10 Things I Learned in 2020
Every season, I look back before jumping ahead or riding on toward my future.
I learned to do this as I walk or ride the trails on my mountain bike in the woods of Central Oregon. It is a practice that helps me recognize the path from a different angle and find my way home when the light changes. When the road home is not a straight shot, but filled with choices of paths to take, it helps to see the trees, stumps, and rock outcroppings from the other side.
This habit is a version of an ancient Christian prayer originating with St. Ignatius called Examen. I like to practice it at the close of each season in nature and then mine those reflections into a top ten lesson list for the year.
This is the big one. Here we go!
1. Don’t skip your rough drafts.
I went hiking with two friends last summer. We hiked one of the 7 wonders of Oregon - Smith Rock. After traipsing around in a hot and dusty caldera, we came home to the patio and my artist friend, Lisa, took us through some steps to painting a photo from our hike.
Our first step was making four rough sketches in under four minutes, trying just to capture the movement and big chunks of space. It was a fascinating study in truly seeing before beginning to paint. I realized something immediately about myself. In my zeal to get to what I often consider the real project, be it a painting, writing, or any spiritual practice, I tend to skip over such a preliminary step.
But that sketch turned out to be my favorite part of the whole process.
When I thought about why, I realized I felt the most myself in the rough draft - before I was trying too hard, had worried or polished or performed too much.
It reminded me that I have two old prints of charcoal sketches by Van Gogh that my Mama gave me years ago, knowing I often liked the studies and working copies more than the final paintings (though I do love a colorful Van Gogh!). It is so easy to underestimate the value and beauty of a rough draft. That is true in writing, art, friendship, parenting, or our friendship with Jesus.
What rough draft can you slow down and appreciate?
2. Make rough draft friends.
In the spirit of not skipping our rough drafts in work or creativity to find hidden beauty, comes the idea of making rough draft friends. Who can we be ourselves with? Who do we trust enough to let them see our struggle in the middle of it? Not the heroic one later after it is all wrapped up, but the insecure, unpolished, work-in-progress person we are at this moment. You know the one without flattering light or our best angle.
This has been a hard-won lesson for me, one loving a child with autism helped me learn. I have made some progress, but I can still easily forget.
It might not be easy in our curated world, but we have the opportunity to be real with ourselves and our friends.
“We all need a handful of people with whom we can show up and say, “Here I am. The rough draft me.” And they can listen to us and love us and, eventually, help us become a better version of ourselves.” Stephanie Rische
Read Stephanie’s full post here.
What has helped me the most in finding and being a rough draft friend is practicing the ancient prayer of Examen, a look back with a loving eye across the landscape of my life together with my friend Jesus - the best rough draft friend there ever was or will be.
3. Jesus has a dream of me (and you).
One day in my prayers, I was asking Jesus what's next? And in his Jesus way, he turned it around on me and said, not audibly, but in that gentle impression sort of way like the breeze through my hair, "What is it you want?".
It wasn't a question that prompted a grocery store shopping list, but more a question of what are we cooking together? What's on the menu? I wrote down a few things that are currently stirring in my heart - writing, spiritual formation, rhythms of life, creative collaborations, poetry, and resilience. I looked back in my life and saw that these had been stirring for a long time. I remembered my girlhood heroes were Anne Frank, Jo March, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Emily Dickinson, and much later, the biblical women, Deborah, Rahab, and Ruth. Even more recently, I’ve been drawn to Harriet Tubman and Evelyn Underhill.
My influences haven’t all been women. There’s Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, Howard Thurman, Parker Palmer, and Wendell Berry. And in the Bible, I have always loved Nehemiah, Job, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, John. These affinities were little clues to something about me, something about how God made me and hints of work God wants to do in and through me.
Jo Saxton writes in her book “The Dream of You”,
"The Dream of You is God's vision of you - your real, true identity and your God-given purpose."
Who were your childhood heroes or heroines? Who are your biblical heroes or heroines? What about writers, poets, mystics, or teachers?
We are all living out some version of what's in our hearts even when we don't notice it. The time we spend considering how we are truly made and how to live out our identity in Christ on purpose is well spent. What have you noticed about where your life and your life in Christ meet?
4. Seminary taught me to walk around inside myself.
I learned so many lessons in Seminary that did not come out of a book. One of those things is that my feelings, while they are not the boss of me, can tell me important things about myself, the world around me, and the Artist God who made us both.
Within me are corners that need light, cobwebs that need sweeping, windows that need to be thrown open for fresh air, beauty I have missed, places God is touching with his tender hand. Every Sunday as I look over my past week, I have realized it does not have to be done with harsh flashlight or the voice of shame run amok. In the words of Richard Foster, I am looking together with my friend Jesus with "a scrutiny of love for my health, my happiness and my healing".
I am not saying I like everything I see when I peer over the rim of my heart, but I can say that Jesus and I are looking together His grace is both gentle with who I am at the moment and challenging me to live more fully into who he is calling me to become in the world where he is king.
