Jiu-jitsu and parenting

I have recently realized that one of the most important truths about parenting is that I don’t really know how to do it. Most of the time, I’m just making my best guess as to how to handle a given situation, waiting to see how my decisions play out, and then adjusting based on the results. In this way, I suppose parenting is a lot like jiu-jitsu. 

The thing about jiu-jitsu is that it’s not just about you and what you want. Your training partner always gets a say. You may think things are going to go a certain way, but your training partner has his or her own plans, strategies, and goals as well. Even if you have a specific outcome in mind, your training partner may block or counter your move, or even use your own move against you. 

In this way, Jiu-jitsu is much more of a conversation than it is a monologue. Very rarely can you simply impose your will on your partner without any resistance. Even when you can, it’s not really that satisfying or beneficial to either party. 

All of this also applies to parenting. I have certain goals and aspirations for my daughter, but she gets a say. And when I try to guide, lead, or correct her with a specific outcome in mind, it often does not go as planned. She has her own personality, emotions, ideas, and aspirations that all influence how our interactions go. I may start with a plan, but I am often forced to pivot because she didn’t react or respond the way I anticipated. 

This is not to say that I am powerless over her and that she always gets what she wants. That would be neither desirable nor beneficial for either of us. Rather, my best parenting takes into account her personality, desires, and responses. It’s a conversation not a monologue. 

Another similarity between jiu-jitsu and parenting is that, no matter how long I do either, I realize that there is way more to learn. Both jiu-jitsu and parenting keep me humble. As soon as I think I have it all figured out, I am quickly reminded that I don’t. I must remain a perpetual student. 

Both also require presence and intention. I have realized that I can neither be a good parent nor jiu-jitsu practitioner if I am not present, in the moment, and undistracted. My complete attention is required if I am going to be effective. I also cannot phone it in. If I want to be a good parent and a good training partner, I have to be intentional about it. Half measures get less than half results. They get me nowhere. 

Ironically perhaps, in spite of their similarities, I think parenting is way more difficult than jiu-jitsu. I’m way more scared of messing up my daughter with bad parenting than I am of messing up my training partner with bad jiu-jitsu. Actually, if I have bad jiu-jitsu, I’m the one who gets hurt. Whereas, if I parent poorly, my daughter has to live with the consequences. Raising another human being is lot of pressure. 

That said, I love my life. I love being a father, even on the bad days, and I love practicing and teaching jiu-jitsu, even on the bad days. I am also extremely fortunate that I sometimes get to do both at the same time. As painful and frustrating as it may be sometimes, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Our primary purpose

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was working at a bank as a floating teller. As a floating teller, I traveled from branch to branch to fill in as needed. On this particular day, I was working in one of the Annapolis branches and I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled at lunchtime, so I was going to be leaving work early. 

As we set up the branch, getting all of our cash drawers ready for when the doors opened to the public, we saw the news that a plane had just crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. We were all shocked and not quite sure what to do, but it was time to open. Then, just after we opened the doors, the news came in that another plane hit the World Trade Center and we all sensed that the world as we knew it had just changed forever. 

There was a haunting sense of concern and confusion throughout the branch as we did our best to do our jobs as usual, but as the towers collapsed, we all just wanted to go home. I tried to call the doctor’s office to confirm my appointment, but no one answered the phones. I soon realized that, whether the doctor’s office was open or not, I still had an appointment, I still wanted to go home, and this was my chance to do so. So, when it was time for me to go to the doctor, I left work as planned and went home instead. 

At home were my two roommates, both older than me but also very good friends of mine. In fact, we are still friends to this day and stay in touch often. We briefly discussed what had happened and kept our eyes on the news. As the day went on and the initial shock wore off, the realness of it all started to sink in. 

That evening, like every other Tuesday night at that time in my life, we had a meeting to attend in a church basement. Every week a bunch of us gathered together to discuss our lives, our relationship with God, and the spiritual experiences we had each had, through which we shared a common bond. We met regularly, and still do in a different forum, so that others who may be interested in what we have to offer may find us and a way to change their lives. 

