Tag Archives: systems thinking

The Overfunctioner’s Bread

You are sitting there in worship, minding your own business, and what seems like an innocent psalm leaps off the page and stirs up trouble. I don’t expect trouble from the psalm! The makers of the lectionary pair it with a Gospel. It is more like an opener than the headliner.

During the second service yesterday, the psalm did its leaping, its words landing on my often overfunctioning self. Splat!

Psalm 127-1-2

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord guards the city,
the guard keeps watch in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil,
for he gives sleep to his beloved.

Overfunctioning is one of four relationship patterns. When a relationship with your family, a friend, workplace, or even the larger society becomes anxious or stressful, your response may be shaped by what you learned growing up:

  • Over/Under-Functioning: You may take over the situation, appoint yourself to think or act on someone else’s behalf. Or step back and disengage, passively let someone else do the thinking or doing for you, even though you are capable.
  • Distance: Keep your opinion to yourself, reduce contact with family, adopt an “ism” like workaholism or alcoholism. Or immerse yourself in a hobby.
  • Conflict: Respond with criticism, blame, and perhaps even abusively put others down.
  • Cut-Off: Avoid dealing with the stress and leave the family/friendship/workplace/society altogether, even though the stress tends to go with you.

Again, these are relationship patterns you rely on with people. And these are your patterns when there is stress at work, or when the nation in which you live is absolutely crazy. Here’s looking at you, America!

We rely on one of these four patterns to keep us steady. The patterns do not make you good or bad, they are simply the way you cope. The good news is that we tend to be consistent, Once you recognize your pattern, you can keep watch for it the next time a relationship with a person, workplace or nation amps up.

Overfunctioning is my go-to. In the psalm, I check all the overfunctioner boxes: laboring, guarding, eating the bread of anxious toil. The psalm leaped out at me because I had been overfunctioning in my work at church, not for the first time. I have eaten a plateful of anxious toil bread.

It happens when there is staff transition, when there are tasks that need to be done but the person who would do them is missing. (Every office seems ripe with transition these days, people coming and going; you may also be eating anxious toil bread.) The risk of overfunctioning increases for me because I’ve been there long enough to know what needs doing and maybe even how to do it.

These days, there is less overfunctioning and more handing off because we are belovedly fully staffed and I feel very excited for this team God has gathered. That might be why God added neon lights to the psalm yesterday. Instead of stirring up trouble, it stirred up curiosity. I notice that my diet of anxious toil bread has decreased.

It is easier to recognize your relationship pattern when you are on the other side of the stress.

I see it now, all that anxious toil bread, all that extra guarding and rising too early to labor. Now that I recognize the pattern, I’ll stir a verse from another psalm into the mix in hopes of recognizing the pattern the next time it emerges…because it will, as will your pattern, beloved human. Your pattern is your pattern, it does not define you. It is simply how you cope with the stress, not who you are. 

In peace, I will lie | down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me | rest secure. (Psalm 4:8)
  • What is your relationship pattern?
  • Would you test your guess by visiting with someone who knows you well?
  • Look back into the early pages of your life story. Did you learn that pattern growing up? Visiting with my cousins has helped me recognize my pattern. Mine is inherited. I am in good company!
  • How might you keep watch for your pattern the next time you feel anxious?

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

I Wrote a Book When Few People Read Books

A year ago I wrote a book even though reading books is a rarity. If you are reading this, perhaps you also read books. Or, maybe not. It is possible you used to read many books and now you pick up a book only once in a while.

I recently read (in an actual book!) that reading fiction broadens our perspectives of other people. A book is like someone else’s shoes we get to slip in and out of. A story parks us briefly in another person’s mind.

Because of books, I have at least a slightly more honest understanding of people who grew up on a Native American reservation, or raised a child within inner-city poverty, or battled addiction or contended with a family member’s addiction. None of these scenarios are my own. Without fiction, I would remain ignorant and probably judgmental – certainly less understanding of people whose lives differ from mine.

The book I wrote is an Advent daily devotional called Wait, An Advent of the
Familiar. Although few people read books, we all live among people whose stories differ from our own. There is a variety of footwear for us to try on. I wrote the book in hopes of making life with so many other people slightly more honest and understanding.

In the book, I often invite you to imagine you are a character in a play. Family members join you on stage, for example at the holiday dinner table. What part do you play? What family member is the antagonist? Is there a hero on stage? Who is helpful – annoyingly helpful? Which character goes mostly unnoticed?

If these questions are uninteresting, this might get you to turn the page.

The way you play your part “on stage” will influence the next generation of your family, the next cast of characters whom you may never meet.

