A Labyrinthine Journey: Soon Coming in 3-D

So if you have been reading here, I had all kinds of plans to be already 2 weeks into a newly minted web site with 5-6 new blog entries under my belt in exploration of my new theme of 3+D Living.

You also might have noticed that it didn’t happen. Yet.

Life has a funny way of changing the landscape. As I say quite often, the best laid plans of mice and ministers…

One of the undercurrents in this writing space has been dealing with depression from the perspective of an active ministry. Let me tell you one thing I’ve learned: I haven’t been able to do it.

For many years before I was able to do it, but barely. I would receive help and support from people who cared for me. I would have times when my praying and writing and creative endeavors would refill the well. And always, I would find more energy than I needed for leading worship and preaching. Always have and still do.

But when the administrative pressures increase, the water main would break underground and the well would dry up and not stay filled no matter how much love I would receive.

With my new commitment to a writing project I have been looking forward to it looks like I might have something that will help plug that hole and enable me to stay full.

Events have delayed that a couple weeks. As they tend to do.

The end result of those events is that I will be taking a 3 month Renewal Leave beginning February 1 and ending April 18.

That is very welcome news. It takes my life offline from the source of the distress filled pressure of active ministry to Renew, Rebuild, and Recharge. I’ve been in ordained ministry for 22 years now and this is the first one I’ve taken.

The board of my church graciously allowed me this time and will continue paying my salary during the time.

So last week and this week, my other activities are placed on hold while I try to take care of all the business I need to take care of before I unplug from the office. I have a single list I’m working from: Everything On This List MUST Be Done Before January 31.

So far, as I have been sharing that news with people I have found lots of people who truly understand and support my need for this time. And for that I’m grateful.

• Anyone else out there taken such a leave and found it helpful?
• What was most helpful?

Let’s support each other.

I had hoped to have my new 3D Living Site ready for launch today, but I have more things I want to have ready. It won’t be perfect yet, but it needs to be better than it is now. In the meantime, some quotations that have been intruding into my soul and some reflective questions. No answers, just questions.

From last night’s Lectio Divina group: Psalm 40:8 (NRSV):

I delight to do your will, O my God. Your law in within my heart.

• What is the connection between my delight and God’s will?
• And what about God’s delight and my will?
• What is happening when I find the delight in my living is dim and virtually extinguished? Is that saying something to me about where I am in or not in God’s will?

The same verse from Nan C. Merrill’s Psalms For Praying:

I delight to abandon myself into your hands, O my Beloved. For you are the Heart of my own heart.

• How can I live the Heart of my own heart in the face of strong pressure to do everything to perpetuate the group your in?
• Is the hope of the church in the growth of the institution or in reconnecting with a deeper obedience, a broader delight?

Then on my bulletin board, this piece from Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from the desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me
by the right road through I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always
thought I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Just one more question:

• What does delight look like?

“See, I am making all things new” – Revelation 21:5

During last week’s Lectio Divina group, these words came alive for me.

For quite a while, I feel like I’m treading along the edge of many things in my life. There is an intuitive sense that some sort of a rebirth is approaching. Unfortunately, I have no clue what my intuition is thinking about.

Part of this is a yearning to be free from being blocked by the debilitating power of fear. I am amazed how powerful anxiety can be. And that anxiety just doesn’t simply go away. So far, I’m learning that taking steps of faith (even small ones) are the only way to live beyond the fear. So I keep trying things that can free my from the pall of anxiety.

Another piece of this is a sense of restlessness. This has been present for many years and it has no connection with where I am currently living. It is a larger sense that there is something I’m supposed to be doing and have yet to live into.

A waiting, a yearning to be remade. To be reborn.

What is being reborn?

As I said above, most of this is still a mystery to me. Yet the invitation of faith is to not wait for understanding but to begin venturing into what seems to be the directing of God.

I won’t go into all the various areas here, but one area that I’m changing my intention with is my relationship to my writing. For years I’ve been thinking that someday maybe I’ll magically become a writer. So far, all I’ve been able to create is a haunting frustration and sense of failure that this someday will never come. Over the last couple years and especially the last few months, I’ve been gravitating to books and articles about writing. One key message from all of them is the importance of moving from thinking and talking about writing to really writing even if my own uncertainties and anxieties continue.

So here I am with a new commitment to online writing.

