Can't You Read The Sign?

   

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

5 Man Electrical Band 1970

Essential to the El Camino are its signs.

My choice to walk the Camino del Norte only using the signs set out along various places like roads, curbs, walls, buildings, bridges, and trees meant I had to be vigilant.  No map. No GPS.  I wanted to walk like a pilgrim of old, sans tech. There was actually an excitement to intuiting the path 'au naturel' and if necessary, facing the challenge of getting lost!

After 281 KM of this I concluded that when you are consciously watching for signs rather than having a GPS (read: cultural) voice tell you where to go, your skills of 'noticing' become heightened.

We live in a world where others set out signs for us to follow.  Their aim is to prescribe the way you should go.  Political, media, religious, vocational institutions and a host other forces in our lives regularly set out their signs, beckoning us to walk in their stated direction.

People are reading a lot of signs and reacting to them, but I contend we don't 'notice' them very well. Just watch your Facebook feed and the comments section.

To notice is to discern.  Discernment is the process of making careful distinctions in our thinking about the truth of those signs for us.  Discernment asks questions like:

• Is this sign pointing in the general direction of where I want to go?
• Does this sign make any sense being here, now?
• Based on the signs that have brought me to this place, can I trust this sign?
• Do I actually want to go where this sign will direct me?
• Where will I end up if I actually followed this sign?

Unfortunately it's now a rampant habit in our culture to latch on to a position and lock into ways of thinking and looking at the world.  Any signs pointing to potential new ideas, new routes and new ways of thinking/being can't be 'noticed' because our eyes have become unaccustomed to looking at a sign and discerning it's meaning.  Signs are given attention only as far as they fit our existing biases.

How can you 'see' a sign for its own merit and make a decision? Some of my thoughts from following Camino signs:

1. Define the signs you are looking for. Not all signs have to do with you or your journey.  On the Camino it's a yellow arrow.  The arrow exists in a few different formats, but there's a distinctiveness about it you recognize as a pilgrim.  Those arrows (among many other arrows on the route) were the ones that had a reference to my ultimate goal of reaching Santiago de Compostela.   Life is full of signs, but which ones matter to you?  Much depends on your reference points. If your life & goals are ill-defined, any sign will get you somewhere. Reminds me of a quote by Lily Tomlin - "I always wanted to be a somebody.  I just should have been more specific."
2. You can't see if you are not looking! That's a Captain Obvious declaration, but...  Early one morning as I left Lezama, Spain I walked behind a fellow pilgrim who was very agitated. He was on his phone with someone, frustrated he could not see the signs. Somehow he hoped a remote person on the other end of the line could help him see! The comical irony was while on the phone, he was regularly walking past the very signs pointing out his way! The need for speed kills insight, so slow down in order to really see.  My best advice - if you can't find the signs it's time to stop, retreat, and reorient yourself. It may be you have forgotten what signs to look for. In the rush of life, you can only see well when you have silenced your mind and calmed your spirit.
3. Beware the Crowd.  Once while walking through a city I saw a crowd of pilgrims a few blocks in front of me.  So, believing they were on the path I wanted to be on, I lowered my personal sign-seeking vigilance and followed them.  After all, safety in numbers!  In one instance however, that crowd took a collective wrong turn.  If it wasn't for a personal check in at that moment on my commitment to look for the signs for myself, I would have blissfully been wrong with them.  I stopped, saw the sign they missed, and turned. BEWARE. The crowd can be safe and helpful but it can also cause you to pay less attention to the signs laid out for your unique pilgrimage. Crowd-sourcing your direction in life will cause you to lose the awareness and discipline of looking for your signs.  An example from my vocational context is the production and use of commonly themed, large-scale training programs for Christians, and the one-way communicative patterns of most church's' public gatherings.  It can produce a version of 'group-think'.  As a result of the need and desire for orthodoxy (and orthopraxis), the Church inadvertently produces pilgrims who can only walk with the crowd. I see this revealed in the rhetoric of many who can spout off clichés, platitudes and simplistic responses to life issues they commonly learned in these contexts. They have not always learned the discipline of discerning the signs for themselves. Frankly this applies to our politics too. ATTENTION: We each must walk our own journey and make up our own minds. This is not a declaration of independence from human community or absolute truth. However there also exists a walk that is unique to you and Jesus. He will set out the signs for YOU.  Are you building capacity to see His signs for your unique journey?
4. Train your eyes.  You can fall out of the practice of noticing and might even become lazy at looking.  After I had taken a day-long break from walking, on my return to the Camino the next day I struggled for a while to re-adjust my eyes to searching for the signs.  When you stop seeking the signs that point you toward purpose and meaning (and that affirm you are on the right path) your eyes will cloud over and perhaps even become desensitized. A host of avoidable and unavoidable life circumstances will affect our vision.  We all deal at times with  stress, transition, resignation, exhaustion and even just struggling to survive. But if not careful we can become used to not looking for the signs that guide our ultimate journey of life. If you are in a break-time for whatever reason, your vision may be cloudy.  Make the choice to keep looking.  The signs are there.  You just have to see.

