Centered

Will our children remember us by the toy we couldn’t afford to buy them or by the one we repaired? Will our friends remember the expensive birthday gift or the drunken insult? Will our partners remember the first lie or the last embrace?

I was recently in a position to speak to a group of forty-five teens on the topic of self-esteem. The idea, quite logically, was: When we love ourselves, we can love others. But strangely, as the words slipped over my lips and out into the warmth of the quiet, carpeted conference room, the idea turned and became: When we love others, we can love ourselves.

“How do you feel when someone gives you flowers for no particular reason?” I asked a girl in the front row. She was brown-haired and mousey. Shy, eyes shifting, deep blush that told me no one ever had, except maybe her grandma or parents.

“I feel amazing,” she answered, her voice a murmur of the expected but so deep with sincerity no one snickered.

“If someone bought you flowers just for being you, could you still feel bad about yourself?” I opened my hands, palms up, offering the question to the room, careful not to put anyone too much on the spot.

Another girl answers, “All the time.” Then, with raw honesty, “Sometimes it makes me feel worse.”

I’m nodding and I’m not the only one. I lift my hands higher, I shrug, I let my incredulous uncertainty flood my face. “How messed up is that, huh?” There’s laughter.

Someone buys us flowers, or picks us flowers, hand-chosen and perfect in their imperfections. They care about us. There is no reason for this offering. It isn’t our birthday. It isn’t a holiday. They’ve done us no harm, caused no slight. But here they are. Flowers. For us.

We stare at the bunch, the colors, shapes and textures. The scents are awesome. But with no self-esteem, with guilt and anger and uncertainty and doubt instead of self-esteem, we look at the gift and say: “I don’t deserve this. I’m not worthy of this. What does this person want from me? They’re just trying to deceive me. They’re just trying to get something from me.” We don’t believe we’ve earned the gift. We actually come to twist everything around until we don’t even believe it *is* a gift but rather the flowers are a trick... to make us feel not better but even worse.

“How do you feel when you give someone flowers for no reason at all, just because?” I ask the question of a broad-shouldered young man with a high and tight hair cut and very green eyes. He raises his prominent, very square chin and says in a voice deeper than his peers, “I feel *great.*” And it’s obvious from the smile that softens his features that he’s speaking from experience.

I ask the room, “Can you feel bad about yourself when you give someone else flower for no reason at all?”

There are many answers tumbling over each other and for a while everyone agrees. There is laughter and wide smiles. The audience makes those collective leaps that audiences do. Learning en mass, the masses are learning.

“If you want to feel good about yourself, do something for someone else,” one kiddo intones, spreading his hands wide like mine then screwing up his face and rolling his eyes with the simplicity of it all. “Duh!” There’s more laughter, including mine, then a brave young woman poses this:

“Sometimes, though, it makes me mad. I wish the other person would do something nice for me just because.”

This quiets then silences the room. Eyes drifts from her to me, back and forth with expectation, surprise, respect.

I look up a little, like I’m thinking. I brush my hair back away from my face. “Then you really aren’t giving the gift just because, are you?” I meet her eyes, half-hidden by blonde hair. “You’re not giving the gift just because. You’re giving to teach a lesson... or make an example... or make someone guilty.”

She is very quiet. I don’t need her to say more because she’s far from the only one in those room to have felt that way.

How do you treat your friends? How do you speak to them? How do you ask them for things? How do you praise them? How do you treat your family? How often do you raise your voice in anger or displeasure? When people you love are angry or hurting, when they’re disappointed by small things or big things, how do you react? Are you impatient when a child needs help? Are you resentful when you aren’t the leader of the pack?

Do you step up and protect the ones you love or do you stand back and praise them for standing alone?

Do you quietly work behind the scenes to protect them from pain without expecting kudos in return or is every action in expectation of a reward?

Do you love for who someone else is or for what loving will get you?

I say to the room, “I always hear it said, ‘Love yourself and you will be able to love others.’ I don’t think I can love myself if I’m not spending my hours loving someone else first.

“I was taught to try to live like Christ. He didn’t gain anything by preaching the word and the way. He wasn’t universally adored. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t given a position of power. His every moment was spent loving us. Loving for nothing in return. Loving even when He was hated in return.

“It seems a very simple thing but it’s only simple on the surface: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Treat others as you would want them to treat you. And stepping further onto Christ’s path: Treat others as He would treat them. Do unto others as love dictates.”

I look at the faces turned toward me. I smile a little. They are mostly thinkers. Natural leaders. Hand-picked by their peers and teachers to be here today. How interesting that a group like this would be determined to need a talk about self-esteem.

I finish with a shrug and deeper smile, “It is very hard to hate yourself when you’re rejoicing for someone else.”

From the back of the room, a young person’s voice, “My cup runneth over.”

