on, the calendar, what they are teaching me

dear 2015

One year ago at this time I was toasting with friends that, if nothing else, are evidence that God is up to unforeseeable and perfect trouble all the time. We were sitting around an evening campfire in the Cederberg, South Africa. We had been speedily doing nothing at all after I had arrived hours earlier after over 24 hours of flight and New Year’s champagne somewhere over the Atlantic.

We were sharing words about what the next year might mean for us, wrapping up both our hopes and our predictions in one tiny word. When it came around to me, I said the word “next” which was immediately met with laughter. Shortly thereafter, when I repeated it, these friends realized I wasn’t passing my turn, but was rather choosing the word “next” as my choice of a defining word for 2015. Next in employment, next in understanding, next in outlook.

I’m never sure if self-fulfilling prophecy is a legitimate reality or simply a filter for reflective thought, but 2015 was no doubt the year of “next.”

I learned more about people, who they say they are, how they really are, and how things work than I ever wanted to know in 2015. I met people and groups and neighborhoods and communities I thought I knew about but learned I was completely ignorant of and disconnected from. I became friends with people I would have never known about but now can’t imagine operating without. I faced my biggest fears and insecurities, and faced the world the next day realizing that people are just as evil and just as good as I had imagined. I realized how hope and reality fight constantly, leaving me in a fragile reality where the battle is not over yet but I’m supposed to operate as if I know the ending.

I enter 2016 with texts of jealousy-inducing pictures from the same friends in the same Cederberg. I’m not sure what my word for 2016 is yet, but I’m grateful for all of the next that 2015 brought. I’m no longer afraid of “the worst” that others are capable of bringing, because they’ve brought it and I’m still standing. I’m no longer ignorant of so much of my own city I desperately need to be in relationship with, and I can’t go back operating as a wealthy white kid who doesn’t know what it’s costing everybody else. I’m no longer wondering if fighting when I might not win is worth it.

I’ve learned the good fight is always worth it. And I’ve learned that if I’m paying attention, there are always people who’ve been fighting and losing the good fight a long time who have a lot to teach me about being honest and brave. About taking up what Sara Groves calls the things that are “too heavy to carry and impossible to leave.”

So to 2016, I’m not sure what you’re bringing, but I’m sure that I’ll be ready.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged acceptance, cederberg, difference, job, learning, mosthopeful, new, New Year, New Years, next, social work, South Africa, understanding, writing

Sep 13 2015

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learning to live

almost there. almost enough.

Screen Shot 2015-09-13 at 10.40.01 PM

My fingers have been afraid to push down on these keys. I’m not sure what I have to say or whether it’s worth saying. I’ve been in the world of everyone else, fighting to make sense of the day to day and hoping that every now and then something of meaning squeezes out of it. Paperwork is usually late, dinners are cut short, stories aren’t completely told. And while I feel like I almost have something to write, it seems like it’s a little short of worthwhile.

But in each of those moments, I still know something magical has happened. I’ve met a buddy for a beer or a friend for a coffee. We’ve eaten too many chips in queso or had too many mozzarella sticks. But we’ve been offering rounds of “me too” and “yes, exactly” in the meantime. We share the same anger at the same institutions, the same grieving around the same situations, and the same hopefulness toward the same possibilities.

And it only feels almost there. Almost enough to write home about. Almost enough to remember. Almost enough to be worth reminding others that something worthwhile comes along every now and then. But it always seems just short, so I’ve chosen not to write it down. In the last week, though, those moments of almost have seemed just enough to be worth it. The moments that fall a little short of important seem very important. The conversations that fall a little short of profound seem very profound.

And it leaves me wondering if it’s not worthwhile moments I’m waiting on to write about, but perhaps I have forgotten what moments are worthwhile after all.

