In our noisy world, we are stimulated, it seems by all of our senses so much that we may not be able to really hear what we need to hear—what we want to hear. The sounds of traffic, the beeps of technology, the rings on our phones always interrupt almost any attempt to find quiet—even for a nano second it seems. Then we hear our inner voices—the inner critic who seems to always be nagging about what we just did wrong; the voices of shame that seem to whisper or shout at us about how messed up we are. One friend told me he always has a “committee meeting” going on in his head. His mind seems to always filled with multiple and conflicting voices saying one thing—then another. He is not mentally ill. He is not schizophrenic . He is voicing my inner world and perhaps yours.So much talking. So many words. So many meetings. So much information. How can we ever take in what we really need to receive to make sense of our lives, our days and most importantly, one another.It is hard to listen. We actually might think that we are listening but our attention may be divided. Our minds are distracted. Many times we are already formulating our responses; our disagreements and forming our opinions while our spouse or a friend is talking with us. We miss much of what is being said. We can’t hear. They are not making much sense and we are not understanding or showing compassion.Perhaps, we may all have an un- diagnosed conditions called, “Attention Deficit Disorder.” We are in such a deficit of giving attention because our outer world is so noisy and our inner words are shouting to us about what we should have done; should have accomplished; should have already become in this world. Perhaps rather than taking a new medication, we can learn to listen deeply. Even at the Staff meetings of our ministry, Potter's Inn, I find myself beginning most of our times together saying, "Can everyone please power down your phones?" It is an invitation which means, "Hey, we have important work to do here. Let's be fully present with each other." When our kids all come home, I try to muster the courage to say the same thing: Can we turn our phones off and no one post pictures of our food while we eat to Facebook?" Perhaps it is as simple as this --as I age, I see our times so sacred and sadly so rare--I don't want any of us to miss out by being distracted to our table--to each other.Most of us are familiar with the story (See Luke 10:38-42) about the two sisters, Mary and Martha in the presence of Jesus. Martha was overly busy and pre-occupied with “so many things” and Mary got the praise for being so attentive to Jesus by listening so well—so deeply to him. We have heard this preached about for years thinking that there are two different kinds of people and how we all need to become even more like Mary. But when you study the teaching methods of Jesus, we realize that each of us actually has a little bit of Mary and a little bit of Martha in our hearts. A part of us wants the deeper, more intimate things of God while another part of us is distracted, busy and living a life out of being ‘attention deficit” to spiritual things of life. This really is a story about learning to experience the Presence of God—and how we need this story to come alive today to us with all of our inner and outward distractions.To listen—to listen deeply is really a challenge. I’ve been listening to people all of my vocational life. I’ve listened to problems. I’ve listened to couples argue about their dying marriage. I’ve listened to children lament about their emotionally absent parents. I’ve listened to team members complain about another team member. I’ve listened to staff complain about their senior leader. I’ve listened to so many leaders, that listening always presents me with a huge challenge. Will I really listen? Or, will I be distracted, unfocused, pre-occupied with the last conversation and not THIS particular person? Sometimes, I can think to myself, “Here we go again, another couple on the brink.” Or, “Here’s the latest staff team in conflict.” I am editing. I can be pre-occupied. I can miss them and what they need to say and want to say because I am so much like Martha.In my marriage with Gwen, I have found the challenge of really listening to her, a huge challenge. Sometimes, I feel a growing impatience within me as she is talking. One time as she was sharing with me about her day, I was feeling anxious, frustrated and annoyed. I remember thinking—but thankfully not saying—“Can you just give me the bullet points of your day. Spare me the details. Get on with it.” Maybe you can relate? Have you ever felt frustrated as someone you actually love is talking and you can’t really hear them because you are so preoccupied with your own inner noise? Many of us can identify with this conundrum. We want to listen but find it hard to really listen well—to listen deeply.We are often deaf or hard of hearing it seems. One couple I counseled came in one week and the wife began. “He’s totally deaf to me. He doesn’t hear me any more.” We can be this way with our families; at work and even with God. We can’t seem to hear one another well. We hear the buzz of noisy words but we are really missing each other. Life becomes absurd for us when we can’t listen. In the Latin, the root word ‘absurd’ comes from the word—deaf. When things in marriage, work and with life feel absurd---I am experiencing a deafness—a missing of what is being spoken. It makes no sense. She makes no sense. You make no sense. Life makes no sense. Even God makes no sense.When Luke describes the encounter of Mary and Martha and Martha’s ADD, we’re told that Mary “listened to