Being Present

“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence.” – Psalm 62:5

Two years ago, we came up with a family mission, vision, and values statement, and one of our values was peace. I was thinking today how I yell at the kids less than I used to. Yelling at kids is easy, especially when you have a lot of them: it’s the poor man’s method of crowd control.

In retrospect, two things have helped the most with that: one is making sure I have my kids’ attention when I communicate, and the second is having an expectation of first-time obedience. The latter has to do with realizing that if I have an issue with my kids’ compliance, the solution is not more yelling, but effective discipline. Yelling is just beating them over the head with verbal demands, which kids have an amazing ability to increasingly tune out; it’s an odd sort of auto-vaccinating process. Discipline addresses the heart of their behavior in a process that involves as much understanding as asking. Discipline takes a lot more time and work, but it saves you a whole lot of potential yelling down the road.

The former issue sounds pretty basic but was just as revolutionary: making sure my kids can hear me when I talk. Lots of times I’d get frustrated at them just to realize they couldn’t hear me calling up to the second floor, or even just across a room when they’re otherwise occupied. What we hear is a product of what our priorities are and how present we are—so yeah, I think getting somewhere on time is important and I’m pretty present to what needs to get done next to accomplish that, but my kids think their imaginary story is important and are more present to that than my asking them to get their shoes on. If I want my kids to be present for me, I have to be just as present to where they are in their worlds.

It makes me think about how present we are for people in general. Obviously we do have to get things done, but I can remember even as a kid wishing my mom would just sit down to ask me how I was doing, and listen. I think about how often I tell my kids to hurry up, or wait until I finish doing a chore to read to them, or think whew now I’ve got some time to get stuff done when they start playing well together instead of how can I join them and enjoy their play?

There are some practical ways we try to be present for the kids. Dave tries to sit down with each one of them alone at some point during the day to talk. We take turns taking each of them (well, the older three at this point) out on dates once a month. We try not to look at our phones too much in front of our kids—it’s amazing how much we tune out when we’re glued to our screens, and it sets a bad example if we expect our kids to be screen-free. We work on not interrupting each other so we can listen when someone talks.

But a lot of it is just a mindset. Do I wake up thinking, how can I be present for my kids today? How can I be present for Dave—for God? How often do we do the equivalent of yelling at God—this is what I want, this is how I feel—instead of waiting in silence? How often do we treat God like a consultant instead of the God that he is? And if we understood who he is, how could we be anything but present?

The Lost Art of Lingering

“[Friendship is] not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence. .. The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,’ replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. ‘People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.’ By his definition, friends are people you take the time to understand and allow to understand you.

- “Do Your FriendsActually Like You?” Sunday Review, New York Times

The first time I was aware of Dave’s existence was when I read a blog post he had written about the lost art of lingering. It struck a chord because I was efficient and task-focused to a fault: if hanging out with you doing something without aim wasn’t going to benefit my resume or what I needed to get done (and I could never see how it could), I didn’t see the point. An attitude which got me into a great grad school but into deeper and deeper isolation. Dave’s post found me around a time when I realized I may have gotten all the right things on the outside, but life on the inside was pretty lonely and unhealthy without true friends. Turning that around changed my life.

Now we’re in a different stage of life. Finding friends after thirty is tough: people have kids and disappear. They move around to follow careers or spouses or schooling. They hit the suburbs and get enclosed in enclaves—school groups, soccer leagues, church circles—that promote superficial connection and identity without pushing for anything deeper. Then there’s social media, which promotes friendship as image, self-gratifying connection, selective exposure. Pretty much the opposite of hanging out to hang out. Psychologist Robin Dunbar is quoted in the article as saying we only have five slots for high-quality friendships, which is a laughable contrast to the hundreds of “friends” folks have on Facebook.

The fact is, you have to be intentional about finding community when you have an absorbing career or family. Especially family—it’s easy to become so absorbed in your kids you feel you can never leave them, or not want to pay for childcare, but we’ve found it’s worth it. We leave the kids to go to small group, meet up with other couples; we arrange playdates when that’s not possible. All that structured community is okay, and necessary.

But I feel like the best friendships come not through planning or production, but something more natural and organic. They happen almost when you’re not looking: you’re just being. You’re looking at something else together. And in it, you’re revealing yourself, and understanding the other person.

So sometimes, it’s just about having space for the unexpected. Being open to being uncomfortably vulnerable. Being okay with mess or hassle. Being generous with your time. Being forgiving with faults. Enjoying instead of analyzing. Doing together instead of alone.

