We all have days when we wake up and feel disoriented. Maybe everything is the same, except for one or two small things and everything feels disorienting. The thing you were leaning on; the thing that had been supporting your weight for a while, all of a sudden shifted… buckled under your weight. And now you’re questioning everything.    Every once in a while, something disrupts the rhythm. Like the little old lady clapping off-beat in church… or any white person with a tambourine. It comes out of nowhere, and disrupts the flow of things. It immediately absorbs all of your attention, no matter how big or small it is. It’s new, it’s foreign, it’s disruptive, it’s disorienting.    I was talking with a friend at the gym about it. I was talking with a coworker about it. There are times when you can see a change coming from a long way off, so you can sort of brace yourself for it. You can see the storm on the horizon and you batten down the hatches, collect all your supplies and ready yourself for it. But there are also other times when a situation blind sides you. It’s the buddy-pass… You see these guys in hockey passing the puck up the ice, skating forward but looking backwards to catch the puck, only to turn around and immediately get knocked off their feet by a bone-crushing check. I just saw it in the Patriots game on Sunday… a guy was watching the ball, high in the air, watched it all the way down into his hands, and before he could turn he just got leveled.    And it’s disorienting. To say the least.    So what do you do when you’re disoriented? When change comes, as it always does, whether you see it coming or not, how do you handle it? How do you process it?    It makes me think of scuba diving training… My father was scuba certified, as well as my college roommate that’s now a Navy SEAL. I’ve heard from both of them, training in swimming pools, and learning what to do in case of an emergency. If you’re 50 feet underwater and your mask gets ripped off, or your oxygen gets cut off, how do you respond? Panic isn’t an option. Swimming straight up as fast as you can isn’t an option. And that’s why they train for this.    My father told me that they set all the scuba gear down at the bottom of a 12 foot deep pool, and that you had to swim down, get your oxygen going, take a few breaths, then find your mask, put it on, clear it out by blowing hard through your nose and tilting your head back, then getting the tank on your back and getting on your way.    The SEALs are a little bit more intense, of course. They’re actually all geared up together on the bottom of the pool, and other divers (their instructors) basically beat you up a little bit at the bottom of the pool. They rip your mask off, rip the respirator out of your mouth, flip you around, take the tubes off your oxygen tank, all the while you’re holding your breath, everything blurry, not knowing which way is up, and you have to re-orient yourself… get all your stuff back in order without panicking or passing out under water.    This, I believe, is a really helpful metaphor for understanding what we should do when we find ourselves disoriented. When in doubt, learn from a Navy SEAL.   First things first — you need oxygen. You need to find your tank, reconnect the tubes and get the respirator in your mouth. It’s blurry, it’s dark, you can’t really see but you’re feeling around for things, and this is your highest priority. If you have oxygen, everything else immediately becomes less of a panic. This is the same thing they say on airplanes… Secure your oxygen mask first, then help the people next to you. If you’ve got kids, that might be counter-intuitive, but you’re no help if you faint from lack of oxygen. You need to reconnect to your life-source. Take a deep breath… take a few. The only thing that matters is that you’re getting deep breaths of fresh air. The next things can wait.    For you… what’s your source of oxygen? Where do you find life? Where do you find a connection to God or something larger than yourself? When you’re disoriented, what can you tap into that you know will breathe life into your lungs? Maybe it’s family… maybe it’s time with trusted friends and mentors and people that want the best for you. Maybe it’s time in nature… stepping away from the daily grind, turning your phone off, sitting down at the water’s edge and opening a journal… What sort of self-care can you administer immediately to get your oxygen levels back up? When we’re disoriented, we’re in danger of expiring… exhaling and not having any more inhaling… so you need to find inspiration. Literal, in-spiring, those words meaning being breathed into. That’s what God did with Adam, in-spired and gave him life. What brings you life? Even if things are foggy and panic is brimming under the surface, find that source and do whatever it takes to get it. That first and highest priority.    The second thing is to figure out which way is up. One of the biggest dangers in scuba diving really deep where there’s not a lot of light is that you can lose your understanding of which way is up. Cave divers, diving in the pitch black, can think they’re swimming up and really be swimming down, and that obviously is a recipe for disaster. If your Navy Seal instructors have roughed you up and you don’t know which way is up, you need to take a second and see which way the bubbles are going. Your vision will still be blurry, and that’s fine for now, getting upright is important.   How we’d apply this step I think looks like re-orienting ourselves to who we are, where we are, what exactly is going on… This is like when someone faints and then wakes back up, they’re asking them who the president is, what year is it, what their name is… Simple orienting questions that remind us that our brain is properly functioning. Who are you, where are you, do you know exactly what’s going on?    