A Few More Pounds to Go Toward Life

I've plateaued. In early January I kept my New Year's resolution and saw my doctor for a physical. Et al. When all was said and done, things turned out pretty well. One secondary doctor even pronounced me "perfect" -- at least one part of me. But my Internist reported a few imperfections. Some "numbers", he observed, are slightly outside the desirable range. "I could put you on medication," he began, "but" -- and here he looked curiously at me, or skeptically -- "the better course would be to lose some weight." Ah! Here we go.

I was prepared for it, and knew I was overdue for it. Over the past year I had jumped a pant size. I wasn't happy about it, generally avoided the mirror, and vigilantly avoided the scales. But the facts were hardly obscure. So why hadn't I started? I suppose I had simply gotten comfortable. One could, I suppose, even say "lazy." A more careful assessment might reveal "obligation fatigue." As happens, from time to time, I have gotten over committed. There are more things I have to do -- meetings I am obligated to attend, reports I am obligated to write, relations I am required to nurture -- than I really have time to do. It's my own fault. As a co-worker once observed, I have a faulty "No" switch. I've said "Yes" too often. But however it came to be, the thought of coming home at night -- or getting up still earlier in the morning, or thinking about one more "essential element" in between -- to satisfy one more obligation... "Please just let me rest."

But somehow it ceased to be an obligation. Suddenly it was taking personal care -- like honoring a day off or protecting adequate quiet time. And all in all, losing weight is comparatively simple -- eat less, eat better, exercise more. Simple, but not necessarily easy.

But easy or not, I have been doing pretty well. I have not missed a day of exercise since I left the doctor's office. And more than just token activity. I have been working at it. And while eating habits still have room for improvement, I'm making progress. But I have noticed a pattern. Change is more episodic than steady. The first five pounds dropped quickly. I grew confident, then smug. But then the bathroom scales seemed to freeze. Days went by, and then a week. Then, as though a cord had been plugged in, the needle again began to move. Another three, four, five, and then...another screeching halt.

And that's the way it's been. Progress, plateau. Progress, plateau.

I think about that pattern here in the early weeks of Lent, when spiritual vitality is the focus of attention. We pray more frequently and conscientiously; we pay more attention in worship; we pick up and use devotional guides. And it helps...for awhile. We feel and breathe and root a little deeper, until spiritually we hit another kind of plateau. A drought seems to bake the heart that only days before had beat with such fervor. Discouragement follows, and then more life-giving rain. Progress, plateau. Progress, plateau.

All of which reminds me that both of these categories are more lifestyle than diet. It isn't for a season, and then I go back to my previous habits; it is assembling the routines and habits, practices and norms that sustain a different way of life.

The benchmarks may be useful goals -- 20 lbs, 25 lbs, through the Bible in a year -- but the living is the point. Wonderfully, fruitfully real living.

A Winter Morning Song

It's early, the dawn only beginning to dilute the night sky, and there is a bird singing in the tree outside. I suppose there is nothing particularly novel about that, but it is February in Iowa and I haven't heard birds for months. Temperatures have played between single-digits and sub-zero for the better part of a month now, with snow perched on branches more commonly than feathers. It is, though, February 2 -- Groundhog Day. Perhaps the bird is our version of Punxsutawney Phil, though without any precedent I can't guess whether singing predicts an early spring or an extended winter. At this hour of the morning there are certainly no shadows to be seen.

Rather than prognostication, I prefer to hear the bird's singing as encouragement and inspiration. Brittle branches, paralyzing temperatures, and black ice on sidewalks and streets are not the only truths. In the midst of it all is singing -- every now and then; once in awhile; on a random, naked limb -- singing. And suddenly I am too.

Folk singer Peter Mayer, who we will be blessed to host for a concert in June, glimpses the same realization this way:

When winter’s gray is on the sky
Rust upon the leaves that lie
Red on the last few berries clinging
Brown on the branch where the bitter wind’s singing
Even when white obscures the scene
Still, in winter, there is green

Death may raise its voice today
O but life will have its say
Speaking in lovers and in children
In poets pens and philosopher’s visions
Life is a planet’s daring dream
Earth’s devotion, spoken in green

Still, in winter, there is green...
...and a song.

