Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

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How to Live a Satisfying and Reverent Life

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I recently came across an intriguing quote from the second century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who asked, “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

The question got me thinking about what things I would consider necessary for such a life. And so, before I could overthink my answer, I grabbed a pen and jotted a list into my journal:

Spend time in nature.
Move my body.
Enjoy good food.
Read.
Do good work.
Love my people.
Pet my dog.

It’s a remarkably short and pedestrian list, which perhaps means I’m the most boring person in existence. Or, maybe it means I don’t need to do much at all to live a satisfying and reverent life.

Turns out, my criteria for living a satisfying and reverent life don’t include fame or notice, worldly success, accolades or achievement. I need not travel to exotic locales or rub shoulders with influential people. I don’t have to climb ladders, set goals or check boxes. I don’t need an impressive job title, good connections, a big salary, a fancy house or name-brand shoes.

Truthfully, everything I need for a life of satisfaction and reverence is already right here in abundance — within my own self, in my own backyard, in my own community:

Fresh air. Nourishing food. Meaningful work. Beauty. Connection. Curiosity. Love.

::

A few days ago Brad and I were sitting on the back patio with our son Noah, who will be a high school senior next fall. We were having a conversation about jobs and vocations, and Noah had asked my husband and me if we thought it would be possible to afford to live in a tiny house on an annual salary of around $35,000. “It might be possible,” Brad answered, “depending on what part of the country you were living in and what other expenses you had.”

“Good,” Noah declared. “That means I might be able to work part-time, or at least less than full-time, so I’ll have more time to do what I want to do.”

“What do you mean, work part-time?” I replied, aghast. “What kind of ambition is that? Your father and I certainly aren’t going to pay to send you to college so you can work part-time!”

Here’s the irony: I responded to Noah without considering the fact that I have two college degrees and have worked part-time for the last 18 years.

I also made these remarks forgetting that just a few days earlier, the criteria I’d listed for living a full life looked a lot like what Noah was imagining.

Turns out, it’s one thing to pen a quaint list into my journal. It’s another thing entirely to consider what non-traditional choices might look like in the life of my own kid. In responding to my son’s musings about what he might like his adult life to look like, I had automatically defaulted to both society’s and my own long-held definition of “success.”

Whether part-time work and a tiny house will actually be realistic options for Noah someday isn’t really the heart of the matter here. The heart of the matter, I’m beginning to understand, is that the definition of a satisfying and reverent life won’t necessarily look the same for everyone, nor will it necessarily mirror our culture’s ever-increasing “be more, do more, earn more, have more” expectations.

A few days after that back patio conversation, I thought again about the emperor’s question as I lay in the hammock, watching the clouds wisp across a sapphire sky, listening to a singsonging trio of goldfinches as they came and went at the feeder. The hammock rocked like a cradle in the spring breeze. I could feel the sun-warmed fabric beneath my bare legs. Above my head, seed pods dangled from the branches of the river birch tree like tassels on a Chinese lantern.

Do you see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

I think I do. I think maybe, on the cusp of my 49th year, I am finally beginning to see.

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.

How to Chase a Different Kind of Great

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“Everyone is chasing status, but serving the vulnerable is wide open in every field.” — Andy Crouch

I’m intimately familiar with chasing status. As an author, I’ve spent countless hours strategizing how to sell more books, attract more readers, build my platform, gain more social media shares, and rub shoulders with influential people.

I could tell you that this emphasis on networking and platform is an integral part of my job as a writer, and that would be partially true. But that’s not the whole story. The truth is, I like the status that comes with being a published author. I like the recognition. I like being known. I chase status because I want status.

I’ve been chasing status for a long time, and here’s what I’ve learned after years of hot pursuit: the chase never ends.

No matter how much we achieve, status is ephemeral. We will always want more – whether it’s better book sales, a more prestigious job title, a higher salary, a bigger house, a more expensive car, or a fancier purse. Chasing status is a race we will never win.

This is a lesson that’s taken me a long time to learn, and truthfully, on most days, I’m still learning it.

In his interview, Andy Crouch noted that when we focus our tunnel-vision solely on being the biggest, the best, and the most successful, we lose the opportunity to use our gifts to benefit others rather than ourselves. So many of us it seems, myself included, are wildly spinning our wheels in a fruitless attempt to Become Someone Important. Yet in doing so, we leave in our wakes a vast expanse of potential to make a real difference.

Setting our sights so narrowly on reaching whatever it is we’ve deemed The One Big Thing means we often miss the wide-open field of less glamorous but no less important work available to us.

