What Are You Gonna Do?
The rule I try and live by is never, ever, ever check on what Luria is doing and last night I broke the rule and checked her twitter account. That the Cali Lewis brand no longer is about Shiny, Happy Tech news and has become Shiny, Happy John news stabs me in the heart again and again.
I’ve struggled for a year leaning on the concept of God and there is something very powerful there. Trusting that idea gave me hope and peace, but it didn’t pay the bills. What Luria did to me wasn’t nice and wasn’t fair and letting go of it hasn’t been easy because there hasn’t been closure. She left. I asked, why? At first she told me nothing and then she started just making stuff up as if that would make me okay with everything. Made up reasons for leaving don’t help. I get that I made her miserable in the last two years of our marriage because I tried everything I could think of to get John out of our marriage.
With every ounce of my being, I’ve wanted to kill myself because I didn’t know how to deal with Luria and John. One of the things that makes me believe in God WAY more than the Bible is that killing yourself isn’t as easy as you’d think. I researched every possible method and got scared off by the failure rate. I no longer want to die. I want to live and thrive and I want Luria to be successful. I have never been angry with her. I’ve only been angry at John and holding it in isn’t getting me anywhere. It’s like poison inside.
In the last year, I’ve dealt with them creating anonymous Twitter accounts to smear me. When I was doing great and thought the divorce was over and I was ready to move on, John posted on his blog that he was suing me. He took everything from me and then said he was suing me?
I hate the fact that his stupidity mattered to me. By Christmas I felt so hopeless that I hung out with some of my best friends really thinking it would be my last Christmas. In January, I rarely got out of bed, but then in February, just like fog lifting off of San Francisco, I stopped being depressed.
The words of that Dixie Chick’s song, “I’m not ready to make nice” resonate with me. They can accuse me of stuff to justify what they did and no matter how ugly that is or how powerful they are because they have money and attention, they cannot send me as low as they sent me by being crappy people.
All I ever did in my marriage was work to make Luria famous because she wrote me a note before we were married saying she wanted that. It isn’t an easy thing to make happen, but I think I did it well!
Since August, I’ve struggled to know how to rescue Luria from the influence of people who were using her…not to get her back in my life…just to get her out from under the influence of people who would do what they did to me and to her.
In August, they did something so nasty to her and convinced her I was to blame. Only they could have done it because only they had access to make it possible. I go to bed crying night after night at the thought she thinks I would have done what they did.
From here on out, I’m standing up to them. No one, even her family, gets that she’s being used because we put a PR hungry man on GeekBrief.TV and when I went crazy trying to get him out of our life she chose him and now lives a life promoting him.
Fine! I’m not ready to make nice, but I am ready to start a new show that does shiny, happy tech news and isn’t about self promotion or just getting rich. I don’t care if anyone knows my name. I want to get back to doing what I did with GeekBrief.TV … just loving technology. I can’t do that if I bottle everything up and pretend everything is okay.
Next week I’m shooting a pilot for a new show. I’m excited and scared to death, but I’m done letting a creepy, rich guy intimidate me.
I wish I could be angry with Luria. I’m sure it would help me move on, but until she left, I’ve never known Luria to be anything other than the most awesome person I’ve ever met. It’s Luria manipulated by John that I have a problem with and pretending that my problem doesn’t exist just hasn’t worked. I also can’t find a way to blame Luria because I’ve known her half my life and her nature is kindness. It’s very much like her operating system has a virus and that virus is John.
That man took my life away from me. He wrote me in an email after Luria left saying, if I would have turned to him rather than God my marriage would have been saved! I’m glad I didn’t turn to him because I don’t believe in him.
There are people who say I should keep this to myself and move on, but doing that just eats me up. The truth is, I don’t really know what to do to get over what they did to me. I hired an attorney who believes divorce should be nice because I couldn’t accept that Luria would do something so mean. I still don’t believe she would. I know I turned her off because I think John is the worst man I’ve ever met in my life and I told her that over and over and over and over. It was when I told HIM that that she got mad at me, but not at first … only after talking to him about it. As soon as he thought his access to the Cali brand and GeekBrief.TV would end, he started turning her against me and it was totally possible because his constant involvement in our life turned me into someone who was miserable to be around.
