This post was written Jan 12-13, 2024.
Well, here I am, in familiar territory once again. A surprise blog post following up a post from an embarrassingly long time ago that was full of good intentions (I’m going to start writing blog posts consistently again!) but ultimately left unfulfilled (I wrote nothing!). So what’s new this time around? As it turns out, a great many things.
While I see 2022 as a personal year of growth & recovery, setting down roots to grow again, 2023 was a year of hard realizations for me. I’ve grappled with prolonged physical illness, consistent mental barriers, and abrupt relational shakeups, all of which have made their marks. Thankfully, these realizations aren’t birthed from a cynical mindset, but instead one taken from the reality that God has created. That reality is both beautiful and broken.
My physical reality last year kicked off with a resurgence of gastrointestinal issues for me. As it turns out, a Celiac diagnosis only covered about half of my problems. While I was not eating any wheat, I was still not able to digest food properly. After many rounds of tests and ‘-oscopies,’ doctors & specialists arrived at no certain diagnosis, and my wife and I decided to put a stop to the series of tests. They weren’t giving us any new information regarding my condition and we eventually couldn’t afford to keep using me as a dartboard for the doctors’ use. However, I decided to take matters into my own hands and try to figure out what else could be at play, coming to the conclusion that it was likely stress and anxiety that was also “churning my waves,” so to speak. Recently I’ve begun taking natural supplements (though a supplement by its very nature isn’t exactly natural, is it?) to help ease said stress and anxiety, and I have begun to see incremental improvements. It’s amazing how much your gut health plays into other aspects of your health.
Calming the torso tides has helped me in a relational sense, as I’m not always either in the bathroom after eating a wonderful meal at a church potluck or a friend’s house, or fearful that I’m going to be suffering on the porcelain throne instead of having conversations or making memories with people I care about. Not only that, but when I do have a reaction, I can also experience joint issues and become extremely fatigued, which can last for days, thus killing any motivation I have to be with people. As someone who has quietly snuck away from a standard presence on social media, focusing my attention on local relationships instead of long-distance, impersonal ones, the bad moments hit harder. But as I said, things have been better lately, and I thank God for that.
While I’ve been able to be more with people and focus on these in-person relationships lately, this does come with some drawbacks. There have been some relationships which I’ve held dear that have diverted off from a healthy path. I’m not the most people-pleasing person, but I do truly care for the well-being of those that God has placed in my life. There were many times in 2023 that my words, thoughtful or (unfortunately) blunt as they were, didn’t land well with others. Sometimes this wasn’t my fault, and my conscience is clear on those moments, but other times I know I could have phrased things in a different way. Sometimes I assumed that I was on the same page with a relation, and it was eventually quickly shown that this was not the case. I am usually up to the challenge of doing my part to redeem those relationships, but that is not always reciprocated. If I had to be more honest than that (which I can do on my own blog, right?), I rarely witness a time when the person I’m experiencing distance from reaches out first to start mending our bond. I consistently experience a burden of being the person to address the so-called elephant in the room.
This leads to my mental reality. I do think I’ve become a more “positive” individual lately, with people I know telling myself (and my wife) that they’ve appreciated my “calm presence” in certain situations. I have never really been described as that kind of a person before, but I’ve striven to become that person. I recognize this improvement, even though the enemy has certainly been throwing obstacles my way, making this road harder to travel regardless of my courage to do so. I regularly feel the pull of my old, cynical self trying to break free from its cage and start torching everything with pessimistic flames. And while I’ve certainly been better about trusting God and placing my fears in His lap lately, I’m by no means consistent with doing so. By doing my best to keep my wyvern that wants to rage and destroy in its cave, I’ve seen how God can patiently work in my life and in the lives of others in His perfect way. The sad part is, no matter how many times I see examples of His work, I still fight against my doubts that He’ll have a repeat performance. I suppose many Christians struggle with this as well, but that doesn’t excuse my occasional faithlessness.
