idolatry

When You Find Rot at the Root…Again

May 2, 2018 By Michelle

Recently I rearranged my office. I swapped the curbside table I’d been using for a legitimate desk to give myself more workspace, Goodwilled a bunch of knickknacks, and shifted the orchid from the top of the bookshelf, where it had sat for the last two years, to the corner of my desk.

Not long after, I noticed an influx of ants, mainly on my desk, but some on the floor beneath it too. I thought at first they were emanating from my laptop. I’m a snacker-writer, so I worried that a few too many crumbs had fallen between the keys and provided a pantry of sorts for the ants.

But yesterday morning I discovered the source of the ants was not my laptop, but my beautiful orchid. When I gingerly lifted the plant from its plastic pot, I saw immediately that the root ball was swarming with hundreds of ants. They’d made a nest amid the moist, gnarled roots. Beneath all its prolific beauty, down at the root, the plant was a decaying mess.

Initially I tried to save the orchid, but as I stood over the kitchen sink with the plant in my hand, the ants scattering helter-skelter across the counter and down the cabinets, I quickly realized my efforts were futile. Finally, ants running up my arms, I dashed out the front door and dumped the whole plant, pot and all, into the trash can at the curb.

Here’s the question I asked myself yesterday afternoon as I sat at my desk, its white surface disinfected and clean of ants, the orchid gone:

How many times in my life have I been wooed by the picture-perfect exterior — the intoxicating, alluring blooms — only to discover that my desires were actually rotten at the core?

Readers, subscribers, social media shares, book contracts, sales, achievement, success. I’ve wanted it all – a whole bountiful spray of blooms, bending heavy under the weight of abundance. But what I’ve discovered is that my desires are often a tangled mess of decay deep down at the root.

Sometimes we rediscover something about ourselves we thought we’d “taken care of” a good long time ago. Sometimes we realize we’ve fallen prey to the same-old root rot problem again — the problem we thought we’d fixed, the problem we thought we’d already overcome.

And then up it rears, the unseemly underneath exposed again, making you want to chuck the whole thing in the trash can at the curb, roots and blooms and pot and all.

It’s hard work, this turning back, this beginning again. I’m not alway sure I’m up for it, to be quite honest. I feel like I should be further along on this spiritual journey by now, less inclined to succumb to the same old temptations.

Yet despite my frustration and dismay, and no matter how rotten the roots beneath the blooms, I remember that God doesn’t chuck me into the trash can at the curb, roots and blooms and pot and all. I remember that God gives me grace, again and again and again. He graciously shows me the error of my ways. He shines his light into my dark places, not so that I will recoil in shame, but so I can see his love, even there.

God patiently redirects my gaze from the pretty, enticing blooms to the roots underneath that need tending and nurturing. And he reminds me that he is always with me, even there, even as I begin again.

I have a new orchid on my desk. I bought it at Trader Joe’s – they sell them cheap there. It’s not as pretty as the one I had before. This one is a bit spindly, with far fewer blooms. But its roots are clean of ants and decay, wrapped tightly together, snug in the bottom of the pot.

I’ll tend this plant more diligently than I did its predecessor. Every now and then I’ll lift it gently by its stem from the pot to look underneath, remembering that the orchid’s health depends not just on the pretty blooms above, but also on the condition of its roots below.

A post from the archives (2015), but still (sigh) very much relevant.

That Time I Dreamed about the Pope {or, How I Desire to be Known}

July 30, 2015 By Michelle

We’re just back from my favorite place in the world: the North Shore of Lake Superior, where we have a cabin on the edge of the lake that looks like an ocean. I’ve loved this place ever since my very first trip there with Brad more than 20 years ago.

Up on the North Shore, you can walk through a birch grove and hear nothing but the sound of the wind through the leaves, the call of a chickadee, the crunch of pebbles beneath your hiking boots.

You can underhand toss a smooth-as-butter rock into the glassy lake and watch the ripples expand further and further out until they disappear, blending into the great expanse of water that stretches as far as your eye can see.

