Staying Thankful

Staying Thankful

When I first became a Christian in 2011, I was very conscious of thanking God every day for everything that He has blessed me with and trying to always have that attitude of staying thankful.  I have read many profiles of people who are able to keep a humble and thankful attitude about the smaller things in life and seem not to grumble or complain about things.  I admire people like this who can find reasons to be thankful and grateful even in the most mundane aspects of life.

By now most of you who are regular or semi-regular readers of my blog know that I come from a background that was very negative.  People in my family did not often pause and reflect on what they had and how that they should be grateful for it.  We complained about things we didn’t like.  As I have said before, I was exposed to a lot of negativity growing up.  I had 30 + years to establish negative thought patterns.  Instead of focusing on what I had and being thankful for it, I focused on what I did not have.  I have read enough Scripture, listened to enough sermons, and talked to enough people to know that this is far from uncommon.  But, when I read those stories about those people who are so focused on the positive I cannot help but want to be more like them.

The impetus for writing this piece is that these past few months I have found myself complaining about the winter weather, and other things.  Instead of focusing on the thought that I am fortunate and blessed to be in a position where I have shelter, food, and people who love me I allow myself to feel “gipped” because I don’t live in a place that has nice weather in winter.  I am focusing on the negative side of this instead of seeing the positive.  I feel a mix of emotions, happy because I am now in a position to be able to see that I can control my thoughts, and disappointed because I vowed to myself that I would not allow myself to slip back into these thought patterns (and I have).  I find it somewhat distasteful how much negativity I have felt emanating from myself lately.  I “feel” more like the old Bryan and less like the man that I know God is making me into.

I have said more than once that I want to be a person who radiates and reflects warmth and love.  I want to be someone who builds other people up, and encourages them.  (All things that I did not have growing up).  I know what it feels like to live in a negative environment and how awesome and energizing it feels to be around people who radiate a positive energy.  I want to be one of these people. I look at Charlie and I see how happy she is and how in love we are, and I know that for at least one person in this world that I am encouraging and building them up.  However, when I am at work I can feel the negative energy inside me and around me and there are times it just eats me up.  This is one reason that I am glad to be leaving this place in a few months.

So I am going to make a request to all my family and friends who might read this.  If you see me being too negative or pessimistic, call me out on it.  If you see me as someone who is encouraging and building other people up, let me know.  Like anyone else who is trying to change and become the best person that I can be, I need encouragement and support to grow.  Charlie has been a great support network to me, as has my church and family.  I will be honest here, when I catch myself being negative and pessimistic, I feel guilty.  I feel that I am letting down my family, friends, Savior and others.  That is a big burden to carry around.  Intellectually I know this is not true, but none the less that thought and feeling is there.  In order to move forward and become the best person that I can be, I am going to renew my focus on surrounding myself with people, ideas and things that radiate positive energy.  Because, once and for all I want to leave the negative energy and my old self in the past where they belong.

The Need to Be Organized

The Need to Be Organized

This week is my first full week of classes.  At the beginning of last semester, I felt a sense of overwhelm and panic.  I did not know how to organize my time.  Like many people when I can plan out a schedule and establish a routine for a continuing endeavor like school work, I can then focus and concentrate on one thing at a time.  My lovely wife suggested that I organize things with a student planner, God bless her she was right (as she normally is).  Once I started writing down everything that I needed to do in a week, I was able to establish a daily and weekly work flow and rhythm.

So, I enter a new semester and I find myself having some of the same worries.  I have been through a semester in the MLIS program now, so I now have the experience and I know how to function and organize my work.  Being in an online program the daily and weekly work flow is different than being an onsite student.  The major difference is in class participation.  Online students are required to respond to discussion questions that professor’s post on message boards.  Each message board generally is “open” for discussion and responses for one week.  It is not just a matter of responding to a question and being done with it.  We are responsible for participating in the ongoing board discussion.  This can take up an hour or two a day.