what he was saying.” It was Mary’s ability to focus, to give attention to the words of Jesus that Jesus noticed. Mary listened first to his words but then the words gave way to the experience of the presence of Jesus. Mary was in the presence of Jesus while Martha was not. She moved beyond the content of the actual words of what Jesus was saying to experiencing the Presence of Jesus.Gwen has told me for years that she wants me, needs me to really listen to her. When she says this, I am finally able to figure out that she is wanting my full presence—not just my ears. She wants me; needs me to be present—to be with her. She wants my focus, my attention. She doesn’t want me to be a busy Martha solving her problems before she even finishes telling me about her problems.In my efforts to become a better listener in my marriage and in my work, I was introduced to the Chinese word for “listen.” Remember how sometimes a foreign word can help shed light on our own mono way of understanding? The Chinese characters which make up the word “listen” have each of these parts to make the one word—the whole word listen: One character depicts the ears. Another depicts the mind. One reveals the eyes and another shows the heart. In Chinese, the word for “listen” involves the ears, the mind, eyes, and heart. There is also a horizontal line in the midst of all these characters which means undivided attention. Listening requires focus.Mary’s listening to Jesus involved her mind being present—not rifling through her lists of things that needed to get accomplished. Listening for Mary meant using her ears to really lean into the presence of the words to hear and to experience a deeper meaning. Her eyes were laser focus on the One who was speaking. She offered her undivided attention and her heart was present to experience the true presence of Jesus.At our retreat, we help people listen to the Scriptures. Most of us have heard so much preaching and teaching that we assume we know so much. Our attitudes about even hearing the Scripture stir up feelings of “Yeah, tell me something new. Tell me something I don’t already know. I’m numb to this even before you start reading.” This is what I mean by spiritual absurdity. Nothing seems to ever make any sense because we simply becoming deaf.In the ancient method of listening to Scriptures known as ‘Lectio Divina’, we practice listening by hearing a simple passage read slowly repeatedly and softly. We encourage people to imagine their ears as being the giant ears an elephant wrapping around each word to find the deeper meaning. We are helping the Marthas of today to become the Marys. We are helping each other move from just hearing words—to experiencing the presence.Every lectio reading becomes truly sacred in this way because we move from just hearing to experiencing the Presence. Like Gwen has coached me so well through the years, my lectio in our conversations moves me towards her—moves me to be present with her—moves me to experience her heart and not just hear her words.How can you move from hearing the words to being in the true presence of your spouse, friend, team and into the very Presence of God today?
Going Backward in Order to Move Forward
Progress is not always made by pushing through—by going forward. Often, we will need and will actually desire to go backwards in order to be able to move forward. When we are always moving forward and always moving fast, we simply cannot keep up. The constant momentum to keep moving; keep improving even keep transforming is incredibly exhausting. We are tired mentally, emotionally, physically, sexually and all of these arenas live us feeling “spent” spiritually.There is a remedy to our dilemma of always feeling the need for the next thing; the next break through; the next big thing. It is this: go backwards. Sometimes, we need to go back to have the new found energy to go on. I'm finding this even right now in writing this. I chose to go back and not forward by giving myself a 48 hour solo retreat. I needed time to think. I needed space to access the trajectory of my life. I needed time off to be back on--which I knew was going to happen anyway. So I chose to take this retreat in the midst of so many demands and meetings and needs. I walked away from my staff. I left projects needing my attention on the desks. I went away in order to come back better.Here are 5 areas to challenge you to move backwards in order to move forward in your life.
- Go backwards with technology. I have a friend who is ditching his iphone. It has become way too much for him. He has told me that his iphone is ruining his life. He finds himself always checking; always on and always available. He lamented to me last week that "Texting has become THE primary way we communicate--sometimes even in our house" There was no smile on his face when he shared this with me. He has made the heroic choice to go back to a flip-phone. It’s unthinkable isn’t it? To go back 20 years in technology is to go back to the dark ages—we think—we actually believe. But the value of a flip phone is incredible progressive. It can give you your life back. You can’t text as much. You can’t always be on. You will not always be available. IT may be the step backwards to help you move forward. Choose one day a week that you literally unplug! Take a sabbath from all wired gadgets. Lift your head up and live untethered for just one day a week and see what can happen. Most of us can simply confess this one thing: we are way too tied down by our wired world--even despite the benfits.....If you can't go back to a flip phone--try fasting from technology for one day. Go back to go forward.
