that’s good / that’s bad

The kids went to a birthday party this week, and brought home an unwelcome guest. We spent the whole today in bed or on the couch, nursing our fevers, calming coughs, and soothing sore throats. As I tucked my princess in bed, she asked me to pray for her cold. I did, but probably not how she expected.

I had the pleasure this last week of reading The Shack, Wm Paul Young’s conversation with God. One of the recurring themes in the book is how we have set ourselves up to judge so many things. We judge other people, we judge situations, we judge all of Creation.

At times we might even be guilty of judging God.

When the voice of wisdom speaks to the lead character in the book, she says that we ought not judge a situation based on how we feel about it. We judge that which brings pain to be evil. We judge that which brings discomfort to be not of God, because it certainly doesn’t fit into our will.

And yet, when I think about my father’s painful and prolonged death from a brain tumor, I have to think twice about the situation.

His tumor was painful, and robbed him of much before it took his life. That certainly seems evil (or at least bad) on the face of it.

But through his illness, he provided a written testimony that was read by several thousand, including a large number of hospice patients who faced similar situations.

Through his refusal to call it quits against a tumor that was a 100% killer, I learned something about determination. I’ve had to draw on that lesson repeatedly in the years since.

Through his ongoing concern for my mother, at a time when he could easily have been very self-focused, I saw what true love does under pressure. In my better moments, that shows up in my own marriage, a role model that I hope is seen by my kids.

So tonight, I prayed first that my daughter would heal quickly from her cold. Then I prayed that, if there was something to be learned from having to slow down for a few days, that He would help us to understand that.

Above all, I prayed that we would be grateful for what we have, especially each other.

At five, a cold is a horrible thing. At 44, it is a nuisance. I think we both miss the point – that there can be unexpected blessings in a day where the pajamas stay on and the most strenuous activity is turning the pages of Prince Caspian.

a few steps, miles of progress

A couple of years ago I was blessed with the opportunity to spend a week or so working in an orphanage in southeast Asia. I could write volumes about the trip itself, but I’ll stick to a focused segment for now.

One of the children I worked with has cerebral palsy – a fairly profound case of it. She was unable to sit up, speak, or feed herself, and I don’t remember that she could even crawl.

Yet there was a lot of joy and determination in her eyes.

In her culture, she was viewed as having little to no value. She couldn’t communicate, she would be a burden on anyone caring for her … so what was the use in trying?

There’s a worldview that sees affliction in the present tense as karma from a previous life. There is also a worldview that says our value is based on what we can contribute to society, rather than innate value based on Who created us. I disagree with these views, but they dominate the culture in her native society.

I was blessed last night with a chance to see the family who hosted my earlier trip, and to see some pictures and video of this precious girl.

The first picture showed her shoveling food into her own mouth. I almost didn’t recognize her because of the mess on her face – but it was her hand.

In another picture, she was pushing a series of pictures together. She cannot talk, probably never will; but she knows what she wants to say, and can arrange pictures to communicate.

Then came the video.

She’s walking.

She’s taking big, fast, fairly steady steps.

And she smiles that huge, toothy grin that I remember so well.

Dang, here I go crying on my keyboard.

It is so easy for me to get caught up in my everyday world that I miss miracles:

• She was mute, but now she has a voice
• She was lame, but now she walks
• She was considered little more than a parasite; now she’s an inspiration

Dear Lord, please keep my eyes open. I was blind, but now I see.

too weak, two week

I’m trying something new in the endless battle of the bulge. I’m doing the RPM class at the gym (a.k.a. “Spin,” or “really painful bike riding, set to music“  in most other gyms). I’d say it’s as easy as riding a bike, but that might give one the impression this is not a difficult effort.

I have never sweat so much in my life.

I almost blacked out the first morning.

My legs were sore for almost a week.

Sounds like fun, huh?

As I began this new brand of torture, I also started looking at changing my approach to food. I’ve been watching very carefully what I do during the day, keeping fat content and other stuff at bay, while trying to kick in the protein and other good stuff.

