Moments of Time.

Hola and such.

As my vacation to Colorado looms ahead (as such there may be no post next week), I've been thinking about my previous trips there in.  We always enjoy our time there.  Great views, great people, and great atmosphere.  Fun times had or not had.  Laughs laughed and tears shed.  All of the weird and wacky and odd.

And as I tried to turn the way back machine on, I started realizing how odd the things are you sometimes remember.

The strong smell of cows drifting in from two towns away.  That time 12 billion moths tried to invade our home during the time we actually lived there, and had to duct tape all our windows and not used doors.  The great snowball fight of June.  The great snowball fight of August.  The 70 degree motorcycle ride in February.  Getting shocked so hard by static electricity that it left a mark.  Having a very large and bearded man stuff my man bits into a led "cup" during my fun times in radiation treatment.  Receiving my three medical tattoos.  Having squirrels practice parkour off my legs as they tried to steal my granola whilst hiking in the mountains.  Skiing into a park bench.  Accidentally being led into my first Black ski run and learning how to stop with my face.

It turns out if you bite down really hard into the snow...

Anyway...

There are so many memories.  So many things that pop out once you start to remember, or when something trips a memory long dormant.  Things you hadn't thought about since.  Things you had hoped to never think about again.  Things you were reminded about by others that you hadn't expected them to remember.

I think I told you the story already about the time I fell down Mt. Elbert, and while laying there recovering I was robbed of my food by a squirrel and a bird?  Well, there was another person there with me when it happened.  A nice man who was one of the supervisors of us kids.  I was 10 at the time.  He was much older.  That's how supervision works, or so I'm told.

Well, as coincidence would have it, I ran into that gentleman about a month ago.  I've only seen him a couple times since those young days.  I was down helping out at the summer camp and he showed up, saw me eating lunch, and came over to eat his and say hello.  He asked me how my parents and brother were, and after all the base pleasantries were done he asked me this:

"Hey, do you remember that time that one bird stole your apple after you fell down the mountain?"

He had a sly grin on his face.

"Do I remember?  How could I forget.  I can't believe YOU remember that."

I was pretty surprised he remembered that, although I suppose I shouldn't have been.

He then laughed.  "Ya, that was pretty darn funny."

I decided not to ask if he meant the bird thief or me falling.

Probably both.

But it was funny that he remembered that.  After all these years, and it's been almost 30 since that time, this man remembered that day.

As a response to seeing him, I was reminded of a time I ate at his house, and while sitting at his table, a spider dropped down from the ceiling and tried to snuggle up with me.  

I hadn't thought of that in years.  I'd only ever been to his house once, so I suppose there wasn't a large cache of memories to pull from.

But this caused me to think about something.

How many things like that are buried somewhere in my mind?  Little memories laying hidden in my brain waiting for the correct stimulus to bring them out?

That probably sounds like a stupid question.  You are probably thinking, "well, all of them."

And, of course, you are correct.

But that's not what I mean.

I'm talking about the significant moments.  The moments that stood out.  The moments that taught something.  The moments that COULD have taught something, but it's been relegated to the closet of our minds in favor of a more recent moment.

How many moments lay hidden in our minds, moments that formed us and made us who were are, for good or bad, that we have forgotten about?  And, if we could remember, would those formative moments lose their power over us?

Because if there is something that formed something negative within us, this might be important to discover.

I realized as I thought about the old memories that perhaps I have taken so many of these formative moments for granted.  That I haven't truly recognized their significance.  That I have let them fade instead of keeping them strong in my mind.

What would our lives look like if we didn't let ourselves forget the important moments?  Or maybe the more important question is, what if we actually recognized the important moments for what they were?

That last one is really the trick.  Recognizing the profound while you are in the moment.  Sometimes the profound jumps out at you.  Sometimes it passes by unnoticed.

As I started remembering all those old memories, I realized how easy it is to forget important things or to miss important things.

Don't let those formative events pass you by unnoticed.  Be aware always of the importance of what happens around you.

It might be, you know, important.

Have a great night.

Crazy Tired.

Howdy and everything!

I hope everyone has had a snazzy week.  My week has been sufficiently not awful(with exceptions), thanks for asking. What did I do all week?

Well let me tell you.

