Do Not Calm This Storm

It’s 2019, y’all. Anyone else more than ready for a new year to avalanche over the old one?

I haven’t done a #OneWord365 in years. I used to be religious about it, every year, coming up with a new one-word theme for the year in lieu of a slate of resolutions that fall by the wayside. A single word to live out my entire year by, an ongoing funnel for motivation.

I’m not sure why I stopped that blogging tradition. Maybe it’s that the more work I’ve done with Your Other Brothers, the more this blog and other personal projects have suffered.

I wasn’t even intending on writing a #OneWord365 post as my first blog of 2019. But then I took a walk around the lake the other day, mourning the current clogged state of things, and it hit me.

Cleanse.

My theme for the year.

My 2018 was tumultuous and increasingly toxic by year’s end. A year of bliss and adventure with #YearOfFlights and yet also a year of destructive habits and relationships.

I feel cliché starting the year with this glitzy new year energy, but given my life at the moment, I honestly feel I’d be just as motivated to cleanse this toxicity if it were March 12th or October 28th.

At some point, you have to wake up, snap out of it, and breathe fresh air again. You can only partake in the same addictive and unhealthy patterns before it makes your stomach sick. Literally sick.

I store all my stress in my gut, and I’ve felt physically ruined lately. Skipping meals. Feeling weak. Dreading getting out of bed in the morning. I slept 18 hours one day recently.

There have been all the Instagram images of my smiles in Ireland and marvels from the Great Sand Dunes.

But then there’s been the other side. The other side of living. Of slavery masked as living.

Consider this the year of the Cleanse, including a literal body cleanse this week. I’m joining CrossFit. I’m buying beard oil and facial moisturizer and cleansing conditioner and taking care of my body after turning into a disheveled slug for four months. (Thanks, Queer Eye.)

I’m reading again. I started six or seven books last year and finished zero of them. I want to fill my mind with words again. Good words. Finishing one book before starting the next. Constantly filling the well.

I’m writing again. Back to blogging here weekly and even breaking ground on a new book. My third. I want — need — to continue charting my course with these books. A life of stories beyond initial coming out confessions and wanderlust realized.

I’m recommitting to healthy relationships in my life and putting to bed unhealthy ones. I’m also learning what it means to be a better friend, not always so invested in myself, and reaching out to others more than I ever have. (Though I still have a long way to go.)

I’m in counseling, and I’m developing a regular practice of telling another human how I’m doing — how I’m actually doing — after passively admiring teenagers engage in this practice while working in wilderness therapy and at a therapeutic boarding school for three years.

I’m praying and reading Scripture and “returning to my first Love,” so to speak. I’m recognizing and breaking down idols, brick by agonizing brick. I’ll have a YOB post coming soon about my longstanding idol of brotherhood and the perils it brought me last year.

If 2018 was a year of escalating toxicity, I pray 2019 is a year of major cleansing. I’m not naive, and I know it will take the better part of this year, if not longer, to redeem what’s eroded or been lost in 2018.

CrossFit won’t change my body in a week. I can’t read twelve books in a month. I can’t put out my third written book by May.

Jesus won’t calm the storm with a single word.

His way is a way of work. Of picking up crosses daily. Of lugging said crosses up mountains. Of taking the narrower way of all the broader ways available to my wanderlust.

But his ultimate burden is light. The purpose and payoff and precious people to be found along the way, worth more than buried treasure in a field.

I’m already seeing the fruit of my cleansing efforts in the form of peace, not groans, in my gut where abdominal muscles just so happen to be reemerging after a long sickly winter.

I’m reading and writing more than I have in months.

I’m looking at my calendar and actually honestly anticipating some sunny days rather than 365 black, torrential ones.

2019 is the year of Cleanse.

I’ll rejoice. I’ll cry. I’ll swear. I’ll be very, very afraid. I’ll feel all my fucking feelings because I am learning more than ever this is what a real man does.

He does not run away from that which scares him. Or angers him. Or wrecks him with unparalleled grief.

He rides into the storm like the mighty buffalo, my new “spirit animal.” The buffalo spots the storm on the horizon and rather than run away like the rest of the animal kingdom, rides into it.

Let it rain, I say. Cleanse this earth. Cleanse this gut, this soul, this story. Wash away all that ruins me and ruins others.

Do not calm this storm, Jesus.

But keep me in your firm grasp through every cleansing drop.