To Leave Undone…

To Leave Undone…

Turning off my hot staggered engine, time for that hot metal transport to get a break. I grabbed my bag with my head full of stuff- some of it feeling real important and the rest more futile. It was another blurred edge day with serrated in-between and it cut through me like I was the room temp butter.

Days like these come and go and at the end I simply feel like an overused tool, a gadget that can do just about anything…maybe more like the multi-tool on my brown belt. A valuable thing in a time of crisis but nothing you would build a house with. Jack of all trades- like Jack Bauer of the TV show “24” I can come through in just about anyway needed to get the job done. I am necessary, functional, true tested, creative at solutions done on the go. I can deliver the goods.

But I cannot enjoy my work…the work coming to my hands does not pause or stop to consider me…it is never, ever, ever completely satisfied. Each task is all-important, time sensitive and persistent and it always leaves me with a reminder that at some level all my work will remain, as I remain on earth, at some level forever and irrevocably undone. That leaves me undone in many ways, and my soul suffers unaware. I have become a well worn tool within a world of projects swirling around my head, “You Complete Me…NOW!”

Pulling myself from the matrix I learn just how lost I have become and where I have traded my Sonship for a toolbox.

That is why I am being trained in the surrender of Shabbat, which in Hebrew understanding and teaching is “to leave undone”. It does NOT mean to complete and then leave. Nor is it to take the “undone” with you so that you can finish it later. It is unapologetically vacating the premises, leaving the handle, and all that needs to be finished...unfinished.

Picture that you are a farmer and it is time to plant seeds today so you may have a harvest tomorrow. You are plowing your field towards the end of the day and you have finished only half of what you intended to because some pesky birds came and stole some of the seeds. 3 rows of beans are still uncovered, and the time comes to stop. You know you must leave the beans, the rows, and the field. It is the time to rest and lay down the plow and take the team home. But you want to rush back and cover over the beans from those birds and maybe plow one more row before the night falls.

We are pulled into some fear of the undone. Something linked heavily into our interior belief system- that we are only valuable if we finish something. Tie it tight with a bow and set it in the corner, nail it shut, paint it to match, seal it from rain…or else! Something wars with us and it masks itself as responsibility- but this has nothing to do with the noble pursuit of being responsible. It has everything to do with how my value is welded into my ability to produce.

What I am asked to leave is more than a task- for embodied in that task is my system of certainty, of controlling my value to the world that the world cannot take away from me. It is my daily grinded proof, my earned star, and my achieved credentials that I can point on the day they may be questioned to lock in my value based only on the fact of this completed task.

And as I am holding up my partially finished task #11245 of #36882 my Father speaks to me and says, “My son, leave it undone.”

The tears come and warm my eyes just at the mention of these words. I am awakened by the voice of my Father asking me to leave the day and this task undone while the world is screaming, “Finish it now…or else!!”

I argue with him “But Father I must finish this, for this very task says I am so valuable to them- it is my ticket to financial success and it will secure my future.”

Kindly with confident renderings He smiles and says, “If you don’t leave it undone, you will become it and you are far more valuable than a completed task to me. Let’s leave it together.”

Leaving something undone is no small thing. It is a good thing to complete our work and we receive pleasure from a job well done. Yet to learn Shabbat, to fully rest and be restored, we must leave so many things undone.

But it is the way of the daughter who’s Father is delighted in her simply because of who she is, nothing more or added is necessary. The Father enjoys the son not because he finishes the work, but only because he is his son and they are together. They work hard together and share the weight of the day. Then at the end of the day they put down the plow and leave it undone- together. The demanding voices inside and outside the son’s head fade as they walk away together laughing about the day, away from simmering tasks and charted maps…and away from cooling engines.

The Grace of Van Gogh

                                               I had this idea about art and life and grace when reading through a bio-sketch of Vincent Van Gogh.

