One More Truth

Reflections on faith, truth, and being human

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The start of One More Truth and how life is a race

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This is the start of One More Truth and to properly set the tone, I’ll open with truth: thinking about the first post took less effort than actually writing it. It seemed easier to leave the cursor blinking on an empty page.

Writing had been a ‘someday’ goal; easier to set and much harder to work toward. But I was conflicted. Writing the first post wasn’t the starting line; I was already running. I had been planning One More Truth for several months – choosing the theme, purchasing a domain name, and consulting a designer. With the site design complete, the big moment had arrived. It was thrilling and terrifying, but to never begin writing was essentially dropping from the race. At this point, was quitting really easier?

The Bible refers to the faith life as a race. Following Jesus isn’t a temporary journey, wandering until we sort things out, find home, and settle comfortably into ‘normal life.’ Jesus-following is active and intentional with eyes and energy concentrated on moving forward. Always. Finishing well is important, but the focus is on running well. The goal in the faith race is obedience – one intentional step of obedience after the other – because obedience is faith. It’s a fluid motion, meant to flow into and throughout everyday living. Obeying isn’t a mindless routine, but an intentional discipline. It’s fueled by love. Jesus prompts us and we move.

God has a purpose and design for you. Are you in it? You can run, walk, or even crawl, just don’t become static. What’s the next step for you today? For me, I’ll finally click a button…

1. Relax

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I’m currently on vacation. The waves and cooler weather make relaxation easy here. The sand and sun relax my body. I’m not concerned with time or what’s being eaten for dinner. If sand gets tracked into the little cottage, I’m not worried about it. The kids – who have all surpassed me in height, as of the quarantine – are burying each other up to their necks and taking pictures. We’re jumping the Pacific’s icy waves, and we’re laughing together. I am relaxed.

What could ruin our good time together?

Expectations.

Relaxing my body is a great thing. My spirit is confined to my body, and if it’s comfortable in that body, all the better. But relaxing doesn’t begin in the body – it starts in the mind, particularly in the area where my unspoken, subconscious expectations are hidden. These expectations – of myself, of others, and of situations – are often unrealistic, and unchecked, they have the power to damage relationships, ruin a good mood, and burden my body. Until I confront them and evaluate if they are reasonable, beneficial, or worth clenching up over, I will continue to demand someone meet my expectations.

Relaxing my mind by relaxing my expectations is a proactive approach to life. It takes diligence and practice, time and focus. It requires ownership, and yes, it is work. I don’t want to spoil the next 4 steps for you, but this little series about having conversations with people who make you mad because their ideas are so archaic and their beliefs are so out there they must have the IQ of a gnat, is actually a series on how to work on yourself.

Because the only person you can control is you.

When engaging in conversations about topics that divide people, you only have control over you.

To expect more than that will negatively affect you – mind, body, emotions, and your biological systems and responses. You’ll get tied up out there in the big world where people have the free will to think, act, look, speak, feel, and decide differently from you.

So relax your expectations.

Expect people will disagree with you. Expect to be misunderstood and judged. Expect to have convincing explanations, strong research, and loads of passion, and expect that someone may not care. Expect challenges and moments where you are tongue-tied or corrected. Expect self-centeredness to come at you, and sometimes, come out of you.

‘Ok, Michelle, so just lower my expectations, toss heavy issues I care about to the wind, and become a pessimist?’

No, that sounds miserable. And in times such as these, when hard conversations need to be had and people are hungry for a glimpse of humility within these conversations, we can’t throw away opportunities to share the truth about things that matter. Here’s the beauty of relaxing my expectations in people and outcomes: it raises my capacity to hope and remain hopeful.

In faith, I expect that God will uphold the truth.

In hope, I expect that He will convict hearts and reveal understanding, in His time.

In trust, I expect that He sees all, knows all, and He is a Judge who is perfectly fair.

Because of His love, I expect that when my beliefs are challenged, when my understanding is questioned, when my doubts are activated, God is faithful to renew my spirit and refresh my peace when I come to Him and ask.

No matter who disagrees with me, I still get to be me.

