Tag Archives: culture

Of the challenges that I’ve encountered during my life, being a parent is by far the most difficult.

I don’t mean for that to sound as though I’m some wise, ancient guru or something. Certainly I’m not, as anyone who knows me well will happily attest. Still, I have had some experience at life, and, relatively speaking, I haven’t encountered an experience as difficult as parenting.

I also am not writing from the perspective of the things that you generally think of when you think of parenting challenges. No, diapers, cuts and scrapes, temper tantrums, cleaning up after projectile…sickness…all are inherently challenging in their own right, but I’m referring to something more…well, more metaphysical than that.

There’s an angst, for me at least, that comes with knowing that there are two small human lives for which I am responsible. This is angst born of the desire to somehow protect them from harm, to keep away that which would do them wrong at all cost to myself, as impossible a goal as that is. As frustrated as I have always been at injustice in the world, I am doubly so now, because I find myself sometimes feeling an overwhelming guilt about bringing our children into a world in which there is a seemingly constant state of war or power-mongering or profit at someone else’s expense.

Of course, when either of my daughters smile at me and express a desire for my time, this all goes away, because I know that I can only do my best within my sphere of influence. Still, when the emotional onslaught makes its presence felt, it is a force to be reckoned with.

The reason that it is so overwhelming is because it is rooted, I think, in a feeling of hopelessness. I see violence and hate growing around us, and I feel that I have no ability to stop it, despite my intentionality of choosing to not engage in it. I know that both of my daughters will make poor decisions, likely decisions that will harm them at some level, in the future, and that I will be unable to prevent this, as well, as much as I would give anything to do so. A lack of hope is a dark place, indeed, and the smallest glimpse of hope in a dark situation is cause enough for the fiercest struggle.

Except, sometimes, the hope that I’m missing comes, seemingly, out of nowhere.

I was in a coffee shop a few days ago, waiting what in my Western mind was an unacceptably long time for my over-priced drink, and I watched an older couple come and go. They were traveling, is my guess…passing through as this particular Starbucks was right off a major Interstate. I watched them interacting with each other, their talking and their smiles, and my imagination began to weave a story around them. How had they met? How many children did they have? Where were those children now? What insurmountable odds had they faced at various points in their life together?

Certainly they’ve seen more than I have, and overcome more than I could imagine simply by virtue of their age. I wonder what pain and grievous moments might have interrupted their joy at being parents, either by decisions made or by the actions of outside forces over which they had no control. I wondered when they had felt powerless, as I sometimes do.

And I concluded that, whatever their story, whenever and however these events had occurred, that they were here now, enjoying time together, having made it through whatever challenges they had faced.

And there, in my imaginative wandering, was the hope for which I sometimes find myself grasping. They made it through.

And we will, too.

Not without scars, of course. Life gives us those regardless of our best efforts, but it is by those scars that we learn.

I don’t know those people, their names, or their stories. I very likely will never see them again. We do have friends, however, in the same position, friends who have been through more life than we have, and that, with only their presence, give the same hope.

I wonder if, one day, someone will see Karen and I in a Starbucks (that part, at least, is very likely) and think these thoughts. Because I know that we will have made it. I know that our children will have made it, that, in the end, everything will be okay. Not because things around us got better, but because life is created to survive, and because Light is created to overwhelm the darkness.

If we’re open to it, the hope will find us. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to be receptive to it, and that’s okay. That’s a spiritual discipline in itself. When revealed, though, the smallest hope will always bring us through the most crushing of obstacles.

Hope, by definition, will always point us to faith.

And hope is always, always more powerful than hate.

Always.

There’s an old adage, I’m certain you’ve heard it, that a “body in motion stays in motion.” I believe that its meant as a physical truth, encouraging one to remain active and fit. I remember, though, a conversation that I had with a young colleague in a Boston office building years ago, while he worked his way, as we all do, through relationships and life. I reminded him that none of us are static. That we change. That the people whom we know change.

On an emotional, psychological and spiritual level, we are always bodies in motion. We’re always moving forward or backward, but I don’t for a moment think that we’re ever stagnant. If we are, we don’t stay that way for long.

I’m thinking of this because I remember a teacher with whom I worked many years ago during my first career. She was struggling when I knew her, both personally and professionally. She wasn’t received well by her peers, and, whatever the details of her battle, the fact that she would not be returning after that semester became increasingly obvious. I remember respecting her strength as she worked to hold life together during the final few months of that academic year. She didn’t return the following year, and I have no idea what happened to her. If I remember her, though, I remember a person struggling through a difficult season of life, wearing all of the frustration and insecurities that go with that on her face, displaying it with her eyes and averted gaze.

