Ed Cyzewski's Blog, page 19

The Hidden Cost of Free Stuff for Your Calling

I used to work with a youth pastor who had an “Aww shucks” way about him that hid a shrewdness that I’d associate with an oil tycoon or high stakes finance big wig. His office was littered with broken computers, sports equipment, and the literally “important” pile of stuff was always on the floor in front of his door. He looked like a classic youth pastor.

Those who thought they could boss him around quickly learned otherwise. He always had the right policy in place to keep the kids safe, each event had been carefully considered with the big picture in mind, and he always knew how to handle money.

Perhaps that last one about money impressed me the most because handling money has always been a mystery—at least, once you get past the part where I spend it on hockey tickets or a cheeseburger. Earning it and saving it have largely eluded me.

Whenever the youth pastor collected registration forms for any event or trip, he always asked for a modest deposit, typically between $10 and $20.

“The kids won’t flake out and the parents won’t forget if there’s a little money on the line,” he shared with me.

This, of course, is a pretty standard trick to prompt people to make a commitment. It was just the first time I saw how things worked behind the scenes at a church and an important lesson in the ways money changes behavior.

As I’ve taken one step after another toward my calling/vocation/career as a writer, I’m starting to see how the wealth of free writing and promotion tools has been a major set back in terms of my mindset and commitment level. In the past year I’ve started paying for more tools, and there’s an advantage in paying for tools, services, books, and even training.

While I love the democratic, accessible, free to join nature of so many internet tools, it does come with the very real risk of creating a culture of dabbling where creators fail to take themselves and their work seriously. Do we sign up for a bunch of free tools, play at writing, and then condemn ourselves to an eternal purgatory as a wannabe writer, photographer, or creator because we fear losing money or making a commitment?

Free stuff is great. Trying stuff for free is great. Freemiums are a super way to test out something without any financial risk. Free eBooks are really nice when you want the content in them. Free blogging tools, free social media services, and free management and marketing software are all wonderful for writers trying to get started on a tight budget. However, the inherent risk of setting up a free website, sending email newsletters for free, contacting fans for free through social media, and being able to set up eBooks for free by simply loading a Word file means that the point of entry is so low and accessible that we may never actually set worthy goals or take leaps of faith that actually require… faith.

 

In 2016 I wanted to finally take myself a little more seriously as a professional author, and one of the steps I needed to take was finally paying up for professional social media tools like Buffer, purchasing and learning Scrivener for writing and compiling eBooks, managing my invoices and expenses with Freshbooks (seriously, give it a spin and integrate PayPal for Business, it’s great!), and paying for the next level up in MailChimp (while giving ConvertKit a long look). It was time to graduate from all of the freemiums and to start using professional tools at a higher level just like any professional business venture.

Once I started paying a bit more each month for all of my tools, I started to think differently of myself and my work.

Were there ways I could improve my writing?

Could I write more books?

Are there ways to make myself more efficient?

Can I do a better job of planning my schedule each week?

I never thought of myself as puttering around or acting like an amateur, but the truth is that I hadn’t taken myself as seriously as I should have. I’d paid to attend writing conferences, but that didn’t translate into professional changes in my day to day operation. When I stopped trying to squeeze by with free, cheap stuff, I clicked into a mindset where I’d better make the most of the tools I’m paying to use.

The truth is that I run the risk of turning into a dabbler every day. I can switch from a person with a vision and calling into a person who just plays around with all of the free, cheap stuff and tries to just get by.

When I practice my Examen each evening, I try to look at whether I’ve stretched myself at some point throughout the day. The questions look something like this:

Did I step out in faith in some way?

Did I reach out to others vulnerably and honestly?

Did I need God or fall back on God in the course of my day?

Before you answer any of these questions or head off to guilt trip central with me, I want to suggest something very important. God is merciful and loving. God wants to restore us and when we are faithless, God is faithful. For every time that I’ve lost sight of the fact that God keeps calling me back to my writing work and the calling to write seriously, there is ample mercy and forgiveness that carry me back so that I can get my act together.

Dabbling isn’t an act of faith. I don’t need God’s help in order to play around in the fringes.

It’s not that spending money automatically means you’re living by faith. It’s not a magic trick. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up where you need to be any more than a $20 deposit guaranteed that the high school students will show up for the youth group event. Life happens. Distractions come up. Nothing is certain.

But perhaps you’ve been on the fence, aimless, or discouraged. Maybe you’re terrified of failure. Maybe you want to just play it safe. I know that feeling well. Man, I love playing it safe. There’s nothing better than home base. Who wants to try something new, risk failure, and then have to learn from a bunch of mistakes?

NOT ME.

But I have some money on the line now. I’m taking little steps of faith. I’ve paid my deposit to keep pursuing my calling. I’m trying to avoid being an aimless dabbler. I’m trying to live by faith and to try things that require faith in God and, more importantly, God’s provision.

If I end up playing it safe today, I can fall back on God’s mercy and kindness. There’s always tomorrow. As my friend Ray Hollenbach says, “New morning, new mercies.”

Perhaps you can end your day by asking, “Where can I move toward living by faith tomorrow?” This isn’t about RESULTS or charts with gold stars or earned favor.