This kind of opportunity likely won’t result in being known or recognized or famous, but as Martin Luther King, Jr., observed, there is the opportunity for a different kind of greatness here.

Last week, as part of my work for The Salvation Army, I had the opportunity to interview Daniel, a recovering crack cocaine addict who is eight months sober, on the road back to physical and mental health, and, having recently completed training, about to begin volunteering as a peer support counselor. As we chatted, the mix of perseverance, strength, and humility I heard in Daniel’s voice touched me deeply.

Writing part-time for The Salvation Army isn’t glamorous work. The story I wrote about Daniel, for example, will be included in a newsletter that will be mailed to fewer than 800 people, and I suspect far fewer than that will actually read the article. That work won’t impact book sales, help me build my platform, or earn me any name recognition. There’s no status in this kind of writing. And yet, talking with Daniel and writing his story was some of the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.

A couple of Sundays ago in church I listened to a soloist sing “Go Light Your World.” It was Senior Sunday, the day we bless the graduating high school seniors and send them off, and I teared up as I thought about the potential of each of these young men and women to impact the world.

The truth is, though, the ability to make a difference has no age limit. Each one of us, no matter how young or old, has the potential to carry our candle, to “run to the darkness, seek out the helpless, confused and torn,” as the song goes. Each one of us has been blessed with gifts we can use not just to increase our own status, but to serve those in need around us.

Reaching out to the Daniels in your world and the organizations that serve them with your God-given gifts won’t make you famous. It won’t earn you a lot of money or accolades or notoriety. It won’t make you “successful” by modern-day standards. But this I know for sure: it will offer you the opportunity for a different but no less beautiful kind of greatness, the kind of greatness that will bless you unexpectedly beyond measure.

The Finish Line Isn’t Always the Most Important Part of the Race

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Last week I had to cut short an interview I was doing for my new job when I realized I was going to be late to pick up my kids from school. The man I was interviewing on the phone was kind and gracious, but still, it was an awkward moment, and I felt like an unprofessional amateur.

As I sped down South Street toward the middle school, my cell phone rang, and I knew from the ring tone it was Rowan calling from the sidewalk outside his school, wondering where I was as he watched all the cars pull up to and away from the curb.

By the time I got home from the school pick-up circuit, dialed the manager I’d interrupted 20 minutes before to continue the interview, finished the conversation and hung up, I sat back in my chair, sweaty, flustered, and limp with defeat.

Cleary this new-job-work-from-home-be-a-good-mother-and-write-books-too endeavor was not going to work. Clearly I stunk as a professional, stunk as a mother, and, having struggled to string together ten creative words all week, stunk as a writer too.

No one has ever accused me of being glass-half-full.

That was Friday. On Sunday morning I ran the Lincoln Half Marathon. It was a great race, and I felt good the whole way — my breathing was easy, my body felt strong, and I finished in a respectable-for-me time. After I crossed the finish line, I went home, posted a Facebook photo of me with a medal around my neck and my number pinned to the front of my shirt, and celebrated by eating a great many delicious and unhealthy foods.

Later that afternoon, though, I remembered something important about that race, something the Facebook photo didn’t necessarily reveal, which is this:

I didn’t cross the Sunday morning finish line without days, weeks, and months of training first.

Our results-right-now culture has us programmed to expect instantaneous aptitude, but the reality is, doing a hard thing like starting a new job, becoming a new parent, walking through loss, or navigating a new season of life is a process that entails persistent work, growing pains, trial and error, and both small and large successes and failures along the way.

Case in point: My final training run for the half marathon was one of the worst training runs I’ve had in more than 30 years of running. It was so miserable, in fact, that afterward, as I lay on the sunroom floor in a heaving heap, I announced out loud to myself and the dog that I was done with half marathons forever. Two weeks later, I had one of my best races ever.

Last week was hard as I struggled to balance the new demands of work, parenting, home, and the creative life. I was hard on myself for failing to do it all perfectly, and I assumed that because I hadn’t succeeded right out of the gate, I wasn’t going to succeed at all.  Luckily, a 13-mile race, the culmination of four months of training, reminded me that’s simply not true.

If, like me, you’ve been hard on yourself as you struggle through something big, hard or new,  I want to gently remind you that big things, hard things, and new things don’t magically become small, easy, and routine overnight.

