Seeds, Soil, and Dreaming in the Now

What do you think when you hear the words "dreams," "dreaming," or "dreamer?" Does it conjure images and feelings of things ethereal or distant, or a substance so heavy yet so light that you cannot quite grasp it? Dreams are typically thought of as just out of reach, whether we are talking about the images that flow through our minds while we sleep or the life visions that propel our lives forward through the mundane in pursuit of something better. I, for one, am a big dreamer, and today I would like to explore something that inspired me in a podcast I listened to last night entitled "Living the Dream" by Danny Silk. The idea I want to explore is, <i>What if we could actually experience and give out of the substance of our dream (or dreams) right now in the present?

For those of you who don't know, Danny Silk is a pastor on staff at Bethel Church in Redding, California, and he is one of the many speakers there whose sermons rock my world on a regular basis. You may be wondering at this point, "Wait a minute. Did you just say that a sermon rocked your world? Are you kidding?" If that is you, I'm actually excited that you are reading this because you have an opportunity to experience something incredibly rich and life-giving that you have probably otherwise experienced as dull or irrelevant up until now. Just as there is a good way to cook chicken (insert vegetable of your choice here if you do not eat meat) and a bad way to cook chicken, and as chicken-eaters (or vegetable eaters) all have varying tastes, the same is true for the presentation of sermons. Some are full and juicy, some are bland and dry, in need of salt, and some are in between, neither the perfection of poultry nor culinary disaster. If you want to get a taste of the particular sermon I am talking about, check it out (and many others like it) here: http://podcasts.ibethel.org/en/. If it ends up taking you to a general page, look for the podcast entitled "Living the Dream."

Now that I have hopefully piqued your interest in exploring the joy of sermons (think of 'em as inspirational talks with incredible revelation and truth packed in), one of the statements that struck me the most in Danny Silk's sermon was this idea that our dreams are primarily for the good of others. Yes, we get to enjoy our dreams, both in the process of pursuing them and in living them out, and that's such a gift, but if we make it all about ourselves and how good we are going to feel as we are pursuing or living out those dreams, we've missed the point, and they are likely to become an unhealthy weight in our lives. The truth is that all of our amazingness is meant to impact others in a positive way, not to simply sit as our own personal reservoir for us to drink from and enjoy. There's a reason the Dead Sea is called the Dead Sea. The salt water doesn't flow out anywhere. It remains within itself. What a waste to the waters around it. The same can be said for our lives and in this case, our dreams.

That brings me to another thought I was pondering with Jesus this morning and the reason for me writing this blog. I thought, "Okay, what is it that I want my dreams to do to others?" (in a good way) "and how can I pursue the heart of that right now even while the fullness of those dreams are not yet manifested?" To put it another way, what is at the heart of my dreams in terms of how they are going to affect people, and what can I do right now, today, to cultivate that in my life and in the lives of others?

I conjecture that we can actually perform the substance of our dreams right now, since the seed of those dreams lies within us, what God has put in each and every one of us, and the manifestation of those dreams just multiplies the scope of how many people we are able to reach with that substance. Let's break it down into very practical terms, using an example from my own life.

David (that's me) wants to revolutionize the mainstream theatre world from the inside out, taking what he sees as a broken system (albeit with some very beautiful working parts) and restoring it, with the help of others, to a glorious wholeness which produces greater life through the art that is created and the way that it is created. David wants to see greater opportunities for actors and other theatre artists of color who have historically been marginalized for reasons unjust. David wants to make high-quality theatre more accessible to the poor. David wants to foster theatre-making atmospheres in which every person involved, from the production crew to the actors with the smallest parts, feel incredibly vital to the community of which they are a part and thoroughly safe to be who they are. David wants to raise up an army of playwrights, producers, and directors who will create works of greater substance, honoring what's good, noble, pure, right, and exposing the very real evil and brokenness that exists in the world. (This means that not all art has to be pretty in order to be pure and potent. Sometimes dark chocolate tastes better than milk chocolate. Both have their place.) David wants to see more work like this get into the mainstream theatre sector, serving as a norm in the industry and not simply the unseen anomaly to be kept hidden underground for a select subculture. No. It's time to change the game. Serve one another and slay the dragon. If theatre became more about serving others than serving the self, it would look totally different. And it will.

