Trust Issues

One year, when I was in Elementary School, there was a poster contest for a carnival in town. It was a thing the city was putting on, so they had the kids in each school make posters to promote it, and each school chose a winner for best poster. If you won, you would get free tickets to the carnival, yada yada yada. So I went home and drew up a poster. It was Donald Duck, telling the kids to go to the carnival because it was going to be so much fun. Yada yada yada. And it turned out pretty good. I won the contest.

So the posters go up on the wall of the school, in the big hallway near the office, and they did some little ceremony with me. I can’t quite remember the details, but the principal shook my hand and such. Which was all cool. But then this one lady, she was a teacher or a secretary or something, I honesty don’t remember why she was there, but she turned to me and asked me a question. She said: “The picture is really great, but why did you spell the words all wrong.”

I was a little dumbfounded because what I had done was obvious. Or, at least, it should have been. Donald Duck has his peculiar way of speaking. A kind of scratchy duckese. So I had spelled whatever it was I had him saying on the poster phonetically to reflect that. No one had questioned this, all the way to the victory circle. And that’s what I told the woman. “I just tried to spell it like it would sound if Donald Duck said it.” It was, let me say it again: obvious. But the woman seemed surprised. She said, “Oh.” Then she looked at the poster for a second and looked at me and said, “Well. I think it would have been better if you had spelled the words correctly.” She said the word “correctly” as if it was a word I would have a hard time understanding. I remember that the principal gave her a look, but he didn’t say anything. After all, she was a grown up like him. He just gave me a pat on the head and sent me back to class.

Now. I mention all this because, in a small way, it was a life changing moment. For the first time in my life I looked at an adult and thought to myself: This is a stupid person. I wasn’t thinking mean about it. I didn’t look down on her. I just realized that she didn’t get something that was simple. Something I understood, and I was just a kid.

Seriously. I thought about it all that day, and again and again over the years. Grown ups CAN be stupid. Grown ups CAN be wrong. Some grown ups MIGHT not know more than kids, let alone other grown ups.

Can you see how this could change one’s world view? Can you see how this one little incident could undermine a kids trust in the adult world?

I’d like to say that the adults of the world have regained my trust. You know, in general.

I’d really like to.


Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2011

Grow Up Already

Over the years I’ve become a much more serious person. I suppose it needed to happen, but I kind of miss the old me who would do and say really dumb things and laugh at whatever and not take everything so seriously. But growing up happens. And it should.

I found growing up a challenging thing from an emotional standpoint. I simply didn’t want to do it. Partly because it scared me, and partly because our culture encourages us to not grow up. It’s apparently something we’re supposed to avoid.

The commercials said, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid.”

Walt Disney said, “Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up.”

The Ramones sang, “I don’t want to grow up.”

Simple Plan sang it at the top of their lungs, "I don't want to be told to grow up."

And there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s a theme of living in the western world that growing up is about loss. Losing innocence. Losing freedom. Losing imagination and wonder.

But I think, in reality, what people are afraid of is losing our selfishness. After all, childhood is a massive exercise in selfishness. And we accept it from children, to a point, because they’re trying to figure out who they are and what their life should be about. But when this selfish, self focus, drags on year after year, decade after decade, keeping a person from growing and maturing, it gets plain ugly to see.

Growing up doesn’t mean giving up comic books or giving up dreaming about the future or losing your sense of wonder. At least it shouldn’t be about things like that. Growing up means realizing that the world doesn’t revolve around you, and being at peace with that reality. It means living for others sometimes instead of living every moment for yourself. It means learning to live out grace with contentment. It means learning to cope with the harshness of life without letting it eat you alive.

I love children. I adore my own kids. They are wonderful. There is much to be said for childhood. I miss my childhood in some ways. But here’s the truth: Apart from a very few child savants, children have not produced great art or films or accomplished great scientific discoveries. Children have not created medicines and vaccinations. Children have not built great cities or uncovered profound spiritual truths. They just don’t have it in them yet.

We should be like children. We can be child-like. But we should not be children forever. It’s okay to grow up. It’s healthy. And it should be expected.


1 Corinthians 13:11
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

More

I’ve learned to be more careful over the years about making pronouncements about myself or my plans or what I think God is going to do. I’ve become wary of making declarations of intent, as if I need to tell people what I’m going to do or what God is going to do. My soul just cries out at me to shut up about it. Too much talk just complicates everything and brings out my foolishness. We think we have to proclaim our intent in order to accomplish it, but I’m not so sure about that.