I drove.  

A lot.

Let's start with Wednesday.  I drove to a world wide camp outing in Wisconsin.  It is three hours one way and we drove there and back on the same day.  In between, we walked around the place pretty much the whole time we were there.  Just so you understand what that means, there are 50,000 people there.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Fifty thousand.  It's in Oshkosh, Wisconsin at the airfield.  It's basically a small city made of tents and bigger tents.  

We walked back and forth and across and diagonal all over that place.  After doing that for a number of hours, we hopped into the car and drove back home.

That was a relatively long day.

The next day after getting about 5 hours of sleep (I don't do well on low amounts of sleep.  Thank you cancer.  Yes, I'm blaming cancer.  Let me have my moment.) I got up the next morning and drove 1.5 hours to a leadership summit.  It was great, except how I was so tired from the previous day that I was literally emotionally unstable through the whole thing.  No, I am not using "literally" in the figurative sense.  I actually was emotionally unstable the whole day.  Not in any violent sort of way, but in the way that makes you want to curl up on the couch and cry into a pillow while you hold your most sacred stuffed animal sort of way.

Have you ever been so tired that you couldn't actually fall asleep quickly?

Last night was sort of like that.  While I did sleep better than the night before, I laid in bed for quite some time with my mind doing all manner of odd things as my body screamed for sleep while my brain merely screamed gibberish at a thousand miles per hour in return.

Today was day two of the leadership summit.  It was also good.  And, while I was not unstable today (I'm actually not unstable as a rule, there will be a point to all of this other than me telling random people I'm unstable, which as a rule, I'm not, like I said, really, I'm not, stop staring at me...), it was still a long exhausting day.

So, to recap, 6 hours in the car on Wednesday with miles of walking in the hot sun in between, 3 hours of driving yesterday with an exhaustion fueled foray into altered states and sleep deprivation, followed by another 3.5 hours of driving today (traffic is always worse on Friday here), after which my wife and I crammed in an entire session of OCD fueled house cleaning as we are expecting guests this Sunday.

We finished that and dinner shortly before I sat down to write this.

But wait, there is more.

Tomorrow we will be driving back to Oshkosh, Wisconsin for more camp goodies, only to return the same day, again, because of other obligations.  So, another 6 hours of driving with tons of hiking in the middle.

This doesn't even take into account the first half of this past week.

Now... why would I go on and tell you about all of that?

Well, it's not for sympathy in spite of what you may be thinking.  I am aware that many of you may have longer days and weeks every day and every week.  I completely acknowledge up front that my life isn't nearly as hard as many, if not most peoples.

What I do want to point out is what effects exhaustion has on you.

Everyone has been exhausted at some point in their lives.  It's not as if I've just now discovered it.

And, more to the point, many people live with it as a rule.  This brings me to my point.

After just a short period of exhaustion I was starting to experience problems.  What might that be like after a couple weeks of it?  A month?  A year?  10 years?

This may not be overly profound, but I really want to encourage you all to get some rest.  When you are not at your best, you start compromising your ability to do everything.

For me, as a pastor, I'm in the customer service business to a certain extent.  On top of that, I have to be smart and quick 100% of the time because when people want to talk or NEED to talk, I need to be ready right then to go any direction they take me.  I don't get to prepare ahead of time.

All of it requires high levels of patience.  All of those things are gone when the energy is gone.  

Actually, my smartness is pretty much non-existent as a rule, but there is nothing I can do about that.

But consider this in a different context.  

What about your families and relationships?  How often do you think that you have taken their relationship for granted and put it to the test simply because you had nothing left to give?  You were used up.  Out of gas.

If a person doesn't take care of themselves first, they can not see to anyone or anything else.  At least, not with any real success.  Instead, we end up destroying our careers, our health, and our relationships.

Fortunately for me, I was self aware enough that I came home and basically locked myself in a room until I could get enough rest to function again.  It wasn't much, but it was enough.  As soon as I post this, I'll be in bed again.  It's going to be a long road till Sunday.  And, while I can't remember the last time I was so tired I couldn't hold it together, it was a good reminder about how easy it is for something like that to happen.  You don't see it coming.  It sneaks up on you and hits you when you don't even realize you were close.  

