Author: Wes White

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How to Make Good Life Transitions

How do we let go of the past and embrace our present opportunities? The key is learning to make good life transitions.

We all will experience many changes in our lives: leaving home, marriage, having children, watching our children grow up and leave home, moves to new places, retirement, new jobs, deaths. How will we navigate these many changes?

For those looking for help in making good transitions, I would recommend William Bridges’ Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Bridges provides a helpful framework for thinking about how to make good transitions. He argues that moving forward consists of three elements: saying “goodbye”, waiting, and saying “hello” (his terms are an ending, the neutral zone, and a new beginning). Let me explain each element.


 
Bridges makes a distinction between the actual events and our ability to accept them and embrace them in our hearts and minds. Saying “good-bye” is not the actual change, i.e., the move, the lost job, or the death. It is the point when we come to accept the change in our hearts and minds. For example, we may move somewhere new, but a “transition” is the process of coming to accept living in the new place.

All societies have recognized the importance of saying “good-bye” in their funeral rites. Funerals are a way of saying “good-bye” to a loved one. In our society, we often rush through it, but the wisdom of the ancients recognized a lengthy time of mourning. We also often miss that other changes require a “good-bye” like growing up, retirement, moves to new places, and different seasons of life.

The second stage in a good transition is waiting. In between the “good-bye” and the “hello” is a waiting stage. This is a time when the old is gone but the new has not yet fully formed. A good example of this is the death of a spouse. An old way of life has died with the spouse, but what the new way of life will be is not immediately clear. There is a time of waiting. Retirement is often also like that. For years, you have had a rhythm of going to work. Now, you don’t know what you are going to do. Before the new pattern emerges, you must walk through the wilderness of waiting. This can be hard.

The third stage is saying “hello.” This is the moment when we embrace the new reality. After waiting for a time, we embrace the new reality in our hearts and minds. It could occur while you are sitting on your porch and all of a sudden thinking, “This is my home now.” It could be a flash of insight that gives you a vision for a new future. It could be a decision to go back to school to begin a new career.

Let me give an example from my own life. When I came to my current church, the church had faced a hard change from a large building in town to renting a small facility part-time. They had also lost leadership. We needed a vision for what life as a church would look like in our new situation.

About a year and a half later, I was thinking deeply about the organization of the church, and I came to a realization: I didn’t need to. We had found the new pattern already. I had to make the transition away from crisis to what I might call normal church life. It was a mental transition, and it took place one day while I was walking in a flash of insight. Later, my wife and I marked this transition with a party celebrating what I called “The end of the beginning.”

Adapting to changes is rarely easy, but it is a necessary part of flourishing in this life of changes. If we can recognize ahead of time that transitions are a process of saying “good-bye” to an old reality and “hello” to a new and that they take time, we will be much better equipped to embrace the future God has for us when the next big change comes.

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Where Are the Voices for Optimism?

Things are getting better all the time! That was the near universal view of the Western world in the 19th century. People were optimistic, and they believed in progress.

Today, there is near universal pessimism in the Western world. Hardly anyone seems excited about the future, and few are filled with wonder as they contemplate what the world will be like 100 years from now.

Compare the science fiction novels of the 19th century to those of today. Many of the novels of the 19th century brim with enthusiasm about future discoveries. Today, the dystopian novel is the most popular. This illustrates the pervasive optimism of the 19th century and the pessimism of today.

So, what happened? Well, two world wars and a decades-long threat of nuclear annihilation have a way of knocking the optimism out of you. World War I sent a shockwave through the Western World from which we certainly have not recovered.

But when we look at the big picture and all that could have gone wrong in the 20th century, you notice two things. We lived to talk about it, and a lot of things are actually going relatively well. True, there are problems in the world, but there are lots of opportunities. Millions have come out of poverty. World travel and communication is better than ever before. Trade is as robust as ever. Even on the religion front, religions are growing and thriving all over the world.

In regards to the Christian faith, the majority of followers of Jesus now live outside of the West because Christianity has grown so much in the southern hemisphere. In spite of the growth of Christianity, there is general skepticism among Christians about the state of the church in the West. In part, this is due to the decline of Christianity in Western Europe. In America, church attendance has been the same for decades, though the influence of Christianity has waned in the non-church going society (see Ed Stetzer on this here).

