Then, I started thinking about the Disney princesses. Are they just as passive? What did any of them actually do to move their relative story lines along? Did they play any active part in achieving their “happy ending” or did it just come to them, floating along free as a cloud?

Sleeping Beauty: Bewitched, protected by fairies, accidentally spotted by a prince, lured into a trap, rescued.

Snow White: Abandoned in the woods, cooks and cleans for a bunch of dwarves, accidentally spotted by a prince, lured into a trap, rescued.

Cinderella: Forced into servitude, offered a chance to “go to the ball” by a fairy, spotted by a prince, lured into a trap, rescued.

Now, Ariel is a different story. She is the one who spots the prince and falls in love with him. She is the one who rescues him. She is the one who goes searching for a way to find her happy ending, and she is the one who saves herself. That’s a more like it.

So, what’s my point? Sometimes life just “happens” to people, and they are moved along without making any effort at all. But most of the time, if you aim for nothing — you’ll hit nothing. Life needs a catalyst to really get going. Don’t be a sleeping beauty and snooze through the precious opportunities God has in store for you. Find your legs and run.

The Bible is full of verbs: praise, love, speak, listen, give, testify, understand, pray, forgive. There is much to do, and no time to waste waiting for God’s will to happen.

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” (Ephisians 5:15-17)

Click here for a list of Bible versus about using time wisely.

But it’s amazing how quickly we can be distracted from our plans. All it took this morning was a text message and an email, and I was lost. Distraction followed distraction and soon I was doing multiple things at once, and none of them well. By about 1 p.m., my frazzled mind went into “retreat” mode and all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. I couldn’t think any more, and I felt like it was too late to pull this day back from the brink.

So I laid down (because working from home means I can do this, which is both a blessing and a curse at times), and I prayed. I asked God to help me find my way back to the path I had carved with my “good intentions.” It was a struggle. My weary mind and body wanted to give up, but my heart wanted to keep trying.

Then I looked outside and saw the sun shining through the trees. I have to get out of here, I thought. It seemed like the opposite of getting to work — taking time to put all my things together and walk somewhere else, to get away from my apartment and face the real world. But the day was too beautiful. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 118:24).

So I went out into the day, and I rejoiced and was glad. The air was warm and the sun was shining brightly. I walked to the local library, took a silent pew, and set to work putting words on paper.

Instead of feeling like a failure, I felt lighter, freer and happier. By the end of the day, the story was still unfinished — but at least it had begun.

Picture of the Day: Cream Tea in Benicia

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, a time when Christians around the world devote 40 days to spiritual preparation and exploration in honor of Jesus’ time in the desert fasting and being tempted by the devil.

Traditionally, it is a time to challenge oneself by abstaining from something integral to daily life, such as a certain food or drink — meat, chocolate or alcohol for example — or from a particular behavior, such as gossiping. What you “give up” could be anything, but Lent is intended to be a test that brings us closer to God. Through the challenge of abstinence, we are reminded of all we are and all we have yet to become in our path to God, and of the spiritual struggle we face every moment of our lives for the welfare of our own souls. We are actively choosing, on a daily basis, to pursue God’s kingdom above this earthly life.

This is what Lent means to me now — but it is not what Lent has always meant. In the past, Lent has been a “good excuse” to give up a bad habit or test my own will power, much like a New Year’s resolution. I didn’t fully understand the importance of the spiritual journey, and therefore approached the 40 days as more of a physical challenge, with “mind over matter” being the goal.

But “mind over matter,” I have begun to realize, is something I should pursue for myself in this physical world, not for my soul in its true spiritual home. This body, and therefore this mind, belongs to this earth, and not to God’s kingdom. My mind, like my matter, is destined to become dust. It is my soul that will live on. And so, Lent becomes a journey of “soul over matter.”

Soul Over Matter

How do I feed my soul and abstain from the diversions of the earthly world? It seems impossible. My soul lives in a body that requires physical sustenance. I get hungry. I get cold. I get tired. I am also at the whim of my human emotions. I get lonely. I get irritable. I get disillusioned. All of these things, at times, stand in the way of my relationship with God.

