Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns
If you think Jesus would have come into your home that day and not issued a strong rebuke to the head of household, you are mistaken. These words of condemnation have been haunting me for days now. They aren’t all that different than the soundtrack I play in my head on an almost-daily basis. It’s…
I am nesting. On Saturday I emptied the refrigerator. Last summer’s homemade pickles in their jars. The bread ends that seem to multiply on every shelf. The eggs. The milk. The fruit and veggies. All of it sat on the floor or the counter as I carefully removed the shelves and wiped them down with…
I’ve heard that life is like a highway. And it definitely seems like that sometimes. The pace of life swirls around me at dizzying speeds. We’re all so busy. In such a hurry. Always somewhere to be, something else to do. I’m a get-to-the-point, get-there-quick kind of girl. I don’t like to waste time on…
I shared the following thoughts with our church community on February 13 as part of a series to start the year called “What We Learned in 2021.” Images added for blog purposes.
A friend recently shared a meme on Facebook that said: “What I learned in 2021: no one learned anything in 2020.”
Obviously, that’s meant to be a joke, but on some of my worst days in 2021, I could believe it.
What I learned in 2021 is rooted in 2020, though. Last year, after the summer lull of COVID cases that gave us a sense of normality, fall brought us more of what the early days of the pandemic did: rising numbers, uncertainty, confusion. Except that this time, we were still expected as a society to sort of carry on as normal.
Sometime late in 2021, I realized that I was happier in lockdown.
Remember lockdown? It feels like a lifetime ago. And maybe “happier” is the wrong word because I definitely didn’t enjoy being unemployed, and my kids were struggling with online school, and I was afraid for my husband’s health and safety because he worked with the public. But there was something good about that time for me. Life was boiled down to its simplest elements. We spent a lot of time together as a family, which can be a blessing and a curse. We hiked almost every week. I sent a hand-written letter or card snail mail to a different person every week. We reached out to more friends and family via zoom and FaceTime. Some of my best memories from that time are things we never would have done if we weren’t in lockdown: a board game night with friends in Pittsburgh and North Carolina via Zoom; watching a parade of teachers from my kids’ school as they visited all the neighborhoods where students lived; virtual adventures (we picked a destination at random and watched a documentary and made some food that reflected the culture of that area).
The expectations from society during lockdown matched my own longings: to slow down and stay home more and take care of people. There was a sense of camaraderie, like we were all in this together.
Generally, I’m the kind of person who will just keep going along on a certain path until I’m forced to make a change. I don’t seek out change. That’s an unhealthy go-with-the-flow kind of attitude because I let other people or outside circumstances determine the “flow” of my life. Before March 2020, life was hectic and busy, and even if I wanted things to be different, I didn’t know how different things could be or how to make them different.
Lockdown changed all of that.
So when life tried to get back to some kind of normal, first in the fall of 2020, then in the fall of 2021, I was anxious and conflicted. I still wanted some of that lockdown life, but now I felt pressure to abandon it for what life was like before the pandemic began. The desire to get back to “normal” is a strong one, but I started to wonder what exactly “normal” meant.
Before I go on, I want to say that I understand that my experience of lockdown came with some privilege, and I don’t want to ignore that. Yes, I was unemployed, but I was receiving unemployment and my husband was still working. Yes, I was stuck at home with my kids, but they’re pre-teen or teenage and moderately self-sufficient. Lockdown was more challenging for some people than others: like those who live alone or who have small children and for those of us who struggle with mental illness. I don’t want you to hear me say “Life was better in lockdown” and tune me out because that’s not how it was for you. Lockdown was hard. I know that.
But I like how author Matt Haig, who openly writes about mental illness, evaluated the tension between lockdown life and “normal” life. In May of 2021, he posted on Twitter: “Lockdown posed massive mental health challenges. But our ‘normal’ world of long working hours, stressful commutes, overstretched lives, hectic crowds, shopping centres, pointless meetings, eco-destruction and 24/7 everything was hardly a mental health utopia. A new normal please.”
That’s the tension I felt. That I no longer wanted the kind of life where I was stretched to the extremes daily, where my health suffered because I was trying to meet all the expectations of work, family and society. Lockdown gave me a glimpse of what life could look like and helped me evaluate what I want it to include. I realized I have more choice than I thought about the kind of life I want to live.
That sounds really simple in theory. Putting it into practice is another thing entirely. It’s definitely a work in progress because aren’t we all? But I’m trying to pay attention to what adds meaning to my life and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s little things like lighting a candle for no special reason or sitting in silence. Sometimes it’s a choice that seems counterproductive but adds to my overall health like taking a walk before starting on dinner prep or napping before finishing some household chore. I’m trying to cure myself of always needing to DO something and letting myself just BE from time to time.
