name: the other guy

[part 2]

i think that what other people say about us has a long way to go in terms of how we see ourselves, in terms of our identity. what people say, how we perceive that they view us has a massive impact on who we are, what we become, what we imagine is possible in our lives.

i can still remember the voices of certain people, some from a very long time ago that have shaped me, in some way or another, to be the person i am today.

____________________

when i was in the third grade, mrs. purdy’s class, the big thing was four-square. after lunch we would haul tail out to the paved parking lot of a playground beside our school, nellie isles.

[side note: our school was named after a former principle, ms nellie isles, who had died some years earlier. whoever decided to change the name, good intentions aside, really should have consulted some first graders before doing so. any kid from a rival elementary school worth half their salt quickly recognized the sheer brilliance of renaming our school to the more pungent, "Smellie Piles." i mean that is pretty good. but that moniker is a pretty heavy burden for any young person to bear.]

four-square was my game. i was the fastest in my class. my dad was a PE teacher. i rarely, if ever, lost at four-square.

i remember one recess particularly well. i was the first one to arrive at the four-square court [for those not familiar with the game, the court is exactly as it sounds, one large square dissected into four smaller ones. who names these games?], but i was soon followed by, ugh, three girls.

it was a little insulting to be honest. kind of like shaq against a middle school girls’ JV team. just not fair. i was giant in the four-square world. everyone knew it, especially me.

i stared straight into the eyes of my adversaries: lorie murdoch, katie beckett, karen hahn. brother, i smirked.

as the recess crowd gathered around the court, a buzz started. undoubtedly the gallery could sense this was epic. the greatest four-square player in the history of smellie piles versus an obviously over-matched field. kind of like that year tiger woods won the us open by like 30 strokes at pebble beach. it was ugly how badly he beat them, but somehow so beautiful you couldnt look away.

i think i muttered something like, “well, let’s get this over with,” as i served the ball.

the game was pretty furious. we smacked that little red rubber ball around, back and forth. at first i didnt really try. a lazy shot here to karen; an easy bounce i knew not even katie could miss. i was a cat, toying with three mice.

but then something happened. lorie murdoch let loose a shot that took me a bit off balance. i recovered, barely getting the ball into  karen’s square. but i was vulnerable and the mice sensed it.

quickly karen returned my weak shot. i was really scrambling now. i dove, my fingers barely connecting with the ball, i redirected it towards katie’s square.

the world, slows down in those moments: as i fell to the ground i could hear the laughter of children in the distance, the squeak of the merry-go-round, the gentle whisper of wind through the yellowing cottonwood leaves.

i blacked out, if only for a moment when i hit the asphalt. and then i heard it.

“out!” the mice called in annoying unison.

“noooooooooooooo!” i rolled to my knees looking heavenward, hand clenched, hoping for some divine intervention. the unthinkable had happened: buster douglas has beaten mike tyson. boston college has beaten miami. the US has beaten the soviets. the soviets have beaten the US [in basketball this time. huge upset].

i stood up, dazed from disbelief. the red rubber ball came to rest at my feet. instinct took over. i picked up the ball. its dimpled surface had the appearance of a million tiny mouths arched in a million tiny smiles as if to mock me. to mock my pain and shame.

i turned and kicked that ball as far as i could; it erupted off my foot down spring creek avenue and disappeared in a denouement of graceful arcs and hollow boings.

the playground was silent. i stood alone barely conscious, comotose but upright.

i was awakened from my nightmare by a sharp pain in my right ear.

“come hear, young man.” mrs purdy had witnesses the whole thing and she was ready to do some teaching.

“listen to me trey dunham, you can’t be the best at everything,” she growled.

defiant as an third grader can be with his ear about to be ripped of by someone who can only be described as someones grandmother turned teacher-dictator, i replied, “yes, i can.”

it is a funny story and kind of ridiculous to think that this exchange would shape me for the next 35 years, but it really did. her words were like a challenge, like she didnt think i could do it, be the best at everything.

and for the next few decades that is what i tried to become. her words shaped me.

____________________

and this happens all the time. i am sure that you can remember things that people have said that has shaped who you are today: good and bad.

i remember laughing at some one’s joke or something on a yellow school bus to play basketball at mccormack junior high in cheyenne. ron yovich looked at me with disdain and said, “dunham laughs at everything.” from that day on i have become a guy who has a hard time laughing freely.

one time i was at a party at denison, a very “greek” school. everyone who was anyone was in a fraternity or sorority. i wasn’t. i was too busy with school and running. but i was at this party for some reason and some girl came up to talk to me, which believe me rarely happens. her first question was, “so what house are you in?”

when i told her i wasn’t, she turned, without a word, and walked away.

i guess i wasn’t worth the time.

we become what other people speak into our lives.

“you can do anything you want.” and they do.

“you will never succeed at anything.” and they don’t.

“you are such a loser.” and they grow up never amounting to anything.

