A Momentous Life

Sidestep from nugget number two.

I was going to follow up on my last post by writing about storms today.  (I'll come back to that one later.)  Instead, because it is fresh in my brain, I'm going to give you a preview of the huge topic that has consumed most of my thinking for the past year or more: time.

Time is a really weird thing.  And I will confess up front that time, as measured by clocks and calendars, doesn't hold a lot of importance to me.  Being on time to events isn't a high priority.  In fact, I don't like being on time and hate being early.  But it isn't just that.  I also don't really care how long a meeting lasts.  I don't care which day we celebrate a birthday.  My wife asks me when I will be done at work?  I don't know.  Probably right after I finish.

Rather than in minutes and hours and days, to me, time is expressed as too early, or too long, or too soon, or just right.

If the meeting lasted too long it isn't that it took too many minutes.  It is that we didn't use the time well.  Some 30 minute meetings feel like a life-sapping trial.  Other, much longer meetings leave me energized and wishing we could continue.  It isn't about the minutes.

This attitude is something I have really had to work on as an adult.  Because, while time doesn't mean much to me (it seems pretty arbitrary), it means a lot to others.  And I can't say I care about people if I dismiss what is important to them.

And there's the rub. I may not care about the quantity of time, (the minutes) but I absolutely care about the quality of it (the moments).  A minute is just a measurement.  A moment is an event.  I love moments.  They matter.

Anyway.  I'm skipping the "storms" topic today, because last week, I watched a movie titled "About Time".  It's a British, romantic comedy with the key word here being "British".  We Americans like our comedies quick witted, scene changing, surface level stuff.  Like SNL or MTV, we don't even want to say the full names of the shows.  British movies are different.  They let you agonize in the uncomfortable situations, the funny ones and the heart warming ones and the tragic ones, for way more than two seconds.  You just sit in it.  It's brutal.

"About Time" is like that.  It has some humor and some romance.  But it also has a heavy dose of profound conviction.  (At least it did for me.)  Kind of like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" meets "Dead Poets Society".

I don't know if I recommend it.  It is rated R and is kind of slow at times.  But it has its cute and funny moments, and it received pretty good reviews.  Mainly, though, I liked it, but I don't know how good it is.  I do know that it shifted me. I was going along through life and this movie came along and pushed me off my trajectory.  Probably was worth the $3 rental.

Bon Appetit

I've been struggling with a post since late November.  Granted, I get some grace for the slow start since I began right after being in a pretty serious car accident.  What do you do when you are in a concussed stupor?  Blog.  (Really.  This might explain a lot.)

Anyway, I tried redrafting my original post after I came out of the fog, but I couldn't make it come together.  It read like some late-night, drunken, stream-of-consciousness, college student's rambling.  (Maybe I should have just published it.)  After working on it over the past month and a half, it now reads more like a long winded, high school student's essay rewritten by a parent before work on the morning it is due.

Bottom line: it is just bad.  But, there is a lot of good thought in it too, so instead of trying to make sense out of it, I decided to break it up into smaller portions.  Small bites, right?  So, here is my first brain damage induced nugget of wisdom:

You can't instantly marinate a steak.  (Bam!  Mic drop.)


Seriously though.  It takes time for the acids to break down the tissue and the salts to penetrate the cells.  In fact, without time, a marinade isn't a marinade at all. It's just sauce.  It covers the meat.  It makes it taste better, but sauce doesn't fundamentally change anything.  It doesn't work into every potential bite.  It doesn't tenderize.  It doesn't transform.  Without time, a marinated steak is basically the same gristly, tough, chewy protein with which you began. (Only now, maybe it is also self-consciously aware of its short-comings.)

During the four months prior to Thanksgiving, I couldn't bring myself to write.  I sat down a few times, and simply couldn't bring anything up.  Maybe I needed a head injury to get me started, but I think some of it was that I was feeling sorry for myself.  There was some self-pity in there and some resignation, but mostly, I think I was just marinating.  Like a steak.  (See?  Like a steak? Clever, huh?)

Okay, not so clever, but growth is like that.  Ideas are like that. It takes time for ideas to transition from the theoretical (on the surface) to the practical (penetrating your life).  It takes time for understanding to take hold.  Unfortunately, five months later, I think the lessons are just beginning to penetrate.  I'm still marinating.  

