A Commitment to Happiness…

“Happiness is not out of reach.”

Krista O’Reilly David-Digue

The pandemic taught me so much about happiness. I discovered that it is not out of reach even if a lot of things that I thought brought me happiness are off limits. The pandemic required a level of paring down that most of us never dreamed would be required.

But in this, I found that happiness was still within reach.

For Pete and I we needed to recalibrate to grab hold of it because our longing for our “old” life was causing us a lot of anxiety. Anxiety was creating health problems and health problems were making us feel as old as our kids seem to believe we are - we were starting to feel our age.

We regrouped. We asked ourselves - what makes us happy that is attainable? We decided to believe that God is for us and with us and in us and that even a pandemic could not keep us from the love of God. We consciously, deliberately, asked ourselves - what do we need to practice that fits our chosen way of seeing?

We turned off the television and limited electronics. We started long daily walks. We found that eating home all the time allowed for better food choices. We gave ourselves permission to do more puzzles and read more books that in no way would improve our mind or body. Funny, mysterious, formulaic fiction. Whatever it took! I started taking online classes that filled me with the joy of learning. I followed both my personal interests and tried to up my ministerial skill sets - believing that one day the world would open back up and there would be plenty of fields in need of harvesting (Luke 10 if you are curious).

And we increased our conscious contact with people who love us. We had to ask ourselves, maybe for the first time in our lives - who loves US? We figured out how to play bridge online with our friends. We walk down the street and talk to our neighbors. We wave at strangers and smile even when we feel like crying because we know everyone needs a little encouragement.

Happiness is not out of reach if we are willing to take it on its terms - not as we would always have it, but where we can get it. The world is starting to open back up but Pete and I have made a promise to ourselves - we are not going to re-enter the world buried under the weight of obligation or duty. We are going to require of ourselves a commitment to happiness, the happiness that we have found in the most unlikely places.

Our One Wild and Precious Life…

“It’s okay to be happy with a calm life.”

Unknown

“My job is killing me. I work all the time. If I don’t, I’ll get fired or dinged on my performance review. I need this job to support my family.”

“I am so tired, I cannot rest worrying about my kids.”

“I cannot turn off the news at night; what is this world coming to?”

Can you relate? What’s your story? What story do you tell yourself that interrupts the possibility of a calm life? What stands between you and a reasonable level of happiness?

What could you change about how you think and what you do that would reframe your perspective? Can you give yourself permission to create a reasonably happy, calm life for yourself?

I know habits may have to change; hard choices may need to be made. But, as Mary Oliver says, THIS IS OUR ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE! Why would we waste it on chasing our tails? Or, metaphorically speaking, chasing our tales?

Breathe. Rest. Relax.

“You’ll never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

Unknown

There is inherent danger in believing our own press releases. We all have a way of crafting our stories, don’t we? We have ways of seeing the world and the circumstances that have come to define our sense of self.

If your story is one of feeling “less than”, I have a suggestion. Consider choosing a new adventure. I see the fly in the anointment that may have you questioning this logic. You, me and by the way - everyone else on this planet - has lived in unworthy, “less than” ways. This is a fact. We do not always live in accordance with our own values and core beliefs.

But this does not invalidate our inherent worth. So what to do about our past mistakes? Own them. Own them fully but not exclusively. Account fully for shortcomings without ignoring the rest of the story - we were doing the best we could even if our best was not great.

How can we do that? Well, we could try noticing our defensive posturing - however that looks. Some of us are pretty defensive, others of us are straight up aggressive, others take on too much responsibility and blame themselves for everything! All of it is ignoring God’s value of inherent worth.

Inherent worth allows us to forgive and ask for forgiveness. It enables us to own our mistakes. It qualifies us to recognize the mistakes of others without having to judge them for their humanity.

When we are anxious about something, when we fear that God is not paying attention to us and if he is, he doesn’t like what he sees...we run to idols. This is the history of humanity. There is no need to expect that we will be the exception. But what we can do is recognize and pay attention to our tendency to fail to see the big picture.

God has us and he has got this - this whole wide world in his hands. Breathe. Rest. Relax.

Self-Worth and Self-Care

“Rest is not idle, is not wasteful. Sometimes rest is the most productive thing you can do for body and soul.”

Erica Layne

People who know their worth recognize the value of self-care. They rest. They relax. They allow time for restoration. Those of us who do not KNOW this, are forced to either hop on the hamster wheel of trying to prove it to self and others or find some way to numb the pain that is associated with living a lie - that we are somehow lacking.

Devaluing or inflating ourselves is living a lie and lies are hard to maintain. It rubs against our nature. It flies in the face of who God says we are. It requires massive amounts of denial.

The world feels like a scary place; I get that. I know, oh how I know, the anxiety born of wanting to please and not offend others. But I also know this - trying to win someone’s approval when I refuse to approve of myself is a waste of time. It’ll never happen.

So today, rest up. And think about it - if you were a person of value and inherently worthy, what kind of person would you want to be?

Seen and Worthy

“Remember, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong… to be welcomed… to know that you are seen and worthy.”

Rachel Macy Stafford

I spent some of the best years of my life in a tenth grade class, trying to teach tenth graders to fall in love with not only God but the scriptures that teach us about his story. In each class there were the cool kids, the not-so-cool kids and the kids who defied a label. I loved them all to pieces. They taught me an amazing lesson that I’ve never forgotten. The “labels” that the rest of the community put on them never seemed to translate into lived experience. The cool kids whispered to me of their loneliness with the same frequency as the kids who actually LOOKED lonely. And they were lonely too. All of them - lonely. All of them - swore they did not fit in and no one loved them.

I learned from these confessions. I learned that it does not matter how much you are welcomed, or who invites you to belong - if you cannot accept the truth that you are seen and worthy, there is not enough belonging and welcoming in the world that will make it feel true.

Yes, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong and be welcomed and to know that we are seen and worthy. BUT THIS IS AN INSIDE JOB. No one can “give” us this, we have to accept it. We must accept our inherent worthiness and then we must live into it.

This acceptance will be hard fought and will necessarily require that we beat back our insecurities and our perceived victimhood. It will feel unnatural. Unless I had the most amazing run of years of having uniquely lonely kids in my class, which I do not think is possible, this acceptance and belonging that we long for is not something we just take to like a duck to water when it presents itself.

Instead of asking the world to prove to us our worthiness, what if we began today, right now, with a commitment to the belief that we (and everyone else) are inherently worthy? We do belong. We are welcome. Sometimes we have to believe it before there is evidence to support our audacious belief. But the belief aligns with the story of God and I like our odds that it will ultimately prove true.

In December 1954 a committee that the state of North Carolina should find the way to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional. By the late summer of 1957 ONLY a dozen children of color were enrolled in traditionally white schools. In 1961 the number had increased to 200 children in 11 districts. It was a slow start, but the ball was rolling. I want to know how those dozen children felt. I want to know what it was like for the first 200 to blaze a trail. Most of all, I hope they knew that they were inherently worthy. For those kids and for us, even those of us who have never had to experience that kind of exclusion - we all struggle to feel worthy. How can we make this a little easier for one another?