In 2021, though, it also looked like taking my anxiety seriously. Late in the year, I started taking a daily anxiety medication. I have lived with anxiety for so long that I didn’t know life could be any different. I was scared to make a change because I had learned how to “manage” my anxiety. But the pandemic has also taught me that I don’t just want to “manage” through life. I don’t just want to survive. Some days, that’s all I’ve got, but in the long run, I want to live a whole life.
2021 was also the year that brought our family to Life Church. We had been stuck in our previous church community and our faith was becoming stagnant or starting to die out. We felt like we needed to leave but weren’t sure how or when until COVID hit.
I remember the first few Sundays that we tuned in online to Life Church and as the songs played, I felt angry. Not at Life Church; I was angry that I’d been experiencing such a limited piece of the Kingdom of God. There were inclusive songs? Songs about justice? Songs of lament that didn’t have choruses with easy answers? As with my anxiety, I didn’t know my experience of faith could be like this. But we’d had to leave what we’d always known and venture out toward something relatively unknown.
We recently watched the movie “Free Guy” as a family, and I won’t give anything away if you haven’t seen it, but at one point, the main character says “Life doesn’t have to be something that just happens to us.” So much of my life has felt like it was happening to me and those words stir something inside of me. That also scares me a little because it requires change.
So I guess if I had to sum up what I learned in 2021 in just one sentence, I would say: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” I hope that doesn’t sound naive because I know that sometimes, for a season, life does have to be a certain way. There are things I can do now that I could never do when I had babies at home. And there will be things that I can do years from now that I can’t do now because I have teenagers at home.
Maybe the changes I’m looking for can be made immediately. Maybe others will take more time and planning. But when I feel tension about the way life is going, this is what I keep coming back to.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Which leads to some follow-up questions: if it doesn’t have to be THIS way, then how do I want it to be? And what can I do to work toward that?
I was thinking back recently to the time late last summer into early fall when we’d had a bit of a respite from rising COVID cases and people were making fall plans only to have the Delta variant arrive on the scene. On Twitter, especially, “my fall plans/delta variant” memes were shared widely.
This one was my favorite (you probably have to be a fan of “The Office” to LOL at it):
And this one’s for all of us old enough to remember:
This whole vibe was sort of how I was feeling about the start of 2022. I used to feel a lot of hope and positive expectation at the new year, but the last two years have made me wary of thinking things will get better or that my life will improve in noticeable ways just because the calendar flips over to a new year. I’m not saying I have no hope for these things but instead of demanding them of the new year, I’m sort of tilting my head at the new year with a look of curiosity.
Like, “What do you have for us now?”
It’s a potentially dangerous question, but I’m trying to be open to what comes next, whatever it is.
That’s not a happy-new-year-rah-rah-crush-your-goals kind of sentiment, but those have never really worked for me anyway. (Plus it’s February now. We’re solidly settled into the new year anyway, right?)
I’m honestly wanting to navigate the space between false optimism and gloom-and-doom. I want to acknowledge the reality of the circumstances in which we live while holding out hope that things can change.
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I recently read an author bio that listed a bunch of amazing things the person had done before becoming an author: “J.R. has been an international spy, a professional skydiver, a jazz musician and has climbed three mountains and sailed solo around the world.” This is not the actual bio, but it contained similar jobs or positions that a reader might think are exciting or important. Maybe the inclusion of them in the bio was meant to impress, or maybe it’s just the author being honest about what has happened in their life.
Reading it discouraged me a little bit. I wondered if any other writers reading the bio might think, “Is THAT what it takes to be an author?” It’s certainly the kind of life that gets attention, but what about those of us who don’t have that kind of life? Can we still be writers?
More generally, I wondered if anyone might question their own life experiences, thinking “interesting” lives are the only ones worth anything.
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My life is hardly what I would call exciting and I kind of like it that way. I’m a middle-aged white woman married to a middle-aged white man. We’re raising two kids (one a teenager, one a pre-teenager). My favorite pastime is reading a book in my pajamas. I like being at home because the world exhausts me. No one important knows my name. No one would look at my life and think “Wow! What an amazing life she’s lived.”
I don’t say any of this to elicit sympathy or words to the contrary. This is my life, and what it lacks in excitement it makes up for with stability, depth and meaning. (I hope. I don’t feel this way about my little life every day, but I think it is true overall.)
Does that mean it’s not important?
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I have the pleasure of being part of an online writing group through the health and fitness community My Peak Challenge (founded by Outlander actor Sam Heughan). In the last year, I have gotten more involved with the Peaker Writers, as our subgroup is called, and it’s been encouraging to my writing to talk about the projects I’m working on and support other writers in their endeavors.