“i believe in you.” and there is no limit.

it is a funny think i think, how others shape us. the power that so many, even total strangers, have to speak into our lives.

my junior year of high school i was thinking about not going out for football, a sport i had played since i could walk. mostly because i didnt think i would get to play. i was small, about 135 pounds. i had broken my arm the previous season so i didn’t play or even get to practice much the prior year. i didnt figure anyone would even notice.

one day as i was walking in the hallway, i saw the head football, john deti coming towards me past the rows and rows of lockers. the hall was full of kids so i figured he would just walk right past me, not even see me.

deti was one of those old school coaches. he always had a sweat suit on with a stop watch around his neck. never saw him without it. i figure he probably wore the thing to bed and mass on sunday. he was short, like someone had smashed him down. his head was thick and pushed into his hunched shoulders like a marshmallow under someone’s thumb. he spoke in short, incomplete sentences.

i tried to avoid his gaze, but as we neared he saw me.

“dunham! get over hear.”

i obeyed. “yeah coach”

“you need to get on out for the team this year.”

“ok coach.”

that was it. that was all it took. someone believed in me. i still have no idea to this day how he knew i was thinking of not playing, but he changed my life. helped me to believe in myself, that i could do it. that i had what it takes.

we are shaped, continually, by the other guy. and i am just not sure that is the right perspective. people say mean things that affect us and we think less of ourselves. people say good things and we tend to believe that a little too much too.

i speak from time to time at one of the largest churches in west virginia. and when i do i normally get a lot of “man that was a great sermon” type comments. trouble is i might start to believe that i am a good speaker, perhaps the best ever. and weeks i don’t get so many accolades, could be a little rougher, a little more like “man, i suck.”

the problem is two-fold: people are inconsistent and probably, most of the time, they just dont know what they are talking about. ron yovich doesnt know that i laugh at everything; he probably doesnt even remember saying that.

in some ways we need a way to sort out the voices in our heads: the good from the bad, the true from the false. a lot is riding on it really. our identity, who we are is in the balance. who can we trust when trying to figure out who we are?

____________________

there is a really interesting story on the bible about a man who was born blind [john 9]. one day jesus and his posse were walking along and they met this guy. his disciples asked jesus, “who sinned that this guy was born blind? was it him or his parents?”

i always wondered what the blind guy was thinking as he listened to this conversation. it doesnt say this in the bible, but i wonder if he interjected, “hey, i am standing right here! i can hear everything you are saying! guys? what? am i invisible too?”

it seems a curious question to ask: who sinned that this guy is like this?

i think this is what is going on. jesus is telling his guys, hey, i know that you have opinions about this person, about who is and what we are to think about him. and i know that a lot of how he views himself is a result of the opinions of the people in this town. But the reality is, God has something very different in mind, and from the beginning God’s idea about him was that this guy was going to be special because through him the glory of God would be made known. God has something special in mind for him and his life.

later on the religious dudes are asking this guy who healed him. they were obviously ticked. i think they liked the fact that he was a cripple; they could keep him in his place. and when he pushed back, new confidence in the fact that jesus said something different about him, the response was nothing short of venomous. “you were steeped in sin at birth! how dare you lecture us!”

____________________

jesus found this guy who was crippled a little later and asked him if he believed in the son of man.

“who is he, sir? tell me so that i may believe in him.”

“you have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking to you.”

“for judgment i have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

may we believe and see.

name: creating ourselves

[part 1]

i never thought i was a huge fan of halloween. maybe it i because we grew up in a Christian home that our family just never got all that pumped up about celebrating satan’s birthday [kidding]. come to think of it we didnt really go over board with Christmas either, so i think it was more that my parents were just not that into having fun in general.

but even though halloween wasnt much of a deal in our family i remember being very excited as a kid about figuring out what i was going to dress up as for the school parties and for trick-or-treat and all that.

two costume come most immediately to mind: one year i was a robot; the other i was a minnesota viking football player: fran tarkenton, who was a gangly, elusive, all-pro quarterback, much like myself.

i am sure i dressed up in other costumes for other years, but to be honest i cannot remember anything other than the robot and fran tarkenton. and i am not sure why, but i have a theory.

the robot was my own creation, it was fashioned out a collection of cardboard boxes i found around the house. i can remember cutting and folding and bending and taping tubes for my arms and legs to squeeze into, the large box that covered my torso and a somewhat smaller version which i put on my head.

to my best recollection i wrapped everything in reynolds aluminum foil [no small feat for an eight year old] and i think i fashioned some coat-hanger antennae to give it that really futuristic look.

i was [and still am] pretty proud of that robot costume. i mean i made it, fashioned it from nothing, from the dust as it were, and brought it into being. and when i put it on i was transformed into a new creation, a being from the distant future, 1988. i even adopted the robot voice: choppy, staccato, metallic mono-tone drone. “Take me to your leader. I am a robot from the future.” there is just something thrilling that comes from slipping on this new persona that you have created.

the problem with the robot was though that i was eight. and eight year olds have no idea about things like design and the human form. it seemed as though, through the whole construction process that i had forgotten that i have knees elbows that bend and a head that swivels on a neck to that i can see.

i could hardly move in the thing. i teetered around like some drunk stick figure: knees taut, arms flailing about like out of control antennae. i was a little disappointed when i realized that this was not going to be the well-oiled robot killing machine from the future i had hoped. and if i am honest, i was pretty glad at the end of the day when i could take the stupid thing off.

the vikings football uniform was a little different story. i mean i didnt really have to make that. my next door neighbor, danny mendoza already owned it. i just put a little eye black on and there you go. it was much less a creative process than the robot, but i still remember the feeling of pulling on that purple jersey and helmet. i was transformed: somehow bigger and faster and more elusive like the real fran tarkenton.

the exciting thing about that was that i got to become someone else. i got to become a professional football player. all of the qualities and attributes, all of the skills and abilities somehow magically became mine through the transformative power of shoulder pads and stretchy football pants.

and my thoughts were confirmed over and over that day.