As I was thinking this morning about what to get to take me through the week at work, I had a troubling thought:

I will put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into what I eat, how food is prepared, portion size, etc., and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But why is it so much harder for me to bring that same intensity to bear on what is my biggest problem? Why is it that I can focus for a year and a half on busting my gut, but I have trouble maintaining my focus on holiness and righteous living for more than two weeks at a time?

Don’t misuderstand – I’m not going back to old patterns of behavior every two weeks; instead, I find that I am intently focused on taking all the right steps, calling people, being highly involved in others’ lives…all for brief periods. Then I retreat again, back into my coccoon, back to the safety of not having to deal with real people.

It perplexes me. I see what I need to do, and I can talk a good game – but there are times when my heart just isn’t really in it.

I know that a muscle builds endurance through being torn and rebuilt. Strength doesn’t come from light work. As Benjamin Disreali said, “No pain, no gain. No gain, no brain.” Most people leave off the last half of that quote. I’ve been able to retrain my brain regarding exercise. I know what will likely happen if I don’t work out, and I know that losing the weight of a sack of concrete has made my days much less painful.

I also know that there are similar benefits and risks in not getting “fit” spiritually. The obvious problem is that the risks are less tangible.

So what do I do to make the risks more real? How do I reach a point where I take to heart what my head already knows, that I don’t want to cross the finish line in the back of the pack?  I really want to hear, “Well done – good job” at the finish line, not “Well, I guess you made it.“

Perhaps I’ve forgotten one of the mantras of recovery – one day at a time. Thinking ahead is not a bad thing – but maybe I need to establish a pattern of single days – one that lasts longer than two weeks – before I start getting concerned about the long term.

blaming the past or understanding it?

I remember years ago, when I was still in denial that my life was out of control, shaking my head when I heard someone talk about how their childhood had some impact on the bad choices they were making as an adult. “Yeh, it’s always easier to blame our parents than take responsibility, isn’t it?”, I thought.

What I’ve come to believe in the intervening years is that the events of our earlier years does indeed shape our thinking, our values, and our beliefs about ourselves and others.

The child who is told that they are useless, a mistake, that the people who brought them into the world wish they had never been born – is it really surprising that they would either be hopeless or be extremely driven to prove long-departed tormentors incorrect?

The child who is never reprimanded, never corrected, never taught to consider others – is it surprising when this person turns out to be corrupt, criminal, incorrigible?

Okay, so there are extreme cases; but what about ‘normal’ people with average childhoods?

I would argue (as many do) that virtually everyone carries some wounds from their youth. The wound may not cut as deep for me as it does for someone else, but they are there nonetheless.

My dad never abused me. He was a “model father” of the 1960’s variety. He worked hard and provided well. He didn’t smoke or drink, was highly involved in church, saved for rainy days, and could spend a long day making corporate management decisions and come home and change the brakes on the family roadster.

He was also absent a lot during the years I was looking to him for guidance on becoming a man.

I see; it’s all his fault you strayed so far.

Hardly. My fault, my choices. During my teen years, I was figuring out a lot of things on my own, things some other kids learned from their dads earlier. I’m not blaming him – I’m saying that where I went to learn wasn’t the right classroom for the subject of being a Christian man.

Perhaps an analogy would help. My grandmother played the violin. Somewhere in her early adult life, she broke her left arm. I’m not clear on the circumstances, but for whatever reason, she never went to the doctor. The arm set, badly. It would affect one of the great joys in her life until she quit playing somewhere in her 70s. But the fact that it hindered her disturbed her less than the thought of the pain that would be involved in re-breaking the bone to set it correctly.

To me, that typifies why a lot of people don’t address the issues from their youth that so clearly affect where they are today.

It isn’t blame-shifting to recognize that the past has an influence on where we are today.

It is blame-shifting to say, “It’s all someone else’s fault,” but that’s a different animal than I’m talking about.