The Sunday morning finish line is wonderfully gratifying and a lot of fun, but the days, weeks, and months of  two-steps-forward-one-step-back are what get us there. It’s the “pressing on” part, as Paul reminds us, that ultimately brings us to the prize.

Turns out, those hard beginnings and demoralizing middles might actually be the most important part of the race.

Why I Said Yes to a Part-Time Job {or, Let’s Talk Real about the Creative Life}

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When I left the traditional workplace five years ago, after ten years working part-time as a fundraising writer for Nebraska public television and radio, I never expected I would want to return to a “regular job.” But here’s something I’ve learned in five years of full-time writing: flexibility and an open mind are key to having a fulfilling, productive, sustainable creative life. If something’s not working, you have to be willing to admit it’s not working and have the courage to try something new.

As a Triple Type A planner, it’s been hard for me to live in the gray space of not knowing when my next project will turn up. Off and on over the last five years I’ve often been anxious about whether I would get enough freelance writing and editing assignments and whether I would land another book contract in order to be able to contribute financially to our household. I missed the stability of a steady, reliable paycheck (to say nothing of human interaction – turns out, the Beagle-Corgi and the Philodendron don’t quite cut it).

Five years ago, I also didn’t realize that a writer typically doesn’t get a book contract every year or so…nor should they (I know of a very small minority of writers who manage to do it, but the fact is, writing a book every year is nearly impossible). That said, I realized I had begun to rely on book advances as a part of my income, and the pressure to produce book after book was becoming increasingly burdensome.

Here’s the real deal, friends (at least the way I see it): unless you have a very large platform or have established yourself as a multi-book best-selling author, you are likely not going to be able to earn even a part-time living as an author of books without supplementing your income in a variety of creative ways — and even then, you might struggle. The truth is, even with three published books under my belt, several freelance book editing projects a year, a paid monthly column in my local newspaper, and a handful of paid articles every year, I was still barely eking out a very modest part-time income.

Please know, I don’t say this to deter you from pursuing your creative dream, whether it’s to be a writer or a musician or an artist or a crafter. We need to pursue our passions. I believe from the top of my head to the tips of my toes that creativity is imperative to the health of our souls.

All I’m saying is that you should pursue your passion alongside a healthy serving of reality. If you are looking to earn a living as an author, you better also have a strong entrepreneurial spirit and be willing to get creative with making the most of your skills in new and unique ways.

Honestly, I don’t have much of an entrepreneurial spirit. The idea of launching a series of web classes or an online membership community for writers or an I-don’t-even-know-what (see? not creative in that way) makes me want to shave my head, don a drapey orange robe and eat Godiva chocolate bunnies while chanting in Sanskrit. In other words, retreat as fast as I can into a monastic existence that also provides copious amounts of quality chocolate.

Alas, all this to say, I am thrilled to have accepted a part-time job as a writer for The Salvation Army Western Division! And despite the fact that I just dedicated the preceding seven  paragraphs to talking about money, money isn’t the only reason I am delighted with this new opportunity. I’ve been freelancing for The Salvation Army for a few months now and have enjoyed every moment of it.

Plus, ever since I wrote a chapter in 50 Women about Catherine Booth, co-founder with her husband William of The Salvation Army, I have had a tremendous respect for the work The Salvation Army does with the people who are most in need in our communities. It’s an honor and a privilege to work for an organization that for more than 150 years has been serving those society has deemed unworthy of support, respect, and love.

Add to that the fact that as I was perusing an old journal this week, I saw I had written a prayer a couple of years ago asking that I would find non-profit human services organization that would be a good fit for my skills. I’d forgotten all about that prayer, but God hadn’t. As God has fanned into flame my desires to serve others with my specific gifts, he has been moving me toward this point in my spiritual and vocational  journey all along. God is the best!

So that’s my big news. And just so we’re clear, I’ll still be writing here once a week or so, and I hope to continue to write books, God willing. Truth be told, I’m a little anxious about adding 20 hours of work to what already feels like a pretty full schedule, but as my agent Rachelle reminded me, I tend to be a person whose efficiency increases with my workload (thank you Triple Type A personality), so we’ll see. Something will inevitably have to give; time will tell what that something is.

Am I disappointed that I couldn’t make a viable part-time living as a full-time writer? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But I’m also absolutely comfortable with and genuinely excited about this new phase of the journey.

The moral of the story? Pursue your passion with gusto, don’t be afraid to make mistakes (that’s the only way we really learn, right?), and know that there’s an infinite number of ways to make it all work. God’s in it, and he always, always has our best interests at heart.