Think about it, how did the decisions your parents and grandparents make shape which family you are now closest with, or distant from? The book is a tool to walk in other family members’ stories, and to take a more neutral look at your own.

The 24 devotions in the Advent devotional book lead to the story you know very well, regardless of your relationship with books. You need not be an avid reader to get swept up in the story of the God who put on sandals to understand your life.

Happy (almost) Advent! May this season offer clarity and healing to your relationships, lighten your heart and broaden your footwear.

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Who Will You Avoid at Thanksgiving By Scrolling on Your Phone?

(This is an excerpt adapted from a chapter that didn’t make it into my Advent devotional book. The book is meant to offer you a new perspective on your own self, and on your relationships with family.)

I may forever question my parenting decisions in regard to devices. Our second son, born the same year as the iPhone, has never known an app-less world. Before the creation of the iPhone, I explain to these space-age creatures who are my kids, the word apps referred exclusively to appetizers. They still don’t believe me.

I love what my phone and tablet do for me. My Christmas shopping list is safely tucked away from nosy children. The recipe I am excited to try for a holiday meal is bookmarked. And all the Christmas music!  

It is ironic that by definition a phone, meant to be a tool for connection, has a way of blocking connection. Phones and tablets hold hostage our attention like neurotic Christmas lights, jumping ahead in the line of our priorities. Try the spiritual practice of eye contact and then struggle when your watch or phone call out for you like a needy toddler, “look at me!”

A week from Thursday, you may be required to set down your device and face a room full of humans, many of whom are related to you. It is possible you may prefer the company of your device to the company of at least one or two of those humans. It’s okay, you can keep that a secret!

To dial back the dread you may feel, one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Kathleen Smith, offers this uncomplicated tip: person-to-person relationships.

The idea is to sit down with one person at the gathering and strike up a conversation. Your conversation need not be deep. No need to address a sticky point in your relationship. “But short, personal inquiries about each other are an important glue in our society, families, and organization. They bolster mental health and create trust in relationships.”[1]

Can you set aside your phone and ask someone about the dish he brought to the meal? Or sit beside the person who seems left out of the conversation and simply say hello? What might happen if you ask her the highlight of the past year? What was great? What was rough?

Families so often make the mistake of assuming they know each other, or that it might be too vulnerable to get to know one another. What if, dear Lord, the person asks you a question back?! Yes, this is a risk of person-to-person contact.

Each day, there is a temptation to rely on a device to pass the time, entertain, even distract us. What connection might you miss next week if you scrutinize over the Wordle instead of sharing caring words with the person beside you?

As soon as you finish the last turkey sandwich, it will be Advent. Advent is the assurance that nothing can distract God from loving you. In the birth of Christ, God did not communicate such love from far away, but up close up, person-to-person.

If God came all this way, join me in wondering what might happen at Thanksgiving if we ignore our distracting devices and travel across the room to sit beside someone we’d rather not? Moving helps with digestion, so it would be a win-win.

Reflection

When does your phone distract you from your relationships with loved ones? And, think this one through: who is one person you could get to know better over the holiday?

Thank you, Lord, for your deep connection with us. Hold my attention, that I might receive the abundance of your life to share with my family. Amen.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

[1] The Power of Contact – by Kathleen Smith (substack.com)

A Cookie Contradiction

My daughter baked these lovely sprinkle cookies. She is a near-master of the Crumbl knock-off recipes, which was the answer to my husband’s question a few months ago: “Why in the world do we have so much flour?”

The cookies are as good as they look…most of the time.

Always the willing taste-tester, she handed me one after it had cooled. At first, I could not describe what I was tasting. It looked sweet, yet the taste did not match. A weird contradiction clung to the roof of my mouth.

“You should try these,” I told her, or warned her, before she took them over to her grandpa for his birthday.

“What do you mean?”

“Just…try one.”

When she did, her face matched my perplexed tastebuds. What was this odd, perhaps even savory flavor competing with the rainbow specks of sweetness?

After some deliberation, we realized the culprit was the cutting board. She had asked if I thought it was okay to set the cookies to cool on the cutting board instead of dragging out the cooling racks, an act of injustice we will never again commit.

I did not consider the onions and garlic that had been chopped up for something, probably soup, just a few days before. Those savory flavors rose up in delight, invading the warm sweetness of the cookies like a sneak-attack, flavor-massacre.

Luckily, setting them back on the baking sheet for an hour or so seemed to undo the disaster. I did appreciate the lesson.

Human beings, like those cookies, are absorbent. Without realizing it, we soak up the sweet or spicy flavor of the spaces in which we gather. We can easily absorb both loving and unloving attitudes toward the world and our neighbor from those with whom we spend our time in-person and online.

