A Few Moments of Quiet

So it’s Sunday morning, and while you are probably asleep, I am up even earlier than usual. I was prepared to drive through the snowstorm to the gathering where I lead worship. Got a call–it’s cancelled.

Just snowy enough to cancel my commitments; not quite snowy enough to stop me from walking down to my favorite blogging spot. 🙂 Can’t beat that with a stick. So here I am, blogging away for your indifferent disinterest reading pleasure.

It’s been a mixed bag these days for me and mine. We’re so glad to be here in Denver, love the wonder of a new climate, love the beauty of the surroundings, love the pace of life, and love the relationships we’re forming. But we’re also in the nitty-gritty of trying to earn our keep and pay the bills in the day to day, while trying to look ahead and build a foundation for the future–not just survive. The pressures of the immediate can be overwhelming at times, and it’s a discipline for us to keep perspective in those moments.

But that’s what we came here for. Fresh perspective.

I don’t want to sound either new-agey or midlife-crisis-ey here…but it’s like, especially in the last season, we spent so much time and energy trying to survive moment to moment that we lost perspective and stopped living life, embracing the moment in the now. “Living life” was pushed into some unknown date in the future, some day that would just magically come if we just trudged through enough crap and didn’t give up.

Looking back, I think we got the not-giving-up part right. What we were missing was that life wasn’t in the future when all our circumstances turned rosy. Life is now. It always is. And too many of us get caught in the cycle of survival, noses to the grindstone, where we stop living and start just existing. And we miss the moments, because we think life is over the next hill, past the next obstacle…never stopping to realize that life is now–even the difficult moments we live through are part of our story, part of our adventure.

I know a lot of folks didn’t care much for the movie Revolutionary Road because it was such a sad, tragic tale. But for me, it spoke volumes. I could see in the lives of the characters the classic dilemma we face in our rat-race world, where it seems we must choose between doing what’s needed to survive and live a “normal” life (whatever that is) and pursuing our passions–those things, those dreams that makes us want to live. Never was the choice so plain as with the couple in the movie, and their decision to stay within the lines literally cost them everything. It reinforced to me what I had already been grappling with deep inside, and I came away going, “Man–I do not want to be those people.”

Maybe I’m just a dreamer, but I can’t shake the conviction that we aren’t put here on this planet just to find a way to muddle through, and I reject the notion that we have to choose between living and existing. I want to do those things that make me live inside (that is, pursue my God-given passions)…AND I want to pay the bills. In short–I want it all. That’s not asking too much, now is it? 🙂

And so I think we’re looking at all these things through a new set of eyes these days, always asking ourselves what solutions to the everyday challenges will lay groundwork for the future, not just get us by–and not forgetting to live these moments along the way.

I think it’s best said in a lyric fragment I came up with–which will likely turn into a song (so don’t steal it):

I can’t change the past
And I can’t see the future
But I don’t want to miss what happens in between

Happy Sunday.