another blog post and dont forget tomorrow night

4/3
When life is overwhelming.
When the crazy of the world is crushing.
When the buzzsaw of COVID 19 shreds thru your defense mechanisms and everyday life leaving you a trembling mess.
When your defense mechanisms are not available or are so overwhelmed that is becomes clear they are not working.
What do we do when life and its pain peels away all the normal and reveals the broken?
This is the world we are living in.
When I leave for the office at 725am, when West Lafayette is usually buzzing w people, the street is silent. Walking around Purdue’s campus, usually alive w tens of thousands of coeds, silent. Standing in line at the pharmacy yesterday and someone coughed and it seemed like the entire room jumped.
The same look on peoples’ faces as after the Murrah building bombing, and worse.
I see the frustration and the hurt – the loss of innocence – the feeling of betrayal, by life.
Aren’t we are supposed to be entitled to life, liberty, and happiness – but how are we doing that hiding in our houses and keeping our 6 feet apart? How is that supposed to work when we are locked in a cage called our house and told we can’t come out. Someone seems to have promised us this life, this liberty, this happiness and success and laughter and goodness and what we feel is lost, abandoned, hurt. We have been working really hard to be happy in a culture that has promised us so much, but now that it is all stripped away, we wonder. Seems there was some false advertising. Our culture has lied to us.
In this revealing, we see that maybe our society and us, maybe we are not forever. We are having to face the mortality of our culture and ourselves. We have to see that we are broken – our way is broken.
See, in the days after the OKC bombing, our defenses were gone. Our way of life was threatened. Life as usual was stripped away. We all felt it.
This pandemic is so much bigger, so much scarier, so much…
See, COVID is shredding our culture. It is exposing the culture, and unfortunately, our lives.
How are you feeling as you pass thru the life-grinder called COVID? As your life as usual is ripped up? As your rhythms are so remarkably disrupted and disordered.
Sad? Angry? Lonely? Jealous? Afraid? All of the above?
What specifically makes you sad?
Things or people you have lost? Hurts you have endured. Not being able to do something, go somewhere? Not being able to touch people or be with people you care about? Maybe just not being able to feel the way you want to feel when you want to? Maybe the nagging suspicion that everything you thought was real is not? The uneasiness of realizing how you were spending your time, your money, your passion, your energy, prior to all this and the sneaking feeling that maybe that is not how you want to be now?
What makes you angry?
Seeing people out and about when you are stuck at home? Seeing good people die? Not being able to work? Not knowing how you will provide for your family? People getting refused ventilators because there aren’t enough? People buying up masks and protective equipment and hoarding and seeing health care workers risk their lives to care for someone without? Being deprived of the comfort and ease that you are used to? Being threatened for your very existence when some people roll in the money taking advantage of difficult times? Not knowing what direction your life will take? Realizing that you made plenty of money to weather this well, if you had just been more careful? Maybe you are feeling the end result of a whole lot of your choices and you are not even sure why you chose them?
What makes you afraid?
The possibility of losing people you love? The possibility of abandoning the people you love? Not being able to measure up to your standards? Disappointing yourself? Someone else? Not knowing what the future holds? Not feeling safe? Feeling like all the things you thought were stable, maybe they aren’t? Feeling like maybe you have been pursuing the wrong things? Maybe our whole world has? Feeling like all the life you have spent trying to get a house and a car and fun things and all, maybe it was all for nothing?
See, when cultures and lives and relationships and bank accounts and stock markets get shredded, we find the layers of our lives being pulled off.
One at a time, like an onion, we find that the things we used to do/be are not there. The places we would go are not there. The people we would see are off limits. Peeled away, one at a time, we find that we are alone, with ourselves.
We look up and we suddenly see that the things we have spent our lives doing are gone. We see that the way we have spent our lives has been full of stuff: activities and spending and earning and distracting and numbing – for what?
And we are left w…us.
That, my friends always feels uneasy. Sometimes, crazy uneasy. When all of us are feeling it together, it is ridiculously uneasy.
When life is peeled off, we often realize that we have not been spending our life doing the things that really matter. We have not been being the people we really want to be.
Many have commented on how in these times, they are realizing the value in things that they had been missing before.
Some we miss now that were there before:
neighbors. Hugs. Just talking to another human. Extended family. Freedom to come and go as we please. Getting together in big groups just to celebrate. Having a child run to you. Feeling like you have everything figured out. Feeling like there is a rhythm of life that will go on forever.
And
Some we see more clearly now:
Close family. Breath in our lungs. Every day of being alive without COVID inside us. Laughter. Flowers. People who care for other people. People who sacrifice. Basic things like someone who takes the trash for us or who delivers our package. The taste of home cooked food. Learning things together as a family. The value of a human life. Companies that care more about their employees than their profit. People that are willing to risk because of love. Companies that give to help people they don’t even know. Old ladies who say no to a ventilator because a younger person needs it more than them
It simultaneously feels good to see these things w more clarity and unsettling that we have been missing them.
We look at who we have been pre-covid and we miss the easy of it, the rhythm and routine of it, we miss feeling like we had everything figured out – but now we are seeing that, much like I wrote in my last post, we have been lived by our lives, instead of living our lives. We are the yoyo and someone else has the end of the string.
In my case, fearing losing anything else, I spent my days anxiously trying to figure out and anticipate threats in order to feel safe. In fear of failure, I worked til I exhausted myself and nearly abandoned my family, only to fear becoming a bad father and husband and internally pressuring myself to be perfect, heaping condemnation on myself when I failed. I spent my life so determined to be the best doctor in the world that if one patient was unhappy, one bad review, I felt crushed.
On the outside, I seemed successful and productive and hardworking, but inside I was being lived by my fears. I was believing an unspoken brokenness inside me that was defining my life.
Then, when life was stripped away and I realized that I was not actually being the person I wanted to be, I looked in grief and despair on my life. I was not living the life I wanted to live.
When I was face to face w me, I felt uneasy. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t really know what I stood for.
Times like these COVID times tend to bring us face to face w these kinds of moments. We see, us. Personally, familially, and culturally.
And, I gotta say, there are a lot of us that are not liking what we are seeing. There are a lot of us that are not fans of our culture. There are a lot of us who wish that when we start life back up again, we can be different.
I have a name for what we find at the base of ourselves. The heart of us. Understand, im no psychologist, just an ordinary guy, but I call it identity.
Identity.
Who are you? Really? The heart of who you are.
This is the part of me that made me quake when all the layers of myself were peeled off.
I realized that
I
Didn’t
Know.
I didn’t know who I was.
I had an idea of who I wanted to be.
I had a great idea of what my behaviors were showing I was.
But I really didn’t know who I was.
I had what I call a squishy identity.
And my identity was more something that I had become because of my fears and my hurts and my losses and my brokenness – they had decided who I was.
And
Who I was decided how I acted, what I felt, and who I became.
That’s how my life was living me.
And
I think a lot of our world is very much in the same boat.
And, if we are going to go thru the shredding of COVID, and we begin to have a chance to see ourselves clearly,
Why not look at our identity, as people and as a culture and stop letting our lives live us and instead begin living our lives?
Why not reevaluate our identity, and let our lives flow out of that?
In my next post, let's talk about identity.