“You are what you eat,” is perhaps a simpler way to say all of this. Hang out with angry people and we absorb that anger. Hang out with joyful people and we absorb that joy. Hang out with people who are curious, or kind, or bitter, or hateful and we will find ourselves like that cookie: one thing on the outside and another on the inside.

The slipperiest part of being human is that you think you can change another person, but you cannot. You can try to make the angry person less angry, or the bitter person less bitter, however, without even noticing, those exact flavors have a way of sneaking in from the cutting board and shaping who you are and how you see the world and your neighbor.

What flavors would you like to absorb as you live your life with people?

For years, I have prayed with this New Zealand Prayer Book, a prayer book my internship supervisor first introduced. The ELCA lacks in prayer books, unlike our friends in Christ who are Roman Catholic or Episcopalian, which is the source of this prayer book. A few months ago, I tried to be more disciplined in reading the morning and evening prayers daily. As these things go for me, most days I remembered and other days I did not. I am no champion of perfection.

I can tell you that on the days I start and end with these prayers, it feels as though the day fully begins and ends with the Lord. Dare I say it is absorbing! The morning and evening prayers of each day are tied together and somehow, each prayer has spoken directly to my life, as the Holy Spirit has a habit of doing.

Here are two wonderings for you to absorb:

  • Consider the people with whom you spend your time at home, work, and wherever you go for fun. What might you be absorbing? What is the same or different in each setting?
  • What are you absorbing in the time you spend online? Does it make life sweeter when you spend time wherever you do online? Or would you like to reconsider what you prefer to absorb when you travel around the internet?

Imaginary Enemies

I hope I wasn’t the only one who grew up with imaginary friends. I also had real live friends, but my two imaginary friends were the most reliable. Always there when I needed them!

Since then, both of them have moved on, or I have moved on. Perhaps both.

There comes a time when the imaginary people must move on, and we must move on. Definitely both.

Just as there are reliable, imaginary friends, there are reliable, imaginary enemies. People we have pitted against us, even though they may not even exist. Imagined enemies we have learned to hate.

I noticed when our president spoke against imaginary enemies in his eulogy for Charlie Kirk. His words reminded me of Fredrick Backman’s definition of hate in his novel, “Beartown.”

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

At about minute 24 of the eulogy, the president referred to debates he’d had with Charlie Kirk. According to the president, Kirk did not hate his opponents. That, the president explained, was where they disagreed. “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them,” the president proclaimed to a cheering funeral crowd.

Like any president ever, ours has a long line of opponents, enemies he has made here and there. And yet, I’m not sure all of his enemies are real. I wonder if his love for having an enemy can threaten to create imaginary enemies, enemies that invite people to hate even further.

Hate is so powerfully stimulating, it can baptize a crowd of Christians in an amnesia bath, foregoing a substantial pillar of the Christian faith: love thine enemies (real or imagined), do good to those who hate you, offer the other cheek, and so on.

When there is tension in the air in our society, in your family, or in your work, you are in charge of only one person: You. You cannot change the people around you, especially your enemies, but you can decide how you will move through the tension.

  • How do I want to show up in this anxious time of our country?
  • What emotion do I need to notice in myself, so that it does not get the best of me?
  • Am I watching too much news? (I appreciated Danielle Webster’s words in this episode of The Prairie Beat podcast.)

Blessed are you as you wrestle with your place in this anxious time, for you will be filled with the real live love of the God who came to live among you in a real live body simply to love. Love. Love.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

The Case of the Missing Lids

It happens to you.

You finish a meal and you are left with the leftovers. You reach into the drawer or cupboard where containers and lids take up residence. You find the perfect container but cannot locate the lid. You know it was just there! How do containers and lids separate? It is madness!

If you live alone, you wonder what you did with the lid and investigate, or give up, depending on the day and how much you want to bother with a missing lid.

If you live with other people, however, you open the case of the missing lid and go looking for someone to blame! At our house, the list of suspects includes the teenager who leaves a trail of containers and lids throughout the house, the old guy Marcus visits each week and delivers a meal in these containers, the dishwasher (you never know), or the dog who has been known to mistake a lid for a frisbee.

Blame is a lovely distraction. In fact, the missing lid will never be found, I know this to be true. The time we spend distractedly looking for someone to blame could be better spent reorganizing the system to make it less likely for lids to go missing in the first place.

If I zoom out a bit, I can see this fact: we toss lids into a drawer and hope for the best. Because multiple people do the dishes at our house, not everyone files lids (or containers) in exactly the same drawer. Also, lids crack and get tossed before a replacement is found, like benching a basketball player without sending in a sub, leaving only four on the floor, an incomplete team.