This walking around inside myself is not a solitary journey. My listening and looking for God’s fingerprints on my life is helping me become more wholehearted, not only for me but for the flourishing of the whole world.
That heightened desire for the flourishing of a world-wide community has shaped me inside and out. It has changed the books I’ve read, the voices I’ve listened to, the way I read the gospels.
5. “Tender thresholds” are little ways keep the door ajar so our soul can come out of hiding.
I was looking for a way to ease my four-year-old granddaughter, Sweet Pea, through a teary time when I was babysitting and she missed her Mama.
So, Sweet Pea and I made papery things together: paper airplanes, fortune tellers, and a throwback to my childhood, tissue paper flowers. These were simple things we could make out of whatever was around the house, in this case, printer paper and used tissue paper. And you know what? Mama was home before she knew it. It turned out to be soothing and grow patience during fear or pain at the same time.
I call these activities that open space inside us “tender thresholds”. Tender thresholds can ease our fears, relax our bodies, and tap into our creativity and deeper longings.
Adults need these liminal spaces, too. We need these activities to gather momentum as in a jet runway or smooth the path into work like a writing project, a speaking engagement, or intimacy with Christ as we lean into our deeper, more difficult prayers.
“The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
— Parker Palmer
Poetry, songs, cooking, hobbies, and engaging in creativity can all work a similar magic. Recently, in a small online workshop, I invited participants to create old-fashioned magazine collages to help express life themes that are sometimes hidden even from ourselves. We juxtaposed words and images clipped and torn from magazines and mail catalogues, to express who we were becoming.
What are your tender thresholds?
6. Discernment is more than decision-making.
It can surprise us to know that making good decisions is less about knowing what exactly to do next and more about recognizing the voice of the One who lives inside me.
All of our good decisions involve discernment. And we have so many decisions to make in our modern life. Certainly Covid has only complicated many of our decisions even the ones we thought we had made well - how do we work, live, gather or stay home while caring deeply for the health of the world? How are we church? How are our children educated?
I’ve been thinking that discernment might be mostly about listening and asking good questions, even ones we can’t quite answer.
7. Sabbath is a mending day.
I adore Sabbath. But to be clear, it’s both beautiful and hard.
It took me a while to realize that Sabbath isn’t only about stopping work. It is also about letting God do instead of me. This is mending for me. My frayed edges come together.
By way of a deep cure, I wonder if I can let God be my giver, my breath, my beautiful view, my still point?
I leave labor and load,
Take up a different story.
I keep an inventory
of wonders and uncommercial goods.
Wendell Berry
8. A Psalm a day is a time keeper.
This was an idea seminary professor Eugene Peterson gave his student W. David O. Taylor years ago. Eugene told David read through the Psalms, one per day. When you reach 150, begin again. In this way, you will read through the Psalms about 2 1/2 times each year.
I am reading them aloud to myself and staying near the psalmist's feelings whatever they may be. It is a practice that helped me keep time during Covid19 -20. And it is a practice that keeps me in God’s time. Like all good poetry, the Psalms help me process collisions of opposite feelings at the same time - happy and sad, selfish and generous, mad and merciful, gain and loss, being fearful in my heart and confident in my Shepherd.
Photo by Michael Conlin
9. I’m a star-gazer and a moon-chaser.
I suppose I haven’t always known this or been able to name it. But in the last few years I’ve found myself looking for the moon in the night sky, noticing her phases, and lately, learning the difference between waxing gibbous and waning crescent. Basically, I have been increasingly nerding out about that pock-marked ball that reflects the sunshine, affects the ocean tides, and hangs like a pearl around the neck of our Earth.
Same with the stars. You can usually find me with Mike getting ourselves and anyone who will join us into the path of totality of a Solar eclipse or under the night sky and her beautiful scar, the Milky Way.
I keep reminding myself that what I am actually doing is chasing the Sun-Shiner and the Moon-Maker. There is something about naming my affinity for the cosmos out loud. It says something about my identity as a child of the One who said, “Let there be Light.” And it was so.
I have needed light shed on so many things this year. Most of that light has been a gritty search for health and truth in our ideas and practices of home, church, leadership, gatherings, racial inequalities and reconciliation, grieving, politics, and truly caring for others.
10. Tiny thanks are making big space in me.
Sometime towards the end of summer while sipping my morning coffee, I started writing down three things I was grateful for from the previous day. That’s it - just three small things from the prior 24 hours right into my planner. I called it tiny thanks.
Over that season and into the next, my thankfulness grew not in numbers but in depth to include very specific qualities of God and very human joys and sorrows in my life. Not only big and general, and not only happy, but in all the ways I experienced gifts from our ever-present God recently. In. that way, this small practice began making big space in me. God space.
It was simply too good to keep to myself. So I decided to add my tiny thanks to my Instagram stories and invite people to join me. If you want to jump in, you can join me there with #tinythanks, no experience or prep needed.
Of all the lessons of 2020, and there were so many, this is a collection of the highlights that I am taking forward.
As I happen to be writing this on Epiphany, I leave you with a Magi prayer from my Advent adventure, “Fiat Mihi”.