The gift of a word

A calendar screen can simply scroll over into a new year. As for me,  I dawdle, sigh, reflect and mutter when approaching a new year. My transition into a new year is much like the way I approach Christmas morning. I don’t want to be rushed; I want to savor the gift in hand before moving on to the next. I want to fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the gift: the giver, the effort that went into its selection, the connection between giver and receiver, and the gift itself.

And so it is with a new year…a wrestling against the speed of time for space to savor what has been received this year before opening up the next one. A friend communicates similar angst at this time of year in her text message, “Just taped up the last box of Christmas. Some pieces went kicking and in protest of yet another closure.”

Before I can tidy up this past year without regret and look forward to the next, I want to take time to savor the year past and its many gifts. Were I just to recall those gifts packaged in festive paper and celebration, my gratitude and my growth would be lacking. Much like the gift of sea glass fragments found, collected and saved in a large, see-through, wide-open vase, I finger through gifts from last year marveling over the accumulated growth that time has produced bit-by-bit. 

Retrieving those gifts from the past year spotlights a new path for the new year. My recollection of the year is most visible from the vantage point of my word for the year. And it is by the light of my word for the year—last year—that I can best view the gifts I have gleaned. With my 2012 word in hand, I sift through the gifts I received in connection to my previous word, open. I recall, absorb and own each and every gift listed below…

Choice: Taking responsibility for my life opens up many different options. From the book, Boundaries, by Cloud and Townsend

Support: Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any one hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. Rev. 3:20

Spaciousness: I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way. I'm speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!  2 Corinthians 6:11-13, The Message

Freedom: Beckoned from the shadows, from behind walls, I have been released into the open. Into the open, Julie Voorhees, Feb 2012

Love: Breathe in love, exhale captivity. Breathing lessons, Julie Voorhees, March 2012

Acceptance: I want to be Julie. Growing into my clothes, Julie Voorhees, April 2012

Redemption: Life’s traumas are not wasted; they are redeemed by forcing out seeds for new growth…by forcing new steps leading to new growth. The other side, Julie Voorhees, July 2012

Recovery: Buoyancy - the power to recover emotionally...I was okay. Under the surface, Julie Voorhees, August 2012

Value: That day I discovered a personal treasure….unique, fearfully and wonderfully made, and intrinsically valued. The pink one, Julie Voorhees, October 2012

Significance: My dad’s five words were his final gift to me. He heard me…therefore he cared. Loss and found, Julie Voorhees, November 2012

In a December 2012 sermon, pastor Jon Ireland challenged all to “live in a posture of generosity with open hands”. This past year has pried open my hands and my soul…to receive so that I might give.

Anonymously quoted words beckon me into 2013: “Dear Past, thanks for all the lessons. Dear Future, I’m ready!”

And I look ahead with the expanded view that my friend, Lorene, describes, “A windshield is much larger than the rearview mirror.”

I so want for you to look ahead through your own clean, large windshield with hope and promise. I encourage you to select your focus word for this current year. If you would like help in choosing your word, go to my blog post, One Word Challenge, or listen to my interview with Geri Swingle, radio show host and fellow life coach.

Your focus word has potential to enhance the year ahead of you, provided you don’t shelve it within a couple of weeks like a forgotten gift. On the contrary, a good gift is relevant and sustainable. A focus word can be a relevant and sustainable gift over the course of the year provided you ask the pertinent questions along the way. Click here for cool coaching questions that will help you stay focused with your word for an entire year.

My word…you want to know my word for 2013? Hey, thanks for asking. Having tried out several words, I narrowed it down to three. Like Goldilocks looking for the right bed in which to rest, I tested out two other words before settling into the best one for me this new year. I tried NOTICE…uh-uh, too passive. I switched to SEEK…um, not quite active enough. Then I stretched to PURSUE: to seek persistently, strive for something, carry something out…which encompasses noticing, seeking and activity. Yes, PURSUE is the next journey on which I am embarking for 2013. 

Under the surface

Packing for a week on a sailboat in Belize was a straightforward task: bathing suits, cover-ups, a couple of shorts and tank tops, one sundress and flip-flops. Nothing complicated; nothing encumbering.

