You Can’t Coast Through Life

When I wrote the previous post, We Are Singing One Song Together, I had intended to write about what I learned from receiving a speeding ticket.  I guess part of what I learned is that “there are no mistakes, only opportunities to improve.”  The other thing I learned is that you can’t coast through life–literally.  You see, right before the flashing red and blue lights turned on and I received my ticket, I noticed my speedometer.  I had just come off the exit and was heading downhill into Roanoke.  When I looked down I saw that I was almost going 60 mph.  I didn’t have my foot on the gas and was just coasting downhill. My thought was, “I guess this is the natural speed of gravity. This should be the speed limit for this area.  I guess I’ll just coast until I see the speed limit sign.”  Seconds later, I saw that the speed limit was 45 mph.  Immediately I started to slow down, but not before the police officer who was parked under the sign clocked me and proceeded to come after me.  Long story short is that I got a ticket. 

As a Virginian, I know that we are the state of speed traps, so I was not surprised that there was a police officer posted by the first speed limit sign at the bottom of a downward slope.  In fact the first ticket I ever received at age 17 was in the same situation.  So all I could do was accept the ticket and try to learn from it.  So what did I learn? Well like I said, “we can’t coast through life.”  That’s what I was doing in that moment–coasting. Sometimes we have to slow down.  Sometimes we have to speed up. Because that is what life with others seems to require. Not all of us move at the same pace.  Even though I really didn’t know the speed limit, from the point of view of the officer, it was cut and dry. I was going faster than the sign said I was supposed to.  When the signs say slow down  we are expected to slow down. And who likes driving behind someone going slow in  fast lane. Life in relationships is a life of continual adjustment and readjustment. We all live with this expectation whether consciously or not.  And when we don’t adjust when it is expected there is an “offness” that we feel.  Sometimes we are the ones that create the “offness” and sometimes its those with whom we relate.  But, because we are all part of one system–One Song— it doesn’t matter who “started it”.  It’s up to everyone to readjust when things are off.  And I think the officer felt off about giving me the ticket.

When he wrote up my ticket, he actually compassionately took off 5 miles to lower the price of the ticket.  That was nice of him, but I also got the sense that he didn’t want to give me the ticket at all.  And that gave me something to consider as well.  As he was in his car looking up my license, I prayed for him and us and the whole situation. I didn’t pray that I didn’t get the ticket (even though maybe I should have).  I prayed that we both receive everything this encounter came to teach us. When he saw our family, I could tell that he felt awkward.  Here I was in a rental car six miles from my destination after driving four hours from the Charlotte airport–all of which he I told him when he asked the customary questions. My little daughter is crying in the backseat and asking, “Are you taking my daddy?”  Maybe I was projecting onto him, but I felt like he wanted to just tell me to slow down and let me go.  But he seemed trapped by what he was “supposed to do”.  So as a gesture he took off a few miles.  That’s how I took it.  And then it hit me that him giving me that ticket was a kind of coasting as well.  When he stopped me he was actually being carried by a metaphor of gravity–for the law of man is an attempt to mimic the law of nature.  He was pulled by the law to stop me.  It was almost natural for him to do.  But the fact that he wrote the ticket as 5 miles less when that is contrary to the “law” suggests to me that in my case he knew that I was not intentionally breaking the law and I think in his own way, he was trying to “put on his breaks” to slow down the momentum of writing that ticket.  But like me, he was caught in the pull and wasn’t able to break in time.  Does that make sense?

As you can see, I am still processing this experience.  This might sound backwards, but I actually feel like I could have helped the officer not give me the ticket by either asking him or by apologizing for going too fast.  The fact that I didn’t know was not going to help him use his power to choose. I think he wrote it out of compulsion even when he didn’t want to. In my opinion, I think he needed something to empower him to make the decision he wanted to make and in some ways I left him hanging by deferring. 

Ultimately I don’t think I lost anything by receiving the ticket.  If I just take the lessons of “slowing down” and “no coasting through life” to heart, I have gained a fortune for the $120 investment to Roanoke.  In the One Song of the Universe, the officer and I both played our parts.  That’s how it is.  The reverberations of our encounter will continue to go out for eternity.  If I choose to, I can revisit it and continue to learn from it until I align with everything it came to teach me.  That’s how it is with every experience we have in life.  They all come to make us better.  Nothing takes away from us.  Everything adds.  But it is up to us what we receive.