You can leap wild and carefree with a yelp that echoes into the cavernous space, a split-second moment of blood-roiling exhilaration before the cold tomb closes over your head and you emerge sputtering and flailing.

You can sit on a boulder, your feet tucked in tight, and watch the water swirl around your fingertips as it burbles toward the thundering falls.

You can dip a paddle into strands of lakeweed wavering like snakes. You can laugh till your sides ache when your mom’s marshmallow erupts into flames and slides into the coals in one goopy glump. You can perch on the rocks and watch as day ebbs into night and the sky and the lake become one.

I love all these things about the North Shore, but on this trip, I realized there’s one thing about our cabin on the edge of Lake Superior that I love most of all:

There’s no wifi. No computer. No Dish, cable or DirectTV. On some days, depending on who knows what, there isn’t even a proper cell phone connection.

At the cabin, I am truly disconnected. For one week out of fifty-two, I let it all go – the likes and comments; the Amazon rankings; the who’s arguing about which issue and which movie star is getting divorced from whom and whose blog post went viral and whose book is coming out when and why did she get an advance copy and I didn’t and I don’t think Kate Middleton should have chosen that hat and maybe I should try to pitch the Huffington Post again and did you hear about Whitney Houston’s daughter and why did I only get 11 shares on that blog post it took me four hours to write and hey I had no idea capri pants aren’t in style anymore.

Gone. Off the radar screen entirely with nary a second thought. It all melts away, and I don’t even notice it’s gone. Until, that is, I recognize what’s slipped into its spot, what’s taken its rightful place in the forefront, in full, crystal-clear focus:

My life.

My people. My place. My real thoughts, emotions and deepest desires.

My real life.

I know, I know these things should always be first; these things should always take priority. I mean, how pathetic, right, that my online life takes precedence over my actual, real, in-the-flesh life? But that’s the honest, ugly truth. It does. Not always, not all the time, not every minute. But often enough. Too often.

“I live my life in widening rings which spread out to cover everything.”

That’s the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I read that line in one of his poems while I was up at the cabin, and it stopped me in my tracks. Because the hard truth is, I don’t always — or even often — live my life in widening rings. When I choose social media, when I choose to let social media dictate my life rather than living and being fully present in my real, actual, in-the-flesh life, I find myself living in an increasingly smaller and smaller space. More often than not, social media and my online life press in on me from all sides and crush the very life and breath out of me.

This, friends, is a quandary. Because as much as I dislike it, as much as I find that social media zaps the life right out of me, it’s an integral part of a writer’s professional life these days. Now, I could be brave like my friend Shawn Smucker, who recently closed his Facebook and Twitter accounts entirely, but frankly, I’m chicken. My platform stinks like giant rotten tomatoes as it is; can I really afford to step off the grid?

Or, here’s another, more difficult question: am I simply offering the platform rationale as an excuse? Is the real truth that I won’t step away from social media because it feeds my need to be known?

While I was on vacation in Minnesota I had a dream that I recalled in intricate detail when I awoke. In the dream, I was in charge of a visit by the Pope (it was not Pope Francis, but Francis’s successor, apparently). When I met the Pope, I extended my hand and introduced myself, and as he shook my hand, the Pope looked at me closely, and then said, I kid you not, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar…Oh! I know! I read your articles in the Journal Star!”

No lie. I dreamed that the Pope recognized me from my articles in the Lincoln Journal Star.

Once I was awake and had stopped dying of laughter, I realized the gravity of this funny-but-not-really-funny dream. It pointed in technicolor clarity to my desire to be known. Recognized. Dare I say, famous.

This, friends, is my be-all and end-all idol: I want to be known and valued.

Now here’s the point where, if I were a good Christian writer, I’d tell you that I am known – known by the One and Only One who matters. But I can’t do that, at least not honestly, because even though I believe and know it in my head, I don’t always believe and truly know it in my heart. And so to go down that road right now in this blog post, with relevant Bible verses and encouraging words, wouldn’t really be truthful or authentic.

