Mindy

I've been thinking about Mindy lately. Mostly because my knuckle has been a little sore for a few days. 

Mindy was a young lady that I met over 20 years ago, when I was also a young lady. We were roughly the same age, but could not have been more different. I was a social outcast, kept to myself most of the time, and didn't much care about what my style might be or if I even had one. Mindy...was a beauty queen. Literally. She participated in beauty pageants and had a thriving social life and probably got voted homecoming queen, or at least on the court. (I don't know. I didn't go to Mindy's high school.) 

God brought Mindy and I together on a work crew during a summer mission trip in the early 2000s in the little town of Bucyrus, Ohio. Our youth groups had come to this work camp, where we separated into work crews with kids that came from different churches than ours and went out into the community to help homeowners and families with much-needed repairs. 

That summer, we were replacing a dilapidated porch.

I quickly became a leader in my work group, due to my background in building things and my fresh/young heart for God (I had only been a Christian for a year or so). They voted me to be our group's devotional leader, so every day around lunch, I would lead us in a reflection on the Scripture and in prayer. But they also came to me for construction expertise. 

We had braced the roof of the old porch, which was still in decent shape and we were going to try to save it, and we'd torn up the old floor boards. We were starting to set to work on the joists. Mindy, who had confessed that she wasn't really sure about all this physical labor and who wasn't shy about her participation in beauty pageants and the importance of her fingernails, came over to where I was working and said she wanted to learn how to do some of this. After all, she was here. She might as well do something. 

I handed her my crowbar, from my dusty, dirty, calloused and scarred hands (even at mid-teen-years-old), and I started to explain to her how to drive it down between a couple of the joist boards and get the right angle for prying them apart. As she put the crowbar in where I was telling her, I reached down to help adjust some things and get her set up for success, and at that just that moment, in her zeal for actually doing the work, she put all of her muscle into pulling - so much that she nearly knocked herself over. 

The index finger on my left hand got stuck somehow between all the wood and the metal and the angles that were down in there, and there was this loud POP. I looked down and saw my knuckle starting to swell almost immediately, little shades of blue and red already coming through the skin. I shook my hand a little to work out the pain and looked over at Mindy, who looked absolutely horrified. She was extremely apologetic and dropped the crowbar immediately. 

I picked it up and handed it back to her and showed her again how to do it. "But," I said, "Wait until I get my hand out of there this time," and smiled. 

While Mindy went to work on the joist, I walked over to the first aid kit and grabbed a length of tape and taped my index and middle fingers together, then went back to work. They don't do much for a broken finger anyway, so I never did see anyone about it. 

To this day, every now and then, my knuckle starts to ache pretty good. Every time it does, I shake my head a little and remember Mindy, the beauty queen who wanted to learn how to tear out a joist. 

And I remember what grace I had for her...and still have. Oh, that I would have as much grace for others in my life as I've had for Mindy. 

This aching knuckle is a reminder to me, usually when I most need it, that it's possible. By the grace that God has had on me, it's possible. 

Change

One of the most difficult things about changing your life is that others don't always seem to notice right away. Sometimes, they don't notice at all. And sometimes, even if they notice, they're not willing to let you do it. 

Like everyone, I have some folks in my life who have known me a long time. I have some folks who have known me a short time. And it seems like it's easy for all of these folks to form an opinion of who I am, what must be important to me, what my life must be like, etc. They will over-emphasize everything that confirms their opinion and completely ignore anything that doesn't.

They will never let me grow. Or change. Or heal. 

It can be really frustrating, especially if you are earnestly working to change your life in some way that is meaningful for you. You can invest yourself and put in the work and embrace the discipline and have success after success after success, a bunch of little wins that you know are adding up to something big. 

Then, you have a bad day. Then, you have a day that's not your best. Then, you have a moment that looks a little bit like your old life. 

I don't know how it happens, but those folks who aren't willing to let you grow or change or heal are always there for your not-best moments. And they always have an opinion on it. And they always feel like they have to speak that opinion. You mourn your mild setback, and they're right there to say, "Yeah, but that's just you. That's how you've always been." 

Thanks, bro. Thanks for not noticing the 17 little victories I've had between my "always been" and my "becoming."