As was our custom, we gathered, had some coffee or tea, talked for an hour, said a prayer, and then began to part ways. Before we left, however, one of the members of our group pointed out that no one, not a single person, had spoken of or even alluded to the events of that morning in our meeting. In spite of the severity and gravity of the event, it simply never came up, and the reason it never came up was because that was not what we were there for. 

We knew our purpose for being together, which was to carry the message of the profound change that had taken place in our lives after we gave our lives to God, cleaned up our pasts, and then shared this good news freely with others. We were not there to talk about current events, no matter how tragic. For that hour, the only thing that mattered was that we share with each other and whoever else wanted to listen, what our lives were like, the spiritual transformation we had experienced, the process through which we experienced that transformation, and what our lives were like as the result of that transformation, and, as this gentleman pointed out, we stuck to that primary purpose, even on what is now infamously known as 9/11. 

I think about this experience and the lesson it offers quite often. If I know my purpose in life or in specific relationships or situations, and I stick to that purpose, I am much less likely to get caught up in all of the other things going on in life that either don’t concern me or that I cannot do anything about. This is not the same as apathy, however. I care a lot about a lot of things. Rather, it is about purpose and effectiveness. 

If, on that day, we had allowed the events of 9/11 to seep into our gathering, we would not have been able to do the work we were there to do. It would have made us less effective. And, the work we were there to do was and is extremely important. It literally changed my life and the lives of many others. By talking about the events of 9/11, we would not have been talking about God and spiritual transformation, and that would have been a shame. 

I have found that this principle carries over quite well into other aspects of my life. For example, when I am with my family, if I focus on my family and not on current events or politics, I am much more useful to them and we enjoy our time together more fully. When I’m at work and my attention is on the work itself and on my relationships with my coworkers, as opposed to gossip or personal opinions for example, I not only get more work done, but it is also much more satisfying and fulfilling to be at work in general. Likewise, when I’m at jiu-jitsu, my primary purpose is to teach or practice jiu-jitsu, and when I’m at church my primary purpose is to worship and praise God. 

In every aspect of my life, if I can define my purpose for being there and give my attention to that purpose without being distracted by extraneous issues that I have no control or influence over, my life is better and I am able to serve others more effectively. Of course, there is a time and place for current events, politics, etc. and for having an opinion on these things. There are even people whose purpose and profession it is to do so. However, I find that when I adhere to my life’s primary purpose, which is to love and serve God and to love and serve my fellows, I don’t actually have much time or desire to get caught up in those things or to drag them into places they don’t belong. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Capacity for love

Early in our relationship, my wife gave me this warning. She said, “Remember, the amount I love you is also the amount I can hate you.” I’ve sat with this statement for years and, the more I’ve thought about it, the deeper the sentiment becomes.

When I’ve told other people this story, I’ve gotten mixed reactions. Some people laugh, others are taken aback, and some people really get it. There’s a deep truth in her words.

Love, as I have come to understand and experience it, is more than just a feeling. It’s a capacity. In other words, there is a space in our hearts which love is intended to fill. The more we love someone, the greater this capacity for love becomes.

But what happens when that person hurts us, leaves us, or passes away? That same capacity for love then becomes filled with other emotions. Our potential for love becomes our potential to feel everything else.

So the amount we love someone is also the amount we can be hurt by them if they betray or abandon us. It’s the amount we can miss them if they leave or if we go away. It’s the amount we can worry about them if they are hurt or sick. It’s also the amount we can grieve for them if they die.

Upon understanding this truth, there is a temptation to protect ourselves by limiting or shutting off our capacity to love. If we don’t open ourselves up to love, we can’t get hurt, after all. But this is a grave mistake because any attempt to limit our capacity to feel pain, anger, or sorrow also limits our capacity to feel love, joy, and pleasure.