I can remember all the times in college and after I would be up till stupid-thirty in the morning, then get 3 hours of sleep and go to work and life would be fine.  I'd be tired, but I'd pull it off.  But eventually it all catches up with you.  I've watched a lot of people slowly let their lives fall apart for no other reason than they weren't taking care of themselves and just used themselves up.

I'm grateful that this is a rare thing for me.  Very rarely do I have this long convergence of activities that messes with my schedule.  I'm blessed that way.  But as I mentioned before, there are many people for whom this is a way of life.

It's not smart and it's not safe.

So, I leave with a very simple and obvious charge.  Stay healthy and rested.  And if you aren't already, make it your mission to get there.  Everything else in your life will benefit.

I guarantee it.

Goodnight, friends.

The Wisdom of Comics

Hi all.

The last couple weeks have been super educational as I've gotten into the swing of doing a regular web based comic strip (go here to check it out).  It's so much fun, but also quite technical.

While I have learned (and re-learned) how to streamline the art side of things and make it more efficient and expressive and how better to tell stories with pictures (also a steep learning curve and one I'm still climbing), the biggest aspect was figuring out how best to post the comic to the website while keeping the image and text crisp, clear, and readable AND while keeping the file sizes small.

That has been big deal.

I spent three hours one night doing nothing else but experimenting with file settings and formats and the like.

But it was worth it.  I now have a workable format that keeps things small and quality (thank you to Brittany for nudging me in the correct direction).

I realize that this seems like it should have been the easy part of the whole process, but in fact, it was the most difficult.  It is where 100% of my frustration has been.

The final packaging.

And it's equally important to the rest of the process because if you cannot publish what you've done, it doesn't matter how quality (or not) it is.  It doesn't matter if you do everything else correctly, if you can't put it out there properly, it's all for nothing.

Ooo, I think there is a lesson in there.  

That reminds of me of an early experience I had as a pastor.  I had just started a new district and walked in to a pre-existing hornet's nest of a problem.  The details are largely irrelevant.  But the gist of it goes like this.

The old pastor and some of the leadership had decided to make a huge controversial change.  One that I did, in fact, agree with.  The problem was that the church as a whole wasn't in agreement.  This happens from time to time, so as a leader you learn how to deal with these things and move progress through in a proper way.

They didn't do that.  Yes, they did all the proper steps.  They said all the correct things.  But the "packaging" wasn't done properly.

The issue gave them trouble for years, almost split the church, and decimated their attendance.

Here is where I ask for your forgiveness.  Because to make my point I have to do something that sounds shockingly similar to bragging.  And will it be bragging?  Um, probably a little.  But I have to say it so that the point comes across clear.  So, please, again, forgive my moment of braggadocio.

What took them years to never solve, I solved in less than 6 months WITHOUT undoing the change.  And, I did it by making the same arguments they did.

So, what was different?  

The packaging.

In that case, it wasn't just what you said, it was how you said it and who was saying it.  Some of the changes they made had to do with personnel.  Some people didn't like the personnel.  So, who did they send, after the fact to help smooth out the problems?  The very people who were not liked or respected in the first place.

Just as, if not more, importantly, the main person, who in fact is a great individual, is a terrible communicator.  This person has one tone of voice.  I like to refer to it as "angry school teacher".

One day this person asked me how I was able to fix the problem with the people who were upset about the changes so quickly.  I told her what I did and what I said.  She said, "that's what I did.  Why didn't it work for me?"

I sort of pretended a measure of ignorance because I didn't have the heart to tell her at the time that she sounded angry 100% of the time.  Instead, I told her that I was very gentle, patient, and understanding, but also very clear on the theology of such things.

She said, "That's what I did too!"

I said, "Ah, well, then I couldn't tell you what the difference is."

Ok, so, I basically lied to her.  Forgive me for that too.

It wasn't the right time to have that talk with her because I wasn't super confident in my position yet.  I probably could have done it in a way that didn't hurt her feelings (packaging), but it seemed risky.

Knowing the correct things (or what we think is correct), or saying the correct things (refer to previous statement), is only a part of making things work.  It's only part of the packaging.

How we present ourselves is the difference between success and failure before we ever open our mouths.  This lesson was the first and to this day the biggest lesson I've learned in leadership.  A person can inspire or repulse just by their very presence.  And I'm not talking about hygiene, fashion, or "beauty".