We’re learning to hear and then respond to a gentle whisper from God that sometimes calls us to take some big risks. We’re learning to put something real and tangible and risky on the line, trusting that God will go with us as we step out into the unknown, hoping that paying that deposit for the trip was worth it.

 

 

 

 

I Write for the Money

I was one of those kids who could wander off into the woods and spend the better part of a day on a project.

When my teacher gave me a notebook that I could use for anything, anything at all, I filled it up with stories and drawings.

When my friend and I started thinking about a fun thing to do after school, we started writing a book together.

By the time I got to college, I’d heard all about finding a job that is respectable, like a lawyer or a doctor, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Writing wasn’t even close to being on the radar. I honestly didn’t even know there were people called “copy writers” or “business writers” who got paid a living wage to work with words. I believed that words were just part of my childhood and that part of me needed to die in the service of finding a career.

My wife once said to me, “I can’t even imagine what kind of major you should have been in college.”

Truer words have never been spoken. I didn’t fit into any tidy career boxes. I have creative inclinations that drew me toward writing and reading, but I also had more interpersonal, pastoral inclinations that drew me toward ministry. The English and Bible majors weren’t good fits, and in the presence of both camps I felt like an imposter.

I replied to my wife, “Maybe if they had a major called ‘Professional F – – k ups’?”

Those were darker days.

I couldn’t even trace a clear path between that little kid who filled up piles of notebooks with stories and the young adult who set off for seminary for a career in ministry that never felt right. It was the least-worst least-right thing.

In the back of my mind, I kept hearing a little voice whispering: You could write on the side. I continued to hear it as I earned a degree for a career I wouldn’t pursue. When I turned to a job in the nonprofit sector, I still felt like an imposter, and that voice in the back of my mind grew louder: you could write on the side…

When I finally started listening to that voice to write, I had no idea how to make a living as a writer. I just knew that it was my last shot at some kind of a career.

I thought that I was finally becoming the kind of adult who made some sense out of that kid who would wander in the woods all day or who would fill up notebooks with stories. This was going to be the time when I finally linked a career with my actual identity. Right?

Not quite.

I started out with writing with the simple hope of earning a sustainable living. Yes, I wrote for the money. Writers should never be ashamed of creating high quality creative work or professional business pieces for a fair wage. That isn’t the same thing as being annoying about promotion or selling out for a paycheck. That also isn’t the same thing as writing in order to get famous. In fact, the latter distinction has been essential for me.

Unfortunately, many writers today are stuck in a kind of limbo between a perception that writing for a sustainable income means writing in order to get famous. This perception is grounded in an unnecessary reality that has unfortunately become all too normal.

When I started out as an author, I had the modest goal of writing for a respectable, sustainable audience. I never wanted to be the headliner at conferences, the go-to guy for hot takes on cable news, or a social media rock star. I just wanted to write and get paid for it.

I imagined my dad working long days as a plumber, often taking me on estimates in the evenings or going in for half or full days on Saturdays. That’s what I had in mind: hard work, a career that used my talents and abilities, and a paycheck at the end of the week.

Instead I found a carnival of conferences, social media personalities, Middle-school-style blog fights, and popularity contests.

I had no idea that the traditional publishing world has less and less room (and use?) for a working author. Rather, what I’ve discovered is a huge gap between the haves and have nots. There are the new authors who get picked up as a kind of Hail Mary pass and the big names who consistently earn their keep. The majority of the resources go the big names, and I honestly don’t blame publishers for choosing what works. However, the number of authors who can earn a living without engaging in the publicity circus are growing fewer and fewer.

I write for the money. I don’t write for fame or publicity. Today many authors are finding that you can’t write books for a living wage unless you also gun for the fame and publicity. A select few have carved their own way between the two, but I assure you they don’t have much by way of long term security. For the most part, I’ve chosen to release my latest books independently in order to earn a modest monthly wage on my own terms.

I don’t have easy answers here. I have found a middle ground that includes lots of freelancing, writing for blogs and websites combined with author coaching and editing things like books and proposals. I write my own books and release them independently while keeping communication channels with publishers open.

Perhaps I’m foolish, but I can’t let go of a few images in my mind.

I see that kid who filled up notebooks and then took long walks in the woods.

I see my dad removing his muddy boots in the garage and then scrubbing his hands in the kitchen sink.

I see my own notebook filled with ideas, dreams, and hopes. Sometimes the ideas in that notebook translate into a check, direct deposit from Amazon, or a PayPal payment. Sometimes those ideas turn into an appreciative note from a reader or a five-star review.

My kids don’t see muddy work boots or blackened hands in our home. They see torn-open envelopes, a computer, and a pile of fine point black pens next to my notebook.

I remember my dad sharing a plumber joke with me one day when he came home covered in mud.

“That’s not dirt,” he said. “That’s money.”

And so as I scribble again and again in my notebook…

“That’s not ink… that’s money.”

This is my career. This is my calling—who I’ve always been deep down to my core from the earliest days that I could write in a notebook or tap away on a keyboard. I write for the money that leads to a sustainable creative career, and I hope that more writers can do the same.

Confess Your Dreams to Each Other

There’s a Christian tradition of confessing your sins to someone else as a step toward freedom. We may quote James saying, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” James 5:16, NIV.

