Acknowledgements

I thought this day would never come.  I submitted a complete, revised dissertation to my adviser Monday night.

I wrote a dissertation.

Yup.  Past tense.  I wrote it.  I did it.  It's done.  It's over.  It is finished.

Except...not quite yet.  I still have my defense coming up: I will stand before my committee (wearing an appropriate power suit) and summarize my project, emphasizing its contribution to the field, after which my committee will commence to mercilessly grill me.

Well...not quite that bad, but you get the idea.

Anyway, one of the last things I wrote was my acknowledgments.  I sat and thought of all the people who have supported, encouraged, inspired and guided me throughout my academic career.  It was a really humbling exercise.  The realization of how much other people have contributed to and have been absolutely essential to my success...it's really humbling.

Acknowledgement is what I often fail to do consistently with God.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.  And when I fail to acknowledge Him, I start to think that it's all up to me and start getting anxious and fearful.  I begin to forget that He's got this; He always has and He always will.

Suffice it to say that the last paragraph of my acknowledgements was an unashamed shout out to the good Lord.  I felt like a gangsta rapper accepting an award.  "I wanna thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ..."  Like, um, God ain't pleased with your violent, misogynistic materialism, son.  Just sayin.  But I digress.

Intellectualism is looked down upon in the church world, and faith is looked down upon in academia.  But the former didn't stop me from pursuing my PhD, and the latter didn't stop me from acknowledging God and quoting the Word in my dissertation.

One of the life lessons I still haven't mastered yet is learning not to care.  Learning to just be who I am, who I know I am, who I was created to be, be content with it, accept it, embrace it, and not care.  I'll get there one day.

But in the meantime, as of July 20, you can address me as Dr. while I'm still figuring it all out.

I'm not brave.

I'm not brave.

I want things to stay as they are, truth be told.

I prefer an even keel.  A steady flow of manageable sameness.

As much as I issue challenges, even if they remain in my head, the truth is that I don't like to be challenged myself.

As much as I'm willing to admit that there are things I don't know and claim that I'm always open to learning, the truth is that I think I'm right about the things I do know (or think I know) and that I'm usually pretty confident about my rightness.

I hate messy things.  They unnerve me.  I prefer order.  I want things to just stay in place.

I care too much about what goes on in other people's heads.  I care too much about how I am perceived by others.  I often imagine others' incriminating, head-shaking disappointment once they actually discovered who I am, what I value, what I believe, what my views are, what my aspirations are.  I consistently imagine being exposed as a fraud.  You don't belong, you know you don't belong, but for some reason you want people to believe that you do.  

I don't like being faced with difficult questions.  Acknowledging my cowardice, I'd rather ignore them and let them somehow self-resolve.  Just because I'm not God doesn't mean that I'm completely powerless, but I'd rather allow my share of powerlessness to be brought into relief and it push me along like a gentle current.

I usually hang back.  Let other people hurl themselves into the fray.  Let other people be bold and declarative.  Let other people draw a decisive line in the sand and dare others to cross it.  Let other people respond appropriately.  I could even be accused of apathy.  Let other people be bothered.

I want to be loved.  Like any human being, I want people to care about me.  But I don't want fierce emotional stakes attached to me.  I can be a disappointment, and failing to meet others' expectations weighs heavy.

I fear my ordered, constructed, predictable, manageable space becoming suddenly unzipped.  I'd stand helplessly as all the unresolved jumble I'd carefully stowed away came tumbling out in a rush.  I would handle it.  Somehow, I always do.  But it would be one more niggling thing to occasionally jostle my mind and make me cringe to remember that time when.

Facebook and the Garden of Eden

I often have conversations with my husband and my best friend about the insidious nature of Facebook.  I'm back to being more or less active on it, but I've downloaded an app to block access to it during working hours of the day in an attempt to boost my productivity.

Anyway, the main thing about Facebook is that it's essentially a highlight reel of people's lives.  And people make the mistake of interpreting that highlight reel as the norm of people's lives and they misguidedly compare the norm of their own lives to the highlight reel of someone else's. (Check out this well-documented study.)  Facebook essentially enables us to ignore the many positive aspects of where we are in life and ruminate over what we don't have, what we haven't achieved, what relationships we haven't attained, what we haven't done with our kids because we've allowed ourselves to believe an inaccurate version of other people's lives.

A couple of Wednesday nights ago, my pastor used the current NBA playoffs as an example of this phenomenon during his lesson.  He mentioned that when you go and look at the replays of the latest game with the Golden State Warriors, what you see is Steph Curry and Klay Thompson sinking three pointer after three pointer.  What you don't see is all the shots they missed.

When we believe that there's something "better" out there that is somehow being denied us, we believe a lie.  If you have a relationship with God and you believe He is withholding something "better" from you, you've accepted a lie about the nature of God.

Eve fell into the same trap in the Garden of Eden.  She was in a literal paradise.  She could eat freely of every tree of the Garden.  But the adversary deceived her into believing that God was withholding something better from her.  Instead of enjoying the beauty and provision that surrounded her, she focused in on what she didn't have.  The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil became her Facebook newsfeed, distracting her from the truth that she already had everything she needed.

Are there things in life I desire that I haven't yet attained?  Absolutely.  Let's be honest.  I'd like to be a mother.  I'd like to own a home.  I'd like job security instead of this prolonged life of going from gig to gig.  I'd like to put down roots somewhere instead of continuing to bounce around all over the place.  But are my needs being met?  Do I have a wealth of things to be thankful for?  Am I surrounded by wonder and beauty and love?  Absolutely.  I am where I am for a reason.  Where I am now is not where I will always be.  So, God, help me to appreciate the now.  Help me to turn away from fruitlessly, foolishly, futilely comparing myself with others.  Help me to believe that You are who You say You are.

For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from those who walk uprightly.

— Psalm 84:11