This is why Lent is such a challenge — because it is meant to be. And achieving “soul over matter” is, indeed, impossible while living in an earthly body. But our God is a God who merits us for our intentions as well as the outcomes. This is a God who went to the trouble of becoming human so that he could fully experience and understand the impossibility of such a task. Remembering that God knows how hard it is to be both a living body and a living soul, we can pursue the challenge of spiritual growth respecting the impossibility of the task, understanding the need for faith and courage, and also accepting that our best effort is the most we can hope to achieve — as well as the most that is being asked of us.

Opening My Heart

At church this past Sunday, I asked God what he wanted me to “give up” for Lent. Until that point, I was planning on giving up alcohol — foregoing the glass of wine that usually marks the end of a hard work week, and trying instead to attain calm, peace and contentment through spiritual means. Abstaining from alcohol would have made this a Lent similar to any other, just like the time I gave up meat or coffee. However, “the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking,” the pastor reminded us through Romans 14:17, “but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

Now I was on new ground. This Lent, things would be different. There was no earthly thing to “give up” — I had a spiritual task instead. But how was I to know which task would be most spiritually challenging, and therefore most spiritually fulfilling? It turns out that I didn’t need to know. The answer came as if it had been there all along.

I prayed, and was given a challenge I could not imagine being more difficult.

I have always been an introspective person. I spend a lot of time thinking, and on a daily basis, very few of these thoughts are shared with anyone else. I guess I am guarded in that sense, but I am also extremely self-reliant — to my own detriment. I don’t see the purpose in burdening others with my own ideas, concerns, problems, feelings and whatever else. We all have our own crosses to bear, and they are heavy enough alone. So I try to resolve my issues without involving anyone else. I travel through deep, dark valleys and climb over mountains in solitude. Only when I have reached an even plane might I share the story of the journey.

People often overwhelm me, and I find myself distancing myself. I can be content in my own company for a seemingly infinite amount of time. In fact, I frequently lament the fact that I do not live on a desert island, or in a cave in some undiscovered land. I seek and revel in solitude.

The reason for this, I know, is that being around people makes me feel very tired. Ironically, I chose a job that requires interacting with people almost constantly, and at the end of the day I am so weary that all I can do is hide from the world.

What I didn’t understand is why people tire me so much. But in the past couple of days the answer has come, once again, like it was always there. People tire me because I am always on guard. Around others, I am like a soldier standing to attention. I constantly analyse everything I say and do, filtering the thoughts and feelings in my heart through my mind before acting upon them. If I lose this “control” even for a moment, I feel guilty and embarrassed — and end up analysing myself in retrospect much more severely.

This is a very tiring process. It is also one I can only escape when I am alone.

Suddenly, so much makes sense. I know what I have to do, and even realize why this journey began with a half-hearted promise to abstain from alcohol for Lent. That glass of wine was never just a way to “relax” my body, but a way to relax my mind and loosen the hold of those critical and defensive thoughts, my heart filtering system, for a brief time.

Random Acts of Courage

What does it mean to cease conducting my life in the manner it has always been conducted? What will it take? This is where my journey begins.

I know that I must learn to trust myself and to trust God. I must open my heart and let it flow freely, rather than stifling it out of fear. I must be who God intended me to be, and not some filtered version of myself.

It sounds obvious, in theory, but what does it look and feel like to open your heart?

I think I began to understand this past Monday when a good friend of my father’s — and an angel, mentor and mother-figure to me — came to visit. I hadn’t seen her since before my dad had died (almost a year ago, from a long and terrible fight with prostate cancer). There was so much I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say thank you, and I love you, and ask her how she was dealing with the grief — but when it came down to it, I couldn’t. I was afraid of opening my heart. So, I said nothing of the sort, and after she left I spent the evening feeling guilty and sad.