“and who are you little boy?”

“i am fran tarkenton.”

i have a new name. this is who i am.

much of life is like this i think. you and me trying to create a better us. slipping into jobs and careers, cars and homes, clothes and bodies that we hope will give us the name we want. much of our lives are spent trying to create an us we can live with. and us we can love.

____________________

i live in a college town and work with college students. our church has a little coffee house on the main drag just down from campus. we are located at the top of high street and each weekend thousands of kids walk past our store to get to the 10-15 bars scattered downtown.

every night it is pretty interesting to sit and watch the groups of students walk by, but halloween night is in a class all its own. i think one of the most surprising things was just the sheer number of people that dressed up. i would say without hesitation that you would be in the minority if you were not in costume. for some reason i had it in my mind that college kids would be too cool for that sort of thing; maybe that’s high schoolers.

but as i think about college is really the time in life when we forge our identity: we choose a career path, a mate to share life with, we forge values and make decisions about who we are going to be. this is the first time in our lives when we are out from under the microscope of mom and dad, out from under their pressure [implicit or not] to be a certain way, to be a certain person.

and so it makes sense that all that identity creation, the forging and creating of our real selves would come out in spades on a night like halloween where the whole premise is: you can be whomever or whatever you want to be. just make a costume and voila, there you be.

without being too graphic with particulars i think that the costumes typically fall into two categories: for the girls the message seems to be “i am someone who is worth pursuing.” for the boys i get the sense the message is, “i am important and significant, look at me.”

and i wonder how many party goers walk down high st or wake up in the morning marveling at how poorly designed their costumes are? how awkwardly they seem to fit? how they didnt turn out like they thought they would?

____________________

jean-paul sartre is a famous french philosopher who wrote extensively about the the nature of human “being” or identity. i think that his thinking is pretty much in alignment with the way that most of us view ourselves.

i will spare you going through his entire philosphical system. [believe me you do not want the whole story. i had to slug my way through 800 pages of mind-numbing existentialism my senior year of college. sartre uses a lot of words like being-for-itself and being-in-itself and body-for-others. seriously who reads those guys. no one that's who. no one. but i digress....] essentially sartre is credited [mistakenly some say] with the idea that our existence precedes essence. what this means is that people have no existence [in the philosophical sense] prior to their doing things in the world. Essentially we get to decide who we want to be as we work, play, fight, love with the world and those in it.

Austin Cline puts sartre’s idea this way: “Human beings must develop, define, and decide what their ‘nature’ will be through an engagement with themselves, their society, and the natural world around them.”

i am not sure that we MUST decide who we will be; i just think that most of us THINK that we must. and we act like it too. we feel this obligation to create ourselves, to prove to the world who we are, to show everyone what we are and what we can become. and who we ARE is simply the sum of everything we have DONE. this is what sartre tells us. this is what the world tells us, and worse what we tell ourselves.

and what sucks, what really sucks is that some of you are really good at this, this self-creation thing. some of you are incredibly talented and beautiful and go to great colleges and land winning jobs lead roles in the movie. you buy gorgeous homes in the best neighborhoods and your kids go to awesome schools and learn piano and 4 and all i can think is, man what is wrong with me? i could never do that. i could never become that.

all i could create out of my life was a middle class income in a small mid-atlantic state, an average salary, a failed marriage, a pretty nice yard [with the help of mountaineer lawn care], a ten-year old truck that always seems to need $200 worth of work done to it every other month.

i mean this is me. this is who i am, right? this is what i have done and created and brought into being in the world. i am my own project. i have made myself and will continue to do so on until i die. sure i will have some victories and some failures, but what i become and ultimately am depends on what i can come up with, the road i choose, the path i take. right?

i just wish i was better at it.

____________________

there is a story of a king in the bible named nebuchadnezzar. he had built a mighty kingdom called babylon, conquering many nations. he was the most powerful and important man of his time. and i think, when i read about him that i am pretty impressed. i mean he built a kingdom. his name is in the bible for crying out loud; a bunch of times. i am writing about him thousands of years later; he must be a pretty special dude; important, significant.

well one night ol’ nebuchadnezzar had a dream and in his dream he saw a great and mighty tree, with large widespread branches full of beautiful leaves and abundant fruit; food for all.

as the vision progressed a messenger appeared, an angel from heaven, and this is what he said,

“Cut down the tree and trim off its branches; strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the animals flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But let the stump and its roots, bound with iron and bronze, remain in the ground, in the grass of the field.

“Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven, and let him live with the animals among the plants of the earth. Let his mind be changed from that of a man and let him be given the mind of an animal, till seven times pass by for him.” [daniel 4:14-16]

the king was pretty shaken up by this dream, because in those days dreams meant something [this was way before scientific methodology and the enlightenment skewed our brains]. so nebuchadnezzar called together the best and the brightest people he knew to get some sort of interpretation as to what this dream might mean.

daniel, God’s man in the kingdom, comes onto the scene and the news he delivers is less than thrilling. he tells the king that the vision was about him and how he has made himself to be a great leader in the world, but that he will be cut down, become insane and live like an animal for seven years.

and not long after that revelation, the king is walking on his porch, pronouncing the grandiosity of his kingdom, when madness overtakes him and the next seven years of his life are spent munching grass in a meadow.

i think this is an incredible story. i mean if ever there was a self-made man it would be nebuchadnezzar. he had conquered much of the world, was powerful, famous and by all accounts a pretty decent guy. he had every reason to think that he had arrived and it is pretty evident he had a good self-image. maybe too good.

his one failure seemed to be he was under the impression he had created himself; that his “self-project” was going pretty well. and then he has this crazy dream and the wheels seem to come off.

i wondered for a long time at why God put nebuchadnezzar through this whole ordeal. i mean after he goes crazy for a bit the bible tells us that he was restored to his throne “and became even greater than before.” [daniel 4:36].

this is what i think: God wanted the king to know that he had something to say about who he was. God has something to say about what nebuchadnezzar had become, and who he would be.

this is the point i believe: God wants us to know that he has something to say about our identity. we are not a project of ourselves, we are a creation of his. and he has something to say about who we are.

____________________

i grew up in a family with three younger brothers. my father was a physical education professor and a general sports nut so as you can imagine much of our family life centered around athletics. we played football, basketball, baseball, ran track, played soccer, wrestled, played volleyball, walleyball and racquetball and golf. most of them on varsity sports teams in high school and college.

being the eldest i, of course, crushed my little brother unmercifully for years. pounded their faces in living room wrestling. dunked on their ridiculously skinny bodies in the driveway hoops court. made them look like ridiculous girls [no offense ladies] in wiffle ball. sent them home crying to their mother in front yard football.

i was the king [sorry dad, you were old and weak and get your two-handed push shot out of here. i dont care if you were the first kid in clinton county to shoot a jump shot; i would have sent it into the fourth row]. and i was pretty sure i let everyone know.

but there came a time…

every year laramie senior high school awards the school top all-around jock with the athlete of the year award. i have to admit i thought i should have won. lance rainwater beat me out, but i just chalked it up to politics; he was the head football coaches nephew.

to be honest i dont remember it bothering me all that much. sure, i wanted to win, but whatever.

the next year, tim was a senior. i thought he had no chance of winning; he was by far the scrawniest of the four of us and he ran cross country for crying out loud. is that even a sport?

but by some miracle he did. and i have to admit that one stung a bit. i was happy for him, but you know.

a few years later, jon got ready to graduate. this one made m sweat because to this point only tim had won athlete of the year; i still had two chances of not being the only loser.

but what was i thinking. jon was probably the best athlete in the state, much less our high school. he won by a landslide i am sure.

my only hope lie now in my youngest brother. i held thinly on to the knowledge that a doctor [when he was maybe 6 months old] told my parents he thought joe might be a little mentally slow if you know what i mean. he didnt seem that way in the 17 years hence, but perhaps some long-dormant synapse malfunction would erupt and he would start running backwards around the track or shooting hoops into the opponents basket.

that year joe won the state title in cross country and pretty much single-handedly lead our school to the state title in track [which i dont think we had ever won before]. joe won something like 5 events.

athlete of the year: joe dunham.

it is moments like these, moments when we come up against people who are better looking, more talented, more athletic, smarter, funnier and nicer that we begin to despair of this idea that we somehow create our own identity. we begin to question who we are and those questions turn into fear and jealousy and envy and anger and before we know it we are way off course of what we ever hoped we would become.

____________________

i have a friend named joel. he is probably 45 years old and has lived on the streets throughout new england, the south and pretty much all over the united states. he has no education, no family to speak of. his clothes are usually pretty ragged and dirty. he has no marketable skills to speak of. he helps to sweep up the little coffee shop we run and cuts out things for us when we need it.

to be honest i see why people look down on him. i get it because i understand that most of us see our identity, our worth and value as a function of this self-project we buy into. we see and measure ourselves that way and so of course we see and measure others that way too.

but there is just something in me that understands that is not how we are made and that is not how people should be viewed or judged; we were created, each individually by a God, who has something to say about who he made us to be. he has something to say about the neudchadnezzars and the trey dunhams and the fran tarkentons and the joels of the world. he has something to say about who we are.

holy: a new hope

part 4

i live in west virginia and one of the things our state is known for, besides beautiful mountains and kissing cousins, is its whitewater rafting. truly it is some of the best in the world. the narrow gorges and steep ravines accelerate the water and create some of the most terrifying rapids you have ever seen. the power is intimidating to be sure.

many times i have stood on the side of a river and marveled at the power of the water and the lunacy of the people who would strap themselves into a rubber boat [a balloon basically] and hurl themselves into what can only be describe as a cauldron of death. i am pretty sure they write on the rafts dante’s famous welcome, inscribed over the gates of hell: abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

but, if you live, it is a lot of fun. for some reason, flirting with death is pretty exhilarating.

i have been whitewater rafting maybe a dozen times in my life, usually on the class 3 or lower [class 5 is rapids as big as your house. death pretty much guaranteed], so i am nothing of an expert, but even if you only go occasionally you learn to respect the power of the river pretty quickly.

