On Being Divinely Ambushed
An Escape from Fear
It’s Saturday afternoon. I’m sitting in a comfy chair in our bookstore during one of the few quiet spells we’ve had since we opened on Thursday. Cars swish past on Prince Street, their tires kicking up the rain. The spring leaves on the maple tree (or is it a sycamore?) outside the front door are lime green and sagging under all the moisture.
I didn’t feel much fear when it came to purchasing and opening our bookstore, Nooks. Maile says I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, and it’s true—I tend to think things will work out. We’ll figure it out. I’ve leaned hard into Singer’s Surrender Experiment and try to live by this quote from Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust:
“The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.”
But fear is a sneaky little flea that keeps looking for bare flesh, any sensitive place it can bite.
Last Wednesday evening, the night before we opened, our daughter was singing in a choir performance at her university, an hour or so drive away. We still had so much to do, but we’ve been pretty determined from the beginning of this process not to let the store hijack our family life, so at 6:00 p.m., with more art to hang and floors to clean and books to shelve, we drove away from the store and sat in a beautiful hall and listened to beautiful music. When the strings rose up and joined the voices, I was ushered to some other heavenly realm.
After the show we went with her to the student union and had late night tacos and talked about life and taking chances and always keeping your calling square in front of you. In other words, not always taking the easy route. In other words, not following the money (all the time).
And then we kissed her and gave her a hug and did the same with my son who was working in the kitchen at the same student union and drove the long, dark, quiet highway home, finally crawling into bed after 11 a.m.
The night before opening day. It was exhilarating and I could barely keep my eyes open.
Maile and I woke up at 5:30 the next morning, Thursday morning, the morning of our opening, and she drove me to the store at 6:15 so that I could clean and hang art and she could be back in time to get the little kids up and off to school. And on the way in, for the first time, I felt a twinge of fear. This tiny little pinprick of what if.
I cleaned the kids’ room floor in the bookstore on my hands and knees and the Voice in My Head asked me what we would do if it was a huge flop and no one wanted to buy books from us. What if the store made us too busy. What if our family fell apart under the strain.
I’ve been reading Richard Rohr’s Just This and an idea from that book came to mind, this concept that living in this present moment is all that is asked of me. He writes, “You cannot get there by any method whatsoever; you can only be there. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front fo you—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean-Pierre de Caussade called the sacrament of the present moment.”
The present moment. Not some future failing, some future falling apart. But this. Just this. This washing the floor by hand, dumping the dirty water, filling it with fresh hot water, and washing the next block, and the next, and the next. Hanging art, measuring, drilling. Each moment sufficient for itself.
“I wonder,” Rohr writes, “if the only way that conversion, enlightenment, and transformation can happen is by a kind of divine ambush. It seems the ego has to be caught off guard to give up its constant surveillance.”
This store has certainly been a divine ambush. We are awake. Transformation is happening.
What are you afraid of? What is currently divinely ambushing you?
By the way, our opening day on Thursday and then Friday as well were wonderful. Our community really showed up for us. Here are a few pictures from my Instagram account (@shawnsmucker and @noooooks):
Congratulations! Both on the book store, and for mentioning three of my favorite spiritual writers in one post! 😂
I have been actively fighting fear by being present since my medical emergency last year, and as I approach the anniversary of that event, the fear starts to speak more loudly. But I continue to tell myself that I am here. Now. Still. I will live each moment I'm given because the next one is not certain. Some days I am more confident about that than others.