By keeping our struggles, flaws, and imperfections secret, we leave ourselves vulnerable to their attacks, the shame they generate, and the feeling that we’re inevitable failures in spirituality. I know all of this from repeated experience.

It’s hard to confess to someone else. The times I’ve stepped forward to receive prayer from someone have been agonizing. Perhaps we fear judgment or being exposed as frauds. Perhaps we fear that the prayers of the person we approach won’t help. If there’s a chance that the prayers offered won’t help, then why risk exposing ourselves?

Vulnerability feels like we’re going to trap ourselves, but more often than not, it’s quite liberating. I find that hard to believe most weeks.

I’m a begrudging believer in confessing sins to a trusted friend or mentor, but I also believe in confessing our dreams.

Aside from our flaws, I believe our hopes, callings, and dreams may be the most fragile parts of ourselves. We don’t want to appear foolish, stupid, or ridiculous. We don’t want to set out for a valiant goal only to fall on our faces. Who wants to set out in pursuit of something that carries significant personal meaning and then fail publicly and dramatically?

Mind you, a dream or goal or hope isn’t necessarily virtuous in and of itself. However, before we can even discern this, many of us will suppress these notions before they get out of hand and people find out about them.

I have gone back and forth on this stuff plenty of times. I remember sharing an idea for a book one time in a group of friends and a stone cold silence followed. Someone may have said, “Hmmmm.”

Needless to say, I never touched that idea again.

I’m learning how to manage “confessing” these ideas and dreams and callings a bit. For instance, I’ve learned that the place to start with confessing my dreams is a few trusted people. I’ll tell my wife and then follow up with an email to a few trusted friends and experts to sound things out.

Last year I bought domain name and built an entire website. I felt like I just needed to do it in order to have the experience of building a more static website from the ground up regardless of whether or not I used it. I ran the idea past some trusted people. Many gave it a thumbs up, but a few shared some reservations. Perhaps there were already websites that covered this topic. Perhaps it wouldn’t catch on as I hoped. I asked for prayer. I prayed a lot.

I followed up the feedback and discernment process with some tests on social media. I shared posts and updated related to my new website’s topic.

Silence. Zip. Nada.

I decided to scrap the idea. I’m not sure if it wasn’t my thing to do or if my approach wasn’t the most effective way forward, but I’m pretty sure it was a combination of both.

I’ve been sitting and waiting on what’s next. I wrapped up my book Write without Crushing Your Soul this past fall and have been mentally divided between three book ideas that I can’t quite choose between.

Just as the domain name for last year’s website experiment expired, a new idea popped into my mind. Once again I tested it with my wife and then, before I could talk myself out of it, I zipped off some texts and emails to friends.

I confessed that I needed them to be in the loop right from the start. I told them that I needed them to know about this idea before I bailed. Sure enough, they were encouraging, while I spent the following day picking apart all of the reasons why this website is a terrible idea.

However, once I got over the fear of launching a new website and received some helpful feedback, I started to take tentative steps forward.

This project feels big and intimidating enough that I have to trust in God’s help to make it happen. It’s true to my experiences and, dare I say, “journey” in spirituality. It’s about something that I keep asking God, “Are you sure I should do this?” And I keep getting affirmations in return.

Today I’m plugging along with this new project, and I can’t believe that I ever doubted it or needed to tell someone before I preemptively gave up on it. But the truth is that I needed my friends’ accountability. I needed them to know that at one point in time I had thought this was a good idea, and I needed their honest feedback right then and there before I blew the whole thing up.

Accountability is good for uncovering our faults and struggles, but it’s also good for keeping us pointed to our true north. Accountability helps us put both hands on a crazy idea that just may come from God and to hold onto it through the storms of doubt, exhaustion, and fear.

Confess your hopes and dreams to one another so that you may discern God’s direction. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective

Why We Need the Wilderness

Why did Jesus spend so much time hiding in the wilderness?

That strikes me as a terrible strategy for influencing the largest number of people. He was completely cut off from the existing networks and leaders who could help amplify his message.

His talent pool of potential apostles was also frightfully low in the wilderness backwaters around Galilee. How in the world would he find speakers, managers, and teachers educated and sophisticated enough to carry his message to enough people? Wouldn’t they just wreck what he started?

All of that time in the wilderness also made Jesus really inefficient with his time. He was always withdrawing to pray for long stretches of time. Didn’t his life feel a bit out of balance, always praying alone or teaching a few disciples instead of communicating to larger crowds on a regular basis?

Every time Jesus returned to the centers of power and influence, the religious leaders met him with strong opposition and applied one test after another to determine whether he was an insider or an outsider. If he refused to play their games, he most assuredly had to be an outsider.

Why did Jesus choose the wilderness?

He prioritized prayer.

He preemptively identified himself as an outsider so that his message did not depend on the religious establishment to prop up his ministry. He let the message grow on its own.

Notice that Paul did something very similar. He withdrew to the wilderness for a period of time and then let his message rise and fall more on its own merit and inspiration from God rather than depending on the leaders of the early church.

The wilderness is where we begin and build the right kind of foundation so that we actually have something worthwhile to say.

I confess that I didn’t start out loving the wilderness. I still have my gripes about it today.