I understand God best when I think of Him as the storyteller He is, as I am a storyteller as well. The issues I’ve described above come up whenever I see the same stories repeating themselves. I know, in a sense, that I’m powerless to stop those stories from happening, but I stress about what my role is in it, and what actions I can take to prevent the bad outcomes from happening. You would think that by ministering to lost people in the past by sacrificing time, money, emotions, and love for their betterment only for them to abandon your concern and go astray, that one would know how better to serve others in the future. What an untrue thought, especially regarding the fact that literally everyone on this planet is different from the next. You would think that one would expect trouble regarding employment status after having corporate job after corporate job where trouble and uncertainty was commonplace. But that is not the case, especially after you give the benefit of the doubt to your employer (and coworkers) in order to live in a paranoia-free state of mind.
At the time of this writing (not necessarily the post date, as I am without internet connection), I’m at the L’Abri center in Steelville, Missouri, which is one of my absolute favorite places on Earth. It’s a place that, for me, serves as a time of centering. It helps me to focus on what really matters and learning (or relearning) how to be a human being. Each time I have come here, I have focused on an aspect of my life that has gotten out of control. (Cynicism was indeed one of the first studies I did here.) This time around, I approached with a similar thought; how do I work alongside the Spirit to help fix my shortcoming(s)? Much like my insipid tech work that I perform to put a roof over my family’s heads and food on our plates, my default mindset is to think of myself as a problem to fix. But while I certainly did have specific things to address about myself before, this time around I’m being shown that what I thought was a problem to address wasn’t exactly the problem I thought it was.
My plans were to come and study about a Christian theology of work and productivity. How does a Christian best apply their self to their vocation while pleasing God and also providing for their family? What types of drives should the Christian have in the workplace? If I’m having performance issues at my job, and I’m unsure about what to address because the issues that upper management has ascribed to me are not equally applied across the team, how best can I examine myself to discover the core issue they’re not specifically addressing that I need to change? What is a Christian to do when drive or focus isn’t shared with others - even between fellow Christians - on a mutual project?
However, the answer I’m receiving is a different one than I thought I would get. Instead of getting how-to’s or examples to follow, the response is something that I have long struggled with, as seen in my earlier paragraphs: I need to trust in the Lord and the story He’s weaving. If we are made in His image, and He’s designed us for a certain purpose and role in His story, we need to fulfill that role, regardless of who is to come alongside you (if any at all). Some way, somehow, that drive to complete something or to fulfill a need demands to be acted upon because God put it there. And God is not a God of confusion. Even though we don’t presently understand, we do understand the “befores” and how they led to the “nows.” Everything is illuminated in the light of the past. This is a thought I’ve been contemplating since seeing it illustrated in the film (appropriately titled) Everything is Illuminated, which I viewed with fellow students and leaders at L’Abri a few days ago. The film wasn’t one that I fell in love with, nor do I think I will ever see again, but the truth of the statement itself is worth considering.
My life would be so much easier if I could shake off those drives that God gave me: the drive to create art; the drive to seek out the lost and bring them into community; the drive to provide. But I can’t shake them off. And even if I did, I’d be shaking off purpose and be drifting in space, unable to interact with anything but myself. I’ve wasted much of my life either waiting for conditions to be just right to push forward with creative projects, and some of those projects have never seen the light of day. I’ve wasted a lot of my life waiting for God to specifically and explicitly tell me when to push forward with something and how He will support me in my endeavors. While I know I’m not blessed like others with the ability to drop everything, quit my job, and pursue the drives God has given me (I have a wife and child to provide for after all), I need to stop wasting the time that God has given me outside of my nine-to-five.
James, a man I’ve befriended who is serving as a L’Abri helper in the Rochester and St. Louis locations, recommended me a book called Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson. Peterson is a songwriter and fiction storyteller who is now fairly known among Christians who believe in the importance of art and its marriage with the Christian faith. The book itself is an autobiography that uses Peterson’s story to talk about the creative process and how to wrangle with and think about things like doubt, productivity, support, discernment, and more. There were so many good lines in that book that helped to not only provide motivation and kick my butt into action, but also to remind me about why I need to apply the gifts and drive God has given me, to fulfill the mission I’m supposed to complete.
