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Doc Jensen (@ewdocjensen) writes crazy, intriguing recaps for the epic television series LOST. If you’re a fan, you should read these after each episode, especially during this final season. He’s well-read, and makes connections to just about anything and everything you can imagine. I especially appreciated this quote of a quote from his recent recap of the episode Recon:

“Perhaps Charlotte Staples Lewis’ literary namesake, CS Lewis, sums up Ford’s Sideways arc the best. From The Great Divorce:

‘I do not think that all those who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists of being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit-by-bit, with ‘backwards mutters of dissevering power’ — or else not. It is still ‘either-or.’ If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth), we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”’

In my last year of high school I was voted both Most Witty and Most Likely to Succeed. Even though I went to a small Texas high school, I never expected to be voted “most” anything. This is what we call a “self-esteem” issue, something never lacking from the high school experience (and something most of us spend our adult lives trying to prove wasn’t true about our high school selves).

I’m proud of the Most Witty moniker, although I think I won that title because we didn’t have a category for Most Punny. In a small Texas high school, I’m not sure most people knew the difference, but I’m not complaining. It worked to my advantage. I could be witty on occasion, but I might also be saying that there wasn’t exactly a lot of competition, which sounds egotistical, but, then again, as an adult, I’m still trying to combat the self-esteem issues that plagued my high school self.

But I digress.

I’m most comfortable with holding the title Most Witty for the fact that it’s something I am, and not something I have to do.

Being noosed with Most Likely to Succeed is like lugging an albatross to every job interview, new relationship, or writing endeavor. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not an overpowering obsession – This must succeed or else! – but it’s always there, in the backpages of the yearbook of my mind, leaving me notes like Better luck next year!

As an above-average student, I was never allowed to envision a future in which I didn’t succeed at everything I attempted. (God bless my mom!) In some ways, this helped me. It gave me a confidence in my abilities that should have otherwise been sorely lacking, given my self-assessed status of band geek, classic-book lover, introvert, and wannabe writer. Despite those “flaws,” I tackled obstacles in my paths, both academic and professional, like a linebacker bent on making the state championships.

Then I met a girl, got married, and settled down. I was content. I was happy. I was as successful as I thought I could be. I could tell myself, confidently, that I’d finally fulfilled the destiny prophesied by my senior class.

Then the things I had built my life around began to fall, one by one, like band geeks tripping over themselves at halftime. But instead of it being a forgotten event a week later, or a laughable anecdote at a ten year reunion, this experience left lasting scars. The healing would take years. Will take years.

This is not the life I had envisioned. Not in the least.
I’d truly and spectacularly succeeded now, at failing.

Self-esteem? Gone.
Hope? Dead.
Love? As if.
Most Likely to Succeed?
Only if Bob Dylan was right: “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

In counseling and DivorceCare, I heard it wasn’t uncommon for the newly divorced to feel as if they were going through puberty for a second time. In the aftermath of this devastating year, I became my high school self. My voice started cracking (through the strain of unexpected emotion). I started reading again. And drumming. And writing. And praying. And remembering how ardently I used to try to love God. Doing the things I used to do, for no other reason than the joy they brought me. I started to become serious about the man I’d always wanted to be, the man I’m afraid I always should have been.

In this renewal, I became keenly aware of my shortcomings and faults and failures, and it wasn’t until now, with an abundance of time to simply think, that I could own these failures and take responsibility for them. With God’s help, I grow gradually prouder of the man in the mirror these days. In light of what I consider a colossal failure, I’m learning to lean on this verse in a way I never had before:

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses…” (2 Cor. 12:9, ESV)

I’m proud to be Most Likely to Succeed now. It’s either still out there waiting for me, giving me something or someone to look forward to (hope/love), or I’m learning what it means to be content in all circumstances (faith). In my dictionary, making those three words a part of my daily life defines success.

Whatever the case may be, I’m still Most Witty, and have been successful at that for most of my strife… er… life.

