In Over My Head and Advice from Pixar

[Originally published October 11, 2011]

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

Six months ago, in the thro's of bleak mid-winter (yes, it was April, and yet, this particular year, it WAS the bleak MID-winter) I started to worry that I may be slowly dying.

So much of my life was in a comfort zone, that - as often happens when we get a little older - I was starting to feel like that comfort zone was beginning, ever-so-slightly, to shrink. I'd been teaching piano, off and on (more on than off), for 28 years (yes, I started when I was 10). I had had teaching callings in the church for 12 consecutive years. I struggled with routines, but I was even used to that, recognizing my need to approach them with my unique little A.D.D.-ness, and knowing that with the ebb and flow of each year, it always felt like I was fighting my way out of a paper bag...

When in May, as I was still fighting my way out of this year's paper bag, I started to have problems with tendonitis in my right wrist. I continued to nurse a war wound in my left foot as well - aka: zip line injury from girls' camp four years ago. I laughingly noticed one day that every single move I was making - to get in and out of my car, put groceries away, change laundry, etc. - was designed with one major objective: AVOID PAIN. As very often happens when I make these wry little observations, the spirit whispered the eternal truth connected to my observation, "You're doing that spiritually, too."

That feeling I had had in the previous several months, that I was slowly dying inside, crystalized in this new realization, and with it, the further realization that if I was going to make the choice to avoid pain in this life, I was going to die before my heart had the sense to stop beating. If I continued on the path I had set my unwitting feet on, I was going to become incapable of feeling, all because I had decided it might be too painful.

C.S. Lewis said,

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk [my italics] of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

"I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness....We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it."

In my prayers, I began asking Heavenly Father to help me wake up, and live. In feeling the kind of pain connected with my current trials, I didn't want to shut down and be incapable of feeling anything. And as part of that, I didn't want to sleepwalk through life, incapable of being an instrument in the Lord's hands, to bless, and serve, and minister. I've always loved learning new things, and I didn't want to shut myself off to one of the biggest joys in this life, and in the next life: growth and progress.

Fast forward to Sunday...

I was talking to a friend about having too many new things on my plate, and it hit me how every single thing going on in my life right now has me in a huge learning curve. Six months ago, everything in my life was in my comfort zone. Now, everything in my life is OUT of my comfort zone. And since I begged the Lord to not let me die inside, it's all tender mercies. It's like the Lord plucked me out of my old life, and tossed me into the deep end of the swimming pool. To have EVERY. SINGLE. THING be out of my comfort zone puts me in a state far, FAR from grace. That learning curve is messy, and awkward, and clumsy. And when you've been in your comfort zone for any extended period of time, all your natural man instincts practically scream at you to go back to the old way, where you're comfortable, where it's easy. I just have to know that the Lord's grace is available in all of these new circumstances...AFTER ALL I CAN DO. And it's just going to look messy until that starts to happen. He is sooooo good to me, to answer my prayer in such a huge way. It's one of the reasons I feel hesitation to put anything down while I'm figuring it out. I keep trying to just take one day at a time, and since all these messy things are gifts from a loving Father, I plead for guidance, and strength, and FOCUS. Always focus...

And then, as I get up off my knees, and wonder where on earth to plunge in today, I hear this hysterical little voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZF5r1F7nY