My plan is to write each day, but to publish at least 3 times a week

I know I’ve tried this kind of a blog reboot before, but this time I’m taking a different approach. Before I was trying to write the same kind of random ideas and thoughts without a lot of intention other than to toss it out more often. The other part that is different is that it will in a different cyberspace.

This rebirth is a different kind of commitment to my writing. It is a commitment not only to quantity but especially to the quality of my writing. The words I’ve been reading lately focus on writing with the readers in mind. What will you receive from the time you graciously spend with my words.

This revitalization has three elements:

1. 1. a whole new blog related to what I’m calling 3D Living;

1. a collection of materials and resources that will build on the blog writings and become a primer source for this perspective I’m building; and
2. a larger project that I won’t be ready to announce for a couple months but I’m most excited and terrified about.

These principles of 3D living have been forming in my life and thought for as long as I can remember. They get forgotten then relearned and refined time and again. It is now time to give these ideas life beyond a collection of random notes that lie hidden in a collection of folders I carry with me everywhere.

So what does this 3D Living look like? Three words: Open, Connected, and Whole. These three words gather together the elements of abundant life:

• to be open to the work of Love and Hope,
• to be connected to God and others in a living commitment of faith, and
• to be whole in the love and peace of God’s Presence.

There is the seed. There is much more that is coming in a new place. I’ll let you know.

Soon.

The calendar changes and I find myself facing the realisation that it is time for more than just remembering to write 2011 instead of 2010 on my checks.

If you are one of the few that have been following my writings, I am grateful for your persistence, though it might be just as simple as setting up your RSS feed and not noticing that my posts have been few and far between.

The last couple years have been a time for winter in my spiritual and creative life. A season to be struck by the starkness of my own inner life. Which is not a good thing for someone who is an extreme introvert. During the last year I have finally accepted the reality of my own depression and state of being burned out. That was the easy part.

The hard part is accepting that my old ways of trying to fix it won’t work.

Just waiting passively (I would say patiently, but it was really passively) for the hard parts to go away and a magical world … um, a miraculous outpouring of blessings would just come. Casting Jesus in the part of that Prince who would come someday and sweep me into a fantasy isn’t right.

The other thing I’ve tried is to face the waves of fear and depression like the enemies they are and vanquish them with my own will and wit. Yeah, that has worked as well as if I had tried to go the beach and keep the tide from rising.

I can’t fight my way and no Prince will come to wake me from my long slumber.

These ways haven’t worked yet and never will.

Only grace works. The grace of family, friends and God. But grace comes and is always leading us into a place filled with the spaciousness of hope and new possibilities.

So, Goodbye Old.

So now, what’s new?

Last week I was stuck in the old cave of my deeper shadows wondering what if anything could be done to move me out of my dampened inertia. I found myself looking through some old web sites I had bookmarked and read one written by Cath Duncan on July 3, 2010 called “How to Recover from 10 Types of Demotivation.”

I don’t remember reading it before, but I must have sensed that it had something I was going to need to hear. As I read it, many of the ideas resonated with my personal experience.

One of them really stood out.

7.) You’re demotivated by grief

At the beginning of any change, we go through a phase of wondering if we should or could hang onto the way things were and grieving what we’d be losing if we make significant changes. Confusion, self-doubt, mistrust of the world around us and feeling lost are common symptoms and the bigger the change, the more powerful these symptoms. Sometimes we even go through a bit of depression and social withdrawal. Martha Beck calls this the “Death and Rebirth” phase of change in her book, Finding Your Own North Star. With all the grieving and fearing and feeling lost that goes on in this phase, it’s normal for your motivation to dry up.

Death and Rebirth.

I needed to let go of the idea that I was flawed because I was feeling lost and depressed. I had to redirect the voice of condemnation and fear that is a big part of my own loss of vitality and motivation.

Transformation takes time and energy.

For this expected rebirth to happen, some of the known and comfortable must be retired. Best done with gratitude and grace, but left behind nonetheless.

One of these things to retire is this blog. When I started this 6 years ago, it was a place to just toss out some of my thoughts about life. Most of the time what showed up here was the only draft I would write. I hit publish because I was afraid I would lose the nerve if I sat on something and revise it.

That might have worked 6 years ago, but not today. And not now in my life. My writing needs to mature and become more than just random words tossed out my window into the internet. It is time to practice the craft and art of writing.

I have a new project about ready to start. I will introduce that next. It is coming together as a culmination of many years of thought and reflection.

More to come. I hope you’ll like it.