Have you ever noticed how kids are champion lingerers? We’re always telling them to hurry up, get their shoes on, finish eating, come on, come on—because they naturally linger. They ask follow-up questions even when it’s time to go. They stop to look at something interesting even when it’s not the point. They get excited about someone else’s ideas and doing stuff together.

I’ve loved that about this summer: it’s really been a golden summer, watching all four hang out together in a way they never have before. Unlike the school year, they get to do everything together—eat, play, do lessons, nap—without the usual hard timeline. In a way, they have a purer friendship now than they may ever have in the future. They’re changing each other, and bringing things out of each other no one else could have, without even realizing it. I still have to remind myself: linger with the kids instead of getting other stuff done! Hang out with Dave just to enjoy being with him. Set aside time to do that with other friends. With God. Somehow that instinct to linger gets bred out of us, but I look at them and see that without the time and margin to hang out that way with someone, I’m missing out.

Fantasy Sex Lives

I’m going to go on a limb here and talk about secret sexual sins. Not a comfortable topic. Twice in my life, I met with girls who were brave enough to confess their struggles in this area, and both times it opened the door to me doing the same. While recent studies have highlighted how often women watch porn, and certain bestsellers have shed light on erotic literature, this is still a hard topic to talk about, especially for women.

I was reflecting recently on how it is so common, even for those who are outwardly moral, to have a fantasy sex life, defined as watching or reading anything that leads to having mental fantasies often manifesting in masturbation. The actual content one struggles with may range from what most believers would call bad (porn, erotic novels) to more acceptable things (lyrics in songs, TV shows with sex scenes, christian romance books with sexual tension).

The reality is, it’s almost impossible to grow up in this culture without struggling to some extent with a fantasy sex life. Before you get married, you figure actually having sex will fix all of it, but it doesn’t: while the fantasy sex life affects the real sex life, having the real life doesn’t always affect the fantasy one. Because at heart, they are two totally different things. The real sex life is about relationship, about a real person, about putting ourselves aside, about being vulnerable. The fantasy life is about consumerism, objectification, and immediate gratification, without actually giving anything. It’s faster, easier, and more addictive.

What’s behind the fantasy life? Sometimes it’s time-of-month hormones, or being tired, or being angry, but mostly it’s an idolization of feeling desired, at least I think for women. You don’t have to foray far into the romance novel industry to figure this out: the longer the book can draw out the pursuit and ongoing sexual tension, the better.

That’s why, to me, the issue is at heart a spiritual one. There are so many rational reasons to stay away from this stuff (objectification of women, bad examples to our kids, polluting effectiveness in ministry, contributing to pedophilia, rewiring our brains, affecting our sexual expectations, wasting our time, practicing deceit), but what will make us stop?

The other night I was confronting the reality of this in our lives, and I felt overcome with sadness in a way I never had before, just sadness for myself, my friends, for those I loved, that these things which we struggle to utter to the people closest to us on earth will one day come before a holy God. I saw how much these things hurt God, and cheat us of what he wants for us, and as I was crying I started thinking about the picture of Jesus in Revelation 5: Jesus with seven eyes, seeing everything. A slain lamb, because he loves me. Standing, because he has resurrected and overcome the darkness. With seven horns, because he has complete power, power that he gives me to overcome. It’s a bit of a horror-movie image, but at that moment, it felt precious.

It doesn’t take much to see that our story with Jesus is the stuff of fantasies. He went from one world to another, changed form, became poor, suffered for us. He is the ultimate alpha male, sensitive lover, and unfailing protector that all these novels hark on about, and I suppose there is a kind of tension that we exist in, anticipating the ultimate consummation of our lives forever with him in eternity. But there’s a difference between knowing these things and feeling them deep in our hearts, in a way that takes away the hungers and habits we nurse in the dark. I think it can. I’ve experienced that, and I’m praying it for the people I know and love.

Time And Beyond Time

“If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.” –C. S. Lewis

"He has put eternity into man’s heart.” –Ecclesiastes 3:11

It’s interesting how we have to grow into the concept of time. As far as I can tell, time for our one year-old exists in two dimensions: now or never. One or the other. No in-between. I think Esme believes with all her being that if I am not giving something to her immediately, she is never her whole life ever going to have it—the concept of “wait a minute” doesn’t exist, much less waiting until tomorrow. Thus the frantic, frenzied screams of utter despair if she doesn’t get something now.