While these may all feel like different emotions, they have the same source. Our capacity for love is our capacity for all emotions. If we want to feel love, we get to feel everything. And the amount of love we are capable of feeling is the amount of every other emotion we are capable of feeling also. Love, after all, is a capacity.

When my wife told me the amount she loves me is also the amount she can hate me, she was really telling me, “I’m opening my heart to you. The greater my love grows for you, the stronger my feelings become for you, the more vulnerable I become in the process. By loving you, I am giving you the power to hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. I will feel it deeply. I am entrusting you with my heart. Please be kind.”

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

I’m afraid of losing her

Ever since my daughter was born, I would check on her multiple times each night to make sure she was still breathing. Nearly ten years later and I still do this. If she goes to sleep before me, when I go upstairs, I check on her before I go to bed. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I go in her room to check on her before going back to sleep. If I wake up before her in the morning, I check on her before I go downstairs. 

I’ve often thought about why this I do this. I’m sure it’s partly out of habit. I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just something I do. But there’s more to it than that. 

Of course, I check on her because I love her. She’s my only child and we are extremely close. She means the world to me and I adore her. But if I’m being honest with myself, that’s only part of why I check on her so often. 

Having reflected on this behavior quite a bit over the years, the thing I keep coming back to is fear. I’m afraid of losing her, of something happening to her in her sleep, and of her dying suddenly with no warning or explanation. I’m afraid of this because, deep down, I still feel like I don’t deserve her. 

My daughter is such an amazing soul. She is thoughtful, compassionate, kind, creative, hardworking, and extremely smart. I’m in awe of her and I have more love for her than I ever thought I was capable of having for another human being. The thought of losing her terrifies me. 

I have done a lot wrong in my life. At times, I have been selfish, careless, and unkind. Especially in my youth, I have done many things that I regret. And while I know that my shortcomings and mistakes do not define who I am, I also know that I have a life better than I deserve, especially when it comes to her. In the back of my mind, and sometimes in the forefront, I am haunted by the thought of losing her as some kind of divine punishment for my pride, anger, and other wrongdoings. 

Sometimes, this fear drives me to be a better father. It motivates me to spend as much time with her as possible, to be as present for her as I am capable of being, to guide her as best I can, and to let her know that I love her often. Other times, it’s just fear. It results in worry, anxiety, and restless nights. 

The thing is that I know that God loves me and forgives me for my past mistakes. I have confessed them to him and another person, and I have tried to right my wrongs to the best of my ability. I also know, however, that what’s done is done and I cannot change the past. I have to live with my mistakes. 

I’m not sure why I’m writing all of this other than that I needed to get it out. I needed to acknowledge it and put it “on paper” so to speak. Perhaps I wonder if other fathers have the same feelings toward their children, a feeling of absolute unworthiness for the unfathomable miracle that they are. Maybe this is my way of reaching out for connection with those who feel the same way that I do, or maybe someone else needs to know that they are not alone. 

What I am sure of, however, is that God is loving and merciful, so loving in fact that he sacrificed his own son to pay for my sins. For me to continue to wallow in grief and remorse is almost ungrateful, almost a denial of that gift, and it certainly does not make me more useful to God or the people around me. My fear is a subtle way of rejecting God’s grace. 

Perhaps that’s what this is all about. Maybe, through the deep and unexplainable feelings I have for my daughter, God is showing me how much he loves me. I might be making too much out of nothing, but it doesn’t feel like nothing to me. It feels like everything and, as I check on her this evening and kiss her goodnight, I will do so as a form of prayer. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Driving in the moment

I’m old enough to remember driving without a GPS. In fact, when I started driving, computer programs like MapQuest and the like did not yet exist, so we couldn’t just type our location and destination into a computer to print out our route. We simply had to know where we were going. If we couldn’t figure it out, we had use a map or ask for directions. 

As a teenager, I don’t even think I wrote directions down. If I didn’t know how to get where I was going, I’d ask someone and then I would just go. If I got lost, I would either find my way or I would ask for help, usually by calling someone from a payphone to guide me in the right direction. Once I went somewhere, especially if it was somewhere local, without even trying, I could get there again from memory. 

