More Than We Need

My seven year old had a day which might have been quite disappointing for him.  Near the end of it his friends were leaving to watch fireworks.  Not only was he no longer going to be playing with them.  They were headed off to do something as cool as fireworks.  And him?

He was headed to another boring night at home.  His brother and sister (my other two kids) are away at my mom’s.  His mom (my wife) was out with the family car.  It was going to be me and him.   And to him, I’m sure if felt like everybody else in the world got to do cooler stuff than him.

“What can we do?” I asked him as he wailed on the bed.  “Can we walk to the park?”

They just rebuilt this playground near us.  I thought I was being a pretty hip dad.  It was less than an hour untill bed.  This was a bit of an out-of-the-ordinary treat.  At the time, I thought, to judge by his grin, that he was just admiring my wackiness.

As we assented to this plan, I was watching the gears turning in his head.  I figured out why as he shyly, slyly shared a piece of information with me as we headed to the door.

“Uhhm, dad.  Just so you know… it’s raining.”

I fed into his scheming ways tonight.  We walked in the rain to the park.  If it was a scene in a movie, if I was a super cool dad, I’d have been splashing along with him.  I’m not quite that cool.  I found a tree which offered me shelter.  And he played around.  The slide was super-charged with water.  The new park equipment was given this whole extra dismention.  He had it all to himself.  Turns out most people are smart enough to come in out of the rain.

He played for a while.  We decided to walk past home to our favorite little dump of a Chinese food restaurant for a second dinner that was after his normal bedtime.  The fact that we were wholly unprepared for the rain made it better, somehow.  I was in sandals.  We were both in shorts.    The rain soaked our hair and coated my glasses.

We shared General Goa’s chicken, shrimp Lo Mein, rice, and an orange soda.  It’s awesome to hear him read the fortune inside his cookie and hear him pronounce even the tough words right.  It’s so cool to discuss what the silly abstractions mean, and to hear him puzzle out how fortune cookies are just pretend anyway.

On the way home he got a little spooked by barking dogs and the way the streets look different at night.  He let me hold his hand for a while.  And then he found an excuse to pull it away rather than just grabbing it away.

I tucked him in bed a few minutes ago.  And he said something to me.  He said “Dad, thanks for giving me more than I needed tonight.”

And that’s most of the reason I’m sharing this all.  I’m not bragging.  This whole night was me at my fatherly best.  More often my parenting style is closer to Homer Simpson than Mr. Cleaver.

It occured to me that we have a heavenly father.  What he has for us isn’t just enough.  He’s got more than what we need.  He’s over the top and gratitious, decadent, and so very good, all of the time.

More than we need

My seven year old had a day which might have been quite disappointing for him.  Near the end of it his friends were leaving to watch fireworks.  Not only was he no longer going to be playing with them.  They were headed off to do something as cool as fireworks.  And him?

He was headed to another boring night at home.  His brother and sister (my other two kids) are away at my mom’s.  His mom (my wife) was out with the family car.  It was going to be me and him.   And to him, I’m sure if felt like everybody else in the world got to do cooler stuff than him.

“What can we do?” I asked him as he wailed on the bed.  “Can we walk to the park?”

They just rebuilt this playground near us.  I thought I was being a pretty hip dad.  It was less than an hour untill bed.  This was a bit of an out-of-the-ordinary treat.  At the time, I thought, to judge by his grin, that he was just admiring my wackiness.

As we assented to this plan, I was watching the gears turning in his head.  I figured out why as he shyly, slyly shared a piece of information with me as we headed to the door.

“Uhhm, dad.  Just so you know… it’s raining.”

I fed into his scheming ways tonight.  We walked in the rain to the park.  If it was a scene in a movie, if I was a super cool dad, I’d have been splashing along with him.  I’m not quite that cool.  I found a tree which offered me shelter.  And he played around.  The slide was super-charged with water.  The new park equipment was given this whole extra dismention.  He had it all to himself.  Turns out most people are smart enough to come in out of the rain.

