Pondering Productivity

I don’t know what productivity is anymore.

It used to be I had measurable, easily quantified goals for my days. Write one thousand words, edit ten pages, finish building my death ray. You know, easy stuff like that.

Now I’m realizing that the things that matter most in life aren’t something you can really put a “percentage complete” meter on. The task “mold boys into respectable and stable members of society” doesn’t exactly have a sixteen step instruction guide with it. Ditto the objective “strengthen relationship with wife.”

This was the conundrum I found myself facing last Saturday tramping through the woods with the foster kids. I kept thinking to myself, “This feels too much like fun. Fun is bad right? I mean not bad exactly, but it doesn’t go anywhere, right? On the other hand, I do want to give these kids a thirst for something beyond the confines of a TV screen and- Oh look, a deer track!”

As you may have gathered my thoughts tend to ramble. But it’s hard not to feel guilty sometimes. It’s hard not to think, “I should be writing now instead of lying in bed with my wife just talking.” But the truth is, I’m pretty sure “lying in bed just talking” is the nobler of the two pursuits.

I’ve heard it said before that no one lying on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at the office, but I’m not sure that’s true, at least not in spirit. Because I can imagine lying on my deathbed, looking back over my life, wishing I had accomplished more with it.

And so, I find my mind once again returning to that seemingly ever-present theme of balance. Writing is a good thing. So is mowing the yard, or fixing the leaking sink. But I’m finding the most important tasks in life are the ones you never quite get to mark off as “complete”. Building a good relationship with my God and my family is something that’s going to take effort on my part every day for the rest of my life. And I have to continue to remind myself that those moments when it seems like I’m not “accomplishing” anything may be the most productive moments in my life.

The Gardener’s Guide to Life

I have a garden. It’s not much to look at really, just a small patch of dirt (and we’re going to be honest it’s more sand than dirt) in the back corner of my yard.

At the beginning of the year I was all excited about this garden. I borrowed my dad’s tiller and dug up the ground, I went to the hardware store and looked at seeds; in my mind this garden was going to be the best.

Then came the waiting time. Let the record show that I am not good at waiting. I mean seriously three MONTHS for this stupid squash to sprout? The weeds in my yard sprout in about three DAYS. Can’t we just eat them?

But I waited. And waited. And waited.

And finally I started to see little buds of green poking up through the earth. If you’ve never had a garden you can’t know how exciting that is, the realization that the thing you planted, that dead, boring looking seed, is growing up through the earth shooting out its tiny green leaves.

And then there’s more waiting. Because those little green sprouts take time to mature and grow.

But finally they did grow and there was fruit on the vine, not very big fruit mind you, but it ripened nicely, and it was truly exciting to slice into that tomato that I had watched grow for all that time and take juicy, delicious bite.

Only then, it seemed like the garden hit a wall. The tomato plants stopped bearing fruit, the squash vines seemed to stagnate, the corn stalks gave us MAYBE two good ears. And I started to get discouraged.

“This dirt’s no good,” I told myself. “I’m gonna have to wait till next year and start over. I’m gonna do it right this time, with lots of fertilizer. But this crop?  It’s done for.”

So I stopped checking the garden every day, stopped watering in the mornings and evenings, stopped thinking about anything but the next year.

And then my wife came to me one day and said, “Have you seen the garden lately?”

And of course I hadn’t, so she dragged me outside, and lo and behold the squash vine had started to take over the whole garden. And not only that, but my tomato plants had started to perk up a little too. And on top of all that, there was another tomato plant in a section of the garden where I hadn’t planted anything, happily growing up thick and green without any help from me at all.

And it was then that I realized that I had been looking at the garden wrong the whole time. See, I thought it was me making all this stuff happen. My water, my dirt, my fertilizer. Without me those pathetic little plants didn’t have a chance.

But then I thought of the verse in the Bible that says something to the effect of, “I planted, another watered, but God gave the increase.”

And I don’t think it applies to just gardens. There are times in our lives when we do everything right, and everything seems to go wrong. And there are times when we’ve all but given up, and suddenly some new blessing appears out of nowhere.

I think writers are in just about as good a position as anyone to understand this principle. It’s easy to get frustrated when we’ve worked so hard getting things right, and someone else who seems like they haven’t put in nearly as much work, rockets to the top of the readerboards.

The truth is, it’s not because the system is unfair, or because anyone is out to get us. The truth is that we simply don’t have nearly as much control as we’d like to think we do.

It’s not an excuse to give up. It’s just a simple fact of life. We can work and struggle as much as we want to get to the top of the pile, but in the end, it’s God who gives the increase.

Why I Don’t Use Profanity

I was on my way home from church yesterday, when my phone buzzed in my pocket to let me know that I had gotten an email. So I did what any responsible internet-addict would do and whipped it out to read a line or two at a time while occasionally glancing up at the road to make sure that I was still approximately on the road.

The email was from Ellie Anne Soderstrom, who is (by virtue of there not being much competition in this field) probably my biggest fan. She wrote:

I’m really curious about how you decided that you wouldn’t write about sex & you won’t use any bad language. It’s something that I’m really struggling with right now, and I’d really appreciate what you have to say about it.

Which is an excellent question. There are lots of bloggers and writers out there that sling profanity left and right and center, many of them quite talented (I’m looking at you Chuck Wendig). Why should I be such a prude about language?

It might surprise you that the answer is not because I think profanity in and of itself is wrong.

“But Albert,” you might be saying. “You’ve mentioned in several interviews that your faith is very important to you. You’ve said that you read the Bible every day. Are you trying to tell us that that has nothing to do with your decision not to use swear words in your writing?”

