Flood Recovery

Milwaukee, my home town, made the national news this past week because of record setting flooding. In some parts of the area seven inches of rain fell in a fifty minute period. Several feet of water was common in homes and business that had never flooded before. Some homes were flooded up to through the first floor. A couple of giant sink holes developed, including one that swallowed up a full-sized SUV. All around the city people spent the weekend cleaning their flooded basements. Neighbors helped neighbors haul damaged carpet, boxes and furniture to the curb, where it awaits pick up by the city public works department. The size of the pile in front of a given house is a public sign of the severity of the flood damage the house endured. It is also easy to tell the specific blocks that were hit the hardest because every house on both sides of the street in those blocks have their large piles of debris. As flood victims recover from their suffering, there is at least one important lesson we can learn when it comes to wellness.  

The first, and most important, is that suffering is always lessened when it can be shared. When we suffer a loss, nothing helps more than the ability to talk about it, the ability to tell our story of what we have experienced. Literally everyone I have been in touch with the last four days, whether in person, on Facebook, or through email, has been sharing their flood stories as they work through both the physical and emotional damage of their losses. The raw emotions of anger, laughter and tears have been flowing every bit as much as the rainwater flowed last week. As painful as the flooding has been for so many, there is something very moving about seeing the way so many people have come to together to support one another. Some people have compared it to the weeks after Katrina in New Orleans, or times when our city has been crippled by a major snowstorm.

The asking for and/or giving support to or from our neighbor is relatively easy when we have experienced loss from a flood, or other “natural” disaster. As we have seen again here in Milwaukee this week, that support makes all the difference. This got me to thinking, how wonderful it would be if we could just as easily ask for and offer support when we experience other kinds of losses as well, such as a job loss, the loss of a loved one, or a significant physical or emotional distress. What if there was a way to publicly mark our homes when we were experiencing loss, just as the curbside debris now marks the homes that have suffered loss from the floods here in Milwaukee? All of us in Milwaukee are either suffering from, or know someone who is suffering from last week’s flood. And all of you reading this, wherever you live, are either working through or know someone who is working through other kinds of losses in their lives right now. In the spirit of what we have seen in our area this week, let’s resist the urge to isolate from one another and instead come together as neighbors to help each other recover and heal in times of loss.

Deep Wells and Deep Wellness

The efforts to fix the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico are of course made difficult because the opening to the well lies so deep below the ocean’s surface. The well opening is 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and the difficult working conditions at such a depth are what make progress so difficult. If this well had been drilled on land, or in shallow water, the problem certainly would have been fixed by now. There is a lesson in this for all of us in regards to our personal and relational wellness: the deeper the change we try to make or the deeper the wound we seek to heal, the more difficult the process is going to be. Deep-seated habits are the hardest to break--just ask a heavy drinker or a life-long workaholic or a couple that has been bickering for twenty years just how hard it is to change their habits.

Hard does not equal impossible, though. It is possible to change deep-seated problems or habits within ourselves or within our relationships. The mess in the Gulf shows us that three conditions must be present if change is going to happen; a high degree of urgency, patience and perseverance.

Did you notice that once the oil spill began approaching the shores the urgency to fix the problem became much greater? The same principle applies to changing our deep-seated habits. We don’t usually get serious about change until the consequences of our habits become more visible and begin to impact our to day life in a significant way. Taking time to break through denial and honestly assess the effects of our habits can help provide us with the urgency we need to make deeper changes.

The efforts to fix the oil leak have tried our patience and tested the perseverance of those working to solve the problem. We have all shared the same experience when trying to make changes in our long term habits. Most attempts at change, whether personal or relational, are cut short by a lack of patience and/or lack of perseverance. In our fast paced culture today we can easily forget that change that is both real and substantial, takes time.

And yet, how can we not commit to the work it takes to make deep change? The rewards are so great. Just this week, the fact that some real progress was made with the oil leak has brought cautious, but great excitement and relief. Earlier this week I spoke with two people working on deep changes, a young woman who had recently stopped smoking and a man who had recently reconnected with a brother he hadn’t spoken to in ten years. They sounded the same way--both cautiously relieved and excited.

It seems that in both oil work and personal change, working in the depths is both challenging and frustrating at times, but oh, so wonderful when success is finally achieved!

In Honor of the World Cup: "The Beautiful, Simple Game"

The Beautiful, Simple Game

The last four weeks have been heaven for soccer fans. Every four years, thirty-two countries meet (a record 204 countries started the qualifying process this time) for the World Cup finals, a month long tournament watched by billions of fans around the world. The championship game will take place this Sunday between the Netherlands and Spain, and which ever team wins will be bringing the World Cup trophy home to their country for the first time ever.

Soccer is often referred to as “the beautiful game” because of the incredible skill and grace displayed by players at the highest level. Another beautiful aspect of the game is the way it flows. The game is continuous without any interruptions for timeouts or commercials (except at half time). Substitutions are minimal, with each side in the World Cup allowed only three subs the entire game.

For me there is another reason that I find soccer to be such a beautiful game, and that is its simplicity. It is perhaps the most simple sport there is. All that is needed is a ball and a couple of make-shift goals and the game can be played. No fancy or expensive equipment is needed. And because almost everyone knows how to kick a ball, even young children can play the game.

There is something else amazingly simple about soccer and that is the set of rules for the game. There are only 17 rules for soccer, known as the 17 “laws” of the game. Compare this to American football which has 367 rules. That’s right, there are 350 more rules in American football than in soccer. This is probably why a football game requires seven officials, while a soccer game requires only three.

