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I don’t want to write. For like two years that was all I could write, I’ve got like three spiral notebooks that say “I don’t want to write” or “I hate writing” on every page, then it got a little easier, today it’s a little harder.

This past few days everything is a little harder. I’m having a little bout of depression. I have decided that it’s a little bout. I like to control things by naming them.

These days, everything is kind of hard. Like, not can’t get up hard, just hard enough. Just uninspiring enough. Just oceanwater resistance enough.

I spilled some birdseed on my bathroom floor, and it’s been there for days saying “what is wrong with you, there is birdseed on the bathroom floor.” The near perfectness of the new house and the less than perfectness of the moved in items and person is overwhelming. The number of skirts in my closet is overwhelming. The prospect of blow drying my hair is overwhelming. My student’s lack of a pen is overwhelming. And those are just the things that are by no other means overwhelming.

When I feel like this, the hardest thing is people. The hardest people are normal people, saying their normal shit. “How are you?” “How was your trip?” “How’s the new house?” God, how I loathe these questions. On a healthy day I take it as a personal challenge to respond to them honestly. Days like today the only honest response would be to punch the person in the face.

What the fuck is the way to answer that anyway? The answer is bundled up in the question. Obviously I’m fine, it was good and it’s good. You already know the answer so why are we participating in this exercise which makes my eyeballs want to get out of my face?

I do not know how to present to the people I love when I am like this. Being depressed makes me feel like I am a teenager and then everything feels like terrible teenager behavior. I feel petty and verbose and irritating and like a big burdensome pain in the ass. I am very aware of the fact that I am not engaged in making everything OK for everyone else. Then I want to hide under a blanket.

I assume this is here to remind me not to be smug. So I will try to remember not to be smug. I am pretty smug, a lot of the time. There but for the grace of god, most of the time.

I wrote this much. I think that is enough.

More on Enough

There used to be two kind of insufferable guys who came on the radio on weekday mornings, one was Brian something and the other was I forget. But one of them always used to say that the biggest uncovered news story is always the same...that 842 million people in the world are starving and there is enough to feed them. Which is sad but which also stuck with me as an idea. There’s enough, it’s just not in the right places in the right amounts.

That has been a lot on my mind recently, as Andy spoke about the idea of ‘calling’ and what we are called to do, and as I have been reading about the idea of ‘vocation.’

“Vocation’ soothes me. I love how it untangles the purpose of one’s life from one’s livelihood. How your breadwin can be your vocation or not, or how vocation can run alongside work for money but not have to run into it. How people have a lot of vocations.

How we know what we are called to do and we don’t like it.

I might, as I did once, hear about all those starving people, and being young and not having any real stories around cast myself as a savior. I might, as I did, roughly grab the vocation of feeding them all and demand the quickest route to the most fed. I might, as I did, work for non-profits, ask to be sent to the saddest poorest place, with the saddest poorest people, to get the most food in the most mouths as fast as I could with little regard for my own actual gifts and their cultivation or use.

We want to be something in the face of not enough, don’t we? That’s why it’s so easy to get people to volunteer to ladle soup for the homeless and so hard to get them to volunteer to file the backlog of their social service paperwork. One lets us perform ‘be.’

That’s why you can get donors for programming- they’ll buy the sacks of rice or the medicine or the schooling, but not the copy paper for the home office. Not the salaries of the people who manage the distribution.

The stories we have elevate some vocations and marginalize and shame others. I live in a world that doesn’t really revere the vocation of parenting, for example, despite the fact that it was devoted parenting that allowed most of us many of the blessings we have. I work with students every day who have vocations for the arts, or for helping professions or for gardening that their parents have shamed into a corner, depriving us all of the enough we need.

And though we know- as Andy said this week- we know we are called to earnestness and humility, the shame that comes with them will train us out of it.

No, dude, you're really doing me a favor. 

