N. Ford's Blog

A Heart at Ease with Itself, Part I

A Heart at Ease with Itself, Part I

I think Elisabeth Elliott is the one who coined the phrase, but someone more learned than me can confirm.

“A heart at ease with itself.”

It’s one that has done the great work of self-forgetfulness to the point of freedom. Joy. Ease.

In this world, it feels somedays, impossible.

But the more I live, the more I learn, and I’ve come to believe that the idea of self-forgetfulness is not a task, obligation, or requirement, but an invitation. The greatest invitation to the greatest party. It’s an open door to a place of ease. The free vacation of which we’ve dreamt, again and again. It may have felt like a pipe dream and yet here it is, set on the table before us if only we choose to eat of it.

And that’s where the grand invitation becomes something harder than we wished it would be. That’s the snag, the catch, the fine print.

We actually have to choose it.

We have to do the hard, seemingly impossible work of forgetting ourselves.   

IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS

Forgetting ourselves in our relationships – romantic and otherwise – lies in the Biblical definition of love found in 1 Corinthians. It is, in itself, all the instruction we need in order to be self-forgetful when it comes to those God has put in front of us to love. And although this scripture is often quoted at weddings and is, of course, relevant to marriage relationships, it should be noted that in its original context it was a guide for how the people of Corinth were to love one another. They’d been getting in squabbles and wasting energies on petty arguments and misunderstandings and Paul was writing to correct them. To coach them and encourage them out of pettiness. That’s where this scripture originates, well outside the context of romantic relationships, but a guide nonetheless for any relationship into which you’ve been called.

“Love is patient and kind; it does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things. Love never ends.” 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8

 Look – it is so easy to be concerned about ourselves in our relationships. Especially in the world we live in where we’re constantly being told to look out for ‘number one’. We are not encouraged into Biblical love, we’re encouraged to serve ourselves, choose ourselves, and do everything we can to protect our own interests.

Read the scripture again and you will see, it is a directive in the opposite direction.

Consider the last argument you had with a loved one. How easy was it to be patient or kind? Arrogance and rudeness come so easy. Insisting on our own ways and becoming irritable and resentful is exactly what our spirits want to do. It’s where we want to live. It’s where I want to live.

These charges are so difficult to attain because every one of them asks us to forget ourselves.

We must lose sight of our own timing in order to be patient. We must forget the insults and arrows that come flying our way if we are to offer kindness across a hostile battlefield line. We will need to completely forget what we perceive as our own needs or wants in order to release insisting on our own ways. We will be required to forget our own egos, and our pride, if we are going to forego the opportunities to return rudeness for more rudeness. And we will never avoid becoming resentful or holding our loved ones in contempt unless we can forget entirely what we feel we are owed – what we want to demand as our rights.

It’s easy to get lost in the checklist of character traits we perceive as too righteous for us to ever be able to achieve, but if we narrow the list down to this one thing – to forget ourselves – we will begin moving toward Biblical love without even realizing it’s happening.

In the next squabble, or the next tiff, or the next knock-out full-on brawl with our closest, I wonder what it would look like to seek self-forgetfulness. How would it change our conversations or our tones or our language or our pride response or our ego response or the way we view a situation? I wonder, if we could forget ourselves, how it could change our relationships.

(It must be said, and I hate that it does, but there is a time when self-forgetfulness is not the answer, and that time is abuse. Recognize it and care for yourself.)

IN OUR WORK

Our work is a silent giant for most of us, whether we recognize it or not.

The truth is that we say our families are the most important thing in our lives, but we constantly make decisions for our jobs instead. Where we live, who we spend time with, where spend our most valuable time and energy – we choose for our jobs first, and our families second.

For most of us, if we’re being honest, our work is our priority. And as such, it is devastatingly easy to be entirely consumed by it, and indirectly so, to be consumed in ourselves. It is a climb up a steep mountain to have a heart at ease with itself when it is inordinately consumed by achievement.

