So in the last post
(this one) I briefly talked about how another aspect of God asking us “Do you
want to build a snowman?” is Him asking us “Do you want to do what I’m calling
you to do?” When we hear this question, often we’re like Elsa and we freeze in
fear behind the door. We’re reluctant to accept His calling and to come out
saying yes. We either tell Him to go away or we ignore Him and that calling.
This fear usually stems from reluctance or uncertainty that we’ve properly discerned.
It can actually be a healthy type of fear when it comes to not being sure if
we’ve discerned the right calling because discernment is a slow process and can
be thrown off by many factors in our life, such as times of chaos or doubt. But
just like Anna is persistent at knocking on Elsa’s door, God is persistent in
asking us if we want to do what He is calling us to do. That is often the way
you can tell if you’ve properly discerned whether or not something is God’s
will: if it has lasting consistency of consolations, particularly during times
of peace when your heart and mind are clear to listen to Him. If you keep
getting solid consolations about what you feel God is calling you to do, then
that fear needs to be overcome by trust in God and you need to say yes to Him.
But often when we
overcome that first fear and say yes, we get overwhelmed by a second fear that
freezes us. It’s the “you know this is what you’re supposed to do and you freak
out about messing it up so it’s like there’s a big rock on you preventing you
from moving” kind of fear. It’s that little voice inside of you saying “you’re
not going to make it, everyone will laugh at you, it’s a stupid idea, you’re
going to fail.” It’s a paralyzing type of fear, one that causes us to never try
or give up too early.
And this fear can be
for anything that God calls us to do: our main vocation of getting married or
entering the religious life or committing to the single/community life, our
career, our talents, applying to things like college or grad school, moving to
a new place, or even just little things like reaching out to others and doing
service activities. We just get stuck and would rather hide ourselves away. But
this isn’t healthy because we become ourselves when we’re doing what God wants.
Elsa was just a shell of herself when she hid her powers, but when she let them
go, she transformed—figuratively and literally—and became who she was meant to
be.
This past Pentecost,
the priest at the church I go to in the summer told us that at our Confirmation
the Holy Spirit gives each of us gifts that are unique to the purpose God has
for us. He said we come alive when we use these gifts in the service of others
to do the purpose God sent us here for. Thus if we feel spiritually dead or
stagnant, it likely means that we have a gift we haven’t shared with the world
yet in the way God intends.
Building a snowman
meant Elsa was using her powers, the gifts she’d been given, and better yet,
she was sharing them with others. When Elsa started to use her powers during
“Let It Go,” that’s when she felt free and alive. She transformed when she just
let her powers go and did her best. She sings, “It’s time to see what I can do,
to test the limits and break through.” We need to do that, and we can when we
ask for God’s help. It’s true that Elsa didn’t have her true metanoia moment
until later in the movie. But those things take time and a spark, and letting
go of fear so we can be open and receptive to God’s love and will is the first
step.
If it’s God’s will,
we can do anything, so if we feel called to it, we need to try it and ask Him
for help. There’s an Irish Jesuit prayer guidance website called Sacred Space
(it’s a really great resource if you’re having trouble figuring out how to pray
so here’s the link for anyone curious) and I particularly love two of their
reflection prayers on this subject. One is by St. Ignatius Loyola: “There are
very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned
themselves into His hands and let themselves be formed by His grace.” The other
is from their authors, “Saint Ignatius thought that a thick and shapeless
tree-trunk would never believe that it could become a statue, admired as a
miracle of sculpture, and would never submit itself to the chisel of the
sculptor, who sees by her genius what she can make of it. I ask for the grace
to let myself by shaped by my loving Creator.”