He played for a while.  We decided to walk past home to our favorite little dump of a Chinese food restaurant for a second dinner that was after his normal bedtime.  The fact that we were wholly unprepared for the rain made it better, somehow.  I was in sandals.  We were both in shorts.    The rain soaked our hair and coated my glasses.

We shared General Goa’s chicken, shrimp Lo Mein, rice, and an orange soda.  It’s awesome to hear him read the fortune inside his cookie and hear him pronounce even the tough words right.  It’s so cool to discuss what the silly abstractions mean, and to hear him puzzle out how fortune cookies are just pretend anyway.

On the way home he got a little spooked by barking dogs and the way the streets look different at night.  He let me hold his hand for a while.  And then he found an excuse to pull it away rather than just grabbing it away.

I tucked him in bed a few minutes ago.  And he said something to me.  He said “Dad, thanks for giving me more than I needed tonight.”

And that’s most of the reason I’m sharing this all.  I’m not bragging.  This whole night was me at my fatherly best.  More often my parenting style is closer to Homer Simpson than Mr. Cleaver.

It occured to me that we have a heavenly father.  What he has for us isn’t just enough.  He’s got more than what we need.  He’s over the top and gratitious, decadent, and so very good, all of the time.

An open letter to my future self

Dear Future Me:

I wanted to right you a quick little note.  Sometimes, I/you can be so forgetful.  Sometimes, I/you can be so short-sighted.

The last couple days have been peaceful ones.  God has been around… Not in a huge, Moses-Burning bush kind-of way.  It’s been a little less dramatic then that.  But the last couple days are a good reminder, that dramatic isn’t always good.

Over these calm days, I’ve done nothing that counts as exciting.  Gotten a bit caught up with housework.  Read scripture, and some other books.  Spent quality time with my lovely wife and the youngest.  (The other 2 are at their grandmother’s.)

So, my future self, there will be a time when things are just crappy, stressful, and overwhelming.  At this point it will feel like life has always been crappy, stressful, and overwhelming.  Whatever the stress of the moment is, it will fill up my world.

I’m trying to lay some groundwork to prevent this from happening.  I’m trying to help myself deal with this future issue, right now, my future self.  One of the things I’m noticing is that I have this tendency.  When things are good I don’t think about God because I want to take credit for all the good things, and because, in truth, I don’t particularly feel like I need God when things are going well.

The result is that when things are bad, it’s not instinctive to lean on him.   Though God doesn’t deal in regret and shame, when things are bad, if I’m a fair weathered friend to God, if he had no active roll in my life when things were going well, then I feel a hypocrite on top of whatever the stress is.

So I’m spending time with God, as things have been pretty peaceful over these last couple days… And you know what, my future self?

Being in God’s presence is a pretty cool thing, when I’m not in the middle of a crisis.   As you know, there was this time that our life was crisis-filled.  And every time we needed our earthly parents they were there for us.  But it got old.  I/we missed just hanging out with them, when we could just enjoy each other’s company rather than have to work out a bunch of problems.

So, my future self, as much as I hope that in bad times, you can work on keeping a perspective on things, I hope that during the good times, you’ll continue to spend time with God.

Love,

Me/You

Transcendence and People Magazine

I hope you’ll bare with me for a few more thoughts about Michael Jackson.  The things I’m thinking about today, they are only about M.J. on the surface, though.  Beneath the veneer, I think there’s something deeper going on.

I was trying to wrap my brain on just why people are so impacted by this whole affair.  One way we can note this is to simply turn on the news.    A wise friend observed that there is something of our own identities in all this.  People are so effected because there is something of their lives, thier history, and their memories wrapped up in all this.  With the death of Jackson, a little piece of them dies too.

It’s clearly not the music.  If it was everybody would have had the C.D.’s and downloads before he passed away.  But he’s a top seller all over the place again.  It’s as if people are trying to hold on to pieces of him through buying a piece of the music.  But (hope I’m not beating a dead horse here) really, they only want a piece of him because it’s a little piece of themselves.

