Last time I said that we’re creative because we’re made in the image of the Creator. I said that we’re each here to bring order out of chaos. This time I want to add two more layers. The first is this: As we fulfill our calling to bring order to the disorder of the world, doing that work actually brings order to our internal world as well. Something about hearing and heeding the call on our lives begins to set us right. So to be engaged in the good, the beautiful and the true is healthy. So that’s the first layer: The good work does us good. The second layer is this: Because the work is healthy for us, when setbacks and troubles hit us, we need to get back up and get back to work doing the thing we’ve been created to do. So here we go.
Do what you’re here to do when you don’t feel like it.
Sometimes when I’m blue and can’t seem to break out of it, Carrie says, “You know what you need to do?! You sound like you need to go pastor some people. Whenever you do that you leave feeling sad but you come home encouraged.” Of course, the hard part is that even though I know she’s right, when I’m sad I don’t want to go out. I just want to go into hibernation.
Sadness has a way of making us reclusive, introspective, and introverted, which is self-defeating. What I’m saying is when I’m in that condition my calling is the thing I feel least like doing, and those are the times I feel the least qualified to do it. But that’s exactly the time I need to be about the work of my calling the most. Because as I sit and listen to someone else’s troubles, and as I enter into their story and feel alongside them, and as I share whatever the Holy Spirit might bring to my mind, and as I love them without trying to fix them, something about that holy process seems to help put me back together. As I’m working on what I’m called and anointed to do, I’m being worked on as well. It’s as though by putting myself in the center of my path and moving forward, I’m also, without my knowing it, putting myself in the center of the Potter’s wheel.
For whatever reason it seems easier to believe on behalf of others than it is to believe for myself. But I can’t very easily bring encouragement to others without getting some on myself.
Those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed (Proverbs 11:25).
When I’m doing what I’m made to do, it’s inherently restorative. It’s also totally engaging. And that’s very important.
Full engagement and flow.
I read a book about the flow state a few years ago. The flow state is what athletes call “being in the zone.” It’s what writers experience as the opposite of writer’s block, and what musicians like Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, Flea, describes as being a conduit for the music to come through. Here’s the definition wikipedia gives for the flow state:
“Flow, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one’s sense of space and time.”
The author of the book I read, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, described our human mental capacity in computer terms, and said that our brains can process 120 bits of data at a time. Apparently, listening to one person speak with full attention only takes about 40 bits of data. Which leaves ⅔ of our mental capacity available and unoccupied, which helps me understand why they called me a dreamer in school growing up. But here’s my point: A passive (or even a partially active but unchallenged!) mind leaves too much mental ram unused. This is a state, which is the opposite of flow, that we often call “boredom.” And many of us, when we’re bored, have learned to gravitate to something easy that gives us just a little hit of dopamine. You know. The content consuming activities we talked about last week. But you already know that we’re not made to be just passive consumers, but active creators.
We’re made to seek enjoyment, not just pleasure.
Pleasure is just what “feels immediately good.” Ice cream. Instagram. Tv. Enjoyment is deeper. Enjoyment is that work or play which, while satisfying, also comes with a sense of purpose, and usually comes with a bit of challenge. In fact, the enjoyable activities are probably not very engaging unless they are a challenge of some kind or another. Simple quick pleasure only hits us with a brief shot of dopamine, but then leaves us feeling as though we’ve wasted our lives. Enjoyable work, on the other hand, actually helps us write a good story with our one life. If our lives when written are not a story worth reading, then we need to do some editing. And if we keep on going when we believe we’re wasting our life, that’s the point at which many of us start to burn out. Burnout usually has less to do with overwork, and more to do with internal chaos or disorientation. Pastors, when polled, said that relational conflict, not overwork, was the main source of their burnout.
Enjoyable work requires a sweet spot between success and challenge. If it’s too easy, we get bored, if it’s too hard, we get discouraged. We have to be good enough to feel the satisfaction of progress, yet the bar of challenge has to keep rising incrementally so that as we add new skills new challenges keep us focused and fully engaged.
Enjoyable work also needs clear rules of engagement. We have to know how to win, we have to be able to know how to score “points.” Limitation actually creates the climate for ingenuity.
I want to give two examples of total focus: Super Mario Bros Speed Runs, and rock climber Alex Honnold.
