In our current political, spiritual, and interpersonal contexts, I find myself at a loss for next steps.
When I lament the state of the world, I find it helpful to revisit times when I have felt simultaneously over my head and underwater. Some are more on point than others, but I lived through them all, and that is something to cling to.
One doesn’t often think of being married to a CPA as entertaining, but my husband has imparted wisdom and stepped up in many ways over the years to make my life easier. Dan is the kind of guy who has vacuumed 90% of the time during our marriage because the sound of a small motor is an annoying trigger for my ADHD. (He has pretended to buy that reasoning for decades.)
He once returned a rented Ford Taurus for me after my sister, my children, and I had driven through the desert for three weeks. We put so many miles on it that we had to have the oil changed in Las Vegas.
In addition to the excessive mileage, one of my children threw chewing gum out the window in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it stuck to the glass, smeared across the window as it was rolled up, and baked on in the desert July heat.
Without throwing me under the bus, Dan returned that abused car to the Hertz location and threw himself on the sword. He is convinced the trip changed Hertz’s policy on unlimited mileage across multi-state lines.
It is not his nature to fight my battles for me. He has always believed I was quite capable.
Still, during one particularly exhausting and drawn-out staff situation, a pastor broke my spirit with pointed words directed at me in a sermon. I left mid-service and never returned.
When the culprit called—not to apologize but to “explain” his words—Dan took the phone and, without anger or rancor, said, “You know, it doesn’t matter whether you drive over someone or back over them; they are still flattened by the tread marks. I believe she told you she is through,” then hung up. (Ironically, that pastor and I found our way to friendship after we both got medication for our neurodivergent conditions.)
In light of the chaos in this world, I am reminded of a particularly clarifying moment when Dan’s counter-wisdom changed my whole outlook.
I was working at a small college. A week earlier, my mentor and boss had died unexpectedly, and my grief was compounded by the feeling that some colleagues would use this opportunity to jeopardize the causes my boss and I had championed.
As we headed toward campus for an event, I stared out the window and, in a despondent voice, said, “I feel like vultures are circling me.” Without even looking at me, Dan said, “Well, you know how to throw a vulture off your trail, don’t you?”
I replied to my rhetorical lament with a quizzical “No?”
“You need to look alive,” he declared.
I have spent a lot of time lately trying to look alive when I feel the vultures circling. Along with millions of others, may we look for ways to express our “aliveness.”
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Retired campus minister, campus ministry coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, and Collegiate Specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.