I’m finally appreciating the value of moving forward at my own pace (God’s pace?) as the Spirit leads. I don’t kick and scream quite as loudly when I need to go into the wilderness. I can see how a seeming step backwards into the wilderness is the only way I can move forward.

Most of us don’t need one more thing to do. We need more wilderness, more space, and more withdrawal.

I remember reading piles of Christian books throughout college and seminary, and I started to hate a particular phrase: “We must…”

We must engage this, we must consider another concept, we must remember, we must do another thing, and we must keep adding one… more… thing… to do. The more a book said “We must,” the more I resisted the impracticality of its message. It seemed like every Christian book I read was an unintentional recipe for spiritual burn out.

Americans are a people deeply invested in doing. We’re optimistic work-a-holics who have a reputation for taking a fraction of the vacation time that the rest of the world deems essential. As a culture, Americans aren’t very good at withdrawing from much of anything. When we burn out, we immediately blame ourselves for not being strong enough, not being resilient, not being organized, or not hiring someone to help us do more.

If we try to fix a problem, we tend to fix it by adding “something” else to the mix rather than subtracting. If you want to fix your diet, you focus on eating MORE of something else, such as meat (hello, Dr. Atkins). If you want to fix your crowded schedule, you get a cool new app or five cool new apps that all sync together. If you want to fix clutter, you buy better storage containers.

As a culture, we don’t have much of a grid for disconnecting. We don’t naturally value the wisdom of those who speak from a place of simplicity and less unless that simplicity comes with a product attached to it.

Venturing into the wilderness doesn’t look like STRONG LEADERSHIP(TM).  We fear that the vision, strategy, and key results are all going right down the toilet when we step away. Perhaps they will. Then again, if we keep pushing, keep adding, keep trying to bear it all, we will break down, wear out, and burn out. We need the strength to admit our weakness.

It’s an act of faith to withdraw. I’m trusting God to provide for us and to guide us when I step back and make the nearly impossible admission that I can’t do it all, that I don’t know where all of this heading, and perhaps exerting more control is the worst thing for me.

Most importantly, when I look around and wish I had more influence or could expand my work to new, greater heights, that’s most likely the exact moment I need the wilderness. Growth that’s lasting and meaningful comes from the wilderness.

The lure of “I want it now!” success doesn’t mix well with the wilderness.

The wilderness will kill our drive for quick success. That’s why we need the wilderness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The profession of writing carries one particular challenge that any follower of Jesus must continually face. The more I confront this challenge, the more I’m convinced that it’s one of the deepest, darkest struggles we all face in one way or another.

Writers are always attempting to capture the attention of an audience, and this naturally tempts us to gauge our faithfulness by the size of our audience or the amount of money we earn from our work. I’ve written in Write without Crushing Your Soul that numbers can tell you some two-dimensional, black and white things, such as whether what you’re doing is “working,” not whether you should be doing it or should try something else.

This is the age old problem of seeking validation from what other people think of you. We could probably all take up a ton of time at a psychologist’s office listing all of the situations and people where we have sought the approval of others. Writers have the added “advantage” of having easily procured metrics and industry gatekeepers who provide what people think of us.

If you aren’t reaching a large enough audience or working with the most credible publisher, it’s tempting to judge that you don’t have anything worthwhile to share. I’ve been there plenty of times.

Having worked on both the inside and the outside of the Christian publishing establishment, I’ve seen that there are very good people on the inside and the outside. The difference is that those of us who don’t have particularly large audiences to begin with

 

 

There’s something to be said about preemptively starting on the outside, finding something worthwhile to say, and not depending on the leaders and gatekeepers for our validation.

If you’re starting in the wilderness, you’re in the best place possible to hear God without confusing the approval of others with God’s blessing.

It’s easy to just repeat what you think people want to hear. Perhaps many writers start out like this, just telling people what they want to hear and have already heard but adding their own pathology and spin. We may hear the same message year in, year out, but the situations and people linked to those repeat messages change just enough to escape our notice.

 

 

 

Believing God Exists Isn’t Enough for Prayer

I’ve spent so much time worrying about whether or not God exists that I overlooked a more important question. If I believe that God exists, do I believe in a God that I would approach in prayer?

Another way to ask that would be: If I believe in God, do I believe in a loving, merciful God who wants nothing more than for me to pray? Or do I let my imagination create images of an angry, violent, and petty God who is waiting for me to finally mess up enough to justify banishing me from his presence forever?

That latter image haunted my prayers for years. Whenever I struggled to pray, I told myself, “Well, this is it. You’ve finally done it. God has finally turned away from you, and there’s no hope. Prayer may work for other people, but it won’t work for you.”

By imagining a God who could take me or leave me, waiting to strike me down, or to cast me away at the slightest infraction, I made it extremely hard to pray. If I can’t imagine God liking me, let alone loving me and seeing me with compassion and mercy, it’s awfully hard to begin to pray.

Perhaps we struggle to reconcile the God of Hebrew Bible who throws down thunder, hail stones, and fire from the heavens. Perhaps we can’t reconcile those stories with the proclamations of the Psalms:

The LORD is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.