Now back up a minute. That isn’t what I said at all. What I said was I don’t believe swearing is in and of itself a sin. But my personal beliefs do have a lot to do with  my decision to abstain from profanity.

In the eighth chapter of the book of Corinthians the Apostle Paul wrote to the people who lived in Corinth about a problem they had. Some of them were eating food that had been offered to idols (unsurprisingly, the statues themselves couldn’t eat it, so the temple sold it to people who could at a discount) but others were offended by this because they believed that eating food that had been in proximity with a pagan deity to be wrong.

Paul’s response was basically, Hey, it’s just meat. The fact that it was offered to an idol doesn’t make any difference because he’s just a dumb piece of rock carved to look like Bozo the clowns ugly stepmother.

(In case you couldn’t tell I’m paraphrasing rather liberally here.)

But Paul didn’t stop there. He went on to say, HOWEVER not everyone around you believes that way. Some of them look at that steak that’s been offered to that statue and they think that eating it would be a sin. Just because you know this isn’t true doesn’t mean you get to act all high and mighty and shove the fact that you’re eating at Baal’s Discount Steak House down their throats.

He went on to say.

But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ. Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.

So what does any of this have to do with swearing? Simply this:

I believe that words are just words. All of them. The only power any of them have is the power we give them in our own mind.

BUT. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start carpet-bombing f-bombs in my blog posts and my writing. Because I’m responsible for more than just myself. There are other Christians out there who would look at my use of profanity and be offended by it. Still worse there would be non-Christians who would view my use of “bad language” as hypocritical.

Regardless of the inherent right or wrongness of profanity it would be foolish of me to ignore the connotations linked to it in the popular mind. As a Christian my number one goal in life should be to bring glory to my God, and I cannot think of a single scenario in which the cause of Christ would be helped by my exercising my liberty in this matter.

I realize that some of you won’t agree with this. Some of you may not even understand it. But I’ve come to the place in my life where I realize there’s no point in trying to win the blogging popularity contest at the cost of watering down my Christianity. That’s not to say that this blog is going to become some kind of religious diatribe, but if I feel the urge to speak out about something pertaining to my faith I’m not going to fight it for the sake of my readership.

If you’re offended or put off by what I say, then you’re more than welcome to stop reading. We all have to decide what we will do with God as individuals and I’m not here to twist your arm or put you on a guilt trip to get you to see things my way. But I’m through being worried that people won’t like me if they know how important Jesus Christ is in my life.

This is where I stand. This is who I am.

Unanswered Prayers: Keeping Your Faith when God Says “No”

[Warning: if you couldn't tell from the title this post contains references to PRAYER and GOD. If that's not your cup of Earl Grey, tune back in some other time and we'll get back to writing-type stuff.]

When I married my wife we lived in this tiny one bedroom apartment where the walls were so thin we could hear the neighbors screaming at each other next door, and the plumbing backed up at least once a week. I won’t complain about it too much. As far as places to live goes, it was light years better than what most of the world has to put up with.

But it wasn’t where we wanted to be. So after we got more financially stable we started looking for a house. It wasn’t easy. We were fairly poor, and we didn’t have a lot of extra money to begin with but we found a fantastic real estate agent who was willing to work to help us find something in our price range.

Several months after the hunt began, our real estate agent came to us with a proposal. She told us about a program that was available to help first time home buyers like us get into a brand new house at an affordable price. We were elated about the opportunity and for the next few months we went through the process of signing various bits of paperwork and picking out the colours of the cabinets and carpet. We drove by that house almost every week as it was being built, watching the progress with eager anticipation.

But then it didn’t happen. The builder upped the price and suddenly the house we had invested so much time and anticipation in was snatched out of our reach.

We went on the hunt again, and this time we found an older house that was well within our price range. Again we started the wheels turning on the process to buy the house.

But we hit another snag. The house had a small amount of termite damage which excluded it from being eligible for the type of loan we were able to afford.

We were devastated and started to get a little discouraged. We had been praying hard all through this process that God would help us find a house to call our own, and it felt like time and time again he was slamming the door in our faces. We didn’t understand what we were doing wrong, or why He kept telling us “no” time after time.

But then the day came when our agent called and said, “I’ve got a house you need to see. I think this might be the one.”

And, to make a long story short, it was. In fact it is the house where I am sitting at this very moment and writing this blog post. It was perfect for use in every way.

Now, looking back at those other houses we wanted to buy I can see why God said no. It wasn’t because He was a big meany who didn’t want us to have anything. It was because those places wouldn’t have been right for us. The first house would have cost us so much money we would have been tied up in financial knots trying to keep up the with mortgage, and the second one was so old it would have been a nightmare to maintain.

But the one we ended up with? It’s perfect for us in so many ways. We just couldn’t see it from where we were then.

Today, me and my wife are facing a different kind of difficulty. We’re trying to have a child. We’ve been praying and praying and everything seems like its going against us. Last summer we conceived for the first time, but my wife miscarried shortly into the pregnancy. And just this past week my she went to the doctor and learned that a condition related to her diabetes may make it extremely difficult for her to conceive again.

It would be easy enough to get angry with God about all of this. After all, He could fix it with a snap of his almighty fingers and give us the baby we’ve been asking for. But He hasn’t.

Sometimes I look at people who look like terrible parents, and I want to ask God, “Why have you given them children and kept us from having any?” But I’ve been through this kind of thing before. I know that when God says “No” sometimes it means he has something even better in store down the road.

So now I’m trying be what I ought to be where I am and with what I’ve got. I still don’t understand everything God is doing in my life, but I believe he has a plan that’s better than anything I could ever dream of, and that is what faith is all about.