So, that is some of my dream, in a nutshell. It actually doesn't fit into a nutshell, which is why there is more of it not even listed up there, and which is why it is a DREAM. Dreams don't fit into nuts...but they do begin as seeds, and grow beyond what at first appears minuscule to become something much bigger. We must not neglect the seeds of our dreams. Seeds need to be cultivated in the right soil before they can grow (most of the time, anyway...Some seeds will grow regardless. How cool is that?). I think that soil is our hearts, and the more we cultivate that soil (or let God cultivate it with us, in his loving way), the more the seed begins to grow and the greater potential that beanstalk or tree has to develop into something MASSIVE.

In this analogy, there are two things that I feel we can do. One is to ask, "What is the seed--not the big tree that the dream will be but the heart of the dream?"

In my case, it's a heart to see worship of God returned to the center of theatre-making, broken hearts made whole, fractured lives mended, and relationships restored. It is to see people step into who they are meant to be as individuals and as communities and through stepping into their destinies, to make the world brighter...to give the world CHAI! If I could condense all of this into one sentence, one thought, perhaps it's found again in my chai imagery, that I want the chai of God to caffeinate people's souls and awaken them to new realities, brightening the world as they step into their destinies as individuals and communities. I want people to taste Jesus' chai and come to life.

The question here then becomes, "What can I do with this seed right now?" or "How can I pursue these things at this very moment, without the external parts of my dream having taken place fully yet?"

If we continue to use my own dreams as an example for this breakdown, I can call people into their destinies on a daily basis through encouraging them and speaking words of identity over them. I can be a peacemaker in the lives of my friends and others, helping to restore relationships. I can create works of life or simply BE the work of life that God has made me and so allow others to drink of the chai that he has put in me. I can write a blogpost like this!

What about you? What are the seeds of your dreams, and what can YOU do to cultivate them right now? Take a minute and actually think about it. It might just change your whole day. Ha! Once you've done that (or if you need some further help fleshing this out), read on.

The second big right-now thing that we can do is to cultivate that soil I mentioned, namely the condition of our hearts. If that is where the seed is to grow, then we surely want the soil to give it the best potential for growing into the most full expression of dream that it can. Perhaps our hearts determine how far a dream will grow, or if it will grow at all.

So how can we cultivate that soil? For me, it has a lot to do with letting Jesus, Holy Spirit, and God the Father, soften that soil through daily conversation, meditation on the truth (as revealed in the Bible and in other congruent things that have been spoken to me through others), and taking risks where God wants to stir the soil up. If I just remain a sessile piece of earth and say, "No God! No stirring today! I'm just gonna stay right here and you're not gonna move any of this dirt around!" I'll just become a hardened mound of dry soil and clay. And we know how hard it is to work with hardened clay. If, however, I say, "Okay, God, you want to shift things around? I'll let you," then the soil is tilled and things that were hard or were becoming too heavy are aerated and even watered where needed.

This also implies action on our part. Sometimes, we get to till the soil of our own heart along with God. Jesus might say, "Hey, see that patch over there? It needs some water" or "Let's throw some manure over there." And we can say, "What? Water? MANURE?" and resist even stepping in that direction for fear of a mess, or we can say "Okay, I'm not sure about this, but your fertilizer worked well last time, so I'm willing to give this a go. Just help me with the manure part, alright?"

In my life, this looks like reaching out to people whom I wouldn't otherwise reach out to, or considering working with a student population in theatre that brings me outside of my comfort zone but reminds me that it is important to give to people whose differences challenge me.