Psalm 103:8

I don’t know how to create a theological system that seamlessly accounts for these stories and comfortably fits them in with the many verses in the Psalms and prophets where God is described as merciful, compassionate, full of love, and loving for his people like a jilted lover.

Here’s what I do know: the people who seek God in prayer have found more love, mercy, and compassion than they ever would have guessed. When the mystics write about the presence of God, there is awe and even a bit of fear at times, but God is love, compassion and mercy.

The people who have dedicated their lives to prayer overwhelming reveal that the God we seek is the kind of God we would want to seek.

That isn’t to say that our faults or sins aren’t a big deal. Anyone who believes in the cross and resurrection would recognize that these are important problems that God himself has set out to resolve. The point for me is not minimizing my faults, it’s seeing the largeness of God’s love, mercy, and compassion.

My mistake wasn’t underestimating the seriousness of sin; it was underestimating how deeply God loves us.

Over and over again in the Gospels, I see Jesus telling people that God is more loving and merciful than they expect, that more people are welcome than they suspect, and that the supposed barriers between people and God are actually not holding anyone back.

Perhaps the greatest struggle for Christians today isn’t believing God exists, it’s believing that God is merciful.

We do ourselves no good if we believe in a God that we fear, a God we dare not approach, or a God who is so terrible that we fail to open our deepest fears and pains to him.

In the vast reserves of God’s love and mercy, there is room for us to come as we are and to seek healing and restoration. The greatest obstacle to God’s mercy is believing that it exists and applies even to you and to me.

 

What If We Defined Success as Freedom?

How many times have I made myself miserable by focusing on my unfulfilled hopes and desires?

How often have I stayed put for fear of appearing like a failure?

When haven’t I said that I’m not enough or not doing enough in order to meet a certain measure for success?

Sometimes life feels like an endless race where I just keep moving the finish line for myself. All it takes is a bit of unchecked envy or comparison to make me realize I’m doing everything wrong, am in danger of appearing as a failure, and at risk of being a lonely isolated failure forever. So I squint my eyes hard to look at that finish line and commit to work harder than anyone else in order to reach it before people learn THE TRUTH about me.

A New Standard for Success

Let’s forget that finish line for a second. Let’s forget what everyone else is doing.

What if that finish line for success and the fear of being found out as a fraud is actually holding you in bondage? What if the allure of freedom through success, money, influence, etc. is just a fleeting mirage of our consumer society? What if the people who appear to be on top are actually MORE TRAPPED than we are because they have all of the same fears as us and they need to maintain the appearance of having it all together?

I’m done with defining success as a particular accomplishment that we can measure with material possessions or online analytics.

Let’s define success as freedom.

Do you know that God loves you deeply and has sent you to love others?

Are you creating space in each day to rest in that love and in the presence of God?

Are you sharing that love and freedom in some way? Are you free to love your family and friends?

I’ve lived under the weight of anxiety, fear, and performing for others for far too long. Sure, there are many things that I can legitimately fear, but fear and scarcity become lifestyles that rob us of the gifts we should enjoy.

If you’re looking to define yourself or your day as a success, let’s ask this question: Am I living in freedom?

God Offers What We Need

The Gospel message that I have given my life to is about freedom, freedom in Christ and freedom through the Spirit. Our lives are hidden away in Christ and Christ lives in us. We have been set free for the purpose of freedom. This is the anthem of the Gospels and Epistles where Jesus and Paul repeatedly argued with people who wanted to add behavior requirements and mandatory rituals for followers of Jesus. Paul clearly stated that we don’t live in the freedom of Christ by subjecting ourselves to yet another written code.

The love of God frees us to love and serve others. There is a cost of following Christ, but there is also tremendous freedom as we drop the crushing weight of pursuing success and trying to identify ourselves by what we can earn or the influence we can gain.

It is extremely problematic to define ourselves by the flimsy judgments of others and the forces of the market.

I can’t do anything to make God love me more.

I can’t do anything to improve upon the freedom that God gives.

I can only choose to accept God’s freedom by faith and lean into it each day. That is where the real struggle of spirituality comes in for me.

Are You Thirsty for God? Then You Are In!

Each day I can either seek the presence of God and move toward freedom or I can seek outward measures of my worth and success. I can start to look at everything I haven’t achieved or I can rest in all that God has given me.

The good news is that even if we face this struggle daily, we can turn things around. We can stop the fear, anxiety, and longing for something, anything other than what we have.

Instead of working harder, getting more efficient, or adopting new ways to schedule productive days, we can opt out of the crazy, soul-crushing system. We can take the ultimate leap of faith into a moment of silence where we believe that God calls out to us: All who are thirsty, come!

 

What’s Your Next Step?

Keep in touch via my newsletter where I’ll share more “off the record” thoughts on prayer, writing, and caring for your soul. Sign up and receive two FREE bestselling eBooks.

Does this describe at least part of your writing career? Check out my book: Write without Crushing Your Soul. The eBook is usually between $1.99 and $3.99 on Kindle.

Dig deeper with some helpful books: Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond and Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly are among the most helpful books I’ve read.

 

 

Why Jesus Needed to Pray

I’m not 100% certain about all of the reasons why Jesus needed to pray. The thing is, once I start asking why a member of the Trinity would find it necessary to pray for long stretches of time, it makes me wonder if I’m still missing something about prayer.