at the river rafting places i have been to they are quite concerned about safety. they sit you in a boat on the land and tell you to NEVER stand up and when you go through a rapid to paddle hard to keep you momentum up so you dont get stuck. they tell you about the biggest rapid on the river that day. it is called the Washing Machine.

everyone in our group shudders.

the guide goes on to explain that that rapid is formed by a huge boulder on the corner of the river and the obstruction causes a massive churning pool of undertow and water and death. it is called the Washing Machine because if you get stuck in it, the rapid will spin and churn you you round like a pile of dirty undies. and people dont emerge from that until well after the spin cycle.

another shudder and i am starting to wonder if all this fun is worth the $45 they took from me. [why is flirting with death so expensive?]

he said that it is impossible to get out of that rapid by yourself. they actually post someone on top of the rock with a lifeline they can throw in and hope to snag anyone unlucky enough to capsize at that point in the river. the guide didnt really tell what the success rate was at pulling people out of the Washing Machine, but he did note that usually a few people died there each season.

and he reiterated, “keep paddling through the rapids, and whatever you do, DON’T STAND UP IN THE BOAT!”

when i first moved to west virginia for graduate school i was a resident assistant in one of the dorms. and maybe because i had just moved back to the US from nepal they put on my floor a large number of international students: i had kids from germany, australia, japan, hungary, france, sweden and probably a couple of other places.

i kind of felt like it was my job to give them something of a memorable time in America, so we would go on little trips every once in a while. one time i took them all white water rafting on the youghigheny river. the one with the Washing Machine rapid although i didnt know that until we got there.

after all the safety training and death warnings we finally got on the river; for some reason [probably because we are guys] we decided the girls should be in one raft and them men in another. i have to admit i felt a little safer thinking about the washing machine down river. i was glad to have four strapping, athletic guys in my boat. if i was going to cheat death, i wanted some muscle with me.

as we started down the river we were all pretty confident. i had huge hungarian, a strapping mate from australia, a german and a swede with me. we were like the United Nations of rafting.

of course we brought up the rear, planning to sweep up any poor soul unlucky enough to fall in the water.. probably another 10 rafts were ahead of us including the girls from our dorm: two little japanese students, a french student studying english lit and the one american on our floor, a petite girl from pittsburgh.

the first rapid is coming up, maybe a class 2, and our guides point out that we should enter on the right side, paddle hard until we are out on the other side and DO NOT STAND UP IN THE BOAT AT ANY TIME OR FOR ANY REASON.

one by one the boats enter the rapid, boats full of teenagers and families, young children and their parents, a boat full of senior citizens. i even think there was a raft or two full of nuns from a local convent.

the girls from our dorm were next to last, right before us, ponytails bobbing in the early fall air, they slipped into the current and slid over the water like an elegant sea serpent. negotiating between the rocks the emerged downstream giggling like they had just found a love note in their locker from the cute boy in sixth period. we laughed. silly girls.

the man raft was next. our muscles tensed glistening with man sweat and the testosterone of a thousand wild mustangs. each of us leaned into our oars, i sat in the back on rudder guiding us into the flow of water, our first rapid.

we moved beautifully over the water, a collective thousands pounds of brute strength syncopated in pure, precise unison.

i yelled to my crew, above the roar of the river, “keep paddling all the way through the rapid!”

we picked up speed as we sped towards the narrow opening which was our target.

man for man we pulled. i leaned into my paddle righting our course.

“keep paddling! keep paddling!”

almost there. it was like we were in the x-wing fighter about to obliterate the imperial death star with the swift launch of a photon torpedo hurtled into the narrow ventilation hatch.

i could feel my pulse quicken, i gasped and held my breath just as we fell into the rapid.

“keep paddling!” i managed to scream one last time.

and then something happened. i would call it magical, poetic, were the results less catastophic.

in that brief moment during which we entered that cauldron of churning water, each of my fellow rafters, simultaneously, as if under the spell of some mythical siren, stood up and moved to the center of the boat, closing in an embrace like a rose closing against the coming night.

time seems to move more slowly in those moments. i remember the feel of the wind all around us pushed by the massive waves and turbulence of the river. i remember the sun bouncing brightly off the tall hulking frame of the hungarian and swede as they embraced, fully upright, in the middle of that yellow raft. i remember trying to yell, above the din, “DON’T STAND UP IN THE RAFT!”

but it was too late. suddenly, time caught up and immediately the clarity of that moment was tossed into the muffled world of the undersea creatures. as i bobbed for air i heard alternately, what i can only assume were the more flowery parts of speech found in scandanavia, eastern europe and the land down under, and the indistinct grunts of large men bouncing off underwater rocks.

it is hard enough to get back in a boat in the middle of a river without having to endure the bemused looks of the girls from our dorm and 15 nuns. it was humiliating to say the least.

the worst part though was that i had to get back in the boat with those knuckleheads who, at the first sign of danger had leapt into each others’ arms like scared sorority sisters. i couldnt help but think what lay ahead, the Washing Machine. how were we going to survive that one if we got dumped in a much tamer rapid? we were goners for sure. as i looked at the now soaking wet crew, shivering in the brisk air, i suggested we take a moment to write letter to our families that could be delivered when they were informed of our deaths.

no one disagreed.

i wondered if the guy perched on top of the rock at Washing Machine had enough rope to pull all five of us out.

