497 More Words on Inspiration (& Work)

I spent the better part of the last twenty years waiting to be inspired to write something awesome. I didn’t get a whole lot written. Sure, I started a bunch of stuff, but I could never finish it. The inspiration (that feeling of invincibility derived from a catalyst) would run out and I would wait for the next catalyst to push me further down road.

What a complete waste.

Then in the last few years I started digging deeper into the craft of writing. I spent more time thinking about and working on the mechanics of good writing, rather than relying on talent and waiting for inspiration. In 2010 (in addition to all the stuff I wrote for work) I wrote a both a feature-length screenplay and stage play. I was inspired to write both, but finished them through perseverance, through pushing through that place where there’s no more inspiration and only a mountain of words left to write.

Because if there’s one thing that’s been beaten into me about living and working as a creative, it’s that it’s a habit. You have to get up and do it whether you feel like it or not. Inspiration has little to do with it. It is hard, painstaking, gutting-it-out work. Inspiration has its place as the jumping off point (see the definition: “a sudden brilliant, creative or timely idea), but inspiration is a fleeting emotion that doesn’t get you through the dark night of the soul. (Donald Miller has touched recently on this too. Here and Here.)

The question then, I don’t think should be “what inspires you?” It can actually be counterproductive. We find something we think is the bee’s knees and can’t wait to share with people but when we do we hardly ever get the desired response. A “yeah…cool” at the most. We get our feeling hurt because they didn’t get it. If this happens enough we get bitter. Inspiration wasted. Lord knows I’ve lost plenty of good ideas that way.

So I think it’s important to recognize that the inspiration you experience is for you. It’s your rocket fuel to break out of the centripetal force that’s holding you where you are, but it’s only the stage one booster of breaking orbit. You have to maintain your trajectory after lift off. Stage two. This question I believe, is the important one: “what is the result inspiration produces?”

In that earlier series I wrote, I talked about that symbiotic relationship between faith and inspiration. I believe they are inexorably linked. You can’t have one without the other. The next logical step (for faith and creativity) is found in James. As paraphrased by Rich Mullins: “Faith without works, it just ain’t happening.”

I plan to double my output this year. Two screenplays. Two plays. And I plan on writing at least one of them here in front of you. I have not an ounce of inspiration for any of these four projects.

That’s also for later.

In the Intersection

Shannon looked at me yesterday when I got home and said, “why don’t you go write tomorrow night?”

This is huge.

Neil’s typical daily routine:

4am: alarm
4:30am-5:30am: exercise
5:30am-6:30am: shower/make coffee, smoothie, lunch. Kiss Shannon. Kiss the kids.
6:30am: leave for work.
7:30am-4:00pm: work
5pm: arrive home
5pm-8pm: dinner, being a dad
8pm-9:30pm: Shannon time (usually a movie or a tv show)
9:30pm: Bed

This merely to illustrate how much time I, who consider myself a writer, have to write. This isn’t a pity party. It’s just the way it is. I have a wife. I have kids. I have a job. I have a long commute. I have a doctor who tells me to exercise so I’ll live past 40.

Sure I have time at work to write. But at work I’m writing for work—AM show scripts, group leader segments, late nite games. Not anything for me. But again, that’s okay because it’s my job and I’m good at it.

So if I ever want to write anything for myself (or you, my five faithful readers), it’s at the expense of the above-mentioned commitments.

So when Shannon says, “why don’t you go write tomorrow night?” It’s a pretty big deal. I get excited.

But also nervous. Cause now there’s pressure to produce something in these precious, worth their weight in gold, five hours I have been gifted. I go somewhere reasonably cool with interesting things and people to look at (new and unexpected visuals cause creative stimulation). I make a playlist of dramatic/epic music. I sit down and hope to God something happens. I solve my Rubik’s Cube eight or nine times.

And lo, God answers the hopes and makes something happen. The second act of a screenplay I’ve been stuck on for eight months breaks. Three new blog topics pop out.