I want to encourage anyone who happens to read this to take stock on how you are perceived.  How the way you do things and say things and generally behave affects a situation around you.  It can be a very enlightening and humbling experience, even if you are doing it right.

Well, I guess that it.  That's all I got for tonight.  Have a great evening!

Lesson 24: The Loop.

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a thought loop?

Maybe it's an idea that just circles round and round in your brain, or maybe it's a song that won't go away.  Those are pretty benign examples.

However, there are other, more malicious examples.

Often, when the thoughts are accompanied by strong negative emotions, it can become a cycle of anger revolving around in your head.  It can even be triggered preemptively, meaning that it happens just because you think the reality MIGHT happen.  This is often where anger fantasies are created.

Or maybe it happens because once something bad DID happen, and now you think it will every time. Or you think that because a bad thing happened, that everything involved is also bad and evil all the time.

And, eventually, these things spill out of our heads and into the real world, creating problems that didn't exist.  Sometimes creating the very problem we thought might exist and didn't until we made it so.  (I just had a mental image of Captain Picard point and saying "Make it so."  It's a Star Trek thing... never mind.)

I recently had the misfortune of watching a teenage girl get passive-aggressively barraged and have her greatest love and passion insulted and condemned to her face simply because the other person had suffered an injury at the hands of thing this girl loved.  Even though it was this persons own fault that it happened.  But to this person, it didn't matter.  Instead of being considerate, this person kept calling the object of the girls passion "evil".

Which it isn't.

In fact, this person was so traumatized by their experience, any time someone even mentions this thing, they start calmly freaking out and spewing hate.  The thought returns and it starts looping and the emotions spiral until control can be regained.

Now, let me pause here.  I totally get that traumatic events can cause, well, trauma.  Emotional as well as physical.  I get it.  I understand it.  I've been there.  You learn to deal, or you get help, or you avoid the thing.  But what you don't do is hurt the feelings of others simply because you had a bad day once.

Back to the point.

Maybe it's a relationship, or an aspect of a relationship and every time a certain trigger happens you automatically "know" what will come next, or NOT come next and you start to spiral.  Suddenly, for no real reason at all, you are angry all because of how you think events will play out, even if they don't.

Do you know what an alcoholic (or anyone else who's been through rehab) calls this mental process?

Addiction.

Yep.  Addiction.

Not long ago, I listened to an alcoholic tell the story of his addiction and sobriety.  He told about how he was so drunk all the time that every time he sobered up he became suicidal.  Finally one day he decided he was going to kill himself and the only thing that saved him was that the bartender who's bar he had passed out in (as had the bartender) asked him to have a drink with him before he took off for the day (about mid morning the next day after the drink fueled unconsciousness occurred).  As a result, the drink turned into drinks until both were thoroughly plastered at which point the guy had forgotten he was going to kill himself.

And so it went for a while.  Eventually he realized one day that the only thing keeping him from killing himself was his drinking and he decided to ask for help.

He went to a legit rehab center and took it seriously.  And while he learned many things, here is the thing that applies for the point.  He learned that he did NOT have a drinking problem.

Her learned that he had a THINKING problem.  It was the wrong thinking that kept him in the mental spiral that in turn kept him in the drinking spiral.

And, while his body itself is most definitely addicted to the substance, it was the addiction of the thought process surrounding it that kept him from trying to stop.

The same is true for each of us.

These thought loops that grab us and "force" us down a specific emotional path of anger and frustration are in many ways an addiction.  To go a different way would require us to give up something.  Perhaps the sense of power that the emotions of rage give us.  Maybe the sense of entitlement that emotions of injustice give us.  The sense of me being in the right and you being in the wrong.

We would have to decide and accept that it is completely irrelevant, as almost all of our friction and fighting is.

If you want to act different, you have to think different.  We can not use the same thinking that created the problem to solve the problem.  (That was Einstein.  Just so no one thinks I'm claiming wisdom that isn't mine.)

Like all things, it comes down to a choice.  

In this case, do you want to pretend that you are better?  Or do you want to actually BE better?

Think a different thought and make a different choice.

Have a great night.