So, fingers to the keys and eyes on the horizon. I’m doing my best to pay attention. At least, that’s what I intend to do.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged almost, anxiety, arrogance, asking, bravery, friendship, imagination, inspiration, kingdom, Magic, reality, short, write, writing

Jan 03 2013

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grief and trauma, learning to live, Quotes, what they are teaching me

scarred by struggle, transformed by hope

I received a book in the mail today from a friend I met through the blog.

Multiple conversations have been had via email, with time and oceans in between, about issues of faith and justice and loss and hope and hopelessness and holding on. When I recently had a time of near blog-silence, she checked in to see how things were. She immediately hit right on the nature of the issues adding to the silence, and gracefully wrote words that echoed like prayers of acceptance of creative silence, and requesting of hopeful imagination.

And today, after waking up to run, pour a slow cup of coffee and then get back to work at Area Relief Ministries for the first time since mid-December, I walked in to see a package on my desk. I opened it up and immediately knew who it was from, as this friend had referenced the book in an email during those dry days.

The following is an excerpt, and the book itself, sitting on my desk in its packaging waiting quietly like the sneaky gift it was is now a reminder, of how the kingdom community is broader and larger and more powerful than I remember on most days. It is ebbing and flowing in and out of our quiet and alive places, keeping us moving and pushing forward, even when we aren’t sure why it’s worth it.

So to this friend, and the other friends of which there are many brave and marginalized kingdom-souls, who are willing to tell the stories of struggle in an effort to sing the true songs of hope, I cannot say thank you enough.

djordan
108 S Church

“Hope is rooted in the past but believes in the future. God’s world is in God’s hands, hope says, and therefore cannot possibly be hopeless. Life, already fulfilled in God, is only the process of coming to realize that we have been given everything we need to come to fullness of life, both here and hereafter. The greater the hope, the greater the appreciation of life now, the greater the confidence in the future, whatever it is.

But if struggle is the process of evolution from spiritual emptiness to spiritual wisdom, hope is a process as well. Hope, the response of the spiritual person to struggle, takes us from the risk of inner stagnation, of emotional despair, to a total transformation of life. … The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope.”

from “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope,” by J.D. Chittister

Tagged blogging, empty, full, God, hope, hopeful, hopeless, jacob, jacob wrestles, quiet, Religion and Spirituality, Scarred by Struggle Transformed by Hope, silence, spirituality, stillness, struggle, wrestling with God, writing

Sep 09 2012

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the beginnings of life and a world of mysteries

“I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.”

+ Anais Nin

For more on Anais Nin, and the source of this particular quote, visit BrainPickings.org which will quickly become one of your favorite blogs.

Tagged anais nin, brain pickings, creativity, literarure, quotes, writing

Aug 15 2012

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from the archives

from the archives: closing the book

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience.

+++

View original post from January 17, 2012

closing the book | Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I cannot remember the last time I’ve fallen so deeply into a novel. I’ve said for many years that I’m not grown up enough to read fiction, so I mostly stick with memoirs and textbooks.

After finishing Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I’m sticking to my guns and saying I’m not grown up enough for fiction,

but that it is surely time for me to start growing up.

A better summary can be found HERE, but in a single swipe of great injustice, I’ll try: it’s a story of a young boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks. It is his parallel journeys through finding a lock that a mysterious key of his father’s opens, and through a child’s honest and sharp grief of losing a father on “the worst day ever.” I often found myself with tears about to break, just after a laugh would suddenly erupt. I felt more human while reading than I’ve felt in a very long time.

What I noticed the most were the dozen times that I would find myself shielding my eyes from the upcoming lines, often closing the book in the middle of a conversation, an argument in motion, a story in telling, a memory in recollection.

I knew I wasn’t ready for it.

I knew I couldn’t bear to go on. Yet.

So I shut the book; I looked around to wonder why no one else was as worried about the impending outcome as me. And then finally, after the not-knowing would outweigh the not-wanting-to-know, I would flip the book back open, hold my breath, and …

***

I read books and journal articles constantly about clinical and community work because I want to do justice with the beyond-generous people who offer me their beyond-personal stories as we look to do hopeful and honest work together in therapy.