I love warm water and could flipper over the surface oogling coral, starfish, stingrays and barracuda from above. But what was deep below the surface and down into the unknown threatened me, kind of like engulfing emotions I tend to reject.

Three men from our group posed for a picture with the beginning Scuba instructor. Stepping out of the frame, I resolved to myself, “Uh-uh, not me, no way.” No one wheedled at my decision, which was another relief. And the photo captured their anticipation for the next day’s dive lesson.

Laura, the female instructor in her late twenties, reassured the men that she had been on more than 5,000 dives. “Where would you like to go but have not dived there yet?” I questioned daring to dip my toe in her ocean of intrigue. 

“I really don’t have a bucket list of places yet to dive. However, I do want to see new underwater life that I know from pictures but have not yet experienced. Just the other day, I saw my first manta ray.” Laura’s passion to experience ocean life pinged me like an errant pebble strikes a windshield.

That evening I snuggled into our boat bunk comfortably reading while all my excuses not to Scuba drifted by on the waves outside. However, as I read, another stray object struck the exact same spot on the windshield through which I narrowly viewed life, and a small crack started. I read about two blind men responding to Jesus’ inquiry into what they wanted of Him: “Lord, we want our eyes to be opened.” ‘Open’  got my attention; that has been my word, my passion and my request for the year. Could this Scuba lesson be an invitation for me? Was the crack allowing me to be open to look beyond my limited view…and face the fears, the emotions, and the insecurities that lurk underneath the surface of my life?

Who would have suspected that a tiny crack would let in a whole ocean?

The next day I squeezed into a full-body Lycra suit for our beginning Scuba lesson with Laura and the three guys from our group. We tightened our vests, weighted our belts, tanked our backs, finned our feet, and masked our faces. This outfitted character was most foreign to me. I wanted to bolt. Somehow my flippers kept me planted while Laura provided truth through precise instruction and grace through our trial-and-error exercises in waist deep water.

“Buoyancy is critical, explained Laura. “The ideal is to find that place in the depths where you are not sinking to the bottom nor escaping up to the surface. You are simply suspended underwater.” The tight Lycra bound my racing heartbeat and me together as I fingered the buttons trying to remember which one inflated and which one deflated my buoyancy vest.

Going deeper was painful.

We were to swim on the surface to the dive flag several yards away. The extra weight pulled me down; I gasped for strength. I wasn’t sure if I could make it to the flag. Laura recognized my labored efforts. She reminded all of us that inflating our vests would create buoyancy and allow us to swim effortlessly along the surface. And to think that I could power to the destination with an additional burden of diver’s weights and tank simply by inflating my vest! How many other times in my life do I sink under everyday burdens when all I need to do is to remember to engage an extra source of support?

At the flag together, we were to deflate our vests and descend to fifteen feet. I concentrated on slowing my breaths, and down I went with the others. But the pressure inside my ears was excruciating. I shot up out of the water to stop the pain. This escape to avoid the pain was somehow familiar. Having been coached earlier to stay together, Laura rose after me along with the other men. My confidence felt just as wounded as my eardrums. And I hoped no one could detect tears inside my mask. Laura and each one of the men joined in to explain and demonstrate the right way to clear one’s ears. Collectively I heard a good solution,  “Pinch your nose, capture your breath and try to push it out your ears.”

Before attempting the next descent, I fought to pinch off the trepidation, recapture some confidence and push through giving up. I became intentional about clearing my ears at intervals as we descended to more than thirty feet during the dive.

Buoyancy ­– the power to recover emotionally, like resiliency.

Buoyancy is critical, I repeated to myself. The buttons that deflated and inflated my vest still confused me. Yet I was committed to making the adjustments to my flotation vest to achieve that place of gentle suspension. While Laura smoothly traced the descent of the ocean floor, I bobbed up and down behind her. And I was okay.

Even with the extra heaviness and pressure, this journey that went deep—to the bottom, in fact—released something in me. I watched free-floating bubbles from my breathing apparatus drift upwards as I began to surface in our ascent to the flag.

