Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Michelle

The Value of Doing Your Work Well…Even When It Goes Unnoticed

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Last June on our family vacation to Maui, I started my days on the balcony. Each morning before the boys awoke, I slipped into one of the plush hotel robes that hung in the closet, poured a cup of coffee, slid open the glass door and settled into a patio chair, my bare feet propped on the metal railing still damp with dew. I listened to the exotic cackles and calls of unfamiliar tropical birds, luxuriated in the humid breeze on my face and let myself awaken.

I loved observing the early morning buzz of activity taking place four stories below. As the rising sun painted the palm fronds golden, I watched the attendants in their crisp polo shirts and belted shorts navigate carts towering with clean, folded towels along the resort’s pathways, stopping to distribute neat stacks beneath the canvas cabanas.

Across the way, a shop keeper raised the metal shutter of the dive store, announcing with a clatter that they were open for business.

A gardener hosed down the concrete, while another attendant dutifully lined up the lounge chairs, one after the other in undulating rows alongside the curving edge of the pool.

My first morning on the balcony, I watched a trim, older woman bend low over the shorn grass and use a small straw hand broom to whisk spent blossoms and browned, crinkled leaves into a dustpan. When she completed one small section of the garden, she pushed her wheeled barrel to the next section and began again, crouching low over the ground, whisking and sweeping, leaving the emerald carpet of grass pristine in her wake.

Every morning of our week-long stay in Maui I sat on the balcony in my hotel robe, white mug in hand, and watched the groundskeeper in her neatly pressed uniform and her wide-brimmed woven hat, cord cinched under her neck, as she methodically tidied the garden. Every morning the grass was littered anew with spent blossoms and leaves, and every morning she set to work, crouching, whisking, gathering, disposing.

She moved like a Tai Chi master – slowly and fluidly, but with absolute precision. In the six mornings I watched her, she never missed a single errant petal or leaf.

The groundskeeper’s job was not glamorous, and I don’t want to make the mistake of romanticizing her work. It was back-breaking labor, done day in and day out under the searing Maui sun, undoubtedly for little more than minimum wage, if that. Yet in observing her carefully over several days, I could see from her scrupulous care and meticulous attention to every detail that she took pride in her work. I suspect few people noticed her or recognized the impact of her labor, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. What mattered, it seemed, was the work itself and doing it well. She was committed to her work, regardless of whether anyone noticed the results of her labor or not.

Seven months after our trip to Maui, I still think about the island’s fragrant air, its unceasing tropical breezes, the tumbling Pacific waves, the sea turtle that swam so close to me when I was snorkeling, I almost could have grazed its barnacled back with my fingertips.

Strangely, though, what I think about most often is the groundskeeper in her wide-brimmed woven hat, bending low, whisking and sweeping the lush garden clean.

Why Small Talk {even about the weather} Is More Important Than You Might Think

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Recently I was reviewing the daily listings I had recorded in my gratitude journal during January, and I noticed something I didn’t expect to see. Nearly every day my list of three or four “gratitudes” included at least one interaction with another person:

Catching up with Summer over coffee.

Stopping on the bike path to pet Kona and chat with Mary Jo.

A friendly conversation with the Hobby Lobby cashier.

Laughing with friends at Trivia Night.

Reconnecting with Kelli.

Chatting about the cold snap with the guy at the birdseed store.

I was surprised. The truth is, I’m not the most social person you’ll ever meet. Given the choice between time spent with others and time spent alone, I’ll typically opt for solitude. Yet in examining the pages of my journal, it was obvious that even the briefest interaction with another person, including a stranger, had been less an empty exchange of pleasantries and more a legitimate bright spot in my day.

It was clear from the variety of people and the types of interactions that neither the topic nor the duration of the conversation were as important as the simple act of connecting with another human being.

That said, I was also a little dismayed. Was my life so dull, I wondered, that making small talk with a stranger was enough to qualify as an entry on my gratitude list?

Turns out, a growing body of research supports the notion that small talk benefits us more than we might think.