What about you? Which area of soil is God wanting to cultivate in your heart right now? If you don't believe in God, you're certainly welcome to try to cultivate that soil on your own, and I would applaud you for your noble effort. However, from personal experience trying to fix myself up in my own strength, I can tell you that it's hard to work with the manure from the outside when there's plenty of manure I can't deal with on the inside. Sometimes a whole new heart is the only way to reset the pH levels in the soil. And to quote the title of a song my mom, Cat Ello, wrote, ("Jesus, Gardener of my Heart") "Jesus" is the only gardener that can do that kind of soil transplant. (See Matthew 13 if you are interested in looking further into this imagery of Jesus as a gardener.)

So what are the seeds of your dreams? What is the thrust of them, the heart behind all of the activity? How can you engage in that thrust today, RIGHT NOW? And how is the soil of your heart in which your dreams can truly thrive and grow into all they were meant to be? How can you cultivate that soil, not tomorrow, not in the future, but RIGHT NOW, TODAY? If you need some gardening tips, I've got a guy you can talk to. ;-) Let's get dreaming...today.

"Jesus Gardener of my heart,
break this fallow ground apart.
Loosen every layer of the hardness that's in me.
You have plans that I don't know.
Fruitful seeds in me you'll sow.
Come prepare the soil.
You're the Gardener of my heart." -From "Jesus, Gardener of My Heart" on Cat Ello's upcoming CD of original music.

Desire's End or What Pac-Man Really Wants

For the past month or two, I have been intrigued by some sayings that I came across in the book of Proverbs, sayings that have to do with desire. I have been trying to wrap my mind and heart around these verses because on the surface they seem so good, yet at the same time, experience could dictate otherwise. Which is it? Are these sayings untrue, or do I need to go deeper to discover what they are really saying? Today, I want to talk about DESIRE through the lens of these three proverbs. I bet you are wondering what they are. Let's jump in!

King Solomon, the same guy I quoted much of in my last post, had this to say about desire in a book we now know as Proverbs: "The desire of the righteous ends only in good, but the hope of the wicked only in wrath." -Proverbs 11:23

Lest this proverb be shucked off an anomaly and not worth really considering, there are two other proverbs that say something very similar in the chapter just before: "What the wicked dreads will overtake him; what the righteous desire will be granted." -Proverbs 10:24

"The prospect of the righteous is joy, but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing." -Proverbs 10:28

Do you see a pattern here? See what this king is saying? It almost seems too good to be true, when taken at face value, and too many experiences of failed hopes can further the argument to give these sayings little real attention and to quickly move on. But we can't move on. We shouldn't. We'll miss something very deep, very important. And since when does experience become the barometer for truth? I find that often my own experiences have been misinterpreted by a cloudy vision on my part, thus preventing myself from knowing the truth of a situation for what it really was. So let's include experience in our discourse but treat it with less weight than it is due.

I want to break this apart some, as I do believe King Solomon is getting at something deeper than what's on the surface of these verses. Yet what is on the surface is not to be missed. Let's just focus on the first one. It says that "the desire of the righteous ends only in good," as opposed to the hopes of the wicked, which don't end well. Here is where experience would come in and tell us, "Ah, ah! Not so fast! That's not how it really works. Look at all of those selfish people who do whatever they want at the demise of others and get away with it! They get what they want. Their hopes aren't completely deflated." Or, experience might say something like this, on the other side: "You consider yourself righteous, yet look at all of the desires in your life that haven't been fulfilled. Look at all of the times in which you've hoped and not received that which you desired. Surely something is wrong here."

I was journaling just earlier, and trying to pick apart this proverb in question (from Proverbs 11:23). Something hit me. It is perhaps the END of our desire that it truly fulfilled, and I don't simply mean "end" as in "end of life," though that can be true at times. It hit me that someone who has a truly righteous desire, a hope or want that comes from a place that is pure and is centered in God, is going to indeed get that desire fulfilled, the root of it, or the END of it.