Achievement is one of the easiest places to claim identity, to find validation, and to self-affirm. It’s the most natural place from which to derive purpose (and appropriately so!). But when work becomes ultimate (as Tim Keller would say), then it has become our master. It has become what we worship. It has become the singular place where we are defined. If work is okay, I am okay. If it’s not okay – I’m not okay.

The trouble with that model is that our work can be taken away from us any time, any day, in a multitude of ways. So if our identity, purpose, validation, and affirmation lie in the hands of our achievements and then we don’t achieve, we’re setting ourselves up for a world of disappointment and hurt. Someone could lose a job, or lose the ability to do their job, or get in an accident, or get sick, or need to move to care for a family member, or they could hire someone new, or pick someone better, or any number of other things that could strip us of our ability to achieve in a heartbeat. And then what?

If we’ve been so consumed in becoming ‘someone’ through our work and that is somehow affected, we lose way more than an income.

Incomes can be replaced. Identities are far rarer and much more difficult to find.

To have a heart at ease with itself is to be self-forgetful. To be self-forgetful in our work we must understand, with every cell in our bodies, that we cannot and will not find our soul’s fulfillment there. We can’t find our personal value there. We can experience purpose in our work and the purpose that sticks – the purpose that makes people want to keep coming back – is the purpose that exists outside of filling ourselves.

If an NBA basketball player gets critically injured but understands his purpose is to inspire youth – he will find another way to inspire youth without doing it from the court. If a CEO understands her purpose to be creating healthcare solutions for the underprivileged and she’s fired by the board, she’ll find a new way, a new company, a new road to pave for new healthcare solutions. If a musician understands his purpose to share the gospel through his music and he can’t play a guitar anymore, he’ll keep writing songs or start speaking or find another way to share the gospel with his audience.

The ‘why’ cannot be overcome when it exists for more than filling our own chests.

What that leaves us with is what we do now. Today. How we interact with the people we work with and lead. How we pour into our work, understanding that it has the power to grant us a sense of purpose but that it cannot be the place where we find our identities – because it can be taken away in a breath.

It’s in this place, the place of purpose apart from identity, that we can be free to forget ourselves. Purposes are adjustable. They bend according to supply and demand. They evolve with pandemics and birth announcements and economic swings. Identity is not so fluid. Identity is core. It’s root to our tree. Cornerstone to our foundation. It moves, and the whole building shifts (or crumbles, as the case may be). Identity must exist outside of purpose, outside of work, outside of achievement. It must exist in something lasting and eternal and unchangeable. Inviolable.

Identity apart from our work is the freedom to dive in with our entire selves, without it defining us. We can stop worrying about our level of achievement because it can’t fill us. We can work free from the pressure of someone else’s definition of success because we are not measured by the success of our work. Work becomes then, merely a part of what makes us who we are and a guide for how life sends us on in the directions we will inevitably go.

Our strivings to be someone can rest. Our efforts to prove ourselves to a world that does not care and will likely never know who we are, can die peacefully. A heart at ease with itself is a heart that knows that whatever work we are given to do here is beautiful and wonderful and worth it, but it cannot now, nor can it ever, fill our souls.

Self-forgetfulness in our work is freedom and it will only be achieved by identifying what we’re made to do, and doing it with joy and purpose and mission, yet knowing fulfillment, identity, and value apart from our measures of perceived success.

Work is good. We were created to work – as far back as Adam in the garden – and I believe we were created to get joy and satisfaction out of our work well done. But I do not believe we can enjoy the freedom of self-forgetfulness if our identities are found in our works. It puts too great a burden on something that is not structurally built to withstand it.