My heart wants no one to pay attention to my need to let this out, but if I don’t let it out, it will kill me.
People liked GeekBrief.TV because it was built on love. I’ve had to watch some episodes recently and something is very clear. If you watch the episodes before when we put John on the show and after, you can see the joy being sucked out of our lives.
If Luria would have left and moved to San Francisco or New York because she got tired of me, I would be heartbroken, but I would be her biggest fan. That she left and gave what I created to a very bad man is not something I’ve figured out how to get over.
Pretty much all I can do is shrug and say what her wonderful grandmother always said about situations you can’t control, “What are you gonna do?”
Read MoreI Don’t Know How to Solve This
Very few people understand I’m not depressed because of the divorce. I’m depressed because I put my professional identity into the character of Cali Lewis. I woke up around 750 mornings and wrote, “Hey, I’m Cali Lewis. You’re watching GeekBrief.TV. This is Brief # whatever.” I put all my effort into building that brand and deflected any attention directed at me back to that brand. I wrote around 750 shows where I shared my opinions and excitement about technology through the character of Cali.
I built a brand that has influence in the tech community. We did really cool things like sit down with engineers at Ford long before they were putting all that tech into cars and talked to them about what they should be doing. They incorporated what we talked about into what they put into cars. There are all kinds of stories like that.
I worked for five years to make Cali Lewis a business and it is a good one.
Now it’s gone. I haven’t figured out how to face life without continuing to create that business.
Every time in the past year I tried to be optimistic about my future, Luria’s friends did something in the background that was really mean and each time I’ve gotten more and more discouraged, disillusioned and I’m scared to trust anyone.
I have friends and family who have loved me and taken care of me and helped me heal from the pain of the divorce. No one can tell me how to get my business back. I’m so filled with dispair and hopelessness because I just don’t see a way out of this hole.
I’ve thought of becoming a missionary, but I don’t know what I have to offer. I want to build a new media company, but I don’t know how to find business partners who can help. More than anything, I want to give up.
A friend is making an appointment for me to see a doctor so I can start taking anti-depressants. I hope that’s the answer. I’m pretty void of hope.
Read MoreA Different Kind of Giving Up
It feels like my life is a huge experiment this year. The big question is how much it really works to lay down your life, your dreams, your desires, your hopes, and your expectations and to trust God to do what He promises He will. If the God thing is a lie, I’ll end up homeless or working in some job I hate. So far this year, though, God has been more than faithful.
This morning, I woke up with the verse where Jesus, says, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” I looked up Matthew 10 and read it in The Message in context. Then at church, Robert Morris told me exactly what I needed to hear. When Robert Morris was done, James Robison stood up and talked about how God loves those of us who’s dreams were ripped away by life or the enemy of our souls.
I love God and I’m so grateful to Him for continually bringing peace and joy when it doesn’t make sense to have peace and joy. I’m so grateful that He’s brought friends and family into my life who are filled with love and grace rather than religion, or meanness. I’m so grateful to Robert Morris for starting a church that can transcend my cynicism and distaste for what church had become to me. Gateway is a church working to heal and restore broken people to what God created and redeemed them to be.
This morning, Kari Jobe sang a song from the new Gateway Worship album, God Be Praised:
Spiritual Freedom
Have you ever had an experience that was so fundamentally amazing that you just want to tell everyone? I’m that way when it comes to Chipotle burritos, Apple products and the Cannon 5D Mark II. Guy Kawasaki borrowed the term evangelism to explain what happens when extremely satisfied customers are compelled to spread the good news about good experiences.
This Summer a GeekBrief.TV viewer who works on the tech team at Gateway Church in Southlake found out I go there and invited me over to see the amazing technology they’ve put in place to deliver live services in HD to various campuses and through GatewayPeople.TV. As he walked me around and introduced me to people, I got to share my story with some of the worship team about how I found out about Gateway in February. He also introduced me to a man named Bob Hamp. I hadn’t heard about Bob, and when I walked into his office, I didn’t really know anything about his work at Gateway. There was something about him that just caused me to dump all my stuff on him. I told him my story and what I was going through. When I was done, he said a few simple words that knocked the burden off my shoulders. He said, “I’m not worried about any of that.”