When I traveled through different states, I would pick up the state map at a welcome center or a rest stop and stuff it in my glovebox in case I needed it. For years, I traveled up and down the east coast visiting family with nothing more than my memory, a set of handwritten directions, and a handful of free state maps. My friend and I even traveled to the deep south multiple times a year for blues festivals, putting tens of thousands of miles on my car and, except on a few rare occasions in new places, almost never got lost. 

This all changed when I became a commercial coffee-equipment repair-technician fixing espresso machines and such in and around Washington DC. I was only on the job for a few days when I realized I was in over my head. I had to travel from store to store fixing coffee equipment, in and out of the city, and time was of the essence. 

Now, I was driving for a living in an unfamiliar and confusing place, and especially if I wanted to get home at a decent hour, I couldn’t afford to get lost. GPS units had been out for a while at this point – I remember my father showing me the one he had – but they were still very expensive. After driving in circles between DC and Arlington, VA one day for about an hour trying to figure out where I was going, I finally broke down and made the investment. 

That was nearly twenty years ago and I have been using a GPS in one capacity or another ever since. I’ve been through several dashboard or windshield mounted units, but now it’s simply an app on my phone. Specifically, I use an app called Waze these days because it offers free, crowdsourced traffic, police, and hazard updates which are updated in real time. 

Waze is great and I am sure that has helped me avoid many hours worth of traffic jams, as well as tickets from police speed traps. For this reason, I have found myself using it even when I know where I am going and how to get there. I realized recently, however, that this convenience does not come without its cost. 

At some point in recent years, I started having anxiety about being stuck in traffic, in tunnels, and in any other situation I feel like I can’t easily get out of. It’s something I’ve been working through in therapy and also with my prayer and meditation practice. In spite of having made an amazing amount of progress in this area, I still have moments here and there when my anxiousness gets the best of me. 

One such incident happened a month or so ago when we were meeting some friends in the Baltimore for dinner. In order to get where we were going, we had to go through the Harbor Tunnel and, having never been to this particular restaurant before, I had Waze up on my phone to tell me where to go. It was getting late, it was dark, and I was exhausted from a particularly long week. 

As we approached the tunnel, I began getting anxious. Recognizing whet was happening, I started to think through the situation a bit in an attempt to overcome this feeling that was welling up inside me. Then, the thought came to me, “Is God anxious about driving through tunnels?” 

What this really meant, at least in my mind, was, “What part of you is anxious about driving through the tunnel? Is it the part of you where God resides or is it something else?” I then said a prayer asking God to give me the courage to get through this moment and he did. My fear began to fade, I drove through the tunnel, and we got where we were going. 

After a nice dinner with friends, we got in the car, and I began driving home. As we approached the Harbor Tunnel this time, I could see on Waze that there was traffic building up inside the tunnel and, because of this, the average speed in the tunnel at that time was around 20mph. I immediately panicked and pulled off the highway onto a side street. 

I don’t know what it is, but the thought of being trapped in traffic in the tunnel was simply too much for me and I decided to find a different way to get home. Waze rerouted me and I ended up driving through the city, eventually finding myself entering the Fort McHenry Tunnel which had no traffic backing up in it. This unnecessary detour added at least thirty minutes to my drive home, not to mention what it did to my dignity. 

Over the next few days, I stared to notice a pattern, however. Everywhere I went, I put Waze on to get there. If it showed delays due to traffic, hazards, or whatever, I would start to get anxious. This happened even when I wasn’t in a hurry. 

Then it occurred to me that I was doing this to myself. I was causing myself unnecessary stress by using Waze to look into the future and then obsessing about problems I didn’t even have yet. I was using my GPS to take me out of the moment and it was messing with my peace. 

So I decided to try an experiment. For the foreseeable future, I would go old school. I would stop using Waze, or any other GPS, to get to places I knew how to get to. If I was worried about traffic, I would simply have to leave earlier to account for it, but other than some initial GPS withdrawal, a funny thing happened. I stopped worrying about what was up ahead, and I started focusing on what was in front of me. 