In a 2014 study published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” researchers revealed that daily interactions with casual acquaintances or even strangers contributed to day-to-day satisfaction and contentment. Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, contends that people who reach out to strangers feel a significantly greater sense of belonging.

“It’s not that talking to the barista is better than talking to your husband,” said Dunn. “But interactions with more peripheral members of our social network actually matter for our well-being.”

Others social science researchers note that small talk with acquaintances and strangers increases our empathy, helps us find common ground and bonds us with others.

Examining my gratitude list for January reminded me that we need each other not only during difficult seasons, but also amid the ordinary comings and goings of our daily lives.

We need to see others and to be seen.

We need to be present to others and know that others are present with us.

We need to listen to others and to be heard.

These simple interactions might seem trivial on the surface, but they are important because they remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves – individual threads woven together to create a vibrant tapestry.

Last week my neighbor, Marian, stopped by my house to drop off a book. We chatted for a few minutes in my living room, our conversation meandering from topic to topic: books we’d read recently, her future travel plans, my dog’s languid disposition and, of course, the weather.

It wasn’t a long conversation – in fact, Marian didn’t even take off her coat as she perched on the edge of the wing chair – and yet, after she left, I felt an inexplicable lightness in both my body and my spirit.

Later that night, before I clicked off the bedside lamp, I penned a few more entries into my gratitude journal. Sure enough Afternoon chat with Marian made the day’s list.

This post was first published in the Lincoln Journal Star on February 9.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Why You Don’t Have to Grasp for God

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The wind is gusting hard this morning. Tree branches clash and clink, coated in ice; twigs screech across the sunroom window like fingernails on a chalkboard. From my desk I watch the sparrows spilling seed at the feeder, the dark-eyed Juncos pecking at the dirty snow. High up on the trunk of the river birch tree, a strip of papery bark waves in the breeze like a prayer flag.

“So now what?” my counselor asked me in our session last week. “What do you want to do now that the book is out and your responsibilities there are easing up a bit?”

“I just want to do my regular stuff – work, write, be with my family,” I replied.

It was such a simple answer – some would say a boring answer – but for me, the answer to my counselor’s question was something of a revelation.

My desire to “do my regular stuff” is an indication that I have relinquished (at least somewhat) what was once my relentless drive to produce and achieve. I feel less driven, less inclined to strive and accomplish, less need to push. Instead, I sense a broader, deeper ease and openness in myself, not only in my professional life, but in my spiritual life as well.

Last month I read something in Ann Voskamp’s Advent devotional The Greatest Gift that struck me hard. “When do you find yourself striving, reaching, grasping, for the next rung to try to pull yourself closer to God?” she asked.

I penned that question into my journal and pondered it. There was deep truth for me in Ann’s words.

All my life I have been striving, reaching and grasping – striving toward professional achievements, grasping at personal goals, reaching in my relationships, and yes, even striving to pull myself closer to God. I’ve often looked with envy at others who speak about God with seemingly more intimacy than I have with him. I assumed they had something I didn’t. I assumed that if I pushed and grasped and strove harder, I would find what they had.

Why You Don't Have to Pull Yourself Closer to God

I am finally beginning to see the truth though, which is that we don’t need to strive, reach and grasp for the next rung to pull ourselves closer to God simply because God has already come close to us — closer, perhaps, than we can ever perceive.

I know now that I don’t need to pray for the deepest desire of my heart – to be close to God – because the deepest desire of my heart has already been answered. I have God right here and right now. I had God yesterday. I will have God tomorrow and the day after that and for all of eternity.

It is simply in our ordinary living and being that we find God. He has already drawn near. He has been here all along.

The winter wind has died down. Outside my window, the pine boughs barely shift, the birch bark prayer flag is stiff and still. The sparrows and Juncos sit tucked into the lilac shrub, alert and expectant.

I sit at my desk and watch the snow begin to fall, quieting the world in stillness.

I’m doing “my regular stuff,” as I told my counselor. I am working. I am writing. I am folding laundry and stopping at the post office to mail a package. I am spending time with my family.

And in all that is regular and ordinary, I am already and always with God.

