I Got Nothin’

I have not been ship wrecked or beaten to within an inch of my life in the last twelve months.  Actually, neither of these things has ever happened to me which means that I’m doing a bit better than Paul.

I have not lost all of my fortunes, had my kids die suddenly, and then been covered in puss-filled blistered.  This suggests I am ahead of Job, too. 

But it has been a long, hard, sucky year.  Despite my failure to hit just the same challenges as Job, a few friends, quite independently of each other, have observed that this has been a Job-like year for me.

I was pretty well wrung-out today in church.  It was a hard to sit through the service, but a good kind of hard, I think.  Lots of wrestling with the meaning of it all, turning some of pain over to Jesus, taking a long hard look at what responsibility I need to own and learn from.

Too be honest, it didn’t tie itself so neatly in a bow at the time.   And it still isn’t entirely neatly tied up.  Theres a part of me that has turned it over, and another that is holding onto it; a part of me that is owning responsibility for my parts and a part of me that’s just simply angry at God, a part of me that sees the meaning and a part of me that does not.

My church community has been so giving and loving through this whole year.  And this just adds to the quagmire of emotions; it adds guilt to the mix, guilt that despite the love and kindness I am still struggling and anxious and fearful and yes, angry.

And one of the things I am angry about is this:

I have been this recipient.  This object of kindness.  I don’t feel like I have a lot to give, a lot to share.  One problem with this is it leads to shame.  It leads to fearing that I am some kind of leech.  I have this fear that things will always be this way.

I thought about the widow.  Jesus said her tiny little act of giving counts for more than the wealth given by the Pharisee. 

The part of this story that I got before was this: her giving was an act of faith, because she had real need of the moneys that she offered up.  A rich man, giving out of abundance, at best, he will be inconvenienced by his genorousity.  Presumably, he is still holding on to enough that he need not directly rely on God to get his needs met.

Today I got this glimpse of something more.  Something in addition to the faith implicit in the widows act.  I am struggling a little to explain it.

It would have been easy for the widow to sit like me, and bemoan that she has nothing to give.  I suppose I am pretty good company.  The disciples had just that boys lunch with which to feed the thousands.  They too, were paralyzed by the size of the need.  They too overlooked the little that they did have to give. 

When God looks at the tiny amount the widow has, or all of the riches of the richest man… he sees not much difference.  These are still both from God.  When viewed from infitinity, they are both unimaginably… tiny and pathetic.

It is not the quantity.  Any quantity that we can come up with comes from God, and is such a tiny fraction of what God has. 

In the middle of the sadness and shame its hard to see that.  There are these little tiny things I can offer.  But I am so ashamed of how small they are when compared to what I have received… a talk myself out of offering them up.

And so I become like the servant who just buried the riches; protectively holding onto what I have because of the fear. 

I Want to Add Mustard Gas to my Gun Collection

Early weapons models, such as the “Fat Man” bomb, were extremely large and difficult to use. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What if a large comittee of white mostly rich men gathered and wrote a document over too years ago?  A document that was brilliant, progressive, ahead of it’s time, but also limited by their joint experiences, their personal and historical cirumstances, preconceptions, and prejudices?  What if portions were left intentionally vague as a manner of settling the tremendous differences that even popped up among this group? 

As we used this document to guide our decisions, how far would our assumptions drift from what they meant?  At what point would our circumstances become so different from the original that it became absurd to say “The founding fathers would have felt X about Y” Because circumstance Y would have been so alien to their life experience we can really have no way whatsoever to know how they would have felt.

At some point, the game becomes one of “The founding fathers were my kind-of people.  If they had been born today, they would have been like me.  That’s why I think the constitution supports my position.”

Again, I think the Constitution is an amazing document.  It ought to be rated among the top human-created documents ever.  I think it is is still informative, instructive, and useful.  But I think we are in a time and place that we need to proclaim the emporer naked: we have to admit that there is places where we are without constitutional guidance.

A test case: The Second Ammendment

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The word “arms” written above can sometimes be narrowly defined as “firearms”– pistols, rifles, etc.

But it can be more broadly defined to include all sorts of weapons.  If somebody had a knife, and I asked, “Are you armed?”  They would answer “Yes.”  More to the point, I could say “Is that airplane armed?” and if it had a missile, or a bomb, or a chemical weapon, we would answer, “Yes.”

When the constitution was written, the second ammendment could and should have meant “People can have any available weapon that the military can have.”

I hope most people will agree with me that holding such a position today would be a little bit crazy.  The second ammendment does not guarentee a person’s right to have a rocket propelled grenade.  A conventional missile.  Chemical weapons.  Nuclear weapons. 

So here’s the question for the NRA and all their friends: What limits would you place on the second ammendment?  What weapons is a person NOT entitlted to bear?

I haven’t heard a serious answer to the question.  It’s a thorny one.  But can we please just stop saying that every difficult question is a slipper slope?  Because an awfully slippery slope has been created by the failure to answer questions like this one: we now live in a world where the slippery slope implies an every day average joe has the right to mustard gas and nuclear bombs.