Everything Has A Purpose

Sometime ago, I adopted the mindset that absolutely everything has a purpose.  I determined that there is nothing that is that “should not be” in and of itself.  I accepted that context and usefulness determine the value of things to people.  From that point of view, it is possible to live a life of constant discovery.  Upon this platform our minds can create a use for almost everything.  The banana bread is a perfect example.  When I looked in the fridge and saw bananas that looked like this:

Heartburn waiting to happen

my first thought was how it was just another symbol of the wastefulness I was feeling after getting sucked into a Steven Seagal-thon for 6 hours.  I just felt dirty.  No offense Steven.  But then I remembered that I could change my mind about what these bananas symbolized.  They were still good for something.  They did not have to go to waste if I was willing to put in the work.  And so even though the laziness factor was trying to talk me out of it by telling me how late it was, I made use of my resonant Steven Seagal vibrations to psychically karate chop that weakness in me and turned those mushy bananas into this:

Deliciousness wins the day

As I pushed myself to grab all of the ingredients and look online for a recipe, I felt myself getting energized.  My mind engaged and it became a holistic experience.  As I loosely followed two different recipes, I began thinking of how much my daughter would enjoy the banana bread.  She loves it when my wife makes it and I figured I could do just as well. Mashing the bananas, I thought about all of the brown bananas my grandma gave me as a child and laughed.  Why didn’t she ever make banana bread I wondered.  Flour, eggs, milk, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and melted butter joined the bananas in the mixing bowl.  I stir and stir until I feel like I have the right consistency. Cooking is chemistry I realize.  I buttered the loaf pan and poured in  the mixture.  I become consciously aware of how amazing it is that we can bake in glass cookware.  The process that makes glass strong enough to cook with is called tempering. I think of how interesting that is and look up the process and discover that it is created by negotiating a balance of internal stresses.  Hmmm.  Very interesting.  By balancing internal stresses, glass that was once weak, becomes stronger.  I wonder if the same process works on people. The heat is on.  Heat and time are the final contributions to the banana bread. Two hours later, we’re eating it. It’s as delicious as it looks. The purpose of my work is fulfilled.  But not only that,  I’m fulfilled.  I’m stronger.  Maybe I’ve been tempered.  Prior to taking action on baking the bread, my internal stresses were all out of balance.  But when I let go of my disappointment in how I spent the greater part of my day and decided to use the negative energy for good, the creative nature of the Universe was able to fill in the space and use every part of the day to make something both useful and delicious.  New context, new insights.

This Functional Family

Where it all started

When I received this picture in the mail as a graduation gift from my aunt, I saw it as a sign that things are really coming full circle for me. My dad always wanted me to become the preacher that he could never let himself become and here I was after years of resistance, graduating from seminary and even giving the student commencement address. How the heck did I go from the clueless two year old in the picture to this guy who is fast becoming what my dad wanted me to be even when he was barely there to influence the outcome? He used to always say that I was going to be his preacher and here I am doing that very thing. Often when I would visit him, he would engage me in conversations about God and then ask in his subtle way, “Do you ever think about being a preacher?” Then he would tell me how people always told him that he would make a great preacher, but that he had made too many mistakes for that. So instead he would read the Bible on his own and sermonize other people who didn’t go to church and even school some avid churchgoers.  A pastor even said at his funeral that my dad would call him to the house and then debate him on theological points.  I didn’t know that about my dad until that day.  And the irony of it all, was that the only day I had ever been to church with my dad in my life was at his funeral.

Still, over the years, when I would entertain the idea of becoming a preacher, I would think of my dad’s desire and other factors to include the tradition of ministers on my mother’s side and decide that I didn’t want to do it because I wasn’t 100 percent sure that it was what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to find myself in the pulpit one day realizing that I was just doing it to satisfy my dad’s unfulfilled dream or some family tradition that every generation had to have a minister. After I hit thirty plus years old and wasn’t even attending church much, I thought I had let the whole idea go. But then out of seemingly nowhere, several months after my dad passed I decided to go to seminary full time. The funny thing was that the whole time I was there I barely thought about the fact that my dad wanted me to be a preacher. I felt called. I went. I graduated. It wasn’t until I was asked to give the commencement address that I was hit by  the thought of what my dad would think about the whole thing.  I mean, I knew he would have been happy. But when I imagined what he would feel to see me giving the address, I got this sense that he would feel like he had succeeded in getting me to that pulpit and that was what tripped me out.