Maybe this is where we come back to my struggles with faith. Maybe I haven’t been transformed as much as I’d like to believe. Because the truth is, if I truly believed and knew in my heart that God knows me and loves me and values me, and that’s all that really counts or matters when all is said and done, would I really continue to struggle day in and day out with this idol? Wouldn’t this problem be solved by now if I really believed I am known by God and that being known by him is the only being known that matters?

And how about this: if I don’t always truly believe and know in my heart that I am known by God and that’s all that matters, can I say I really, truly believe in God?

Oh boy. We’ve gotten ourselves down into one big ol’ rabbit hole, haven’t we? And you thought this post was going to be all Minnesota pretty pictures, didn’t you? {yeah, me too – thus the trouble with writing…sometimes it leads you where you don’t expect and where you don’t really want to go}

It seems I’ve been doing this a lot lately: leaving you with more questions than answers, more unsettled than peaceful. I’m sorry about that, I truly am. I guess though, for what it’s worth, questions and unsettledness go hand-in-hand with real life, and maybe even with real faith. At least that’s the way it seems to be for me.

For now, I’ll leave you with that Rilke quote again, because I think there’s something there that’s relevant to all the topics and questions I’ve touched on here: social media, being present, asking questions, wrestling with idolatry, living out faith. Friends, together let’s ask ourselves this; let’s sit with this question a bit today:

Are you living your life in widening rings? And if your answer is no, like it is for me, how might you begin to change that?

Even Now, Peace Like a River

July 14, 2015 By Michelle

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A few weeks before Spiritual Misfit released to the public, I mailed out a bunch of advance copies to people – “influencers,” as they are called in publishing lingo. Some of these people I knew a little bit from the Christian blogging/writing world, some were people I didn’t have a personal connection with at all. Many who received those advance copies didn’t respond. This, I know, is par for the course. People are busy; they have their own books to promote; they have their own close writer friends to support. This is the way the system works.

But here’s the hard part: some of the people who had initially expressed interest in my book ultimately didn’t respond either. I heard nothing from them. Utter silence. No response.

I get it. I do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. People are busy. We bite off more than we can chew. And frankly, people are allowed to not like a book. Just because you send someone a free copy of your book, even if they’ve told you they want to read it, doesn’t mean they have to like it.

But here’s where it gets ugly (You thought you’d heard all my book-related angst and ugliness, didn’t you? Yeah, no. There’s more. Pour yourself a second cup of coffee.) You know what happens when you put your story into the world and into the hands of people you admire and respect and who you want to like you and respect you back, and you hear nothing?

You assume the worst.

Not only do you assume that your writing didn’t resonate with them; you also begin to assume your story itself didn’t resonate.

And, because you wrote a memoir, a story about your own life, you begin to assume that you, as a human being, didn’t resonate.

Maybe they think my story is baloney, you wonder. Maybe they think I’m a lousy Christian, or a terrible parent or a bad person.

Maybe, you worry, they simply decided they don’t like you.

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Once you’re tumbling down this raging river, friends, let me tell you, it’s awfully hard to extricate yourself. I know, because I’ve been caught in the currents of self-doubt, insecurity and, let’s get really real here, self-loathing, for fifteen months now, ever since Spiritual Misfit released a year ago this past April. For fifteen months I haven’t been able to let it go. My brain works overtime, churning out questions, doubts, insecurities, fears. When I can’t sleep, when I’m staring at the shaft of light from the bathroom nightlight, piercing the hallway darkness, I think about those people, the ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t acknowledge my book. I know who they are — believe me, as a first-time author, you know who you send your book to, and who responds and who doesn’t. I obsess over them.