- Get Quiet—not Get Loud. We live in a noisy world and the noise outwardly and inwardly is making life absurd. Did you know that the Latin word for “deafness” is rooted in the word meaning ‘absurdity’? When we can’t listen--- so much of life and relationships—even our faith can feel absurd. One mega church I work with adopted a series for their entire congregation titled, “Get Loud!” It was a way of inviting their congregation to get loud; get big and involved; perhaps do great things for God. But where is the sermon series or emphasis on “Let’s get quiet?” While writing this, I am on a private retreat. I am doing a solo retreat of 48 hours of quiet. Yesterday as I took a long hike in the Rocky Mountains, I was disturbed by the constant buzzing of helicopters circling around. Their loud and buzzing rotating blades invaded my much sought after tranquility of mountain streams and eagles flying nearby. I was annoyed. Loud things can annoy us and the only remedy there is to notice is quiet. Quietness is the great antidote to our stress. As the buzzing of the choppers keep disturbing me on my hike, I used that outer noise to help me assuage my inner noise which we’re saying, “You could be so much more productive if you were back at the office actually doing something!” That is a voice that needs to be suspect. That is a voice I need to shun. That is a voice that does not bring me life.
- Do Less not more. No book has affected me more this past year than the book by Greg McKeown titled, “Essentialism.” I have thoroughly enjoyed and been challenged to align my life and work with what is essential; what I find to be absolutely essential in life. Putting meetings, people and invitations to help into a grid which asks me this one question: Is this really necessary and will it help me stay in the pursuit of less—not more. Am I investing in the right/essential activities? How can I live focused and not so distracted by all the chances; all the ways; all the people? When we feel too stretched; too much like we are skating on thin ice, we need to check the trajectory of our lives and see if where we are headed is actually where we want to go.
- Reflect more and react less. By learning to practice the lost art of reflection, we can have the time to think our own thoughts; feel our own feelings and find our own center of our own soul. Thus we can live our own lives—not live the life designed by someone else—someone who may not actually have the best intentions for my life. In this age of constant availability and constant news, we are over-saturated; over-stimulated and over-committed. We are robbed from the simple times of a stroll; a lingering conversation and following the thread of our own thoughts and feelings to find out our own passions and feelings. We simply must have time to reflect. Reflection is the great art of being human. My dog Laz cannot reflect. The humming birds busy buzzing around at the feeder cannot reflect. Only humans can reflect—and to be human; to remain human and to live a fully non-machine like life, we will need to go back and learn the great art of reflection. As we learn to reflect, we will find ourselves less prone to react; less ready to fly off the handle and tap into our reserves of anger and rage that always seem so ready at our disposal. Walk away when the tension gets heated. Take a time out. Sit with what just happened....that email that just came in that triggered you into writing back a angry email in response.
- Go slow—not fast. Slowing our lives down is the antidote to our time sickness. One year gets blurred with the next and the last. Birthdays come so quickly. Everything good in life is not fast. By slowing—by actually practicing slowing, we can savor the richness of the wine of our lives. We can lift up the chalice of our lives and toast---and celebrate—and enjoy the goodness of life—even in an age of terror and violence. Time-sickness has greatly contributed to the constant state of exhaustion that so very many of us experience. The antidote is slow. When someone has burned out, the only remedy is dis-engagement.
As you consider going backwards, take a look at my list and add your own areas and suggestions and possibilities and let’s encourage each other to go backwards in order to move forward. Go ahead, leave your comments! Let's get a good discussion going!
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The Morphing of Community and Friendship
My understanding of community has morphed through the years. Time, failure in relationships, brutal betrayal, sacrificial love and unimaginable kindness by strangers have all helped develop my experience of being in and practicing community--of sharing friendship.If you have read some of my books, you have been a witness to my progressive revelation of what community is and what it is not. In 2006, I was shaped and impacted by the words of psychologist David Benner when he says that friendship has several non-negotiable ingredients—one of which is this: True friendship and community must be reciprocal. There must be give and take in healthy relationships. No one person can be the one who gives all the time. No one person can do all the initiating. It must be reciprocal. It must be shared. It must be give and take and back and forth. Benner penned these words in my very first book, The Transformation of a Man’s Heart. That clarification helped me greatly to distinguish what had become a fuzzy boundary in my life in relationships where I was paid to be people’s friends in ministry as a pastor. When I grasped the needed quality of having reciprocal relationships, I learned to distinguish between people who were really my “work” and people who were really my “friends.” It helped me and still helps me know who I am to the few people I can find in my life that actually do want to be reciprocal rather than one of us feeling like we are doing all the giving and thus someone else is doing all the taking.In 2008, I wrote in a chapter in Soul Custody titled, “Soul Companions: Choosing your Friends” that companionship is one of God’s great desires for us. Since God is Trinity—and we are created in the image of God—we learn that the soul was created to actually be in and thrive by community. It really is not good to be by ourselves in this life. There’s a lot