Tag Archives: faith

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.

In the U.S., we’re celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday this week, a holiday that, while originally tied to religious components in the language of its original proclamation, did not spring forth from any sort of faith tradition. That is to say, while it is a holiday that is loosely tied to the Christian faith, it is not a holiday rooted in the Christian Church’s history or theology. It’s more a national day of remembrance, if you will.

This is interesting when we consider the season into which we enter. A couple of weeks ago, our daughter requested to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, a longstanding prerequisite for me to enter any sort of Christmas “spirit.” While that was a bit early, I’ll admit, I am beginning to find myself feeling the peace of the Holiday early this year, which is a welcome change from recent years, during which I struggled through Christmas day to feel anything at all.

All as we enter a decidedly non-religious holiday.

One of the holidays encapsulated when I wish someone, “Happy Holidays.”

Something that I do, because, much to the apparent horror of many other members of the Christian faith who apparently have no more substantive an outlet than anger over a coffee chain’s cup design, I find this expression not diminutive to my own faith, but rather respectful of my fellow human beings.

You see, many of my friends and colleagues practice different faiths than I do. Some practice no faith at all. A way in which I am particularly blessed, however, is that all of my colleagues and friends are respectful of this. My wishing them Happy Holidays, a phrase which encompasses the group of winter holidays, some of which are not religious and some of which may or may not be holidays that my friends or I observe, is being polite and civil to them. It is, in fact, far more appropriate that they wish me a Merry Christmas than I them, if they do not celebrate Christmas, because that is them being kind to me, as it is kind of me to wish them, for example, a Happy Hanukkah.

So, all of this to say that, as much as playable sound-bytes might have one to believe otherwise, there are those of us who take the practice of our faith very seriously, and part of the practice of my faith is to love my neighbor. That means respecting my neighbor, not forcing the practice of my faith on them.

That said, I find it quite sad that any member of any faith would waste this much energy being upset over the phraseology of a holiday wish, year after year. After all, with so many experiencing hunger, injustice, poverty, and loneliness over any of these winter holidays, it seems that the true practice of our faith would involve something much more…human…than debating whether or not we’ve “kept Christ in Christmas.”

Because, if we’ve loved the least of these, then we have.

Regardless of the verbiage of our expression.