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Choices.

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Romans 7:15

Oh, Paul. How I can relate. It stinks to want to do one thing but to choose, for any of a multitude of reasons, to do something else instead. It is a whole other awful thing to know perfectly well what you should do and choose to do anything but it. (Paul’s been there.)

Sometimes, what I do I don’t want to do, have time to do or benefit from doing and what I don’t do is exactly what I should do. Like when I shop like I don’t have a budget. Or when I eat but I’m not hungry. Or when, instead of studying, I pretend my TV remote is a microphone and I perform the Avett Brothers’s Live Volume 3 album in its entirety in front of a mirror.

Afterward, I don’t say, “Wow. I’m glad I chose that. It really worked out for me.”

I say, “I do not understand what I do.”

But I do understand that I have choices. And that — in the words of the Avett Brothers — we only get so many days.

Choose wisely.

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Infidelity.

In a recent conversation, a friend brought up the prevalence of marital infidelity among professionals whose jobs require long hours or lots of travel.

How, my friend wondered, does a married man or woman avoid the temptation to cheat? How, when there’s no time to enjoy his or her personal life
when one basically lives in hotels
when one has very little space
when one spends a lot of time in that little space with a colleague to whom he or she is “fatally” attracted?

My knee-jerk reaction: Um, easily?

My answer: Let’s say it’s a married man. If the combination of who he is and what a career requires of him really renders him so disatisfied with or detached from his personal life that he becomes attracted to and/or acts on his attraction to anyone who isn’t his wife…

he needs a new career.

Why? Because vows are vows. And because love, the choice, the action, is selfless.

Next question: What would you do if your spouse cheated on you?

Would you choose love?

One couple, whose story I happened to come across in the same week I had the aforementioned conversation, did. Take seven minutes to watch the video below. Pay particular attention to what the husband says in the segment from 4:30 to 5:30.

Beautiful. Unique. For every couple affected by infidelity? Not sure… but the single, married, faithful and unfaithful all have a little to learn about love from the Markleys.

Read the Markley couple’s story, as written by Sarah, here.

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Assumptions.

Have you ever had a relationship in which you could be completely honest?

I don’t mean to imply that we’re liars, but that sometimes, we speak in code. Or we feel one way while acting like we feel another. We gunnysack all the things that bother us until we don’t like the person who does them (or until we explode). We avoid expressing ourselves explicitly because, frankly, we don’t want what we want from whom we want it unless we can get it without asking.

And when we don’t get what we want, we sincerely cannot believe such a frustrating turn of events. How dare [so-and-so] not do [such-and-such], even after I dropped an almost unending series of extremely vague hints?

If you’ve been there (and you have. Don’t lie!), you know that it is frustrating. And fruitless. It stunts growth. Assumptions don’t work where communication is required.

I’ll leave it to two famous guys to prove my point:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” -George Bernard Shaw

and

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” -Henry Winkler

?

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Empty.

Lent is the season of the church that starts on Ash Wednesday (today) and ends on Easter. It’s dark and somber. Solemn and quiet. Chock full of scripture, tradition and spiritual discipline.

Sometimes, especially toward the end, Lent is sad.

But I love it.

In an email I got around Ash Wednesday last year, a friend of mine who’s a Franciscan friar explained the concept of kenosis. It’s the “process of emptying,” he wrote, and it’s “very common in our Christian spirituality.” Especially during Lent.

Most practicing Roman Catholic Christians fast until dinner on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We don’t eat meat on Ash Wednesday, or on any Friday in Lent. We usually make a 40-day sacrifice. Sometimes, it’s a sacrifice of time, like volunteering at a food bank, going to mass daily or waking up earlier every day to read the Bible. Other times, it’s actually giving up stuff. In past Lents, I’ve given up chocolate. Bread. CDs. Facebook. Once, I heard about a guy who gave up his bed (so he slept on the floor).

But what people give up is only part of the point. The rest of the point is what happens to you when you deny yourself something. Fewer things means fewer distractions. Time is finite. Attention is finite. The fewer our obligations, the more time and attention we can give to what’s left. The more time and attention we give, the higher the quality of it. When we give up stuff, it puts a new perspective on the difference between the words want and need. When we sacrifice, it empties us.

That, the Franciscan friar wrote, is the point.

“In order to let God fill our life, we need to empty it first.”

Here’s to an empty Lent.