My GPS was taking me out of the moment. It allowed me to abdicate responsibility for my timeliness and even my speed, and, instead of using it as a tool, I had started relying on it to make decisions for me. I was serving my GPS more than my GPS was serving me, and it was distracting me from being present to what was actually going on around me. 

I’m not blaming Waze for my anxiety. Anxiety is a complex, multifaceted issue. However, one of my main anxiety triggers is projecting too far into the future. I have a very strong imagination and when I predict the future, it’s always the apocalypse. I am, therefore, happier and more at peace living in the present moment whenever I can. As silly as it may seem, in addition to my meditation and mindfulness practices, driving without a GPS unless I truly need it is just one small way I can help myself do that.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

With practice and grace

The task of a person called to live a contemplative life is to notice things, to observe God in everyday occurrences, in mundane interactions, and in the places people normally do not look for God. But if God is, isn’t God in everything? Like Adam and Eve in the garden after eating the forbidden fruit, isn’t it we who are hiding, not God? 

The call to contemplation begins as a whisper. It’s a fleeting glimpse into eternity that leaves us wanting more. In a moment, God catches us off guard and grabs our attention. He pulls back the veil and we get to see what he sees, and feel what he feels. But as quickly as he reveals himself to us, he withdraws, leaving us full and empty at the same time. 

In what feels like his absence, we long for his presence. We begin to sense, to know, that nothing less than perfect union with perfect God is going to be enough. And yet there is something in the way. We can’t quite get there no matter how much we want to. 

God is always present, constantly pouring himself out, in and through us, but we are not always present to and for him. We have to practice. Awareness takes practice. Consciousness takes practice. Stillness takes practice.

As we practice, as we awaken to God’s presence, God’s presence begins to awaken within us. More and more often, we start to feel him acting through us, we begin to see him in our life as it unfolds before us, and we start to see and hear him in and through others. Over time, with practice and grace, God-consciousness becomes the rule, not the exception. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

The heartache of the spiritual path

The spiritual life does not save us from heartache or suffering. It opens us up to experience life more fully. By choosing to live with an open heart, we are choosing both joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, connection and heartbreak. We get it all. 

Whether we know it or not, when we step onto the spiritual path, we are making a decision to feel everything, to experience everything. As a spiritual director once told me, “Unfortunately, we do not get to selectively numb. We can feel everything or nothing.” Openness is a package deal.

But it’s hard. Living with an open heart is hard. Love is hard. People we care about pass away, some betray or abandon us, and others disappoint us and let us down. And, in spite of this, we have to keep going. 

People who were on the path before us, who once led, guided, and accompanied us, they sometimes fall off or walk away, or they may simply stop seeking. They stop growing. Likewise, people we entered onto this journey along side, or met along the way, may not stay with us for the long haul. We are lucky if they do, but chances are they won’t. 

Quite often what feels like a parallel path of lifelong companionship turns out to be only a brief meeting at a crossroads. Even the deepest connections, connections that feel eternal, may not last but a moment before we are pulled by God or self in different directions. And parting hurts. 

If we are dedicated to this path, however, if we have chosen to love and seek God above all else, we must keep going. For those of us who long so deeply for divine connection with the infinite and eternal source of all things that nothing else will suffice, we must continue on the path even, or perhaps especially, when it gets lonely. We must walk in faith with our broken hearts toward the one who heals all wounds. 

But it’s not going to be easy. Easy was never the promise anyway. It’s going to be real. It’s going to be true. It’s going to be meaningful. It’s going to be rewarding. It’s going to be fulfilling. But it’s not going to be easy. 

This hardened world will break our fragile hearts, but as the late Leonard Cohen said, “That’s how the light gets in.” 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Keep writing

As I said in Evolution of a Blog Pt. 1, I’ve been publishing daily blog posts for a long time on Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. In addition to publishing to my website, I also post my writing on social media. Social media being what it is, when people feel so inclined, they comment on what I post. 