Evangelical Christians might defend pessimism by pointing to the decline in family and sexual ethics. This decline is true to some degree (I am speaking from an evangelical perspective). However, even here the news is mixed. Today, parents spend more time with their kids. Also, while less people than in past decades say sex before marriage is wrong, more people than in the past say adultery is wrong! (See the statistics on this in the book Upside by sociologist Bradley R.E. Wright). I remember talking to some folks about this, and they would not believe it. They were also fans of the television show Frasier. I pointed out that the characters on the show seemed to have no problem with sex before marriage. However, the characters clearly believed adultery was morally wrong. For example, in episode 17, Frasier tried to save Niles from having an affair with Daphne and seemed horrified that he would do so. I believe this illustrates the general ethos in America.

Another way someone might defending pessimism is to ask, couldn’t something go radically wrong and devastate our society? Yes. There’s no question that this is true, but it also might not. When I was in junior high, I read Larry Burkett’s The Coming Economic Earthquake (yes, I was and am a nerd!). I bought into it. I thought we were facing an imminent economic collapse. Then . . . it didn’t happen. I heard predictions like this again and again as the years went by. They all turned out to be false. The trouble with these sorts of predictions is that they have some, albeit a very small, plausibility, and the effects are so disastrous that they are hard to ignore. The American economy has been on the upswing for a long time. If I had started with the belief that this would continue, I probably would have been better off.

Another argument in favor of pessimism is the many daunting challenges we face today or could face in the near future. But look back at the 20th century. There were incredible challenges, and many things went really wrong. However, people also rose up to meet them. Men and women took leadership to challenge global tyranny and to build the good things that we are experiencing today. We can do the same thing, and our children can too, by the grace of God.

Speaking of our children, they are often the focus of our pessimism and anxiety about the future. We sometimes have almost a paranoia about our children, and, let’s be frank, things can and sometimes do go very wrong. However, most children experiment with the same dumb things we did, learn from it, and move on into adulthood. When it comes to our children, where is there a voice that says, our children will do greater things than we did and past generations did? Who has a vision for our children accomplishing greater things? It’s easy to look at their weaknesses and extrapolate them into the future, but we had enough weaknesses to warrant pessimism. But where are the voices for optimism?

From a Christian standpoint, we not only believe that our children are made in the image of God with tremendous potential for good and for evil. We also believe that God will be present in the future. He has been at work, is at work, and will be at work. This gives Christianity a basic future orientation and a note of cautious optimism. I like how Isaiah expresses it: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (43:18 19).

Reinhold Niebuhr summarized the Christian perspective in this little phrase: “If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 176).

I hear a lot of spokespeople for our fears, but where are spokespeople for our hopes? Where are the voices for optimism?

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Why I Am Unplugging from News Media and Ignoring President Trump and His Critics in 2019

I was happy and feeling good. It was Thanksgiving. Like millions of others, I was anticipating a day of turkey, football, family, and fun.

We had traveled from Tennessee to North Carolina to my parents home where my Mother had lovingly prepared a meal for her children and grandchildren. Because we have seven children, my parents can only accommodate 5 of the 9 of us. So, my wife and two of my children stayed at the Greensboro Airport Quality Inn.

Thanksgiving morning, I went down to consume the free breakfast offered by the hotel. Sure enough, there was a cable news network loudly blaring across the room. “President Donald Trump responded to criticisms by John Roberts . . . blah, blah blah.”

I said to my wife: “Seriously! Can’t we just have one day where we don’t talk about our political disagreements and focus on good things. It is Thanksgiving after all!”

As I reflected on that experience, a bunch of things came together for me. I thought, doesn’t the 24 hour new cycle feed into most of what’s worst in human nature? Why do we need it? Does it help us?

I was reminded of the many times I had said something like the following to people: “Isn’t it great that poverty is being reduced dramatically worldwide, that hunger is on the verge of being eliminated, and caloric intake is up worldwide?”

The inevitable response is: “it is???”

How is it that in a world drenched in “news,” we don’t know this rather encouraging morsel? “Reduction in worldwide hunger,” it appears, is just not the sort of thing that makes headlines. Apparently, good long-term trends don’t lend themselves to “breaking news.”

At that point, I made a decision. I was going to unplug from news media. That did not mean that I was going to ignore current events altogether. I decided I would read only my local paper and one news magazine that is relatively close to the middle of the spectrum.

I did not wait until 2019 to do this. I started right away. It demanded changes on my part.

