Author: Isaac Morehouse

It’s really hard for me to leave things open. I like to complete stuff, wrap it with a bow, and move on.

Some things need time and benefit from a non-immediate cadence. I’ve had to learn this – still am learning – and now leave some messages without a response and questions unanswered when it seems they need time to breathe.

Immediacy is the better default setting. But it’s not always best.

And it’s not just that waiting allows time to gather more information or weigh things consciously. That is part of it. But even without any explicit attempt to think on or discuss a matter, just giving it time and allowing yourself to go through some different mental cycles and moods can make the response better, clearer.

There are cadences to everything, and an immediate back and forth is only the ideal cadence for a few things.

Hard to really care

To come so close and yet miss

Is it next year yet?

Tired: Coffee

Wired: Cold plunge

Inspired: 9 hours of sleep

The best course of action is always to do the right thing.

But it seems there are times where not doing what is right might be right. Lying to protect innocents from the Gestapo. Even killing in defense of self or family.

I don’t pretend to know where the lines are or what situations call for lying or killing. I’m not sure it much matters to get granular and figure it out.

It’s enough for us to know, ‘do not lie’, and ‘do not kill’. And enough to know that, should you find yourself in a situation where you feel violating these is best, you must be fully prepared to bear all consequences. On the material plane, you must be willing to be found guilty and condemned by your fellow man or earthly governments. On the spiritual plane, you must be willing to present your actions to God and accept whatever judgement may come.

If the thought of such accountability causes defensiveness to rise in you, it’s probably a sign that you ought not to do the thing. Justifying your actions is a sign you are probably not at peace with them in your own conscience. If you are completely willing to accept whatever happens without even the need to defend yourself, perhaps it’s a different matter.

I’ve often wondered whether, if faced with death at the hands of tyrants, I would fight or choose martyrdom. I don’t know. But I know that whatever I chose, I would have to be fully at peace with it, rendering myself up to God for judgement.

Once you’ve bumped up against truth, your options get fewer.

You can let its light disband your darkness – a painful and scary thing, but ultimately the best possible thing. Or you can run from it.

The problem with running is that the light of truth is bright and expansive. It’s like trying to run from the light of the sun. Eventually you realize you can’t keep going from shadow to shadow, because shadows are not permanent.

You have to hide. And still the light tries to penetrate. You have to burrow down into deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller caverns, where fewer and fewer guests can fit or want to go.

You have to give up your world to retain your darkness.

Often, the darkness you’re trying so hard to protect is a small thing. A little fear. A little lie you’re telling yourself. A little path of least resistance habit or mindset.

Are you really willing to deny yourself the light of day, the surface of the earth, and the company of others just to keep that small darkness from being destroyed?

If not, better to get the whole procedure over with as quickly as possible. It only gets harder the longer you evade the light.

The young professional who haphazardly interrupts everyone with unscheduled calls or texts is a problem. They waste people’s time, annoy, and struggle to maintain their own work schedule efficiently. They don’t yet have systems and calendars. Everything is ad hoc. It’s their default and they don’t know any other way. Emails and calendar invites are confusing and seem like noise to them.

As you mature in your career, you need systems and order. You must wrangle your days and weeks into submission. Schedules must be deliberate, chunked into maker mode and manager mode. Meetings must have prep time and be properly slotted. Your tools and rules are your friend.

Then something weird happens. You reach total overwhelm as your network and nodes and modes of contact grow. Your systems aren’t sufficient. They handle the moderately important stuff, and you mostly sorta follow your calendar, but sometimes have to ignore it. The top tier stuff just doesn’t fit, and a calendar invite doesn’t stand above the noise.

You have to bypass it all and call or text people unscheduled. You’ve got a tranche of contacts for whom the rules don’t – simply can’t – apply.

Eventually, highly successful people tend to return to their pre-professional ways and eschew systems altogether.

It seems at very low stakes, inefficient, system-less communication is fine. Medium stakes require systems in order to scale. But high stakes break the scale ceiling for these systems and it’s back to inefficient, system-less communication.

It’s become fairly popular to discuss paranormal experiences, aliens, entities, cryptids, spirits, and other things from the fringes.

I enjoy a good weird encounter story as much as the next person, and have heard my share of them.

When the question comes of who these various beings are, I’m always reminded of the statement, “You will know them by their fruit.” What is the fruit? It’s hard to say. And the fact that it’s hard to say, I think, says something.

Consider another kind of experience, called supernatural by Christians and shared as a ‘testimony’. These stories appear similar on the surface, but really the only commonality is the presence of some kind of personage not typically visible on the material plane. Otherwise they are quite different.