Only in finding and placing our identities in something everlasting will we truly and rightly be able to experience the joy and satisfaction intended for us in our work. Only then will we find a heart at ease with itself.

love, Nic

“A Heart at Ease with Itself, Part II” coming soon…

The post A Heart at Ease with Itself, Part I first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Songwriter Connection Podcast

Songwriter Connection Podcast 
with Dave Lenahan

Coming December 2024

The post Songwriter Connection Podcast first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Kicks & Carseats

Kicks & Carseats
A Night of Worship

Just Love Coffee Cafe
Spring Hill

Bring a pair of tennis shoes and/or a carseat to support children in foster care in Middle TN.

Thursday, July 18, 2024
Doors 5:30 PM
Music Starts 6:00 PM

The post Kicks & Carseats first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Bound Booksellers

Bound Booksellers
Franklin, TN

Author meet & greet, Q&A, & book signing.

Saturday, July 13, 2024
1:00 – 4:00 PM

The post Bound Booksellers first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Nothing but Ashes

Nothing but Ashes

The older I get, the more I believe a few things to be extraordinarily true.

One of those things is that pain always has the potential to be productive, but we must choose it.

In the course of life I’ve come across so many people who believe that God cannot possibly exist or be a loving God because they, or someone they love, has experienced tremendous hurt. In reaction to this hurt, they have (understandably) pushed back against belief, rejected any form of loyalty or agreement with a God who has allowed such pain to come into their lives.

Put plainly, their argument is this: if God can do something to stop suffering and doesn’t, He’s not really all-loving. And if God wants to stop our suffering but can’t, He’s not really all-powerful*.

I have to say… I get it.

It feels incredibly human to resist a God who is called loving, but allows heartache, hurt, loss, and injustice in our lives.

But that position has in it a foundational flaw. Because if we choose to resist God altogether, we are still faced with the question, “Why does pain exist?”.

As the late Dr. Tim Keller states, if there is no God, there is only nature, and nature, in its very essence, is violence.

Examine the food chain and discover immediately the violence of nature. Observe a thunderstorm, a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, a flood. Nature is violence. Nature is pain. Nature is hurt. So if one cannot believe in God because there is pain, what is one left with when the result of life on this earth is still pain? How can anything meaningful result from suffering other than a strategy for survival?

If you know my story at all, you know it hasn’t been a bed of roses. There are many things for which I am incredibly grateful. There are also many things that have been incredibly difficult. I don’t share this to compare our pains or pit my experience against yours. I share it so you know I don’t write from atop a cotton-clouded daydream. I write from something more akin to a mountain climb with repeated volcanic activity that loves to slide me back down to the base of the mountain among its erupted gut of smoldering lava and ash.

That’s where I find myself today. Back at the bottom. Among the ashes.

As I watch people respond to hurt, there really seem to be two types of general reactions. One reaction is to push away, revolt, or reject God. Why would He do this to me? Or how could He let this happen? How could He possibly love me? This reaction usually leads to finding comfort in old behaviors. Behaviors that typically don’t serve health or longevity or purity or long-term happiness, but instead offer temporary comfort and relief from feelings that feel too hard to bear in their fullness. This reaction also tends to lead to a bitter, victim mindset that finds solace in the seductive whistle of self-pity.

I have to admit, it’s an alluring choice.

The other reaction is to lean into God. To search for Him. To seek Him for comfort and to bring every tear and question and doubt and fear to Him. This reaction usually leads, at first, to more pain and questioning and is difficult to bear in the rawness of the eruption. But this reaction also tends to lead to a sustainable peace. It seems to bring a deep stillness for the seeking souls who aren’t as shaken when the next eruption comes. There’s a knowingness that grows in these people. A calmness. A steady breath – like specially trained soldiers who can control their heartrates in the heat of a life-threatening mission.

The thing about sitting on the second choice, the choice to lean into God, is that it costs more upfront. One pays a higher price at the beginning of the hurt because it requires a soul to sit in the pain – to process it. To let it hurt. And then it requires action. It requires asking questions and digging in. It requires searching for answers. It requires excavating one’s own flaws and scars. Unearthing one’s doubts and turning on the light inside one’s own littered basement.