Everything happens in His time. I know that. I know He orchestrates events: things I’ve seen and read, Shannon’s subtle observation of when I need a night, a badly needed phone call. But I think we forget it. How else to explain the constant surprise at God showing up in our lives and making things happen? Be it the Red Sea or a plot point, I feel the rustle in my heart as the Pneuma moves to orchestrate events, and I am surprised. I am surprised that He hasn’t forgotten me, hasn’t abandoned me. And my surprise turns to gratefulness.

Later it might become guilt over my lack of faith. But tonight I’ve got my foot on the brake pedal, hanging out in this intersection of surprise and gratefulness. It’s clear to me that God and I meet here regularly in this intersection, where His plan is the road, what He does and who He made me to be are the colliding cars, and this keyboard the blinking traffic light.

Shannon says as long as there’s nothing else going on, there’s no reason this can’t be a regular event. Shannon rules.

A Santa Rant (but acutally 1069)

I really thought I could let this go, but I guess I can’t.

Shannon and I don’t spend a lot of time on Santa. Neither do we discourage it. We don’t have the stupid plastic elf in our living room and we have never hung “naughty list” over their heads. But we do take them for a picture with Santa every year and we do place gifts “from Santa” under the tree. We let them believe he’s real.

I’ll probably take some heat for this one, but I don’t care. It’s time to stop the madness. The other day in Sunday school a girl I don’t really know asked the class what their opinion was on Santa, that they weren’t sure what to teach their daughter. The room was kind of mixed. She told us she grew up not believing in Santa but also that she wasn’t popular because she ruined it for other kids. The room hesitantly debated back and forth for a while, but basically said, “It’s up to you.”

And it is up to you what you teach your children about Santa. But frankly, I find the argument that teaching children to believe in Santa will damage their belief in God to be ridiculous. I understand there are extenuating circumstances. I understand some people have a real problem with it. A missionary friend of mine hates the idea of Santa, but he also related a story in which his father shamed him in front of people over his belief in Santa (neither he nor his father were believers at the time.). I completely respect him and his belief. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to follow his advice, because my experience was different, and I will make sure my children’s experience is different.

I don’t remember when I discovered the truth about Santa (this should be testimony in itself at how little it affected my relationship with Jesus), but I do remember my mother’s acknowledgement of it. I was twelve or thirteen. It was around midnight on Christmas Eve and my mother and I were the last two up. She was stuffing the stockings, and when she realized I was still up she said something to the effect of “I guess you know now.” I said sure. She said, “don’t tell your little brother.” I said okay. And then she asked, “you want to help?” It’s a great Christmas memory of mine, getting to help with the stockings that night. There’s real magic in it for me. I simply never associated belief in Santa with belief in God. I think it has something to do with the fact that my parents never made a big deal out of it either. They didn’t discourage it, but they didn’t sell it.

On another note, I find it fascinating that parents who so vehemently oppose Santa because he’s “not real” have no problem inviting talking hamsters and turtles into their homes everyday. There’s no guy in a red suit that delivers presents, but mice and ducks can use “mousekatools” sing “Hot Dog Hot Dog Hot Diggity Dog”.

I do believe in these things. I believe in talking clown fish and families with super powers. I believe in the power their stories have to impact my life and teach me things about being a good husband, a good father, a good person, a good writer. And I believe in the power of Santa Claus. I particularly believe in the origin stories about a Turkish Bishop, whether they are all rooted in fact or not. I also believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, including Genesis 1-12. You can’t start reading the Bible before there are seeming contradictions. Right up front, right at the very beginning, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have conflicting accounts of creation. How can I believe both? Because I believe in the God who chose to write the story of His love for us as a narrative and not as a textbook. Because I believe that God likes a good story and He made us to be like Him. We are each of us created with the need for narrative, to tell and have told good stories.

There was one good thing I took out of Sunday school that morning. George, our intrepid teacher and host said this when speaking of how discovering the truth about Santa might cause doubt in God: “My father (a Baptist minister) said it’s good to doubt. I doubt a lot, and it’s a good thing.”

