All posts by Diane Rivers

Diane is a native Floridian whose career as an FBI Agent got her transferred to the North. She's retired from that gig now and "repurposed" as a freelance writer, author, and sometimes poet who blogs about the bumpy, bone-jostling ride of her “workaround” life. She loves Jesus, her family, black coffee, kayaking, biking, and hiking, and she looks forward to eternity with the One who will make all things beautiful. (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

The High Cost of Drama, Assumptions, and False Agreements

I could feel myself sliding into a funk.

Traveling with a group of my closest friends over the last several years had always been restorative. Relaxing. Outrageously fun. But now it had taken on additional layers. Somehow drama and dysfunction had been introduced into the mix this time around, a complication that had never been a part of any previous experience.

everystockphoto.com

Looked at through a particular lens, you could say it made us more like a family. After all, families are imperfect, right?  And it doesn’t mean we don’t love each other. (I rather prefer that view.)

It started with a minor misunderstanding that morphed into hurt feelings and doubts about motives. Tears. Words. Then hugs. Forgiveness.

And for me, a lingering darkness. Here’s why. Continue reading The High Cost of Drama, Assumptions, and False Agreements

Do I Detect A Little Slippage Here?

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems our “good intentions” department is a little low on inventory these days.

Looking around, civility appears a little thin. Chivalry – despite those who like to say it isn’t dead – is fighting for a good, deep breath. And sympathy? Sympathy is struggling to stay afloat.

I’m just not sure we’re as nice as we could be any more. Has it become acceptable to get by with the minimum, to be happy with  a half-hearted effort, the “old college try”? Are we too closed off emotionally? Too busy? Just tired?

flickr.com by macrophile

Shouldn’t Tears Come with a Gift Receipt?

When I was a teenager, my older brother brought his lovely, poised new girlfriend home to meet us. He introduced me by saying, “And this is Diane; she can cloud up and rain at a Hallmark commercial.”

Dear God. It was – and still is – true. And it remains something about me I would change in a heartbeat if I could.

In Christian circles we are fond of saying, “tears are a gift from God”. The idea is that the ability to feel deeply and express ourselves openly is something God values and has given us out of His abundance. Someone will usually quote John 11:35: “Jesus wept”.

Scott Robinson via Creative Commons

I appreciate gifts, I really do. But this is one I would love to exchange.

No offense, God, but even at this late date maybe I could switch it out for something like a more robust and uninhibited sense of humor; perhaps a penchant for effortless hospitality; or maybe a slightly longer fuse when things don’t go my way? Heck, I’d be happy if I could just multitask a little better.

Understand, I chose a career in law enforcement. Continue reading Shouldn’t Tears Come with a Gift Receipt?

Everyday Miracles and the “Skinny” on Walt

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I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea about Walt Whitman’s faith, whether he was a Christian or not.  For all I know he may have been a pantheist, a Universalist, a Buddhist.  He died 120 years ago, so it would be pretty hard to have a conversation with him about it now.

I do hope I meet him in Heaven someday so I can talk to him about his poetry and his process.  I would enjoy gaining some insight into what it’s like to see through his eyes and hear how he crafted his thoughts into such classics.

That said, when I read his poem “Miracles” through my faith grid and spiritual experience, it’s hard for me not to believe that he had some sort of relationship with the Divine.  I read his lovely words about the miracles found in the common and the extraordinary, about the beauty to be found in the streets as well as the fields, and I am inspired to worship.

Somehow, I think that’s what Walt was doing.

Here is his poem, see what you think:

 Miracles

By Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

If you’re living a “workaround” life like I am (and who among us isn’t, on some level?), recognizing the everyday miracles may often be just what you need to get you through.  For me, they include a sweet friend writing me an email at just the right time to tell me what she appreciates about me; the return of green to the grass after a brutal summer drought; the giant chocolate Lab catching my eye from across the room and thumping his tail in greeting; the discovery of shared faith in the unlikeliest of places.

Will you share one or more of your everyday miracles in the comments below?

The Thing About Hands

“I will not forget you!  See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” Isaiah 49:15b-16a

I can relate to hands, can’t you?  Strong ones, gnarled ones, huge, tiny, soft, capable, calloused, grimy – they come in all varieties.