The Disequilibrium of Change

It started, oddly enough, with an empty guest room. Old furniture had been distributed to kids, and now the blank walls and single remnant bed cried out for attention. A trip to the furniture store resulted in the purchase of better furnishings than our master bedroom, so we decided to move the old furniture downstairs and use the new, ourselves. In the meantime we ought to paint the master bedroom while it was empty...

You get the idea. For the past week we have been living in the guest room downstairs -- mostly, that is, since the majority of our clothes are still in the closet upstairs. Except for the clothes in our drawers that are now downstairs. Meanwhile, the painting upstairs starts today, and the new furniture arrives next week.

Then, I returned to the church Sunday afternoon for a visiting choir's concert to discover that my office computer had been stolen. In the span of two and a half hours, someone had slipped into my office, unplugged peripherals, packed the laptop in its case and made their way into oblivion. Goodbye emails. Goodbye contact list. Goodbye iTunes library. Goodbye goodness knows what all that I cannot remember. All that, plus this violated feeling of lost innocence. A lot of people have been in and out of my study -- street people, transient people, grieving people and angry people, searching people, dreaming people, ill people and working people -- but never until now have I felt like the space needed fumigating. My precious and comfortable and "homey" study suddenly feels, in inexplicable ways, foreign and dirty.

And I'm shocked -- and somewhat embarrassed -- by how dislocated and disoriented all this has left me feeling. Dislocation at home and work. I like to think of myself as pretty flexible -- rolling with the punches; enjoying adventure and change and the possibilities of whatever "new" lies ahead. Instead, I've wondered around this week as though I had suffered a blow to the head, unable to concentrate, unable to accomplish anything worthwhile, hardly recognizing where I was, looking quizzically at even the simplest questions or tasks at hand -- as though they, or I, had suddenly dropped down from Mars.

So much for flexibility, rolling with the punches, and that exuberant sense of adventure and possibility. I have a dreaded sense that this craving for the restoration of order and normalcy means I'm getting old.

Meanwhile, a new computer is on the way despite our insurance coverage's $1000 deductible, and after a few hours of tedious work with the backup files my iTunes library is roughly restored. And sleeping in the guest room really does feel like vacationing in a nice hotel -- although the housekeeping service is considerably less attentive. But parking is free, I can read my own paper instead of USA Today, and the coffee pot makes more than 4 cups. Who needs order when you have all that?

Shedding a Tear of Affirmation -- if not Support

The big conversation, of course, is now the value of tears. Did Hillary Clinton's emotional reflection on the challenges and motivations of being a presidential candidate win her votes? Does crying grease or derail her chances? Every newspaper I have read since the New Hampshire primary has spilled far more ink on the question than she spilled actual tears.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I did not caucus for Senator Clinton in the recent Iowa Caucuses. She is not my candidate.

That said, I appreciated her emotion. As someone who quite regularly finds the lump in his throat squeezing fluidly out of his tear ducts, I know how unexpectedly such emotional moments get triggered, and how quickly they can dissipate. I have also learned how powerless I am to prevent them. I used to be quite bothered by the interruptions -- less because I was embarrassed by the emotions, themselves, than I was annoyed by the breach in my conversational flow. But I've gotten over that. In fact, I've come to view such emotional interludes as reliable and tangible evidence that I am still alive -- still actively accepting inputs to my system, and still allowing them to impact me. To be human is to feel. I've concluded that becoming robotic is not in my best interest; that being a whole person necessarily involves my whole self -- body, brains, soulful and spiritual connection, and emotion. That multi-faceted wholeness is an important and precious part of the way God created us. I have long since relinquished the fear that emotional sensitivity renders me any less capable of performing meaningfully and effectively in the vocation that chose me; indeed, if anything I think it makes me more effective.

So should Hillary be President? Answering that question demands consideration of a whole range of factors -- policies, values, character, instinct, what I like to think of as "center of gravity", and a person's ability to persuade and, more importantly, inspire -- just to name a few. My own assessment of those criteria, as I said, has floated me toward a different ripple in the candidate pool. Just because a person can cry doesn't necessarily mean she or he can be President.

But God save us from electing someone who can't.

Of Wonder and Risk and Living a New Year

New Year's Day, and after yesterday's four or five inches, more snow is predicted in the hours ahead. I have a mixed reaction. I love tromping around in the Vermont snow; love watching it fall and love watching broad evergreen branches intercept its decent. But our tickets demand that we make the trip back to Boston today for the flight home, and I'm less enthused about driving on frozen roads. The juxtaposition, then, of beauty and playful awe, with tedious and precarious hazard.

