Lessons from a Jar of Pickles - Redefining Wastefulness

You can read the introduction to this series here where I explain how three jars of terrible-tasting pickles came to be in my pantry.

There are several reasons why it was hard for me to throw away those three jars of awful pickles. One of them was:

I spent time and money on these, and to throw them away is wasteful. It would be like throwing money and effort in the trash.

I often correlate value with tangibility. If I spend money on something, I ought to have something tangible to show for it. Value = stuff. Value = practicality.

Spending money and time on jars of pickles and then not eating them is a waste of a tangible resource. Especially since I continued to buy pickles from the store - it is a waste to spend money on something that you already have sitting on a shelf at home. So there is actually a double-waste - the money spent on the pickling supplies and the money spent on the extra jars of pickles that I shouldn't have had to buy because I already had (awful) pickles at home.

Every time I saw those jars there was a sense of guilt associated with them. I ought to eat those. Not eating them is a waste.

But they taste awful.

Yeah, they taste awful because you failed at making them. You should have gone to the store for more dill but you didn't. I sure hope you learned your lesson.

Guilt, failure, and "you made your bed and now you have to lie in it" condemnation every time I looked at those darn pickles.

Now, this conversation wasn't that obvious in my head. I didn't fully realize this was happening because it was painful and I have a knack (I think we all do) for pushing away that pain. I'm quite talented in the art of ignoring familiar pain. I say "familiar" because I think we all have hurts and wounds that eventually become fixtures in our lives - for me those things have been procrastination and failure and laziness and probably some other stuff I can't think of right now. It's the stuff I bump up against all the time and I have this lie in my head that I am deficient - the pain exists because I am deficient. And it is just too much to openly confront that stuff all of the time so I learn to tolerate it, to ignore it, to medicate it with food and episodes of Chopped or Storage Wars or whatever.

And shuffling those pickles around on the shelf seemed to be much easier than throwing them away and admitting that I am wasteful and I am a failure and I am deficient.

Lies, lies, and more lies!

Thank you Jesus for truth and for healing and for the reality of the gospel! The truth is that as a human, I am deficient. However, in Jesus I am a new creation. I don't have to live in condemnation and I can give my deficiency and failures to Jesus and allow him to use them for good. I don't have to accept my fate as a failure - I can step into the inheritance that Jesus freely shares with me. Oh the GRACE and the FREEDOM that come with that inheritance!!!

Over the past few years I have allowed God to show me the depth of this reality and I have finally allowed myself to see me for how God sees me. And it is this renewing of my perspective that enabled me to throw away those confounded pickles!

So that night as I journaled about my day and thought about the pickles, the Holy Spirit dropped a new thought in my head. You know what he showed me?

The time and money I spent wasn't a waste - it was an investment in my creativity. It was an investment in an experience, and the experience itself was the value. The experience made it money well spent.

Talk about turning a thought upside down!

I realized that my creativity, my desire to make things from scratch, my desire to try new things - these are all gifts. They are a testament to the fact that I am a reflection of THE Creator. But if I believe the lie that every creative impulse and every attempt at something new must result in something that is useful and practical and tangible and successful, then my creativity will wither and die. I will never cease to compare the amount of my "successes" to the number of my "failures." I will see each failure as a sign that I'm not really as creative as I ought to be and my confidence to experiment and try new ideas will shrink away to nothingness. I will constantly compare my failures to the visible success of others, not recognizing that their success is a result of their (invisible-to-me) failures. I will believe the lie that I am not as creative as they are, I will believe that I'm not good enough, I will eventually believe that I should stop trying.

Instead, I need to see that failure is a part of creativity. Failure is a useful experience because I have the opportunity to learn from it. I must reject the lie that failure is an ending; instead, I must recognize it as part of the process.

This has redefined how I look at spending money on things like art supplies and spending time on projects. My daughter Kaitlyn is very creative and she loves anything that has to do with art. In the past, I avoided purchasing supplies and doing projects with her because the practical, tangible outcome didn't leave me anything to show for the time and money. What can you do with snowflakes made out of coffee filters? How is a pipe cleaner crown useful? If felt wasteful to make projects like this and then see them end up in the trash. Money wasted, I would think.