Fortunately, I got the opportunity to see her again the next day. This time, however, we would be surrounded by lots of family members and it wouldn’t be as easy to step away from lighthearted chatter to make an emotional connection. Throughout the evening, I kept trying to bring myself to tell her what I needed to say. It was on the tip on my tongue. At one point, I think, I even took a breath in preparation to speak, but ended up sighing dejectedly instead.

Before long, our time together was coming to an end. We were about to say our goodbyes. I stood there, waiting for myself, and thinking about how awful those words left unsaid would make me feel. Then, suddenly, I decided to just be brave.

I hugged her. I told her thank you. I told her I love you. It wasn’t an eloquent speech or a happy-ending movie moment, it couldn’t even come close to what I truly wanted to express, but it was a start. It was, as I heard a KLOVE radio host say today, a “random act of courage.”

I know that this journey, over the course of 40 days and beyond, will require much more of this new kind of bravery. So, starting today, the first day of Lent, I will be practicing “Random Acts of Courage” whenever I am challenged to open my heart.

And, in the spirit of being open, I will also be documenting this journey here online, in plain view instead of in the pages of a journal no-one but myself will ever read. This is me, unedited.

Thank you for reading and God bless!

"A person can grow only as much as the horizon allows." — John Powell.

Yesterday, the girl I’m “mentoring” (which equivalates to hanging out with and listening to whenever I can find a few spare hours from work) told me that she’d had enough. She didn’t know how much more she could take. She put her head in her hands and hid her usually smiling face, and said, “I’m so stressed.”

It turns out that she’s lonely too. And overwhelmed. The world of a teenager is full of unnecessary drama, and hers is no different in that respect. But in most cases, teenagers perpetuate that drama intentionally as a kind of hobby. Not in this case. This girl doesn’t need any more drama, and yet it keeps seeking her out.

There are around 3,000 young people in foster care in Alameda County, and this girl — let’s call her Ruby — is one of them. I’ve only known her since November 2011, but already she has lived in three different places (in the space of less than three months).

And there always seems to be the same problems. She doesn’t have any space, sharing someone else’s home not only with her younger brothers but with other foster children. The last place she lived was packed with three other teenagers, in addition to Ruby and her siblings. The two other problems are money and food, and Ruby says she doesn’t have enough of either. She needs a hat so she can keep warm during January’s cold snap, she says. But it’s always a fight to get a clothing allowance from her foster families. Last time her lawyer had to intervene (— yes, this is a girl who stands up for herself and her rights.) Every time I meet with her, she’s hungry, no matter what time of day it is. We stopped into Trader Joe’s once so I could buy her some snacks to keep in her room. Anything left in the kitchen cupboards or fridge gets eaten, she says, no matter whom it belongs to. And with multiple teenagers in these foster homes — some of them tall, stocky young men — that seems no surprise.

So, Ruby has to fight and keep fighting just to get an inch of what many American teenagers take completely for granted. She does a lot of things by herself, including taking the bus around town and to her after-school classes. She’s working on completing high school with good grades, and she’s been managing exceptionally well considering that her world is extremely isolated. The people she comes home to are strangers to exchange courtesies with, not to vent about her day to or to lean on for a cry. Those things she must do alone.

Despite the fact that I once might have considered myself in a similar, although far less dire, position to Ruby, I find that the advice I offer tumbles out of my mouth in clichés. I tell her what I know now is true: that these years are most likely going to be the hardest of your life, and that everything else beyond it — once you are able to escape — will be much better. But it sounds so hollow. If I had been talking to my teenage self, I wouldn’t have believed it either.

When you’re young and so defined by your environment, it’s almost impossible to see beyond the horizon. You assume that this is life, right here and now, and that it will always be this way. If your “home” is lost, and your environment unstable, how can you ground yourself enough to even move forward a few steps, let alone run a marathon?

In time, Ruby will discover that time is all it will take for her to be somewhere new and happier. But time is the most powerful, unrelenting force to a teenager who wants to fight her way out. There is no winning the fight against time, other than by giving up fighting.