It occurs to me that the whole thing is like some Greek or Roman legend.  Michael Jackson and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Madonna– they are this milenia’s Thor and Odin and Anansi and Ali Babba.   They live in Hollywood rather than on Mount Olympus, but it’s really all the same: This psuedo-human cast of larger than life characters, engaged in the sex and violence and living in this promised land… only the very rarest of the mere mortals can ascend to their heights, though occasionally they lower themselves to walk among us for a while.  Some of these figures stay forever unchanging, (Consider the people famous people whose fountain of youth is plastic surgery)  some present themselves in a dizzying swirl of new incarnations (We even use that word for both celebreties and mthic figures: incarnations) Even the fact that we call these people “stars” is kind of a fascinating thing.  The stars that hang in the night sky, and the consellations formed by them played important roles in these ancient myths.

The thing I know about all this is that we are built to look for God or Gods.  If we don’t find the true God that is and will always be, we will find him somewhere else.  Thousand of years ago we would have gathered around the story-teller.  We would have placed his stories about Asgard in the God-shaped whole in our hearts, hoping they’d fit.  Today, we throw five bucks to the cashier and consume our People magazines.

I don’t think these will ever satisfy.

And under our own power, we are imparmanent.  Chasing after old songs to hold on to our sense of who we are, it’s a fools errand.   Connecting our own sense of mortality to the death of pop stars is a fragile way to live.  Virtually everything is fragile and impermanent.  Looking to escape death through any created thing is futile.  There’s only one thing that’s uncreated, there’s only one thing that is permanent.  The only way to escape death is through him.

From Out of the Mouths of Babes…

While getting some gas tonight, I was watching a couple women who appeared to be in their early 20’s.  They had a perfect little girl between them.  I’m going to guess that this little was maybe 3.

They got my attention by using the “N” word.  They said it the way it pops up in rap songs; the “r” at the end of the word wasn’t pronounced.  It seemed to refer to people in general, and not any one of a certain skin color.

It’s still an ugly word.  Particularly with a kid around.

And sure enough, this perfect little girl, in this almost cartoonish voice said, “Damn, how many stores  we gonna go to?”

I was disturbed by the fact that nobody even seemed to notice.  Damn, of course, is not the ugliest word in the english language.  But the child was of the age that she should be watching Barney say things like, “Super-dee-dooper.”

I spent some time contemplating this interaction, and mourning for the future.  This is not a place where I’ve got my head in the sand.  I work with behaviorally challenged adolescents.  I spend my work weeks surrounded by kids who need to be taught how to notice when they are dropping “F” bombs.

As I pumped my gas, I decided that one was a dead beat parent and the other was a sister or best friend.  I’d pretty much chalked them up to the type who never watches their kid at the playground, park, pool, or store.  I’d laid out this little 3 yr. old’s whole life before her.  This whole thing was generational.  This three year old girl would surely be pregnant before she was out of her own teens.

The first thing I realized when I started to think in this way was to recognize my own hypocrisy.  My eldest son was concieved out of wedlock.  It was wrong that we did this, but it is how things went down.  Who am I to project this on anybody else?

But more than all this, it occured to me that these words, they don’t mean the things they used to mean.  This is partially generational and partially cultural.  Generations and cultures can be wrong.  Perhaps they are.  There is a whole theological aspect to using words like “damn” lightly.

There is a question of whether it’s wise for people to run around flaunting the norms of society.  But that’s sort-of the point.  In the world these kids run in, expecting kids not to say “damn” is less and less of a norm.  Prior generations would have disaproved of women wearing pants, using the word, “cancer” in polite conversation, etc.

My point isn’t whether these ideas are right or wrong.  My point is that my opinions were probably as irrelevant to these people as the old-fashioned people above are irrelevant to me.

I don’t think that this means we ought to give up and decide that anything goes.

I think we ought to shift gears.  I think we ought to work at demonstrating to people what the prevailing culture’s expectations are (in those cases where they don’t know) and I think we ought to work at demonstrating to people that they actually have something to gain by following these expectations (in those cases when they know but don’t feel that it really matters.)

