Beam Me Up, Scotty!
by Michael Malloy, LCSW
A good friend sent a copy of this article I had written in a summer newsletter in 1994 when I was executive director of the non-profit. As I read it...years later...much of it still rings true. So I 'reprint' it here.
Some days you just feel like giving up. Throwing in the towel. Screaming "BEAM ME UP! SCOTTY!" Life isn't getting any easier as I get older. As the saying goes, aging isn't for sissies. (I smile now wondering what I knew then about aging and achy muscles and joints back then) It is just plain tough.
I read about leisure time in America but in the lives I see, I am not sure we know what "leisure time" is. We even stress out recreationally treating our alternative time the same way we do our daily schedules. On top of the pace of our crazy lives, in the fleeting quiet moments, I'm feeling I'm not what I should be as a husband. Neither am I pleased with my performance as a dad or as a friend---well, I could do better, I say to myself if I had the time.
Money is a pressure. Where you live really doesn't matter. As one has said, living in Belle Meade or Brentwood only means you have the option to be miserable in another zip code. College is looming ahead for our kids, how will we pay for it? There is always something needing to be fixed at home or on the cars. Maintenance is eternal---mowing, painting, trimming, cleaning, waxing.
Then there are the times I feel ignored, left out, and not appreciated. It's like investing several years of your life in the production of a movie and finding out you're not even listed in the credits. It may be your job, it may be an organization to which you gave hours upon hours, it may be feeling used by your kids or your spouse.
Beyond the personal, our lives are cast against the backdrop of the 'big picture'. Wow, what a mess! For us melancholies, it is best at times to forgo CNN, Newsweek, and The Tennessean (for you younger readers we used to have things called newspapers and news magazines. Now with the internet and social media this has increased exponentially—watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix) Some of us take it all in too deeply. Waiting on hold this morning listening to the radio I heard about a workshop dealing with paranoid repercussions related to modern-day advertising media. The example given was the Smokey the Bear ad "Only YOU can prevent forest fires!" and the pressure that statement creates when saving the nation’s timberlands falls totally on your shoulders.
I must admit that I am influenced by the media in a big way. (group confession: we ALL are) I see sitcoms with people laughing their way through life. I wonder if they ever feel like throwing in the towel? (I also wonder what drugs they're on). I see the melodramatic commercials about calling my dad. Where does that heart-tugging image fit when it doesn't work that way for him and me? I've tried calling a gazillion times.
My life is not and will not be ideal. Most of the time it doesn't even come close. And, my expectations seem to have a great deal to do with my satisfaction in life.
At a recent conference, Harry Schaumburg, a counselor/writer who practices in Colorado Springs, said that until you are ready to quit, you've not developed a mature faith. Until you are totally done in, overwhelmed, and fed up, Schaumburg believes you are still living in denial or with an illusion. The denial is being out of touch with what is going on around you and the illusion that you have some control over it. The truth is, we have no control. If you're like me, my greatest challenges at control are with my own actions and feelings. What I do or don't do and what I desire to do or not do are miles apart much of the time. As I learn to accept my failure at control, I am coming to simply appreciate the minor influence I have, with my family, my job, with my friends---not control, just influence.
Losing several clients---and friends---to HIV over the last seven years and with my own mother's death Christmas eve of 1991, I've learned through what these precious people taught me that death is the final 'letting go' --- releasing of control --- in this life. I also struggle with letting go of other things like a particular season of my life. My body aches more now when I do Saturday yard work than it used to (nothing like it aches now). And when I catch a cold...I don't make a nice sick patient (ask my wife). I'm for a national campaign against fine print as I anticipate another power boost of my vanity bifocals. This next year, we send our firstborn off to college, and letting go is already hard. ( I cried like a baby after leaving her at her freshman dorm for the first time). Aging gracefully isn't coming easily for this baby boomer. There are days I almost take offense as the clerk at Home Depot or the checker at Publix who seem to emphasize calling me 'Sir' or 'Mr.'.