Over the years, the feedback I’ve received has been mostly positive, which is nice. It’s good to know that others find value in my work. But since feedback is not the primary aim of my writing, I tend to glance at it, acknowledge it, and then move on. I suppose I’m afraid that if I get too caught up in what others think, it will change the way that I write, so I try to take it with a grain of salt.

That doesn’t mean the feedback goes unnoticed and unappreciated. It actually means a lot to me when someone takes the time to tell me they like what I am doing. At the very least, it’s reassuring, but it can also be fuel to keep going. I’m only human and, like most people, I feels good to be acknowledged for the work I’m doing, even if I make a concerted effort to not let it get to my head. 

When I receive criticism, however, it’s a different story altogether. I read it, reread it, worry about it, and obsess over it. If someone doesn’t like my work, whether it be the content or the style, I can’t stop thinking about it. It doesn’t matter how many positive comments I receive, one negative comment will make me question everything I’m doing. 

Recently, I received such a comment on one of my poems I had posted to a group called Contemplative Christianity on Facebook. Overall, it’s a good group. The folks on there seem to be respectful and supportive, but one group member took the time to write a long comment on one of my posts that really threw me for a loop. 

In her remarks, she stated that, while she enjoyed my writing, she felt that I posted too often and that my doing so is a sign of spiritual immaturity and borders on arrogance. In reading this, I was crushed, but also confused. I post once a day, it’s always respectful and in alignment with the group’s rules and focus, and I’ve never tried to push my ideas or my work on anyone. Not only that, everyone has the right to choose whether or not they want to read what I post. No one is forcing anyone to do so. 

I did my best to be respectful to her and to try to understand her position, but I was really taken aback by it because all she had to do was to not read my posts. The whole situation got me thinking though. It made me question why my reaction to negative feedback is so much stronger than my reaction to positive feedback. Why is it so lopsided? 

Why did this comment bother me so much that I read it over and over again, and couldn’t stop thinking about it? Was this enough to make me change my style, my frequency of posting, or quit altogether? No. Then why was I giving so much space in my head? 

I had to remind myself that I’m not writing for feedback, either positive or negative. I’m writing to write. I share my work as not only an act of bravery, but also an act of generosity. Some people, probably most people, are not going to like it. It’s not for them and that’s okay. My job is to keep writing for as long as I feel called to do so. Maybe someday I’ll have published work that people will pay to read and write negative comments about. What a blessing that would be. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Evolution of a blog pt. 1

Every day, for quite some time now, I have been writing and publishing a short blog post for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog. I’ve been doing this for several years and, other than missing a day or two here and there, and a couple of longer periods where I thought I had quit altogether, I have been faithful to this practice. I honestly can’t even remember how or why I started, but I do know that I got the idea of posting daily from listing to an interview with Seth Godin who has been writing and publishing a daily blog post for well over a decade.

My blog didn’t start out as what it is now. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was posting on an entirely different site than the one I’ve been using for the last few years. The name has also changed over time. At first, I don’t think it had a name. Then, it became Holistic Budo. 

Sometime before my first martial art teacher, Joe Sheya, passed away, I had started doing a form of qigong, a mind-and-body movement practice for developing so-called internal strength, to supplement my hapkido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu practices. Upon hearing that I was studying qigong, Joe said to me, “That’s good, but don’t make the mistake I made by thinking your qigong practice is separate from your martial art practice. Find a way to integrate them.” 

The name Holistic Budo was meant to embody this idea of the integration of the holistic arts with the martial arts, with budo being the Japanese word for ‘martial arts.’ I thought that I would use my blog to document my journey through the arts, but art tends to have a mind of its own and the idea we start with is not always the art we end up with. In spite of my intentions, Holistic Budo evolved into my writing short philosophical posts wherein I shared experience, wisdom, or advice for living a better life. 

