I've never liked asking for help.
More than anything, asking for help is admitting deficiency or need. At times it requires a sheepish shrug of the shoulders, a nodding "I know I should know how to do this but I don't" look on your face, a hint of pleading without clear desperation as you ask someone to sacrifice their time or resources to meet needs that are not their own. It is a pride-swallowing admission that "you know something I don't know" or "I don't have it all figured out like I want you to believe I do." Whether it's help moving, help fixing, help learning, or help providing, the request puts you in a clear position of inferiority.
There are people who take pride in never having to ask for help. They may want help. Help may make their situation easier. But they will not ask, because, just to be clear, they do not need it. I have never had the skills or resources to be one of those people. Now I don't even want to be.
This week I came to realize more fully why asking for help is one of the best requests you can make. At the beginning of the week I spent two days on RAGBRAI, a major bike ride across the state of Iowa. I love the ride and have been thrilled to have ridden parts of it over the past four years with a good friend of mine, but it can be an absolute logistical nightmare. First, my friend and I needed transportation to the western edge of the state. We also needed places to stay in two different locations. Then we needed someone to come pick us up in the middle of nowhere. Also, I needed someone to watch my kids and my dog. All this for the selfish cause of two days on a bike with a good friend consuming gluttonous amounts of roadside calories.
The favor requests began. And they were all met. My wife agreed to give up much of her weekend to drive us to the start. Her sister offered us supper and a place to sleep on Saturday night. My sister volunteered to watch both my kids and our 5-month old lab. An old friend from high school supplied food and lodging on the second night. Strangers we've never met before transported our bags from one town to another. My friend's parents picked us up after two days. Obviously we were blessed, blessed beyond belief, helped in every way to meet every need (or want) that we requested. We asked for help. We were provided for. But it was more than that.
Asking for help felt like I was making a huge burden of myself. And I probably was. But in reality, I see that what asking for help did was provide me the opportunity to build relationships, or strengthen them, and to share time and stories and laughs. Every person who agreed to help provided that. I would not have spent two hours with my sister and her husband on Saturday if we had not asked for help. Similarly, I wouldn't have had a couple of road hours with my wife, or a great meal and good stories with my sister-in-law and her family, or a stroll down the Iowa Walk of Fame on the sidewalks of Shenendoah, Iowa with an old friend and her husband. They were all so eager to offer help, and what I see now is that they were eager to offer themselves.
Looking back, I know that every time I've asked a friend to help me figure out a home improvement project, or to borrow a tool, or to water my garden, it's given us more time together. When I ask my parents, or my in-laws for help, we become closer. And when I admit to my wife what I won't admit to anyone else, that I just can't do it all, that I need her, need emotional support, need energy, need prayers, need someone to help me limp across whatever finish line there may be, need her, that it is then that we are the strongest. I've built and grown many relationships on the premise of needing someone's help. I needed their help, but I mostly needed them in my life.
John Steinbeck said that, "people are more inclined to help each other in hard times. Good times don't bring out the best in people." In good times, we isolate. Pride swells. We are not vulnerable, we do not reach out, and we do not seek the connections that are the oxygen of living well. No matter how hard asking for help seems, we are always better, in many more ways than we sought, after having done so.
The best of times, it seems, is when we most need others.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Monday, July 18, 2016
Throw Away Your Novel
Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his book Preaching and Preachers, writes that "The best way of checking any tendency to pride - pride in your preaching or in anything else you may do or may be - is to read on Sunday nights the biography of some great saint." It is reading that will humble us, remind us that there is a vast universe, that we are a small part of it, and we are both nothing special in particular and also not alone in our pride and joy and fear and sin. Reading gets us out of our own way, out of our own world, and into a much larger reality. Biography, as Lloyd Jones mentions, is an excellent source for this. Not only does biography humble, it also inspires.
Reading about John Steinbeck's life and work has that effect on me. In my last post I discussed one of the reasons I love Steinbeck's works so much, citing his willingness to try anything that interested him, try it with passion, regardless of whether or not he thought he'd be good at it. Tonight I look at his doggedness, his ability to grind, and the understanding that he couldn't become a great novelist in a day.