This troubled and transcendent mind

this heart that gave us more than empty words through eyes full of beauty 

sight

this life that painted further into the soul of simple work

this rough beauty sketches were ways out from his longings unmatched

this heart channeled out equal to its own terrain

this blood flowing back into the fields of flowers captivating his chamber 

Vincent painted colors to canvas in a field or in a city. He lived in both the rural and urban and traveled the tension between them giving him color with dimension. When he attempted to speak his thoughts about God he was quieted by the religious order...so he chose to speak in the way untraveled by many. His loneliness dreamed for a community of artists that might understand him, yet his internal tension drove them away. He lived with a prostitute and her children in one of his attempts to find his home. The tension within, the losses mounting, relationships squandered, and his eventual mysterious death at his own hands or anothers' leaves us with the many impressions...but what we see is one life on canvas. 

Vincent's art is some of my favorite to take in. The way he saw color and life and beauty are his words of healing on canvas to me- a soul traveling the road between. As I am drawn to the light and color of simple life, I am drawn into grace. I think about my life and wanderings, living between the pulled strings of life- the harmony and discord. My eyes meet the aching beauty of canvas drawings, some showing and some unpainted, the colors seen and unseen. 

I bring this back around to the wild reaching creation we are. The beauty and strength we find growing, maturing, and giving from the tension within and without. The reaching Vincent expressed gave us cause for remembering and dreaming within the balance of Grace. We can find more life when we ask to see the tension and stay there unpacking our bags. The Creator smiles.

Van Gogh Art

Steps and Stumbling Towards Forgiveness

Sat in this for awhile today. Talking to Jesus and letting his love pour over me. I needed to forgive some people. I needed to know this deep inside my heart, not just on my lips of faith. Jesus kept taking me to the words he spoke while hanging on the cross. He said, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” We simply do not know what we do. This forgiveness is the only way Jesus knew because he knew our way very well. He still does. We do not know what we do to each other in search for our own way. Yet Jesus pleads with the Father to forgive our "unknowing". It is as if Jesus, after spending many years with us; with men and women, having dinner with prostitutes and thieves, navigating the religious confusion of the Pharisees and Sadducees, fishing with the disciples and teaching the hungry masses…he comes to understand us. He pleads on our behalf in the middle of his pain from the very weight of the sin we do not understand- the sin we cannot see. He is not saying that our sin does not matter, that our sin will not have consequences, or that we do not make meaningful choices. He is saying that we simply do not know what we do and then his compassion sweeps over him like a deep waves of an ocean storm...he is left with the raw heart of love for you...for me. There are echoes of this compassion from the moment Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

Malcolm Guite said it well with this thought:

Jesus comes near and he beholds the city

And looks on us with tears in his eyes,

And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity

Flow from the fountain whence all things arise.

He loved us into life and longs to gather

And meet with his beloved face to face

How often has he called, a careful mother,

And wept for our refusals of his grace,

Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping,

Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way,

Fatigued compassion is already sleeping

Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day.

But we might waken yet, and face those fears,

If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.

Well said. Jesus weeps first for our unknowing and yet he presses in towards the way of suffering the cross where he will plead from the depths of his heart. I was reminded that he continues to weep for my stumbling towards forgiveness. The Father’s heart is to forgive as the story in the prodigal- he forgives because he loves. When we withhold the journey of forgiving others from ourselves we shrink back from the voyage of Jesus in our identifying with his forgiveness. Jesus asks us to walk with him in the unknowing we feel in forgiving others. In a way he is saying that we must abandon the limits we place on forgiving others and ourselves. Yet he weeps. Jesus says for us to forgive one another seventy times seven…this is a lot…and the spirit of this is continual forgiveness...and we will stumble in it if we are moving towards it. There are sins that others have done to us, especially the ones that touch our sexuality, that seems to have no room in our heart for forgiving. We simply cannot imagine what forgiveness would be like, it feels so looming and dark.

Yet I find this statement so deeply true-I do not know what all that it is I do. Neither do they. None of us know what we do. We do not know who we are. In other words I am stumbling most of the time in and out of forgiveness. 

