My least-favorite lie
This is one that I have bought into many times, which probably explains why I feel so strongly about it:
“Once you get through this week/this month/this season, then you’ll have time to slow down and breathe.”
It is a lie. The future where you and I finally get the chance to become the calm, present, patient versions of ourselves never comes if we always push it out of the present.
I can’t tell you how often it has called to me, like the siren songs of old that lured sailors from their path and onto the rocks that spelled their doom, but it has worked.
Over and over again it has worked.
The kids just have a lot extra going on right now, we’ll get the chance to connect when things calm down in a few weeks.
I’m really stressed about getting this project done by Friday. Once we get this thing shipped we can slow down for a bit.
I’ve just been so tired lately, I can go for that prayer walk this weekend.
Yeah, I have been numbing a little bit more this season, but I have just been so busy and lonely that I just need to turn off the noise for a bit. I’m sure that will stop when things get better.
There’s just too much below the surface. If I stop moving then I might sink down and not get back up. I don’t have time right now.
“One day soon”, we tell ourselves.
It’s the lie that has us excusing the pain and the dissociation of our lives. It’s the lie that robs us of our very lives, letting us drift along passively accepting the levels of suffering that we can tolerate and calling it “fine”.
What if, and hear me out here, what if you already had everything you need to engage your life? What if the only choice you and I need to make is to say: today, in the face of all of the reasons not to, I will engage my life fully.
The first step is to notice if the lie has been one you too have been accepting. The second is to choose one thing that we have been putting off and step into it today.
Go for the walk and pray. Tell God how pissed and lonely you are.
Call your college roommate and tell him how much his friendship meant to you. Ask him how he has been doing since his mom died.
Hide your phone from yourself. Sit with your spouse. Read poetry together and laugh and cry and look each other in the eye.
Take a breath. Stop pushing the pain down. Ask for help.
— Sam Eldredge
“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