Sometimes I wrote about something I had experienced throughout the day. Sometimes I was writing to myself, basically giving myself advice for how I could have handled a situation or experience better. Other times, I imagined that I was leaving a trail of literary breadcrumbs for my daughter should she need it someday if I were no longer here to talk to. Eventually, wanting a name that better reflected what the blog had become, I changed the name to what it is now, Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

God’s goodnight kiss

As I finished my daily writing, my wife and my daughter were both fast asleep. Normally, I’d be right behind them, but on this night I was up later than usual. I had overbooked myself that day and I was behind on my work. The fact that I had overslept that morning didn’t help, but I needed it. It had been a long week with lots of jiu-jitsu classes, wrestling practices, appointments, meetings, and a tight schedule all around. 

Normally, I wake up at around 5:30am to do my morning prayers before my wife and daughter get up for work and school, respectively. On this day, I slept until nearly 7am. Actually, we all did. With only one bathroom, this caused quite a scurry to get everyone out the door on time and, being unwilling to give up my morning prayers, which, between my daily readings and meditation usually take about an hour, I was late for jiu-jitsu. I wasn’t scheduled to teach, so it wasn’t really a big deal, but my tardiness set the tone for the rest of my day. 

Fast forward and now it’s time for bed and I still hadn’t finished my writing for the day. So I sat down to write and, of course, I was stuck. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been more of a morning person than an evening person. My creative work is no different. In the morning, if I’m not distracted, the work just seems to flow out of me. At night, it’s much more of a struggle. Being tired doesn’t help. So here I am, past my bedtime, stuck at my keyboard determined to get something out. 

You could say I had writer’s block, but I’ve learned that there is no such thing as writer’s block. What feels like writer’s block is really just pride manifesting itself as fear, frustration, and perfectionism. Somehow writer’s believe that everything they write should be their best work and, if it isn’t, they convince themselves that some mysterious force is blocking them from writing. In actuality, no great creative work happens without a lot of mediocre, or even terrible, work happening first. The key to good writing, therefore, is to just write. 

So I started to get some ideas out. After a lot of false starts, typed and deleted sentences, and prideful disappointment in myself, things began to flow. After about an hour, I finally got to a point where I was pleased enough with what I had written that I was willing to publish it. I posted it to my blog, closed up my laptop, and got myself ready for bed. 

At night, before I lie down, I always go into my daughter’s room to check on her, give her a kiss on the cheek, and say my evening prayers at her bedside. This night was no different, except it was. My routine was the same, but as I walked away from her, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Maybe I was just overly tired. Perhaps it was a sense of release from having gotten through a very long day. But it felt like more. 

I went into my room, laid my head on my pillow, and was struck with a feeling of pure love coupled with a vision, like a waking dream. It lasted but a moment, but in that moment it was as if God uploaded into my consciousness a lifetime’s worth of information all at once. 

What I saw in my mind’s eye was me giving my daughter her goodnight kiss, but I saw it from the outside looking in. Words come up short, but in this single kiss, I could see the love transferred between us. I could see my love for her flowing from me into her, her reception of my love flowing back into me like the closing of a circuit, and God’s love for both of us surrounding us and flowing through the entire relationship. It felt like God gave me a glimpse, even if ever so briefly, into what he sees. 

This experience passed as suddenly as it came to me. Exhausted from the day, I fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up remembering what had happened the night before. As life goes, however, the day’s demands distracted me from reflection. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to really acknowledge and process this experience. In my reflection, I realized how easy it is to ignore, deny, or dismiss these moments and to simply move on with our lives, but I refuse to do so. I can’t. 

These experiences, fleeting glimpses into the mystery of God’s love, leave me longing for more, longing for God, but also extremely grateful that he chose to come to me in this way. Now my task is to not allow this transformative experience to go to waste, to use it, like so many others that I have had like it, as fuel to go deeper, to get closer, and to be still and present more often. But knowing that I cannot manufacture spiritual experiences, that I cannot make God come to me, and that grace is a gift undeserved, the best I can do is to pray. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.