilt doesn’t stop there. In an effort to protect our position or reputation, we attack, undermine or distort the character or behavior of those who aren’t “like us” or who don’t follow every rule we deem critical–in politics and in life.

Again, Jesus comes along to reframe the discussion. Be careful at whom you throw stones. I know the truth about all of you. He invites us to measure our actions and words by his standard, take the forgiveness he offers and live differently in the future.

If you think I’m trying to make some kind of subtle political statement about a particular candidate or party, you’re wrong. What’s happening in the political arena simply illustrates the true condition of the human heart when not reformed by God. Building up our own image or tearing down someone else’s comes more naturally than we care to admit.

God said he made us in his image. It’s the only image that should matter.

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