____________________

i think there comes a time in most everyone’s life, if we are honest with ourselves when we realize we can’t do this thing, this life on our own. we feel stuck and we hope that the guy on the rock, above those churning rapids has enough rope to reach us.

i remember a distinct time in my life when i looked around and realized i was kind of a punk and a jerk. i was partying way too much, didnt have any real close friends, was disrespectful to my parents and family, treated girls very poorly. i was a loser. and it took me getting arrested to realize i was in the wrong boat with the wrong people.

but what was worse was that i was the wrong person. i was failing at life and i did not like at all who i was turning out to be. that scared me. i didnt want to grow up to be a 50 year old womanizing drunk with no friends but that is where i was headed and i needed some help.

but i felt stuck in the washing machine; tumbling over and over, falling into the same patterns of behavior, the same bad decisions, the same awful relationships.

____________________

i like the apostle paul in the bible. he is a guy i think i can identify with. mostly this is because he seems honest and not afraid to talk about how screwed up he was.

in his letter to the people in the church at rome there is one section where i think he really lets down his guard, lets us in to the inner life of paul. he writes about his frustration with himself and about how he wishes he didnt keep getting caught, stuck doing the same old stupid things all the time. the things he doesnt want to do, he keeps on doing. the things he wants to do, the good things, he cant seem to do them on anything like a consistent basis.

he is pretty frustrated with himself.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.

For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. [romans 7:15, 18-19]

i feel that way sometimes. i feel like i am caught in the Washing Machine, this massive churning water hole, doing all the things i dont want to do. unable to do the right things, which is what i really want to do. stuck. unable to get out.

i dont feel that way all the time, but there are days when it dawns on me just how messed up i am. paul probably felt the same way. those can be pretty bad days.

paul asks what i have often thought,

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? [romans 7:24]

who will rescue me? who will save me from myself? it is a good question

____________________

every summer we have a little bible study with our college group at west virginia university. usually we have some new people show up who are in town for the summer or getting ready to start classes in the fall. it is hard to know where people are coming from those first few weeks because we usually just want people to see the good stuff, the better side of our nature. we dont usually go letting people in real close right away.

sometimes though someone a little more honest comes in.

this last year james showed up, pretty much at the beginning of the summer. i hadnt seen him around before so i went to introduce myself before the meeting began. i asked him where he was from and i was just curious how he found out about our little group.

“well, my mom found your website and she told me about it,” he explained.

“that’s cool. so you just kind of showed up by yourself?” i was impressed and told him so because usually people only come with other friends or because they know someone already a part of the group.

“yeah man,” he replied, “this is kind of my last chance.” james went on to explain that he was an alcoholic and a drug addict and that his life was pretty much falling apart. and he said he thought that God might be his last chance, his last hope.

“this has to work,” he told me.

i work and talk with a lot of students and i had never heard that one before, not within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. to be honest i didnt quite know what to tell him except that i thought he might be in the right place.

i really wanted to tell him that i believed that God could make a difference in his life, that God wanted to pull him out. i mean i do believe that, i really do. it happened in my life; sometimes in those moments though i wonder if God can really rescue someone from those kinds of addictions, from those dark places.

____________________

when the apostle paul penned those words “what a wretched man i am! who will rescue me from this body of death?” it is maybe easy to divorce those ideas that from reality, to wonder if he wasnt being a little over-dramatic. seriously? body of death. is it ever really that bad?

i think it takes some level of honesty to realize that yeah, it is that bad, we are that desperate. james is. i am.

the other night i was out for a walk with lauren and mark and their boys jack and luke. it was not late but dark [being late-november]. we were talking about some hard things a couple of our friends were going through, a rough spot in their marriage. we all felt pretty beat up and tired. we thought a walk would do us good, get some fresh air. maybe not talk about things for a while

as we moved down cobun avenue towards their house, a car passed us, lights out in front on the road. i dont know why i watched, there was nothing of real interest in a car passing on the street.

as i continued to watch a black figure scurried on to the road, it paused then darted in a frenetic attempt to avoid the car. instead the animal ran right under the front left tire of the passing auto. i let out a gasp. i had never seen an animal get hit before in real time.

to be honest i wanted to just imagine that it never happened. i just wanted to walk by and not look and not stop, really afraid of what i might see on the road.

as i processed these thoughts though a man on a porch across the street emerged. he had seen what i had seen. he ran to he road and and peered down, i am sure terrified of what he would find. when he saw the little huddled mass of fur he wailed. and then he looked skyward and cursed.

this was the kind of wail you cannot ignore. he cried and sobbed like a mother who has lost her son or daughter in a horrific accident.

as we walked by we strained not to look, to ignore the crying man and his small friend who had run into the road and picked up the dying cat, carrying it carefully back to the house, whispering inaudibly, words meant to comfort his friend. they had no effect.

of all the days for this to happen. why today with shared pain of hurting friends fresh on our minds, the smell of our own frailty and failures fresh in our nostrils? it was as if the world wanted to remind us of her brokenness, her cruelty and that the cries of a man for his pet were the cries of all of us.

who will save us?