I have my mother’s hands:  the length of my fingers, the shape of my nails, the skin that is starting to thin.  I notice the similarities more and more as I get older, because it’s her older hands that I recall most clearly.  I find I even fidget with my hands the way she once did, repositioning my rings with my thumb and pinky finger, stiffening and thrumming my fingers when I’m tense.

There’s an extra spark of recognition these days when I look at old photos of her.  She’s rooting through a purse, folding her arms, holding a book.

And she has my hands.

She never learned to play a musical instrument that I know of, but she could type about a jillion words a minute, error-free, whether on a manual typewriter or an IBM Selectric.  When word processing became an option, it was a breeze for her.

She spent hours at the keyboard, fingers flying, typing out the notes she would use to teach her Sunday School class, notes she then printed out in 5 x 8” booklet form.   Sometimes she would even add clip art and decorative embellishments, though no one was going to see her notes but her.

She wasn’t an artist but she was always willing to learn: ceramics, crochet, dress-making – she tried her hand at all.  She was a perfectionist, so smart and yet in many ways so insecure, which meant she always worked harder than most anyone else.

To this day, I treasure the tiny sugar bowl and creamer she shaped and fired in her community center class.  For years I had one of those crocheted doll skirts she made that would fit discreetly over a roll of toilet tissue. (Remember those? The doll stood in the cardboard core).  And I see her clearly in my mind’s eye, bent over the dining room table or kneeling down on the floor, pinning a pattern to fabric.

She penned many a note in the margins of her Bible with those hands and wrote out prayers to her Savior in longhand to tape on the mirror, clip to the refrigerator, or tuck in her purse.  After she died, anything with her handwriting on it became like gold to me, physical evidence of her existence through the words her hands had written.

I love the idea that God wants so much for me to understand the depth of His love for me, He uses human concepts, tangible images I can understand.  Like hands.

Now if I’m fidgeting, if I’m tense, if I nervously ball my fingers into a fist, I think to myself, “Look at me.  I’m turning into Mama.”  And love courses through me like an electric current.  She’s been gone 15 years but she’s really not.  God has given me her hands and I am so thankful.

I think of my mother when I look at my hands and I am reminded of the love I will always have for her.  And I picture Jesus thinking of me when He looks at His hands, with nail scars that bespeak an unfathomable, eternal love.  It undoes me every time.

That’s the thing about hands.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwerfeldein/2234720298/”>Martin Gommel</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photo pin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>

Are You Dreading a Divine Scolding?

The Hasidim have a tale about a rabbi named Meir
who used to worry that God would reproach him
in his final days and say, “Meir! Why did you not
become Meir?”  

~ Poet David Kirby, “Mr. Dithers Explains It All”

The problem I have – and this is part of leading a “workaround” life – is that I am painfully aware I did not become who I thought I would become.  I mean, seriously, this did not work out the way I envisioned it would, on SO many levels.

I’m pretty sure if I had another chance, I would skip over the pesky derailments and embarrassing failures.  I would try harder to orchestrate things so that my life was more honorable and certainly more significant – in my mind, I would be a “better” person, if I could do it all over.

Does that mean I have not “become Diane” and that I should expect a divine reproach someday?

I was talking to my brother the other day about how as parents we try so hard to protect our children, to keep them from making the same mistakes we made.  We want to spare them the pain and embarrassment we suffered, the setbacks and failures we brought on ourselves.  And if we’re honest, there’s a part of us that wants to correct our own screw-ups through our kids which is of course, impossible.  Maybe it’s a kind of redemption that we are trying to engineer for ourselves: a do-over through our children.

Wow, that is so NOT Biblical, but it is pretty common.  That hovering and overprotecting is where we get the term “helicopter parents”.

I think that desire to protect our sons and daughters comes from a good place, a tender heart-shaped place.  But my brother, wise sage that he is, reminded me that kids have to make their own mistakes and learn from them like we did so they can become who they are supposed to be.  He pointed out the application in my own life, how if I had done things differently, I wouldn’t be who I am now.  And then he observed that my life has turned out pretty well and I’m in a good place, so it’s not all bad.  (Thanks, bro.)

Yes, there are many things I would change if I could, but news flash:  It’s not going to happen.  This is my workaround life and it’s not perfect but, really, is anyone’s?

So about that divine reproach: I don’t think God is going to scold me for not becoming Diane.  I think perhaps He will reveal to me the many ways He creatively redeemed all those blunders and made me exactly who He knew I would become all along.