This does not mean that there are still not memories that spill from our consciousness- times when we are deeply sad and even angry for the effect of others sin on us- yet it must always be seen in the light of our not knowing and his knowing- deeply knowing our own sin and others sin and the effect it has…and we are not offered to know that knowing in full- perhaps in part connected with the knowledge of good and evil-we are asked by God to seek the tree of life, not clarity of good and evil. Diving into the life Jesus offers will speak a way in its own clarity and in its own time...in balance with love.

Yet to those of us who are blessed with the grace of knowing Jesus-we get to know him and there we are protected from the full pain, the full remorse, the full weight. This is the sheltering, the mothering of God for our very soul. Not in a denial of sin, not in a light patting of the head. We are given the life of Jesus. We are given his eyes- we don't see well from the streets. We see through God’s direction, protection,  and sustaining. There are times when all is safe as he judges it to be safe for us- he will gift us with his eyes for others- the deepest compassion, tenderness, justice, and love that eyes could ever feel for the world. He knows our very fear, limits, and condition…and he weeps, he pleads, he loves!

Ponderings 2011

"Father, these are some of the things I desire and request for you to address in the year...a true companion who is your best for me: a beauty to love, a safe place and lover for my heart, one who sees me and loves me, one with whom I can be a man with, one woman reflecting your grace and mercy and mystery...to live everyday in the wisdom of my acceptance, belovedness, and tenderness of You my Father...oh and also a blue motorcycle with flames on the tank!!!"            -Nathan, January 2011

Motorcycle no...woman yes! Wisdom in process. The settling inside my heart has been one of remarkable and deep transitions. The growing confidence internal- the grace of the Father lavish. Elizabeth my fiance is by far the greatest gift of the Father but it is one that continues to expand beyond the words I can place here. Yet much of this love is a young oak tree, a small green flag in the ground, a tender root reaching out into the ancient soil of Love. She is a beautiful gift...one gift that is meant to be unwrapped slowly...and beauty is like that! Father- thanks for the woman!!

(Anyone that has been through significant loss, dreams shattered, can understand this process of leaving everything and everyone as you knew them- a death. I have had such a death. Yet I am blessed with sojourners that did not leave me, they did not abandon my side, they did not see the death only, they saw the life available and would not let me recede into hopelessness. They helped me leave a known world for the unknown...and my heart is deeply grateful for them. My fellow sojourners I have made it to the unknown other side of this valley...namaste. You will never be forgotten!)

Healing. Sometimes I am angry and I do not know why...but I possess some deep anger at myself. About a month ago I sensed a deep anger erupting from a basketball game  that caused me to stop in my sweaty shoes, grab a towel and walk around to shake the heat. Not sure why the anger is there. The Father is pressing into this...an anger towards Nathan His son. This is new and this is not so new. One thing I know now is that I can hear it. I have been learning to be aware of such things because I am beloved...even if I am also angry at the beloved. The Father is calling out more and more sonship in me which means anger towards his son must go. 

Repent. Today, with the Father's help, I repent...I turn from one direction and step towards another. From anger and step toward understanding, from hatred toward love, from judgement towards mercy. In my sonship spirit I know this will be good for the beloved son to stop beating upon his own breast. So Jesus, lead me your little angry brother, lead me to the strength, acceptance and tenderness you have in our Father...and stay with me until I become as you are...whole and holy. 

P.S. Jesus my Brother, please remind our Father that I still want a blue motorcycle-  one with flames on the tank!

