2nd Half

Is there anything under the paint?

The producers of a Broadway musical hired a soft shoe dancer — not a big name, but someone who had the kind of competence that world class theater relies on. During the rehearsals and early tryouts,  it became clear that his soft shoe “signature” dance — the one that always got ovations from the crowd — would have to be cut, but, to the dancer’s surprise, the director and producers did not cut him from their play.

 When the musical opened, he felt awkward and out-of-place on stage. What would he do if he couldn’t dance? Then he delivered his lines and got a roar of laughter out of the crowd. 

He discovered something in himself that he didn’t know he had. Underneath the paint of “dancer” he found a comedian.

The surprise of discovery

My mother, who loved refinishing chairs, used to marvel at what she found underneath the paint She said it was always a surprise – a surprise that clearly delighted her.

The chair in the photo used to be covered in red tractor paint. You can see what it looks like now. To find the character of that more-than-a-100 year old chair, we had to brush a harsh liquid onto the paint, let it work and then wipe the softened paint off with rags. 

I’ve been using that chair as a metaphor for finding our true selves in the second half of life — the grain of our lives —  after we have spent a lifetime getting painted with the roles we have played in our families, our jobs and our communities.

We can remember who we were before we were painted. We can trace the grain under the paint. Or we can see, as in the case of this chair, what we look like when the paint that has constituted our identity for so long is dissolved.

The actor thought he was a dancer, but when the dancer-paint was dissolved, he discovered a comedian underneath.

The pain of paint removal

If you remember who you were before you were painted or you can trace the grain of your life under the paint, removing the paint may be liberating.  But if you think of yourself as a red chair, then watching the red paint dissolve  may feel like a devastating loss.

I was a pretty successful pastor for most of my ministry. I always left congregations with more people (and more money) than they had when I arrived — until the last five years of my career.

The world changed around 2010.The things I knew how to do didn’t work anymore. I used to joke that I felt like a highly trained typewriter repairman trying to fix a PC.  The things that seemed to be working for other pastors were not only things I didn’t know how to do but, to be honest, I didn’t want to learn how to do. For the first time in my life, I began to experience the congregational decline that the vast majority of my colleagues had been experiencing for a generation.

I was well aware of the dangers of pastor-paint. As a young man, I had run across the French epitaph: “Born a man – died a grocer”, and I had seen too many of my colleagues snap a clerical collar around their necks and never take it off again.

For that reason I worked to maintain a distance between my self and the very seductive role of clergy. I resisted titles like “Reverend” and “Pastor”. If I called you by your first name, you should be able to call me by my first name.

What I didn’t realize is that, while I refused to identify with the role of pastor, I had embraced the identity of “success”.  When the successful pastor-paint dissolved around me, I was disoriented – and disheartened. I survived the last half-decade of church leadership by discovering strengths that I did not know I had – resilience being one of them.

Finding true character

I have been using the grain in the wood of that refinished chair as a metaphor for character – and to some extent I have equated character with “passion” or “calling”.  But sometimes, when the paint dissolves, we find something even more important than our vocation. We discover that we, in fact, have character.

My maternal grandfather was a kind of small-town Donald Trump. He invested in real estate and, to hear him tell it, he was a huge success although, for some reason, he never had much to show for his efforts. He was also pretty self-centered. Toward the end of his life, he battled with several different forms of cancer, and during the last two years of his life, he lived in a lot of pain from bone cancer. Oddly, that experience brought out of him unsuspected (by his family and friends) reserves of courage, compassion and self-awareness. He became an admirable person while lying in bed suffering and watching his very life dissolve.

I never had an in-depth conversation with my mother about what it was like for her to help  her mother care for my grandfather as he was dying. I wonder if, as his true character emerged from a lifetime of bluster, she felt the same surprise and wonder and delight that she said she always felt when she dissolved the paint on a chair.

Remember the chair in my last post that had been covered with red tractor paint? Here it is again:

Just as it took a lot of work to remove the paint to discover the beautiful grain underneath, so it often takes us a lot of work to get down to our true characters that have been covered over with the paint of social conventions, family expectations, and professional roles.

This, however, is the work many people undertake in the second half of life.

But how do you do that? This is the first of four blogs on this subject, because there are at least three ways to find the grain – the character of a chair that has been painted over. Here is one of the most obvious:

Remember who you were before you were painted.

When he was a kid, my father always wanted to be a physician, but he could see no path to medical school. He took over his father’s dairy farm and later worked for the local electric utility.  Away from the farm and living in town, he joined the volunteer fire department. He took their Emergency Medical Technician training and eventually became an instructor. It was a long ambulance ride from my rural hometown to the nearest hospital. For many years, my Dad rode those ambulances and kept people from bleeding to death or dying from heart attacks. He even delivered babies! He loved it. He was good at it. It was what he felt he was meant to do.  He found the grain of his life by regaining his dream.

What were your dreams when you were young?

Some people are lucky enough to follow them. A very accomplished church organist said that when he was a young boy, his aunt took him to an organ concert. She was afraid that he would be bored, but instead, he said, “I was transfixed.” He found his dream and followed it.

Others, like my Dad, never had the opportunity, or missed the opportunity because of the need to raise a family, satisfy someone else’s expectations, or they just chose the “sensible” path.

Can you go back to who you were when you were 24 or 14 or even 4 and remember your dreams back then? Who did you want to be when you grew up?

It’s a scary question – especially late in life. We may have buried the answer like a stillborn child that we have tried to forget because we can’t stand the heartache. It may involve unlearning what we think we are and are meant to be.

As a young man, Moses killed an overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave. Perhaps even then he was dreaming of becoming a liberator. Instead he became a fugitive and a shepherd. According to tradition, he was 80 when he talked to a burning bush, and became a very different kind of liberator.

Moses’ dialogue with that Burning Bush in Exodus 3 can be a model for reclaiming an old dream.

• It appears that Moses had to take time out from his routine – to “turn aside” – in order for God to speak to him (Exodus 3:3-4).  Can you interrupt your routine long enough to listen to what God may be saying through your dream?
• The first thing God does after introducing Himself to Moses is  show Moses what his people need. (Exodus 3:7-9).
• The next thing God does is give Moses a vision for what he can do to solve this problem (Exodus 3:10).
• Moses responds by doubting that he is suited to this task. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” (Exodus 3:11).  He will have to unlearn what he thinks of himself and his limitations (Exodus 4:1-17)
• Note that every time that Moses brings up an objection, God doesn’t magically make it go away, but rather finds a way around it.

Do you have any tales you can tell about finding a path back to your original dreams – your character – the grain of your life that got painted over by necessity or fear?

• What or who did you want to be when you grew up?
• How have you had to unlearn what you thought of yourself and your possibilities
• How have you gotten around obstacles?

The next post will be about finding the grain beneath the paint.