This year, our group designed a T-shirt for members. The motto we chose to represent our community is “Live a Great Story.”
It’s a message I believe with all my heart–that we’re meant to live a great story with our lives.
What, though, I wonder does it mean to live a “great” story?
Do I have to accomplish a never-before-attempted challenge? Do I have to have an exciting career? Do I have to take an impressive trip? Do I need to found a charity that saves the world or fund a movement that effects some massive change?
Are those the only ways to be “great”?
I’m pretty sure that’s not what our group meant when it chose this motto.
We’re a gracious, supportive, inspiring, encouraging group who celebrate every goal and challenge met or worked toward. (The entire My Peak Challenge community is this way. You don’t have to be an elite athlete or work out hard every day or run a marathon or lose 100 pounds in order to be encouraged and celebrated.) It’s one of my favorite things about the community: your goals are YOUR goals, no one else’s and you get to decide how and when and if you reach them but every step forward (or backward) is cheered and encouraged and full of support because we recognize that life is not a straight line and reaching your goals is not an onward and upward kind of journey. Sometimes it takes us in circles. Sometimes we have to go backward or pause or change course. That doesn’t mean we’ve failed.
But back to being “great.”
Can we live a great story in the midst of our everyday lives? Can our stories be great if they don’t measure up to some lofty idea of greatness?
I’d like to suggest that yes, they can.
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One of the fun things about my job as a teacher’s aide in a reading class is all the new knowledge I acquire. I’ve learned about interesting people and places and animals from these small books we read together with our students.
A month or so ago, we read a story about a British man named Alastair Humphreys who 10-ish years ago (these books are a little bit outdated) launched the idea of micro adventures. Humphreys has done some big adventures, too, but he had this idea that maybe you didn’t have to climb a mountain or run an ultra-marathon or travel around the world to have an adventure.
He says this on his website: “you do not need to fly to the other side of the planet to undertake an expedition. You do not need to be an elite athlete, expertly trained or rich to have an adventure.” That’s good news for most of us.
I wouldn’t consider myself an adventurous person but I do like to experience new things and see new places. I’m a curious person but also anxious about certain adventures. I love to travel, for example, but I have high anxiety about the whole process.
Humphreys says, “I believe that adventure is about stretching yourself: mentally, physically or culturally. It is about doing what you do not normally do, pushing yourself hard and doing it to the best of your ability. If that is true then adventure is all around us, at all times. Adventure is accessible to normal people, in normal places, in short segments of time and without having to spend much money. Adventure is only a state of mind.”
Adventure is accessible to us, in the places we already live. That’s an encouraging thought, especially in pandemic times when travel and adventure are more limited than in pre-pandemic times.
So, Humphreys came up with these micro adventures, the kinds of things you could do in a weekend or close to home. You can check out his website for more about these micro adventures. Some of them involve sleeping outside. Others are food-related. (He has a challenge about eating A-Z international cuisine that intrigues me.)
All of them are meant to be done close to home. This, too, could be a great adventure.
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The lure of fame in this insta-fame world is strong. We want to go viral or get noticed by someone famous or do something extraordinary. But most of us won’t. And even if we do, the fame will be fleeting. So much new content is generated every day that what was viral one day is old news the next. If that’s what we’re striving for because we believe it will lead to greatness, I think we’ll be disappointed. It’ll feel like sand slipping through our fingers.
What if instead of chasing that kind of life, we look at the life we already have and redefine what it means to be “great”? Some of the greatest people to live through history are people most of us don’t even know. I’m no longer surprised when I hear about an inventor or activist or business owner from the past whose name isn’t well-known. There are so many stories and lives out there; not all of them can be known to everyone.
That doesn’t mean their stories and lives weren’t great.
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Live a great story.
I’m still working out what this means for my life. I’m not seeking fortune or fame or notoriety. (That stuff terrifies me because I’m so very awkward and ordinary.) I’m not seeking to make some big-time lasting impression that people will still be talking about decades from now.
I just want to live wholly and fully in the moments I have in front of me. To me a “great” life is one where I’ve followed my convictions, stayed true to my heart, sown kindness to those who come into my life whether they deserve it or not, and loved well the people and places in my care. I will consider my life “great” if at the end of it, I can see where I changed and learned and grew and can’t imagine it being any other way.
To live a great story is to choose daily in the direction of what makes the world a better place. That’s probably going to be something different for you than it is for me, and that’s what makes it such a beautiful world. I can’t tell YOU how to live a great story; only you can decide that for your life.
All I can say is that you don’t have to let someone else decide what greatness means. You get to define it.
So, what does living a great life look like for you?