My most common way of following the news was my phone. A lot of my consumption of news grew out of boredom. This made me reflect on how I use my phone. I often use it as a cure for boredom not because I’ve thought it through and think it’s useful. So, I made another resolution: stop using my phone as an attempted cure for boredom.

I then unsubscribed from a variety of news alerts and emails. I removed apps from my phone. I was unplugging.

Then, a thought occurred to me. What drives most of the 24 hours news cycle in this country? President Trump and his detractors. So, I thought a little bit more. What if I just ignored what President Trump said about this or that and also ignored his detractors. Would I really lose anything? . . . Nah.

So, I began my journey. I actually didn’t think that much about it. I just cut out electronic news from my life. After that, I didn’t really think about it much or miss it.

Then, one day, I was walking around town, and I realized something. Throughout 2018, I had spent a ton of time thinking about the current “crisis” in our country, the deep partisan divide. I wrote and preached addressing this “crisis” as you can read here and here.

After a few weeks of being unplugged from news media and ignoring President Trump and his detractors, I realized something: “There’s no crisis!” I just did not experience the sort of deep division manifested in the news media in the life I live on a day to day, week to week, or month to month basis. I was now free to spend my time thinking about other things, including solving the real problems that I, my family, my church, and my community face.

I am not saying that anyone should follow my example in doing this. I certainly don’t mean to condemn or judge anyone who watches news or reads news web site. I think of this more as an interest experiment in living.

It’s already changed my perspective on life quite a bit. I wonder, what will a year unplugged from news media and ignoring President Trump and his detractors will be like?

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Talk About Death

“Talk About Death” says chapter heading 41 in Irvin D. Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy.

Why does Yalom say this? Consideration of death provides us an opportunity for growth.

This conclusion arises from two observations. First, he says that behind many of our problems is the subconscious awareness of death. Concerns about the transitions of life are often about the shortness of life. Instead of letting it be an undercurrent, we can make it explicit and gain wisdom by considering the shortness of our lives.

Second, he observed that those who were facing death often made the greatest progress in therapy. He did therapy with cancer patients who were facing death, and he was amazed at how quickly insights about life would come to them in contrast to other patients who took so much longer to really confront key issues in their lives.

One explanation for why this is the case is what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. In the every day mode, we consider the events of our everyday life. In the ontological mode, we ask questions about being itself. Growth occurs when we step into the ontological mode.

I might re-phrase it this way: our normal way of thinking is to look at the small picture. In order to grow, we need to look at the big picture and ask questions like: why am I here? What is my purpose? What really matters? What is my relationship to God?

The specter of death has a way of helping us move into the ontological or big picture mode. This is where growth occurs.

So, do we need to wait until we are dying to ask big picture questions? Of course, we do not, but it’s hard for us to move out of the small picture, every day mode. So, how can we move into the big picture mode? How do we help others do the same?

Yalom notes that there are many events in our lives that present opportunities for considering the bigger picture: the death of a spouse, children leaving home, retirement, a move to another place. These things have a way of stripping away temporary things that we rely on and opening the possibility for deeper questions. Though these events can be sad or challenging, we can also see them as opportunities.

Yalom did a study that illustrates this point. He studied a number of spouses who had lost a spouse to death. He found that many of them went beyond returning to their pre-loss emotional levels. A fourth to a third of them went on to greater levels of maturity and growth.

This reminds me of the advice of King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (7:2).

Not only the therapist, but the minister, the Christian, and anyone trying to make their way through the world should not avoid the subject but talk about death.

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How to Grow — Working on What Matters

The Preacher asked, “For who knows what is good for a person in life, during the few and meaningless days they pass through like a shadow?” (Ecclesiastes 6:12).

It is a question that we should ask ourselves again and again. What is good, and what is to be done? What will make the most impact? In terms of growth, what should we concentrate on? There are so many things that could take our attention. What really matters?

In my first post on growth, I suggested that God created us to do primarily four things: live in relationship with Him and other human beings; do significant things that bless ourselves and others and bring glory to Him; and to enjoy His glory as reflected in creation.

These are four priorities that give us a framework for thinking about how to work on what matters most, the things that will be most beneficial for our growth, for our joy and peace, and for impact on the world. I will explain what each of the four things are and then propose ideas for implementing them in your life.

Relationship with God
Our relationship with God consists first and foremost in learning to receive the love that He wants to give us. I discussed this at length in my last post, so I won’t dwell on it here except to say this: our relationship with God, like any other relationship, takes time to develop. We have to be deliberate in setting aside time for it, or our relationship with God will not deepen.