I’m trying to dig into my past a little more, trying to understand what I missed that may have helped set me up for the bad choices I’ve since made. There’s some pain in that. But I believe the music will be sweeter in the end.

it is well

We’re in a season of anxiety right now. We have kept current on the mortgage, we’re scraping by…but we have been depending heavily on help from family members to stay there. I think that means we’re sinking.

There were times in my life…no, strike that, reverse it…for most of my life, my response to the current stresses and strains would have been predictable. All this stress, I would tell myself, has earned me some kind of reward – maybe stopping by that place that’s only a little out of the way on my drive home, or maybe using a few bucks I don’t really have to pig out on a bag of cookies.

But I’m not defined by those actions; I’m not even defined as an addict. I’m more than that.

See, I have a Father. Not the genetic one – he was good to me, but he would be the first to say that he couldn’t meet my needs like the Father I’m referring to.

My Father isn’t a figment of my imagination, an invention of man created to fill some evolutionary void or weakness of character (or to balance some mental illness).

My Father doesn’t create accidents. He creates children.

My Father doesn’t see fit to have large amounts of money transferred into my bank account, unfortunately. Nor does He encourage me to sit on my patoukis and expect all to work out without any thought on my part. I’m going to try to find a second job, and we’ll take yet another look at how to trim some from the home budget. That isn’t a lack of trust; it is using common sense.

But He does lead me; He shows me that He isn’t just standing by thinking, “Whew – sucks to be him right now.“

He brings me peace.

Yep, things are a mess right now. But I have assurance that we’ll get through it. My Father has seen me through tough stuff before; He’ll do it again.

the end of the innocence

We didn’t have a care in the world
with mommy and daddy standing by.
- Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby

Five years old.

She isn’t old enough yet to think that boys are “icky.”

She isn’t old enough to question the motives of the people she encounters.

The people she encounters are all considered her friends within minutes if not immediately.

And yesterday, while playing on the inside play area of a fast-food chain, she was accosted.

Two nine-year-old boys were apparently bullying around the younger kids. They were up in the upper reaches of the structure, where their voices would be muffled and there was no way to see what was going on.

My daughter tried to pass by them.

They started pulling on her clothes.

They pulled down her pants.

She says they spanked her, but she seems a little confused about that. She knows what a spanking is – which makes me think they did something else.

Whether they did or not, I’m mad as hell.

Where on earth does a nine-year-old get the idea that it is acceptable to pull down a little girl’s pants?

Who taught these kids so little respect for others?

Why do I have to teach my daughter at five years old how to react if someone tries to touch her inappropriately?

Why did the dad, when my wife confronted him, insist that it must have been the other boy, his girlfriend’s son, because “that doesn’t sound like something my son would do” rather than just apologize and take both kids to the woodshed?

My daughter is a happy, friendly person. Why do I have to teach her to be wary this early?

I know, probably better than most, that it is a mean world out there. I sit in a room every week with guys who were abused as children, and some of them became child abusers. I get that this isn’t the world of Leave It To Beaver.

I just wanted another couple of years, a little more time, before this touched my kids’ lives.

tiptoe on the deadline

Almost a century and a half ago, one of my forebears was a captive in the Andersonville Confederate prison camp near Americus, Georgia. He was one of a handful who successfully escaped that death-trap, and found his way to the Union lines. Fortunately for him, the Union lines at the time were in Northern Georgia, as “Uncle Billy” Sherman and his men were occupying Atlanta.

I’ve been hooked on history since I first read a family history that included that episode, and I’ve fed that interest with a lot of reading and a little independent research about The War (I live in Atlanta – I am contractually required to capitalize all references to the conflict).

Andersonville is now home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, and a National Military Park. The graveyard that sprung up outside this hellhole of a prison now is a place where honored dead from several military conflicts are buried.

There is a phrase in our vernacular that appears to have been born at Andersonville, one for which you would probably never guess its origins – the deadline.

Andersonville was built to house Union soldiers captured in battle. As The War progressed, the stockade was enlarged, but was never large enough for the number of captives it would eventually hold. 45,000 men spent some time at Andersonville; nearly 13,000 died there. Men wrote later of having to sleep crammed together for lack of space. Food was lacking, water was scarce.