Why do I pray?

I pray out of fear or a sense of need.

I pray because I feel distant from God.

I pray because I hope to intercede on someone else’s behalf.

I pray to let go of circumstances.

I pray to say thank you—that is, if I’ve managed to loosen my grip on a situation long enough to wait on God.

You could say that my prayer life is very result-focused. I have an outcome or goal in mind. Even my moments of quiet prayer have a goal of sorts in mind. That’s not necessarily wrong. We are told to make our requests known to God and to even be as persistent as a woman who wakes up an unjust judge in the middle of the night in order to plead her case.

There’s an untiring tenacity that the writers of the Bible use to describe prayer over and over again. It’s not wrong to say that prayer can be result-focused. The difference is this: I wonder if sometimes I’ve made the mistake of ONLY being result-focused with prayer.

From the 40 days in the wilderness to the all-night prayer-a-thons that pop up throughout Jesus’ ministry, we can’t possibly think he spent the entire night making requests or saying thank you for things. There’s every reason to believe that he spent significant amounts of time before God in silence, especially since the Psalms, which many Jews had memorized, instructed him to do just that when praying.

I recognize that we’re well into the territory of speculation, but it’s reasonable speculation with a Biblical precedent. It’s not outlandish to presume that Jesus spent long stretches of time simply sitting, kneeling, or standing in stillness before God.

Such prayer leaves the agenda up to God, and nothing at all may happen. Then again, everything could happen. It’s not about what we say, think, or do. There’s no special incantation or procedure that you have to get “just right.” There’s just you and God and a quiet stretch of time that is open to the Spirit.

I suspect that Jesus craved this time with God the Father so much that he was willing to lose an entire night of sleep in order to make it happen. That strikes me on one level as a mind-blowing level of commitment since I’m a sleep deprived parent of young kids. And yet, many people who work out or pursue a serious hobby often sacrifice sleep in order to make it happen in the early or late hours of the day.

The same benefit of writing or running in the still, silence of the morning can be found in a late night prayer time that commits to both speak and listen to God the Father. I suspect that Jesus craved the simple, singular focus of his attention to God the Father. He knew that his days were filled with people making requests, asking hard questions, and traveling throughout territories that were sometimes hostile. Each day presented new challenges and conversations that were no doubt exhausting physically and could leave little time to focus solely on the Father.

There was nothing in the middle of the night that could pull his attention away from the Father. While I don’t know exactly how the Trinity works or how things lined up while Jesus was incarnated on earth, the simple answer is that Jesus craved uninterrupted attentiveness to the Father.

While surrounded with so many people who either misunderstood him and his mission or outright opposed him and even plotted his death, Jesus found his rest in solitude with the Father.

As an American, I’m obsessed with growth, progress, and results. I want things I can measure. I want to work on stuff and excel.

I desperately need to imagine Jesus venturing away from the city in order to find the quiet he needed in order to meet with the Father. I need to imagine him sitting down and letting go of the questions, controversies, and needs that surrounded him nearly every waking minute. In that solitude he is attentive to the Father without distraction, and like a warm breeze drifting from the nearby sea, his Father’s love settles over him.

The Gifts of a Cold Sandwich and a Book Released in Tragedy

During the first day of the 2012 Festival of Faith and Writing, I picked up my disappointing boxed lunch in a mostly deserted lobby at the arts building of Calvin College and regretted my decision. While everyone else I knew was going out for lunch, I was going to sit on a step and eat a cold sandwich by myself.

Way to network, champ!

Just as I was about to give up, I noticed an empty seat in a sitting area where five women were eating their equally cold and disappointing boxed lunches. I fought through my social anxiety and struggles with small talk, took the empty seat, and immediately introduced myself to the woman next to me.

Things started to look up immediately.

“Are you the Ed Cyzewski who runs the Women in Ministry series?” a woman across from me asked.

“That’s me,” I replied, relieved that the ice had been broken so fast.

It turned out that this woman, Angie Mabry-Nauta, is a pastor and had really appreciated the series on my blog where I hosted stories of women serving in ministry—a way that I hoped to outflank the tiring “women in ministry” debate. The woman sitting next to her was Christie Purifoy, a blogger and, at that time, aspiring author who had a freaky number of things in common with me.

Christie has a PhD in English Literature, the very degree that my wife has been working on.
Christie was pregnant and had a nearly identical due date as my own wife, who was pregnant with our first son at the time.
Christie also had plans to buy a house in the Philadelphia area, which happens to be my home town.

I exchanged business cards with Angie and Christie, found them on social media, and have since stayed in touch. Christie and I further connected as fellow writers on the Deeper Story website, which is no longer active.

Around two years ago Christie contacted me with some big news. She was finally sending out a book proposal to a literary agent. I enthusiastically read through her proposal and was completely riveted with her prose and story telling.

I’m terrible at endorsements and reviews, especially when I enjoy the book. Do I say it’s a TOUR DE FORCE!? A majestic triumph for the ages!!!!?? I can’t quite figure out the right tone and word choice for these things. It’s MUCH eaiser to be critical, right?

