RESET: Letting Go Of An Incomplete Masterpiece.
Have you ever wanted a “do over-” an opportunity to do something over again after a previous attempt failed?
Sometimes what we need is not so much a ‘do over’ as it is a reset. Like the reset button on the electric motor of your hair dryer. You know those buttons on the wall plug that are there to protect you from shock. Or like rebooting your computer which allows new programs to load and shift how the motherboard of your computer functions.
Resets in life are not so much about doing something over as they are about a recalibration; maybe it is a cooling off period; maybe it is just finding the same joy in life as what you had when you were a kid.
Marriages can use a reset occasionally. Remember when you first got married, everything was so exciting; you got married and you were growing, but somewhere along the line, life crept in and it seemed not as much fun.
Our careers can use a reset at time. What once made us passionate can be the thing that weighs us down.
That can be true of our faith as well. When we first meet the Divine, we can be on “fire”. We wanted to tell everyone about our newfound all inclusive love of Jesus. Overtime that too can wain.
Reset.
It was December 2007, Heather and I had snuck up into the balcony of this dark and beautiful mid-century modern sanctuary in Encino California. Less than four months previous all I knew about this town was that Encino Man was filled there.
This was our third or forth recon mission. The first few had been sneaking into the balcony to watch worship, but this night was different. This night changed everything.
It was evening and this little community of 30 worshipers was throwing a large event for a grandmother and her grandson. The grandson’s name was Justin. Justin had Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy and he needed a new van to help he and his grandmother Roxie get around. In the previous month the community had sourced a van that would cost over 10k and they were throwing this event to help purchase the van.
I had already had a couple of meetings with the church call committee about becoming their future pastor, but only the event organizers knew that I was coming and would be “hiding” upstairs.
The event was crazy beautiful. It was hosted by some of Justin's favorite disney actors, musicians, and playwrights. There were film crews, lights and cameras. It was by all intents and purposes a huge event. Well over 200 people were in attendance and very few of them were “from” the church but this little community had planned and executed like no other. In a few hours and more than 12K later, Justin and Roxie had a new van.
As I sat in the balcony the one thing that kept going through my mind was... This is a church I want to pastor.. This is a church I want to belong too.
...I loved them, before I knew them…
See, I had learned early that the quality of your life, the quality of your work, is valued on the quality of your relationships. Relationships are everything. God has created us for relationship, and it’s where we derive all that is meaningful.
Michelangelo
Legend has it that when Michelangelo finished his statue of David, a local patron of the arts approached him, awestruck, and asked how he did it. The artist responded simply, “David was always there in the marble. I just took away everything that was not David.”
What many people don’t know about that story is that the giant block of stone that Michelangelo started sculpting was so damaged that his contemporaries thought it was trash. In fact, Donatello 50 years before owned the marble and considered it “ruined” and “a thing of no value.” and discarded the piece of stone.
But that didn’t stop Michelangelo from seeing something inside. He just had to get to work chipping away all that wasnt David.
My Own Beautiful Stone
I love art. I love to paint, but even more, I love to create. As I came down from that balcony I was resolved to Bethel’s pastor. This decision set the course for most of the next decade of my life. A year later I was called as the Pastor of Bethel Encino.
Now Bethel had a history:
In the 90’s it ran 800 people on any given Sunday but by my first Sunday it was worshiping only 30.
When the bishop was approving me for the call, he handed me a file a foot deep of paperwork full of all of Bethel’s past. He said “You can’t take the file with you but you need to know what your getting into.”
It was 40,000 square feet of property in the heart of the San Fernando valley with a couple decades of deferred maintenance.
The church had voted the year previous to sell the property and close its doors. 6-12 members fought the vote and drafted a 5 point “Resurrection Plan.” I was one part of that 5 point plan.
This community was diverse. It was the first Christian church the Dali Lama had ever spoken in. It is leteraly in the heart of the valley which is about ⅓ Christian, ⅓ Muslim, and ⅓ Jewish.
This church had a broken heart, and believed itself to be broken.
It had closed its school two years earlier and the neighborhood thought when the school closed the church closed too.
My first week I went to the end of the block to the Trader Joes and the 7/11 across the street and asked the clerks if they knew where Bethel Encino was. Both clerks gave me a resounding no. Yet if you walked outside to the parking lot you could see the steeple with our name clearly on it.
