If we really care about people, we need to stop doing this…

This week I (along with a few partners) am signing my name to legal documents that in the very near future could literally launch me and my family into an incredible new season in life. We’ve been working on it for months behind the scenes, and to be completely honest, I’ve never been so excited/scared about anything in my life. The possibilities for this new venture could have an impact for many years to come.

It’a an adventure unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

It’ll be a little bit longer before I can start sharing the project publicly, but for the last 10 years or so, I’ve had to learn how to quit a very dangerous habit. And if this new project is going to work at all, I need to keep this habit as far away as possible.

What am I talking about?

Trying to please everyone.

I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t struggled at some point along the way with a tendency toward this, and in certain situations, it can explode into an absolute relational devastation.

It seems so harmless too. In the pressure of the moment, all you have to do is tell someone what they want to hear, or do something you think will make them happy. The problem arises when what you did for or told someone else clashes with another person. It gets really complicated and possibly disastrous when three or more people are involved…especially if they all know each other.

In the end, your integrity is questioned, relationships are damaged, effectiveness is decreased, and much precious time has been wasted trying to keep too many unnecessary informational plates spinning. All for the fact that you just wanted to cover you tail and not disappoint anyone in the process.

That’s impossible by the way. Disappointing people and being disappointed by people is a part of the journey. But we’ll lie, avoid answering awkward questions, not return phone calls, text messages, and emails in the hopes we’ll squeak through unscathed.

How do I know? Because I’ve done it for years. And you probably have too. It’s practically a culturally accepted norm. It’s just something we do.

But I just can’t do it anymore.

Why?

1. There’s too much at stake…none of us have any time to waste, and when we do have free time, I’d much rather spend mine with my family and dear friends or inhaling the beauty of all the life around me instead of backtracking because my explanatory house of cards finally collapsed.

2. Our work is crucial…people are counting on us to do what we do with excellence, not clever, selfish, butt-covering maneuvers. Also, there’s no way we will always have the perfect alibi. The fact that we screw up and drop the ball sometimes is also the reason we should be committed to finishing well, even if that means getting it wrong fifty times before we finally get it right.

3. And people are always worth the truth…not much to add to that. Seems easy enough, but it’s often the most uncomfortable truth to embrace. It’s incredible how much time we’ll spend devising ways to dress the truth in some kind of tweed verbal smokescreens. (I don’t have anything against tweed. In fact, I actually love it, just wanted to use it in a blog post.)

The abyss of trying to please everyone can be as alluring as the most attractive person we know finally showing us some attention. We want them…we even believe we need them. So when they ask something of us, our first inclination is to breathlessly acquiesce to their request…because we want them to keep wanting us. And they might…but at what cost? And how long will it be until someone else we want to want us asks of us something that has direct consequences to the request of the other person we want to want us.

See how confusing and ridiculous it becomes?

The drug of trying to please everyone ruins marriages, makes churches into monsters, stunts creativity, mutes beauty, silences honesty and pumps our insecurities full of steroids.

If you find yourself surrounded by people who always expect you to please them…RUN. Over the past four years, I’ve slowly, sometimes painfully learned this lesson. You need people around you who desire your best, even if that means you completely blow it sometimes. These are the people who help you become better, keep your trajectory towards excellence, and are there to pick you up when miss.

Truth creates trust, and in order for us to be who we’re called to be and do what we’re called to do, people HAVE to trust us.

You can’t please everyone, but you can be honest with everyone. If you’re a friend of mine, I prefer the latter.

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Have you ever struggled with trying to please everyone? How’d that work out?

The reality is…

The reality is…some days are not that great.

The reality is…things don’t always turn out the way we hope or plan.

The reality is…sometimes I’m a disaster as a dad and husband.

The reality is…sometimes my kids act like I’ve never taught them anything.

The reality is…life can be utterly overwhelming.

The reality is…some days we just have to trust and keep going, even when the way ahead is too dark to see.

As the poet King David wrote, “If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you [God]; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” // Psalm 139.11-12

When you can’t see…there’s grace to lean on the One who can.