There was a fence around the prison; a wall of pine with armed guards who were given status and rewards if they shot a prisoner trying to escape. The definition of an “attempt to escape” was fairly loose – there was a line about thirty feet from the wall, referred to as “the dead-line.” Anyone who crossed that line was considered a target. Some wrote that many were shot who merely sat near the line, or reached over to pick up a dropped fork or tent peg.

Some were pushed across by other prisoners wanting their tents or food.

Some ran across screaming when the confinement became too much.

If I miss a deadline, I am rebuked; rarely have shots been fired.

One of the books I’ve read about Andersonville, written by a survivor, was titled “Dancing on the Dead Line” and I’ve had a few conversations recently that made me think of this book.

Some of the men made a game of dancing with the deadline – seeing how close they could get without a guard raising a rifle. It was a foolish game, but these men didn’t have a lot of options to occupy their time.

I see a lot of the same foolishness in men around me (and myself). We know where the line is, and we know that to cross it would be deadly (relationally, if not physically); yet we still approach. We tiptoe up, watching to see if anyone is looking. Satisfied that we have not yet been detected, we wave a toe over the line. If we don’t hear a rifle being cocked, we might even stick a whole foot over. Oh, we’re so careful not to put that foot down – we don’t really want to die.

But we linger in that moment where we are getting away with something.

Were I a sane man, I would stay well back from the line. I would learn that men who dance on the dead line can sometimes slip, stumble, or even be pushed. I would recognize that there are others who would follow in my footsteps (he got away with it – let me try). I would know that one can only tempt fate for so long before a little unexpected breeze shifts my balance, bringing me down heavily on the wrong side of the line.

Now for the really insane part – I’m not in the prison. I am standing outside the walls, and I have been freed. Have I become so institutionalized that I would try to get back inside those walls?

Sometimes, it would appear so.

Sometimes it seems that I am determined to dance my way across the dead line that surrounds the prison, expecting that I can do so without fear of death.

Sometimes it would appear that I haven’t learned much.

table for one?

Christian writers talk of the hole in our hearts that only God can fill. I agree with the thought behind that, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today.

I believe there is also, somewhere in the seat of our emotion and thoughts, a seat that is reserved for one other human being. It is a place that is reserved for the relationship that will come as close as I will ever see to heaven here on earth. It is the seat reserved for my wife.

When I was single, I let a lot of people try out that seat. I let too many try out that seat, and I forgot (or never realized) what that seat was about. As a result, it became easy to move people in and out of that position. The seat became a little less important as I pushed people into the seat, then unceremoniously pulled it out from beneath them when it suited me.

In my addiction, I let people who were never even prospects rest in that spot, at least temporarily.

• A dancer at a “gentlemen’s club” (there’s a misnomer if ever there was one) in Memphis held the seat for about three hours
• Women in movies I saw at an “adult” theater (major misnomer #2) sat there for five or ten minute intervals
• I seated strangers who wanted anonymous encounters for short periods of time

Rather than that seat being a place of privilege, I turned it into the seat by the door others used while waiting for a better table.

Eventually, I began to recognize that I was cheapening something that should have been very special. Eventually, my heart was so tired of the endless flow of other broken souls that it cried, “enough!”

The sad thing is, somewhere in that flow I met the proper occupant for that seat. She is my wife, and is the one for whom that spot was reserved, long before I knew the seat existed. The problem is that I still hadn’t figured out that the chair wasn’t big enough for two or three, so I kept pushing her out to make room for others. Since I was married, I had to be more discreet. I had to make my seating arrangements a secret. I couldn’t let anyone know that the seat was still in play. This led to more dishonesty, and the secrecy joined with a growing desire for more and wilder experiences.

That was a recipe for disaster.

I can easily enough write about how God spoke to me in that time, how He brought me to a place where I could begin to see what I was doing for what it was. I can tell you how He brought some key people into my life who would show me grace, but not be enablers.

