drops like stars
We plot, we plan, we assume things are going to go a certain way and then they don’t and we find ourselves in a new place, a place we haven’t been before, a place we never would have imagined on our own. And so it was difficult and unexpected and maybe even tragic and yet it opened us up and freed us to see things in a whole new way.
Suffering does that—It hurts, But it also creates.
How many of the most significant moments in your life came not because it all went right, but because It all fell apart?
It’s strange how there can be art in the agony…
It’s interesting to me what I have been hearing at this point in my life. It seems as if a year ago this month I was at a point in my life where I didn’t know what was going to happen; I didn’t know where I was going to go; I didn’t know who I was going to be with; I just didn’t know what the future held. However, I did know, that I had to be open and honest with myself and through my relationship with Christ, I knew something had to change, and that change brought suffering. Through this suffering all I could do was PRAY.
Now when looking at prayer for Jesus, it was not a passive acceptance of, “Well, OK, I guess this is just how it’s going to be. “And it wasn’t this “well I’m going to dictate the future.” Prayer for Jesus was being open to the God who is at work here and now. But to be open to God you have to be brutally honest with yourself. When Jesus was on his way to the cross and he knew, HE KNEW the suffering he was going to go through! Jesus prayed with his father and was brutally honest with him. Prayer was not just some ritual Jesus just did to do!
Matthew 26:39
Going a little ahead, he fell on his face, praying, “My Father, if there is any way, get me out of this. But please, not what I want. You, what do you want?”
Prayer is brutal honesty with God. God can handle what your thinking, he can handle what your saying, he can handle what your feeling. Be still, be honest, be open, reflect and never stop asking what is God up to, and how can I be apart of it?
At that one point in my life I was brutally honest with God. I didn’t want to lose what I had or to have happen what happened; however, being brutally honest requires you to be brutally open! I had to be open to what God had and has planned! I had to let go of what I had. I had to say, “not my will, but yours be done.”
Now, the other night, I sat in on Rob Bell’s talk and which his new book is called, “Drops Like Stars.”
Here are some of my notes from it.
Rob started by talking about a man walking down a hospital hallway, a hallway where he has mourned the death of a grandson and celebrated the birth of a healthy granddaughter, all in one year. He asserted that in life, “We live in the hallways.”
Set aside the why questions about suffering and grieving. It happened, there is nothing you can do to change it’s happening, it is unresolved.
So, instead of asking “why?” Ask what, where? What and where have context, interplay between each other, which creates an unexpected momentum of energy.
The presentation of “out of the box” … being inside the box gives of insulators, which fame an event so, the meaning frames your mind.
In situations, we judge not only the “what” of something, but the “where,” the content and also the context. He gave the example of the funny NYU application essay (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm), which is so funny mainly because of the surprising context.
How do you make meaning of it? We are quite good at planning how things are to go and then all of a sudden we suffer. The tomorrow we are planning on is gone.
This is the art of disruption, insulators are removed, and the boxes are smashed. We are left saying, “I never thought this would happen” or, “I never imagined it would be like this.”
The art of disruption brings about creativity.
Life’s defining moments are not when we get and or acquire things, but they are in moments of suffering, difficult, painful, dramatic things.
Again, we are left saying, “I could never imagine that happening, but now, I don’t know or what it would be like not happening.” Essentially, those sufferings had to happen.
He showed that suffering can come not only through what we generally associate with pain and hardship but living on the other extreme, from having “everything” and being bored. He gave an example of a boy in his mom’s suburban listening to rap, which was made in the heart of a risky neighborhood a few miles away. Rob asked, “Why does the boy listen to this song?” He offers the suggestion that this pampered boy wants adventure and risk because he’s bored. People can be bored when they have everything. There is physical death and numb complacency. Both are bad.
Ex. Will Ferrell in Old School.
Now, many find this about ourselves: we find ourselves having everything that we are supposed to have, yet, we are bored, we are frustrated. In essence, we are dying.
Eventually you will be frustrated enough to be real and honest.
The art of disruption leads to the art of honesty.
Pain makes you honest, has a way of making us honest.
“None can get to God but through trouble”
The art of elimination: to be great, you must know what to take away.
Design by elimination; There is endless greatness among you, it just takes knowing what to take away.
Suffering has a design by elimination harmony dimension to it.
The moments of suffering are our defining moments.
At one point in the talk, Rob had everyone in the room take a simple, white, 3X5 index card and write with their non-dominant writing hand, “I know how you feel.”
He proceeded to ask questions like, “who in the room has been directly affected by cancer?” and if you had then you were to stand up and almost everyone in the room stood. He had people shout out responses; some said, “this is a lot” or “this sucks” or even “right now.” The response that got me was, when Rob had said that a few nights ago in Detroit a man shouted out, “I miss her.”
After going through a couple more similar questions, you exchanged the card with several different people who were going through similar situations.
A group of people among a common suffering, the air in the room changes.
Suffering produces an art of solidarity: union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests, as between members of a group or between classes, peoples.
Jesus offered sacrificial love.
Why when we suffer do we say to God, “If you only knew what I was going through!”
God came into the world & screamed alongside of us.
The Cross-, represents this, “I know how you feel” effect.
When you suffer you get clear, distinct, crisp answers and conclusions.
Would knowing why we suffered or why something happened the way it happened, would it really help?
Real, true healing comes when you go through it with someone.
We’re not alone, God is not distant, detached, or remote.
We crave to know we are not alone.
Funny thing, I made this video about a week ago before hearing this.
Ownership and possession, there is a difference.
We seem to have, and possess everything but we own nothing.
2 Corinthians 6:8-10
Through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
The art of fear; even the failed pieces are essential.
The God who wastes nothing;
Beat yourself up, or see as an invitation & opportunity to grow. A, new creation or resurrection.
Bitter or better. Shutdown or open up.
When we suffer, this to will shape me; but, how?
I will be willing to entertain there is a new tomorrow…
Be open.
“Of course he couldn’t forget! No creator can forget! If the blast-off’s successful you’re hooked, and once you’re hooked you’re inside the work as well as outside it, it’s part of you, you’re welded to it, you’re enslaved, and that’s why it’s such bloody hell when things go adrift. But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work because you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess – but it’s agony, agony, agony – while simultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world – and that’s the creative process which so few people understand. It involves an indestructible sort of fidelity, an insane sort of hope, and indescribable sort of . . . well, it’s love, isn’t it? There’s no other word for it. You love the work and you suffer with it and always – always – you’re slaving away against all the odds to made everything come right… Every step I take – every bit of clay I ever touch – they’re all there in the final work. If they hadn’t happened, then this” – she gestured to the sculpture – “wouldn’t exist. In fact they had to happen for the work to emerge as it is. So in the end every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat and tears – everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me.”
May you, see drops like stars.