In one of the interviews I recently read about him, the interviewer wrote this about him:
"He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. He has always written more than he has published. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929."
He destroyed two full novels. They're gone. Years of work, thousands of words, pages and pages of thoughts and ideas and communication of his heart and mind, and he threw them away. Gone. I typically have to cut and throw away 20% of any sermon I write for the purposes of time and clarity, and I am breathlessly despondent with each click of the delete key. But I've never had to throw away a whole sermon, or even a blog post, let alone a novel.
It took Steinbeck fifteen years worth of grinding out pages that would never be read to get to his first success. Let that one sink in.
What are you doing now, that in fifteen years, might define you? Can you name anything you do that will matter in fifteen years? Not because it lasted, but because you threw it away, and threw some more away, and threw enough time and energy doing what nobody would see to reach a lasting contribution?
Yes, this is a call to put hours and commitment into something and stick with it. Of course it's that. But more so than that, this is a call to be doing something today that might matter in fifteen years - something big, something that you love, something that feeds you and the world. It doesn't have to feed the world today. But might it, down the road, after it's fed you and you've thrown it away, be your contribution?
Steinbeck was beginning a life's work, a great literary career, and he didn't know it. He had no assurances that he was headed anywhere of significance. But he wrote anyway.
Someone asked him in an interview was his personal philosophy was. His response: "Like everyone else in the world I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved." Writing, unnoticed for a really long time, allowed him to do that. And it reminds me today to get down some words, take in another book, work on another sermon, and feed good and true and loving words into my daughters and wife as often as possible. No one may notice or remember any of it. But in fifteen years, that work will have produced something that matters greatly to me.
Reading about John Steinbeck's life and work has that effect on me. In my last post I discussed one of the reasons I love Steinbeck's works so much, citing his willingness to try anything that interested him, try it with passion, regardless of whether or not he thought he'd be good at it. Tonight I look at his doggedness, his ability to grind, and the understanding that he couldn't become a great novelist in a day.
In one of the interviews I recently read about him, the interviewer wrote this about him:
"He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. He has always written more than he has published. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929."
He destroyed two full novels. They're gone. Years of work, thousands of words, pages and pages of thoughts and ideas and communication of his heart and mind, and he threw them away. Gone. I typically have to cut and throw away 20% of any sermon I write for the purposes of time and clarity, and I am breathlessly despondent with each click of the delete key. But I've never had to throw away a whole sermon, or even a blog post, let alone a novel.
It took Steinbeck fifteen years worth of grinding out pages that would never be read to get to his first success. Let that one sink in.
What are you doing now, that in fifteen years, might define you? Can you name anything you do that will matter in fifteen years? Not because it lasted, but because you threw it away, and threw some more away, and threw enough time and energy doing what nobody would see to reach a lasting contribution?
Yes, this is a call to put hours and commitment into something and stick with it. Of course it's that. But more so than that, this is a call to be doing something today that might matter in fifteen years - something big, something that you love, something that feeds you and the world. It doesn't have to feed the world today. But might it, down the road, after it's fed you and you've thrown it away, be your contribution?
Steinbeck was beginning a life's work, a great literary career, and he didn't know it. He had no assurances that he was headed anywhere of significance. But he wrote anyway.
Someone asked him in an interview was his personal philosophy was. His response: "Like everyone else in the world I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved." Writing, unnoticed for a really long time, allowed him to do that. And it reminds me today to get down some words, take in another book, work on another sermon, and feed good and true and loving words into my daughters and wife as often as possible. No one may notice or remember any of it. But in fifteen years, that work will have produced something that matters greatly to me.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
The Right Kind of Stupidity
I love John Steinbeck. It's an improbable love affair that has nothing to do with being introduced to his work in school or introducing him to students myself as an instructor now. Frankly, I don't know when it began. But his words squeeze truth and joy out of thin air, offering literary manna in the form of comedy and tragedy, whether written to alarm or agitate or educate or delight.
