Here’s To Plan D

•May 31, 2012 • Leave a Comment

We’ve all got a Plan A.  It’s the life you always pictured yourself living.  Some of you are picturing the house with the little white fence, or maybe the super hip downtown loft apartment.. Maybe you wanted to be a musician on tour, on some red carpet someplace, in a pool full of supermodels… a doctor, a lawyer, own a business, maybe even the White House… It’s the life you dreamed of but was completely unrealistic.  It’s what looks like the better-than-best case scenario.  One of Murphy’s Laws of Combat says that all plans work until you include the enemy, then they fall apart, which is where Plan B comes in.

Plan B is the life you ended up actually going after. For some of you, you’ve hit pretty close to the mark.. you’re a doctor with a pool and a Porsche, but  $1 million in debt.  You’ve made it into movies, but nobody knows your name and you die in every scene you get cast in.. You just released an album on iTunes, and you drive a 84 Civic  and watch the Grammys in your underwear eating Cheese-Its.

Maybe Plan B has gone better than you expected! If that’s you, then congratulations!  Some people dream of a family, and as long as they have a wife and kids to come home to at night they don’t care if they sit at a desk, work in a factory, lay concrete or sell insurance.  Some people want to be soldiers and make their families proud… and from what I hear once you sign up for that they don’t really give you the choice to fail!  Some of you own your own businesses, just like you always wanted.  Some of you have a wooden plaque on the front of a pulpit where you stand and teach week in and week out.  The point is, there’s nothing wrong with Plan B.  Plan B is life, it’s your life!  Parts of it may be disappointing, and other parts are so absolutely beautiful they make you cry at the thought.

At some point during Plan B it starts raining crap.  Your company shuts down, your spouse packs a bag, the doctor says it’s cancer, there’s a fire, a car accident, a robbery… maybe you just do something idiotic… Welcome to Plan C.

In Plan C The heat turns up and your friends turn out to be made of plastic and melt away… your phone goes silent overnight.. the bills start to pile up and you don’t even bother opening them.. you fall into a bottle or a bed with a stranger.. you spend your nights in the blue light of a TV, not really watching anything…  over time you slowly float back to the top of the bottle. You start to smile again, you find another job, another house, someone else who says they love you.  You learn to look at the bright side of things again.  You surround yourself with distractions, good things, but still distractions.  You pour yourself into your work, or you start to travel or read books you never would have otherwise. You take up photography or kite-boarding.  You buy a blood red 2013 Mustang Cobra.  A lot of people make a joke out of this and call it the “mid-life crisis” , but it’s really just the later part of Plan C… realizing that Plan A was a joke and we just want to go back to Plan B, even if it was a disappointment because it’s better than this.  Most people just lift their chin and focus on the things that keep them distracted from the tears always pushing behind their eyes or the lump in their throat that must always be re-swallowed every time they hear a certain song on the radio or walk past a certain park bench.  Plan C is making the most of what you’ve got left… living with the heartache… it’s living with what life has left you.. it’s letting the past dictate your future.  …but there are some people, bloody few people, who search and find something better…

Plan D is the escape plan.

This is where you wake up one morning and feel a little more strength in your shoulders than you should and when you stand up the world seems to shrink back a little.. things that normally get under your skin or make you sweat suddenly look small and laughable.. your boss seems shorter, the sky bluer, things don’t seem like they happened yesterday… the car and the house and the bills look like  paper and wood and junk and you realize that you own your life, it doesn’t own you.  Your past has changed you, but it hasn’t pulled you down to it’s level.  You’ve been hurt, maybe hurt bad, maybe even knocked down and out for a long time… but you’re still breathing and still you.  You are not just the sum of what’s happened to you or the mistakes you’ve made.

In Plan D you hear God whispering, ‘behold, I am making all things new’..  and you stop hiding… either from the past or behind it…   You throw away Plans A, B and C… you stop letting your past control you.  You stop the cycle and the pattern.  The past will always be with you, but you learn to stop running from it, and also to stop holding onto it.  You stop feeling guilty, you stop feeling oppressed.  You forgive yourself of that stupid mistake (or all those stupid mistakes), you forgive ‘those people’ and the chains start to come loose..

Jesus said,”The Thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, but I have come that they may find abundant life!”  - John 10:10  There’s a crack in the wall… a missing bar in the fence… a lock Satan forgot to click shut because he thought you were too lethargic to ever crawl to the gate and shake it…  Plan D is a note passed through the fence that says ‘come to me…’  then flares and floodlights, air raid sirens and barking dogs.. but you’re already at the shore.  they’ll never catch you… because you’ve hit the water and it’s washed you clean, and nothing will ever be the same.

Here’s to Plan D.

Writers Write… So I’m Writing.

•May 30, 2012 • Leave a Comment

I may be foolish for thinking I am even capable of this, but beginning today, I am going to post to the blog every day for a month!  I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting regularly, and I can tell the stuff I do post isn’t what it used to be… SO… here we go!

My friend Liz has published a book on Amazon Kindle (Intersection of Lost and Found by Elizabeth Hoffman – it’s .99 and it will make you cry. Read it!) so I’ve decided that I’m going to give myself 6 months to do the same… but the catch is that before I publish I’m also challenging myself to get the blog up to 100 email or RSS subscribers! So I need help from from the handful of you who already do subscribe/read: get the word out!  If you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, whatever, toss out a link when I post something, tell your friends, leave comments on the blog (even if you’re telling me the post is crap or I’m completely wrong!), email me, I REALLY want to make it all a joint effort, I want to publish thoughts on the human conversation, not just my own little manifesto on life!   When I publish whatever I end up publishing, I’d like to list you all as contributing authors!  Also, if you are a current email subscriber, I can count you… but I don’t have any way of tracking how many RSS feeds get picked up, so if you read the blog that way, would you do me a favor and also subscribe to the email so I can know when I hit 100?  Thanks!  …and please don’t sign up multiple times! I want to hit 100 but I don’t want to cut corners to get there!