Not so long ago, I was beginning a new career, and had taken a position with a company which surrounded me with people much better than I was at what I do. I had viewed this role as a learning experience…and it ultimately was exactly that…but I was a source of frustration to my more-experienced colleagues as they had to stop and explain things to me that were, for them, elementary concepts. When one has to meet tight deadlines in an environment where communication is not a priority, mentoring someone less experienced in one’s field is a burden, not a privilege.

I’m much more experienced at what I do now, and I’ve grown into an expert in my  niche. I have a skill set now that I wish I had possessed in that job, for the sake of my colleagues, because I could have been so much more productive and helpful to them. I occasionally encounter one of them on LinkedIn, congratulating them on a new role or something similar, and I wonder how they remember me. I think that, in their minds, I am still the inexperienced and troublesome novice whom they believed would have no success in this new career.

The teacher that I knew all those years ago, whatever happened to her, is likely in a much better place in life, now. I imagine that she no longer carries the stress that she did when I knew her. I no longer carry the stress of being inexperienced and needing to ask constant questions now, because I have learned and grown. I no longer carry the burdens that I did when my colleagues from two years ago knew me.

We are not static people. We stay in motion.

We all know people like me, or like that teacher. We’ve helped someone through a difficult time in their life, and, whenever we see them now that they are doing better, we begin our approach with a practiced empathy that is no longer warranted or even helpful (perhaps even the opposite), yet engrained with a sort of emotional muscle memory when encountering that person. I’ve been on the receiving end of that, and it’s not fun.

Just as our children will not be the same next year as they are now, neither will the people that we know. I think that recognizing the growth that someone has experienced…actively seeking all the ways in which they are better…is the sort of unconditional positive regard that has an enormous influence on all of us, something that helps us to live our lives that much better.

Because we are in motion. Always in motion. And that is a frightening, as well as a really cool, thing.

As I write this, I’m sitting on the sofa of our friends on a Sunday afternoon…friends who were kind enough to give us a warm place to crash after an ice storm knocked out power for thousands in North Carolina, including us, on the preceding Friday afternoon with a restoration estimate of sometime on Monday (and I thought winters in New England were difficult to navigate).

Good friends are a God-send. We are blessed to have them in our lives.

During this weekend outage, we also joined forces with a neighbor who was in the same predicament as we were. That neighbor, in true Southern hospitality fashion, had proactively introduced himself to us when we moved into our neighborhood, something that was helpful to us as reserved New Englanders. During our brief time living here, this couple has helped us with a few things, and we them. I trusted them by the time this incident occurred.

Karen and I approach others in very different ways. Karen begins with the assumption that someone is trustworthy…I begin with the opposite. I’m the guy who won’t ask someone to watch my bags at the airport gate for a moment while I step away…I pack them all up again and take them with me. I lock the car when I’m away from it for two minutes. I assume that someone cannot be trusted until they’ve proven otherwise. I call this prudent…others (Karen) call it paranoid.

In any case, an interesting disparity struck me in this particular situation. I trusted our neighbors because they have, in my mind, proven themselves trustworthy. When I meet new friends, I believe that opportunities for someone to prove themselves trustworthy occur naturally. This is true of neighbors, co-workers, fellow members of the same faith community. I expect no one to trust me unless I’ve proven myself trustworthy to them. And, yes, there have been multiple times when the questionable theology of this opinion has been brought to my attention. I’m working on it.

The friends with whom we are staying as write this, however, present an interesting exception to this rule of mine. They were Karen’s friends long before Karen and I ever met. I met them through her, on our wedding day. My trust for them wasn’t earned…it didn’t have to be. This is an inherited trust. My wife trusts them completely, and thus so do I.

This is true with many of my wife’s friends, but with many of my friends’ friends, as well, which causes me to suspect that my “trust when proven trustworthy” position on others is perhaps not as universal as I might think. I’m not certain that this is a bad thing.

Trust is a beautiful event. Karen contends, as L’Engle contended, that trust can only be achieved when one is given the opportunity to prove themselves trustworthy. I have a long way to go…longer, likely, than I care to admit.

I’m so very, very thankful for friends in whom I can trust.