Because, turns out, I'm a pretty poor cut of beef.  And, more importantly, God isn't the type to stop the process early.  I don't really picture God in his heavenly kitchen preparing a steak, but if he did, I doubt he'd cook it for a while, say, "Good enough," slap it on a plate and add, "Throw some ketchup on it.  It will taste better."  He would finish the job.  He promises to finish the job.

Philippians 1:6 says "For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus."  And I'm glad about that, because if I'm going through this, I'd better come out tasty.  It isn't fun, but it's worthwhile.  Who wants to stay the same tough, gristly, immature version of themselves, anyway?  

So, I'm still marinating, but I hope I'm close to done.

...cause I'm a little raw (Ha!)

...and tender (double Ha!)

...and the next step is turning up the heat!

...before someone trims the fat!

...Sorry. 

Bon Appetit.

Time to Post Again

It’s been over a year and a half since I posted.

When I looked back at my last post, I was surprised that it had been that long since I last wrote.  The past 20 months feel like they have flown by.  It doesn’t feel like nearly two years.  We all understand this relative nature of time, because regardless of what our clocks say, regardless of how we talk about time, for each of us, it flows at different speeds and those speeds are determined by our perception. 

We usually associate time moving quickly with fun, but the past year and a half didn’t pass in a time-flies-when-you’re-having-fun way.  In part, it went quickly because I’m getting older, and I no longer catalog life by how many Gilligan’s Islands I can watch in a given amount of time. 

When I was eight, 30 minutes (about the time of one episode of Gilligan’s Island) was a long time. I would watch the clock in school with 20 minutes till recess and tell myself that it wasn’t very long.  I’d say, “If you started Gilligan’s Island right now, you’d be running out on the field about the time the professor makes a nuclear powered blender out of a banana and some palm fronds.  It’s not that long. Really.”  But it was.  It was an eternity.  And even though the long awaited recess was equally 20 minutes long, those 20 minutes were criminally short.  The bell seemed to ring ending recess before they even finished the song.  “…the professor aaand Mary Aaa… Brrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnngggggg!” Try telling an eight year old that time is constant.  He knows it isn’t true.

I’m not eight anymore.  Life no longer passes in stranded-boater-chunks. It now passes weeks and months at a time.  It passes with seasons and estimated tax payments and Super Bowls and Presidential cycles.  Even TV doesn’t pass in nice 30 minute segments anymore. With Netflix, I now measure television in entire seasons or series, but that doesn’t mean that my sense of time is now more accurate.

I had my teeth cleaned this morning.  It went really well.  No issues.  In and out in 25 minutes, but that doesn’t really tell the story does it? In the context of my inner eight year old, it felt like the equivalent the entire Gilligan’s Island series, all 98 episodes, twice. 

The cycle is the same every time:  I recline in the chair and tell myself to relax.  I willfully release the tension from my feet; then my legs; my hands; my shoulders; my head and neck… Oh crap!  Sorry.   I open my mouth back up.  I try not to gag on the saliva pooling in the back of my throat.  I ignore the hygienist scraping the plaque off my teeth with that tiny tool made of discarded chalkboards.  I hope that on the next pass, her little pick will slide cleanly between my teeth rather than catching again and threatening to pry two of my incisors off the bone. (I actually don’t think my gums are receding.  I think my teeth are just yanked slightly farther out of my gums during each cleaning.) About this time I realize there isn’t any blood in my hands.  Somehow, even though I’m not gripping anything, I have rigidly contracted all the muscles below my elbows to the extent that I can feel the blood flowing back into my palms as I force them to loosen.  So, I tell myself to relax.  I willfully release the tension from my feet; then my legs…

I also think time passed quickly between posts because the recently, my life has been characterized by a lot of growth and thinking.  Whether with my wife, or my small group, or my counselor, I’ve been working through a lot of “stuff”.  Some of it spiritual.  Some of it relational.  All of it personal. And even though I may still have the sense of humor of an eight year old boy (because every man does), I know my wife would agree that I’ve grown up a decent amount in the past year or two.

So, with all that elapsed, when I tried to encapsulate it into a post, I drew a blank.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything.  It was more like when you get too close to a video projected on a big screen and all you see are the pixels.  I think there is something there if I can step far enough back, but right now, I’m still seeing the pixels.

It’s been several weeks since I started thinking about this post (approximately equivalent to 2 Gilligan’s Islands), and I’m still struggling.  So, because I couldn’t compose something out of all the bits of information, I decided to write several posts about the pixels and hope they coalesce into a coherent image.  Since I already started, pixel #1 is time.