But I want to focus for a second on how occupancy of that seat is still challenged.

• The mall is not a good place for me. There are the obvious things – the lingerie shops and others with tantalizing pictures that invite mental undressing, the sea of women dressed in clothes that (20 years ago) would have been worn by “professionals” plying their trade (street girls, if that wasn’t clear enough) – and there are the not-so-obvious things. Noise and crowds get to me. Maybe it’s because I am actively blocking so much of what is around me that it wears me down. It is at least in part a paranoia because I like to have a good picture of what’s going on around me, but I also know that I can’t start looking without seeing something that will kick off a painful cycle within me.
• Church can be a problem. I’m glad that I go to a church where no one expects me to wear a suit and tie, but there are Sundays (usually spring and summer) when I can’t look around without seeing more shoulder, or even an occasional tight belly, that distracts me from the focus of the service.

I recognize that the problem still lies in me. I doubt one of the women at the church got dressed that morning thinking, “Wonder how many guys will get turned on by this number?” I suspect that might be exactly the thought of some of the women at the mall, but that may be projection on my part.

Wherever I go there I am.

I have to be very wary about where I focus my eyes. I have to remember that God is about my heart, not my hands. If I go the rest of my life without acting out physically, that’s great – but Jesus says that if I lust after somone, I’ve committed adultery in my heart. That’s harsh, but I believe it.

Surely you don’t think it is the same thing to look a little as it is to take actioin on it?!?

Not my call – I just kinda go with what Jesus said.

And when I feel my heart starting to tip the chair, pulling it out from under the rightful occupant, I have a decision to make; is the little adrenaline rush of what is unknown, forbidden, considered in secret worth the cost to my relationship with my wife? As I get to know her better and better, the answer comes more easily as “No.” That isn’t to say there aren’t challenges – they come often, and they threaten the place I have given her; but for me, the choice has to be to keep that seat a sacred place. I want her to be in that seat, until the day one of us isn’t sitting anymore.

masquerade

Are we really happy here, in this lonely game we play,
Looking for words to say?
Searching, but not finding understanding anyway
We’re lost in this masquerade.
- Leon Russell

George Benson got the award, but Leon Russell wrote this song that captures a lot of life for addicts and codependents.

By the way, I’m not saying either of them fit the above categories.

I’ve been reading back through TrueFaced, and have just had a few experiences with running square into my own and others’ masks. We put on the masks because we don’t want others to see our reality. We think that we can influence others’ opinions if we behave a certain way, or if we do certain things.

Me, for instance. I do woodworking as a hobby. Can it be called a hobby if you only do it two or three days a year? In any case, I used to tell myself that when I would make a piece of furniture, I was doing others a favor. I made a dresser for my daughter. It is way oversized, and the paint job wasn’t done well; but I built it for about half the sticker price at the furniture stores. In the process, I didn’t spend nearly as much time with my wife and infant daughter. Our girl probably didn’t notice as much then, but it did create tension with my wife. She would probably rather have had a husband and helper with our little girl.

As I was reading back through the above-mentioned book, I had a recollection of the Thanksgiving my extended family came to our house. As I showed everyone around, I took a great deal of pride in pointing out the furniture around the house which I had built. In fact, leading the tour was all about trying to impress them with my work.

Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with taking some pride in the work of our hands. I think that is quite normal. I think the issues are who I was trying to impress, and valuing the work over the people.

Who was I hoping to impress? My oldest brother. Always it comes back to him. Since I was a kid, I’ve been trying to make him think more of me. That drive only increased when our dad died. Go ahead, psych majors and minors – doesn’t take a lot to see what’s wrong there.

Then there were the relational sacrifices of the project. This is hard to quantify, but there were times when it was clear that my wife would rather have had me nearby and involved than down in the shop.

We are still together, and I don’t think there was long-term damage to us because I took about a week total to put that monster together; but it was a very heavy withdrawal on our emotional bank account. And now, with two active kids (roughly 4 & 6 years old), those times that I would choose to spend in the shop become more costly.