Truth be told, I’m picky, oh so terribly picky, about memoir. 80% of the memoirs that I pick up, I put down before the half way point. I don’t need simple, every day events imbued with embellished life-altering meaning. You ate a piece of bread and you thought some deep thoughts. Get over it and tell me something worth reading.

I’m the ultimate “get off my lawn” memoir reader.

Having said that, when I love a memoir, I really love it. For just a small sample:

When We Were on Fire? Amazing.

Any Day a Beautiful Change? Perfect.

Girl Meets God? Beautiful.

Tables in the Wilderness? I hate you, Preston.

Coming Clean? Breaks my brain.

So when I picked up Christie’s sample chapters for her new book, Roots & Sky, I found artful prose and engaging description of the everyday without unnecessary embellishment. She opens up about the simple longings and desires we all experience and invites us to sit with her over tea or to take a stroll in her garden to talk it over. It’s perhaps cliché these days to say that a book “helps you find God in the everyday events of life,” but this book takes a very unique, artful spin on that concept that I found engaging and enjoyable.

I could not be more enthusiastic about this book, but just as Christie should be celebrating this beautiful book, tragedy struck her family. Christie’s brother-in-law, the husband of her sister, was one of the 12 Marines who appears to have perished in a helicopter crash off the coast of Hawaii. Christie has set off to Hawaii in order to comfort her sister and her four nieces and nephews.

I can’t imagine what Christie, her sister, and the rest of the family are going through during this time of tremendous loss. Perhaps as you read this post, which is being posted on Friday, January 22, 2016, the families will be attending a memorial service for the Marines.

Would you like to help Christie and her family at this time?

First of all, I know that they would all deeply covet your prayers—prayers for God to be near those who are grieving so deeply, prayers for God’s provision for this family, prayers for these children who have lost their father at so young an age, and prayers that God will sustain Christie at this time as she comforts and grieves.

Secondly, as Christie has stepped back to serve her family, a group of authors, bloggers, and friends have stepped up to help get the word out about this book. While there is undeniable tragedy and pain in this world, authors and artists like Christie are creating beauty, and we don’t want to lose sight of that. Here are some ways you can help:

Order your own copy of Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons. (pre-orders are especially helpful)

Post a brief review on Amazon, Goodreads, etc. Reviews are critical since so many people buy books online.

Share this book with your network: Check out this new memoir: Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons by @ChristiePurifoy http://buff.ly/1Ta6PLz.

I’m trusting that God is going to bless a lot of folks through this book, and I can’t wait for you to read it for yourself!

The Worst Has Already Happened and It’s Going to Be OK

Failure, rejection, isolation: these are just a few of the things I fear on a day to day basis. Perhaps I don’t even take the time to reflect on what I fear the most. Fear can simmer in the back of my mind.

In our work, in our relationships, and in our spirituality, we often fear the worst happening.

I fear that no one will care about my next book.

I fear that the people I respect will reject me or, worse, ignore me.

I fear not having close friendships while everyone else has tight-knit communities who rally around them and cheer them on.

Writing has pushed me to face these limits in so many ways on a regular basis. On many occasions the worst has happened. I’ve faced all of these fears, and without a doubt they have left me devastated, sad, and despairing about the future.

Then something unexpected happened: the sun rose on another day, and another after that.

I didn’t really have any choice in the matter. I had to figure out what to do next.

I may have endured some of these struggles quietly, but don’t mistake that for handling them gracefully.

Facing failure, seeing my worst fears come to life again and again, and staring into the vast expanse of loneliness for long seasons pushed me to also see all of the unhealthy ways I’d relied on flimsy crutches to keep myself standing. Things such as the validation of the crowd or of specific authors and editors were given far too much weight in determining the value of my work and my progress in my calling.

Rejection today does not mean it’s inevitable for next year or five years from now if I keep working and try something different.

Most striking, the perspective I’ve gained after facing my worst fears revealed to me that so many of my worst fears were already realized long before I thought I was facing them. In many cases I lived in either delusion or ignorance, and it took falling on my face dramatically to finally remove my own blinders.

I saw the hard truth: while I feared that readers would be apathetic about my work, I could finally see in hindsight that very few people cared about my writing when I started out, and rightfully so. I needed a lot of time to work on it and to build deeper connections.

I don’t know how to avoid starting off so fragile. I know that the number one fear of bloggers is that no one will read their posts. So many don’t start because of this fear. I worked at my blog for several years without seeing much traction. It was the worst.

Then the sun came up again and again and again. I tried something different, and things finally started moving forward. I could point to several different factors, but perhaps I most needed to fail before I could figure out the right way forward.

With so many things in life we have to ditch the narrative of steady progress. Writing has showed me that it’s more like a series of wrong turns, crashes, and stretches of progress. I’ve been all over the map, and I don’t think I could truly move forward until I finally felt stuck, lost, or banged up beyond usefulness.

I had to be jarred from my daydream. It took failure to make me realize just how tough things were at the outset. And yet, once I saw how bad things were, I finally saw that things could may be OK if I kept moving forward.

I have no doubt now that the bad days will come again and again. I also know that there will be good days and even days of slow, incremental progress. I know that I have a calling to write, but that doesn’t guarantee a smooth trip forward.