I am once again feeling that anxiety that comes at the beginning of a new semester.  I am not yet in a rhythm, and have not established a weekly work flow and this is an unsettling feeling.  Each online class has a “week”.  For my 571 class Information Retrieval the class runs Monday-Sunday, for my 650 Introduction to Archives class it runs Wednesday-Tuesday.  Last semester I divided my week into two three day sections and would do all the course work for one, before I moved on to the other.  As the semester wore on and the larger assignments where do I had to change my routine to ensure I had enough time to complete term papers. 

Last semester I did very well in my classes and got A’s in both.  I look at the classes that I have this semester, and there seems to be less “busy work” each week.  One of my classes last semester in addition to the readings had 2-4 in class assignments each week plus the online discussion questions.  So even though I will probably have a lower volume of work, I still feel scared.  I don’t feel like I am in the groove yet and hope I get back in it soon. Organization and detailed planning is a great antidote to school related anxiety.

Seasonal Anger, an Opprtunity to Grow?

Normally, in the winter, I experience some symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Two years ago, I experienced some symptoms but the fairly mild weather and the opportunity to get outside negated a lot of the feeling.  Last winter, I experienced more of the symptoms more intensely. This winter however, because I was busy school I didn’t notice the symptoms that much.

This week, I got some great news that I had been selected for an internship that I applied for.  I was and still am overjoyed.  However, as this week has gone on, I have felt an increasing amount of anger and frustration.  I was confused I would be feeling these emotions after receiving this news and realizing that I would be able to quit my job in May.  (I have been looking at getting into a different career for at least the past 4-5 years).  I thought that I had been dealing well with the Seasonal Affective Disorder.  It turns out that increased anger and irritability can be symptoms of SAD as well.  In the past I had experienced the lack of energy and eating more “comfort “food.  But I had not experienced the anger and irritability. The anger comes from a feeling that I am being cheated out of better weather or as we would say growing up “gipped” or “screwed” in today’s parlance.

So what am I angry about, or what thoughts run through my mind before I feel this way?  I feel trapped.  Trapped indoors, or trapped in a wall of snow and ice.  I know that I have no control over the weather so why get so “worked up” about it, right?  This whole process of deep Arctic cold and numerous snowfalls seems endless to me.  At least another two months.  I think of being able to step out onto my porch, on a warm sun splashed afternoon with a warm light breeze, close my eyes and enjoy the feel of the suns warmth on my face.  The fact that we are so far from that right now, I just feel discouraged. 

Now in a sense of disclosure last year I used a light therapy box a lot, and this winter I have not.  This morning I started to use one again.  This is irrational to me.  Why waste this kind of emotional energy on something I have no control over.  This leads to an increase in my anxiety level.  I have so many awesome things happening in my life right now.  I am falling more in love with my wife every day, I just got the internship and school is starting again (which is a good thing as far as I am concerned).  Yet I am focused a lot of time on this anger and frustration.  For short periods of time I can overcome these feelings by exercising vigorously, or spend time with my wife and family but I have not been able to turn this feeling off.

 Maybe as school gets ramped up and I have to focus more mental energy on that I won’t be noticing this as much.  I want to be able to hold onto the joy and happiness around me and let go of this anger and frustration I feel over something I can’t control.  This thought pattern is classic “old Bryan.”  Get worked up about something I have no control over and complain about it.  Man, I am really trying to not repeat this pattern, but I have been unsuccessful thus far.  Well, I guess the thing to do is keep praying for God to change my heart, and take it one day at a time.  The snow will eventually melt, right?

Trusting in Love

There is another area of my life where I am struggling with trust, my personal life. I grew up in a family where we followed along with what my dad wanted to do.  There were times where I wanted to do something else, but I was told not to “rock the boat”.  Growing up in this kind of an environment where family life revolved around the wants and desires of one parent left me feeling minimized and insignificant, that what I wanted was not important.

            As I got older, I decided that I would not let other people make me feel this way, if other people would not validate me, I would find a way to do it myself.  Therefore, I developed an inflexible and defensive side to my personality. I decided that I would do what I wanted to do, and to hell with what others thought or wanted. I ended up going very far in this direction and developed a my way or the highway mentality.  I allowed myself to have tunnel vision and became so inflexible and defensive that I did not let people in, and lived in a “bubble.”