From doubt comes belief. Henry Blackaby in “Experiencing God” calls it the “crisis of belief”. We all at one moment or another have to decide if we believe something is true in the face of uncertainty and make a decision based on it. Doubt is good because it forces us to examine what we believe and why. I have doubted the existence of God many more times than is probably wise to admit, but I’m still here, because each of those times has only served to deepen my faith in Him. Because I’ve wrestled with Him through long nights and cried out in desperation “I will not let you go unless you bless me!” All this leads me to say: if you’re worried that your children’s belief in God will be shaken by Santa, maybe you should examine why this is. How much doubt have you wrestled through? How much are you modeling the Relationship? Are you merely talking about God or are you showing them God with your life?

Every night that my family has been able to sit down to dinner together in the month of December, Asher looks at me and says “Can you tell us the words again?” I say, “what words?”

Asher: About Christmas
Me: What about Christmas?
Asher: It means giving.
Me: What else?
Asher: Jesus.

This three year-old, my Asher-the-Big-Basher, goes rabid at the mention of Santa and wants to make sure the milk we leave out for him is chocolate. But every night wants to talk about Christmas in relation to giving and Jesus. He will tell you Christmas is about giving because the wise men came to give presents to Jesus, not get them, and that we should do the same. It’s a good story.

(edit)

This thing’s full of theological holes and wanders all over the place, but I don’t care. Raising kids is messy business.

The Creative Doldrums Pt.3 (but actually 631)

I’ve seen “The Prince of Egypt” at least five hundred times. When Jacob was two it was his favorite movie. He’d ask constantly, “Moses? Moses?” I like this movie a lot, I think they got a lot of things right. It’s a spiritual marker for me, but I was always dissatisfied with the ending. For me the most defining moment of faith for the Israelites was not getting out of Egypt, it was what they did when they once they got out.

A few years back before I worked for the ‘Way I bid on a rather large set contract and got it. We had just moved back to Nashville and were staying with Shannon’s parents. Not only did we not have a place to live, not only did I not have to place to build these twenty-six sets, I didn’t have the tools, materials, anything really. I was talking to my dad about it and he told me that he and his coworkers had a phrase they would use whenever they landed a huge project they didn’t think they would get. “The dog has caught the car…now what?”

In a magnificent cataclysm of salty spray the Red Sea crashes closed on the Egyptians. Boom. The end. No more Egyptians. The Israelites are free. Free! There’s a big party—lots of singing, probably a big barbecue. And then the next day or week (if it was a really good barbecue) Moses wakes up and rolls out of his sleeping bag, looks East and sees a big fat bunch of nothing.

I resonate with the Israelites in the desert. Every day these people wake up, step out of their tents, shake the sand out of their sandals and go collect Manna. As they’re picking up the daily portion (and no more because it rots! Learned that one the hard way, they did) they look up to see if the Pillar of Cloud is moving. To see if they’re packing up the kids and tents and loading the donkey and hitting the road. It’s not terribly exciting, but neither is getting up and making a smoothie and driving 45 minutes to 1 Lifeway Plaza for a day of Pipe & Drape inventory. They spend the day walking in sand. They pull over for lunch and eat manna sandwiches sitting in the sand. When the day’s over, they unload the donkey, pitch the tent, grill some quail, maybe take in an evening campfire song, and then go to sleep in the sand. On the good days they don’t grumble about this monotonous existence. According to Moses, there weren’t many good days.

When there’s ridiculous plagues and a sea that splits in half, faith isn’t hard to come by. God seems pretty big and powerful and when you get down to it--inspiring. No, you don’t have to look far for inspiration in those moments. It’s when you’ve lost track of how many days in a row you’ve eaten quail-on-manna (or had a salad for lunch), when the next dune looks like the last (writing 11 years of camp drama), when there’s sand in FREAKING EVERYTHING that faith takes work. Only the right kind of inspiration could sustain you through those times and give you the spark to keep going. Sugar rushes and caffeine highs don’t get you through the desert.

Hang on. (He goes back and reads what he’s written).

…At some point I turned a corner and started talking about faith instead of creativity…

Wow, there’s just all kinds of stuff popping around in my head now…

We’ll have to pick it up here later, kids.

(edit)

I've got 7 or 8 different strands that spun out of this. I'm just trying to make sense of them. Once I do, you'll have it.