Writing has served as a kind of lab for living. It has given me a much higher tolerance for pain and failure in other areas of my life. I am learning that I may fail others at times in relationships, but I can make progress in being more considerate or less controlling. I may really hate the first three months of running, but at a certain point I’ll start to crave my weekday runs. I may really struggle to focus for five minutes during prayer, but if I keep failing and trying month after month, I can build myself up to 20 minutes of quiet meditation that feel far more natural—and needed.

I still fear plenty of things. Worry is a lifestyle or habit that I’m learning to break. Some days I fail dramatically at trusting God with my worries and cares. I’m grateful that I’ve failed enough to know that tomorrow promises another day to take a step forward.

Can Parents Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry from Their Lives?

I read once that in the early days of his ministry at Willow Creek Community Church, pastor John Ortberg contacted a spiritual leader for advice (I think it was Dallas Willard).

“What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” Ortberg asked.

Long pause.

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life,” he said at last.

That’s it. Willard refused to add anything else to his advice—not even a footnote.

That concept sounded challenging when I only had to manage myself and my anxiety-ridden mind. Now we have kids, and hurry just feels like the baseline for every day.

Before the birth of our first son, I asked a mother of three (now four) about the ways that having a kid changes your day-to-day life.

Her eyes grew big. “The nap,” she said. “Everything revolves around the nap.”

I only have two kids, but her advice has proven true thus far. Most days I can only make the nap happen if I hurry.

If you’ve ever seen a young kid completely losing it in a store, red-faced bawling and throwing everything while shrieking, “NOOOOO!!!!”, you have most likely seen evidence of either a late nap or no nap. Not every time, mind you, but this is a typical outcome for nap-less child.

I consider myself a spiritual or contemplative writer. I also spend about half of each day with our kids. Hurry feels essential to the latter even if it’s toxic for the former.

Most days it’s on me to get the kids home in time for their naps, preparing lunch, finding what they need for nap time, and setting things up for a smooth transition for when my wife comes home to put the oldest down for a nap.

If I’m late, there’s no wiggle room. Lunch is a long, slow, messy disaster where the older child spills milk frequently, food is chewed up and then thrown by the younger child, and both require constant prodding to take the next bite.

You could say that each day is like a stack of dominos where falling off course at an early point in the day makes it that much harder to knock out the next thing.

If the kids are late for lunch, then I can expect that they’re late for their naps, I’m late to my work, the chance of at least one kid having a melt down increases, the chance of short or skipped naps increases, and then an afternoon of over-tired and cranky kids increases.

There’s no single moment that is a make or break scene. A late nap isn’t a guarantee that the wheels will fall off. It’s more like you’ve loosened up the lug nuts on the wheels and taken a high-speed drive on a bumpy road.

In order to make the nap happen I have to manage the prodding of my children throughout the morning. If we’re going to the children’s science museum and still have time for lunch, the ideal is to leave the house by 9:30 am, and the prodding always includes negotiating, cleaning up spills, and multiple threats. The journey from the parking lot to the ticket desk to the play area requires SIGNIFICANT prodding to stay on track. Then the play time is followed by more prodding to get a snack and more prodding to get all the way back to the car and then, hopefully, a little prodding to get into the house.

I know that my tendency is to be a hurried, up-tight, no-nonsense parent. While we can’t stop and look at every single display in the science museum hallway, I began to wonder this fall if I needed to work on cutting back on the hurry in my life. I started to notice that plenty of parents bring their kids 5-10 minutes late for pre-school. Yes, our son prefers to be there early, but that has yet to translate into cooperation when leaving the house without a long list of conditions and needs.

There are times when we genuinely need to move faster in order to get the kids home in time to eat and then sleep. However, hurry has also become a default setting of sorts for myself.

Hurry becomes a lifestyle rather than an occasional tactic for moving kids in the right direction when time is of the essence.

I’m working on my awareness of hurry through my daily Examen practice. I want to know when I’m making too much of a small thing. I also want to extend grace to myself when I’m doing my best to handle a difficult situation.

I can feel the pull of hurry when I’m praying, meditating on scripture, reflecting on my day, or reading at the end of the day. There’s a pull to get this done and move on to the next thing.

With hurry, life becomes a production line where tasks need to be completed efficiently and production capacity is the only goal.

Hurry hates stillness and quiet.

Hurry hates “being” because it’s all about doing. Spirituality needs being in order to translate into doing.

Parents who want to cultivate a healthy spiritual life regularly face this gap between what spiritual leaders tell us we need and the meager scraps left in our days. This spiritual struggle while parenting small children is well documented in Micha Boyett’s book Found.

Must parents watch their spirituality whither away under the burden of hurry?

I’m very much in process here. I don’t have the answers. I do have an observation:

The spirit or mindset of hurry strikes me as a far greater threat rather than beating myself up over each time I have to hurry in order to keep our kids happy and sane.

I don’t want to let hurry become my default. I don’t want hurry to be a part of nearly every interaction with my kids.

And here’s the real kicker and perhaps the greatest trap of all: We can be in a hurry to get rid of… hurry.

I’ve been moving into a season of awareness and discernment about hurry. I don’t want to rush this. After all, I most likely became a hurried, worried parent gradually. What makes me think the solution will happen overnight?

I’m not in a hurry to address my struggles with hurry, and that feels like enough for today.