But I’ve never closed a text on grief and grieving because I couldn’t bare to read what came next. My heart doesn’t bleed out onto the pages of an article about responses of communities to children who lost parents on September 11. A text can name and normalize complex emotions, but the voice in a well-written novel can make me feel it.

Make me feel it so much that I have to close the story and catch my breath.

And you can close the book and catch your breath until you know that you must find out what happens in a novel. And precisely in those closed-book moments, I think we are being honest with ourselves, and the teller of the story––and ourselves when we are the teller of the story––honest in that we simply can’t bare it anymore, and we must take a breather if we are to remain human. The thickness of our humanity is often more than even we can tell or hear or feel about.

Textbooks make it clean. Novels make it raw. Living voices make it true.

So we have to do whatever it takes to finish hearing the stories.

The stories of poverty.

Of abuse.

Of abused power.

Of arrogant leadership.

Of selfless givingship.

Of painful loss.

Of ridiculous loss.

Of silent suffering.

Of resilient sufferers.

Of global conflict.

Of über-local conflict.

Of the conversations and stories of the flesh-and-blood people who are acting in those roles as antagonist and protagonist and an(pro)tagonist.

If it takes closing the book for a few moments to catch our breath before we say, “Go on. If you have to tell, I have to know…”

***

I’m a better person for feeling what the book invited me to feel. I’m sure I’ll keep reading textbooks and articles, but it’s time for me to grow up into a deeper humanity and brave the world of fiction for all that it can help me see and feel. For all that it can help me hear. And then listen to.

It feels necessary as part of living and leaning into the kingdom.

Even if it takes closing the book multiple times over to catch my breath before losing it again.

djordan
Cape Town, South Africa

Tagged book review, cape town, children and grief, classroom, death and children, Extremely Loud Incredibly Close, grief, honesty, jonathan safran foer, loss, real life, sadness, September 11, telling the truth, writing

May 22 2012

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reviews, what they are teaching me

like fish laid out on the grass | Fahrenheit 451

She made us read it our junior and senior years of high school, Mrs. Kee did. Fahrenheit 451 was one of many other classics that were required of our reading, so we read them like we were supposed to and came up with whatever answers we thought would get us the grade we needed.

And then the book went on the shelves afterward like all the old classics did. This classic from circa 1950, and already forgotten by 2002…much less by 2012.

But ten years later, noticed on those center sections in the bookstores where we pretend we know what we are looking for, I spotted it among the list of high school summer reading. And with Mrs. Kee on my mind these last several months for some reason, I bought the book and read it the whole road trip there and back.

“…hold onto one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us…”

My biggest notion the entire time I reread this high school assignment was how ignorant we all were as we were asked to read this incredibly important work. And even still, ten years later as I began hearing about “recommended reading lists” and “don’t read lists” and “ask these questions” and “here are your answers” and “too much information will just confuse them” and “only one percent could ever understand” and “just give them something to hang their hats on” being phrases tossed about as if common leadership protocol, the reason Mrs. Kee assigned the book in the first place became all the more important.

And so did picking it up again ten years later.

The book describes a world of the future, written in the 1950s lest we forget, where entire walls of living rooms were taken up with TV screens and “reality” programming. Earbud headphones were commonplace and firemen burned down houses with intellectual contraband instead of putting out fires.

And a ragtag group huddled in the woods, whose ideas had put them on the street, who reminded each other…

I think remembering this book, buried deep in the places we bury most of what we value when we are young––where we bury what it is about encouraging dissent, opinions, opposing views, challenges, diversity, thoughtfulness and disagreement––it is in remembering that the importance of continuing to evaluate the voices we have decided have no value, have no right, are better shut out…it is in noticing what those voices are and what we are afraid of in them that I can follow Bradbury’s words.

And Mrs. Kee’s words.

And the words of those who have come before us, and who have learned before us, the danger is silencing those who speak in opposition of us.

It is in the dialogue that the truth is always found.

djordan
Pine Tree