We’re pregnant?!

“Congratulations!” The young physician practically vomited her excitement all over our stunned faces, “How long have you been trying?”

Trying? We just thought we were practicing!

Barely 60 days into our marriage, and there we sat.

Hearts pounding.

Apparently peeing on multiple sticks doesn’t reverse the results. (Who knew?)

Things were not going according to plan.

Which plan, you ask?

The Five Year Plan™, of course. You know, the one where after arriving home from your honeymoon, a transporter takes you to a magical land where all fighting, fertility, and general life troubles are placed in a holding pattern. That way you and your mind-alteringly hot spouse can begin marriage without the peskiness of real life getting in the way. (That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right?)

We left the doctor’s office and went back to our apartment to mull things over.

I don’t remember it taking very long for us to initially come to grips with our new reality, but the truth is, we weren’t even close to being ready for what came next.

Within just a few week’s time, Jordana was deathly sick, I had been laid off from my job and shortly after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with a serious disorder related to pregnancy called Hyperemesis Gravidarium.

Ever walk through those seasons of life where everything starts getting dark very quickly? Even as I type this, I can still feel all the angst and fear leftover from memory.

There I was, the young husband, anxious to prove myself but left helpless.

There she was, the hopeful bride, ready to launch into a new life and suddenly all the post-it notes of dreams she’d been leaving around the rooms of her heart were stripped down.

Was this a joke?

Were we pawns in some sort of cosmic chess match?

A thought from C.S. Lewis I continually call to mind is, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

The truth is, our every day theology simply cannot fly in the face of our most difficult days or our most glorious days. What we think we know about why things happen (or don’t happen) a certain way will undoubtedly go through times of ebb and flow. This is part of the epic battle between our humanity and our spirituality.

In scripture, notice David wasn’t called “a man after God’s own information”, he was called “a man after God’s own heart.” There is something much deeper going on in us than simply knowing…

God has called us to a place of being.

Knowing and being were never meant to be a replacement for one another, but rather a compliment.

Frequently I find myself knowing many of the “right answers” about situations, but still end up attempting to complete the mission on my own.

If you’ve ever done the same thing, you know that never ends well.

God beckons us to a place of refuge. But knowing about a place of refuge is not where we find safety…we have to actually go there…be there.

Miraculously, nine months later, our firstborn son, Tobin, was born. We chose that name primarily because it means “God is good.” Realistically, that wasn’t something that was always easy for us to embrace, believe or see, but in the end we experienced its truth.

Much of what we knew had been (and still is being) tweaked and pruned. When the doctor announced we were pregnant, she may as well have said, “Congratulations! God is about to wreak seventeen kinds of havoc on everything you had planned…”

Reality is, most of the times my plans stink, and it takes something drastic to convince me. And maybe it’s not the convincing about the subpar nature of my own plans that’s so difficult, but rather the process of embracing the ones God has for me instead.

Maybe you’ve been where we were. Maybe you’re there now. Maybe you’re awaiting the “painful best” as Lewis would say.

But please hear this from me…from someone who is still stumbling forward along the road of grace: accept God’s invitation for you to come and BE. Don’t fight it.

Cling. Trust. Be. Rest.

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More coming on this Friday…

Does this resonate with you?

Is your life a dragon’s lair?

Sort of an odd question.

But the truth is each of us are harboring dragons of some kind…here’s what I mean:

We hold grudges.

We refuse to forgive.

We refuse to ask for forgiveness.

We are afraid.

We feel worthless.

We are insecure.

We are jealous.

We gossip.

We judge.

We look down on.

We are hurting.

We avoid difficulty.

We give up.

We don’t trust.

We ______________ (fill in your own).

After a while our lives are so full of keeping our dragons well-fed and hidden from public view that we are rendered unable to truly live as we were meant to.

Somewhere along the way we start thinking things like:

“Why is it so hard for me to connect?”

“Am I just not likable?”

“Do I just not have anything to offer?”

“I mean seriously, how come the cast of Jersey Shore has better community than I do?”