I had heard of Freedom Ministries at Gateway, but didn’t fully understand what it is all about. It is a series of classes that I assumed were just in-depth Bible studies. The Freedom classes have turned out to be most powerful and transformational experience I’ve ever had in my life and they absolutely are not in-depth Bible studies. Freedom Ministries is radically different than anything I’ve ever experienced from any other church. I’ve been going through the classes since around the time I got back from Europe. Some of the classes I’ve listened to multiple times online and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around how to explain it to people without sounding like I’ve joined a cult.
Freedom classes combine scriptural fundamentals with what we know about change from psychological research. The goal is to help people grow and experience life in the ultimate. The idea is that God has an amazing plan for each of our lives and the enemy of our souls works non-stop to prevent us from experiencing and living that abundant, complete, fulfilled life. So much of the church has been historically aimed at getting people into heaven when they die. Gateway focuses on getting heaven into people while we live.
About 10 years ago, I walked away from church in a big way and God in a small way. This year has been largely about finding my way home, but not in a way that I would have imagined. That old-time religion stuff isn’t what I’ve gone back to. It’s something far less emotional and far more real. The thing about Gateway that is striking is has an absence of flakiness. The more I experience God at Gateway, my own flakiness has been just dropping away. For the first time in my life, I feel like a grownup who is strong and secure and whole. I still have days filled with doubt about my future and doubt about God. In what should be the worst year of my life, I’ve gone from constantly wanting to die to smiling like a fool almost all the time.
Freedom classes start with four foundational classes: Hearing God, Kingdom of God, Levels of Change and Life in the Kingdom. You can watch them on the Gateway website and if you want to be free, it’s worth the six or so hours it takes to watch. Then after the foundation classes, there are at least 30 topical classes. I’ll share more about those later. I also highly, highly, highly recommend Bob Hamp’s book, “Think Differently, Live Differently.”
Read MoreBack to The Shack
I spent Memorial Day weekend re-reading The Shack by William P. Young. Mark Lowry told me to read it a couple of years ago and I did, but I didn’t like it the first time. After hearing somewhere that The Shack is a healing book for people in pain, I decided to give it another go.
If you’ve never heard about The Shack, the story of how the book came to be is just as interesting as the story in the book. Paul Young wrote it for his kids, printed some copies for friends who asked for more copies and more copies. Some guys in L.A. thought the story would make a good movie, if enough people bought the book, so they started a little publishing company. They kept selling out as word of mouth about The Shack spread. There are now 7 million copies in print. Last year alone 3.5 million copies were sold. A book can make the best seller list if 7,000 copies are sold. The Shack is a record breaker because people read it and buy copies for friends to read.
I read The Shack differently than I usually read a book. I read some, put the book down, thought about what I had read and then slept awhile. I did that over and over throughout the weekend. The process of making my way through The Shack was more like a conversation than a literary experience. There were times I couldn’t read any further because all I could do is cry and it seems like the book’s intention was to make that okay. When Mack meets God in The Shack, Mack starts to cry too. God said to him, “It’s okay honey, you can let it all out … I know you’ve been hurt, and I know you’re angry and confused. So, go ahead and let it out. It does a soul good to let the waters run once in a while–the healing waters.”
Growing up, my beliefs about God were so strong. I was a fundamentalist and I had confidence in what I knew to be true about God. Today, I can’t imagine having that kind of certainty again. I wouldn’t want that kind of certainty again. Once we know for sure, we stop investigating and that’s never a good thing.
I don’t have much interest in converting people so they think what I think about God. I don’t want to settle into a set of beliefs that make me comfortable and crusty. I’m intensely focused on this journey of personal transformation and working my way through The Shack this weekend healed and simplified what it means to me to trust in God. I hear it’s done the same thing for thousands of people who once believed, but lost hope as life happened in not so pleasant ways.
The theologeans can argue about it, but the story told in The Shack works for people who need it to work and I think that’s good enough.
Read MoreJason Levine Rocks some Serious Sideburns!
I was watching Jason Levine‘s presentation about Adobe CS5 for Production. It looks like it’s going to be amazing, but I had to pause to post a screenshot. I’ve never seen such a serious commitment to sideburns by any man! I couldn’t help thinking, I want to meet that guy! He seems awesome.
If you haven’t seen the presentation it’s here and worth watching if you’re a creative professional or just a fan of creative work.
Read More