For more information about fostering and adoption in Alameda County, visit A Pathway to Home.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. – Martin Luther King Jr.

As children, we are taught to dream. We are encouraged to dream and praised for dreaming. We are told that the world and the heavens are ours to fill with dreams, and to dream big enough and often enough to populate the vast sky with the dazzling sparks of our imagination at work.

I dreamed of worlds beyond rainbows, of soaring into the beautiful unknown. I saw a future in my small hands, holding them up at night and watching the enormous shadows they could cast. Even in the darkness, in the embrace of sleep, I dreamed in deep color and woke to bright mornings emptied of yesterday, fresh and new, like turning the page in a coloring book.

I filled my childhood with color, from the waking projections of my imagination to the light behind my closed eyelids and, soon, the rainbow world of sleep. From first light to nightlight, I dreamed, living in God’s world where everything is so beautiful, and so true.

But then, endless time began to fade and was replaced by clocks and calendars, a distinction between “real” and “unreal.” Perpetual summer shrank into winter, seemingly without a promise to return. The colors of my world grew washed out and thin, as black and white and grey crept in from the edges, along with the world of people.

It was a world we all become aware of at a certain point, marking the end of childhood and the beginning of the rest of our lives spent somewhere far away. For some, it comes early, and the feeling of loss underlies all that follows. For others, it comes late, and the prolonged transition only serves to add a deeper sting when eventually, inevitably, it arrives. We all run, even though there is no outrunning it, and for those who hide and succeed in staving off the theft of childhood, the world is a lonely place.

This is a natural process, we are told, when time moves us into a new state of being and understanding. In many ways, this is true. But a cold, cynical world makes us give up one part of childhood that should never have been relinquished: the power of faith, hope and imagination. We leave the world of dreams because we are told there is no more room for dreaming.

We trade a limitless existence for a dog-eat-dog world, where responsibilities outweigh everything else. Obligation is God, and it rules with a tight rein. Dreaming is for dreamers, and dreamers are nobodies, painting with faded colors on a canvas of nothingness.

So, the former child weighs the world of people and chooses what seems to be the straightest, sturdiest path. It is a path that requires little faith. And these paths are held in highest esteem in the world of people.

There is no need for hope in a life ruled by fear. There is no expectation, other than the inevitability of bad, of darkness and of defeat. In this world, no one is free. We are slaves to cynicism, and to the creed that if something can go wrong then it will. We dedicate our lives to building up barriers to protect ourselves: money, power, and even cynicism itself. We believe that these things can help us avoid being hurt, and even ultimately protect us against our biggest fear: death.

But we fear the wrong things. And all along, we have already been protected from that which we should fear, and that which we are always unknowingly struggling against: oblivion. We struggle against the threat of non-existence — the idea that we never existed at all, that our lives are inconsequential, that once our bodies have died our existence has died too. We fear becoming imaginary.

This is what makes faith and hope so fundamentally challenging, so seemingly antithetical.

But could we revisit life through the eyes of our childhood selves, we would experience again the power and sureness of faith. There was no threat of oblivion. There was only life, both seen and unseen, and “seeing” itself was a richer, more complex, more enjoyable gift.

Could we carry that sureness with us into adulthood, we would know that we have already been saved from death and oblivion. We would know, in fact, that life and existence are so true, real and unending that there was never any need to be saved. There is no such thing as death or oblivion, only creation, and transformation. It is a truth so intrinsic that it requires letting go of understanding, and simply being.

If we stopped searching for complexity and instead embraced simplicity, we would then begin to see our salvation visible and tangent in every moment of our lives. Of course there is no oblivion. We exist and persist in love, from that which we receive and that which we give. This is how we live on, endlessly creating the future while living in perfect harmony with the past.

If we could remember what it was like to trust in this basic truth, we could stop being so afraid and start believing again — in ourselves, in the people around us, and in the unfathomable might of God.

There is everything to hope for. There is everything to believe in.