The second choice is harder. It’s harder to sit at the bottom of the mountain among the ashes and then stand back up and start climbing again. Knowing sweat and toil will come again. Knowing pain will come again. Knowing that the earth may shake again, and the lava may erupt again, and the mountain itself may give way and fall into the heart of the sea. It’s harder to not choose self-pity. It’s harder to deny the comfortable behaviors that can offer that sweet, temporary relief from feeling every painful breath.

Albert Tate says that the only thing God requires from us is ashes. That sometimes He has to burn our forest down in order to help us understand that the only thing He needs from us is our surrender – our tears at the foot of his cross.

God has, in His mercy, allowed me to win a few times in my life. But God, in His mercy, has also allowed me to lose many, many times. And through that, I’m learning a little bit more about what it means to lose well. Maybe understanding a little more what James means when he writes, “Consider it joy whenever you face trials of many kinds for you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance”.

And though I’m miles from really knowing what it means to lose well, I have, in this moment of ‘nothing but ashes’, the clarity to know that He is doing something. Working something, or someone, into exactly what He’s intended from the start.

I don’t know what your pain looks like. I don’t know how many times you’ve been knocked down the mountain or how weary you are of the climb. I don’t know how painted is your skin in the grey of your own ashes.

But one thing I know is true. Your pain will be productive if you choose it. He will use your suffering to make you better and in turn, make someone else better. He can change the world through your hurt. He can spark a movement through your story. He can redeem anything. Anyone. And He will, if only you let Him.

IG Artist @paigeandherart

*From the sermon titled “Why Does God Allow Suffering?” by Dr. Tim Keller

The post Nothing but Ashes first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Book Two Launch Event

Book Two, The Red
Launch Event

The Good Cup
Franklin, TN 

Friday, May 24, 2024
6:00 – 9:00 PM

The post Book Two Launch Event first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

The Red Launch Event

The Good Cup, Franklin, TN

May 24, 2024 

Book signing, photo ops, and refreshments. 

The post The Red Launch Event first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Vision Church

Flourish Women’s Event

Vision Church
Orlando, FL 

March 9th, 2024
10:00 – 12:00 Noon

The post Vision Church first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

Flourish

Vision Church 

March 9th, 2024

Orlando, FL

The post Flourish first appeared on The website of N. Ford.

life. Unchained. 9. three t’s and legacies

life. unchained. 9. three t's and legacies

i attended a funeral service for a man who passed away recently. 

he lived a good, long, healthy life.  he just got sick at the end with a nasty cancer that beat him to the finish line. 

at the man’s service there were two things that stood out to me:  the parade of men who spoke for him; and the way his spent his t’s.   

let me start with the parade of men.  there aren’t a lot of men i know who have true brotherhoods, but this guy had a slew of them.  it wasn’t one man who was a close friend, it was nine.  and that doesn’t happen by accident. 

this dude fostered rich relationship with these guys, and as a result, nine men spoke at his funeral.  nine men called him ‘brother’.  nine men knew him so intimately they could tell stories about him from decades ago, and stories about him from the week before he died. 

and then there are the three t’s:  time.  talent.  and treasure. 

these are the things that each of has been given.  they range from person to person, each individual unique in what we’re given.  varying amounts of time we’ll get; varying talents and abilities we carry with us; varying resources, or “treasures”. 

at the funeral, the brotherhood didn’t cease commenting on how wisely, how carefully the deceased had spent his t’s.  what he’d chosen to invest his time in – rich relationships, serving the community, traveling the world, and challenging his friends and family.  what he’d chosen to do with his talents – creating, building, applying things only he could.  how intentionally he’d spent his treasure – his resources. 

in his departure from this world, the man left behind a tribe of people who knew him well, loved him deeply, and who were impacted by the way he chose to live.  and in that impact, in his legacy, he drew people into quiet and thoughtful reflection on how they would spend their t’s: their time, their talents, and their treasures, because it’s true that we can’t take anything with us, but we will leave things behind.    