Now neither of these
are saying we should just stop trying and let God do all the work because He’ll
magically and instantaneously transform us into what He wants. But they are
saying that if we just open up our hearts and minds to what God wants us to be
and that if we stop thinking we can’t be anything or that we’re a failure and instead
trust that God will make us into what He wants, we’ll be a greater person and
more skilled than we ever imagined. We need to be open to God’s calling, to
trust Him, and to keep working hard at whatever we feel called to do. We need to
ignore that little voice of doubt and to look to Him to help us melt away all
the ice that has paralyzed us. “I never knew what I was capable of.” That’s
what Elsa says after she’s built her amazing ice palace. When we let go of our
fears and ask for God’s strength to do what He is calling us to do, we end up
discovering the same thing.
When it comes to the
specific calling of developing our talents and we encounter this fear, we need
to just take a deep breath and let go of all that’s holding us back. Whether it
be people who told us we can’t do it, that it’s not worth the time to do it,
whether it’s our own selves saying we’ll be terrible—whatever it is, just let
it go. Elsa took the approach of saying, “no right no wrongs no rules for me,
I’m free!” which for the most part is a good approach. However, taking it too
literally and throwing out your ethical and moral codes is a bad idea, as is
getting rid of all fear. Some fear is good because it helps keep us safe. Just
about everyone has a fear of jumping off buildings because we know that the
likelihood of being injured or killed is extremely great. So don’t go too crazy
in the experiment stage that you ignore all fears and end up doing things that
could harm yourself or others.
Elsa’s approach
means that you need to imagine it’s like that when you’re practicing at
whatever you’re doing—there isn’t a right or wrong or good or bad. There’s no
critical judgment. You’re free to explore, try new approaches, be creative, and
to make mistakes. I feel like sometimes we’re so caught up in what others will
think about what we do, that we don’t even start. We’re so worried about it
being perfect, that we don’t practice. Like that guy in Camus’s novel the
Plague, who is so worried about making every sentence in his novel perfect that
he’s still working on the first sentence several years later. We have to start
somewhere and we can learn from our mistakes. And the more we try, then the
more we succeed and increase our skill, or the more we fail but learn how we
can do better to get to that point of success.
I love Elsa’s line,
“It’s time to see what I can do, to test the limits and break through,” because
it really captures the “dare to be bad” notion that my favorite college writing
professor instilled in us. Just try it, experiment, push yourself to discover
what you can do. Ignore all the voices—whether outside or within—that tell you
that you can’t and just try. If you try you at least have a chance of
succeeding and even if you do fail, each failure is a learning experience and
one step closer to success. There’s a saying in the writing and animation
communities that we all have a certain number of bad stories and bad drawings
in ourselves and that the only way to get to the good ones is to just keep
churning out the bad ones through practice. Each bad version of whatever you do
is one version closer to the good versions. If it’s really what God is calling
us to do, we won’t fail forever. We will succeed.
Sometimes, though,
it’s hard to even start experimenting because we’re so solidly frozen in that
fear or so stuck under the weight of that rock that it’s suffocated us to the
point that we can’t move even a little bit. This often comes from being told at
some point in our lives by someone we trust that we shouldn’t be doing what we
feel called to do. Or it comes from failing so many times while we see others
on our path not only succeed at a faster rate but excel in ways we can’t ever
imagine ourselves doing. Or it comes from some form of “creative block”
regardless of if your talent is officially classified as a creative field or
not.
The world likes to
shape us into the way it thinks we should be, but this isn’t always the way
that God wants us to be. If you have a talent that you love and feel called to
develop but were told to do something else, then this is a case where you need
to ignore the world and listen to that voice God placed within you. Don’t lose
out on that core aspect of yourself just because someone told you to stop and
to hide it. It’ll keep coming back to the surface no matter how hard you try to
“conceal and don’t feel” your love of it. And just like Elsa’s ice powers, the
desire to use those talents will become stronger over time and the more you
fight it the more miserable you’ll become. Listen to that voice. Be who you’re
meant to be. Share the gifts you have with the world and don’t be afraid to try
and to fail and to learn because that’s the only way you’re ever going to reach
success.