A testimony is usually something like this: I was in a bad place – perhaps physical sickness, addiction, or a bad relationship. I saw or heard an angel or Christ or a saint – they healed me, helped me, showed me the way. I am now in a better place – I can walk, I am free from addiction, I am on the way to reconciling my relationship.

Saul encountering Christ on the road, being temporarily blinded, and receiving his calling follows this pattern. So do Joseph and Mary being visited in a dream and told to go to Egypt.

A testimony has a definite direction and purpose. Upon sharing it, everyone gets goosebumps, erupts into applause, and praises God. They usually also become better people themselves from hearing the testimony. And the one sharing it feels strengthened when they remember the events.

A paranormal encounter, on the other hand, seems to have no end, no completion, no direction, and no purpose. A person sees a creature in the woods, feels deep fear, and that’s it. A person is taken up by an alien-looking being, forgets parts of it, suffers from headaches and missing time, and can never figure out exactly why or how or what to do about it.

Those listening to encounter stories do not often become better for hearing it, but more curious or creeped out. And the one sharing it doesn’t tend to feel strengthened by remembering. In fact, many of these experiencers try not to remember.

The main fruit of these encounters seems to be an ever growing obsession with figuring out what happened. A pursuit that, while it may uncover many interesting things, never seems to reach a conclusion. Like a show of endless cliffhangers, the pursuit goes on, and sometimes consumes the person.

Either that, or they have to just put the experience off to the side in a compartment. It’s not part of their story, just some odd accessory. It doesn’t integrate.

The fruit in these peoples lives couldn’t be more different. One is clear, definite, and positive for both the person involved and those they share it with. One is unclear, indefinite, and negative or at least ambiguous for both the person involved and those they share it with. One inspires hope, love, and change. One inspires either fear or an all-consuming curiosity which never seems to get consummated.

If it is for freedom that we have been set free, what are we to do with that freedom?

Blossom into the wholeness of our created potential.

Each person is an imager of God, and a unique expression of some aspect of Him, meant to become the fullness of that aspect in the world.

But if we are enslaved to fear, guilt, shame, addiction, weakness, manipulation, tyranny, or ideology, the best we can do is be imagers of that which enslaves us. We can’t begin to become what we were meant to be until we are freed from these shackles.

Freedom is the gift of God, so that once freed we may then go about our journey of becoming more like ourselves, which is more like Him.

The hardest thing is

Knowing how to win and then

Learning how to lose

If you see a poor man, does your heart go out to him?

What if the government has classified him as an illegal immigrant?

It’s amazing what a bundle of political biases and assumptions can do to our hearts. A poor man is a poor man, regardless of which party wants to weaponize him for what.

Our calling is to deal with individual humans like Christ did. Not to treat them only as pawns in a political game.

All earthly kingdoms are corrupt. All earthly kingdoms will fall. How you behave towards other people will remain.

I always told myself I’d never be one of those people who got stuck in an intellectual rut with age.

I would maintain a sense of wonder, and constantly engage new ideas in new fields, never getting crusty or closed-minded. I couldn’t really imagine it being difficult to do so.

Now 40, I feel the steady pull of patterns and a decline in energy preventing that same level of exploration. The biggest hindrance is that with time, your bullshit meter gets better. And as time becomes more precious, you are inclined to abandon something at the first hint of bullshit.

This is a blessing and a curse.

If you let it continue unabated, pretty soon you end up whittling away every novel idea and are left with a handful of core truths and a handful of books or authors you know won’t waste your time so you come back to them over and again and little else. That’s not all bad, but it feels too safe and a bit defeatist.

But it sure is hard to go out there and engage lots of new ideas when the phoniness, sloppiness, and badness are easier to spot.

Cynicism shrinks a person, and I don’t want to shrink.

One of the keys for me is to remind myself the stakes are low. So what if you read some bad ideas? So what if you spend an hour on something frivolous? When you walk into the woods, do you consider it wasted time if you don’t encounter an amazing animal, or if you do encounter a stupid one?

I’m trying to get less ruthless with my judgements over time to stave off the tendency to shrink my intellectual landscape.

A long time ago, I had a boss with an incredible knack for malapropriating.

“Let’s touch basis”, instead of ‘touch base’.

“We’ll play it by hear”, instead of ‘by ear’.

And on and on. Yes, English was his first and only language.

It was uncanny because if he had absolutely zero knowledge of the correct idiom, you’d expect a fifty-fifty shot at getting it right. But he batted darn-near a thousand when it came to getting it wrong. I’m still mystified to this day.