One of my first reads this summer was Douglas Wilson's book Writers to Read: Nine Names that Belong on Your Bookshelf. In it Wilson describes nine authors and their attributes that make them worthy of his recommendation, his admiration, and his desire to introduce them, on a personal level, to his audience. Writers Wilson, "If books are among our friends, we ought to apply similar standards to them that we apply to our flesh-and-blood friend. We should want to choose them wisely and well and hope that we will be the better for their companionship." He offers us, then, his favorite "friends" and the authors who have written them.
It made me consider my own literary love affairs and why I would want anyone I know to be introduced. In that spirit, I begin with this post to attempt to share with you my relationship with Steinbeckian lyric and lore.
Steinbeck wrote a lot of stuff. A lot. Late in his career, he decided he wanted to try writing for the theater, which was far from what anyone would term his comfort zone. In an interview, he offered these thoughts: "I'm just determined I'm going to learn something about the theatre. Last time we were kicked around like dogs but I still want to do it. This shows a truly pure quality of stupidity. Just nuts. I'm so fascinated by everything about the theatre. I don't really care if the show's a flop."
John Steinbeck is the right kind of stupid, and I love him for it. Throughout his career, he tries. Just to find out. He just wants to see. See if part-time college work is for him. See if a California country boy can embrace living in New York. See if living in migratory camps and writing about it can change the American landscape. See if he can properly and accurately put his best friend Ed Ricketts into his works and have his audience be as pleased with him as Steinbeck is. Try war journalism, try breaking all the rules of writing a novel, try commentary on the past and commentary on the present and commentary on what it's like to get into a vehicle with a dog and drive across the country.
Critics, be damned, he shouts with every swipe of the pen in a new direction. I don't write for you.
And I am delighted by this. Reading a lesser known work of his, or one of his so-called "experiments" (which he considered such texts as Of Mice and Men and East of Eden), I can see him smirking, giddy at the attempt. There is joy in the words, in the tinkering, in the curiosity that must be satisfied. Can I do this? What will it look like?
In Steinbeck's career, and sprinkled lightly in so many of his texts, I see his example, and it implores me: "Get out and do things, even if you'll be bad at them. Quit worrying about winning or being successful. Worry about doing. Find out. And find out for you."
Try. Experiment. Do. Wise thoughts, for sure. I can only hope to be stupid enough to dare them myself.
Try. Experiment. Do. Wise thoughts, for sure. I can only hope to be stupid enough to dare them myself.
Monday, July 11, 2016
Changing Moods
I am fond of saying that an individual cannot let feelings dictate their reality. I know I've written about it here on this blog on more than one occasion, and I just mentioned it once again in the last sermon that I gave. It is an unpopular and difficult truth, and it is one that I struggle with consistently. Frustration and fatigue can be crippling for me when they strike. Six months into the year, and my blog output has been terrible. My reading list hasn't been much better. I've been too tired, or too stressed, or too distracted to get much done that I know I want to and need to and should get done. But how can you be tired for six months? Or distracted?
There are ways to fight this, of course. Mostly those ways are repeating this truth over and over and hoping it sticks. And it does, for me personally, until I'm tired or stressed or distracted again. Then I tend to forget. A bag of Doritos and 2 hours of re-runs later, I've accomplished nothing, done nothing to improve my "feelings," and ultimately I've stayed up late enough to ensure that I'm tired again the next day and more stressed due to a lack of personal productivity. In hindsight, repeating this truth hasn't necessarily helped in the middle of living it.
I may have run across a better way, though. I've been taking down notes and important passages from a book I read months ago and have meant to collect notes regarding for a while. Having been tired and distracted, I'm only now getting them down. Anyway, the book is Martin Lloyd-Jones' Preaching and Preachers. It is a meticulous and passionate collection of Lloyd-Jones' perspective on every possible aspect of preaching. As I collected the notes, I came across this passage:
"The preacher should never be moody; but he will have varying moods. No man can tell what he will feel like tomorrow morning; you do not control that. Our business is to do something about these changing moods and not to allow ourselves to become victims of them. You are not exactly the same two days running, and you have to treat yourself according to your varying conditions. So you will have to discover what is the most appropriate reading for yourself in these varying states. There will be times when you will be unhappy. There are these states and conditions of the soul, and the sooner you learn how to deal with them, and how to handle them, the better it will be for you and for the people to whom you preach."