It seems God has had enough of this foolishness, because last Saturday morning, he plunked me into a chair on my back patio and he gave me a stern talking to. God used Isaiah to get right up in my grill. Isaiah is really good at that, I’ve come to realize over the years. When God wants to get all up in your grill, he uses Isaiah. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is good for you and leads you along the paths you should follow. Oh, that you had listened to my commands. Then you would have peace flowing like a gentle river and righteousness rolling over you like waves in the sea.” (Isaiah 47: 17-18)

Did you catch that? Should follow.

That word should is important. God leads us toward the right paths, the paths we should follow, but he also gives us a choice; he allows us to choose whether or not we will follow the paths he has chosen for us. Choose the right way, the way God leads — toward him – and you will float, buoyant and free, in his peace.

Choose the other way, the wrong way – the way of idolatry — and you will be tossed and tumbled about and will ultimately sink like a river-worn rock, straight to the bottom, where you will stay, mired in the muck.

I know how this works first-hand because I’ve chosen wrong for the last fifteen months.

I’ve chosen the approval of people over the approval of God.

I have not listened to his commands, particularly his first one, his most important one.

I’ve chosen the way of not-enough, less-than, why-don’t-they-like-me, why-aren’t-I-good-enough. I haven’t looked toward him, I have looked toward them, toward the approval of my peers, and I have been tossed and tumbled and have sunk, again and again, straight to the bottom, where I’ve settled, stuck, in the muck.

Thankfully, though, that wasn’t all God had to say to me last Saturday morning in the patio chair. He also said this:

“Yet even now, be free from your captivity!” (Isaiah 48:20)

Last Saturday morning as the sun tipped over the top of the white pines, God spoke those words to me, right after he’d gotten all up in my grill. Yet even now, he said, even now. God reminded me that while I may have sunk like a rock to the bottom, into the muck, I am not sunk for good. I am not stuck.

The way to peace, peace like a river, is still open to me.

Even now, after fifteen months of choosing wrong, after fifteen months of choosing the idol of approval over God, even now, it’s not too late to be free from captivity. Let it go, God said. Choose the right path, the one I’ve had for you all along, the path toward peace like a gently flowing river.

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I don’t know if you wrestle with this kind of angst like I do. I don’t know if you fight tooth and nail to keep God first in your life, instead of putting the approval of others and the need to be liked and admired — or any idol, for that matter — ahead of him. I don’t know if you have peace flowing like a gentle river, or if you are roiling in tumultuous waters, fighting to keep your head above the swirling current.

If you tend toward the latter, though, if you find yourself sinking under that weight, remember God’s words in Isaiah, spoken to you, spoken to me, right now.

Even now, no matter how many week or months or years you have struggled in that current of despair, you can be free from captivity.

Rise from the bottom, from the murky depths, God says. Rise to the surface, to peace, in me.

Your Work Does Not Define Your Self-Worth

March 3, 2015 By Michelle

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A few weeks ago, when he heard I was in between jobs, an acquaintance mentioned that he hoped I was “able to enjoy this time of rest.” At the time I nodded my head and smiled politely, but inside, I was aghast.

“Enjoy this time of rest?” I harrumphed. I was out of a job, at a crossroads in my career. I lay awake in the middle of the night pondering whether I should dust off my resume and beef up my LinkedIn profile or send out my current book proposal to yet another round of publishers. As far as I could see, if there was ever a time to work my tail off, this was it.

In the weeks that have passed, though, I’ve had some time to consider my friend’s comment and my indignant reaction to it. This period of uncertainty has illustrated just how much I value productivity and how strongly I link my work to my definition of self-worth.

Producing something tangible – whether book chapters or baskets of clean, folded clothes – is how I define my value in this world. If I’m not busy, if I’m not “hard at it,” as my mother-in-law used to say, I’m not “contributing.” And if I’m not contributing, well then who am I and what’s my purpose in this world?

Productivity is good. God created us, among other reasons, to work; that’s why he tasked Adam with caring for the Garden of Eden. But like anything good, our work can easily morph from a gift to an idol.

