Inspiration for the New Year

Dorothy and Megan Grace, circa 2005
Photo Credit: Mark Grace

Well, 2012 was a banner year by any standard of judgment.  We managed to dodge several apocalypses.  Now at year's end everyone seems to be more or less in the same place they were when the year started.

Of course this game of The-End-of-the-World-As-We-Know-It appears to be one of the few trends we human beings manage to sustain year in and year out.  

No Armageddon?  Well, step right over here.  How about a nice high Fiscal Cliff to jump off?  If nature or God won't oblige, we'll build our own mini-apocalypse. 

Though I am as overly anxious and prone to panicky obsessions as the next person, in my middle age I seem to have discovered unexpected resources for dealing with the constant excessive preoccupation with disaster that culture and politics keeps throwing my way.

Two of those resources are embodied in the persons of the women pictured above: my daughter, Megan and my mother, Dorothy.

Now 82 years of age, my mother survived the dust bowl years in the Panhandle of Texas and managed her way through the near death and year-long hospitalization of my grandad, Miller Cason.  Though fortunate to survive his milk truck being struck by a train, his body took a long time to mend from its injuries.  Mom and her mother Lena traded 12 hour shifts sitting with him in his hospital room and my mother took on many of the chores of looking after her siblings.

Now she manages a very challenging life with my father, who has mellowed nicely in his old age, but who also suffers from Parkinsons and functional blindness.  Their biggest desire?  To continue to find meaningful ways to serve Christ.

Megan is working hard in Austin, Texas, hustling jobs to make ends meet in an incredibly tough economic climate.  In spite of disappointment and delays on the job front, she brings her best on a daily basis to a very challenging life.  In midst of it all she copes with humor and passion and a deep commitment to learning and growth.  In so many ways I see her carrying forward the legacy that Dorothy is leaving all of us.

Both of these women remind me in different ways of a very basic truth.  Though I can't predict or control what 2013 brings my way, I have more than enough love, determination and faith to deal with what comes.

2013 may or may not be my year to find wealth and fame, to live up to my full potential-whatever that may be.  It may bring disappointment and delay.  Who knows, really? 

I can tell you, however, that because of these two women whom I love and admire more than words can tell, I know that with God's help I have the resources to deal with whatever the New Year brings.

What about you?  Who reminds you, on the cusp of  a new year, that you can meet the challenges that may come your way?  Leave a comment!

Photo Credit: www.crosscards.com

Four Ways to Make the Best of a Bad Mess of a Political Season

Ruins
Photo Credit: Mark Grace

Most people wouldn't recognize the name Harry Emerson Fosdick any more, but he was very well known in 1930.  As a matter of fact, he made the cover of Time Magazine.  Fosdick was a Baptist minister, hated with an abiding hate by the religious legalists of his time and renowned for his ability to make the Bible come alive to ordinary women and men.  The late Martin Luther King, Jr., counted him as an influence.

And though I will never be the preacher that King was, I like to think that Fosdick has influenced me as well.  I don't agree with all of his theology, but you already know that I have a passion for our desperate need to learn from people that we don't agree with.  That seems to me to be the only way out of the current mess we are in as a culture.

One of Fosdick's most famous sermons was titled, "Making the Best of a Bad Mess."  The sermon was based on Titus 1:5, "For this cause I sent thee, that thou shouldst set in order the things that are lacking and should appoint elders in every city, as I have appointed thee." 

Fosdick opens the sermon by imagining the young Titus reading that line from his mentor Paul.  

Fosdick wonders what could have caused Paul to write to Titus.  

Perhaps a communication from his young protege, detailing the bad mess he found in Crete, the place where Paul had sent him. Maybe Titus had described in great detail how difficult the work was, describing the low character of the Cretans, who were infamous as liars, thieves, cheats and murderers.  

Paul's unsympathetic response to Titus was brief and to the point- "for this cause I sent thee . . ."  If there had been no mess, there would be no reason for Paul to have sent Titus.

