Browsing Category: Deep Thinking

That Adventurous Inner Child

My grandpa recalls the same stories every time I visit them when I’m back in Minnesota. The favorite black flowered dress I would wear for days on end. The hours I’d spend playing dress-up with my grandma’s jewelry & heels. Watching me play in the mud puddles with my brother as he plowed the field in our front yard.

As he was reminiscing these stories yet again he said “You were always an adventurous little girl, up for anything. You’d jump right in.” 

I remember a lot of experiences & events from my childhood, but I don’t remember a lot of who I was a child. Perhaps that’s because when we’re 7 we don’t analyze ourselves like we do when we’re 27. I think we’re our truest selves before age 10. After that we have to fight for our inner child.

But I hope that adventurous little girl always speaks up. I hope I have the determination to fight for the sense of innocence & idealism that keeps her alive; the spirit that’s not afraid to be bold.

Do you remember who your inner child was? The one that wasn’t afraid to be? 

1 Comment Deep Thinking, Just Life

When Your Soul Wakes Up

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. – Zora Neale Hurston 

It’s true. Love really does make your soul come out of hiding. In the last 12 months I have known love of different sorts – friendly love, romantic love…even the unexplainable love of strangers. As I read this quote tonight, it put words to the season I’m in – my soul has come out of hiding.

And can I tell you? It’s an equally frightening & exhilarating place to be? The threat of hurt looms around every corner. A broken heart is one vulnerable moment away. But the freedom of being known is waiting on the other side of an honest confession. The opportunity for connection a conversation away.

No one told me that my soul waking up would be so painful at times. Or, as a friend tweeted the other day, “no one told me that getting my heart back would hurt so much.”

Love wakes us up in a way that not much can. LOVE was what woke us up at the beginning of time, so it’s no wonder, is it? But, when we wake up…when our soul crawls timidly out of its hiding place in the darkness of fear & shame into the light of love, acceptance, & freedom, it’s a shock to our system. It will hurt. But I also have to believe that, if I see it through, I will discover a life unlike any I’ve known before.

 

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Play Hurt

What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt. (Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, pg. 48)

Play hurt. As long as you are living, you will be broken. Some part of you will be weak. You can’t eliminate the pain, but you can participate in the process of it being redeemed. 

That’s a daily choice for me – choosing to play hurt. But I think the opposite of it inevitably leads me to bitterness or apathy. So playing hurt may not be the easy choice. Or the comfortable choice. But, I’d rather limp along in pain than sit idle in bitterness.  

Honestly, I’m not so sure that YOU can heal you anyway. I think we’ve got to keep walking and, in doing so, participate in a process that will find us on the road to healing 6 months, 18 months, 2 years from now.

Don’t wait to be whole before walking alongside a friend who is also broken. Don’t wait to be perfect to write that book you’ve been waiting on, paint your next piece, take your next photo, write your next song. Believe that your creativity comes from a place in you deeper than your pain. And that your pain makes your creativity richer as it flows out through that place.

Comment Creativity, Deep Thinking

Awkwardness: A Catalyst for Growth

For most of my life I have tried to avoid awkwardness with all my might to avoid. And to be honest, I still don’t necessarily “like” it per se. I often wish there was another way. But, I’m discovering that sometimes the best catalyst for growth in relationships, in myself, & in creativity is awkward moments…sometimes even whole seasons of them.

The friendships in my life that are the richest, have the deepest connections are oftentimes the ones that have had the greatest number of awkward conversations & awkward seasons. They’re rich because they are deeply honest. And they’re deeply honest because we’ve fought through awkward seasons & attacked the elephants in the room through conversation.

There’s something about fighting through awkwardness that leaves me just a bit more confident, slightly more sure of who I was created to be. It’s as if I’ve passed a test & now I can certify myself in some new skill chipping away just a bit more at self doubt that likes to creep its way in.

Awkwardness is often the result of tension & discomfort – both of which, I believe, are core components of some of our greatest creative labor. It causes us to wrestle, to question, to redefine, to live the work our art requires before we can produce something to share with the world. 

Chances are, I may never “like” awkwardness, but I’m trying to welcome it nonetheless. She may be a less than polite house guest – oftentimes arriving unannounced she seems to have an agenda of her own, but she earns her keep by doing her part in instigating growth. 

Where have you seen awkwardness as a catalyst for growth in your life? 

Comment Creativity, Deep Thinking, Just Life, Leadership, Relationships

I Have…Had…Am Living…a Dream

I have this dream

I have this dream that I get to live in a world where I am free to serve,
Where my schedule is not a barrier to love in action.
A world where life is work & work is life,
That is a big tangled messy but beautiful pile of spaghetti.
A world where what I do is who I am.

I have this dream of community that loves well,
Really loves…in the mud & the rain as well as in the sunshine.
Friends who encourage & speak truth,
Who know all my junk & love my anyway,
Who are splendidly unconventional.
People who love relentlessly because it is simply who they are.

I have this dream of a world where I get to collaborate on Kingdom things with friends.
A world where I get to live adventure.
Where not living according to a plan means being blissfully surprised by the little things.
Where I get to listen when called upon.
A world where God uses the story he’s writing in my life to encourage someone else in theirs.

“Katie, your life is like a dream, one so many would kill for.” (He had listened to me muse for at least 30 minutes about being less than satisfied with life at the moment)

Sometimes my friends speak truth I already know & it wakes me up.

I woke up & remembered that I am living that dream.
And not only am I living that dream but the life I’ve been given the opportunity to live is far greater than anything I could ever dream.

I had this dream. That dream is life.

 

Have you ever had a moment like this?

 

2 Comments Deep Thinking, Just Life

Reconditioning

I don’t know about you, but from little on I’ve been conditioned to avoid pain…of all sorts. Don’t jump off that rock, you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t run, you’ll fall. Don’t tell someone how you feel about them, they’ll reject you. Don’t make that risky career move, you’ll fail & be poor. Do anything you can to avoid pain. 

But the rule of life is we can’t completely avoid pain…at least not forever. The nature of the muscle disease I’ve been blessed with is chronic physical pain. Some days the pain is significantly more intense than others, but it’s almost always there. The past several weeks have been an intensely painful season. And while there’s not much I can do about it, one thing I can do is go to the gym. I know that if I hop on the treadmill for even 30 minutes I will feel better the next day because the pain needs to be forced out by movement.

But, the current pain, which makes me cringe just walking up to the counter at Starbucks, keeps me from actually going to the gym. Because I know that the actual workout itself will hurt, it will be significantly more painful than sitting still. It doesn’t matter that tomorrow I’ll feel better, I know the pain is going to get worse before it gets better and so I choose to stick with the hardly bearable, yet bearable, pain of sitting still. 

As I was complaining to God about this situation the other day, it hit me how often I do that very same thing with the pain of life. I think that’s true for many of us. We’ll tell you we’re unhappy, miserable, etc. And we know that if we’d do the hard work to get through the pain we’d be happier on the other side. But we also now it will hurt more before it hurts less & we’re not sure our hearts & souls can take it. So, we settle for the hardly bearable, yet bearable, pain of sitting still.

I wonder how our lives might look different if we could recondition ourselves to run headfirst into pain rather than avoid it. If we actually made decisions that put us in the line of pain’s fire knowing we’d get hit but that at some point we’d find ourselves sweetly exhausted on the road to recovery.

How would your life look different if you put yourself through a little reconditioning?

4 Comments Deep Thinking, Just Life