In Revelation there are many references to God as being outside of time: he was, and is, and is to come; he is praised forever and ever. With him one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8). He is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you (2 Peter 3:9), which is eerily similar to how it feels when I’m trying to tell a screaming Esme that she has to wait so I can cut up her fruit before giving it to her.

Time even for us contracts and expands depending on our experiences and perspective, but God is beyond time itself. C. S. Lewis gives the example of how God is outside of time the way an author is outside of the timeline of the story he writes. He may put the book down and think about the character without it taking any time within the storyline of the book itself. Only, of course, God does not hop from one time-series to another; he is not in a time-series at all.

This means he can be infinitely with me in my now; that he is with me in my moment in a more infinite way than anyone in my own time-world could be. In a sense, he feels my momentary pains and joys forever, and thus he understands me, knows me more deeply and fully, than anyone else could.

On the other hand, he has the long view in mind. How can I explain the concept of years or decades to Esme? Yet that is how God sees us. How can you even quantify our earthly lives in the context of eternity? Is it a nanosecond, or less? Certainly significant, but almost relatively obsolete? Yet here we are, viewing our lives in hours or weeks or years, when what God is about is suiting us for eternity. We complain about not getting what we want, when God cares about changing us into who we will be; we feel that suffering is unbearably unending, when God sees the reward, the crown and glory, the new bodies, that will be ours forever. If we really understood that, what would not be worth going through?

We are born into an eternity of forever-nows. But I see how two year-old Elijah asks “after nap?” and four year-old Eric asks “tomorrow morning?” and six year-old Ellie can count down the five weeks of summer left. We become increasingly self-absorbed in our time-worlds until we cannot conceive of anything outside of it, yet God was, is, and is to come. He is the first and last, the source and end, the creator and consummator, he is all of our time-world and yet outside of it. He is forever with us in our moments, yet infinitely patient as only one outside of time can be.

Part-Time Surgeon

I say often that I’m lucky to be able to work part-time, but what I don’t often mention is that it’s also harder to be good at what you do when you work part-time. Any part-timer has less experience than someone working full-time, but this is painfully true when it comes to operating, where volume matters. The more cases you do, the more skill and confidence you build. I suppose one could be high-volume but still a poor surgeon, but no matter how naturally gifted one is, it’s hard to rise to the skill level of those with drastically greater volume. I do in one month one-third of the cases that my full-time colleagues do in one week. I know I could be someone churning out thirty cataract surgeries a day, but there is simply no way to do that if I only work two days a week.

And it’s more than the volume. It’s the fact that I’m less available outside of the OR to follow-up on perioperative issues. I have less time or space to innovate or teach. I have less interaction with colleagues to debrief scenarios. And operating can be stressful: if I’m not on top of my game, someone is blinded (I suppose there are no part-time neurosurgeons or cardiothoracic surgeons for a reason).

And personally, it’s a hard thing to know I’m not the best at what I do: I’ve worked towards that my whole career. I found my niche, my passion, and exceled: if I wasn’t always the smartest, I was a quick learner who worked hard; I was naturally good with my hands and an effective teacher. But now, the most remarkable thing I can say about my operating is that I do it at all. I do find my work meaningful, and I know I still offer a lot, but I’m in some ways no longer the best, and it takes only the occasional complication to remind me of that.

Dave said once to me, “you have to really be humble.” And that’s true. Maybe this season is about learning to walk in humility with cheerful grace: admitting without shame when I need help, accepting unexpected outcomes as learning opportunities, counseling patients with thoughtful foresight rather than brash brevity. Reacting to judgment from colleagues with openness and a willingness to learn rather than defensiveness.

Learning how to walk in this place, though, without beating myself up or losing heart, is tough. I used to stay up all night replaying surgeries I did if they hadn’t gone perfectly, second-guessing every step, worrying since I wouldn’t be around to follow-up the next day. The loneliness, the not knowing any other part-time surgeons, was hard. This, more than anything, is what it means to me that I can’t have it all. I feel a deep, nearly inexplicable conviction that I should be home with the kids as much as I am, but this walking in career-humility is what it takes.

I see myself growing in it, though. I’m getting better at learning without beating myself up; I’m becoming less concerned with reputation; and through it all I do see the gift of being able to do what I do. As paltry as it may seem to full-timers, it is a privilege to be able to speak into and change the lives of the patients I have, to be in a world outside of the home where I can exercise different gifts, and I don’t take that for granted, however much I’ve had to give up.