Blame will not get to the bottom drawer of any of this, it will instead stifle creative wondering and problem-solving. Blame keeps me frustrated instead of curious. Blame also makes a person crabby, which is no fun.

Blame for me extends beyond the lid drawer to relationships, just as it does for you.

Kathleen Smith has me considering blame after reading “Blame is a Giant Penguin.” (This is a subscriber-only article.)

“Moving past blame isn’t about letting people off the hook or excusing bad behavior. It’s about not needing a villain to steady the ship or make sense of one’s current functioning, a feat for the uber-narrative brain.”

This is to say, blame distracts us from the actual facts. It keeps us from thinking through the relationship to be honest with our own part in the problem.

  • Who are you blaming instead of zooming out to see the problem differently? Maybe more honestly?

Zooming out offers you a Christ-like view of your relationships, adding mercy to the question. It keeps you from being distracted by blame and reorients you to the everyday wonder of being alive.

  • What blame are you carrying that needs letting go?
  • How does blame melt away when you prayerfully define how you want to live? How you invite people to treat you?

When I zoom out and see my own part in a relationship problem, I often recognize that I have not been clear with how I want to be treated. I distractedly let someone else shape a relationship that needed more input from me.

Blaming is easy and so often it leaves us stuck. God’s gift of your life deserves a wider, zoomed out view of how you want to define your relationships (even with the lids.)

Case closed.

Photo by Luke Peterson on Unsplash

Reflecting: You Are What You Value

Look in the rearview mirror to last week, a stretch of days that now count as history. What do you see?

How did you spend your resources: time, money and energy? Did the days rush by in a blur? Did you feel like a pinball being bounced around in a machine? Or was the pace of each day more like a slow walk through the park?

Take a moment here and look around your life. Look back and to the sides. What you see today may not be the same as what you saw last week or last year, like reading the same Scripture you read long ago (or not so long ago) and understanding it completely differently.

The good news of the Christian faith is the stubborn insistence in a new day despite all reason; amid the joys and sorrows, hopes and regrets. Somehow, a splash of light overcomes an ocean of darkness because we believe Christ has died and rose again.

With God’s promise that every day is made new and even you are made new, look at your life and notice how you are spending the resources God has given you. You are what you value, that is, how you spend time, money and energy is a way to describe you.

The days have a way of moving forward whether or not you are buckled in! If your life feels exhausting, try this:

  1. Set an alarm for 15 minutes.
  2. Sit down with a piece of paper and pen.
  3. Write a list of your values. Consider what matters most to you in this season of your life. Your list may be two or 12 items long. Why do these values matter enough to you to make your list?
  4. Look back at your week. Did you spend your resources in a way that reflects your values? Where did you nail it? What needs reconsidering? Notice both what went well and where you have room to grow.
  5. Carry around your list and revisit it whenever you have that “I’m-a-pinball” feeling.

You, beloved one, are no pinball. God did not create you to be bounced around.

“I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.”

Ephesians 3:16-17

Whether you look in the rearview mirror or to the days ahead, your life matters deeply to the Lord who dwells in your heart and starts over with you each day.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Another Word for Dysfunction

When families gather, each person plays his or her part. There is the wild and crazy one, the organized and orderly one, and the peacemaker in between. Throw in the matriarch and patriarch, the family member who keeps his or her distance, and the perpetually embittered and you may have a complete cast of characters for any family.

If you think your family is uniquely dysfunctional, open the curtain to see an audience of all the other uniquely dysfunctional families, which is to say, all families. At least God was consistent in creating families the same!

In the Christian faith, another word for dysfunction is brokenness. All families are broken because all humans are broken. We are, each of us, an assortment of broken pieces reset each day by the gluey grace of God. We are not perfect clay jars, but by God’s grace we are “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” (2 Corinthians 4:8) Humans and their families are broken and beloved clay jars through and through.

Being part of a family is unavoidable. A family member can move away but cannot move on. The relationship system in which we grew up, even if not for an entire childhood, even if we never again see those family members, will forever shape who we are.

Look around your family. Who is among the cast of characters? What part do you play? What are your starring and supporting roles?

If you have harsh words for the cast, or if there are scenes you play in your mind on repeat that portray you as victim, perhaps you do this: take yourself to a thrift store, find an old jar, take it home, wrap it in a towel, and break it into a few pieces with a rubber mallet. You can leave the jar in pieces, but if you put it back together, you witness the daily work of the potter. We are afflicted but not crushed. Each piece has its place, like a character with its own part to play. Each piece is valuable, but not on its own.