The thing is I didn’t even grow up with my dad. He left for good a few months after the above picture was taken. Before my aunt sent me that picture, I had no pictures of my dad and I together as a child. I hadn’t seen that picture in so long that when I held it, it almost felt otherworldly. Not only do I not have any pictures of my dad and I from when I was a child, during a military move fourteen years ago, the box that had all of my photos got lost so that I virtually have no early childhood pictures of myself. Does that give you a sense of the strangeness I felt to be holding this picture of my dad and I together with my dad smiling and pointing at me? When I held it, I imagined my dad saying in his strong Cape Verdean accent, “This one is going to be a preacher.” Well played dad. Well played.

The irony of my life is that I don’t know if I would have been into God so much if my dad had stuck around. Even before I started visiting him in the summers at around 6 or 7 years old, I had already gotten into God. I heard them say in church that God was a father to the fatherless and I had taken it seriously. I didn’t even know my dad thought about God until I went to visit him and brought up that I loved God. He got so excited and then started telling me about himself wanting to be a preacher and that before he left he had been an usher in the same church that I attended with my mother. I was surprised to say the least. That began our dialogues about God whenever I would visit. I discovered that my dad knew the Bible very well and had a very sincere desire to be the person he believed God created him to be. However, as Jesus said to his disciples when they kept falling asleep at the Garden of Gethsemane, “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Consequently, I became the person my father confessed his sins to as well. I guess that too was part of his way of preparing me for ministry. Who knows?

Now that I am getting closer to being an official minister, I know that I was always meant to do this.  It’s as if my whole life was preparation for it.  All the multiple moves as a kid, being raised by a single mother who evangelized in her own right, the multiple religions in my family, the failed relationships, being bullied as a youngster, the 8 years in the military, my last full time job as a recruiter, my dad’s passing, all the family drama, etc, etc, etc.  It’s like somehow it all got mixed in a pot and when it came out, I turned out to be just what my dad and admittedly several others said I would be.  Could it possibly be that the dysfunction was for this function?  Or is that just what I am telling myself to give meaning to this lost picture from my past?

The Weight of Milestones

What does it all mean!?!?

I have a love hate relationship with milestones. Part of the reason I hate them is because they create false senses of security. For example, someone can be in a relationship for 10 years, right, and for some reason we will see that as a milestone and we will project all kinds of false meaning onto it. “Oh, you’ve been together 10, 20, 30, or even 70 years. How romantic. You must have been so in love.” Meanwhile one partner may be thinking, “Yeah right I only stayed with this person because of the kids or for financial security or worse yet I was afraid of living without them.” Or you may be a genius but you have not reached the milestone of getting a graduate level education so no one listens to you. Or maybe you have an ugly T-shirt full of holes that you know you should get rid of but you’ve had it since high school. You can’t give up all of that meaning. Then there is the other side of milestones where you see someone who is gorgeous and then you find out that they are 87 years old but they look 40 and then you say, “Wow, you have passed that milestone of when you should be using a walker and here you are wearing high heels. It makes you even more attractive that you are even standing up.” Or like my odometer on my vehicle. I don’t know how to feel about that milestone. My truck just hit 100k miles as you can see. Immediately, my brain tried to make meaning out of it.

“Oh man I need to start making some money soon, this truck only has so much life on it now and I can’t afford a new vehicle.”
“Man this car looks good for 100k miles.”
“Now that it is at 100k miles does that mean things are going to start falling off?”
“What is the resale value of a vehicle like this with 100k miles?