The more we receive from God, the more we will learn to love Him in return. This is the greatest commandment, and the ability to love flows out of faith.

In addition to faith and love, we need to learn obedience. Even though we enjoy a relationship with God, it is not a relationship of equals. He is the Lord. We are His servants. We need to deliberately be asking what the Lord would have us to do and how we are to apply His commands and then do what He says! This is how our relationship with our Lord grows and we learn to trust Him.

Relationship with People
We are made for relationships. It is not good for a person to be alone.

In the last post, I spoke of people as being a support for us. We need people like that. However, we are also created and made to be a blessing to other people. We are made to love, and, once the hindrances to love are removed (i.e., sinful ones, see post 3 on how to grow), love is completely natural. The second greatest command is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Who should we love? Anyone God brings into our lives. So, who are the people that God has put in our lives? Consider extended family, neighbors, co-workers, those who are in recreational organizations with us, those who go to the same places we do, and those in our church or other civic organizations. If we think about it, there are more opportunities for us to love than we tend to think.

How should we love? In my view, most of our problems in relationships come from seeking to make people more than they are. They are just people. People are good, and love is good. However, it’s easy to become too dependent on that love or a particular person’s love or a particular pattern of receiving love.

So, here is my advice on how to love: give what you want to give, accept what others want to give you, and let others give what they want to give. See love as a gift. If you feel you should give that gift, do so. Let others decide what they want to give. If they do not give the love you want, you have an everlasting fountain of love in what God gives, so you do not need to get upset. If they do give you love, accept it as a gift and evidence of the love that God has for you.

There are many more things that could be said about this, but this has consistently been the most helpful thought to me.

Work
Work involves two things: the development of ourselves so we can work better and the doing of the work itself.

Development includes general health such as exercise, right eating, and proper rest. Development also involves things that generally help us become well-rounded people such as developing a variety of relationships, a liberal arts education, and experience in doing a variety of activities. Finally, it involves the specific development of our gifts and the skills needed to accomplish particular things, e.g., an electrician, a lawyer, a preacher.

There are two realms of works: creation and redemption. The works of creation include family, building up civilization, government, and anything conducive to human prosperity and dominion. The works of redemption involve the restoration of man to fellowship with God and a life that is in accord with what He has made us to be. This includes service in the church, counseling, sharing with others outside the church, Bible study, etc.

In determining what work we should do, we should ask three things. What are God’s commands? What are our opportunities? What are our gifts? For example, God commands us to provide for our families, and most us of need an influx of money in order to sustain our lives. So, this limits us in some extent in the types of work we can do. Most of us need to do something that someone will pay us to do.

We should always seek to do what is good and be better stewards of what God has given us. At the same time, we should recognize that all labor is valuable to God. God told humans to develop the earth after the fall and the works of creation are everywhere praised and recommended by God. At the same time, we all should also in some ways seek to contribute to God’s work of redemption.

Enjoyment of Creation
Often, this is viewed as a restorative act rather than a duty. It is a restorative act, but it is also a duty.

It is important for us to emphasize this because our natural tendency is to focus on the bad and let the good slip by. We focus on getting things done and do not take time to celebrate. Our fast paced life moves us from one thing to another. Our focus on phones keeps us looking down and missing the beauty that is all around us.

The Apostle Paul says, “God created [foods] to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:3–5).

Thanksgiving is a duty. Thanksgiving involves seeing the good that is around us, taking it in, and giving God praise and thanks for all that He has made and all the good ways in which humans have used creation for good. Enjoying creation can include human works such as buildings, plays, or television shows.

It is important to note, though, that many of the good things that God has for us are the simple things that God has created–touching, feeling, seeing, and tasting the things He has made and enjoying the blessing of people in our lives.

Diagnostic Question
1. How do you take time to develop your relationship with God?
2. Do you ever ask of God, “What do you want me to do?” If you do, do you do it?
3. Who are some of the people in your life with whom you could connect with?
4. Are there people around you who could really use a contact from you?
5. Are there broken relationships that you need to work on?
6. What are your gifts?
7. What are the best opportunities you have to use your gifts?
8. What’s something you really enjoy that you haven’t done in a long time?
9. How are you doing at enjoying the good things around you? Do you take them in or mostly pass them by?
10. Do you take time to enjoy the people in your life?

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This is part 6 of a 7 part series on how to grow. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, and part 5 here.

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