But when I look at the benefit of fostering her creativity, when I begin to see the value of experiences, suddenly it is not a waste. And I no longer agonize about throwing projects away. Part of the joy is the process and the adventure of trying new things; gone is the pressure to make every creation significant and useful and worthy of hanging onto forever.

Making terrible pickles doesn't mean I am deficient, and throwing them away doesn't mean that I am wasteful. It means that I care enough about myself to invest time and money into making sure that my creativity doesn't go to waste.

Wastefulness redefined.

Lessons from a Jar of Pickles - Introduction

After working my way through my series on strengths, it feels right to move on to another series. So now, dear readers, I will begin a series that was inspired by a jar of pickles.

Every summer there is a produce stand on a corner that is on my way to/from work. It's called Sweet Corn Charlie's and they sell a variety of great produce, including (as their name would suggest) lots and lots of sweet corn. I do live in Indiana, after all, and summer in Indiana isn't complete without freshly picked sweet corn.

Two summers ago, in July or August of 2010, I stopped by the stand and was picking up my usual items - some corn, a few tomatoes, a cantaloupe, and some green beans - when I noticed some sprigs of dill next to a bin marked "pickling cucumbers."

One of the things I enjoy in life is experimenting in the kitchen. I love learning to make things from scratch and do things the "old-fashioned" way. I've made pudding from scratch, canned my own tomatoes, I love making my own chicken broth from scratch, and, although this isn't an edible item, I also make my own laundry detergent. There is something empowering about knowing that I can do these things without the aid of a box or a can.

So when I saw the dill and the cucumbers I was inspired to try canning my own pickles. I took all the dill that was left and gathered up some cucumbers and went on my merry way. (But not before I paid. In case you were wondering.)

That Saturday morning I assembled all the ingredients - those I had purchased at the produce stand and some I had picked up at the store. I went about making the pickles only to discover that I didn't have enough of the dill. I considered the situation for a minute and instead of running to the store to pick up some more, I decided to make do with what I had.

So I made the pickles and let them sit for the prescribed amount of time (two weeks, I think.) Then I anxiously opened a jar of them and took my first bite of pickle.

It tasted terrible.

All I tasted was garlic and soggy cucumber. Blech.

I put the opened jar of pickles in the refrigerator and left the rest of them (three jars) in the pantry.

For 18 months I kept those jars in the pantry. About once a month I'd have to shuffle them around to make room for jars of spaghetti sauce or cans of soup or boxes of granola bars. And every time I shuffled them I thought I should get rid of these.

In December 2011 while I was home for Christmas break I had a cleaning spurt and decided to clean out the pantry. I took everything out of the pantry and purged relentlessly. When I arrived at the jars of pickles I sighed a very deep sigh. Oh, those pickles! Why had a I kept them for so long? Why couldn't I just bring myself to throw them away? Why had I allowed them to take up space on my shelf for 18 months?

I took them out, popped the sealed lids off, dumped out the awful, garlicky juice, then coaxed the soggy pickles into the trash can. Finally - freedom!!

Later than night, as I was journaling about my day, I thought about those pickles and the many questions about why they had caused me so much grief. Surprisingly, my pondering led to four or five "aha!" moments that were pretty significant.

Since I wrapped up the strengths series I've been thinking about what I should blog about next, and the other night while I was looking for something in the pantry I was reminded of those awful pickles. And that's when I knew I should write about them.

Next up in the series - redefining wastefulness.

Strengths, Part One - Introduction

In my last post I mentioned the StrengthsFinder test and shared my top five strengths. I have to say that knowing my strengths changed my life! I know that sounds a bit overblown but it's true. Understanding my strengths allowed me to see where I was trying to be like others (and failing miserably) and freed me to just be me.

Because they have been so instrumental in changing the way I view myself, the way I think, the way I approach my to-do list, and the way I work with others I want to take several posts to talk about my strengths.

Part of me feels like this is really self-serving. Like, "Hey guys, let's talk all about MEEEEEEE!!!" I started thinking about this in church on Sunday, and then I wondered if it was a nudge from God since, you know, I was in church. Was he telling me that coming back to blogging is making me self-absorbed?

But the truth is, if I'm going to blog about thoughts and process and transformation and growth, I'm really only an expert when it comes to ME. It would be way weirder if I decided to become an expert (and share my expertise on this here blog) on how other people need to change; I'm sure that's an option but I have feeling it would make me unpopular with friends and family.

Anyway... I guess I felt the need to express that and get it out of the way. Now back to the subject of this post...

I first heard of the StrengthsFinder in college. In fact, most of my graduating class took the test during the second semester of our senior year. I graduated a semester early so I missed out on that opportunity and I always wondered what I would have discovered had I taken the test.

Fast forward eleven years to a staff meeting where everyone on our staff was given a copy of "StrengthsFinder 2.0." I was so excited to finally have a chance to take the test! (In hindsight, I'm not sure why I never researched what it would cost to get the book/test on my own. The book is $25 retail, $15 on Amazon, so I could have easily discovered my strengths if I'd only thought to search it out.)

I've taken many different assessments and there is something about this one that is really unique. Perhaps it is because there are 34 different strengths; perhaps it is simply that I didn't take this assessment until I'd gained some life experience and started coming to terms with who I really am.

If you are unfamiliar with the StrengthsFinder book/test, here is a little excerpt about the strengths concept:

"Our goal was to start a global conversation about what's right with people. We were tired of living in a world that revolved around fixing our weaknesses. Society's relentless focus on people's shortcomings had turned into a global obsession. What's more, we had discovered that people have several times more potential for growth when they invest energy in developing their strengths instead of correcting their deficiencies."

Here are my top five strengths along with some excerpts from the book that explain them:

Ideation
"You are fascinated by ideas. ... An idea is a new perspective on familiar challenges. You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre. For all these reasons you derive a jolt of energy whenever a new idea occurs to you."

Futuristic
"You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. ... You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you."

Intellection
"You like to think. You like mental activity. You like exercising the "muscles" of your brain, stretching them in multiple directions. ... You are the kind of person who enjoys your time alone because it is your time for musing and reflection. You are introspective. ... This introspection may lead you to a slight sense of discontent as you compare what you are actually doing with all the thoughts and ideas that your mind conceives. Or this introspection may tend toward more pragmatic matters such as the events of the day or a conversation that you plan to have later. Wherever it leads you, this mental hum is one of the constants of your life."

Adaptability
"You live in the moment. You don't see the future as a fixed destination. Instead, you see it as a place that you create out of the choices you make right now. ... This theme of Adaptability enables you to respond willingly to the demands of the moment even if they pull you away from your plans. ... You are, at heart, a very flexible person who can stay productive when the demands of work are pulling you in many different directions at once."

Connectedness
"Things happen for a reason. You are sure of it. You are sure of it because in your soul you know that we are all connected. Yes, we are individuals, responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will, but nonetheless we are part of something larger. ... This feeling of Connectedness implies certain responsibilities. If we are all part of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting ourselves. Your awareness of these responsibilities creates your value system."

The book offers some examples of what these strengths look like in everyday life and gives some advice for the types of jobs and roles to avoid/pursue. The above descriptions for Adaptability and Connectedness leave me wondering if those are really in my strengths, but the additional information confirms that they represent how I operate.

For example, for Adaptability one of the ideas for action is "avoid roles that demand structure and predictability. These roles will quickly frustrate you, make you feel inadequate, and stifle your independence." That is spot on for me, although I am learning to develop the ability to live within structure and predictability.

I feel like this post was not very insightful overall but I wanted to lay the foundation for sharing all the ways my strengths have affected my life. In the next couple of posts I want to share several "aha!" moments I had as I processed my strengths and saw how they applied to my thinking and my approach to doing, both at work and at home. (Here is part two, here is part three.)

Do you spend a lot of time focusing on your weaknesses instead of your strengths? What would happen if you shifted your focus and began to develop your key strengths instead?