Reading a book on how to improve my own occasional preaching, I unexpectedly found this paragraph that made my English teacher heart cry out triumphantly. Don't like your mood? Then read! Do something about your changing mood. That something is read. And read with purpose.
This is a far cry from my typical Nick-at-Nite marathon or glass of wine approach.
What does your anger need? Or your lethargy? What sets your distracted mind back on your priorities? What will fight against your own provincialism and victimhood? You need a plan. I need a plan. A literary plan.
Not only does reading attack a mood, it also works proactively to create it. I seldom walk away from Steinbeck without inspiration to write. The Bible keeps me grateful. Calvin and Hobbes comic books remind me to not think like a father all the time, and any book with two children on my lap listening makes me feel like the most valued man on the planet. Other authors, like Shauna Niequist, even make me want to cook, or at least enjoy what my wife cooks, and sit around a big table with good friends and loud conversation. I cannot point to anything on a screen, any screen, that comes close to producing any of this.
Whatever the mood, it seems that there's a book for that. If you're not sure what it is, pick one up anyway. It'll lead you to some feeling far more worthy of calling a reality than the predatory fatigue and frustration.
There are ways to fight this, of course. Mostly those ways are repeating this truth over and over and hoping it sticks. And it does, for me personally, until I'm tired or stressed or distracted again. Then I tend to forget. A bag of Doritos and 2 hours of re-runs later, I've accomplished nothing, done nothing to improve my "feelings," and ultimately I've stayed up late enough to ensure that I'm tired again the next day and more stressed due to a lack of personal productivity. In hindsight, repeating this truth hasn't necessarily helped in the middle of living it.
I may have run across a better way, though. I've been taking down notes and important passages from a book I read months ago and have meant to collect notes regarding for a while. Having been tired and distracted, I'm only now getting them down. Anyway, the book is Martin Lloyd-Jones' Preaching and Preachers. It is a meticulous and passionate collection of Lloyd-Jones' perspective on every possible aspect of preaching. As I collected the notes, I came across this passage:
"The preacher should never be moody; but he will have varying moods. No man can tell what he will feel like tomorrow morning; you do not control that. Our business is to do something about these changing moods and not to allow ourselves to become victims of them. You are not exactly the same two days running, and you have to treat yourself according to your varying conditions. So you will have to discover what is the most appropriate reading for yourself in these varying states. There will be times when you will be unhappy. There are these states and conditions of the soul, and the sooner you learn how to deal with them, and how to handle them, the better it will be for you and for the people to whom you preach."
Reading a book on how to improve my own occasional preaching, I unexpectedly found this paragraph that made my English teacher heart cry out triumphantly. Don't like your mood? Then read! Do something about your changing mood. That something is read. And read with purpose.
This is a far cry from my typical Nick-at-Nite marathon or glass of wine approach.
What does your anger need? Or your lethargy? What sets your distracted mind back on your priorities? What will fight against your own provincialism and victimhood? You need a plan. I need a plan. A literary plan.
Not only does reading attack a mood, it also works proactively to create it. I seldom walk away from Steinbeck without inspiration to write. The Bible keeps me grateful. Calvin and Hobbes comic books remind me to not think like a father all the time, and any book with two children on my lap listening makes me feel like the most valued man on the planet. Other authors, like Shauna Niequist, even make me want to cook, or at least enjoy what my wife cooks, and sit around a big table with good friends and loud conversation. I cannot point to anything on a screen, any screen, that comes close to producing any of this.
Whatever the mood, it seems that there's a book for that. If you're not sure what it is, pick one up anyway. It'll lead you to some feeling far more worthy of calling a reality than the predatory fatigue and frustration.
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