Let's look at it this way. If you are desiring to do something great with your life and have a specific way in which you aim to do it, it is very likely that you will achieve that, but perhaps you won't. However, the desire itself is good, what is driving it and what is at the root, so the END of that desire (what ends up actually fulfilling it) is going to be nothing but good. Make sense yet? Let's break it down further:

Let's look at Pac-Man. ("Pac-Man?" you might ask. Yes, Pac-Man. It just came to me. Let's see where this goes.) What is Pac-Man's desire. His desire is to eat all of the little dots in his path, and the fruits along the way while preventing getting eaten by any ghosts. There are many ways in which Pac-Man can do this, but let's pretend that he had one set of directions he wanted to follow, and one set only.

"I, Pac-Man, want to go straight, left, up, left, and right, then eat only cherries and and a banana along the way to my destination."

Now, what if Pac-Man, because of the ghosts who come along to corner him, has to take a different route? Suppose he gets to go straight, left, and up, but finds he has to go right first, then right again? And what if he missed the cherries and banana but he got a good gulp of strawberry along the way? Let us also suppose that Pac-Man completed his level. He arrived at his destination, and the end of it was good. Did he get what he wanted?

I think our lives are similar. There are all kind of things that we desire, when perhaps what we really desire beyond the specifics are the root, heart fulfillments that those specifics provide. In Pac-Man's case, he wants to get to his goal in a certain manner and have some tart and sweet fruit along the way (the cherries and the banana). Maybe he could have gotten everything just as he wished, but in our example, he got strawberries instead (and went another route). I conjecture that strawberries are both tart AND sweet, so Pac-Man got the better deal. And he reached the end of his destination, albeit going a different way.

Am I saying that we are never to desire specific things, since there is something deeper underneath that we want and will receive the root fulfillment from? No, not at all. Actually, I would say the opposite. In a world where multiple ghosts and roadblocks come to divert us from the path we've set ourselves on (Pac-Man, speak, mind you), it is all too easy to give up on desiring wholeheartedly and instead settle for whatever comes, or worse, remaining complacently stationary. It is good for Pac-Man to want those cherries, just as it is good for us to desire specific things! Maybe he will get the cherries (he sometimes does), and maybe we will achieve what we are specifically desiring (often times we do). I daresay it is in pursuit of those desires that we can come to a place of receiving the END of that desire, whether it is what we specifically sought out for or not. Imagine Pac-Man not moving anywhere. Those ghosts would gobble him up in a second, and do so repeatedly until...yup...Game Over. But that is not you and me. No, we shall be brave enough to desire, and we will win. Leave the wrath for those pesky ghosts. That's the end of their desire.

Are you afraid to desire? Are you desiring, but not desiring as big and and boldly as you think or know you can? Don't brace yourself for disappointment and forget to move. That's no way to live. Desire boldly, and let that desire move you in extravagant pursuit of that which you long for. If your desire is rooted in righteousness, you'll be fine. And the way to make sure it is rooted in righteousness is...well, I'll leave you with one other verse, one of my favorites, from the Psalms, and you can figure it out.

"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." -Psalm 37:4

Fear, Challenge, and the Potential for Growth

What is fear? Why do we fear it? What power does it have? And why do we, who host it from time to time, give it such power?

These are questions I am beginning to ask in preparation for writing a new short play.

This exploration of fear was spawned by by a realization I had recently in regard to how I'm reacting to some of my current classes as a grad student. (Like the litany of "r's" in that last sentence? Oh, alliteration.) The realization had to do with fear and how I have been hesitant at the idea of participating in different activities involving acting. Given my first 16 years of schooling providing ample opportunity (and later, training) in acting, this present fear of acting in my graduate classes should have no place. Yet there it is. What's going on?

