Getting It Done

I have never had much ambition. Any driving goal that you might be able to identify in my life is not so much something I was to accomplish, but a person I want to be. It’s solidified for me, recently, into a phrase my brother said about someone else. That person “got shit done” and so was invaluable to his organization. I turned the phrase over in my head and realized that, without being fully cognizant of the specifics, I have been striving to be someone who gets shit done. It’s a sort of “When I grow up…” idea.

It’s a great ambition, in my opinion, this capable dependability no matter the circumstances. It does make transitions rather difficult, though.

I have been at Samaritan for three weeks and I feel like the opposite of someone who gets shit done. I’m the newb, the beginner, the *shudder* trainee. I went from being the trainer to the trainee, making mistakes and plodding along. Since my feeling of worth is so intricately connected with my ability to get shit done I’ve felt like a failure, like a burden on the ministry and my coworkers. Yeah, it’s over-dramatic, but I asked a grocery store employee to dance the hulu today so over-dramatic is about par for me. In my defense, he was in a grass skirt and had a lei around his neck so it should have been expected.

The past three weeks have been difficult. On the one hand, I feel very privileged to work with the people I work with. They are lovely souls, full of grace even when I make mistakes. On the other hand, I have felt the sharp jolt of starting over, learning a new system and new skills. That jolt shook up my sense of self, never very firmly anchored, from its place and bounced it around my insides.

Thursday someone helped strap my sense of self back in. I was telling him about our Opening Ceremonies parties, on the Friday of my first week at a new job while we were giving a friend rides to and from her third-shift job and had spontaneously decided to kidnap my six nieces and nephews overnight. He laughed and, understanding everything else going on in my world, said that no matter what was happening at work, I was still, clearly, someone who got shit done.

And something eased in my soul, a breath that said, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Of Dreams, Rage and Coffee Cake

I haven’t been sleeping well the past couple of days. I feel like I’m mostly just dozing which is when I have the worst dreams. I even did that thing I swore I’d never do, where Jonathan says something mean to me in my dream and I wake up holding it against him. This morning I had a dream that was disturbing and confusing and oddly satisfying.

It featured a friend of Jonathan’s named Dane (no, Jonathan does not have a friend named Dane, nor does he have a friend who looks or behaves anything like Dane. Dane is named Dane simply because I now spend all day looking at names and I thought Dane was kinda cool). Dane was staying with us because he was down on his luck, though our house didn’t look like our house and I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t move in with Jonathan’s parents halfway through the dream.

Welcome to dream logic. Just stick with me.

Anyway, we were helping him, we were trying to take care of him, to give him a place to stay while he pulled himself together and not only did he ‘accidentally’ walk in on me in the shower, but he ate my coffee cake! I have never, not once in my life, made coffee cake, but in my dream this was a violation of trust on the deepest level. I’d apparently been saving that coffee cake or was planning on taking it to an event or something. He tried to apologize, crumbs all over his mouth, but I was furious. I walked over to where he was sitting at the table, Jonathan trying to explain that his behavior was unacceptable, and I flipped the table over.

Just grabbed it and flipped it.

Standing outside of myself, watching myself in my dream, I was shocked. Then I felt this conscious decision to just go with it, to stay mad and drive home the point. Amidst all the shocked feelings and disbelief that I was behaving like this there was a certain satisfaction. I was actually stepping up on my own behalf to someone who had made me feel vulnerable and who had been walking all over my kindness. I wasn’t just taking it anymore.

Someone at work suggested I run my dreams through a dream interpreter, but I hardly think that’s necessary in this case. I have no concept of what this means for the rest of my life, how it connects with turning the other cheek and all that. It feels like a momentous moment, even if it only happened in a dream.

Plus, now I want to make a coffee cake.

Worthy of Love

In my quest to read 24 new books this year I’ve had to get somewhat creative with finding new books to read. I do not have the strength of Ideation so coming up with new ideas for what to read is difficult for me. Browsing through my Kindle library to get spark some ideas I happened upon a book I’d preordered when it seemed like a good idea and then hadn’t read when it’d been released- Altar Ego by Craig Groeschel.

The premise of this book is that we govern our lives according to the many labels and names we carry. Some of them are valid but since many of them were given to us by our fellow man they are faulty, mere lies that we come to believe so deeply they affect who we think we are. The aim of the book was to identify the wrong labels and figure out who God says we are. His labels are perfection, a guidebook of who He made us to be and, as Craig said many times, if you know what something is called then you’ll know what it’s for.

I’m on a recent Brene Brown kick, watching her TED Talks about vulnerability and, soon I hope, reading her book Daring Greatly. Today I watched her first TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability”. In this talk Brene makes a couple of what may turn out to be life-changing assertions. She says, the only difference between the people she studied who were able to accept love and who had a feeling of worthiness and those who were always struggling for it was that the first set of people believed that they were inherently worthy of love and acceptance. It is truthfully as simple as that. And because of this inherent believe these people lived in a way that she called Wholehearted. They were able to be compassionate with others because they had learned to be compassionate with themselves. They were able to connect because they could let go of who they thought they should be and be who they truly were without the fear of being rejected. And since they weren’t constantly on the hunt of something to numb the feelings of inadequacy and shame, they were able to feel all the good emotions like joy and gratitude.

Okay, so follow me here- It seems like what we need to live as Wholehearted people is that inherent surety of our worth. The question remains, though, where does that surety come from? And, if we don’t have it, where do we get it from?

Well, who are you?

At your deepest, most fundamental core what is your name?