The fact of whether or not said Joe currently owns them is irrelevant.  What I am throwing down the guantlet for is a guiding principal: how will we know when someone owns something that exceeds their right to bear arms? 

What many members of the other side don’t want to admit is that their is not a qualitative difference between our positions.  It is one of degrees.  Every thinking person has to put some limits somewhere on what a personal can own.  These limits may not be agnowledged.  But I’m now pointing at the elephant in the room for the gun-rights folks.  What are you going to do about it?

Down with the Ship

They seemed like scratches on the inside,

Spider webby lines in the cool alumininum

That slid through this water.

I didn’t have to decide not to look at them.

Because they were almost nothing.

And I hadn’t seen them yet.

 

I put my oar in the water.

And you put your oar in the water.

And I liked how we found this rhythm.

Even as little beads.

Of what might have been just condensation.

Started to run down the sides.

Then, not even pools.  Just little drops by our sandaled-bare feet.

 

I used to wonder who saw it first.

But there’s no time for that anymore.

We were in the middle of the lake.

When suddenly life jackets seemed like a good idea.

When paying attention seemed suddenly like a good idea.

We fell out of the rhythm before we did anything else.

 

It was futile for both of us to keep rowing anyway.

Sometimes you don’t live you just cancel each other out.

You slid your oar in next to us.

And found a little cup that might be up to the job.

When you scooped the canoe bottom it scratched.

The cup was a third full and you tossed it off to the side.

 

I was still rowing then.

I couldn’t decide which shore was closer.

And the wind, the wind rose up from every direction.

Pushing us back, laughing at my shoulders straining.

Strokes that had been sure and true.

 

We weren’t moving much.

Your cup was coming up full now.

The water wasn’t just trickling in.

We yelled at each other with out using our voices.

“Go faster” We said to each other.

 

When I started baling you started rowing.

I didn’t say out loud it doesn’t work from the front.

You didn’t say out loud don’t just curve your hands and splash it out

Use the cup stupid.

It didn’t change anything.

We were sitting so low in the water.

 

When we began to row together.

I felt like I had found my friend.

We ignored it.

Until we couldn’t.

And we were still lost.

 

We are sitting here.

Not closer to the shore.

And now we are both baling it out.

And we are losing.

The first of the water is peeking up and over the top now.

 

It’s not long now.

But we are baling because it is all we can do.

We are baling because it is a way to pretend that we might get ahead.

I realize something,

As the water pushes the canoe down, toward the mucky bottom.

Maybe we didn’t cancel each other out.

Maybe we each just canceled ourselves.

 

There is a shore far away.

And so we begin to swim together.

 

The Real Journey

I was never the navigator at all.
The twisting and turning

Deciding between the roads not taken

And the trails already blazed…

 

It was and never has been

 The real journey.

Seeing, as I do, and always have

From only this one place…

 

How could I ever have wanted it?

Except that I do.

I still do want to chart this course.

That is the real journey:

 

Lifting my hands up from this wheel.

Lifting my eyes up from that map.

Realizing that the vantage point was never really

Perspective at all.

 

It is a hard discipline.

But beneath that

There is this:

Your good love for me.

 

This Sunset

It is not what I thought it would be.

When I looked out at tomorrow’s tomorrows

As if from a vantage up on a mountain.

As if an unfolded map before.

 

I thought I saw this parade of snap shots.

Yes, each resolved a bit less than the last.

And yet the total effect one that I had understood.

It is not what I thought it would be.

 

I don’t count it as a sorrow anymore.

That these outcomes somewhere along the journey

They became irrelevancies.

This strange land I am a stranger in it.

 

I never knew where that road took me.

I drew comfort and strength when I thought I did.

Now I will find that from somewhere else.

I will because I have to.

 

It is not what I thought it would be.

And it was and always has been a fool’s errand.

To try and try and try

To compare what is with what could have been.

 

There is this sunset

And this warmth, here.

In this place.

I can not name it.

The Journeymen

This is the opening to a novel which is bouncing around the inside of my skull:

A pair of lines.  Running not quite parallel.

                These are the things you notice at first.  It takes a minute for them to resolve.  There are sidewalks flanking the lines.  This is how you figure out is a road.

                It is not foggy.  Or blurry.  It is almost foggy-blurry, here, but it is not quite that.  It is more like living an illustration, a place where the details are only hinted at by the illustrator in the hopes that the imagination will furnish the rest.

                There is a figure down the road, walking toward you.  He is still far away.  In a few minutes, he will be in the circle of  pale yellow, so perfectally round it looks like a cookie cutter stamped it out of the blackness.  It comes from the street light that is nearly directly across from you. 

                His walk is slow and methodical.  He is undeniably heart broken.  You ask yourself how you can know that, from just the way he holds himself, just the way his slow strides gradually eat up the distance between him and you.

                Have you ever thought about that cliché?  Heart broken?

                Here is living proof of a reality behind the words.  This boy-man is broken, deeply broken.  He is past a point of tears, of surrender, of giving up.  In the way he walks, there is something deeper than resignation.