If you have ever liked anything I’ve written, or if you’re just curious to see what happens when I try, then let’s do this thing!

Christians Can Take A Joke

•May 27, 2012 • Leave a Comment

20120527-125313.jpg

The Uncertainty Principal

•May 27, 2012 • Leave a Comment

In quantum physics there is a theory known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal.  Werner Heisenberg lived from 1901-1976, and he’s become famous for making a whole lot of theoretical physicists very angry.  He was the guy who pointed out (in the theory that’s been named after him) that in scientific research, you cannot observe something without affecting it, which basically means that you change everything you encounter.  One lazy saturday afternoon he was firing subatomic particles through a filter into a film on the other side.  When he looked at the film he saw one thing, when he tried to watch the particles on their way to the film he got a different result, meaning that by watching them, he changed them… they were so small even the equipment used to look at them affected their behavior!  EVERYthing in life is connected.

There is an uncertainty principal in relationships as well… you can’t avoid affecting the people around you.  Your life is as it is because of the people you have encountered, just as nobody around you is the same because of you.  As Christians this means that we have a responsibility to the people in our lives.  We are part of each other.

When a father or a husband packs up and runs off with some floozy, he leaves a hole in his family, a hole that only he could fill.  When we have a fight with a friend and stop spending time together we get pretty angry, not because of what was said but because our friend is gone.  People depend on you just like you depend on them.  Your life is not your own to do with as you please… just by breathing we are in each others debt… to be there, because nothing would ever be the same without you.

Some relationships become toxic, people in your life may affect you in negative, unhealthy ways.. and sometimes they’re simply unwilling to do anything about it… because they don’t understand the principal that their life is not their own; their selfishness is the toxin and it poisons them as badly as the people around them… some guy who stops for a drink after work and comes home and hits his wife, a daughter who sneaks out to party with her friends when her parents aren’t watching, a brother or sister mixed up with drugs or addiction that breaks a family’s heart…  runaways, divorces, breakups, widows, orphans, sickness, friends, relatives, neighbors…

The people around you are all you’ve got, and you’re all they’ve got.  You owe them and they owe you. Neither of you would be “you” without the other.

Do the best you can for each other.

Review: Come Away by Jesus Culture

•May 23, 2012 • Leave a Comment

I while ago I picked up a CD, yes, an actual CD, from the ‘christian’ bookstore.  It’s been a while since I got a new worship album, so I went with something i wasn’t used to. Jesus Culture.

The first skim through the album nothing really stood out to me.. there were a couple nice hooks, and a song or two I vaguely recognized.  I left it on repeat and it was really after only one more tour that I was really hooked! I would describe it as Hillsong UNITED without all the production… it’s rough around the edges and real, almost gritty.  Lead singer Chris Quilala looks like he’s 12, but has a maturity in his voice normally missing in worship leaders. And fellow lead singer Kim Walker-Smith has one of the best female voices I’ve ever heard, adding a lot of grit to the overall feel for the album, which is unusual for a female singer.

The band is as tight as they come and the arrangements are beautiful, but still feel open ended as the audience is often encouraged to make up their own words to the songs and just sing out for themselves.  A few years back I was invited to a large gathering of cell churches in Dublin, Ireland, and the worship experience there was a lot like Jesus Culture, it really took me back!  Conservatives would probably describe it as “charismatic”, but in the midst of it, you really just become aware of the “presence” of God.

I cannot wait to see them somewhere live!  You really should go pick up the album Come Away!  I would recommend buying the actual CD because it comes with a DVD of the entire thing.

Five stars, Jesus Culture.

The Best Advice I Can Give

•May 21, 2012 • Leave a Comment

I’m in no condition to be writing anything inspirational… so instead I’m just going to give you some solid advice.

If you have someone that you love, go hug them and tell them so.  Right now.  Call them, text them, go find them, it cannot wait. You may not get another chance… and it may be just the thing they need most right now.

If someone loves you, make sure you do your best to deserve it.  Love is a fragile thing and it can’t be one-sided or it will break.

Real love is unfailing. Lots of feelings can be mistaken for love, but they all turn out to be hollow selfishness in the end… if you’ve got real love in your life be grateful, and nurture it like a little spark… don’t be reckless or prideful or arrogant. If you drop it you’ll regret it forever.

You will never get this moment back, make it count.  It’s better to tell someone you love them and feel silly than to keep it to yourself and regret never saying it.

Whoever you have in your life, hold them close and tight, because the world is big and mean and doesn’t give a crap about either of you.  You’ve got to take care of each other, because nobody else is going to.  Tell them EVERYTHING about yourself, even the shamefull things in the darkest corners of your heart and past, and listen when they tell you theirs… to really know someone and love them you have to love their faults as well.  Don’t judge them for who they used to be, love them for who they could become! …and remember that when things get bad the world will try to split you apart, but HOLD ON!! Remember the good times, and just work through it.  Love is about giving up yourself to take care of someone else.. if you can both remember that, and not turn on each other, everything will be ok.

Love is easier to see when something breaks…

•May 6, 2012 • 2 Comments

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.