You can read Fosdick's marvelous sermon on your own.  It is not my intent here to re-preach it.  I do, however, intend to use his title and main idea as a jumping off point.  In the process I want to address four ways that we can deal with the political quagmire we find ourselves in during this run up to the presidential election.

WE HAVE BEEN CALLED AND EQUIPPED FOR TROUBLED TIMES

If you think that faith is supposed to get you out of trouble, then you have haven't been reading your Bible.  It is my strong opinion that we Christians are serving the devil up a fat, slow pitch every time we wring our hands and moan about the fact that the world is such a godless place.  

If it weren't then we would not have been called to the work God has set in front of us.  

It is time to get over ourselves, and especially time for Christians in the U.S. to stop whining about how things are not what they should be.  Count it all joy, as the Apostle James exhorts us, when you fall onto difficult and trying times.  Or as Mr. Dawson, one of my high school coaches used to say, "It may not be good to you, but I can tell you that it is good for you."

The resiliency theorists label this key survival trait with the term, "optimizing realism," or the resolute, unblinking acceptance of reality that causes us to make the best of future possibilities. 

Optimizing realists leave fear-mongering to the religious and political marketers, who have shown no compunction about constantly mashing the panic button to milk one more reaction from a panic weary public.

Photo Credit: www.123RF.com

PRACTICE TRUST AND DEVELOP FAITH IN GOD'S PURPOSES

"Hope lies to mortals," said W.H.Auden in an insightful poem.  

When asked the difference between those who survived and those who did not survive imprisonment at the hands of the North Vietnamese, medal of honor recipient James Stockdale said, "The optimists were the first to give up emotionally and succumb to death." 

When asked how this could be, Stockdale stated that the difference for the survivors lay in where men placed their ultimate faith- not in being set free by Christmas, or Easter, or July 4, but in preparing themselves for the long battle and believing deeply in the fact that they would eventually experience liberation. 

If you are hoping this presidential election will take care of your problems, or if you have convinced yourself that the defeat of your candidate will spell disaster for you and for this country, then you have placed your trust in the wrong things.  

"The state is destroyed," goes a well known Taoist saying, "but the mountains and rivers remain."  

Can you trust in the creator of mountains and rivers?  

READILY FORGIVE YOURSELF AND OTHERS 

To paraphrase a well-known business motto, fail early, fail often and fail forward.  Accepting the need for risk and the inevitability of failure can prepare us emotionally and spiritually to forgive ourselves and others.

I'd like to suggest that you resist wrestling over your need to forgive, spending lots of time in prayer asking God to give you a forgiving spirit, or anguishing over why you don't yet feel more forgiving.  Forgive yourself and others today. Right now. And if you find that it didn't stick, then forgive yourself and others tomorrow.  And keep forgiving.  

Seventy times seven might be a good goal to shoot for.

A breath prayer that I use frequently goes this way, " I am not dismayed or disappointed by my failures.  I love myself fully in the midst of apparent defeat, confusion, difficulty and delay.  I own my mistakes and I confess them to God and to appropriate others."

BECOME AN ARDENT PRACTITIONER OF REDEMPTION

An interesting term that Resiliency experts often use is the term "briccolage." It refers to a person's capacity to sift through the ashes of defeat to find useful material from which to start again.  

Briccolage reminds me of a favorite television show I watched as a teenager, "MacGyver." 

The repeating plot was predictable.  Richard Dean Anderson would find himself in a very difficult situation, many times facing certain death.  Invariably he saved himself and others by making use of ordinary every day items that he found at hand. He turned those common items into the instruments of his salvation.

The Christian word for "briccolage" is redemption.  The mass marketers, political spinsters and campaign strategists don't want you to believe in redemption.  They want you to fear making the wrong choice.  They want you to believe that your one chance for salvation is to vote the way they scare you to vote.

We have been called to a higher purpose than to serve as lab rats for propagandists.  

We have been called to the ministry of briccolage, to be ambassadors of reconciliation and redemption.

As usual, I am interested in what you are thinking in response to what I've written here.  What is your strategy for making the best of the mess we find ourselves in these days?

Photo Credit: www.crosscards.com