Something, it occurs to me, like the year ahead -- a wonderful, perilous mix, no doubt, of opportunity and beauty and disappointment and sore muscles. Exactly like every year. Looking out over the virgin hours and weeks and months ahead; catching my breath at the beautiful expanse of the time unsullied, for this single moment, by footprints and plowed roads, I realize I haven't made a lot of resolutions. There is, of course, the one: to practice a little remedial medical prudence by finally getting around to those diagnostics urged upon 50-year-olds, a year or so now overdue. I'm not getting any younger, after all, and I would like to get considerably older. I'll call for an appointment first thing tomorrow. Then, of course, there are those other resolutions more assumed than stated: to lose a little weight, exercise a little more, and better love my neighbor as I better love myself. And Lori and I have named some collective practices we intend to claim for the months ahead. So it's not like I -- we -- have no direction.

It's just that living 2008 will likely look a lot like living January 1: doing my best to live as both the little boy, full of laughter and wonder, playfully laughing with arms wide and tongue outstretched to snare the falling flakes, and the church custodian shoveling and sanding and salting to mitigate the risk.

Good luck,
enjoy the snow,
drive slow when you need to...

...and Happy New Year.

Home, Where I Least Expected to Discover It

Fifteen years ago today I began a new life. In a sense that is nothing conspicuously significant. It wouldn't be the last new life I would begin in the course of those fifteen years -- some on the far side of curves that threatened to scuttle me. The difference is that none of the subsequent new beginnings involved a car and a thousand-mile change of address. Fifteen years ago today I drove into Des Moines, Iowa after a lifetime firmly planted in Texas.

It hadn't occurred to me that I would ever live outside of Texas. It never occurred to me that I would ever live in Iowa. It certainly hadn't occurred to me that I would likely live out the rest of the my life in Des Moines. But then who ever knows about such things?

I remember calling my parents the next day to report a safe arrival, mentioning that "it was zero degrees when I rolled into town, and then it got cold." Indeed it did. It was my first experience with sub-zero weather; truly a foreign land.

But it was a land shortly to become home in every way that matters. I'm quite certain that I will always be a Texan -- that Lone Star illuminates every corner of my personal universe, and I read, for better and for worse, by its light -- but I am almost as certain that I'll not live there again. It was a good move fifteen years ago, in countless ways I could not have predicted, and I am grateful -- not so much for what I left behind, because I keep that ever and blessedly with me. No, I am grateful for the new world, indeed the new life, I have subsequently found, where least I would have expected it.

Fifteen years later, no one could still be more surprised than me.

Living proof that God works in mysterious ways.

Who Cares About a Few Aching Muscles?

When I could no longer right myself once fallen I knew I was too tired to continue. It was my first attempt at cross-country skiing, and by this time in the afternoon every muscle was twitching. It was a good twitch, but twitching nonetheless. I had only fallen a few times -- not once, actually, until I left the flat figure-eights in the field where the neophytes learn. Throughout those circles I managed to stay upright, and then I got ambitious. It could be that I got "cocky," but I prefer to think "ambitious." After all, you can't live all your life picking low hanging fruit. As lovely as was the field, I longed for the beauty of the upper trails.

Of course, there is the hill that must be mounted just to reach those trails. And there are those myriad slopes of varying degrees once in that elevation. But even then, for the most part, I managed to stay vertical. For the most part. Thankfully, the fourteen layers of clothing I was wearing kept me warm and surprisingly dry. And blessedly, skiing is populated by people of grace who were ever nearby and ready to help, ready to offer a tip about poles and arms and how best to get back up, ready to check and see if anything was broken. "Only my pride," I routinely responded. But even that was mere sociability. The truth is I hadn't mounted the mount with any pride to break. I could only exceed my expectations, and for the most part ended the day pleasantly surprised. And along the way, when I remembered to quit watching the tips of my skiis and started seeing where I was -- on a snowy hillside in Southern Vermont with trees all around me and trickling brooks beside me and the bright sky above me -- the falls, the hesitations, the calculations, and the incessant twitching seemed completely worthwhile.