This, again, is something that close friends can help us with. People can sit with us to talk things through, to process exactly what blind-sided us, exactly what we’re dealing with, and maybe even WHY it’s happening. That “why” might not come for a long, long time, and may not ever come, if we’re being honest… But simple orientation questions are helping. Taking stock of the present situation. Honesty about RIGHT NOW. Which way is up? How did we get here? What just happened?    A lot of times, these moments of disorientation have gems hidden in them… you might call a silver lining… I know that some of the most disorienting seasons of my life have produced the most transformative life lessons, but only if I’m actually doing the hard work of paying attention. Again, a temptation we all have is, once we’ve got our oxygen, to immediately begin swimming as fast as we can to the surface, with blurry vision and not knowing which way is up; that’s a recipe for disaster.   Orienting yourself upright is a discipline in a moment of confusion. But it’s worth it, because this is where we learn the lessons that this disorientation has to offer us. I see my friends race past this phase, and want to race onto the next thing, because disorientation is uncomfortable, they want to minimize this time to be as short as possible, but missing all the life lessons here. Alternatively, as a side note, I have some friends that stay here TOO LONG… that’s a threat as well. You can’t really quantify how long is too long to sit in a situation and try to learn from it, but there is such thing as too long. This is where people get stuck… they lose all momentum entirely. They’re just sitting at the bottom of the ocean with a respirator in their mouth, being a victim of the circumstance, beating themselves up, or playing woe is me.    After you’ve got your oxygen source, and you’ve figured out which way is up, it’s time to get clear vision. It’s time to find your mask, get it on your head, clear the water out, and blink your eyes into seeing clearly for the first time in a while. This is when you can finally begin to integrate everything that happened over the last season—And not only that, begin to move forward, in the proper direction… It’s time to do something again. It’s time to figure out what’s next. Do you stay down there? Do you swim to the surface? Do you finish what you were doing when you were blind-sided? Or do you immediately begin doing something different?    These near-death moments put things into perspective. Maybe what you were busy doing when you got the wind knocked out of you isn’t worth continuing to do… Maybe it’s a sign that it’s time to hang that up. Or maybe it’s a reminder that this is exactly the thing you’re supposed to be doing, and this is just the cost of you being you. All I know is that these crucible moments refine us… They strengthen us. They give us experience that we can’t learn in a classroom. You can study scuba diving all you want, watch all the YouTube videos you can find, but it’s no substitute for actually getting in the water and living through an extreme moment.    The last thing that I think comes naturally after all of this, is a sense of gratitude. And it might be YEARS afterward, that you find yourself back on the beach, taking the scuba gear off and feeling this deep sense of gratitude overtake you. You survived. The worst possible thing that could’ve happened, HAPPENED, and guess what? You’re still here. You made it.    You didn’t choose it, you didn’t want it, but you traveled full circle from orientation, to disorientation and then re-orientation. And not everyone makes it through. But you have. And that’s when you can reflect, and actually feel grateful for your trials, and what you’ve had to endure.    As I said, that might be years afterwards… but I can look back on disorienting seasons in my past and actually feel grateful for them. 2016, man… that was a bad year for me. My boss and mentor had left our church in a bad place, we had just had Avi, newborn baby, we had family members passing away, we were selling our condo and buying a house, I was hiring new people into the Emery Agency and feeling more financial stress than ever before… and I was drinking a lot. I was turning to that nearly every night to slow my brain down and I developed an unhealthy dependency on it. All of that bubbled to a head in June 2016, spent the summer re-orienting myself to my present reality, getting a new oxygen supply, figuring out which way was up, and getting clarity on what my next steps should be. It was then that I really began stepping out of full-time ministry, changing our business model, and clearing unnecessary responsibilities off my plate. That season kinda sucked, but now 3 years later I”m grateful that I walked through it.    My marriage is stronger than ever before, my understanding of what the hell i’m doing in the world is clearer than ever before… And all because I got blindsided (or more accurately pig-piled on by a dozen different things, crushing me underneath their weight.)    I don’t know what it is for you, or if this episode resonates with you, but the only constant is change… and so if you’re cruising along with clarity and feel very oriented in your life, it’s only a matter of time before a curveball comes your way. And hopefully this is a helpful tool when that happens.    Our lives are a constant cycle of orientation, disorientation and then re-orientation. That’s just how it goes. But if you’re willing to do the work, it’s worth it.    I love you guys, thanks for listening… make it a good day.