At the moment, I’m working on two storage projects for their rooms – a toy chest for him and a dollhouse bookshelf for her. I spent a few hours last Friday and Saturday in the basement, and my daughter had this disappointed look when she saw that I was going “into the dungeon” rather than playing with her.

So here’s a wierd thing. I’ve come to the realization that I’m not doing what I do for them. Oh, sure, they’ll get a lot of use out of the things I build; but to try to explain what I do as being for them is dishonest. I do it for me. I do it because I want or need a little recharge, I desire to exercise my creativity, I want a place where I can solve problems that are mostly of my own making. And there is nothing wrong with that. Expressing that honestly is a bit of a breakthrough – recognizing that I’m doing the work for me.

The problem comes when I let my desire to turn perfectly good lumber into piles of sawdust become more important to me than the people I’m here to love.

So I’m trying to apply a new factor when deciding the cost of a project – the relational cost. If a project is going to take a lot of time, I either need to be prepared to do it mostly during nap times or in those early hours when I’m the only one stirring – or I need to be prepared for the emotional fallout that comes with being the stranger in the basement. I need to think in terms of involving my family in the project where I can (my kids do a decent job with a paint roller, for instance). I also need to let go of the idea that I’m going to do anything more than what is absolutely necessary in the shop.

I have my ideals of how I want to spend my time; the fact is, it isn’t mine anymore to spend. When I got married, I gave up a portion of that control in exchange for the greatest earthly relationship I could have. When we pursued having kids, I gave up more, in exchange for the joys of parenthood (a phrase often said sarcastically, but I’m earnest about it here).

I need to do what I need to do, for certain; but I must always weigh what I believe I need to do against the relational cost with those who matter the most. To be dishonest about my motivations is to wear a mask, and I doubt I fool those who know me the best.

finches, phlox, and fear

Anxiety is a sobriety-killer.

For an addict, the drug of choice often had initial appeal because it brought pleasure, or at least because it distracted us, numbed us, from the cares of life. So what do you suppose happens when the everyday stress level is ratcheted up a few notches?

• The struggler who is trying to go it alone is more likely to fall back into old, familiar, destructive patterns.
• The addict who is recovering with an occasional slip here or there feels the pull more strongly than they otherwise would.
• The person who is thought of as a model of recovery is blindsided by a desire they believed was a thing of the past.

Anxiety is a constant gnawing, the slow dripping sound from that faucet that keeps you awake at night, and pervades your dreams when you do sleep.

In the last several verses of Matthew 6, Jesus spoke to the issue of anxiety (my paraphrase here):

Listen, don’t worry about stuff like your 401k, your car payment, even your job. Isn’t life about more than that stuff?

Ever seen the bluebells along the highway in Texas, or the sunflowers in Kansas? How much time do they spend worrying? They don’t spend two hours commuting and nine hours in a cubicle farm, staring at a computer and wondering about whether that job will still be there tomorrow; they just sit in the dirt and take in what God sends them.

How about the birds around you? How much do they focus on the finer things in life? They build their nests, eat worms, and maybe say, “Dude, it’s getting frosty. Let’s go south” once a year.

You are God’s special creation – princes and princesses in an eternal kingdom. How much more do you suppose he cares for you than these things?

Look, I’m not above feeling anxious. We’ve been feeling the pinch in finances lately as so many others have. My industry is considered a good one to be in, but I see things slowing down. We will have to make some lifestyle changes if we want to keep working to get out of debt. We will likely have to sacrifice a few of the comforts to which we’re accustomed in order to keep our house and feed the kids.

But I am holding on to the fact that the Creator of the Universe sees me as His child.

Oh, I know there are a lot of people who don’t buy into creation, let alone the whole God thing. If that is your belief system, I don’t know how you avoid despair.

But for those who believe, I need only look back at a few other lean years in my life to see that God cares and will provide. He won’t give me my every desire; but He will provide for my needs.

All it takes is a little trust.