And I think He’s going to tell me again how wildly He loves me, just the way I am.

Are you living a workaround life?  Is there a part of you that has ever wondered whether God is going to berate you someday for not “turning out” better?  For not using your one and only life a little more wisely?  Your thoughts and comments are invited ~  

Smudge the Dog Weighs in on: FOCUS

If Smudge could talk, she would tell you there is nothing in the world right now except that tennis ball and the very real possibility that someone might kick it or throw it.  You could dump an ice chest full of Gatorade on her head like they do to the winning coaches at the end of a championship football game, and she would shake it off and be right back on her target.

She is never going to stop being focused; that’s just part of being a Jack Russell.

When I was first starting out in my career, someone called me “intense” and I heard it as a criticism.  It sounded like an annoying personal trait, like I had taken focused too far.   For years, I tried really, really hard to be laid back.

Wow, I’m just not.

I value clarity and I admit to being a bit of a perfectionist.  I like to be absolutely sure about things if at all possible.  I hate having to go back and correct mistakes and clean up messes when – if I had just been paying closer attention in the first place – I’d be moving forward, not backtracking because of a major derailment.  And I can be very hard on myself, can you tell?

Smudge?  Not so much.

She never worries about screwing up.  She never worries, period.  She is focused with anticipation, not fear.  She is expecting a good time, something positive.   She wants to play and let me tell you, she’s hard to ignore.

Ah, and if you engage with her, Smudge will be all in, chasing and retrieving that ball till it’s slimy and disgusting.  She’s really good at it, too, even at 15½ .  (If I had ever learned to throw a Frisbee, maybe I could have trained her to be truly competitive as a Frisbee dog.)

The game is over when she finally collapses in exhaustion, which doesn’t take nearly as long as it used to.  But here’s the thing – she never even pretends to be laid back; she simply throws her whole quivering self into whatever she’s doing.

That’s just who she is.

I can’t change my basic nature any more than Smudge can stop being a Jack Russell, but I can learn to pay attention to what is motivating my intensity (there, I said it) and if it’s negative, I can make a conscious effort to let it go.  Yes, I can relax.

“Relax” is a command Smudge has yet to learn.

What motivates you to focus?

Rats with Good PR

Trespasser in my yard this morning

Sometimes you can get away with being destructive and annoying, as long as you’re cute, have a fluffy tail . . . and good PR.  Squirrels are like that.  They are members of the rodent family, but they are from the better-looking side.

We tend to treat everyone – including wild animals – differently when they’re adorable.  

We see squirrels in our yards and trees, in our parks, on running paths, near our picnic tables, and we don’t freak out.  We’re amused by their lightning-fast antics.  Some people even toss them a scrap of food and encourage them to come closer.

It’s true that given a chance, they’ll raid your bird feeder and dig holes in places you wish they wouldn’t.  They sometimes get in your attic and have families up there, which is generally frowned upon.

But they’re frisky and furtive and they mainly keep their distance.  When they do come close, we’re not particularly threatened (unless your mother has warned you that “wild animals that act docile are probably rabid!”)

But put a rat the same size in the same locations and we’d be screaming our lungs out (and I, for one, would be googling the nearest exterminator).  We wouldn’t be encouraging them with food or thinking they’re precious.

It’s all in the packaging.

People can be like that.  They can look good on the outside and behave according to others’ expectations.  They can be industrious and well-behaved, even entertaining.  But maybe they’re not really like that on the inside.

Maybe we’re all rats; some of us just have better PR.

What do you think? 

Remembering Who I Used to Be

Earlier this week, a friend I haven’t seen in years sent me a video clip on Facebook he had recently put together from old footage of a group of us scuba diving off the beach of Hollywood, FL in the late 70s.

Back then, we all worked in the advertising department of a discount retail chain creating print ads for irregular merchandise, and battling boredom every day.  But we found our release by diving every chance we got after work and on weekends.  Our objective was always to catch tiny tropical fish for our saltwater aquariums (and maybe a Florida lobster for dinner), but mostly we just wanted to be together on the reef.

The film was a little blurry and shaky, and typically goofy like we always were.  My friend had converted it from 8mm to digital and added a soundtrack with a scratchy newscast about President Carter and some songs we all enjoyed back then.  It flipped the switch on a flood of memories for me.

