I did not know it beforehand, but I was reaching the beginning of the end of my time in my Pops’ Workshop. A new phase, which would be the last, was beginning. Looking back, I can see three broad movements in my time in my Pops’ Workshop: identity and invitation, healing and wholeness, and calling and sending.
The first movement was about identity and invitation. I learned who I am to God and who God is to me. I began the long and still-ongoing process of learning to trust him and yielding myself to his will. Understanding who I am to God meant understanding that I have purposes I never would have guessed.1 I was invited to be a small part of the healing and restoration Jesus brings through the ministry of the Holy Spirit and I was invited to bring words of peace and wholeness.
The second movement, my time with the Holy Spirit and my time below the Workshop, focused on my healing and wholeness. I had been promised both peace for my soul and attacks by the enemy, with the assurance that any hurts would be put right. I had taken an inward journey, discovering how the hurts and pain I stuffed down and tried to ignore had damaged my soul and were crippling my ability to share the life-giving waters of Christ-life. Jesus had come alongside me and invited me to bring my hurts, doubts, and sinful attitudes to him. I began the long, continuing journey toward soul wholeness.
A third movement was now starting; It was a movement of calling and sending. In some ways this was an echo and amplification of earlier the earlier invitations to help Jesus sand and polish to reveal inner beauty, to somehow facilitate the Holy Spirit’s internal work, and make God’s promise of peace widely known.
As this third movement unfolded, the way I experienced the workshop was also changing. Up to this point, my time in the workshop formed a fairly linear, coherent narrative, which made for easier writing. My experiences in the Workshop were becoming more like self-contained lessons, though the same lesson was often revisited. My “visits” were becoming shorter and more a distinct point. As I look over my journal entries for the remainder of my time visiting my Pops’ Workshop, it is much harder to tease out any kind of narrative. Accordingly, from this point onward, I will share my time Pops’ Workshop thematically and not necessarily share encounters in the order they happened.
Being
Even as the end was beginning, there were still some important lessons I needed to learn. In a direction session my director reminded me that much of what happened in the Workshop was Jesus healing, shaping, and forming me. That seems obvious to me now, but then it was something that was not front of mind. I simply didn’t notice what had happened and what was happening, especially where my interior state was concerned. We talked at length about just “being” with emotions and thoughts. He encouraged me to set aside analysis in favor of experiencing what was happening in the moment.
I had (and often still have) an unhealthy predilection to question and analyze my thoughts and emotions, novel ones in particular. Given the unpredictable environment of my youth that is not very surprising. I had developed a finely tuned analytical engine that had helped to protect me. Retreating inward in analysis helped me see where danger could be brewing and it also took me mentally and emotionally out of traumatic situations. I built a sturdy wall. Instead of the healthy processing of emotion, I learned avoidance. I stuffed it, either down the hole or hidden away, not to be recovered. In either case, I had learned not to be present to unpleasant and stressful situations.
As is often the case, the defensive mechanisms we craft in our youth are not helpful to us later in life. My inward withdrawal and shutting down was not limited to unpleasant emotions or frightening situations. I had taught myself to use analysis to pull back from unpleasant and stressful situations, emotions, and thoughts. But my defense mechanism was not selective. It applied to all situations, emotions, and events, whether they were good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, sacred or profane. Every emotion, good or bad, that stirred me and every thought that came to my mind had to be understood. What did it mean? What did I need to do about it? What action was necessary?
Focusing on critical analysis and working out the next step, usually a defensive step, kept me from being present to what was happening. I was mainly unaware of the breadth and depth of what God was doing to me, in me, and for me. Instead of receiving and being present to God’s grace, I was racing ahead to see what “it” meant and what I should do next.
The action of analysis, the effort to try to understand and make sense of something, necessarily removes us from the experience we are seeking to understand We stop being participants and start being observers. For me, the most tragic instance of this is failing to be present to moments of transcendant joy. Rather than simply be in that moment, I would detach, taking myself out of the moment, to think about how that feeling of joy came about, how I could maintain it, and how I could get it again in the future. It was like seeing a beautiful sunset beginning to unfold and running into the house to check all the astronomical and meterogical conditions that caused to occur so that I could better understand it and vainly believe I could anticipate and “be ready” for the next one, all the while missing the beauty in front of me.
For many things, especially the things of God, the greatest and perhaps only value, is being present in the moment. The only time we can experience God is in the present moment. We can remember how he was present in the past, but we cannot experience him in the past. We can dream and imagine how he might be present to us in the future, but we cannot experience him in the future. The only time we can be present to God is in this moment. When we take ourselves out of the present moment because we are afraid, uncomfortable, or as a learned defense, we take away the possibility of being aware of God and seeing his activity in and around us.
My director’s advice was wise. I needed to learn to set aside analysis in favor of experiencing what was happening in the moment.
From Pops' Workshop 
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