I visited my cousin this past weekend. We got to talking. It got late. We came up with some of the following. If you’re offended by any of them, those were probably his ideas…

• I Surrender Some
• Mediocre Grace
• Blessed Insurance
• I Sit in Bemusement
• Above Most
• All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Political Clout
• Be Still My Soul
  (but not so still I fall asleep… again)
• Blessed Be Your Name
  (when the Cowboys win)
• Fiend of God
• Great is My Faithfulness
• Look at Me! Here I Am To Worship!
• How Can I Keep from Sinning
  (tomorrow)
• Oh Crappy Day
• It’s All About Me
• Your Grace is Almost Nearly Enough Most of the Time
• I Need Thee Every Few Years or So
• Come Just As You Are
  (as long as you’re not too messed up)
• Come Just As We Hope You Become
• Today is the Day
  (for a short sermon)
• My Redeemer Lives
  (in a land far, far away)
• Shout to the Lord
  (because He certainly hasn’t heard me lately)

This is all, of course, meant in jest.

Feel free to add your own in the comments, now newly renovated so you can login with your Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID credentials.

Towards the end of last year I was afforded the opportunity to hear from  Susan Isaacs, author of Angry Conversations with God and @susanisaacs on Twitter. I listened with rapt attention, a thing that hadn’t happened in quite some time. Maybe it was because so much of what she was saying deeply resonated with me, speaking to the hurt of my last year, and to the hope of something better, something more real than what I thought I once had, or needed.

Susan, a Hollywood actor with multiple “failures” in both her career and her relationships, decided she’d had enough of God. So she took Him to couples counseling and chronicled the journey in Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir. It’s funny as all get-out and painfully honest. Her transparency bleeds from the pages, and where most comics use their gift to hide their inadequacies, Susan’s self-deprecating style brings everyone’s guard down to where we know we are like her in so many ways. Consequently, if she can laugh and grow, then, by God, we can too.

On her book tour (before I’d read the book), Susan challenged me to be brutally honest before God. This is something that had never occurred to me before. I feared being “smoten” for my insolent ways.

Then I recalled my experience, just a few months prior, when I yelled at God like I never had before. And felt bad for doing so, because that’s what a “good” Baptist upbringing will do to you.

Yet I quickly got over that feeling, because the felt injustice of my situation was too overwhelming, to the point where words that I would never have thought about using in a prayer starting running away from my mind and out through my lips. The words came in such a flurry of fury that the sentinel at the door didn’t have time to man the battle-stations and stop the tide of vehemence. He was woefully under-prepared for the onslaught of pent-up rage.

When the words stopped, the silence was dreadful. I was sure I was about to be struck down, to be given the chance to meet my Maker right then and there so I could voice my complaint in his very Presence. But instead of instantaneous death, I heard these words:

I know… I know… I know…

…spoken as from a mother heartbroken over her child’s necessary pain.

I sat stunned, drowning in grace. My anger subsided. And while the answers I wanted didn’t come (ever read the end of the book of Job?), it didn’t matter. The fight I’d had with God (which still continues from day to day) changed me, as if from Jacob to Israel.

So thank you Susan, for being honest with yourself, with God, and with us. It’s helped me, immeasurably. I’m not as mad as hell anymore; I’m just mad at hell on earth.

A few months ago I saw Rob Bell at the Paramount Theatre on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin as part of his book tour for his recent release, Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering. Rob (@realrobbell) is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan (“cultural epicenter of all things progressive”) and may best be known as the Nooma guy.

I wrote the following review/synopsis  after returning from the event; however, at the time, it didn’t see the light of day, or screen, as it were. I didn’t buy the book for myself at the event (since it’s an over-sized, highly visual coffee table book), but I did buy a copy for a friend. Before handing over the book, I wrote the following down for future consideration. However, just last week, I bought the thing at Mardel for $5 and was consequently reminded of what I’d written.

Don’t keep reading if you still want to read the book! This is a very general synopsis, but now that you’ve been warned…

Bell breaks down his thoughts into three sections, or “arts.”

