On Rosa Parks

A letter to my black friends: 

On this day of remembering the advocacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., your faces come to mind. I admit to you that I haven’t lived your family history or experienced your personal aches about your family’s future, but I’m committed to learning how my individual choices can make a difference in my sphere of influence right now.

One individual who challenges me to courageous, yet simple actions is Rosa Parks. This past year, I discovered and read her book Reflections by Rosa Parks: the quiet strength and faith of a woman who changed a nation. The chapters are divided into topics that she spoke on, wrote about, and personally applied over the course of her life. 

She lived out of straightforward conviction regarding right and wrong, an uncomplicated approach to complex racial discrimination against her. Straightforward doesn’t mean socially acceptable, and uncomplicated doesn’t mean easy. What she endured grieves me - for your sake and our nation’s - and I’m sad to say, I doubt I’d have her faith or stamina. 

But I aim for it.

“I have learned that, 

in order to bring about change, 

one must take the first step, 

or else it will not be done.” 

-Rosa Parks

A resource for the committed

On Necessary Endings, by Dr. Henry Cloud

I love green lights. The difference between arriving 5 minutes early or 5 minutes late hinges on traffic signals, and, when not even a brake tap gets in my way, there’s a sense of satisfaction for my perfectly-timed excursion. I must have done something right; I got all the greens!

Yellow lights, though, send me into quick, calculated arguments. Does this really mean I’ll have to stop? Can I accelerate? Can I just cross the white line before the light turns red?  Whenever I cruise through the yellow, I glance with pity at the car in the rearview mirror that failed to make it and has no choice but to stop. 

To keep driving like this could be disastrous, and it’s most definitely disastrous if it’s the way I progress through life itself.

But we are much more accustomed to noticing and interpreting road signs on our daily commute than we are to looking out for warning signs along our life's journey. I think it’s because if we heed the yellows to stop at the red, we experience a sense of failure, instead of commitment. Stopping is certainly failure to continue as before, but stopping is also commitment to follow the signals and recognize them as good. When the light changes, the real failure is to ignore it.

Dr. Cloud sheds light on how to follow the signs toward the end of a job, relationship, or any previous commitment and how to see endings as an essential step toward true and healthy progress in life.

“Make the concept of endings a normal occurance and a normal part of business and life, so you expect and look for them instead of seeing them as a problem.” 

-Dr. Henry Cloud, Necessary Endings

Tenacity and commitment - traits praised for their ability to keep going, stay, and persevere - are also traits that enable a stop, a departure, or a pivot.  Sometimes, you’ll need these traits even more for the red light than you needed them for the green.  

A resource for the restless

On Starting Something New, by Beth Booram

Uncertain. Analytical. Restless.

That’s not exactly how I imagined I would feel when a dream signaled its presence. 

The box I put dreams into was labeled: big picture thinking, dramatic visions for life, and clouds with silver linings. Spurred on by the wind in their sails, dreams always gave quick answers for a ten-year plan and the resources (real or imagined) to match. Dreams lived at a pace that was unstoppable and had sticky note stacks to prove that their ideas wouldn’t be topped. 

If that’s what dreams were, there were none in my box. Although I had interests, desires, skills, gifts, hobbies, frustrations, responsibilities, convictions, and burdens, those didn’t seem like ingredients for any specific dream recipe.  

Dreams, in my mind, were imposters, brushed off with a smirk and without a second thought. 

What a joke. 

Dreams were subject to quick dismissal, like a puppy wandering into my backyard. 

You’re cute, but you belong to someone else. 

Dreams also risked failure, and that didn’t sound necessary - or dreamy. 

I think I’ll pass.

I had it all wrong, and I almost missed out.

“I have a growing sense that many people live with creative, Spirit-inspired ideas stirring inside them, but have little to no clue (and sometimes courage) how to pay attention to and nurture those dreams.”