Letting go has a lot to do with grabbing hold. My satisfaction in life depends on what I choose to grab hold of. Some guys (women too) think the thing to grab for is to start over. Leave your present situation and create another 'new life’…whether that be a spouse, job, or location. Or, even more prevalent, is to use different things, the good and the bad, to run from our deeper questions, disappointments, and frustrations. Some use cocaine or prescription drugs, chocolate or other food, others use Jim Beam, some use sex and pornography, others go for the more socially acceptable addiction of work or fitness. Even religion can be used addictively. It is still an issue of control. When I feel like I don't have it, the drug, the work, the food leaves me with the impression in that fleeting moment that I still have a tiny bit of control---a part of the grand illusion.
Do you every feel like quitting? Then you're ripe for God to show you some major stuff about who He is. We are in His way most of the time---I said 'in His way'...not in His will. We even want to lay out how He will do His healing work in our lives. When I'm at the end of myself and ready to quit, I can see Him much more clearly from there. His best work is done on that edge of self. It's not that we like how we feel hanging out there but what He does to assure us, to lift us above life and to change us, is beyond this realm.
He is what we are to grab hold of. He is the anchor, a rock, the everlasting, open arms of a father always ready to embrace us after we have exhausted our own resources. (which is pretty consistently these days).
We are all prone to addictions (or compulsive behavior should you be bristling with the addiction term). Either my passion will be for God...relationship with Him...or it will seek a pursuit of its own---never as healthy. Until I have utterly surrendered...daily...hourly...my passion(s) will roam. Dan Allender has helped me to see that surrender implies a fight. That I don't surrender until I have fought a war for awhile. Have you fought with God lately? As we do, we come to understand that the height of the victory/peace we will experience with Him is in direct proportion to the depth of our surrender...moment by moment.
So I've come to see that for one thing, my melancholy personality will probably not change (so far not yet) but these days most of me likes it the way it is. I've come to see that life is not easy nor predictable; there's a surprise at each turn...that when God destroys one stronghold in my life, I can expect another. But what I can also expect is His presence at every challenge, every moment of the way. And, when I ultimately round that corner and face death square in the face, He will be there too.
Life in God is paradoxical. the older I get and the more He reveals to me about Himself, the more insignificant I feel and the less I realize I truly do know...or have figured out. That's the way it is and should be. Like a child trying to take his first steps and convince himself to let go of the corner of the table, we too live holding on to the corners of those tables. In faith, we step out in each new situation often, in fear and trembling, and come to see all that is available to us in His kingdom for making it through this life into the next.
Has today been overwhelming? Are you tired to the bone? You are in a great place to see God. Let go...even for a moment from the corner of your little security table and see what's in store for those who...even for a moment...know the reality of absolute surrender.
Postscript: Before this came in an email, I was declaring that I was eliminating the word 'easy' from my vocabulary. Someone in a group I facilitate had used the word 'easy' to describe how Jeannie and I have made marriage work. I corrected her saying that there was little that was easy...parts were horribly tough. About ten years before this article was written I'd read Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled the first line of which is "Life is difficult". In my early 30s that flew right over my head. Now...I'm totally in agreement. As he goes on to say, when you stop thinking it should be easy, it does get more manageable. In the years since writing this I discovered Niebuhr's full Serenity Prayer and the lines: 'accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it'. Jesus did deal with the world on the world's terms...he didn't try to change everything...not that He didn't know how it could be. He accepted the world for what it was...and is...and I came to see that a fair portion of my problem were the expectations that I then develop out of what 'SHOULD be'. I 'shouldst on myself' much less these days. Not that in my self-righteousness I still rear up proclaiming what is wrong with the world (always what someone else is doing wrong...not ME!) I've learned there is a lot to unlearn. I rest more in my relationship with the creator God than I do telling him to explain himself to me all the time.
The prayer goes on to read 'trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to your will'. There it is again. More and more I am believing that the only thing we really do is let go...of our own explanations, ideology, small gods, material stuff, tiny lives....in order that we might have even a portion of the fullness of life He's always promised.
It really is about being beamed up...but it's not Scotty from the Enterprise that does it---then again, with all the other names we've used for God...maybe Scotty is just another?
First written 1994 for the CCS Newsletter
Last edit 3/2021