How to Replace a Bad Habit with a Better One

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“You complain all the time,” she said, turning around from the passenger seat to look me in the eye as I sat squashed between our two sons. “You are relentlessly negative.”

Only a sister could make such a declaration and live to tell about it.

My first reaction was defensiveness. “I am not relentlessly negative,” I shot back, emphatically shaking my head. “And I definitely do not complain all the time.”

My sister didn’t press the issue. She simply looked at me a beat too long, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Oh really?” before turning around to face forward again.

The conversation in the car shifted to another topic. I wasn’t angry, and I didn’t hold my sister’s accusation against her. We DeRushas tend to speak forthrightly to one another – blame it on our no-nonsense Puritan sensibilities. But I also dismissed her declaration, refusing to even consider that there might be some truth in it.

Later, though, I couldn’t get Jeanine’s comments out of my head. I argued with her in my mind, continuing to defend myself. But the more I tried to insist to myself that she was wrong, the more I realized she was right.

The truth is, I do complain. A lot.

I’m cold. I have a headache. My elbow hurts. I’m tired. The kids are bugging me. My work is boring. I have ennui. I’m sick of walking the dog. Why do I always have to be the one to empty the dishwasher? Who left their dirty socks in the middle of the living room floor? How come we never do anything fun? Is this all there is to life?

I complain for a lot of reasons: to get attention; to elevate myself; to garner sympathy and compassion; to be seen and heard.

But we don’t have to dig deeply into my psyche to identify the number one reason I complain. It’s actually quite simple: I complain because it’s a habit. Half the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Near-constant complaining has become my mindless modus operandi.

In her book Better than Before, Gretchen Rubin advises that we should “choose habits mindfully.” Choosing mindfully, it turns out, is the key not only to establishing a good habit, but also to breaking a bad one.

On January 1, my sister’s accusation still ringing in my ears, I resolved to break my habit of mindless complaining and relentless negativity. The challenge, I knew, was that I needed to do more than simply state my good intentions. I knew, as Rubin said, that I would need to mindfully choose a good habit that would, over time, help me begin to pave a new neural pathway in my brain.

Enter the daily gratitude journal.

Or, I should say, re-enter the gratitude journal.

Eight years ago, inspired by Ann Voskamp’s bestselling book One Thousand Gifts, I bought a cheap journal, laid it open on the kitchen counter between the coffee maker and the fruit bowl, picked up a pen, and began to list the everyday, ordinary moments that brought me joy. In total my kids and I and occasionally Brad listed 1,955 gifts over a three-year period.

The first gift listed was “spring song of the chickadee.” The last was penned by Brad, evidently on our anniversary: “18 years with my love.”

That was more than four years ago. Truthfully I don’t remember why I quit the gratitude journal. I don’t even remember when I closed the cover over its wrinkled pages and tucked the notebook into a cabinet, where it still lives today.

I keep my new gratitude journal – a beautiful notebook with a richly vibrant cover, a gift from a dear friend – on my nightstand. Every night before I click off the light, I think back over my day and pen three things for which I am grateful. Sometimes I list more than my three; occasionally it’s a challenge to come up with the bare minimum.

The truth is, I inherently lean toward glass-half-empty. My default is pessimism. Because it doesn’t come naturally to me, I need to choose optimism consciously, and one of the ways I’m trying to do that is to choose gratitude every day.

As with my prior journal, the things I’ve listed so far are ordinary, even mundane – coffee with a friend; glimpse of a sleek fox trotting across the golf course; January sun after a string of gray days. And yet I know that in some ways, it’s their very ordinariness that makes these gifts special.

Today I’m taking my “everyday, ordinary life – my sleeping, eating, going-to-work and walking-around life – and placing it before God as an offering.”

Today I’m mindfully choosing praise over complaint.

Today I’m choosing a new habit mindfully and beginning to repave a well-worn habit of complaint and negativity with one of gratitude.

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So tell me, do you keep a gratitude journal? And have you ever tried to quit a bad habit by replacing it with a better one? 