Like The block of marble that Michelangelo was given. Everyone thought Bethel was trash. Most of the clergy, leaders, and even some of the members..
The next ten years would be a journey of chiseling away at Bethel to find the masterpiece that laid within.
A Masterpiece In The Making
Bethel would quickly become my life's work, .my “pièce de résistance,” my dream, my passion. Over the next 7 years I would pour well over 40,000 hours into the creation and shaping of this community.
Lori McNee is an American Impressionist Painter. She has detailed the steps necessary to the complete a huge landscape painting. She says there are Six steps.
“Although there are only 6 steps, they are each laden with subtle, nuanced, and at times lengthy sub-steps required to complete the masterpiece.”
In step 1 Lori says to “work out your scene first with studies, photos, sketches.”
In step 2 She says, “Start painting the masses with dark abstract shapes with the four basic value planes: the sky, the ground plane, slanted planes, and upright planes.”
In step 5 she tells us, “My paint mixture is getting more opaque and concentrating on values. My paint application is getting thicker but I’ll still scrape and wipeout to soften edges, and then work more paint on top of the scraped areas.”
In step 6 one of the Lori’s comments is, “I’ve pushed thickness of paint, texture, value, contrast and hard edges. After it’s dried I’ll lightly sand and glaze in some warm tones made of transparent red earth.”
The final product is breathtaking! A masterpiece
However, if you weren’t involved in the process it would be easy to miss the intentionality and precision that went into creating such a work of art.
You could ask Lori how long it took her to make one of her paintings and she would say a few weeks or a few months, but the truth is it took her her whole life…
My whole life had led me to, and prepare me for Bethel. It was one of those moments that surfers talk about where you catch the right wave. The water is glistening, your spirit, your body, the board and the water manifest into cosmic oneness.
Masterpieces Take Work and Failure
Now don't get me wrong every swing of the chizel, every renewal, every healing, every step of creativity and redevelopment was hard work. I spent my first 6 months writing apology letters to people the community had hurt. I hand wrote a letter to every student and family that was a part of the school when it had to close. I wrote and had coffee with past members from two separate church splits. For six months I sought forgiveness and reconciliation on behalf of the church. That wasn’t about getting those people back in the pews, It was about healing the organization and the community so it could grow into its future.
We hit more bumps in the journey than a Minnesota road post a hard winter.
We struggled:
We struggled financially.
We struggled with the building.
We rented the property like a cheap brothel.
We fought for every breath those first few years.
I’m not sure exactly when but we turned an organizational corner. We were worshipping healthy numbers, between giving and rentals we could afford to exist and we were choosing to thrive. It was still tenuous but I slept better after the first three years.
So imagine my surprise about 7 years in. I started feeling a shift within my spirit. I was in therapy, and spiritual direction and I started noticing a new transition happening within me and within the community. We were moving into a new phase. At first I was more excited than ever for this new phase because most of my gifts and abilities lay on this new side. So much of what had come before I had to learn the skills along the way.
In the years to come, if we could make the transition it would be even better. Yet, I began to discern with my spiritual director and with leadership that Bethel may not be ready to make this transition with me... in fact I could be in the way of their transition because of how they had come to know me.
In some ways (albeit unintentionally), I had become a Guru. In this new transition they had grown beyond the need for a Guru. I too had grown beyond the desire of being a Guru. Yet, the truth is, it’s hard to let your Guru go and walk together differently. Ready or not!
This Was The Beginning of My Reset.
It all started with a simple little voice that begin to distract, to interject, to speak when I would listen. This is what my spiritual director kept hearing alongside me. She could hear and sense this little voice was calling me forward. Let me be clear it wasn’t calling me away at first it was just forward into living life differently.
There is this great story in the Hebrew Bible about Samauel and Eli. Samuel is the protegee of the old priest Eli. They both fall asleep and and Samuel wakes up due to someone calling his name. He thinks it's the old priest calling for help so he runs into Eli’s room and asks what he needs. Eli says “I don't need you, and I didn't call you. Go back to bed.”
Again Samuel and Eli fall asleep and again the same thing happens. Samuel goes to Eli to see what he needs. Again, Eli says he didn’t call him and to go back to bed. Samuel and Eli fall asleep a third time and Samuel is startled awake by his name being called. This time as he goes to the old priest. Eli in his wisdom says “go back to bed, but if you hear the voice again answer, yes Lord, Speak for your servant is listening.”