I’m also trying to figure out why it’s so funny when people use words incorrectly like this.

Humor is a tricky thing to pin down. Arthur Koestler does a commendable job in his book, The Act of Creation, where he discusses what causes the moment of laughter in a joke.

He describes two separate ‘matrices of thought’ that intersect suddenly and unexpectedly. That’s the punchline moment of a purposefully designed joke. But what creates the humor in the accidental malapropism?

Perhaps it’s the same structure. In this case, the two matrices are less about the content than the context, or perhaps the contrasting social signals.

Idioms are clever. People who use them subtly signal a kind of quick-wittedness, folk wisdom, broad vocabulary, and deftness with language. It is a very grown-up thing to use idioms, as evidenced by how delightfully adorable we find it when kids do.

Unknowingly mispronouncing or misusing a word is just the opposite. It signals cluelessness, naiveté, a small vocabulary, and clumsiness with language. It is a childish thing.

When a serious adult seriously misuses and idiom in a serious soliloquy, these two matrices collide. The fact that the offender is unaware that two polar opposite social signals have collided adds to the tragic humor.

It’s similar to moments when an intense speech is interrupted by someone telling the speaker, “You have a bit of mustard on your chin.”

The unexpected intersection of these planes of reality – dignified, poignant, serious, inspirational, or clever; mundane, domestic, childish, trivial – creates a moment of delight.

Of course the unexpected is not always delightful. Sometimes it’s terrifying. I won’t venture into what separates funny from startling, but I suspect it has to do with the potential risks to the observer.

Can you go wrong seeking the truth?

Perhaps not Truth with a capital ‘T’, but seeking general truths has some traps.

Do you know the truth about what your neighbors are saying about you? What they are doing right now?

Probably not. And seeking to find out might drive you crazy or turn you into a weirdo.

Naïveté is not a virtue, but it’s not as bad as its reputation either. Yes, you want to be shrewd, not taken advantage of, and prepared for what might really be going on in the world. But if you start to dig and understand the secrets behind the secrets, there is a point at which you become less useful, less productive, more paranoid, and less happy.

If you ask yourself, “If I found the answer to this, what would I do differently than I am now?” and the answer is nothing, it’s probably not worth too much more effort.

“Take up your cross” is a monumental call. Being willing to suffer and die for the sake of others is the hardest thing I can imagine. But the call to take up your cross is harder even than that.

It’s easy to limit it to literal martyrdom, something which most of us will never face and which can seem rather romantic as a remote possibility. As the world collapses, some evil dictator demands that you renounce Christ or face the firing squad, and you boldly refuse, choosing death.

I do not deny the courage and honor of such a situation should it occur. But since it’s unlikely for most of us, what else can it mean to take up our cross?

St. Augustine said it meant to “Put up with all that is annoying.” Well that’s certainly not very romantic or heroic sounding. But there’s something important in it.

Your cross is the hardest thing, and, importantly, the thing that you don’t actually have to do. Remember, Jesus was innocent and it was within his power to prove it and avoid the cross. He bore it up willingly, without complaint, sacrificing what he had a right to and enduring scorn, torture, and death.

In most daily situations, the hardest or most annoying thing is not physical torture and death, but something like being misunderstood, or having credit misattributed to someone else, or kindly listening to a chatterbox, or refusing to say a true but negative word, or wanting the best for someone who cut you off in traffic. You would be within your rights, strictly speaking, to not do any of these things. But the small sacrifice of doing them anyway and without complaint is your cross.

It doesn’t mean just to suffer for its own sake or to be a doormat. Jesus certainly was not. It means, like Him, recognizing that doing what you are allowed to do often robs you of a greater birthright. By forgoing glory on earth, Jesus claimed eternal glory for himself and for us. By forgoing a petty complaint you have a right to lodge against someone, you begin to see a vastly more important battle to fight and win.

These crosses don’t just bring you low, they allow you to be someone who is raised up.

I am pretty good about not letting things out of my control dictate my emotions. Except sports.

When my team loses, I usually toss and turn half asleep replaying all the reasons in my head that night. I have to work hard to move on to normal life. Maybe that’s not healthy, but there’s a flip side too.

When my team wins, there is a kind of joy and camaraderie with other fans that is more than just fun. It’s a glimpse of something bigger. It’s a way of participating in things that bind us. It’s an inspiring and elevated form of play or ritual. It bleeds into normal life in good ways, and provides good lessons.

And you can’t really experience that joyful side of sports without being invested enough to experience that agony too.