All that silly brain chatter because of a one and four zeroes. But that is what we do as humans. We make meaning out of the meaningless so we can feel safe or at least make justifications for whatever it is we do or think. But then again, what if there is something more to it than that? What if that human tendency to try to draw significance from the insignificant is actually a God given capacity that when applied in a way that is beyond reason, reveals elements of mystery that we would not otherwise see. I ask this, because right beneath the insignificant 100,000 on the odometer there are four 7s on the trip meter. And I had to ask myself if there was any meaning in that because growing up, I was always told that the number 7 was God’s perfect number–the Divine number of complete signifying the unity of the number 4 which is the number of Creation with the 3 which is the number of the Creator. Thus 7 signifies the completion through Creator/Creation relationship. This makes 7 a number of utmost significance. The fact is I don’t know all of the numerology stuff to tell you one way or the other. All I know is that I didn’t plan for those numbers to come up at the same time. I can clearly identify the milestone of 100k miles on a vehicle as a man made concept that has relative significance and yet brings with it some anxiety. And then I have this other number along with it that has thousands of years of tradition backing it as a revelation of God’s completing and fulfilling activity in the Universe which is a thought that could bring with it ultimate comfort. Who knows? It’s some heavy thinking. For now I am going to drop the whole thing. But if you are a deep thinker or know something about numbers, I’d like to know what do you get out of it?  For me it gives a whole new meaning to perfect and imperfect numbers.

The Price of a Thank You

There’s always a price to pay

Whenever I am taking the 90 into the city to go to school, I have to go through the same toll booths.  After a little more than three years of doing this, I have come to grow familiar with several of the toll booth operators.  No, we do not talk or even share more than three words, but generally speaking I have seen the same people give or take a few throughout the three plus years.  There is the Asian guy who never looks at me but somehow acknowledges my presence, the happy Black lady who smiles every time I go through, the 30 something Black dude that is always wearing rubber gloves and a hoodie who said “what up fam?” to me the one time he wasn’t on his cell phone, the Asian girl who also smiles a lot and wears a button that says, “How can I be of service?”  I appreciate her enthusiasm and yet I have to admit that the jerk part of my brain has imagined that if she were a character in a movie someone would respond to her button with the obvious reply, “You can take my 70 cents and give me a receipt.  That’s how you can be of service.”  I’d never say that, but I know how to be jerk if I want to and I am pretty sure the jerk would say that.  But I am grateful for her because she, like the happy Black lady, she is a good example of how we can choose our attitude no matter what our situation or our job.

Many times I have wondered how people choose the job of toll collector.  I tend to look at almost everything from a spiritual point of view, so I believe that whatever job we are doing is on some level, whether consciously or unconsciously, doing something to nurture our spiritual being.  But barring that the person is consciously aware that they are serving as gate keepers between different worlds whose job is to ensure that only those who pay the price may enter, I’m assuming that most people just see it as a means to an end.  They are there to make a certain amount of money in exchange for the service of telling someone the toll amount, reaching out their arm to grab the money and giving change and a receipt.  There’s not a lot to mess up with the job unless they can’t count, so some people may also see it as a good place to be alone for some periods of time and catch up on some reading or Sudoku or as my “fam” does, talk on the phone.  That is a benefit for sure.  After a few years of working as an Intelligence Analyst at the NSA, I took a job packing books in a warehouse for a year, just to clear my head.  A lot of the time I listened to books on CD and prayed for the people whose orders I was fulfilling.  I was actually loving it.  Unfortunately, my wife at the time thought I lost my mind and chose to be a loser rather than do something with my intelligence, so I can see some toll booth collectors having the negative stigma of feeling like or being made to feel like their job has no meaning, which brings me to the particular toll collector who inspired this post.  The man who until today was my toll booth nemesis.  I call him “the frowning old White guy” (FOWG).  Excuse me describing people by their race or ethnicity.  It’s all I have to go on.

So anyway, for three years the FOWG has never said a word when I’ve gone through his line except, “50 cents” or “70 cents” depending on which exit I entered on.  Every time I’ve gone through his line or anyone else’s, I say, “Thanks.  Have a nice day/evening.”  And generally the person acknowledges my presence in some way.  But not the FOWG.  This is an example of our interaction:

FOWG: “50 cents”

Me: “Warm today isn’t it?”

FOWG: “50 cents”.

Me: (I hand him the money and he doesn’t even ask if I want a receipt. He just looks at the next car coming up.) “Thanks. Have a nice day.”