What I really think happens (much to our horror), is the people around us somehow can see our dragons. And no one ever hangs out or takes refuge in a dragon’s lair. (Unless you’re a dragon…that’s why it’s your lair).

So.. it’s time for you to kill some dragons. You don’t need them, but there are people who need you.

The challenge is, it’s much easier to sit on a couch in our living rooms and be entertained by the crying confessions on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, screaming meltdowns on Bridezilla, or interpersonal exploits on Big Brother. We are fascinated with dissecting other people’s dragons because it distracts us momentarily from our own.

Reality tv is staged…we are not.

In Hebrews 12, we are challenged to throw off anything that keeps us from running the race of life as we were created to. It’s not easy. Being honest about ourselves is much more difficult than continuing to feed the dragons, but the trade off is simply not worth it.

We must be about more than living an exciting story. Our lives should be built in such a way that others are better having encountered us. This, is probably the most difficult thing for me to remember. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own story (or frustration for lack of story), and forget about all the others I impact.

So…who’s ready to go hunting?

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” // GK Chesterton

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What are your dragons?

A dirty diaper almost ruined my plans

The longer I live, the more (painfully) aware I become at how easy it is for even really well designed plans to be completely derailed.

In fact, launching my blog when I had planned to almost didn’t happen because my two year old twins (Eden and Marceau) decided to pull off an incredible feat of disaster-laden wizardry.

And I figure, if two year olds can foil my plans, there must be something bigger happening that I should learn how to see.

So here’s the story…

It was literally 10 minutes before the link to my very first post was supposed to go live online. Now, I’m still new at this whole “internet orchestration” thing, but after a several days of scheming, I had everything “ready to go” (ha).

Suddenly, from the playroom, my wife yells, “Oh no! What are you guys doing?!”

**NOTE TO MEN: Your wife is designed to be able to handle a massive amount of child-related stress, but when she yells “oh no” … you better get there quick.

Anywho, up until that moment, the twins had been playing quietly. And, for some reason, a parenting lesson I’m still struggling to completely grasp is that when your children are too quiet…something sinister is happening around 99% of the time.

I rushed to the doorway to see what catastrophe had occurred, but much to my horror I could actually smell it before I could see it.

My wife and I have five kids, and I’d like to believe that we’re fairly seasoned vets when it comes to facing the regular ambushes of parenting, but mark my words: nothing ever prepares you for when your two-year-old twins strip off their diapers just before they decide to carry out stink-bombing mission.

No, I’m don’t feel the need to describe it in any more detail than that. Yes, it was as bad as you are imagining. Many of their toys are now going through trauma counseling.

In the end, the mess was cleaned up, my blog still made it online and now we’re considering using diapers with padlocks to avoid that ever happening again.

Plans are a funny thing. It seems we even use axioms like, “God laughs at my plans”, when everything goes wrong to try and mask publicly the huge disappointment and frustration we feel underneath.

But, to be honest, I don’t think God laughs at our plans. I don’t think He ever laughs at us at all. I do believe God has an incredible sense of humor, but He doesn’t get his jollies at the expense of His children.

The reality is, plans change…plans fall apart…plans get completely wrecked. Even well designed ones. Even ones I think are impossible to screw up. (Maybe even ESPECIALLY ones I think are impossible to screw up.)

So no matter how well you’ve drawn up your plans, make sure to keep a blank page close by for when everything changes. Because everything always changes.

What I’ve written about in this post is a very surface example of plans changing that we’ve experienced. Our list is actually a mile long – and includes moments where we wept and wondered if there would ever be peace, happiness, joy or normalcy again.

And I know you’ve been there too. Maybe you’re there now.

But it’s not about what we do when our plans happen to work out, it’s about how we respond when they don’t.

I’ll leave you with this:

Isaiah 43 — “Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you. I have called you by name; you are mine. When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you…because you are precious to me…and I love you.”

The wizards of plan-derailment

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Have you ever experienced a change of plans in your life that you weren’t ready for?

What happened?

How did you deal with it?