            At this point in my life, I was an independent person and could do what I wanted, when I wanted to. However, I also had built up an emotional wall around myself and was cut off from the world around me.  I equated subjugating my own wants and needs for others as a weakness that meant I did not matter.  In the past when I had been told to sacrifice what I wanted to do for another, it was out of the selfishness of that person.  Therefore, in my mind, I equated sacrifice and doing for others as being equal to not mattering to the person I was making the sacrifice for.  On the outside, I felt like I was in control of my life and fought hard for it, but on the inside, I was lonely, and miserable.

           

In the summer of 2011, I found Christ and met the woman who would become my wife.  They both changed my life for the better.  I vowed to trust more, and to put myself out there, and to put other people’s needs before my own.  The past few months have really put this plan to the test.  I have been questioning the motives of people around me.  Do they care about me?  Do they have my best interests at heart?  I have allowed the demons of my past to affect me in the present.  I am reliving thought patterns and behaviors that I have engaged in since my mid teens and I want to throw these off like an old garment.

I want to be able to break out of these patterns of negative thinking, insecurity and lack of trust.  I want to view sacrificial living and loving not as a weakness, but as strength.  I can still be my own person and live my life but also give of myself to my loved ones and those that are less fortunate then I am.  I want to be able to trust in the love that Christ has for me, the love that my wife and I have for each other, and leave the ruminating thoughts in the past with my memories.

Letting Go

Right now, I find that in two areas of my life, I have really struggled with letting go of my own self-centered thoughts and being centered in the present.  The first area of my life that I am struggling with letting go is my relationship with Christ.  Last month, I applied for an internship at the UW-Milwaukee library.  I built up my hopes that I would get this part time job and be able to leave the career that I have been in for 11 years behind.  I was ready to move on. 

I felt disappointed, frustrated and betrayed. According to my timetable this was it, let’s go!  But it was not in God’s timetable. I felt upset with God.  He knows how I feel about my job.  Why was He leaving me stuck here?  So I decided that I was going to dig in my heels and do things my way, I’d show Him! I did not even stop to think that my timetable and God’s were different; it did not occur to me that I should just trust that this is where he wants me to be at this exact moment.

In the past week, I have begun to read The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren.  As I started to work through the chapters in the book, I realized that I had lost my perspective.  I was focusing too much on myself and missing the bigger picture.  I was fighting God, wasting a lot of time and energy in the process. So I made a decision, I am going to trust God and stop fighting Him.  If he wants me to be where I am right now, then I am going to accept that fact and try my hardest.  I want to glorify His name.  I am going to trust that Jesus loves me and knows what is best for me.  This will not be easy for me to do on a daily basis, but I am done fighting.  God will do what is in His will when he is ready.

I will be entering my second semester in the LIS program at UW-Milwaukee.  I went back to school, because I am training for a career that is more compatible with my talents and temperament, then the one I have now.  There is no guarantee that I will land a job in this new field, but I have faith that God has guided me to this path for a reason.  If it is His will, this will happen on His timeline, not mine.  I have to surrender this part of my life to Christ, let him take control and be a part of my professional life every day.

There is a part of me that wants to continue to resist and want things on my timetable, which is a mistake that many people and Christians make.  In our arrogance we think that we know better than God what is right for us. In the process, forgetting or not caring how much he loves and wants the best for us.  Most of my life I have seen surrendering or letting go of control of something as a weakness. However, there is a passage in Pastor Warren’s book, where he talks about letting go as strength not a weakness.  Letting go and trusting someone else’s love be it Jesus or my wife for example show’s how strong a person is, not how weak.  Any person can be stubborn and try to live life their way; Jesus modeled the ultimate strength when he sacrificed his own life, for the whole of humanity.  Christ through his example showed that sacrificial living is not something for the weak minded, but the strong hearted.