Like Samuel my spiritual director prompted me to listen more closely to the voice of the divine in my life. To stop and listen. It was about then that I left for my sabbatical to Ireland.
For those of you who don’t know, This is where I met John Ross on a fateful afternoon I slammed into a dorm room slung my bags on the bed. As the bags crashed to the floor I realized someone was asleep in the corner. After abruptly waking them up, I said “Hey, you wanna go to the pub…” A year and a half later I was working in Wayzata.
What happens When you've done all you can on your masterpiece and it still doesn't feel finished? How does and artist, craftsman, business person, or creator let go of their work? What happens when it’s time to let go?
There is no secret playbook to the reset. No guide for making the jump. There is no guarantee of how things will end. Mike Lewis, in his book When to Jump, studied a bunch a people making a career change. As he studied them he found 4 keys phases to the jump.
Phase 1: listen to the little voice.
We get so good at tuning down or turning off the voice inside us. We ignore it, push it down, turn up our music, watch more netflix, we do anything we can to drown the voice. For me step one of my reset was to turn up the voice within me, to turn up the voice of the spirit.
Phase 2 Make a plan.
The next step for me was to dream new dreams. When I met John in Ireland, every piece of myself had been given to the making of the masterpiece. With every swing of the chizel I lost something without taking the time to build back up. Every story I lived was shared, I had preached, I had taught. In the making of the masterpiece I had lost myself.
Meanwhile I was living my dream. Every dream I had in my 20’s and 30’s I was living. I had created the church I longed to attend, Together we created a church for a new world, a new generation, a new time. It was progressive, entrepreneurial, creative, quick on its feet, it was beautiful.
My family was grounded in people that loved them and we loved. We were living in a city that I adored and that heather grew to hate (dont get me wrong Heather doesn’t like any city
I was creating everyday:
Making my neighborhood a better and more just place.
Changing the world for the better.
Living deeply grounded in an interfaith progressive cosmos
Yet somehow in the midst of living the dream I had forgot to keep dreaming. So when I woke from exhaustion. I needed new dreams. I needed stories that were just mine and God’s. I needed to find myself again. I needed space.
Phase 3 to jump or reset is: Let yourself be the luck.
For me in my reset, a better way to say this was I had to learn to trust myself again and I had to learn to trust God again.
The same reality that led me to co-create my first masterpiece would lead me to the what’s next if I listen. The things I had learned in the last 10 years would prepare me for what was to come on the other side. If other skills or gifts were needed for the next part of the journey God had given me the capacity to pick up and gain all that would be needed.
Phase 4 Don’t look back:
This is the point with which I disagree with Mike Lewis. You have to look back to find freedom on the other side. (This one I am just learning.) When you reset, even if you have to reset over and over again. Look to the past with gratitude. Find the grace of the past. Find and name the beauty of what was. But also grieve what needs to be grieved. Grieving is what gives us the ability to the future with hope.
This is what I believe Paul is doing in the opening of his letter to the people of Phillipi
When he writes: “ Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God’s Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.
It’s not at all fanciful for me to think this way about you. My prayers and hopes have deep roots in reality. You have, after all, stuck with me all the way from the time I was thrown in jail, put on trial, and came out of it in one piece. All along you have experienced with me the most generous help from God. He knows how much I love and miss you these days. Sometimes I think I feel as strongly about you as Christ does!”
Paul is looking back on the beauty and love he holds in his heart. This is howIfeel each moment that I think about the people of Bethel.
Paul continues “So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.”
I cannot think of a better prayer for the previous side of my reset.
In Ephesians Paul writes, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
The word used for ‘workmanship’ is the Greek word poiema. This word means a masterpiece or work of art. This Greek word is the root of our English word, ‘poem’. You are God’s poem. And your life is a piece of poetry you get to coauthor alongside God. So reset as many times as you need. Start a new stanza, start a new phrase.
Listen, to that inner voice.
Whatever needs to be cleared away in order to reveal what you really want to become, the person you desire to be, start chiseling? What is stopping you from living the life you were meant to live? What fears, false beliefs, and negative perceptions do you cling to that prevent you from reaching your next step? It’s time to work towards letting them go. Its time to find the masterpiece within.
It’s time to reset.