Your broken family, your broken self, is never beyond repair for the potter and the potter’s gluey grace.

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

This is Not Your First Day (Part Two)

Did you do your homework? Did you?

The reflection questions in the previous post turn your early-days-of-the-school-year attention away from your kiddo and onto you. Yes, you! Parents and guardians tend to focus heavily on our kids when something exciting is about to happen. We ask them:

  • How are you feeling? Are you nervous?
  • You’re a senior! What are you going to do next year?

We might forget that focusing on an anxious kiddo only increases the anxiety and pressure in your relationship. I am guilty as a mom of trying to be helpful only to become obnoxious. This is not something I intend to do, I just happen to be good at it!

It tends to lighten up your relationship with your child if you give your child a break and pose these questions to yourself.

  • Am I feeling anxious? How might I manage my own anxiety?
  • Life is changing for my kid. What am I going to do next year?

I suspect we direct questions to our kids and grandkids with the intention of helping them. Our questions are, as far as we can tell, indicators of how much we care. When actually, question-overload is like keeping the heat on high under a boiling pot of macaroni. It works just as well, even better, to turn the heat down.

In the Bible when life heated up, when the pressure was high, when people may have felt like an overcooked macaroni noodle, the writers offered images as encouragement. With words, they drew pictures of God:

  • God holds back the waters so they do not overwhelm you. (Isaiah 43:2)
  • God dries your tears and wraps you in joy. (Psalm 30:11)
  • You cling to God, and God holds you with one hand. (Psalm 63:8)
  • God is your forever lookout to help you when you need it. (Psalm 121:1)

To you encourage you, beloved parent or guardian, here is an image for you:

Accompanist

A parent or guardian who softly plays the chords for the child to make his or her own solo music. present in the background, the accompanist is practiced. This isn’t her or his first day on the piano. an accompanist is positioned to bring out a child’s unique and best.

I’ve not been an actual accompanist, but I know some brilliant ones. They have a remarkable way of knowing the soloist well enough to draw out his or her best sound. Once in a while, they might discreetly play an intro twice when the soloist misses the entrance. An accompanist is not a director, not the boss of the soloist, but more like a guide through the music.

Accompanists know they are not the soloists. This is not their first day. Instead, they offer steady and supportive roles to grow the confidence of the soloist.

Here is a blessing for the accompanists to send you on your way:

Accompanying is a privilege, may you sit in the Spirit’s presence as you play.

Keep your hands on the keyboard, may Christ be the director of this song.

Let the music carry, may the soloist shine with the light of Christ.

Photo by Wan San Yip on Unsplash

This is Not Your First Day (Part One)

Teachers and school staff do not need a calendar to recognize August. Even teachers who retired years ago feel the start of a school year roll in like a storm system. Similar to a change in the pressure system pronounced by the ache in your elbow, former teachers feel the arrival of August in their bones.

Both new and seasoned teachers are walking storybooks, living records of generations of families that have come and gone through their classrooms. Ask one to tell you a story of an anxious parent on “meet-the-teacher” night who organized her 1st grader’s desk, lining up the glue sticks in perfect order. Or the dad who could be mistaken for the anxious student if he wasn’t so tall, projecting his own first-day-jitters.

A parent carries more than the bag of school supplies on the eve of a kiddo’s first day. That parent also brings his or her own baggage: memories of her anxious need for perfection as a student; memories of his fear that he might look weak in front of the other boys. For some parents and guardians, walking into a school might be slightly terrifying. Certain memories, like a change in the pressure system, run deep and make uncomfortable return visits. We are what’s happened to us, perhaps.

This may surprise you, but your child’s first day may benefit from your reflections on your own first days of school. By looking back on your own life, you become a little clearer on your thoughts, feelings, and values, which helps you parent with extra grace for your child and for yourself.

Below are questions to get you reflecting. You might talk through one or two with a friend or partner or scribble a few notes in a journal. Part Two of this series will take those questions one step deeper. How might what you know about yourself both (always both) help and hinder the excitement of your child’s first day? I’ll share an image that has guided my own parenting.

For now, here is your homework:

  • What comes to mind when you recall your own first days of school?
  • Is there a word or phrase that captures how you felt as a student?
  • What did your parents or family expect from you in school? What happened if you fell short?
  • What did you expect of yourself?
  • What was your favorite activity at recess? (This may not be a helpful question – but it might be fun! Playgrounds have changed since you were there!)

As you reflect, pay attention to what happens inside of you. Notice the tender spots, the feelings that bubble up. And then take a breath that fills you with the peace of the Spirit, making all things new. Even you.

Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash