Triggers and Lint Balls

Have you noticed that life has a cumulative effect? Some of the things that have happened to you in the past are still with you today. In fact, each experience we have changes the way we experience the next thing, and that thing changes the way we experience the things which come after it.

Take hurt as an example. You can never be quite so naïve as you were before the last time you got soundly trounced by someone who took ‘taking advantage of you’ to a whole new level. We can moderate the effect it has on us through effort, but we can’t easily make it go away completely. We carry it with us.

I’ve come to think of all this as something like your own personal ‘lint ball’ of human experience. A lint ball being that slowly growing collection of pet hair, clothing fibers, toast crumbs and far sketchier things which haunt the ½ inch gap beneath kitchen appliances and under the furniture which sits atop hardwood floors. A lint ball is the ‘cumulative effect’ of a bunch of stuff which collects over time and I have one inside me. We alternatively call it ‘baggage’.

At any given moment, I carry with me some part of the shame and fear, hope and willingness, good and bad of all that’s happened to me. I also find that as time goes by, it gets easier and easier to ‘trigger’ some of this ‘stuff’. Whereas it used to take much longer to arouse my suspicions, they can sometimes be triggered almost ready made if someone starts to act out even a small part of something that’s happened to me before.

I’m writing all this because I’ve decided recently that I want to have a larger say in which triggers get triggered most often. Specifically, I want to have a larger say in the one’s that are attached to passion and vision, courage, hope, possibility, creativity and expecting the best of everyone around me. I think a large part of your thought space will be determined by the things you spend the most time celebrating – or the most time ‘turbulating’ (the spell checker drew a blank for that so I’ll say it’s a word I invented based on ‘turbulence’).

I’m guessing all of this is part of the reason Jesus wanted us to stay childlike and live as though we simply hadn’t had enough time to build long triggers attached to large amounts of baggage.

It’s something we’ll be talking more about this Sunday. I hope you find it challenging.

Chris