I’m going to start with an assumption, and yes I know the joke about what that means, it may be true here – we’ll see. So I am assuming that most of us I have something we want to do, somewhere we want to go, a habit to build, a behavior to change, a relationship to fix. We are all working on something or wanting to work on something or just wanting something to be different. And I can say from experience it is easy to get stuck in the wanting part.

That stuckness can turn into a block when we start to define ourselves by it; that sense of I want to do but I don’t know how to start or I haven’t started and now I’m never going to and I’m a failure. It becomes it’s own negative message that keeps us where we are. As Jesus prayed in Gethsemane the night before he was crucified and the disciples he asked to stay awake with him kept falling asleep he acknowledged the very humanness of this challenge saying, ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ Jesus didn’t give up on them, he didn’t say ‘forget it, you people are worthless.’ He was frustrated but he just went back and woke them up over and over; he understood clearly, and better than we usually can ourselves, the challenge of knowing what we want to do, what we should do, and the difficulty in actually doing it when it is hard to do.

It’s easy to read this passage and think, geez these guys just had to do one thing for a person they professed to love and they couldn’t do it, what a bunch of jerks. But I read it and I think ‘thank god’ I’m not the only one, that from the very beginning my imperfection and failure to be the best of what I could be is accepted. At the very least if I am in the right place and the right time God might wake me up and remind me of what I am supposed to be doing so I can try again and maybe do a little better this time. It’s a lifetime process; there is no start and end to the work, only to our lives.

I recently went on a long road trip that was a pilgrimage through the desert of the American southwest and the thing I’m thinking about today is how we show up in our lives knowing that growth and change is what we are about, consciously or subconsciously we are always being moved in a non-linear way. We are always starting from where we wake up, and we might be aiming to get to a particular spot by the end of the day but then we are just starting again from there. The destination is not the end or the point.

I like the tactical experience of meditating with beads, partially because when you have other things you have to do in the day it can be a fixed experience (beginning and end and you don’t have to think about it). I have a mala and a rosary and use them at different times, and on this trip I purchased Navajo beads, cedar, that are used in that tradition for protection. I asked if I could use them for prayer and the woman I bought them from said ‘of course.’ The difference with these beads is that they don’t have a beginning or an ending, it is a continuous loop. There is no clear spot that you come to and know that you have reached a certain time or completed a process. You can just keep going forever. You can feel like there is no completion.

That’s the hard part for me; I like a beginning and an end, a box to check to say good job, you did it. And that is something that I need to work on; knowing that what I have done is enough right now, knowing that what I am is enough right now, that how far I have come is good. That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t growth work to do, that doesn’t mean I can’t do things better, kinder, more patiently, more lovingly. It means I’m not trying to prove something with an external measurement.

Because there is always going to be more to do and there is always going to be what we have done. It can either be never enough, never good enough, or it can always be starting right where I am and doing just what I can in the moment I find myself. I’m not starting and I’m not finishing, I’m just being here with what I have right now.

So the last few days I have been praying with the Navajo beads; I thought about putting a charm on the string to mark a starting/ending point and then quickly realized I might be missing the point (that would be God waking me up again). I just pick up the strand and start where I start and I have a little timer that chimes at the time I set. The strand moves around and around in my hand, it doesn’t start and it doesn’t stop. It just moves. I’m just right here where I am knowing that I’ll need to be woken up again and again, staying as alert as I can in this minute to where it is that I am trying to go, knowing that wherever I get to is just where I am supposed to be.