This could require changing more than perceptions.  To some extent, they might be right to feel disenfranchised from the system.  It might be accurate that they’ve got nothing to gain by folllowing along with expectations such as people– particularly kids– should steer clear of the word, “damn.”

As I was screwing the gas cap back on my car, the trio approached me.  They were looking for directions.  They were polite and respectful.

One interpretation of this fact is to suspect that that they new how to play the game.  When they wanted something from me (directions) they figured out how to follow my expectations.

The alternative interpretation is that the specific words we deem acceptable vary from one culture-generation to another, but the overarching idea that we ought to be respectfuland courterous to each other, this is a constant.

The Complexities for a Christian around the Death of Michael Jackson

I need to confess that much of my reaction to Michael Jackson’s death hasn’t much reflected the spirit of Jesus.   The interesting thoughts here convicted me on this account.  (O.K.  Maybe it was the Holy Spirit convicting me through that piece of writing… However it works, it doesn’t change the basic point.)

After reading that post, and realizing that my response is lacking, I’m still left a bit empty around just what an appropriate response is.   Should we speak well of the dead merely because they are dead?  Or do we have an obligation to speak the truths we see, even if these truths are not very nice?  Is Vengance the Lords?  Or should we look out for the orphans and widows?

The answer to all these questions is yes.  The problem is that I’m not sure that the answer to all of them can be yes at the same time.  The blog linked to above hints at something central to all this.   The content of of our heart, the spirit in whih we’re acting, that may well be more important than what we actually do or say.

On the one hand,  to say that our hearts need to be filled with Christ’s love,  this doesn’t actually say what we should do.  But in some other way, if in fact our hearts are filled with Christ’s love, whatever we do, it’ll turn out to be the right thing.  (For some reasons, I’m thinking about Bob Marley: Don’t worry/ about a thing/ you know every little thing/ gonna be all right now…)

I think maybe two people, acting in love, they might end up taking two distinctly opposite courses in this case.   This is probably o.k.  Because the thing is, people know it when we’re acting in love and when we’re not.  And when we’re acting in love, there are some places we won’t go, some things we won’t say, some things we won’t do.  If we stay out of these “places” I think that we’re o.k.

Regardless of what specific course we take, I think several things will be universal, if we first act from Christ’s love:

No matter how you slice it, the whole thing is tragic.  I suspect that if we act in love whatever we do or say or will be coloured by this brute fact: There are so many things about the whole affair which is tragic.

On the one hand, I think we need to seperate his art from his actions: It’s perfectally plausible that he was a brilliant artist and still did horrible things.  And yet, someone who chooses to be an entertainer chooses a field where we (rightly or wrongly) hold them up to more scrutiny than a plumber, or an accountant.

But even this consideration is compounded by the fact that his course was in some (perhaps minor) way charted for him.  When he was a child he was thrust into the limelight.  His childhood was stolen from him.  But at some point, we just have to start holding people accountable for their decisions, even if they’ve gone through tough stuff.

Finally, there is the fact that he has not been convicted of wrong-doing.  But it’s a valid question: if he’d had less money and fame, would he have been?

I guess this all leaves me throwing my hands up in the air.  And realizing that if I don’t have anything helpful to say I should probably just keep my big mouth closed about the whole thing.

The Trinity at The Office

People often talk about the three aspects of the trinity existencing in a perfect community.

It occurred to me that maybe this is a good way to think about the trinity, and how they are three in and one at the same time.

If you watch a community functioning at it’s best, you don’t really know where one person begins and the next one ends.  Nobody relies on strict, legalistic divisions of labor.  Everybody just participates perfectly.  It is organic.  The whole group would suffer if one part was removed, and yet, nobody could exactly point to the missing person and say “Bob?  His duties were x, y, and z.”  I’ve read the trinity’s interactions compared to a dance.  And this is a metaphor that’s more useful, I think, then comparing the trinity’s interactions to an office, for example, as we do (probably without realizing it) whenever we start trying to wrap our brains around the difference betweeen Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It’s not a bad thing, when we try and deliniate the different jobs, aspects, and importances of the aspects of the trinity.  But I suspect that they are doomed to fail, because doing this fails to account for the organic nature of community.