It’s really
frustrating when someone does get to that success quicker and seemingly easier
than you do. It’s also incredibly intimidating to see the people who excel in
that field because it’s easy to see where they are and where you are and think
that it’s an impossible distance to cover. It’s okay to feel frustrated and
intimidated, but it’s important to remember that all people have their own
paths and our talents don’t peak at the same rates. But if it’s what God is
calling you to do, that distance isn’t impossible, it just takes lots of
practice and working up to that point. Elsa didn’t build the giant ice castle
first—she slowly built up to it by making small puffs, an Olaf like from when she was a kid, bigger puffs, and
a bridge before getting to the castle. Start small like Elsa did with whatever
the equivalent of the little puffs of snow would be in your field. Then build
up bigger and bigger as you learn and succeed at the little things and gain
more confidence for the bigger ones.
As for creative
blocks, every person has times in their talents where they get like this, no
matter how amazing, skilled, or experienced they are. The blocks can be caused
by a myriad of reasons, so sometimes you have to experiment with ways of
overcoming them in order to get back to that stage of experimenting to improve
your talents. Elsa’s line, “It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem
small. And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all,” contains
one of the possible options for breaking the creative block. Sometimes you just
need that distance, get away from it for a little bit—whether it’s mentally or
physically. When I need that mental distance I’ll often take what I call “wander
walks,” where I just wander about the safe neighborhood near me and go down
paths I don’t usually go down so that I can explore and see new things that can
inspire me. Or I’ll play a video game like Animal Crossing where you get to
world build, be creative, and explore new places without risk. Just do
something that jumpstarts your creativity and gets you out of your head and
your usual routine. Sometimes the distance can be taken by watching others do
whatever it is you want to do since seeing them do it can re-spark your desire
or teach you new things that you could try. Other times researching different fields
can be a good distance because you can gain new insights about your field by
applying what you learned about the other fields or it can help you remember why
you love your field so much.
Another way to help
get over the fear is to remember what inspired you in the first place to try
that talent. If it was a TV show or movie, then re-watch it. If it was a book,
re-read it. If it was a conversation, try to remember everything surrounding
that time and your memories of first learning about that talent and trying it
out. Whatever it was, somehow try to put yourself back in that moment where you
had that initial seed of desire for that calling. Sometimes that powerful
initial inspiration can thaw away all the fear because we remember how much we
love it. For talents that we’ve had since we were kids, sometimes it helps to
go back into that mindset of when we were kids and just had fun with our
talents. Notice how the first real thing Elsa built was Olaf—the same Olaf she
built as a kid when she used her powers for fun and to make her sister smile.
Typically when we were kids, we didn’t worry about what others thought or cared
how well things turned out—we just tried our best, had fun, and did things
because we loved them.
That’s the real
thing that always thaws out fear of any kind—love. It’s why it can be so
important when developing your talents to have a support system of people who
love you and can encourage you to keep working hard even when that fear starts
to creep back up on you. It’s best to have at least one person in your life who
really understand your talent so you can talk with them and you can help each
other grow, but I think as long as there’s someone who will listen and
encourage you (and you do the same for them) even if they have a different
talent, that’s enough. While not everyone has that with the people in their
immediate lives, we’re lucky enough to live in an age where it’s easy to find
people on the internet who share the same passions for whatever talent we have
through various forums or community websites. Similarly, there are often groups
in the area where we live for people who share our passions and with a bit of
research we can find, make sure they’re legit and safe, and then join them to
gain that support system. And for those of us who are religious, we also know
that we have that love and support from God and the Saints. There’s a patron
Saint for pretty much everything, so figure out which ones relate to your
talent, then ask them for help, talk with them, read about them and see if they
have advice for your talent’s area if they did the same thing.
Listen to that voice
inside of you that is telling you to respond to God’s calling. Let the love for
whatever that calling is take over you and thaw that icy boulder that keeps you
from moving. If we overcome all the fear that stops us from answering God’s
calling for us, we will be like Elsa at the end of Let it Go: transformed,
fully ourselves, and standing in the light of day.