Like soccer, a well-lived life is both beautiful and simple. Living well does not require a great deal of rules or laws. The Boy Scouts of America recommend twelve laws to live by: be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Jesus recommended two: love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, or more beautiful.

I started playing soccer as an adult some twenty years ago. I still play every week, and only regret that I was not introduced to the beautiful game as a child. When I started playing it took me about ten minutes to learn all the rules. Thousands of hours of playing since then have increased my skills, but I still have a long way to go before I could consider myself playing something that could be described as beautiful!

And so it is with our desire to live a life of wellness and wholeness; it doesn’t take long to learn the rules (see those of the Boy Scouts or Jesus above), but it takes a life- time to learn how to execute the skills on a consistent basis. The World Cup will be over soon, but the players will continue playing the beautiful game as long as they are able. May we be inspired to do the same, living lives that are both beautiful and simple.

Fireworks and Relationships

Fireworks are a lot like relationships. Both combine ingredients that have the potential to create something beautiful--worthy of “oohs” and aahs.” Fireworks are created by a precise combination of several chemicals, most commonly calcium, aluminum, carbon and a chlorine oxidizer. Relationships, on the other hand, are created through a combination of soul, desire, emotion and character. In the past two weeks two different people have spoken to me of fireworks and relationships. One person talked of growing up in a home that was full of fireworks. She said she never knew when the next explosion would happen. Would it be mom exploding at dad, dad exploding at mom, or mom or dad exploding toward one of the children? Another person spoke of a relatively new love relationship that he was in. He met a woman six months ago and said he felt like he had found his soul mate. He spoke of the electricity in the relationship that often turned into fireworks of joy and elation.

It seems that fireworks, like relationships, can be both beautiful and dangerous. People get hurt if they don’t handle them properly. There is a fine line between beauty and danger when you are dealing with either volatile chemicals or volatile emotions. It is one of life’s great paradoxes that the forces that can combine to create the greatest beauty are the very same forces that can combine to create the greatest harm. Religion can create a Desmund Tutu or a person who terroizes in the name of God. Sexuality can create experiences of ecstatic intimacy, or horrific abuse.

So how do we make sure that we are creating fireworks of beauty in our relationships versus fireworks that backfire and cause harm? A short answer to that question can be found by looking at the holiday we celebrate today. As important as the individuals were that labored to create our nation, the essence of what formed our nation is the principles upon which it was founded. And so it is with healthy relationships. The common theme of all healtlhy relationships is not the uniqueness of the individuals that form them, but the principles that guide them, namely humility, integrity, honesty, vulnerability, love, hope and faith.

As we celebrate the founding ideals of our nation and look up to the skies to see the beautiful fireworks, may we also look upwards to the enduring values and ideals that define beauty in relationships and work to embody them each and every day.

Emotional Triangles

General Stanley McChrystal was ousted as the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan this past Wednesday. By now most of us know that he was removed because of derisive comments he made about civilian administrative leadership for a Rolling Stone magazine article. This weekly column is about wellness and so while this is not the place to analyze this incident from a political or military perspective, it is a great opportunity to reflect on this incident to highlight what we can all learn from it, as it relates to our personal and family wellness. The concept of emotional triangles is helpful for understanding what we can learn from the General Stanley McChrystal situation. An emotional triangle always involves three separate individuals, or groups, which we will refer to as A, B and C. In an emotional triangle A is upset with B (and quite likely the feeling may be mutual), but instead of talking to B directly about their unhappiness, A instead talks with C about how unhappy they are with B. General McChrystal (“A”) was extremely unhappy with some of the civilian leaders (“B”), but instead of talking directly to them about it, he talked to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine (“C”). The reason General McChrystal was let go was not because he had critical feelings about the administration. Instead, it was because he broke the trust of the administration by talking to a third party about issues that should have only been discussed between the general and the administration.

Emotional triangles destroy trust and erode relationships. In one’s personal life, emotional triangles can take many forms: you are angry at a colleague, but instead of talking directly to your colleague, you talk to others at work about what a “jerk” your colleague is; a wife is angry with or has been hurt by her husband, but vents to her friends about this instead of talking and working things through with her husband (this is often how the bad feelings that lead to affairs start); a teen is furious with his mother, and finds out that Dad will listen to him complain about his mother (his wife), but neither father or child ever talk to the mother/wife (this also can “flow” the other way where a parent is unloading their frustration at their spouse to one of their children); a parishioner is furious at recent decisions that the pastor has made and chooses to express her frustration to numerous other church members, but never to the pastor directly.

It is easy to see how destructive emotional triangles can be, and at the same time it is easy to see why they are so common. Most of us are “conflict averse” and we find it so much easier to discharge our feelings with a third party than taking the time, energy and risk to address the conflict directly with the party involved. By now we know though, that being intentional about our personal and family wellness rarely ever involves taking the easy way! We must be willing to risk moving out of our comfort zone to grow.

One more very important thing to be learned from the General McChrystal incident. Trust and integrity take years to gain, but can be lost in seconds. General McChrystal was no doubt aware of the World War II advice given to soldiers to never disclose any military information in their letters home. This advice was summarized in the phrase, “loose lips sink ships.” May we also remember when it comes to our personal and family wellness, that loose lips sink trust and integrity, and greatly compromise our well-being and the well-being of our most important relationships.