____________________

perhaps he is is naive. perhaps it is wishful thinking or maybe even desperation, but the apostle paul, in the midst of his sorrow, in the midst of his brokenness and cry for help, who will save me? has this thought,

“thanks be to God–through Jesus Christ our Lord!” [romans 7:25]

there is an amazing turn that takes place in those two thoughts: i am a wretch, but i have a hero. i have one who has rescued me.

i dont know many people who have that kind of optimism, that kind of hope. and maybe it is unfair to say that paul went from one extreme to the other, but it is remarkable the confidence, the joy that jumps off the page, thanks be to God i am rescued through Jesus Christ! i mean, he even adds an exclamation point for crying out loud! [i didnt eve know they had those in paul's day.]

a new hope. we all could use a little hope. i know my friends struggling in their marriage and james and the man grieving his cat could use some hope.

we live in a broken world.

who will rescue us?

thanks be to God.

holy: the unaffected hero

part 3

i have never been saved. not in the normal, physical sense, like i was drowning or got lost in a snow storm and some david hasslehoff-esque paramedic emerged from nowhere with his red trunks and orange flotation device, just in the nick of time to snatch me from the jaws of death. that [and i am pretty thankful it hasn't] has never happened to me.

and i think that is probably the case for most of the people i know. i cannot think of a single friend who was rescued in some dramatic way, by some hero or heroine. or even been a part of a dramatic rescue scene. my friends, mark and lauren, recently heard a huge commotion in their back yard and when they went out there were like eight guys trying to get some pit bull off of some other dog by smashing it in the head with a brick. i guess there was blood and screaming and some guy even emerged from his house with a gun.

it was pretty dramatic to be sure, but there didn’t seem to be any real hero in the story. everyone was pretty upset and there was a lot of yelling [and cussing! not lauren or mark i dont think], but i think you would be hard pressed to say it was a “heroic” situation.

you just dont see heroes all that often. that is the point i am trying to make. and yet we are so fascinated by them. we are drawn to them for some reason. i wonder why.

my hunch is that this is something that is pretty common to all people, to all cultures. i mean the greeks and romans had their heroes: zeus, achilles, mars and mercury. we have our own versions of course: superman, batman, the green lantern, david hasslehoff [i am thinking knight rider here, not baywatch, that guy is everywhere].

what is it about heroes though that is so captivating?

i think it is that heroes tend ot be above the situation. no matter how harrowing or dire the circumstances, heroes are above it. they are detached, not physically, or even emotionally, they are just somehow affected less to the point that they can intervene, i mean this is what is heroic; they are unaffected to the point that they can do something about it. superman wasn’t so heroic when weakened by kryptonite now was he?

now i wouldnt want to put my father in the same class as superman. in fact, my father is pretty well known for drama and over reaction. if you are ever in our house when he stubs his toe or hits his funny bone he will let out literally the loudest scream you have ever heard. you will think someone cut off his arm or leg or something. i am not kidding. it is very disturbing and to be honest a little annoying. to hear him sneeze you want to check the tissue and make sure no brains came out. babies start to cry 4 or 5 houses away.

but my dad has his moments. one time we were in russia, moscow to be exact. he had this great idea that we should take a train to china. they call it the trans-siberian express. “express” is a bit of an exaggeration seeing as it took us nine days, 24 hours a day, hardly stopping except to pick up some food in some remote part of siberia or outer mongolia. all in all it was an amazing trip and one of the best experiences of my life, but it had a nervous beginning.

you pick up the trans-siberian express in any of a number of locations but the terminus are in moscow and beijing. we had been living in budapest that year so we scooted on up to moscow to hop on. this was back in the early 90s, so the soviet union was still pretty much intact. i can remember armed soldiers coming through our train on the border of hungary and ukraine, searching each berth. i seem to remember them outside with big german shepherds and long mirrors and flashlights looking under the train for dissidents [apparently] trying to get back into the motherland. [probably this didnt happen. i watch too many movies.]

they took down the light fixture in our tiny room, because that is obviously where two pimply kids from wyoming would be hiding the microfiche tapes with all the high level soviet secrets. they looked through our luggage and made menacing faces and spoke in what i can only describe as a condescending russian. they smelled like vodka i thought. it was all very james bond, except the part where i was scared out of my wits. i think i had just read solzhenitsyn’s Guglag about the russian prison camps. bad idea.

there are two trains that run back and forth between beijing and moscow every 9 days. one is operated by the russains and the other by the chinese government. they switch places each trip. we happened to be booked on the chinese train, making it’s way back to beijing, leaving from moscow.

one other important detail about russia at that time. when you buy your ticket for the trains, they give you just enough days on your visa to get in and get out. this meant that we had about 10 days total. enough to get us to beijing, but not enough to do much else. they keep you on a pretty strict schedule.

did you know that there are two train stations in moscow? neither did we. and of course we picked the wrong one. after our mad dash to find the right station, we arrived at our platform about 15 minutes before our train was scheduled to leave.

i have never seen anything like it.

i bet there were four to five thousands people [maybe not quite that many, but it seemed like it], mostly chinese, running around on that platform. most of them had large boxes in hand trying to find a place, anyplace to put them. it was insane. the train was huge, maybe 40-40 cars and people were everywhere trying to get on. every car was now stacked with bozes and parcels to the ceiling. the aisle running alongside the sleeping cabins were packed leaving only a narrow strip of hallway to try to get through.

