Article discussion: Keeping my Passport, or Sorry, you’re stuck, sister!
This is how I interpret the essay Keeping my Passport, by Lee Ann Setzer. Life is tough, and you gotta stick with it.
Setzer opens her essay with an example from her mission, where the APs are supposed to take her passport and put it away for safekeeping. Well, in the hulaballo of life, everybody sort of forgets, and life goes on, shockingly, without her passport in the safe. Instead, she keeps it, tucked away somewhere. She doesn’t use it as a source of strength for her during her mission, but every now and then, she describes what she thinks about when things get rough. She has her passport, a credit card, civilian clothes, and a non-member family who wouldn’t balk at her early return. She doesn’t HAVE to stay. She has an out. And her passport is the key. Tempting, tempting, tempting.
One of my favorite phrases is used by one of my favorite authors, Emily Watts. She has often given a talk about “surviving our greatest blessings”. Blessings are gifts freely bestowed, things we pray for, things that make us sing joyous praises to our God. Blessings are things like missions, families, and our beautiful bodies that God has created. Talking about ’surviving’ such things seems paradoxical. But then, think about what it takes to serve an honorable mission, the daily grind that is a part of raising children in righteousness, and dealing with illness, substance abuse, addiction, and everything else that comes with the blessing of a body. The phrase then quickly begins to make sense.
When we are faced with the hard realities of this mortal life and the pain of surviving our greatest blessings, who among us has never wished that we could pull out a passport, grab some coins, and hop a train to Some Place Else. It doesn’t even have to be someplace special. It just has to be anywhere but here. Of course, if there were tropical beaches and a big fluffy bed with mounds of pillows and sweet smelling sheets that I don’t have to clean with quiet hours designated ALL DAY LONG, well now, you probably wouldn’t hear me complaining. But that’s just me.
But there is no magical passport, no magical key that can transport us when things get sticky. We have to tough it out, face it down, and get through it. And sometimes it downright stinks. But we do it by turning it over to the Lord, asking for help, heaving our burdens onto His shoulders, so He can travel the road with us. He’s done it before, He knows the way, and so we follow.
We all know this, of course. We’ve heard it about a billion gajillion times in Sacrament meetings, Conference talks, Young Women’s, Relief Society, yadda yadda yadda. We’ve heard it so many times, it has become cliche. And yet, and yet, it is still so difficult to do. We want to hold on the passport, to imagine we could make everything go away, imagining we can still escape, somehow, instead of facing life to make it work.
This is one of my favorite lines in the essay: “But a few shredded pieces of my passport, soaked in the sweat of my palms, have eventually found their way into the Lord’s safe.”
I imagine a clenched fist, sweating in the heat of anger and trial, gripping a false hope, tearing it in the process. And I imagine the Lord gently picking up that false hope, putting it together, and turning it into something real.
Tell me what you liked about the essay, or if you can identify with the need for escape, and how you address that in your life. Hey, maybe some of you DO get your passport and take off. If so, please tell me where you go, how to get there, and if they serve you good food.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am
[...] C’mon down. [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
My sweet daughter “Fiona” got diagnosed with Lymphoma when she was 4 about a year and a half ago. When I heard it, I just wanted to go back to Hawaii, some place warm. Unfortunately, that would be the last thing I could do. Happily, about 5 months ago, my hubby’s job moved us to Houston where it’s a lot warmer and not as dreary. It’s helpful…we keep wandering around Texas as tourist and enjoy our mini escapes.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I enjoyed the essay and related to it in a particular way. When I was struggling with a difficult companionship on my own mission, tired of the rules, etc., I found myself feeling trapped and angry. Then, in a Stake Conference, the hymn “Know This That Every Soul is Free” was the opening song. All of the words hit home, especially “God will force no man to heaven.” I remembered it was my choice to be doing what I was doing, hard parts and all. I won’t explain everything I felt at that time, but I no longer felt forced to be serving a mission, and I felt grateful for our agency. That lesson has stuck with me for 18 years so far.
I like how Setzer brought the mission example around to the present, to Maxwell’s ideas. I have been thinking about that subject recently, and her thoughts give me more to chew on.
I have wanted to escape at least a few times! Not even pack, but just get on I-80 and drive. Of course I’ve had the more exotic wishes for escape . . . Hawaii or simpler California coast. But the I-80 trip has taken more conscious effort to not do, if I’m already in the car.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Wendy, that is my favorite hymn. I guess I always think I do have an out, or a choice about any given situation. Don’t like my husband? I could walk away. Don’t like my job? I could walk away. Kids whining today? I could walk away. For some reason, just knowing that I can, but that I am choosing to stay and face the situation is helpful. The “choosing it” is very freeing. Sometimes we think we don’t have an out, but we do, even in the most difficult circumstances. In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he discussed the idea of suffering well, creating meaning from suffering.
Some people seems surprised that life is hard, and seem to almost take it personally. We live in a mortal, imperfect world. We ought to be grateful things aren’t harder than they are most of the time. I guess you could say I’m an optimist. Or in denial. Either one works for me.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Elizabeth, I love Frankl’s book. Your comment about it reminds me of M. Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Travelled. The first chapter begins with your idea about life being hard:
“Life is difficult.
“This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult–once we truly understand and accept it–then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
I think your attitude that “we ought to be grateful things aren’t harder than they are most of the time” is one I could adopt! Even though I intellectually get the whole life is hard thing, I don’t think I have completely accepted it yet.
Duh.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Sometimes the best thing to do is take a day off. Sometimes the best thing to do is stay put. The article seemed to intimate that keeping a door open is holding something back and not giving all that is required. So I am not completely comfortable with the Neal Maxwell statement about holding things back unless we are talking about sin.
Suffering and sorrow are a part of life and we cannot escape from it we can only learn from it. Like someone I learned to admire said. “Life never gets any easier. You just have to learn to roll with the punches.”
March 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
There were days in the beginning of my mission that the only reason I stuck around was my inability to say (or understand the answer) “how do you get to the airport). It never even occurred to me that I didn’t have my passport. Chieko Okasaki wrote a book 10+ years ago where she talked about the blessings of angelic answers, but that in order for our agency to be truly that, the angels have to go home. We have to choose on our own, with no pixie dust or warm fuzzy feelings so that when things are rough, we can’t fall back on any sort of coerced feeling. I love Emily Watts and her “surviving blessings” idea, for it helps me to cultivate that knowledge that I know my choices and my blessings and I can own them. Ownership helps me cultivate gratitude and see the far reaching chosen path even when the daily impact that path has on me seems to be something I may not have meant to choose (I chose the babies, but did I choose the colic or the sleep deprivation?) That helps me to hold nothing back, for there really is no day off.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
What was I thinking? Hanging on to my passport would have been so much simpler than praying to get hit by a bus.
Yes. I can identify with the need for escape. We kind of had this saying in the mission field, “This wasn’t in the brochure.” I feel that way about certain aspects of my post-mission life, too. Or maybe they were in the brochure and I just forgot to read the fine print.
How do I get away? On most days the best I can get is a few deep breaths, sincere pleading in prayer, a couple of minutes with my face in the sun or a 9-minute power nap. And then I count myself lucky.