Unchecked expectations carry the false belief that I will experience security and satisfaction when my expectations are met. Hope reminds me that Christ meets those needs. I can relax. That’s good news.

The topics are big and the issues are important, but promoting change within patterns of thinking and behavior is a long game. Endurance, patience, and humility are virtues for this long game. A conversation about a polarizing issue is a hopeful step toward change and understanding, but don’t expect that destiny rests in the outcome of one conversation.

Step 1: Relax – it’s just a conversation.

 

 

I Will Love

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My high school was next to an orange grove in central Florida. The property was beautiful, with rolling green hills and an open courtyard where students gathered before school and between classes. The campus was brand new my freshman year, and although it was still unfinished on the scheduled first day of school, we started classes anyway. We spent the first couple weeks dodging wires, plastic sheeting, and construction workers.

Being new, our school had things the other high schools didn’t have, like a state of the art computer lab, an engineering class, and a home economics room with commercial-grade appliances. We talked about these things with students at the other high school, because people like to talk about new things that make them better than everyone else.

Our school was unique in another way we didn’t talk much about – we were a desegregated high school. The boundary lines for our school were all over the county, bussing us in from middle-class neighborhoods, neighborhoods where all the kids would most definitely attend cotillion, neighborhoods with a lake, and neighborhoods that weren’t called neighborhoods – everyone called them the projects.

Being the South, we were generally polite to each other, but honestly, we quickly and instinctively segregated ourselves. I could walk you through those hallways and show you where the various groups gathered – the Puerto Rican kids, the kids that spoke Spanish but were not Puerto Rican, the black kids, the rich white kids, and the not rich white kids. It seemed natural to find people of a familiar lens and understanding. The regrouping was a reflex more than a recoil of hatred, at least that was my experience. The bell would ring and the groups would shuffle and blend in classrooms – a diverse mix of kids all sharing space in the highlands of Florida.

During my senior year of high school, I was a white, pregnant teen. There was no group for me in the hallway. My friend lost her brother to Cystic Fibrosis that year. There was no group for her in the hallway. I had a friend without arms, and she wrote with her foot up on the desk, and believe me, when I was putting her sandwich between her toes at lunch, there was no group in that lunchroom for her.

In crisis or loss, when life is completely rearranged, we don’t need a group that looks just like us or thinks just like us – we just need a safe person. Someone who receives us. Someone who will listen. Someone who doesn’t have a hundred answers or a hundred questions. They don’t have to understand – and they probably won’t – but they are understanding. They admit life is a privilege, but living it in a human body is hard. (Let’s not forget, Jesus took on a body. It was part of the sacrifice.) Safe people appreciate the human condition is complex and unique, joyful and painful, sometimes full and other times lonely, and they find common ground with anyone – any skin color, any class, any belief or viewpoint or party.

Nostalgia prompted me to dig my high school yearbooks from the closet last week. All those late-nineties trends – my kids and I had a good laugh. Turning those pages, I was reminded I had many safe people. There was Dr. King, the guidance counselor with the messiest desk I’d ever seen, who reworked my schedule to maximize my year. There was the dean of students who saw the office ladies hassling me after a doctor’s appointment. He not only reprimanded them, he told me to come directly to him for anything office related for the rest of the year. There was Raymond and Sara, Ian and Alicia, and Jessica who drove me to and from school. There was my younger sister, Cara.

I did not find these safe people congregated in a group in the hallway – I found them all over the school. They were white, they were black, they spoke Spanish. They were older than me and younger than me. They were comfortable with themselves without thinking too much of themselves. Beyond my situation, they saw a person. They saw me, they accepted me, and it made all the difference in the person I have become. This is what I believe: acceptance is the most generous gift you can give a person.

The world doesn’t need more people who are willing to love others, if. The world needs more safe people who say, ‘I will love.’ For those of us following Christ, we don’t have the option to love – Christ loved us first. We can’t say we don’t understand acceptance – we gladly accepted grace and salvation. We must – and I’ll write more about this soon – let go of being right and let go of deciding wrong, because only then will we be safe people. We must love free of duplicity – mind, heart, body, and will.