in that chapter about loneliness and moving out of loneliness into the actual experience of tasting true friendship. As I read that chapter today, I can clearly see my own pilgrimage in attempting to move beyond my own inner loneliness to a sense of connectedness and community.In 2012, I wrote an important book titled, The Jesus Life. There’s an anchor chapter in this book about “The Way of Companionship.” I wrote this chapter reflecting on one of the greatest hurts and wounds in the erosion of what I thought was a friend. Through a deep betrayal, a friendship ended and has never been resurrected to this day. I still wonder how something that deep and tearing could ever be repaired and would I even WANT it to be? It was in this year that I discovered a small and seemingly insignificant verse in the Gospel of John where we are told that Jesus “would not entrust himself to them for he knew all people” (John 2:24). Jesus was speaking about his companions at a table he was having dinner with. He somehow knew in his interior soul that some of the people around him—perhaps already in his circle were just were not safe. That one, small verse gave me fodder for the fire in my heart to grasp friendship even more deeply. Here I learned that Jesus did not give his heart away like we were taught in Sunday School. He guarded his own heart and was not fully vulnerable. Perhaps, in my quest to be like Jesus, I would need to reign in my heart and be more careful about who I called, “friend” and with whom I told my secrets to in life.In 2014, we moved out of the city where we had lived for a dozen years and uprooted our lives to live near our retreat. We wanted our life to be integrated. I wanted to “do my life” in one place and not be so divided. We left our church. We left our small group. We left our home and have tried to put down roots where our work, life , church and friends can have a sense of synergy, connectedness and harmony. It’s not been easy to be truthful.But in the last few months some new light has come into my quest to understand community even more. The prolific 21st century sage, prophet, farmer and spiritual guru, Wendell Berry, wrote a few sentences that stopped my in my tracks in trying to grasp community. He writes, “Community, I am beginning to understand, is made through a skill I have never learned or valued: the ability to pass time with people you do not and will not know well, talking about nothing in particular, with no end in mind, just to build trust, just to be sure of each other, just to be neighborly. A community is not something that you have, like a camcorder or a breakfast nook. No, it is something you do. And you have to do it all the time. “His words were like a light bulb for me. Something that felt dark became a little more filled with light. Community is something you do and you practice. So, with renewed wind in my sails, Berry’s words have helped me want, desire to practice community. We went to church on Sunday and sat in chairs surrounded by some “friends” and neighbors where we live. We passed the peace to each other when the preacher asked us to; we stood up together and sang the Doxology and sat down to pray the Lord’s prayer together in unison. With one voice; one motion, and in one building we found ourselves warmly connected. It was stirring for me in a deep way. I was practicing Berry’s plea for what authentic community actually is and actually does. Slowly we will build trust. We invited one couple to join us for lunch. We began a new journey of practicing casual friendship. We are both new to our new town; new to our shared neighborhood and in a new stage of life together. There’s a lot in common to build upon. There is some ground now to “practice” all that I have learned thus far in my life about friendship and community.No voice has impacted me more deeply than the prophetic words of poet and author David Whyte. He writes,, “Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” Read that again. Don’t read anything more than his sentence: “Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” He is telling us that friendship is not about being right. Community is not rooted in the affinity where everyone believes the same thing. It is not about have the same political views and sharing the same doctrine. He is telling us that the soul of friendships will shrivel and die unless we practice tolerance and mercy with one another. We will not always agree. 90% of all business partnerships fail. We simply need more tolerance and a whole lot more of mercy. He further states, “A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.” Ouch! How does he write in such a way that his words become a scalpel to my crusted heart. If you find yourselves in a diminishing circle of friends, perhaps your own understanding of friendship will need to morph.About 20 years ago, I wrote an article for a newspaper titled, "Who are the six strong people who will carry your casket to the grave?" I didn't know the answer to that question then and I still am not sure today. Do you know the answer to that unsettling question? For some of us that kind of uneasy question may jar us into thinking more about this very important issue in our lives--the question about who are my friends and how do I really find true community? We live so much of our lives asleep and on the hamster wheel that few of us think below the water line of life as we need to--as God wants and invites us to ponder.Many of the great spiritual truths in our lives are best understood when we accept the notion that goes like this: “I do not know everything. As I live more I will become more wise. I want to be a student of progressive revelation. I want to grow in my understanding of all things that matter: marriage, love, what is really essential in life and my yearning for heaven. As I have morphed and grown in my understanding of community, I can now be ready to lay down some things that have not worked; have not served me or my friends of the past well and now practice a better way of being a friend and having a friend. Like the Apostle Paul told us, sometimes we need to put aside childish notions and take hold of a more mature understanding of things. I find myself doing precisely as he instructed us to do regarding friends and community. Do you?