Mario Speed Runs
I was recently watching some original super mario speedruns and the best Super Mario speedrunners work every single detail of each level to shave off frames, improving hundredths of a second less than the previous world champion. They keep finding, within the tight parameters or rules of this classic 8 bit game, the tiniest details to perform an even more perfect run. You might think that’s a strange sport to watch, but if I made you watch the videos it’s truly impressive to see a human utterly focused on a perfect performance for 4 minutes, 55 seconds, and 796 milliseconds. Yup. 496 milliseconds. Second place has 4 minutes, 55 seconds, and 913 milliseconds.
Without rules, we quit. If someone hacked into the game, it wouldn’t count. It’s the limits that make it count. You remember playing as kids and some joker decided to make up new rules half way through the game? Yeah. I quit. What’s the point? It’s too much chaos. There has to be a playing field with clear lines so we know whether we’re meeting the challenge or not, otherwise it’s not enjoyable.
Alex Honnold
My absolute hero in terms of this level of focus, engagement, flow, and performance is free solo climber, Alex Honnold. Free solo means climbing without ropes of any kind. If you make a mistake, if you fall, you die. Alex was the first person to free solo El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. He did it in 3 hours and 56 minutes. And that’s not all. Each move for that entire nearly four hour climb was perfectly choreographed, memorized, and some of the moves were targeted for physically training. He did daily stretches and strength training for one specific movement in particular where he was thousands up on the wall, and had a hold the width of a finger, facing down, so he had to push up against it with his thumb and up with one foot, then swing his other foot across to the next hold above him. It’s stupid. I love it.
The average person watches what Alex does and thinks, “He knows what he’s doing. He’s a professional.” But his peers, friends, and fellow climbers, think he’s right out there on the hairy edge because they understand what a rare and high level on which he’s operating. There’s a reason no one ever free solo’d El Cap before in the history of the planet. Meanwhile, Alex whistles happily and climbs. He loves being out there on the edge of what’s possible, confident and fearless because he’s trained and prepared, and now everything but the rock and the wind and the movements falls away and he’s completely present and alive, doing the one thing he loves most…total flow.
Our souls recharge kind of like car batteries.
Cell phone batteries recharge best if your phone is off or on airplane mode, and the whole time you use your phone it is depleting. A car needs to be driven in order to keep running. It actually charges through driving. The battery powers the starter and the spark plug but once the engine is turning, the alternator feeds power back to the battery to charge it. You CAN hook up a battery charger to your car, but that’s a hassle, and it’s not how it’s designed to work. I think humans are similar. We recharge less through passivity, and more through vigorous activity in the work for which we are designed.
How to bounce back: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the computer company, Apple, literally from their garage, and from day one, innovation was the driving energy behind everything. Hardware innovation, software innovation, and an awful lot of creative thought about how people would use Apple’s products to make their daily lives better. At the time, the concept of a personal computer was a novelty. So Apple was actually creating products for which there was very little demand. To illustrate this, a few years ago we thought people who had cell phones were pretentious snobs. Now we all think we need them. Half the job of an innovator is to cast vision to the public so that we can see what they see. Steve was a masterful communicator in that way. He actually convinced a key leader from Pepsi to come work for Apple by asking him if he wanted to keep selling sugar water for the rest of his life and be filthy rich or if he wanted to take a pay cut and come change the world.
That leader did come and work for Apple, and as he applied his business sense to their data he decided that the financial strength of the company was built on their Apple IIe. Steve was still driven by innovation, and was pushing the technology further and further in ways that the board saw as cost prohibitive. They told him to stop pushing so hard for the innovations and instead focus on selling what’s already working. In the end, they forced him out because he was incapable of compromise.
So what now? Fired from the company you built. Sometimes that’s life isn’t it? Uncreation happens. Chaos happens. But then what? We’re made in God’s image, what should we do when chaos happens? He could have gone away a broken man, given up, become defined by something outside of his control, or he could go back to his compass. Get back to the work of creation.
Steve Jobs went back to work. He started a computer company called, “NeXT,” which picked up where he left off at Apple. NeXT was truly innovative, but didn’t really see huge market success as their computers were so advanced that hardware prices were high. But Steve didn’t stop pushing. He believed that computers were tools for artists, not just math nerds who want to run spreadsheets and academics who need word processors to replace typewriters. So he built music and art capabilities into his software ecosystem early. And in 1986 he bought the computer animation division of Lucasfilm to make computerized cartoons and renamed it “Pixar.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. They made some movies. Toy Story. Wall-E. The Incredibles. Cars. Ratatouilles. Finding Nemo. Just to name a few.