The Essence Of Bravery

I think more about things to fear than things to love. But that is changing. Slowly. I have adopted a fear centered view of the world, a slow squeezing into a mold-a way of thinking and behaving. Unfortunately most of that culture was never challenged by many of my early mentors- rather it was often taught. A fear centered worldview sees the world as a place to walk around in circles of worry, people pleasing, and regret...ultimately there are brain ruts that run deep, footprints where one step is a fear of success and the other a fear of failure.
Sometimes I wonder about the essence of bravery. Courage in the midst of great trouble, hardship, or misery. Bravery has many faces, a myriad of ways it can come breeze by our ear, peer at us through a crowd, shout down from the mountainside. It often does not appear as bravery to the trembling foot stepping outside the rut, pressing muscle to movement out of the circle of fear. It is forward with a great price...a shaking to the core- and it never "feels" right. There in the middle of it, the tornado swirling around our skin, is the essence of the step. It often feels young, and as it should be- it is the step of the child.
In my new business venture there are moments I step into the rut of fear again. Can I really do this? Will I have the right stuff to make it? Am I doing the right things to please the right people? I am developing business for a construction company and the world of construction is a very dynamic place, often filled with hard edges and harder people. Jesus built things and I think he knew this world well. What I have discovered is that I really enjoy finding things to build, renovate, and restore. My hope is that this evolves into building, renovating, and restoring people...including myself. But as all new ventures they can easily be sidetracked and hobbled by the uneven ground. But this time I am aware that there is a choice...and this is a new pathway of taking my Construction Brothers' hand out of the rut of fear onto the path of life. The LIFE I speak of is one of more than provision for what I need (which seems far away), it is abundant provision for all I need and want deeply in my soul (which seems even further away). A wise mentor of mine once told me that the Father has more than provision- He has Abundant Provision for his sons and daughters. It is the essence of "how much more"and it is the essence of bravery.
But when the child begins to trust their Father's hand for abundant provision, the Father's present strong and nurturing love punishes fear into the ground. If the child hangs onto the fear, and fear has a way of clutching, they cannot take hold of the Father's hand, and it can feel like the Father is punishing them. The child only needs to choose the very brave grasp of their Father and not let go of it. We are beckoned by our Brother Jesus not to cling to fear but to draw into the strong and tender chest of the Father.  A fear-filled hand cannot hold onto anything else except the object of fear...even if it is only an idea of fear. When we grasp the hand of the Father we understand more and more the abundant provision of that hand. Often in his other hand He holds the keys to the Kingdom, His "Exceedingly More"Kingdom which He is very enthused to bestow to us.
I want to be brave everyday but so often I grow weary & tired clutching to fear. I want love but I know fear more. It is my old pathway and it is our culture...but it is not my True Heritage and not our True Family. Everyday we can be more brave than the previous day, we can trust we are sons and daughters...we can ask for the essence. Trust in the Abundant Provision of the Father begins with a brave question and yearning for the Father's hand to wrestle the fear away and bring sheer goodness with the other. The essence of Bravery.

Launch

I have a new tradition.

Yes a new way of seeing stuff...and for that matter a new way of living. "Really? A new tradition we need nothing of...and really is there anything new?" You may say or think this...or utter it in your subconscious- the fact is that we as Americans are suckers for the "new" and we have many "traditions" so I think this will work. Worry no more.

Launch. (Not lunch which was non-existent today except for a few corn nuts...didn't know they had nuts...don them nasty nuggets of death)

I am launching a new blog, a new address upon which to find it, a new face, even for all forsaken matters...a new something-or-other.

There will be new traditions spoken of here- new thoughts and ideas that may actually be very old, raggedy and "perceveratory" (my new word meaning to perceverate which is also a new word...meaning the act of thinking of all the angles, scopes, movements, and ounces of life.) Yes ounces, a friend of mine told me, is not a lot but it is also not a little. They are measured and that makes them cool. These traditions may also remain slightly recycled and retouched bits of stained glass, bloody dirt, damp wood...and maybe a bit of cutting metal.

I have no idea if these will be seen as new or old or slightly used...but I care not deeply about that.

Maybe you will join me for a bit of a glass of port, scotch, or fine beer?
Maybe you will join me for a cigar or a pipe?
Maybe you will join me just to listen in. I would really like that the most.

Onward. Launch. Play.

Cheers!