An open response to non-churchgoing believers (but actually 13 c's & some change)

Hi Chris (and those who confess to being like him),

As I read your blog many things came to mind. But as I began my comment I realized it might be longer than your blog and thought that might be a little much for a comment. So I decided to give it full rein and let it be what it is. A lot of people will think I’m criticizing you. I hope you take it as encouragement.

When I was at SL Fish and I would often talk about how we felt our little traveling family was in many ways more like a church than the ones we attended. We spent MASSIVE amounts of time together talking about life and faith, eating, having devotionals and corporate prayer. We attended hundreds of worship services led by the best pastors and worship leaders out there. It felt a lot like church, and like the church should be. But it wasn’t the church. It wasn’t the church because I never made the decision to be there. I never humbled myself before God and submitted to his process, his plans. I didn’t do any of that because it was my job. Sure, I worshiped, I prayed, I learned. But I was working the whole time. I never submitted myself to God’s ordained community. I’d go to church and feel dead inside, disconnected. “I’ve sung this song a million times. I’ve heard this sermon over and over and over!” I’d leave frustrated, feeling as if church just wasn’t for me.

But singing songs and listening to sermons has very little to do with being a member of a church. What I finally learned to be the truth about the church is not the trappings: the building, the songs, the teaching. It is about commitment to the body. It is Ephesians 5: “just as Christ loved the church…Be subject to one another.” When I subjected myself to the body…when I (as Ms. Ten Boom says) obeyed, my feeling of commitment to the church developed. I spent a year keeping two year-olds, and I loved my church.

When Jacob was born we took the hiatus that we feel we deserve because WE JUST HAD A BABY. And when we came back I felt it all over again. Disconnected, world and church-weary. Every class Shannon and I went to we didn’t fit. Frustrated, our attendance wavered. And then I read this:

“Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior…we are at the same time a member of the Christian church…Our membership in the church is a corollary of our faith in Christ…Membership in church is a basic spiritual fact for those who confess Christ as Lord...For Go never makes private, secret salvation deals with people…We are a family in Christ.” (Peterson, “A Long Obedience…, 175)

And I know you know this. You say as much in your post. But the next part is the one that got me.

“…So the question is not ‘Am I going to be a part of a community of faith?’ but ‘HOW am I going to live in this community of faith?” (ibid, 176, emphasis mine)

You don’t get to choose. You have to be involved. The only thing left up to you is how. And I know you know this too. Your acknowledgment and admission of your sin says as much. So I started teaching a class. It was a class I started for all my friends who felt the same way I do. I figured we could all get together here inside the church instead of outside. But none of my friends came. And for six months the class was on life support because I refused to submit myself to God’s plan for the class. Then, in the midst of my frustration, a funny thing happened. People started coming. They weren’t my friends. But they weren’t church-goers either. They were recovering addicts. They were outcasts that didn’t fit elsewhere. They had lived through harrowing and messy divorces. They were single looking for a community, not a date. They were married and were trying to figure out how to be married. They were broken and painfully aware of their brokenness. Our prayer requests didn’t contain health and wealth concerns. We were praying for people caught in addiction, people who were desperately alone, people who needed a community. I felt like I was swimming in the ocean with no land in sight and I heard God whisper “this is your church.” But I was so uncomfortable with these people! I liked my little insulated SL life. I didn’t want them wrecking things! And then I read this:

“You say that you have almost nothing in common with these people. But isn’t that just the point? YOU have nothing in common with them, but God does. This just happens to be the way that God goes about making a kingdom, pulling all sorts and conditions of people together and then patiently, mercifully, and graciously making something of them. What he obviously does not do is pre-select people who have an aptitude for getting along well and enjoying the same things. Of course you don’t have much in common with them. The church is God’s thing, not yours…The church is not a natural community composed of people with common interests; it is a SUPER-natural community. And the super in that word does not mean that it exceeds your expectations; it is OTHER than your expectations, and much of the other is invisible to you… (Peterson, The Wisdom of Each Other, 26-27).