Meanwhile Apple fell on hard times without their innovative pioneer at the helm, but in a stroke of genius, they bought NeXT, and eventually named Steve interim CEO. Then, with Steve back at the helm, in 1998 Apple released the all-in-one iMac to huge cult success, and in 2000 Apple dropped the “interim” from Job’s status..
Fast forward to the iphone, which ushered in a seismic cultural shift. Maybe you don’t know this, but Google’s Android is a copycat of iOs on the phone, and Windows simply copied the graphical interface operating system from Apple. If you’ve never listened to Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement address, please do, it is brilliant. It ends with the words, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” In other words, don’t compromise. Do that thing you’re here to do, no matter what they say. Don’t’ be passive.
Now I want to make an odd connection, but one I have found very useful.
Sweeping the house for demons…
43 “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12:43-45)
Jesus applied this principle to his generation. And I think it applies in many other ways as well. A passive mind is like a vacant house, perfectly ready demons to come and act as squatters. Conversely, a house filled with the engaging activities of inspiration, the breath of God, is too full to get into. The lights are on. There is laughter there. And songs. And the smell of food. Someone’s always home.
Sometimes when I’m tempted to brood over a circumstance I have no power over, I intentionally choose instead to throw myself into meaningful work that calls on my creative energies and requires all of my focus. I’ve noticed that when I do that, not only do I not have enough RAM left over to worry, but actually, I experience God and inspiration instead. But if I simply sit alone in passivity with my thoughts during a season of travail, then no amount of “trying not to worry,” will be effective. Being so far from the divine creative flow at a time like that is like having my mental house swept clean by the passivity, and it can easily become a canvas for the demons of worry, worst-case speculation, and their useless friends, self-pity, discouragement, and resentment. If we go very long like that we end up having let that thing fashion, shape, mold and form me into an image for which we were never created. But there’s a way to be fashioned by our Father instead.
Jesus knows what to do when we face setbacks.
When we are wronged or face major setbacks there’s nothing more dangerous than sitting around stewing on it indefinitely. Jesus understood this perfectly.
“I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven.”
When Jesus taught us to bless those who curse us and to pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44), he was giving us an activity to engage in, knowing that the negative energy coming at us has to go somewhere. The gravity of nature will lead to sin against us to create sin in us. But if we direct our energies toward the good, the beautiful, and the true, we can defeat the monster without becoming a monster. A passive mind in a negative circumstance is going to let sin against it create sin inside of it. We have to keep making beauty on purpose. We have to. We have to become like late night comedian, Conan O’brien.
Conan O’brien (the 2010 debacle)
Conan had been promised to move into the prestigious “Tonight Show” host role after Jay Leno retired, and in 2010, he did. However, his ratings weren’t what NBC execs expected, and he was asked to move back to the late slot and they opted to bring back Jay Leno. This became a big deal.
Part of the problem was how NBC was tabulating their data. Nielsen ratings for the show were interpreted to mean that the younger demographic they were targeting were not watching at the rates they had hoped. What I believe they were missing is that in 2010 a shift was occuring in how people watch shows that we now take for granted, but old school Television networks were slow to accept. Younger viewers actually were watching Conan, just not on tv. They watched clips of it the next day on Youtube instead. So NBC Let Conan go with a settlement and a signed contract in which he agreed not to work on tv for anybody else for six months. So that was his dream. And then, poof, it was gone.
So did he sit at home and brood? What did he do when the thing he was working to achieve for so long was taken away and the rules were changed in the middle of the game? I’ll tell you what he did. On the last day of the show he hatched a plan to go on a comedy tour across america. Then he wrote songs about what happened to him, and he mined the pain like a diamond mine, wrote songs, sketches, and jokes about his plight. “On the road again,” became, “My own show again. I can’t wait to have my own show again.” In one sketch he’s lying on the ground passed out, unshaven, with a huge beer belly next to a half eaten pizza and the phone startles him out of his stupor and he shouts, “A job? I need a job!”
As soon as they announced the tour on Conan’s website the tickets sold so fast the site couldn’t handle the traffic. Then he got really nervous. He got friends and a band and even backup singers and dancers together and rehearsed and went on tour of the United States. They called the whole thing the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny On Television Tour.” Brilliant. And so darn healthy. Bring it out. Talk about it. Defang it. Kill it. Keep moving forward. Keep doing the thing you are on the planet to do. Bring joy to others even as you are in the thick of your anger and sadness and loss.
An interviewer asked Conan why he can’t stop. “What do you mean, stop? What does that even mean?…I really have fun when I’m with writers or when I’m with musicians and we’re working things out, then I’m content.”
