As a relatively young and technologically-adept person, I often find myself fielding impromptu requests for tech support from family, friends, and coworkers. As Douglas and I sat in the office on Tuesday trying to fix his phone, I realized that my quick fixes fall into four categories:
- “It’s not plugged in.”
- “Turn it off and turn it on again.”
- “You’re doing something wrong. Here’s a better way.”
- “I think you need some professional help.”
It turns out these apply to the rest of life, as well. So:
Are you plugged in? Are you eating, sleeping, getting out of the house? Are you connected to other people and to God? Are you meeting the basic needs that give you energy in life? Or are you running on a battery that’s quickly draining away? In Christian spirituality, we sometimes call this a rule of life: a pattern of work, and community, and prayer that’s sustainable over the long term. Do you have a rule of life, implicitly or explicitly? Are you following it? What needs to change for you to be connected to your power source?
Have you tried turning it off and on again? Sometimes you need a complete reset. Something’s gone haywire. You can’t get from Point A to Point B by a series of gradual steps; you need to shut everything down and start it back up again. The Bible calls this Sabbath, a kind of weekly power cycle where you turn off all the activity and the anxiety and the worries of the world and spend time with family and God. Whether it’s rest from work or space in a relationship or that walk outside that refocuses you and brings you new insight into a problem: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Is there a better way to achieve what you’re trying to achieve? Many of us have parts of our lives that consist mostly of banging our heads against the walls (usually metaphorically.) We’ve fallen into rut. We try the same thing again and again and again and wonder why it doesn’t work. “That link,” we think, “should simply copy and paste!” But it’s not so simple, because engineers (no offense) don’t always think quite the same way you do. Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. This is actually one of the reasons we spend so much time in church reading the Bible: not because it confirms what we already believe and do but because it’s so often surprising and counter-intuitive, at least in our culture. Sometimes it helps to have another perspective that comes from far outside our own place and time, to lead us to ask, “Is there a better way?”[1]
Do you need to ask for help? Sometimes, the most important thing a friend can do to help you is to tell you that he can’t help you. Maybe you need the Genius Bar or the phone manufacturer. Maybe you need a doctor or a therapist. Maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe you’ve been so convinced that you need to be independent and strong that you can’t even ask a friend for help. But this is why we have community: so we have others to whom we can turn in times of need. There’s no shame in needing others’ help or support, when you need it. There’s no shame in recognizing your own limits, when more or different help is needed, beyond what you can provide.
[1] As C.S. Lewis beautifully makes the case for reading old books: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.” (In hisintroduction to a translation of St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation published in 1944.)