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs,

Blocking out the scenery of your own beautiful life journey,

Breaking your God-given, unique mind!

Don't settle for other's voices of 'do this' or 'don't do that'

Can't you read the signs for your life?  

Harv Matchullis

The Way of Wilderness

A few km east of Santander, Spain

Authors note:  After a period of sporadic engagement with this blog, I'm back.  I begin with a series of thoughts and reflections stemming from my sabbatical experience in 2017.  For part of the sabbatical I took a (very) long walk to rest, rejuvenate and relax after a period of burnout.  That walk was on the Camino del Norte in Northern Spain.  281 Km in 15 days along the mountainous coast along the Bay of Biscay.  Though I was still in the dry and cracked personal and leadership wilderness, I encountered the incredible beauty of this natural wilderness...and found Jesus waiting for me there.

If you have not yet walked into a personal wilderness, you will.

My story:

I WAS DONE.

For 34+ years I  have been a Christian ministry leader in Canada and around the world.  I thought I was resilient and indefatigable, but I had reached a breaking point.  For many reasons I found myself in a new landscape - a dry, barren wilderness of mind, soul and body.  I told my ministry board in Feb of 2017 : "I am done.  I'm exhausted physically & emotionally. While I can still 'see' into the future of this ministry, I am completely disconnected.  Professionally I can still perform, but its like I am having an out of body experience each time I speak or serve.  I can do it, but I am an autobot.  I can't go on and I don't know what to do".

With that I declared my leadership bankruptcy.  I had no plan of what to do. The first and only act I knew to do at that point was finally admit it.  Yet it took a long time.  I am fiercely independent and a 'press on' kind of guy, so this was a monumental admission.  There was no plan on my part for what was next, but I knew if I didn't take the first step of personal acknowledgement, I truly was 'done'.  Time to exit ministry and maybe even faith. It was that bad.

My board graciously granted me (and worked hard to provide) a 3 month sabbatical.  I owe them a great deal.  To my board - if you are reading this - I am humbled and indebted to your faith and courage to make this happen.  I know it wasn't easy organizationally. You did the right thing.


On my flight from Canada to start the El Camino in Spain I started reading Eugene Petersen's "The Jesus Way".  How serendipitous.  "El Camino" in Spanish means "The Way".  One quote pierced into my personal situation:

"Wilderness time.  Desert time.  Time to see the way of Jesus tested against the devils' way.  Time to  feel the terrible pull of temptation away from Jesus' way and realize it is a temptation to embrace illusion and to believe a lie.  Time to become aware of the immense and hidden abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan." (pg 30).

Jesus was deliberately tested in a wilderness to determine if He would choose to act according to the ways of His Father or the way offered by Satan (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4). Jesus, the Son of God was led into a wilderness experience.  Did you read that correctly?  He was led into it.  A wilderness.  Deliberately.  By God. I emphasize these things because while at times I beat myself up for ever getting to the point of burnout and 'wilderness', my experience was not beyond the purposeful intentions of God for my testing and maturing.

On the road of leadership are tests.  Often wilderness is the context where God administers those tests.  In the wilderness you are stripped down to the essentials.  Survival becomes paramount.  What's most important comes into a focus you likely have never before experienced, because your very survival depends on that level of clarity.

My wilderness experience was a time to feel at a core level just how much I had embraced the illusion and lie that personal leadership skill and effort was the means to accomplish the mission of God in this world. I had plunged into the abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan.

Jesus is our 'Camino'. He is our Way.  Jesus as the Way also means that the ways of Jesus are a part of the Way.  Once you have abandoned doing things according to His ways, you have succumbed to an illusion and believed the lie of Satan.  Over time, I had developed my own 'way' - driving to the ends according to my own means.  My ways were respectable and frankly, a reflection of  Western Christian leadership culture and expectations. Optically it all looked good.  The industry of Christian leadership training & seminars would affirm my approaches.  People went along with my tactics.  However, behind this illusion was a self-determined striving that lead to cynicism, emotional distance and a soul-sucking emptiness as a Christian leader.  When you live in contradiction to the Jesus way, even while trying to serve His purposes, those are the results.

Are you headed for a wilderness?  Are you already in one?  At the risk of over simplification, I offer  4 starting thoughts for your wilderness journey.

1. Don't beat yourself up over it.  Jesus is there and He is intending to test you.  Surrender to the lessons that will confront you.
2. Be courageous and admit where you are. Stop 'sucking it up' and plowing forward. You can do it for a while but at some point you will implode.  Your mind, body and soul were not built for that level of stress.  Something is gonna give.
3. Confront your fears around vulnerability and tell someone. I told my wife before anyone else, but she saw it long before I admitted it.  It was also hard, but necessary to eventually tell those who shared leadership with me.
4. Surrender any sense of control over what's next.  You are likely in this place because of control issues.  Jesus' full intent is to shift control from you to Him. (That truth easily rolls off our preacher-tongues.  It does not so easily show up in our daily service to the Master).

Much more to come...I'd love to interact with you if this is useful to you. Sign up for this blog to get regular updates, leave a comment or contact me personally at hbmatch@gmail.com

Harv Matchullis
...still leading, but from a different posture...