You dig down deep enough and you’ll find that your name and mine are the same. We are all of us made in the image and likeness of the most perfect and most holy God. He crafted us, decided on us when we could not decide on ourselves. No matter how disparate our experiences, you and I both share the fact that we did nothing to influence our conceptions. No matter what your parents tell you, that you were an accident or a mistake, you were decided upon by the truest embodiment of Father. You are, at your deepest level, worthy of love.

My hope is that if I keep telling myself this then I’ll be able to tell it to you at some point. Then you’ll tell it to someone else and they’ll pass it on and maybe we can actually come to a place where people can love each other, show compassion and connect in deep ways. We are a country of people living together alone and it is killing us. The data seems to say that in order to heal we must first be loved, believe that we are worthy of love.

We are worthy of love. It’s part of our DNA, part of our truest names. Now is the time to live like it, to live wholehearted lives in a broken-hearted world.

Being Vulnerable

I feel like the storm has passed. I’ve settled in, found some normal, feel slightly good at what I do again, and had coworkers respond with speed and grace to a blood sugar crash S.O.S. email. What more could you ask for in a job?

A week or so ago, I followed a series of links to Brene Brown’s TED Talk about vulnerability and shame. After many years researching shame, worthiness and courage she discovered that all of the numbers point to vulnerability being the beginning of all good things. That is a vast oversimplification, but Brene has a Ph.D and I do not so I’m okay with simplifying ideas.

Brene made the distinction between guilt and shame with guilt saying “I’ve done bad” and shame insisting “I am bad”. As someone who struggles with both guilt and shame I found this to be a helpful distinction. I started paying attention to my inner voices, who tend to treat me like crap, trying to determine if I tend to be full of guilt or full of shame. So far I’m leaning towards guilt, but it’s a particular shame-filled variety just to make life interesting.

But getting back to vulnerability. The big idea is that it matters and is a must for anyone who is trying to put any grace out into the world. I’ve seen both sides of this in the realm of talks and lectures I’ve seen. There are some talks that, no matter what the subject matter, work. I have watched lectures on topics I don’t care an iota about that were riveting. And I have suffered through lectures on topics I cared deeply about that, no matter how hard I tried to listen, didn’t work. The deciding factor was rarely how skilled the speaker was or the design of the set he had to work with, but how much of his soul we the audience were allowed to see. If a speaker walked onto the stage and bled for us I would happily sit and listen to him describe his lunch.

Jonathan has been trying to figure out what my blog is all about so he can build me a new one. I keep hemming and hawing through descriptions that make me look vaguely exhibitionist and self-involved. But when all the fluff comes off, the point of this space on the internet is to put some grace out into the world. I want to make beauty and words are all I know. But, and you’ll know this if you’ve followed me thus far, the only way this is going to work is if I get really vulnerable with whoever stumbles across these words.

Yesterday my blood sugar crashed at work. Two weeks earlier and I would have had a nice emergency stash ready to go but I hadn’t thought to build up a stash at Samaritan. So when I felt the shaking start and that odd ache through my gut I felt helpless. I tried this and tried that, but what I needed was milk and peanut butter and I didn’t have either. So, of course, I tried to ignore it. When that (shocker) didn’t work I managed to humble myself to go talk to someone. She was a safe person to talk to, someone I didn’t feel I needed to prove anything to. She suggested sending out an email to the entire office, even offering to send it for me. I balked. No, it wasn’t that bad, I would be fine.

I wasn’t fine and finally had to decide between being vulnerable with my new coworkers and possibly doing great harm to my entire system. I gotta tell you, I thought about it for far too long. Asking for help would look too weak, I hadn’t proven my worth yet, I was still making mistakes on the applications I entered. Finally I realized I might soon lose the ability to type an email so if I wanted some help I needed to jump on it. And what came back was a veritable inventory of what people, some I haven’t met yet, had in their desks. And all of it, every granola bar and bag of trail mix and jar of peanut butter, was mine for the asking. I even got emails after I responded that all was well apologizing for not seeing my email sooner. At least three people stopped by my desk to check on me not counting the guy who brought me his jar of peanut butter.

It’s a beautiful story, right? People, Christians in particular, working to take care of each other. I love these stories, love to tell them myself except, of course, when I was the one being helped, when I was the one exposed in all my weakness and vulnerability.

And yet, some grace was put out into the world, wasn’t it?

That I was the recipient doesn’t change a thing. If this is my goal, for this blog and in life, then it seems my marching orders are clear. It’s time to be vulnerable.

Does it count as being vulnerable if I tell you I have no idea what that means?

Whiplash

I struggle with whiplash. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter if the sudden move is from something bad to something good- the bad was known and we should’ve just left it be.

I hate this about myself.

This facet of me leaves me reeling in the good times, has me taking weeks of good things to relax enough into the new known to enjoy any part of it and just generally makes me feel like a major downer in the best and worst of times. I’ve worked at Samaritan, a job that promises to be a huge stress relief for me, for all of one week. Looking back on my week do I see the conversations with new coworkers as people sought me out to say welcome? The time set aside this morning for prayer? The void where the weight of responsibility and busyness used to live? Riding to work with my man instead of saying ‘goodbye’ to the back of his sleeping head?

Of course not.

I think of the mistakes I made as I learn a new system, how last week I knew the systems I worked with like the back of my hand. I think of how I suddenly went from being the conservative Christian in the room to feeling like a, *gasp*, liberal. I think about being new and the constant feeling of having missed a step.

It won’t always be this way. I know this. The plan is working. Already I can feel the stress evaporating off my skin and my eye hasn’t twitched in a day or more. I know I work with quality people and I look forward to getting more comfortable with everything so I can support the work as a quality person. It will come and won’t take very long to get here. I know this.

There will just be a few weeks of whiplash to sit through.