                If you can watch such a thing and you do not wonder what might cause this to happen, perhaps there is something broken within your own heart.  That, though, is not the story we are here to hear.  We are here for the story of what happens next, after the heart break.

                He walks slowly.  As he nears that pool of light, you begin to suspect something subtle is changing.  It brings to mind that painting, The Ascent of Man, but only if that painting had shown man and his ancestors not just walking in a line but slowly transforming one into the other.

                But it is not some evolutionary progression being passed, ever so slowly, here.  It is age.  If he was barely a teen ager at that far end of the street, then now, as he crosses into the light, he is a young man.

                He does not agnowledge you as he passes by this place.  He walks on.

                He seems to be still-aging slowly.   He is lanky now, perhaps in his early twenties.  The point at which he should have stopped growing.

                Look closer, would you?  You will see that he is not growing at all.  At first you might think that the setting he walks into, that generic suburban landscape is shrinking.  But if you were to look closer still, you might find that this is not right, either.

                There is the breeze.  Not a breeze.  Not a specific breeze.  It is, like the rest of this place, an archetype, not specific.  A breeze in the abstract.  It makes the noises a breeze should make, and yet, there is something else.

                It is carrying words.  The words become clearer as you focus on them, as though tuning a radio station.

                “Perspective lines are straight lines, drawn at an angle from the edges of objects, back into space.”  You look to the sides of the road again.  Those first lines you recognized here.  “Finally, those lines converge at the horizon line.”

                “The horizon line.   It is a fool’s errand to chase after it.  It would be like a shadow trying to catch the object that casts it.  The horizon line moves with us, keeping an equal distance, forever away.”

                And as you hear the strange words, this pseudo-lecture, you see that the figure is not growing and the setting is not shrinking.  Instead, what is happening is this: the young man, nearing middle age, he is gaining on the horizon line itself.   He will reach that point where the almost-paralell lines converge.

                And what then?

                It is a terrible impossibility.  Unnatural in the deepst sense imaginable.  You wish that you did not have to be a witness to something like this, I think. 

                He is there now.   It doesn’t seem like  he should be, but he is.

                It hurts the eyes to look at this.  No, it hurts somewhere deeper than the eyes.  It is all wrong as he steps up and over the place where the lines meet.  He steps past the horizon line.  And mercifully, you won’t have to see him anymore.

 

                But I want to tell you what happens next.

                A man stands before a canvas with a brush.  He is impossibly solid, unimaginably real and concrete.

                His brown and wiry hair is thinning.  He is not an attractive man.  His skin is blotchy and his nose is too big for his face.    His white smock is splattered with paints.  A first impression, before one quite realizes that they are looking at the man, is of a clown.

                But his demeaner belies this image.  His profile is to the heart broken man.  He is absorbed in the painting.  The painting is of the street the heart broken man has just left.  ‘

                The artist turns slowly.  There is fear in his eyes as he sees the other man.

                “You” he says.  His voice is familiar.  It is the voice that was carried on the wind.  “You can’t be here.”

                And then, the heart broken man was gone.

A Theology of Life’s Suckiness

Matt Clinton National Hill-Climb Champion 2008 (Photo credit: Phil and Pam)

When we need Jesus the most, in some ways, that’s when he is so hard to find.

I have been rocked by all these challenges.   In these I cling to this truth that Jesus is closest to us when we are hurting.  I know that he is a savior he weeps with us.

But I cling to the truth because if I didn’t cling on to it, that truth will float away from me.   And I know that about Jesus in my head, only. 

It’s so hard to feel it right now.

In the middle of this terrible, terrible time, I am being tested in so many ways.  Intellectually, I get it, that we are not promised a life of roses and rainbows.  But I struggle with not being angry at Him.  It’s like, Lord, you have spent this time in such intimate contact with me.  And I have with you.  How could you do this to me?

I know it’s foolishness and wrong-headed.  The sun shines on the good and evil.  The rain falls on all of our heads.

It’s easy to lean on Jesus when it’s easy to believe that he loves me.  Right now, it’s like I am having to trust the beliefs that I had.  Because now, in the moment, it’s hard to believe that He has a plan, and he loves me.

One of the thing that carries me through is the practice and discipline I built up before, in easier times.  Practice and discipline in praying and reading the bible and believing in a powerful God who loves me. 

Another thing that carries me is the love and support of friends and families.  Their hugs and acts of kindness and reminders that they are there for us.  And also their example: they serve as reminders, through their actions, of the things I should be doing, the person I should be, even when I don’t want to.

These two things: discipline and friends, a pairing like law and love, like grace and obligation, these two things are what will carry me through.  I am assuming I will get through.  It is as though when times were easy, when things were good, I was building up speed, building up intertia.  Perhaps, I am on a bike, accelerating down a hill.

But now the slope has turned against me, and it up, and above, and I don’t know how high up it goes.  I just know that whatever I accumulated before I am spending now, desperately hoping it is enough to carry me through.