CHAPTER 1
The Promise
Real Living
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas lights.
MAYA ANGELOU
The sunlight filtered through the window with a gentle grace, and I woke up with a smile. I knew I had a lot to be grateful for that morning — I was visiting a friend while taking a study leave from work, which meant that I was temporarily not in charge of the groceries, the car pools, the lunches, or the dogs. This kind of break was a rare gift, and with the quiet awakening, the beautiful day, the smell of coffee brewing, and the promise of a couple of meetings that I was looking forward to later that morning, I whispered a quick hallelujah of praise. It was a day full of potential, and I had a particular sense that God was up to something important.
But then I actually got out of bed.
By noon, I felt deflated. I had been caught off guard by the discussion in one meeting, and I'd felt unheard and unseen in the other. My writing — the reason I was away from home in the first place — remained untouched. The sunshine didn't seem so bright as I walked back toward my friend's house that afternoon.
I tried to get in touch with how I was feeling. I remembered taking a college yoga class that taught relaxation techniques. The instructor had us lie down on our backs, palms to the ceiling, and take a "mental scan" of our bodies, from head to toe, looking for places of stress. Trying to help myself, I employed the same yoga-lady technique, but with a focus on a "mental scan" of my soul, looking for why the day had started so well and now I could barely put one foot in front of the other. That only led to some incriminating self-talk. I huffed a sigh of frustration as I thought: I can't believe I even felt stressed in college. Life is so much more confusing and complicated now that I am a real adult with real problems.
Since I was feeling worse than ever, I tried to be kinder to myself. I took on the tone of a nonjudgmental counselor. Mmmm, how did that meeting make you feel? That got me nowhere, so I went with the boot camp instructor approach: All right, Nicole, get it together. You are in California, for goodness' sake! It's beautiful here! The sun is shining! What the heck is wrong with you? (Scolding myself, by the way, never works.)
This is the gap between real life and the good life. I was claiming in my mind that I was now a mature adult walking in paradise while also berating myself in my soul for being so bad at merely existing. I sometimes think my brain and my heart are like a cranky old married couple, always bickering about why the dog is barking and what they should do about it. Brain told me that disappointing meetings were no big deal and I had no reason to be so upset, while Heart whined back to Brain that a whole day had been wasted, and it really was a big deal, and why would God have it be like this? Brain felt judgy and mean. Heart felt slighted and disappointed. The arguing in my head wore me out, and when I made it back to my friend's house, I headed straight to the guest bedroom, kicked off my shoes, got into bed, and pulled the covers over my head.
As I hid under the covers and closed my eyes, I sighed out a whispered help me prayer. "Help" prayers aren't just about God showing us the way forward with decisions. Often my help prayers are more about grounding and direction:
Help me understand me.
Help me understand why this feels the way it does.
Help me understand what this struggle is really about.
Somehow in the space of a few hours, I had gone from praising God to practically cursing Him. Oh yes, I know what it feels like to struggle over small things, to tug on a weed of frustration or insecurity or doubt, only to realize that you are actually pulling on a deep, wiry root embedded in your soul, one that goes much deeper than whatever your seemingly insignificant struggle might be.
When I woke up from that nap, an important truth was clarified, one that I wish I didn't need to keep learning. I am tempted — over and over again — to believe that a state of happiness is a direct result of God's favor. I am all about the hallelujahs when I'm happy. But because the day didn't turn out the way I planned, because I experienced the state of anything-but-happiness (regret, frustration, despair), I figured that must be a direct result of God's distance (He doesn't care about me) or disfavor (He doesn't like me). Then I wondered, Why do such minor disappointments, such small bumps in the road, cause me such inner turmoil? I realized my struggles that morning in California had not been one isolated event but were connected to a series of frustrations that relate to something bigger in my soul.
As I thought and prayed about this discouraging morning in the weeks that followed, I was reminded again that the little struggles are often related to something much more important: Let's call that the Struggle. The Struggle is about something much deeper than the everyday challenges. It's about the disconnect between what I believe and how I act, how I understand the promises of God and my actual experience with God. The Struggle is the frustrating place between who I want to be and who I actually am.
The Struggle Solution
The good news about the Struggle deep inside each one of us is that we don't need to resolve it on our own. In fact, as I discovered in my rounds of self-talk, that only makes things worse. Instead, we need to look outside ourselves, both for a new way to understand where we've come from and a clear way to move toward the good life we are desperately seeking. Rather than hiding or scolding or "fixing" ourselves, we need a new way to understand both the little struggles and the Struggle, and we need direction on what this good life actually looks like and the steps we can take to get there.
The book of James says, "If you don't know what you're doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help. You'll get his help, and won't be condescended to when you ask for it" (James 1:5, MSG). What I love about this promise is how certain and complete it is. It's a promise to all people, it's a promise related to everything that requires direction, and it's a promise that God will give the answer without any stipulations or requirements. God isn't going to judge you or find fault with you. He's going to give His help generously and freely and completely. That's a true and reliable promise. It means that when I...