How Counseling Can Help You Find Wholeness

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Late last summer I finally admitted to myself that I’d been struggling with low-level depression and discontent for a while, and so, I made the call I’d dreaded making. Honestly, I didn’t want to make an appointment with my counselor because I didn’t want to do the hard work I knew would be inevitable. I didn’t want to dig deep into past hurts, unpack my baggage, sort through the messy detritus of my life.

I’m glad I made the call. Though I was right — it has been hard to sit on the sofa and talk through my junk every other week — it’s been good…and necessary. Slowly my counselor has helped me name my disappointments and failings, my confusion and questions, my hopes and dreams. Slowly she has helped me begin to see that I can be me, even amid the demands and expectations of a book release.

As I wrote to my newsletter subscribers earlier this week, I’m not typically at my best when I am midwifing a book into the world. I worry a lot and try to control things that are beyond my control. The increased time on social media and the increased focus on numbers and outcomes isn’t good for my soul. I struggle to “come down” from the rev of constant interaction and communication. Over time both my body and my brain begin to hum with an agitated restlessness.

Beyond the busyness and hustle, though, releasing a book is also fraught with fear for me — fear that harkens back to the publication of my first book in 2014.

In spite of my best efforts, my first book, a memoir, was not a publishing success. In fact, it sold so few copies, the publishing house’s marketing board turned down my proposal for a second book, a decision based largely on the abysmal sales record for the memoir.

This was a major blow. Not only was I angry, bitter and disappointed, I see now that I was also deeply ashamed. In the aftermath of the book release, all I wanted to do was to hide. I daydreamed about quitting writing and publishing altogether and getting a job at the local greenhouse, surrounding myself with plants and flowers, thrusting my hands into damp dirt all day long.

Instead, I did the only thing I knew to how do at the time: I kicked my hustle into overdrive. I put all my energy into selling the book proposal to another publisher, and when that ultimately failed, I wrote a brand-new proposal for an entirely different book and started the process all over again.

I also focused on managing “my failure” (which, by the way, is like trying to manage outcomes, only infinitely more depressing). “You talk about your book’s supposed ‘failure’ an awful lot,” a friend, himself an author, gently pointed out. “You need to be kinder to yourself.”

I see now that publicly harping on my failure was my way of controlling it. If I acknowledged the failure publicly, if I deemed my book a failure first, I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of others declaring my book – and me – a failure.

At the time I told myself I was calling a spade a spade. In actuality, I was trying to avoid the very real pain of disappointment, shame and sorrow that accompanies failure. I was trying to convince myself that I was naming, and therefore owning, my failure, but the truth is, I wasn’t naming it. I was shaming myself.

Even more detrimental was the fact that in refusing to acknowledge and process my failure, I refused the opportunity to let it teach me, to learn from it, and to allow it to shape me into a better version of myself. If I had truly looked deeply at my humiliation, shame, pain and sorrow, I would have seen there was a reason for it. I would have seen that my entire identity, my entire sense of self, was wrapped up in that book.

How Counseling Can Help You Find Wholeness

So as you can see, there’s been a lot to unpack with my counselor these last few months. There’s a reason I procrastinated making that initial phone call before finally picking up the phone late last summer. And yet, I know now more than ever that counseling has helped me heal in ways that’s allowed me to grow toward greater wholeness.

As I wrote in True You, the journey to wholeness and healing doesn’t begin with surgery or even with diagnosis. The journey to wholeness begins with admitting you are broken.

The phone call to my counselor was an admission that I was broken and in need of healing. And though it was difficult and often uncomfortable work, making that call and subsequently naming and shedding the shame and fear I’d held in my heart since my first book released in 2014 ultimately made way for a healthier book release this time around.

The truth is, sometimes we resist wholeness because, although it sounds lovely on paper, saying yes to the invitation requires a whole lot of hard work. But while saying yes to the invitation into wholeness is a risk, to be sure, it’s also the entry-point into a transformed life.

True You will be what it will be and go where it will go. I’ve done the work. I will continue to do the work. But I also know that my value as a human being is not defined by this or any other book.