After the tour, TBS tried to hire Conan to do a late night show at the 10/11 slot, but he refused to join TBS because their plan was to push George Lopez’ show back an hour to make space for him. Lopez called Conan and convinced him to come to TBS and he’s been there ever since.
If God made you to be funny, then what do you do when you are betrayed and let go from the job you love? You keep on making people laugh and you don’t compromise. And the work itself is integrally involved in re-ordering your inner world.
Shake the dust off your feet
Jesus told his disciples to go through the cities of Israel telling people the good news of God’s kingdom, and demonstrating it with power. If a town rejected them or refused to welcome their message, He told his followers, “shake the dust off your feet, and move on to the next town.” I think that’s fascinating! In the face of rejection, Jesus didn’t say, “You guys are probably going to get your feelings really hurt, and I get it. I’m hurt too. You may want to take a sabbatical and get some inner healing and rest. You’ve been through a lot.” He could have said that. But he didn’t. He did say not to take it personally. And he did say to wipe the dust off your feet and keep right on going.
Now, I’m NOT saying don’t take a sabbatical. The sabbath principal is super healthy. And I’m not saying inner healing isn’t important. It is! What I am saying is that Jesus told us to get back up and do what we are are created and called to do. And if you face setbacks, it is through perseverance that they are turned into setups for comebacks. If you find that you’ve gotten knocked out of your lane, get back in it and drive. If you are misunderstood and rejected, know your calling and walk in it anyway. If your message is rejected, don’t change it, find someone with ears to hear what you’ve been made to say.
Get back to the why behind your what.
Let’s say you’re me, a preacher. And you got into this because of the beauty of God’s love and grace. Thinking about and talking about this gospel just makes me so happy and it’s so satisfying to share him with people. So then let’s say that as I do that I experience setbacks and struggles and betrayals. What then? Maybe somebody will say, “Well, don’t just keep preaching or you’ll just be preaching out of your pain!” And I say, keep right on preaching, but don’t deny your pain. Purposefully bring your pain to God and encounter him afresh. Right in this kind of moment is where Jesus works best. Let the pain become an accidental ally to drive you deeper in God. Go deep with God, and return to the original spark that got you into this at first. As Jonathan David Helser sings, “All the way back, all the way back, all the way back to my first love.” And if you can’t. If you just can’t seem to find that spark, even then, don’t stop. Keep right on proclaiming this gospel to others, in the confidence that as you bring this light to others it comes to you as well. Whatever you do, don’t let anything ugly that happens to you stop you from making something beautiful with your one life. Don’t you quit. You get back up and keep right on your way.
Now I want to finish this talk by telling you about Derek Rose’s 50 point basketball Game.
Derrick Rose’s 50 point game.
The other night Derrick Rose had a 50 point game. You might not be in awe of that, but he was. Maybe you don’t remember that back in the 2010/11 season he was the MVP playing for the chicago bulls, but because of the explosive way he played, he ruined his knees. He was never the same player after the injuries. He’s had probably 5 reconstructive surgeries? And he’s an aging player. Each time the rehab is brutal. I bet every time he tore something or broke something, he thought, “Maybe I’m done.” It takes a certain mindset to push through that pain and doubt. But Rose just keeps going.
He’s played for three other teams since the Bulls. The Timberwolves have him now, and he views himself as a seasoned veteran who can help guide the younger players. But the other night against the Utah Jazz he was in the zone. In the pocket. Feeling it. He put up a career high 50 points. At the end of the game he put in two free throws to give his team the edge and then, in the final seconds, he deflected Dante Exum’s 3-point attempt to seal the win. The crowd began to chant “MVP, MVP!” After the game a reporter wanted to interview him but she had to wait, because he was on his knees, face covered in his towel, weeping.
Why did that performance mean so much to Derrick Rose, and why does it mean so much to me? It meant so much because it didn’t come in 2010. It didn’t come with his best physical health. It didn’t come when the brands were vying for endorsements and teams were positioning to get him. It came after the injuries. After the trades from teams who no longer saw him as a franchise player. After the setbacks. After the voices of analysts without and ghosts within were whispering, “He’s done.” So Derrick Roses’ 50 point game was something special. And it’s my favorite kind of story. The kind where the hero doesn’t quit. The kind where the odds are stacked against the little guy but the little guy’s spirit doesn’t get snuffed out. The defiant joy of someone in love. Someone who, when everything goes wrong, gets back out there and gets to work. And that sets the story right.