Hi there. How are you? Thanks for showing up.
I feel like I need to start this week’s quick message with some basic encouragement. You made it. You got through. You’re going forward.
It’s hard to believe all that happened last week. I barely had time to catch my breath. And now a new week begins.
But I learned so much last week, it’s frightening. To think of who I was even a week ago and how I’ve changed today is humbling and holy.
I didn’t write all I expected to write, but I wrote a ton. And through keeping me focused on last week’s big thought on healthy integration, and the hope of greater excellence to follow in my work, God revealed himself in my writing process, once again.
This week, I’m pondering that big result of skillful integration we all hope for: excellence. What is it and how important is it?–I want to look at that some more.
So after realizing that my news feed betrayed me, the shock, depression, and initial horror, morphing into a reserved hopefulness, converged on me to convince me that though I thought I knew what I was doing, I do not. This election has consumed so much of us. Our candidates and their positions were completely skewed by almost every source, whatever it was–media or friend. We all seem to have swallowed a poisonous cocktail–either red or blue–and now we can’t understand or even talk with those who drank the opposite one.
I feel sick learning how intentionally our media is skewed to be more sensational and competitive, and how social media then amplifies that unbalanced extremism into viral surges using us to infect the entire body politic, until it’s convulsing with internal pain.
And yet every writer I know is actively working to integrate what they’re learning to use it to inform their work and their place in this complex world. There’s also been a surge of revelation this week seeing how our sweet poisons made us sick, and how now we must learn to consume healthier, purer, unbiased sources. But like with everything, the better is hard to find.
And the best, maybe it doesn’t even exist yet.
And going that way, giving yourself to only the best, it’s an uncompromising, lonely and difficult way.
But to progress and move beyond our competition, we have to leave behind our former limited selves.
As I wrote last week, integration is how we come to use and demonstrate growth from new things we learn. And we’ve all learned a lot this week that’s naturally and inevitably going to change us, as writers and as people. Likely as Christians as well. As children we used to integrate new ideas into useable knowledge all the time–we’d learn new info and abilities and then draw on them every day. But as adults, this process became less frequent, smaller in scope, and we became less changeable. We became set in our ways.
I’m praying we can remember how to change, learn and integrate new information and broader truths.
Our happiness, our future success, our very survival may depend on it.
Last week I argued this skill of healthy integration was a core writer thing. Through reading and questioning ideas and beliefs, writers must be our “cultural conscience” keep this process alive in adulthood. It’s an obligation of creative work to promote the good, the better, even the best that hasn’t even been born yet.
Which is why I’m convinced we must remain more malleable than your average bear. As a group, we have to be world-class integrators.
But how? What does all this mean for you and me pounding away on keyboards in obscurity? I’d like to suggest that this superpower of writers has far reaching implications for our culture in helping others understand the big problems in the world, and their role in working on solutions.
Writers help people make sense and use of their world. Our goal is nothing less than excellence–the best ideas, the best words, sound logic and beautiful, weighty, undeniably vital art.
And we achieve it through judging rightly, through humility and empathy, and by doing the hard work.
I believe this is how we move forward today, knowing all we now know, yet to learn all we still need, but pursuing excellence in all things, to the glory of he who created all things, and writing as part of our whole-bodied and embodied spiritual act of worship.
When all our skills and knowledge are working together in proper alignment, I believe excellence should follow.
And as we go forward this week with each other, let’s keep pushing for the integration of new knowledge, receptive and seeking the truth and justice for all God’s people.
It’s a lot to take in and process, but we know who is ultimately in control.
yes, yes, and in my simplistic way of being able to survive this world i choose to see that IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO LOVE. LOVE is everything.
it, outshines the fears, the hobgoblins, the, well, you name it!
xoxo
me
Praying that love can outshine even the mockery of our deepest principles… Thanks, Suzee.
Mick,
Yes :-)
Integration: a lifelong process.. Phil. 1:6 For me, it also means being very intentional to curate what allow into my mind and my thoughts, which is not easy and I fail sometimes but it makes such a huge difference.
Yes! There is poison out there. Thanks for that reminder, Dolly. It’s so important for excellent work–and so often the good is the enemy of the best!