and that’s where socials come in. 

as i’ve said from the start, this project isn’t about getting you off socials, it’s about sharing the freedom of living without them.  and this is a place of an important freedom. 

it’s the place where the three t’s thrive. 

can the three t’s thrive in a world with socials?  well, that’s up to you. what i can tell you is how the three t’s thrive in a world without them. 

time: that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?  we all know the time sucking distraction that socials are.  they are the enemy of production.  they are the antithesis of focus.  they are a combatant of peace.  one pull of the thumb and forty minutes later we’re wondering how we got to the video of a ninety-year-old woman doing yoga.  socials are winning the battle for our time and attention.  and those are two of the most valued resources we have.  once they’re gone, they’re gone.  and right now we’re giving them away to the black hole of socials never to be found again.  in the case of time, there is great freedom in knowing i’m not giving away precious hours on this planet to the screen.  for me there are enough distractions fighting for my minutes and it is freeing to know that socials aren’t one of them. 

talent: our talents can be on display through socials, and it’s a brilliant way to share them.  the challenge with this is that much of the time we used to spend creating the product is now being spent displaying the product.  can one become an IG-famous violinist without spending hours mastering the violin?  can an artist display one’s art without first cultivating the piece?  can an athlete display the mastery of a sport without spending a crushing number of early mornings at the gym?  the challenge with caring for our talents in the age of social media is, once again, the battle over the appointment of our time and attention.   the truth is that we will have no great talent to share if we have not spent the time curating it.  and i think we live in a time in which users take to the social game long before they’ve properly curated and cared for the talent, and in the meantime the tool we hope to leverage to make us known ends up stealing our chance to create something worth consuming.  this is another place of freedom.  in knowing the time curating the talent is well worth the spend.  i won’t get it right.  i rarely do.  but i will know i gave it what i could.    

treasure:  treasure refers to resources spent here, and fam, socials have a target directed at our pockets and our souls.  what is a tool hungry for our time and attention is starving for our wallets and lifeblood.  ads litter the marketplace on socials, fighting for any chance to get us to punch in a credit card number and make a purchase.  the algorithms set to market porn to young teens and adults is astronomical.  a quick google search will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how socials are being used to push pornography to both men and women.  socials are stealing more than financial treasure, aren’t they?  this place away from constant marketing, away from the constant battle for time and attention, away from the war against what’s being put in front of my eyes to tempt me away from true TREASURE – this is a place of great, great freedom.  and this – the freedom away from the fight for my treasure – is the one reason i truly wish i could talk all of you out of socials.  will we still be marketed to?  of course.  will we still be tempted?  always.  but we can make the choice not to swim in the temptation. 

here’s why the three t’s matter so much: the world awaits you. your great works.  the things only you can do.  the things only you can create. and time is of the essence.  it is irreversible and irreplaceable and counting down with every second. 

your attention is a critical and invaluable resource. 

your treasure is finite, and it is easily stolen. 

socials challenge all of these things at once.  all these beautiful, exceptional, limited things. 

i don’t know how much time you or i have left, but i know it matters.  your time matters.  every breath you take matters.  in this entire world, in all of history, in all of time and space, there has never been someone like you and there never will be again.  you are perfectly made and perfectly unique and you matter, profoundly.

what you choose to do with the minutes you have on this planet is up to you.  i only hope that through this project, you’ve become more aware of your relationship with socials.  maybe you feel a nudge to examine more closely how socials interact with your mind, body, and soul.   maybe you feel like you can take a break for a while and observe how you respond to life without them.  i don’t know what’s right for you, but i know if you’ve read this far, it’s not a coincidence.  something about a life unchained is talking to you. 

life out from behind the screen is waiting for you.  it’s brutal and it’s beautiful and it’s ever-changing, but it is life.  and it will be all the richer with you in it. 

this is life without social media. 

this is life. Unchained. 

love, Nic

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