when discouragement comes to visit

A bright row of houses visible only after going through a tunnel. Edinburgh.

This past week was pretty hectic for me with two major presentations due one after the other. On Wednesday I had a workshop reading of my original play which meant that I spent the last few weeks rewriting at least half of my first draft in response to feedback I received. One never knows if a play will be a cohesive, believable piece until it is workshopped. The comments afterwards were more positive than I could have hoped for! People said it was a solid piece with a good arc, believable dialogue, and strong characters. There are still a few problems that need to addressed, but that's to be expected. Overall, I was very encouraged by the response.

On Thursday afternoon I had another presentation, this time for a performance studies seminar. The readings in this seminar are outside of my usual genre and sometimes I feel like I am barely keeping my head above water.  So I was hoping to do well. During the informal presentation, one person wondered why I was making these connections. Was my theme trauma? What? Not at all! I tried to explain myself, but I wasn't sure if I was being clear.  Others in the group offered observations and comments and these seemed much more informed and nuanced than anything I had said.  Oh well. On my way home, I started to get really discouraged. Though everyone in the seminar is always friendly and gracious, I thought...perhaps I am doing really badly in this course and I don't even know it. Yes, that seemed totally likely. The silly, uninformed theology student was totally out of her league in a performance studies graduate seminar.  A pit of uneasiness started to grow in my stomach. This was going to end badly, I knew it. And then I recognised that I was being visited by discouragement. What do you do when you are visited by discouragement? I decided that instead of letting myself be carried away by it, I would try to be honest, gracious, and responsible in how I responded.  So here is what I did.

1. I acknowledged the discouragement. I didn't brush it aside as unfounded negative thoughts or try to overcome it through positive talk. I didn't want to avoid what was happening inside me.  I tried to be truthful about how I felt and vocalised it, telling God what my thoughts were.  I tried to let the emotion connected to the disappointment out in a safe way. Discouragement can be a bit like mourning because some aspect of hope has died, so I tried to face it with grace and courage and let it run its course.
2. After the emotion subsided a bit, I took a look at the situation. Was there a valid reason to be discouraged? I wasn't sure; all I had was my gut feeling and my perceptions of how people had reacted. I decided that I had to find out more about the situation to see if my response was merited.
3. I made contact with my faith community and got a friend to pray with me. I gave the situation over to God. I gave the emotions over to God. I gave the past, the present, the in-between time, and the future over to God.
4. I ate a good meal. I went for a long walk.  I read an inspiring book. I played with the cat. I breathed deeply and listened to some music. I let lots of life in. And then I got a good night's sleep.
5. The next day I contacted my professor and expressed my concern about how I was doing in the course. He provided the clarification I needed and gave me some ideas for how to move forward. It wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined and feared.

The visit by discouragement was relatively short and it left gently, easing off my soul bit by bit until I felt light and filled with hope again.  There is still much work ahead of me in my course of study, but I no longer feel like I am floundering. And I am not afraid of the next time that discouragement comes knocking.  I know what to do.

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

outWORD by Matte Downey

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