It's frustrating. It's defeating. And...it's none of their business. 

This is the hardest one for me. I have these folks in my life (and I know who they are), and when they rear their ugly heads, there's something in me that wants to launch into an eloquent monologue, complete with graphs and bar charts and diagrams, and be like, "No, look. That's not who I always am. That's not who I am now. That's not the story of my life. Look at how my life is changing. Look at my discipline and my hard work and my little wins. They're adding up to something big." 

As heartbreaking as it is to tell you this, there are folks out there who just don't care. They're never gonna see it. It doesn't matter how good your PowerPoint presentation is or how high-res your graphics; they're not gonna get it. They have an impression of you, and they aren't here for your changes. 

Because...if you change, they have to. 

They can't relate to you the same way. They have to change their understanding not just of you, but of all kinds of dynamics and of the whole world sometimes. They have to consider possibilities that have been totally off their radar. It requires something of them to let you change. 

But that doesn't mean you can't. 

It means you go about your work quietly, the way you always intended to, and trust that one day, it will show for itself. It means you stop spending your energies trying to explain your new self because, friend, the more you try to explain who you are now, the more you look like the person you don't want to be any more. I've done it. Guilty as charged. More often than I want to admit. 

But you don't need anyone's permission to change, to grow, to heal. You don't need their affirmation to do it. If you're lucky, and most of us are, they'll come around eventually. Most persons do. After time, they'll see it. How could they not? 

Very few and far between, you'll have someone who just isn't willing, and you'll have to decide whether there's space for them in your new life or not. But overwhelmingly, they come around. Usually about the time that you stop trying to force them to come around. 

Go out there and grow. Change. Heal. Pursue the life that you want for yourself, and go out there and get it. Embrace the discipline. Take every opportunity. Celebrate every little win. Mourn the setbacks, but don't let them stop you. Do stop trying to explain yourself; it doesn't get you anywhere. 

But you're going somewhere. You've got this. 

All naysayers and narrow-visioned individuals aside.  

Motivation

Today marks the fresh start of a new year. A blank page. An empty calendar to fill up with memories - good days and bad days, victories and defeats, successes and struggles. And this puts many of us in the single-minded focus of this one thing: 

Don't mess it up.

This is our chance. This is our time. There's nothing written here yet except what we choose to write. There's nothing but what we want this to be, so here's our chance to make it. 

The question I have for you is this: what do you really want?

The most popular resolutions to make this time of year are always the same: to manage finances better, to eat healthier foods, to exercise more, to stress less, to break bad habits or addictions. Those are the top ones. Very closely related are some relational goals - better marriages, better friendships, better presence in the life of those we love. 

Those are all well and good, but they aren't really what we want. 

Underneath all of our common resolutions, underneath all of the things that we say that we want to change about our lives, are other motivations. 

You don't want to eat healthier foods because you love healthy foods and you feel like you've been neglecting them. You want to eat healthier foods because you want a healthier body. You want a healthier body because you want to be able to engage your life in ways that you can't right now. So...the motivation is the engagement. What is it that you want to engage?

You don't want to manage finances better because you are so troubled by your own wastefulness or you're outraged by inflation. You want to manage your finances better because there is an area in your life where you are feeling your poverty. What is that area? That is your motivation. What part of your life are you looking to make richer? 

You don't want to break a bad habit because you suddenly realize how terrible a thing it is. You want to break your bad habit because it is keeping you from something you want more. That something you want more is your motivation. So..what is it? What is that thing that you want more? 

So often, we focus on the things that we want to change, but we're better off putting our energies on the things that we want to achieve or obtain. We spend our time figuring out how we want to change our lives, but our greatest successes will come when we focus on what changing our lives will allow us to do that we can't do right now. 

Resolutions shouldn't be about making things better; they should be about embracing better things. I know those sound like the same thing, but they're not. That very subtle difference is actually a very big one. 

So as you look at the blank pages, the empty calendar, the fresh start - ask yourself what it is that you really want this year. Don't settle for the small steps of how you might get there, but just go for it and embrace the big picture of what it is that you want. 

What kind of life do you want to fill those pages with? 

Go out and get that.