For example, take this quote that is speaking about the difficulties of starting creative work endeavors. (This is the “kick my butt into action” quotation, if there was any question.)
“It doesn’t matter how many gadgets you have, or how much time and space you have, or how good your guitar is. At the end of the day, it’s just you and the song; you and the story. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge blessing to have a space, or a computer, or a nice sounding guitar. But Ivan Drago had all the best training equipment in the world, and Rocky still clobbered him. You can’t blame your equipment. You can’t blame your lack of time. You can’t blame your upbringing. Either you’re willing to steward the gift God gave you by stepping into the ring and fighting for it, or you spend your life in training, cashing in excuse after excuse until there’s no time left, no fight left, no song, no story.”
And then, the reminder:
“Those of us who write, who sing, who paint, must remember that to a child a song may glow like a nightlight in a scary bedroom. It may be the only thing holding back the monsters. That story may be the only beautiful, true thing that makes it through all the ugliness of a little girl’s world to rest in her secret heart. May we take that seriously. It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fools hope may be the best kind.”
I need to start swinging my sword more often. It may not seem like it, but if I don’t steward the gifts God bestowed me, lives are indeed at stake, including my own. That being said, what does “swinging my sword” mean for myself in 2024? On an immediate scale, I will need to sacrifice other activities in my life in order to even unsheathe the blade. This will more than likely include things that used to be a way for me to blow off steam or pass the time, like PC or mobile games, or using social media (for the sole sake of browsing). I’ve already scaled back on a lot of that in the last year, but I think more improvement could be done here. It’s possible that I can save any kind of gaming for when I can share it with others (like split-screen PC gaming with my daughter, for example), or set specific time limits on my phone for various social apps.
In a specific sense, I do have many goals for the year that will require a significant amount of dedicated time to achieve. Some of these goals are the following:
Curate a regular schedule for creative work, using lessons and ideas from the other book I read during this L’Abri trip, Ploductivity by Doug Wilson.
Cultivate and launch Imago Play, the collaborative project I’ve been working on with two brothers of mine which will serve as a publishing group and community for Christians who want to explore truth and storytelling using tabletop role-play gaming as their medium of choice.
Write and playtest my first tabletop role-play game with the goal of physical production in 2025.
Write more blog posts here and also at Imago Play once launched.
Restart (or, in an honest sense, start) a local group that will focus on building each other up and inspiring them to continue using the gifts they’ve been given from their Creator for creative purposes. (“Resonators” sounds like a good name, and piggybacks off of what Peterson spoke about in Adorning the Dark.
Spend more time in books. This is not just for acquiring knowledge and wisdom (nonfiction) but also for motivation and spurring the imagination (fiction).
Learn (aka relearn) digital illustration.
Take a preaching & teaching class that our church’s minister is providing in order to build up motivation and restore courage to teach again, while also learning how to preach the word effectively.
Begin restoring my body back to a healthy state, which should help address energy levels, stamina, and maybe a host of other physical issues I struggle with.
This certainly appears to be a large list of items to accomplish, but I’m hoping this kind of list will force me to use my time wisely and productively. Will there be struggles? Without a doubt. But will the end goal be worth it? Only if I focus on pleasing Christ and not man, keeping to His word and running the race worth running. Only if I steward what God has given me and the mission he has placed in the core of my being. I alone lack the power to change minds or actions of fellow image bearers, but thankfully I’m not accountable to them. All other concerns related to the challenges I’m bound to run into I need to lay at His feet. God will provide. He has not left myself or my family to wither and die, and has always brought us to better places. May He curse me if I ever deny that.
We sang a song today at L’Abri during worship, a song that I’ve heard over and over again. (A song that I wish my home church would sing more frequently.) But the words struck me hard this day.
Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side;
bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
in every change He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul; thy best, thy heav’nly Friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
Alright, God. I hear you. Let’s get to work.
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