What do you think: are there any particularly helpful– or unhelpful– ways that you’ve heard people discuss the Trinity?

You suffer, I suffer, we suffer

I had an interesting moment of self-realization last night.  It seems like most of our deepest moments of self understanding come at those time when we’re a bit of a fish out of water.

So I found myself in a bar last night.   (We were seeing a band we’re aquianted with play.)   It wasn’t the scankiest bar I’ve ever been in, not by a long shot.  But I don’t drink much these days, especially in public.    If nothing else, this place probably had more drunk people than any where I’ve been in quite a few years.

In fact, the last time I was in this sort of place, I was neither married nor a Christian.

And so I found my reactions to some things surprising.

For example, the place was a bit of what I once would have called a meat market.  There was a fair ammount of hooking up going on.   There was lots of checking people out.

I was quite surprised at the strength of my reaction as people checked my wife out.  Not to put to fine a point on it, but my initial reaction was to want to punch them.  A lot.

I’m not bragging.  In many cases, this probably would have lead to my overwieght,  middle-aged behind getting kicked.

A thing I realize is that it’s comparitively easy to risk myself, to submit myself, to allow myself to be insulted.  I think if the insult to me had been to me, I would have been fine with it.

The truth is that it’s really not all that ridiculous, in that setting, that this wall going on.  Nobody oggled her.  Nobody put there hands on her.

When I consider it rationally, I realize it’s a bit condescending and paternalistic for me to be willing to withstand stuff that I’m unwilling to watch her go through.  This plays out in other ways.  With my kids, for example, and my friends.

I’m confident that Jesus doesn’t want us to be a doormat.  I believe he found a third way, almost always that neither entailed be a victim or a predator.  But his way does call for suffering.

And suffering myself, that’s like little leauge suffering.  Watching my loved ones suffer, that’s like the major leagues of Christ following.  It grows me and calls me out.  It’s necesary.

But still, I did want to throat punch those guys.

Share with us, Please.

You– the person who is reading this– right now– You have some wisdom to offer the world.

I don’t believe it originated with you.  But it lives in you.

The circumstances that came together to create the person who you are were unique.  No one has ever lived your life.  There has never been a person who possessed your unique set of challenges and talents.  And there never will be.

You possess some wisdom that no one else in the world knows unless you share it.

Perhaps it is the secret to ultimate success.  Perhaps it is the recipe for really rockin’ chocolate chip cookies.  Maybe it as the way to live in total harmony with Jesus.  Maybe it is the path to a happy marriage.

Would you share it with me?  Would you leave a comment and share your wisdom with everybody?

Those people who don’t often comment, I’m especially calling you out now.  I read the numbers.  I know that a lot more people read this blog than comment on it.  Normally, that’s o.k.

But right now?  Right now I’d like to be a bit confrontational.  I’m going to say this to you, in love:

As the bearer of unique wisdom, do you have the right to withhold it from the world?  Do you have the right to withhold it when somebody (me) has asked you, point blank, to share it?

Practice makes…

You know, it’s only in long-term relationships that we really learn to forgive.

People marry and divorce.  Friendships come and go as we all move around.  We have thousands of facebook “friends”… yet we the whole online thing is so premeditated that there aren’t many oppurtunities for angering each other, and there aren’t many ways that people can do important things together, so there’s not much liklihood of really messing up and asking someone to forgive you.

Some of us stay connected to family, still.  But it’s different with family.  You almost have to forgive family.  Or in a different way, we never forgive family.

The sum total is that we live our lives hopping from one relationship to another, whenever things get tough.  I’d argue that we aren’t good at forgiving… and probably, as the bible says, we end up being not being very good at being forgiven.