FOWG: *silence*
After more than two years of this interaction, Whenever I could see him before I reached the booth, I started swerving to the other booth if there was an opportunity.  When I couldn’t escape him, I would stick to my routine.  But one morning as I drove in, I was lamenting about how disengaged people are.  At first I was going to ignore him, sure that he didn’t give a crap anyway.  But habit kicked in I said me same line.  And again he ignored me.  To which I responded by singing “Have a nice day” loudly in some loud operatic voice that I remembered from an episode of Tom and Jerry.  He probably thought I was crazy but it made me laugh so I was good until I asked myself why I even needed him to acknowledge me.  Did he owe me a “You’re welcome” or a “No. Thank you.  And please have a nice day.  I know you could have gone through another booth, but you chose me.  So thank you.”?  Of course not.  He didn’t owe me jack.  For all I knew, he could be from another country and only know how to say, “50 cents” or “70 cents” in English and goes into a deep anxiety when he tries to say anything else.  Or maybe I remind him of Alfonso Ribeiro from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and they got in an argument once over cold soup when he was a waiter in Monterey, CA.  The point is, that I don’t know that man’s story.  He doesn’t have to respond to me in anyway.  So that day, after I made an a** of myself by singing “Have a nice day”, I decided that if I could not avoid his booth (Hey, I’m still growing.) I would just appreciate his position, give him my 50 cents or 70 cents, say my line, and roll on without expectations.  And guess what happened.  The last time I went through his line before today, I could have sworn I heard him say “Thank you.”  But today he definitely did.

I tried to avoid him as usual especially because I was feeling in a mood again after reading about some pastoral case studies.  But something within–let’s call it the Holy Spirit–told me to stay in his line.  I haltingly said, “Thank you. Have a nice day.”, unsure of whether I could keep my promise to myself to not have expectations, when as I shifted into first gear to take off I heard, “Thank you.”  I had almost pulled off when I looked back to make sure that I wasn’t hearing things and saw that he was looking at me instead of the car pulling up behind me.  The person I truly am in my soul was glad.  What the SHIFT just happened? What changed?  Was it that I dropped my expectations of him?  Who knows?  All I can say is that I guess I finally paid the price of a thank you from him.  And you know what, in some way I feel like it was worth it.

Orange and Purple Make Me

Purple and Orange Cats Exist!

So, I have a feeling that a lot of trips on this blog are going to be dream trips. Last night I had another weird one.  I dreamed that I was walking through some park or field with a person that might have been my wife.  Out of nowhere came a cat with orange and purple stripes.  When I saw it I got incredibly excited.  I exclaimed, “You can be orange and purple here?  I am really orange and purple, but I did not know you can be orange and purple on Earth so I have been hiding in this skin.”  Immediately I ran after the cat who I was aware was conscious.  I called out to it saying, “I am orange and purple too! I am orange and purple too!” As I ran my skin started to flake off.  Eventually I looked just like a human sized orange and purple cat like Damon Wayans in the movie Earth Girls Are Easy. Soon I was on all fours like a cat chasing it into the woods.  That’s when I woke up uncertain if I ever caught up to the cat.

One I got out of the bed, I looked up the meanings of the colors orange and purple.  Orange is essentially the color of social communication and purple is the color of imagination and spirituality. And in some Jungian interpretations a cat symbolizes either the self, the shadow, or the anima.  According to one site I looked at, animals in dreams are used to express the parts of ourselves that we hide.  Cats in particular are seen as the part of oneself that one secretly prizes and treasures.

Adding this all together, I came up with the interpretation that essentially I treasure and yet am hiding the part of myself that wants to socially communicate my own spiritual path.  In other words, there are parts of my imagination and spiritual expression that I am hiding from the outside world.  Well let me admit here that this is a fact.  I will soon graduate from seminary and I have been thinking a lot about what my public ministry will be.  The fact is that I consider myself to be a Christian who is absolutely in Love with Christ.  However, I feel like popular Christianity has little room for my imagination.  I see connections in Christ that, in my experience, have not been expressed very much in post Nicean Christendom. Without getting into it too much, I have some reservations about really putting everything that crosses my imagination out there.  My concern is less about what people will think about me, but more about what I will think about them.  I avoid people that I feel like I will want to cuss out if they say something crazy.  Ultimately, I just don’t want to be part of the problem of “separation thinking” but I realize also that avoidance does not make me part of the solution.  I guess I am trying to master “doing no harm” and cultivating compassion first.  Who knows?  Point is, I think my crazy dream means it’s time to come out of hiding.  I guess this blog is part of it.