Author Archives: Paul Mitchell

The Box on the Board

I once had a teacher do the following.

At the start of class, he walked silently to the board. He slowly drew two parallel horizontal lines, and then connected them into a rectangle with two vertical lines. (By this time, we were all quiet, watching.) He then asked us a question: “What do you see?”

Every answer tried to describe what he had drawn. A box? A TV? A picture frame?

After some time, his response to us was: “Why are you all only talking about these four lines? My question to you was ‘what do you see?’ You could have chosen anything in this whole room, yet you are all fixated here.”

He was right. He had never told us to describe or even look at the rectangle.

The point of the exercise has stuck with me: we allowed what he drew on the board to corral our thinking, to limit our vision and conversation. And this led to the even more important question: how, outside of the class, do we unreflectively allow our vision to be limited?

If we allow [insert dominant cultural narrative] or [insert news outlet] or [insert social media platform] or [insert cultural turf battle] to frame our thoughts, it will surely limit how we see and think and live.

Relying on outside sources of information is, of course, inescapable, but it is always worth it to consider how a given source corrals the conversation and might get us stuck in an unproductive pattern.

Every day, we can choose to get unstuck by choosing a wider frame and starting a new conversation.

The Capacity for Paradox

A paradox is a statement that seems at first consideration to be self-contradictory but, when lived into, can reveal an exquisite truth.

That desire can lead to pain, but also is the heart of a vocation.

That children can both raze and resurrect the life of a parent.

That I have to be ok being alone in order to be free to love another.

And the big one: That life can spring from death.  (That is, that the cross is our hope.)

I find that the people who are capable of living with paradox are able to live with extraordinary love.  Let’s pray for this capacity every day.

Endurance and Finesse

I love the Olympic biathlon. Skiers negotiate a grueling cross-country course and, at varying levels of exhaustion, must stop and take aim at a tiny target that sits half a football field away.

It is a brilliant challenge of two aspects of physical excellence: endurance and finesse.

That is to say, it is like parenting. A parent, like a biathlete, must develop endurance. (The job is never done, really.) And, while quite tired, the parent must be able to switch gears in a moment to attend gently, care tenderly, or deeply consider a deep, unbidden inquiry.

Let’s pray for parents to have the grace to develop both capacities generously.

No More Days

One Saturday afternoon some months ago, our five-year-old and I were doing puzzles.  Then, with a wild non-sequitor, he said something I will never forget.

He asked: “Papa?  What happens when we have no more days?”

Assuming (correctly) that he was asking about death, I evaded awkwardly.  “You mean…like… when we have no more days in the weekend?  When Monday comes?  Or no more days in this house?  Like when we move back to the US?

I felt panicked.  I could think of nothing to say.

He was thoroughly (and appropriately) underwhelmed.

I surely failed to answer his inquiry that day.  He has, though, asked at other times and in different ways.  My answer has slowly improved.  

And as he asks these questions, I consider the life I want to live before I have no more days.  I pray that my “lived answer” to this challenge is improving also. 

Our son’s questions focus my mind and my guts on the things of ultimate importance, one more way in which he has been God’s grace to me.

Do You Think I Have To?

We recently potty-trained our two-year-old. He is fairly independent now. Sometimes, though, he will come to me and ask, “Do you think I have to pee?”

This is, of course, hilarious, and also illustrative of a fascinating human dynamic. There are things that only he, over the course of a life, can know and do only as an individual, as a subject. For example, only he can attend to his inner life. Only he can have his relationship with God. Only he can live into his vocation. (And, of course, only he can know if he has to pee.)

And this is true for each of us. Certainly, I need companions on the journey, for the most important things, but only I can make my most important decisions.

Too often, we externalize responsibility onto things outside of ourselves regarding those themes that only we can know and decide. We look for someone or something to follow instead of listening to our distinct call of how to live in the world.

Better to attune to our experience and make the next best decision.

Memory and Freedom

A sign of interior freedom is the ability to recall one’s past with clear-eyed honesty. This, I think, is true as an individual as well as a collective (as a Christian or an American, say).

The honest recollection of failure is particularly useful. If we resist whitewashing or banishing our failures, they can teach us to live gracefully into the future. This recollection helps us take ourselves less seriously and ask for help more readily; that is, to live in freedom.

And on a lighter note: If we recall with clear eyes the power and tenderness of being accompanied by God and friends of God, we have the strength to live with interior freedom even in the moments when this accompaniment seems distant.

The Sincerely Held Fiction

A fiction is, by definition, not true.

A sincerely held fiction is not true, but is held so tightly that it can appear (to the holder) to be a truth. Rooted in this clinging, social trouble grows.

When we see another person clinging to a sincerely held fiction, it is tricky to communicate with them about. (It is their “truth” after all.). One thing to do, though, is to get curious. How did this person come to cling to this sincerely held fiction?

Trickier still is seeing the dynamic in ourselves. We are blind to our blind spots.

So then. What do we do in order to get perspective on our own sincerely held fictions?

Cultural Ballast

In a large ship, ballast is the stuff (usually water) loaded into the very bottom of the ship intended to provide balance and stability. Ballast can be taken on (to make the vessel more resistant to outside conditions) or disposed of (to make the ship more responsive).

As our culture steams ahead into the future, it is worthwhile to consider: what is our cultural ballast? That is, what have we picked up along the way (in the name of stability) that is making us less responsive to the demands of our time?

We can let go, individually and as a culture, of the things that hold us back. Ballast provides stability, but if stability is not what our times call for (or if it is an illusion) we do well to eliminate it.

One more related point. Biologically, discharged ballast water can have unintended consequences. For example, in 1991, zebra mussels hitched a ride in the ballast water of a cargo ship headed to New York, were released in the Hudson River, and began to dominate its ecosystem.

So, when we eliminate something we need to let go of, how can we do so in a way that avoids harmful, unintended consequences?

Improv and Contribution

When I was learning to program, each exercise was done in pairs.  One person had hands on the keyboard, while the other person narrated what to type next based on their vision of how to solve the problem at hand.

This is hard.  Like, extremely hard.  For a bunch of big reasons.  Chief among these reasons is the analysis each person does of the other.  I do not understand where this is heading.  Does this person have any idea what they are doing?

But, of course, learning to confront the analysis that breaks down communication was a major objective of the exercise.  To help us with this objective, the school organized an “intro to improv comedy” class for us.  

The parts of the improv session that were actually funny happened when we were able to tune into another person and respond generously and whimsically.  The point was to follow another’s lead without hyper-analysis.  Indeed, we were to replace analysis with cognitive empathy and lightheartedness.

As we consider the present (and future) of our church and world, it is worth it to realize that we make the road by walking.  Much of this road will be improvisation.  Let’s tune into each other and respond with generosity and lightheartedness.