There are stories designed to shame us from small vocations, and there are stories that are made to let us off the hook for the charity and empathy that we know we’re called to offer.  We’re daily called to small acts of generosity that are just too hard. Spare change is hard. Not getting a really good catty remark is hard. Not taking a little extra for ourselves is hard.

Wouldn’t we rather be called to epic-scale martyrdom? Why is it so much easier to imagine yourself risking your life to save a stranger than giving somebody a dollar? Is it because there are no stories for that? No one ever said “‘tis a far far better thing I do” about not being a shithead to a co-worker. There’s no epic climax music for choosing against taking something inconsequential that still isn’t really yours. No great oil painting of someone putting their trash in the trash.

There are so many available imaginings of the vocation of self sacrifice.

The scary truth is that our vocation is self.

All the religions want us to submit to the will of God, or god, or “god.” Maybe we know inside that if we could find a way to behave in accordance with god’s will, we would improve the distribution.

Instead we strive for extremity, mis-distributing all that is needed.

Loaves & Fishes

Look, I don’t do the miracles. Like Thomas Jefferson and his pinking shears, I like to daintily discard the magic parts of the Bible. They mess with my groove.

'Uh, White Jesus, I assume
this is some kind of metaphor?'

So when it was time to read about loaves and fishes, I was ready to write it off and phone it in. Yeah, yeah, and everyone was fed.

Also, every time we get a new minister at church, and every time it is another white dude in his 20’s with millennial hair and hipster glasses (Rat calls them ‘minhipsters’) I expect him to be lame. But the new guy did alright with the old story this week. Pointing out that the loaves and fishes story is about ‘enough.’

It’s about thinking you don’t have enough, or you are not enough, and discovering, by the grace of god that it is enough. By starting from a point that is objectively measurably short of what you need and realizing that it contains all that you need.

It’s a crazy boardwalk magic trick the way once you start pulling from the resources of your actual self that things just keep unfolding, scarf after silken scarf. There is always enough of you for the thing, somehow, always. Even if the thing is more than you should have to face. Memere used to say, and Dad used to sort of doubtfully repeat that God never gives you anything you can’t handle. In the wrong hands, this translates roughly to ‘suck it up.’ But in actuality, it is true, not because all the sufferings of this world are or should be handleable, but because human capacity abounds.

But friends, you got to draw from the right well.

The well of what’s inside is infinitely deep, because if you go down far enough, you get to the source beyond the self, and the source is infinitely vast.

The little plastic cups that you have placed all around to appease the thirsty who come demanding-- those have bottoms.

You cannot draw infinitely from ‘nice,’ you cannot draw infinitely from ‘good,’ nor ‘selfless,’ nor ‘right.’ But you can draw infinitely from what’s true.

God did not grant you enough time to finish the project, or enough patience to keep from snapping, God did not grant you enough money to feed everyone or enough knowledge to solve everything. God did not grant you enough sense not to see that same mistake coming again. God did not grant you, maybe, enough milk for the pancakes. What you got is the enough behind those enoughs. Enough to do the thing. Enough to keep pedaling if you’re me, or keep running if you’re Jess or keep studying if you’re Yin Li. Enough to stop running if you're Rachel. Enough to stop helping if you're Andrew. Enough to stop being good if you're Darin.

What you got is enough to do what you are actually supposed to do.

And if you are out of enough, and at the bottom of some well, that wasn’t the well.

If you’re out of patience, you’re probably not called to be patient with this.

If you’re out of money, you’re not called to get it by buying.

If you’re out of generosity, maybe don’t give.

God doesn't expect you to do more than god gave you resources for, is what Memere might have meant.

This suffering is not a punishment. It’s not a test, sorry Job. It is showing you the bottom of a thing you were meant to spend, so that you would know infinite when you see it.

And it is nuts how far it goes down. How many times you can think it’s the bottom, and it’s not. How deep you can get and what the capacity is. 

And as far down as you ever go at a given time is enough.