Oh, friends. We are well aware of the human condition these days. We are seeing the destruction caused when the human will is motivated by unchecked shadows that go completely dark. We are a diverse mix sharing space on this planet. We must pray to God He’ll help us see people as people, because only then will we pursue the most good. For all people.

 

Thank you for reading, and as always, thank you for sharing. One More Truth is for everyone.

What would you choose if you had nothing to fear?

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I did something this morning I’ve been looking forward to doing all week – I took the Friday morning classes at my gym.

I haven’t been to the gym on Friday for two months, because work obligations took me other places. I spoke at a women’s prison and met women soon to be released. I represented my organization at the Phoenix Open, attended a planning workshop and a donor relations training. On two separate Fridays I sat in on a support group for moms with substance use disorder who are trying to get (and stay) clean. They meet in a back office of a methadone clinic and I come to introduce my organization and all the ways we can help and support them, but I usually finish what I have to say in a couple minutes. For the other two hours, I sit and listen. That’s my favorite part.

I love my job and the work I get to do. I love the people I meet. I love spending one Friday with nonprofit directors and another with convicted women or addicted women. I love all the things I do in between – writing grant proposals, training people in trauma-informed care, writing content to share and post, and delivering goodies to those who support our work. There’s never a dull week. Perfect for someone like me.

I love what I do, but the truth is, I don’t always feel qualified. And that’s a very real feeling.

At the Friday workshop, the morning icebreaker required each of the attendees to choose a magazine clipping that most resonated with them. I chose the picture of the woman eating an ice cream sundae in the pool. She wore bright red lipstick and large sunglasses, and her head was tilted back in carefree confidence. When it was my turn to explain why I chose the picture I did, I shared that I’ve recently adopted the question, ‘Michelle, what would you choose if you had nothing to fear?’ Some days, especially on a Friday, the best answer to that question is, ‘I’d eat ice cream in the pool.’

There are much bigger fears, of course, and there are variations of the question: ‘What would you choose if you were guaranteed _________? What would you do if you couldn’t fail? What would you try if hesitation didn’t have the first say? ’ These are good questions, the kind that drain confusion from a moment of indecision, so all that’s left is a pile of fears and one crystal clear desire.

‘I’d raise this baby as a single mom.’

‘I’d move across the country.’

‘I’d start a blog and put myself out there.’

‘I’d follow the passion, live in my natural design, and trust the Designer to fill in the gaps.’

One very good question draws out all sorts of answers.

The only question to ask next is, ‘So you gonna do it?’

My word for 2020 is free. (Yes, I have a word for the year, and yes, I feel basic.) I’ve been reflecting on, digesting, and applying truth for five years, and freedom follows truth. I know this well. I love freedom – a whole lot, in fact – but I respect the fact that freedom is not without fear. Freedom is wide open, untucked, uncovered, and usually, a little chilly. I’ve stepped into it before and stopped dead. I had to recalibrate, had to get my bearings. Where was I and where was I going? I’ve asked those questions in freedom – because I’m a normal human being.

A sense of freedom, ironically, comes with a sense of lost – ask Paul. Freedom comes with a sense of weakness – ask Gideon. Freedom comes with a sense of doubt – ask Peter. Freedom comes with an overwhelming awareness of underqualification – ask Moses. Freedom will put you face to face with your mortality – ask Esther.

His permission to live freely is essentially an invitation to step into places where I don’t feel qualified. Why? Because freedom activates the faith relationship. In faith, I create space to depend on Christ more, and in His faithfulness, He meets me there with all the strength, wisdom, power, and grace to finish the work. And then the best part – we celebrate together.

So, I’ll leave you with a challenge: What would you choose if you had nothing to fear? What would freedom invite you to do, try, risk, or believe?

Don’t expect the answer or the action to come easy. Fear is quickly learned and the unlearning process is incredibly slow. I know this well, too.

What would I choose if I had nothing to fear? Maybe ice cream. But mostly, I’d trust Jesus more.