Which goes against the grain in a world where we’re supposed to catch a “vision” and cast a “vision” and call people to do “great things.” We’re supposed to do this personally, and we’re supposed to do this as leaders if we’re in leadership positions.

Here’s a problem with all of that.

How do we define “success” or “great things” these days? That’s easy, right? Success = more. That’s really what it seems to come down to most, if not all, of the time.

More.

People give lip service to other things but, let me tell you from experience, “more” is everything in this world. If you have more, then you are “successful” and admired. More money. More influence. More people showing up. More power. Whatever you have, what you need is more, more, more. If you get more or make more or do more, people will affirm that. They will be impressed. They will take it as evidence that you’re doing things right, and you will too, most likely.

Maybe you are. But maybe you aren’t.

It makes me wonder how many people are stuck in the middle of some grand vision, some quest for more, trapped like rats, knowing they are not ever going to be satisfied. Not really. So many people seem to have everything, but inside they are empty, starving for approval and affirmation. It’s like Kurt Cobain wrote in his suicide letter about his fame and success in Nirvana. He wrote, “I've tried everything within my power to appreciate it (and I do, God, believe me I do, but it's not enough).”

Do I really just want to lead people to more? Do I want my own life to be about this constant reaching and grasping?

I have been personally victimized by this idealization of “more.” Not that “more” has anything intrinsically wrong with it. More of the right things could be good, I suppose. "More" is not an evil concept in and of itself. It’s just what we do with it. It’s how we turn it into a little god to bow down to that I find disturbing.

This passage from the Bible has me thinking about these things: Ecclesiastes 5: 7 Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God.

And this one. Jesus said this: Matthew 5:37 Simply let your `Yes' be `Yes,' and your`No,' `No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.


Peace to you.



© LW Publishing 2010

I Could Run Like The Wind

I recently watched the movie, Forest Gump, and I had forgotten just how good this film is. Not only is it beautiful from a visual standpoint, it is profound in so many ways. I could do a blog just on this movie, but I won’t.

It’s amazing how skillfully this movie explores the distinctions between intelligence and wisdom and asks questions about predestination and free will. But I think the basic movement of the film comes from this idea: Forest may not be the most intelligent person, but he is an exceedingly wise person, at least most of the time. When he isn’t wise it’s because he’s too much like a child. It might be better to say that he’s a very wise child.

I was watching the part where Jenny comes home the first time, then sneaks away in the morning, leaving Forest without any explanation. There is an extended group of shots where the soundtrack goes dead silent. Forest is shown sitting in different parts of the house, trying to make sense of what she’s done, but it’s something he can’t make sense of. All he knows is that he’s hurting. Truly, he has been used in a painful way. Finally, the camera shows Forest sitting on his porch, thinking. Then the music begins to swell as Forest says something like, “All of a sudden, for no particular reason, I felt like running.”

And for the next umpteen minutes of the movie we get shots of Forest running across the country and back again, and I remember not really getting this part of the movie when it first came out. It seemed out of place. Even the humor in this section is much broader than the rest of the film. But if you think back to the beginning of the movie where some local punks throw rocks at Forest it makes sense. He’s hit with these rocks and Jenny yells at him, “Run, Forest, run!” So he does. He runs so hard that his braces fall off his legs and he gets away from the boys. He runs from them all through his childhood until it lands him a football scholarship. Later, Jenny tells him that when he gets to Vietnam he needs to run if people try to hurt him.

Jenny teaches him to get away from pain by running.

The reason he runs so long and hard after Jenny abandons him is that the pain of his life has finally caught up to him. The pain of his childhood. The pain of his war wounds and the death of his friend Bubba. The pain of mistreatment. The pain of his mother’s death. And finally, Jenny has given him the greatest pain of his life by using him and abandoning him without an explanation.

All of this pain, festering under the surface, pushes Forest to run for over three years, even though he doesn’t totally understand why he’s doing it. His pain is a silent motivator and running is the only thing he knows to do. But, finally, he says, “Momma always said you got to put the past behind you before you can move on. I think that’s what my running was all about.” So he stops running. He says, “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”

All that running would wear anybody out, don’t you think?






Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010