By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
Until this afternoon I hadn’t intended to write this letter. I already had written and edited another one, and it reads pretty well. Maybe I’ll share it at a later time but something has come up that I need to address now, not sometime later.
I re-read the letter I wrote last week, or perhaps you’d call it the non-letter I wrote, because I basically said I was too stressed to write anything. I also admit I was sounding a bit brusque, chippy and whiny.
I suspect your reaction to that letter was something like, “Who cares? Why do I need to know? Why doesn’t this guy get a life?” But that letter is part of what life is about.
Rather than just take a week off, I felt I should explain why there was no new letter. What you read was like a journal entry. I do a lot of journaling. While on vacation last month I often spent two hours a day at my computer, putting in writing things about myself that I was feeling or seeing in a new way or for the first time. It was the best part of my vacation.
Last January I decided I was going to write these letters as a way of sharing my life and how faith affects it, in the hope you would recognize that we all need to just live our lives and to share them at times with God and others.
I am sure that some people read the articles on this site in the hope of gaining some new perspective about this community and state, our nation and world. They want some new perspective about faith, culture, ethics and what it means to live in community.
That’s all good – unless it becomes a head trip. And I don’t want this letter to become the path to another head trip. We live way too much out of what we think we know, and way too little out of what’s really true. The Rev. Richard Rohr calls this the distinction between the false self and the true self.
Yesterday, as a bunch of us guys carpooled home from a men’s meeting at a friend’s house, we talked not only about the topic of the meeting – our need to rest with God in silence – but also about the things that distract us from that sacred silence. We talked about the difficulties we face in careers, marriages and as dads. We confessed the struggle of faith to be truly silent and present to God, rather than merely quiet. And we all had to admit we have crappy days.
There is a tendency in all of us to dismiss or ignore the gift that a bad day can be for us. In the midst of those days we have a wonderful opportunity to turn all that garbage over to God. We think he doesn’t want it; that he’s not interested. Oh, but he is! We have the chance to rest in Jesus’ embrace and reconnect with the truth that we are loved even when it seems that everybody else misunderstands and/or ignores us.
Nobody likes having a crappy day. But it helps us appreciate all the good days we have. Nobody likes being short of cash, but it helps us appreciate the times when we’re flush with it. Nobody likes being sick, but at least it can help us to appreciate good health when it returns. And in appreciating those good things we can also appreciate the God who provides them.
It’s OK to have a bad day and not be ashamed about it. It’s OK to take that truth to the Lord and ask for his consolation and the grace to deal with it. The bad choice is to try to deal with it on your own. The far worse choice is to blame other people for it.
We all have bad days because we’re all human. We’re not perfect. We’re not God, in other words. And at the very least, when I have a bad day it reminds me who I am. And who I’m not.
All God’s blessings – Mark
Starting next week Mark Azzara’s column will move to Thursdays.