-Beth A. Booram, Starting Something New

It’s always difficult to summarize a book in which I’ve highlighted paragraph after paragraph, so I’ll confine my takeaways to the words of the title:

Starting: Beginnings are usually small. Small things are fragile and easily ignored or crushed, but if they’re nourished little by little, they may grow into an oak tree.

Something: It’s hard to explain. A dream begins more like a longing than a defined goal. 

New: One step brings you to the next, which leads to the next, and that’s how God takes you where you’ve never been before. “Way leads to way”.

If you’re restlessly trying to discern God’s prompting in your heart, try Starting Something New.

Two books for your road trip, roadblock, or rough road ahead

On The Red Sea Rules & The Jordan River Rules, by Robert J. Morgan

I was living in a high rise apartment in a Brazilian city of 1.5 million people when I took the plunge into The Red Sea Rules; I was settled in suburbia surrounded by corn fields in the state of Indiana when I dove into The Jordan River Rules.  A decade of time and a continent of space separated the two occasions, and, from the outside, the surroundings couldn’t have been more distinct from one another. But, on the inside, I was asking the same questions:

Did we take a wrong turn? Will we make it through?

Brazil was definitively foreign, presenting monumental hurdles I’d never faced before, but Indiana felt unexpectedly foreign, challenging lessons I thought I’d already passed.  Although I knew God had called us, that was my only anchor in the uncertainty of following Him in each place. 

Robert J. Morgan’s books are short and simply written, perhaps intentionally approachable for the one who feels overwhelmed by life’s twists and turns. Morgan follows the storyline and draws out principles from Israel’s most historic moment crossing the Red Sea and then from their lesser-known journey through the Jordan River. 

Both books highlight ten “rules” about walking by faith, and #6 in each list was clarifying for me. One translates faith into small movements forward, and the other points to the expectation that each step forward carries with it:

Red Sea Rule #6: When unsure, just take the next logical step by faith.

Jordan River Rule # 6: Prepare today for tomorrow’s wonders.

Physical moves happen to play a major role in my particular walk of faith, but tests of faith are never really about the apparent obstacle; they’re about the faith beneath the surface. Whether your faith is being challenged by a catastrophic impasse (Red Sea), or you’re surprised by the challenge of a secondary barrier in a new phase of life (Jordan River), Morgan’s "rules" can bridge the gap by building your faith.  

Quick read, Lifelong application

On The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, by Tim Keller

Although self esteem is a buzzword from another era, we all know self hasn’t left center stage. At least I know from my own experience…

I was in the middle of a conversation with a friend one sunny day, when I suddenly caught myself looking into her sunglasses, not at her eyes, but at ME, warped in the rounded reflection.  Did I look good standing there, smiling as she talked?  Or did I have broccoli in my teeth?  

I’ve basked in self-obsession.

Another day, as worship music played during church, my voice joined in the lyrics, but my thoughts overruled with critiques: That leader is so much better than you. Don’t even try. 

I’ve wilted under self-accusation.

And on other occasions, I’ve heard the whisper: Aren’t you so offended by what that person just said to you? You don’t deserve that.  

I’ve retaliated in self-promotion.

Is there a way out from under the tyranny of Me, Myself, and I? It seems like an inescapable dilemma to be plagued by self, and that’s what first drew me to The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. 

Unpacking our sense of self, or ego, Tim Keller uses the analogy of a courtroom, based on 1 Corinthians 3:21-4:7. Keller explains, throughout this pamphlet-sized book, that whether we view ourselves too highly or too lowly, neither frees us to have joy. The problem is: “Every single day, we are on trial.  That is the way that everyone’s identity works. And everything we do is providing evidence for the prosecution or evidence for the defense. Some days we feel we are winning the trial and other days we feel we are losing it.  But Paul says that he has found the secret.”   

There are some books that mark pivotal moments in our lives, and we are uniquely changed as a result of what we read. This was one of those books for me.