EJ

Ketchup

She says: Want to know what keeping a promise feels like? I’ll be available to you every night for one hour. I won’t make small talk. I won’t socialize. Don’t expect me to be charming. I will be supportive. I will answer any questions. I will supply any facts. I will hear any ramble. Every night you pay me for my time with a blog. For that one hour, every night, I’ll be your beck and call grrl.

And that was my incentive to catch up on my blog. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t very impassioned or intelligent or even very Christian. There were several threads of hypocrisy. But it was real and it was proof that I’m only human. I have never given in to a bully but I gave in quite easily to this bribe.

So I’m playing catch up. Ketchup. With faith as small as a mustard seed. But Christ assures me, while I blush and run my hands through my hair and relearn to type in txtspk, that even that seed is enough.

You’ve got to start somewhere when you’re starting all over again.

The world can be... no... let’s start again. The world *is* ripped out from under our feet not only when we least expect it but by forces we never expect. The photo of an orphaned child on the front of the discarded paper in the coffee shop. The way the baristta tosses her curls. The clouds broken like san skit glyphs across the sky. A pale blue rose dying in the vase at the local bookstore.

I never saw the train coming. My earbuds were in and my feet were dancing, my hands were raised skyward and my voice was raised in halleluiahs. I never saw the train coming even as I danced down the tracks.

The world is ripped away by the casual glance of a friend, eyes filled with tears that drown everything into bleak perspective. The world crumbles and falls inward, spins outward and away and we find ourselves standing in a void so impossibly dark, black hole dark, that not even our own words can escape the event horizon even as insults, fears, and other jagged things come spiraling in almost out of control.

You are a bad leader.
You’re an ineffectual father.
You haven’t been a good friend.
You were never what I wanted.

It is sometimes so stunning to hear what one person will say to another. I am sitting here listening to strangers. My earbuds are in but the music is off. The blue rubber-coated thread of the wire weaves into my pocket but attaches to nothing. I gaze out the café window. I sip my hot Earl Grey. I listen to strangers. I listen to the things they say not in anger or tones of attack, but rather the things they say with a grin or a nod or a knowing crease of their brows.

You think you know everything but you don’t.
You’re really not right for that job.
I could solve all your problems if only you’d listen.
You choose to shoulder it all; no one asked you to.

Our mustard seed of faith is buried under the onslaught of careless compost that our loved ones can dump on us in the spirit of honesty. This isn’t to mention the truck loads of garbage that strangers and the opposition and our competitors will haul in and pour on our heads. These are just the well-meaning comments.

It’s your favorite color, but not really your best.
I like you a little over-weight.
You’re trying to hide it, but you really don’t look well.
You can’t continue to push yourself. You’ll break.

Maybe I want to break. Maybe I want to push. Maybe I want to fill every moment of my life to its rim and then jump in and swim. Maybe I’ve found my balance walking on fire and my only problem is that you don’t want to walk with me. Maybe my faith is so much bigger than a mustard seed. Maybe my faith is a crisp fall apple. Maybe my faith is my deep red heart. Maybe my faith is a boulder, my laughter in a room, my tears when you hurt me, my voice when I scream.

Maybe my faith is the moon... or every constellation.

Let go, let God. You are holding on so tightly that you’re crushing me. You are making it impossible for me to give it up to Him. Aurora borealis couldn’t escape your grip. Don’t make Him work a miracle just to hear you pray: Lord, take this off me. Show me the way.

In His time. Only and always in His time. He makes us wait not because He can and not because it teaches us some lesson. He makes us wait because He has a reason. Christ is not chaos theory. His father is not cause-and-effect. All things for a reason and all things in His time. We need only to trust... with our mustard seed.

Do you see the cycle that emerges? How we make miracles impossible for one another. How we press down the seed too far, bury faith beneath life and piles of bills and bundles of problems. The cliché that we find it so easy to fix everyone else’s lives but our own. But as mortals full up of flaws, we don’t fix other people’s lives. Only Christ fixes lives. We all too easily mistake criticism, ego and control for help. We will just as easily crush the seed of hope as we will nurture it, and worst of all: Many of us don’t even know it.

I ask myself this before I open my mouth:

Will any good come of it?

Those who cannot do, teach. I have never believed that. But I do believe, those who cannot hope, crush everyone around them.

Many of my friends have argued this point with me for hours and evenings on end. The idea that sometimes the saying is wrong: If you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all. I disagree and I will always disagree. I may not always be able to shut my trap but I have found every time that voicing criticism and negativity only breeds more of the same. It is a mold, a virulent strain of dis-ease that spreads and sprouts crops of doubt, of distrust, of discontent.

I wish we all could have that seed as big as the night time sky. I wish we all were warriors like Athena, like Hercules, like Virgo. I wish we all could take everything the world dumps on us and survive gracefully every time it crumbles from beneath our feet.

I think that will be my prayer tonight. To give the rest of us bigger seeds. Bigger hope. Faith as bright as dawn.

EJ