It wasn't just a 16 km ride, I stopped in the park for a picnic and read (mostly non-fiction) for over three hours. Like a mini retreat, really. Also, riding a bike gives you time to think! And I think better when I'm doing something physical.
I was surprised when two main books I spent time reading yesterday intersected in some of their themes, as they are authors from very different worlds. The first one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: Life Interrupted by a friend, Susan Chapman, it was published three years ago during the pandemic. It's short and jam packed with things to think about how we live our lives, our expectations, how to continue to grow, and take care of ourselves at the same time. Susan is a missionary with our organisation and I've known her since before we came to Japan. She, like me, has lived her life in Australia and East Asia and grew up in a similar part of Australia to me. Her book was born out of a major interruption that she and her husband experienced during Covid. It's a text that you could use for a retreat or a small group, because there's plenty of questions and avenues to explore.
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| The Cosmo field: I alway stop here and take photos at this time of the year. They were almost the only flowers in the whole park yesterday. |
One quote that stood out to me was, "To say no appropriately, we need to stand against any cultural expectation that our busyness is linked to our significance. Author Brené Brown sums it up well—'if we want to live a wholehearted life, we have to become intentional about cultivating sleep and play, and about letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.'"
The second book is The Road to Daybreak, and is the first book I've read by Henri J.M. Nouwen. I've seen him mentioned by authors like Tim Keller and Philip Yancey, but haven't picked up one of Nouwen's works myself. Henri was a Dutch Catholic priest who worked for much of his life in north America; he was an intellectual as well as a priest, a speaker and mentor as well as dipping his toe in the waters of missionary work in South America. This book was extracted from a diary he wrote during a year when God led him away from the intellectual world of Harvard into a very different life. He was serving as the priest at a L'Arche home in France. (L'Arche ("The Ark") is an international federation of non-profit organisations working to create networks of community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together–Wikipedia.)
I've only just begun this latter book, but am finding it fascinating. He was in his early 50s and was searching for God's leading. He writes: "I feel a tension within me. I have only a limited number of years left for active ministry. Why not use them well?...Time given to inner renewal is never wasted. God is not in a hurry."
So here the two books coincide. I struggle with needing to link my output to my significance. Nouwen was discovering that these people he was living with (and indeed himself also) were significant despite having limited output and limited potential for the future as far as the world understood it. I know this all in my head, but I so often fall short when I try to link that to my thoughts about my own worth and value. I want, so often, to prove my value to others through what I do and how busy I am, I get depressed when work is a little slow and my thoughts turn to all my deficits and then start condemning me as "pretty useless really".
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| I saw a lot of red dragonflies. This one is called the "Spotted darter". |
So with these authors speaking to me, I felt very much at peace reading in the park yesterday. It was a rare "perfect" day in Tokyo: neither hot nor cold, not windy or wet or grey. This side of heaven I will never get my thoughts and feelings perfectly aligned with how God sees me, but maybe, incrementally, I can grow more Christ-like and less tied to my faulty thinking.
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| The sky was gorgeous! |
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