Into the open

My word for 2012 began to expose itself to the light weeks before the end of last year’s journey through willing (my word for 2011). The depths, the exposure, the risk, the journey reminded me of our explorations into lava tubes in Northern California years ago. An intense event in nature long ago had formed pathways, hollow tubes throughout the molten lava that hardened into a network of interwoven tunnels. Dark, enclosed, meandering paths beneath the surface. One could easily lose one’s bearings and get lost within the darkness. My husband the miner tied ropes for us to stretch out as we journeyed deep into the tubes. We could tolerate the risk of going deeper because we knew we would be able to get back to where we had begun. When we ran out of rope, we turned and followed the path out of the depths, out of darkness and into the open again.

As I approached 2012, residual feelings of confined spaces and directionless darkness still lingered. And I was intimately aware that I have stayed hidden in the shadows behind walls…from God, from my husband, my family, and from life.

It was in the darkness of the night as a little girl that I first started to hide…from the wounds imposed on me and the humiliation that kept lurking after me. Then I would hide away reading stories not meant for childhood eyes to read. Shame stuck to me like a stubborn price tag that wouldn’t peel off. Sticky note to self: I am bad.

Sometimes, though, I forgot about my favorite hiding spot under the back porch or high in the branches of the Japanese plum tree. And I ventured out into play with the neighborhood kids. I wasn’t hiding when my mother left home. I walked home from sixth grade and she was gone. Never to be caught exposed and vulnerable again, I knew I needed a better hiding place…one that I could take with me and was accessible anytime, anywhere. It was then that I began building the walls around my heart. Sticky note on heart: I am not worth loving.

I felt safe outside my walls when I met my husband more than 36 years ago. I was happy and blessed when our first baby boy arrived. Another son arrived three years later. We were laughing and playing outside my walls when we moved (again), lost our jobs and found out we were pregnant. I mistakenly chose abortion. Sticky note on my wall: I make bad decisions.

Over the years my walls have grown familiar and somewhat comfortable to perch atop. I don’t stray too far beyond my walls. So, less than two years ago, when my husband told me about his sexual integrity issues, I could simply forgive and retreat within the safety of my walls. Sticky note on marriage: I do not speak up when I am hurt.

I went to a Women in the Battle weekend last year because I was stuck all over with sticky notes. I didn’t know why I had no motivation, no joy and no insight from God. Arriving an hour early, I sat alone inside the walls of my vehicle in the hotel parking lot mindlessly checking emails, catching up on Words with Friends, and playing Solitaire on my iPhone.

The next morning—after a full day of teaching and group sessions—I found myself thinking about a man named Lazarus. I found his story in the Bible and read: So the sisters sent word to Him [Jesus] saying, “Lord, behold, he [Lazarus] whom you love is sick.” My lack of motivation and joy felt like I was sick too. Maybe the women in my group—my new sisters—had seen my own ‘sickness’ and petitioned to Jesus on my behalf.

I read more. But when Jesus heard this, He said. “This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it. But Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha lamented that Jesus had not arrived sooner to save her brother.

I needed to read more. So, Jesus again being deeply moved, came to the tomb. Jesus must have cared deeply about Martha and Lazarus; I pondered if He could care so much about me. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” New sticky note: Jesus cares. Jesus can remove walls.

So they removed the stone. Then Jesus said: “Father, I thank You that You have heard me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe You sent Me.” Replacement sticky note: If I stay hidden behind my walls, I miss out on God’s goodness for me, and to others. And if I do not speak up, I have missed an opportunity for others to believe…how much we are loved, so that we can love others unconditionally. How much we are forgiven, so that we can forgive when it is undeserved. How much sorrow is redeemed, so that we can freely reveal God’s mercies through our stories.

And when Jesus had said these things, He cried out with a loud voice, (that seemed to read) “Julie, come forth.”

Beckoned from the shadows, from behind walls, I have been released into the OPEN…my new journey for 2012. The call back to life and into the open was not only for Lazarus, nor just for me (although I felt that way), but is for all of us.