When Jesus visited Mary and Martha’s house for dinner, Luke tells us his gospel, Martha rushed around like a maniac in the kitchen while her sister Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet, soaking up his presence and wisdom. Finally, having worked herself into a resentful frenzy, Martha complained to Jesus, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

Martha and I are clearly cut from the same cloth, and I always cringe a little when I read Jesus’ response to her bitter lament:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

I suspect a lot of us fall into this trap. We’re so bent on working, producing and having something tangible to show for our efforts, we lose sight of “what is better,” the one and only true necessity: our relationship with God.

We’re so busy defining ourselves by how much and how well we produce, we forget that our worth is not based on what we do, but simply on who we are. The truth is, the only self-definition that really matters is that each of us is loved by God.

I’m still looking for a job these days, but I’m also resting in the knowledge that while my work is important, it does not define who I am. God values our work and our accomplishments, but not at the expense of “what is better” – an authentic relationship with him and the understanding, deep in our hearts and souls, that we are loved, no matter what.

Note: This post originally ran in the Lincoln Journal Star on February 28, 2015.

When You Make an Idol out of Success

May 5, 2014 By Michelle

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Five years ago I stood in the bracing wind and watched my then-four-year-old son, Rowan, hunt for plastic eggs hidden in the grass. It was the day before Easter, and behind my sunglasses my eyes burned from crying. An hour earlier a literary agent had emailed to tell me that despite his initial interest, he’d decided not to represent my book. I remember the weight of defeat that sat heavy in the pit of my stomach all weekend, even as the organ thundered the final notes of Handel’s “Messiah” on Easter morning.

A couple weeks ago, just before we left for Easter service, I opened my laptop and clicked on Amazon.com. I typed in the title of my recently published book and scrolled down the page until I found the all-important number: the book’s rank. I saw the number had skyrocketed (the lower the number the better) since the book’s release five days earlier. Tears pricked my eyes, and my stomach clenched in defeat.

The irony is not lost on me. Five years ago, I would have relinquished a lifetime’s supply of Jelly Bellies to have my first book for sale on Amazon.com and stacked on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Yet there I was, disappointed and discontented, a mere five days after the culmination of my dream.

I’ve always been a Triple-Type-A overachiever. As a kid I strove to earn enough badges to decorate my Girl Scout sash top to bottom, front to back. As an adult in the corporate workforce I aimed to achieve a perfect annual review and regular promotions. Ambition and the drive to succeed are stamped on my DNA.

My zest for success is not the problem though. The real issue, it turns out, is my idolatry of ambition and achievement. I’ve made an idol out of the success of my book.

My intentions for the book began honorably. One of the reasons I wrote my memoir was to offer hope to others like myself who were fumbling toward faith. Perseverance enabled me to write the book over two years while working part-time and mothering two young kids. Ambition fueled my relentless pursuit of an agent and publisher.

But along the way, my honorable ambition morphed into something else. My ambition became less and less focused on God and others, until finally, on Easter Sunday morning, I found myself in tears. They weren’t tears of joy that my book had finally been published after seven long years. They weren’t tears of gratitude for the God who saw that process through. I cried because the book wasn’t ranked to my satisfaction on Amazon.com.

I’ve been down this idolatry road before, and I admit it’s disappointing to find myself there again. Like I’ve done in the past, I turned once again to Paul’s words in his Letter to the Romans:

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world,” Paul advised, “but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” (Romans 12:2)

It sounds lovely in theory, doesn’t it? In reality, though, letting God transform you by changing the way you think isn’t easy, because that kind of transformation isn’t a one-time, snap-your-fingers-and-it’s-done occurrence. It’s a life-long process of surrendering and re-surrendering; two steps forward, one step back; beginning again and again.

On Easter Sunday morning, I threw myself a pity party. On Monday morning I read Paul’s words, took a deep breath, and began the process of letting God transform me. Again.

This is a repost of the April Lincoln Journal Star column.

Last Monday was the final publication of Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday. Kelli Woodford has graciously taken the community under her wing. Please join me over there for Unforced Rhythms.

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