Understand, I have lived in the Midwest for most of my adult life and haven’t been diving for years. But watching this shaky, silly video, I flashed back 35 years and there I was again.

What came back was more than just the basics of who, what, when, and where.   I smelled the air, felt the heat of the sand, shivered at the first plunge in the water.  I felt the pressure in my ears and the pounding of my heart, heard my breathing through the regulator and thrilled once again to the beauty of the underwater world.    

What’s more, I remembered how I felt then.  What I was conflicted about.  What I found pleasure in.  Who mattered.

We were all young and unconcerned about what life would hand us over the long haul – and in retrospect, it was a load.  On the reef that day, it didn’t matter.  We weren’t concerned that years later all we would have is a shaky film montage – and the feelings it triggered – to remind us of that simpler time.

I smiled and smiled, watching that video, but I cried a little, too.  For the one of our group of friends who won’t see it because he died of cancer 8 years ago.  And for another who won’t see it because our relationship was irretrievably broken decades ago.

But for 4 minutes and 19 seconds, I remembered who I used to be.  And who I still am.

How to Create an Oasis When Life is a Desert

We were somewhere in the Western Caribbean between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands when I first met Erica McNeal.  A group of about 100 of us were considering how to best use the communication gifts God had given us and we were doing it while enjoying the beauty of His creation on a cruise for “Christian Creatives”.  Not a bad gig.

It was formal dinner night and Erica sat down at the same table as me.  She was vivacious and friendly, a genuine “people person” with a winsome smile and that way of focusing on your face when you talk that makes you feel she is truly interested in what you have to say.  That’s a gift I wish I had.

When she told me she was writing a book to help people see the grief process as healthy and natural, I was a little surprised.  I mean, that’s kind of heavy, right?  Then she said she wanted to give people practical ways to respond to their grieving friends and loved ones, and I was skeptical.  After all, that’s a pretty tall order for one so young and lively.  What could she possibly know about pain that cut so deep it required a guidebook to navigate?

Then she told me a little of her story:

“By the time I was thirty-two years old, I had already suffered through radiation treatments and nearly died from chemo to beat cancer three times. I had made life and death decisions about my tiny baby girl born at twenty-two-and-a-half weeks gestation and lost her only 80 minutes after she was born.  And after falling in love, I handed a child I believed in my soul was meant to be my son, back to his birth mother when she decided to revoke his adoption plan.”

What she said next really stunned me, but then it made perfect sense:

“The reality is: the worst pain in life doesn’t always come from illness, child-loss, death, or even grief itself. Often, the greatest obstacles to overcome are the unintended hurt caused by painful words spoken and things done or not done by those in our support system that care for us.”

She knew what people said to her and her husband, often in a well-meaning way, that had stunted their recovery process and wanted to spare others that pain.  She wanted to share specific encouragement and  alternative approaches that would be so much more helpful.

It’s a little over a year later now and her book, Good Grief!: How To Create an Oasis When Life is a Desert, is launching today!  She sent me a preview copy and after I read it, my response was, “Wow, she nailed it”.

Erica challenges the way Christians sometimes view 1 Corinthians 10:13 – that God will not give us more than we can handle.  Her experience is that God will allow us to be stretched beyond our human capabilities in order to show us our need for Him.

If you’ve ever wondered what to say (or not say) to someone who is grieving, what tangible ways you can help and support them, how to specifically pray,  even how to recognize warning signs that they may be succumbing to depression, it’s all in this book.  She also outlines a process she calls “breaking it down”, where she gives an example of how to  use the Bible as a road map for lowering anxiety and stress, a simple but very effective exercise that has application to other areas of life.

As Erica says,  “Learn from the triumphs and tragedies of others.  Life is too short to experience everything yourself.”  This book will help you do that.  It is convicting but never condemning, enlightening but never trite.

Giveaways

As part of her launch this week, Erica has some great giveaways.  If you purchase a copy of Good Grief between June 11th – 16th at http://amzn.to/goodgrieflaunch and send your receipt to goodgriefgifts@gmail.com, you’ll have a chance to win free books, gift cards, podcasts, study guides and more.  Go to Erica’s website at www.ericamcneal.com for details.  And be sure to follow Erica on Twitter:  @toddanderica .