I. The Art of Distraction
It occurs when life throws you a knuckle-ball that, instead of hitting the dirt, smacks you in the eye. It knocks you to the ground, takes the wind out of your lungs, and quickly, painfully, alters your worldview. Layoffs. Bankruptcy. Divorce. Death. Things that most of us never see coming. Things most of us never imagine happening to us.

There are some who never recover from a hit like this.

There are others who cannot get beyond the muddy, murky existential questions of Why me? Why now? Why God?

Then there are those, and narrow is this path, that press through the questions (whose answers, if they come, seldom help the way you think they will) and get to the place of asking What now?

II. The Art of Elimination
Taking away what is to show what could be. Michaelangelo said the statue of David cried to be freed from the stone pillar from which it was carved. Mark Twain said that if he’d have lived longer, he would have written less. Every true artist, in every true art form, knows that brilliance and genius lie in the tension between the giving and the taking away, between what is and what isn’t, between the first draft and the pared-down final copy.

If I’m to assume that my life is a work of art co-created by its Author and subject, I have been squarely placed in this point of my life for the sole purpose of editing myself – to eliminate what is to become what could be.

What should be.
What should have been.
Which never could have been, had I not been given the “opportunity” to be in this place in the first place.

I now see my recent past as chisel to stone, regardless of who’s hand was on the blade.

III. The Art of Possession
You can own something and not possess it.
You can possess something and not own it.

You’d think consumerism is all about the buyer, the consumer, but I think the word is more dastardly than that, even in its blatancy. Consumerism consumes, even like a roaring lion, looking for whom it may devour.

It will eat your life in tiny bites and make you feel thankful for it. You’ll feel thankful because, somehow, the buying gives you meaning, a reason to exist, a thing to do.
If this is the case, your story is too small, not even long enough to be a novella.

You will own much and possess woefully little. You will not be happy, not where it matters at least. You will wear the same facade you’ve seen on TV, worn by actors who are paid to lie to you. You will buy that lie, repeatedly, as many times as it takes so the effect of the drug doesn’t have enough time to wear off.

But then death calls. Or she leaves. Or the money disappears.

How much TV do you watch then? How much shopping happens then?

Facades like scales fall from your eyes.

You remember how much family means.
You recall why you made friends with your friends in the first place.
You feel God, maybe for the first time, in a long, long time.
You reach out while reaching in, and feel emotions you thought you’d buried so well.

Things become meaningless, but the world erupts with life.

You have the fleeting thought that this is how life is supposed to be, even in the pain, in strange ways because of the pain.
You were always supposed to be like this, not acting like that. That’s not who you really ever were; this is who you are – this is who you should have always been.

So your things no longer define you, and self-gratification is no longer your motivation.

You begin to own little, yet possess all.

IV: The Art of Suffering
This is not one of Rob Bell’s points, although it may have been The Point of the Book, or the point I’m supposed to do something with.

Suffering births creativity. Artists create meaning from their suffering.

This is not new information.

In my current state, on this Friday the Thirteenth of November 2009, I want to forget everything about the last year.

Lately, each day causes me to recall “What exactly was I doing on this date last year?” It’s a sinister mind game. I already know the answer, and yet I feel the need to dredge the sludge of the slums of my previous life. I wonder why my mind does this to itself. I’ve processed so much, and have come so far, yet I still wonder “Will the self-damning questions ever end?”

And I wrestle.

I wrestle with the fact that I do not want this experience to define who I am.
I do not want to use it as a crutch for the rest of my life.
And I want to forget, because that’s easiest, no matter how hard my mind tries to make it.
Yet I cannot forget it, and I will never forget it.

While it will not define me, I cannot help but to realize that it is, however, an irrevocable part of my definition.
The full definition of “me” won’t be realized for many years to come (if even in this lifetime), but I still have a very active role in writing those words.

In learning to birth creativity from this suffering, I must humble myself, pray on bent knees, pick up the shattered remains of a previous life, and piece them back together into something wholly new but still wholly me.

It’s time to start living the rest of my definition.