Redefining Musts and Oughts

Thoughts on what spring break has offered me this year: a chance to stop going with the "musts" and the "oughts" for two weeks and just be. I kept thinking to myself that I've never felt my mind and body decompress as much as it has over the last two weeks.

Although I suppose I should not be surprised, I just did not realize how tightly I was wound. And so the last two weeks there has just been this slow, positive unravelling. I realized this deep in my guts peacefulness while sitting with my four daughters in Starbucks in downtown Seattle across from the Pike Place Market.

We were just sitting there, waiting to pick up Bev at the airport, and I just took a big breath and realized "this is it." I read this poem by Wendell Berry titled "Purification" and quite honestly have felt that over the past two weeks.

At the start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter's accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

So I got to that deep breath by through reading Rob Bell's new book "Love Wins" and Jamie Smith's "Letters to a Young Calvinist", both books were very affirming and challenging for me, so I came away very encouraged. The last two weeks also allowed me to be a single dad with my four daughters for seven days and I re-realized what amazing young girls they are, I swam with my kids and did a flip off the diving board, jumped on the tramp, went to the Seattle Zoo, watched American Idol, puttered and picked weeds in the garden, walked through book stores and sat on the deck in my shorts drinking cold beer. Deep. Peace. Deep. Breath. And trying to redefine what the ought and the musts need to be, should be, and can't be.

“In general we are very busy people. We have many meetings to attend, many visits to make, many services to lead. Our calendars are filled with appointments, our days and weeks filled with engagements, and our years filed with plans and projects. There is seldom a period in which we do not know what to do, and we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say or do are worth thinking, saying, or doing. We simply go along with the many “musts” and “oughts” that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of our Lord.”

Henri Nouwen