One of the video assignments in my Inquiries into Teaching and Learning class shed some light on what I think the problem is here. This video on this idea by Carol Dweck will give you the gist of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTXrV0_3UjY

In my case, it has to do with knowing that I have some talent and not wanting to negate that in the eyes of others (or my own eyes) by screwing up. So I'm fearful of trying something, showing that I'm rusty, not having acted in anything in a year (and the pressure is compounded given that I'm in New York City, Theatrical Mecca of Actors in the United States, full of some of the greatest talent this country has to offer). But why the fear? What's going to happen if I screw up, if I try an acting exercise and find that I am indeed off the mark a bit, not as adept as I once was (or can be in periods of more focused training)?

If you watched the video I posted a link for in the above paragraph, you heard about something called the Fixed Mindset and the Growth Mindset. The Fixed Mindset (according to Dweck) responds to praise of innate talent by not wanting to do things that prove that praise to be in error. In other words, someone who's been told "You're talented," may not want to venture into something more difficult for them after experiencing some level of failure in that difficult area, for fear that it might expose a falsehood about that praise. To condense it further, "You're talented," turns into, "You're not talented," when the Fixed Mindset is presented with something much more challenging than usual. Counter that with the Growth Mindset, which is stimulated by praise of one's efforts, not their talents, and according to Dweck, encourages one to take on challenges for their growth potential, no longer worry about whether or not they are talented. There is potential to get better, so the challenge is looked upon as an opportunity. How does all of this play into fear?

In the second mindset, the Growth Mindset, it seems that fear has less of a place. It's focused more on gaining rather than losing, on adding to knowledge or skill rather than subtracting from or negating it.

What if, instead of listening to fear, "Don't do that, you might expose your weakness," I, and others faced with a challenge, listened instead to the thought that says, "If it turns out more difficult than you thought, then doing it will give you an opportunity to find out and to get better at it." Whoever said that failure had to have such a weighty consequence? (Well, society perhaps says that to us all the time in a number of ways, and failure is rarely fun.) What happens if we stop trying to avoid failure and start focusing more on building skills that will by simple consequence result in increased success?

The one who is afraid to fail is less likely to try. I want take fear out of the equation. How to go about it? Try and fail enough times to find that failing is not so bad after all? Or try so many times to realize that success actually comes more often than failure?

Who said I was so rusty anyway? Who said I was prone to such failure? Where is that negativity coming from? I'm a trained actor. Key word: trained. So, rather than focusing on talent, shouldn't I focus on continuing that which helped to cultivate and sharpen that talent these many years past? On the TRAINING? And that implies something else: to try.

Allow me to spin the spotlight on you for a minute. Where are you afraid to try? Who told you that you'd fail? Others? Yourself? Past experience? Whether those voices are true or false (and I daresay most of the time they're false), why don't you step right past Fear's "Do Not Cross" rope and into the realm of possibility? Fail three times you might, but in the process, you might just gain (or sharpen) the skills necessary to succeed a hundred times after.

Shall we try and grow together?

P.S. For those of you who want to look at this from a spiritual lens, see this parable on investment that Jesus told to describe how his kingdom works. Check it out (this is the Message paraphase by Eugene Peterson)

"14-18 It’s also like a man going off on an extended trip. He called his servants together and delegated responsibilities. To one he gave five thousand dollars, to another two thousand, to a third one thousand, depending on their abilities. Then he left. Right off, the first servant went to work and doubled his master’s investment. The second did the same. But the man with the single thousand dug a hole and carefully buried his master’s money.

19-21 After a long absence, the master of those three servants came back and settled up with them. The one given five thousand dollars showed him how he had doubled his investment. His master commended him: ‘Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.’

22-23 The servant with the two thousand showed how he also had doubled his master’s investment. His master commended him: ‘Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.’

24-25 The servant given one thousand said, ‘Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent.’

26-27 The master was furious. ‘That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest.

28-30 “‘Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this 'play-it-safe' who won’t go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.’" -Matthew 25:14-30