When I read that and got over myself, I saw this rag-tag group of irritating and disturbing liars and narcissists for what they are: a God-collected group of beautiful believers. And it was never easy and I was ALWAYS uncomfortable but I was never closer to God and have never had such a tight-knit group of God community (or the church, if you must).

We moved to Nashville. We moved to disconnection. Again the world & church weariness. Again the frustration. I wanted to find a “cool” church. But none of the “cool” churches had a good kids program. Or they were too far away, or in bad neighborhoods. “Cool” churches in the hood are fine if you’re 24 and single, but for a 35 year-old father of four? Not so much. (And the whole “cool churches in funky neighborhoods” is a whole other discussion).

The church we kept coming back to was the church we grew up in and this absolutely galled me. I like the preacher well enough, but I’m not wild about his style of preaching. The worship is too adult contemporary. I don’t find many people like me here. I didn’t want to go to this church.

But here we are. Instead of if we choose how. We choose obedience, and we’re waiting for the feeling. It’s not the ideal church for us, but it’s God’s thing, not ours. A new class, new people, new challenges, new awkwardness, but I’m already fiercely protective of them. I still find small talk impossible as I try to get to know them, but I know that God’s in it, and that’s enough.

And there is the option of starting your own church. You could absolutely do that. I hear the ATL dream team is giving it a go. But I think that, like me, you’ve noticed our nation is filled with thirty year-old mostly empty buildings. We’ve got plenty of churches. We just need to be subject to one another and commit to them. We need to find one, roll up our sleeves and get to the work of allowing God to mold us into being part of his community.

I hope you take this in the manner in which I wrote it. I like you quite a lot and believe you’re one of the good guys that gets it. I know you already know all the answers. That’s not the problem. The problem is living them. The problem is getting over ourselves and realizing that being ministers doesn’t make us above it.

Engage. Participate. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable. Open yourself and see what God will do.

The elevator and the swing set 2(but actually 534)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the lady in the elevator and Asher falling out of the swing. I guess the thread is the unexpectedness of life. You’re cruising along, the weather’s great, you like what you’re doing, then bam! You fall out of the swing. The question is, what now?

Yesterday Asher wanted to swing. And he wanted to go fast. And he wanted me to push him.

(smile)

I’m not a big fan of using my blog as a devotional tool—there’s guys a lot better than me doing that. And that's why I read them. (Some of them are bookmarked on the right!) But today…

Jesus talked about having faith like children, and we theologize that and hermeneutic it and put it “into practice.” But I really think Jesus was saying, “LOOK AT THE KIDS!! They don’t make it any harder than it already is! They take it as it comes, deal with it as it hits, forget it as it passes! Live like that!”

Asher fell out of the swing and busted his face up pretty good. He came up crying. He wanted me to pick him up and hold him. He wanted his mommy. We pulled the grass out of his nose, cleaned him up and held him until he stopped crying. He wanted his blanket and “do” (pacifier). He wanted to sit on the couch and watch Diego. And then the next day he wanted to swing again.

In other words: he got hurt, grieved the moment, got comforted, then got back to work. The key here is that he wanted me first, then his stuff.

We don’t do that. We get the crap kicked out of us and go looking for solace and comfort everywhere BUT God. In the Asher analogy, when we fall off the swing we don’t go looking for our Father. We lay on the ground and wail. We grab the lighter fluid and the matches and burn the swing set down. We clutch the pacifier and blanket and live on the couch in front of Diego.

Sure we turn to Him, but it’s usually after we’ve talked to everybody and Oprah first. It’s after we’ve self-medicated with our numbing agent of choice. It’s after a month of living in funk of self-pity.

I got on the elevator with someone going to six and asked if they knew who the lady was and they didn’t. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish. I think I just wanted to know her name. I’m sure she’s fine and was just emotional walking into the building for the last time, but I still wish I could talk to her again. I wish I could encourage her to run to and be held by her Father, and let Him pull the grass out of her nose. I wish I could tell her to watch a little Diego (because we all need a little Diego) and get back on the swing.

(edit)

It’s flawed, it’s messy, it’s all over the place, but it’s in there somewhere. And I just used three phrases that mean the same thing.

And here's Seth's blog, where he learned something from his kid too.