i think we all started to panic a bit, wondering how we were going to navigate this mass of people and find our way on. i remember my pulse quickening as the conductor blew his whistle, screamed something in mandarin.

it was eery. the next thing i remember is the 6 of us, alone on the platform, tickets in hand, backpacks on our shoulders. in two seconds the platform was deserted. one little lasy, holding a pink plastic bag, scurried across in front of us like a tumbleweed down the main street in some spaghetti western ghost town.

my heart really started to be now.

my dad shoved our tickets into our hands. my younger brother tim and i had a separate berth in the rear because we were the two oldest boys and you could only book four people to a room. i was 19 and tad was 17 or so.

we took off running in that direction, while mom and dad and the two youngest quickly moved towards the front of the long train.

it is not easy running with a backpack and i can remember being quite our of breathe and more than a little shaken when we arrived at the steps to our car. tad was not far behind.

we handed out tickets to the man on the steps.

“no,” he said in broken english.

“what?” i responded, my heart really starting to race now. “what?” i repeated.

“these are the wrong tickets. you cannot go.” and from the posture he was in i knew he was not going to let us on that train. almost simultaneously a long whistle came from the lead engine.

you have to believe me when i say that i am not one prone to panic. i am the oldest of four boys, we lived in the jungles on papua new guinea as kids; we had traveled the world since we were young. my brother and i had gotten robbed in france, almost drove our VW bus off a cliff in italy. we survived a tribal war over a rugby match. not much shook us.

but i was scared.

the prospect of being left on that platform in the next 2 minutes, in the middle of soviet russia, all alone, with my parents and brothers on a train to china left me terrified.

it is in moments of utter terror and fear that our instincts take over. i do not remember thinking anything. the next thing i knew i was flying down that patform to the only one i know could help me: my dad. somehow he not gotten on the train yet and i remember our eyes meeting as i sprinted towards him.

“dad, they won’t let us on the train! they won’t let us on the train!”

i know i said my father is sometimes overdramatic and reactive [he once punched a guy on a public bus in mexico city for no apparent reason. turns out he thought the guy was part of a pickpocketing cartel, but that is another story], but in that moment he knew exactly what to do.

maybe it wasnt this way but i remember him, calmly and coolly, telling my mother and two younger brothers to get off the train. if we were going to go to russian prison camp, we were going to go as a family.

the thing i remember most though is just this sense that my father had it under control; he seemed above the situation. it was dire, we were in a tough spot to be sure, but i just knew that in that moment it was going to be ok. he seemed unaffected by what was going on.

he was being heroic.

____________________

there is this idea in the Bible of holiness. this is pretty churchy word and one that undoubtedly we have heard thrown around quite a bit, but i think the meaning of it has been lost over time.

the word actually carries with it the notion of separation, distance, apart-ness. i think that you can draw two conclusions when it comes to that kind of understanding of the holiness of God: first of all we could conclude that God is holy because he is separate from all the brokenness and trouble and distress of the world; he is disinterested [or maybe more interested in staying clean and pure] and therefore stays at a distance from it all. kind of like that person that doesnt want to get their new shirt dirty, so they spend all their time sitting on the sidelines or in their house. yeah they stay clean, but they dont really get to do much either.

i think the other conclusion is much more interesting and even consistent with what we read about God in the Bible. the other idea of holiness has more to do with being unaffected. i think that God is holy because He is separate in the sense of being distant from sin, but rather He is holy because He is unaffected by sin.

a hero cannot be heroic if he or she is a long ways off. and a hero cannot be heroic if he or she cannot rise above the circumstances.

____________________

right after Jesus got baptized, the Bible tells us that he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. jesus was fasting for 40 days so he was pretty worn out by the time satan showed up.

satan tempts jesus first with food, trying to get him to turn some stones into bread. the guy is pretty hungry. seems tempting, especially if you could actually do it. but jesus resists. good guys 1, prince of darkness 0.

in the next test satan takes jesus up to the top of the temple and basically challenged jesus’ identity. “if you are the son of God, throw yourself down.” and the the devil goes on to misquote some scripture about how God will save him and not let his foot get crushed on the rocks. apparently jesus has a pretty good idea of who he is, so he doesnt fall for that little trick or trying to play on his insecurity. 2-love.

now if you are like me, you have some skepticism related to this whole scene. i mean, can jesus, who is God, really be tempted? he is God after all. and ok, sometimes i am tempted to eat too much and sometimes i feel insecure about who i am and that drives me to make some bad decisions, but what about all the other stuff i get tempted with? sex? and money? and power and control? i mean it seems to me like jesus is getting off pretty easy here.

i’ve seen more harrowing episodes of Fear Factor.

i have thought about that for years, that jesus cant really relate to my temptation. i mean it’s not like they had the internet back then.

then for some reason i started to understand the third temptation a little differently, think about it a little more broadly. matthew, in his gospel, describes it this way,

“the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.”

what struck me is that he showed him the glory of all the kingdoms of the world.  i read over that for years until one day it just popped into my head, well what is the glory of a kingdom of this world? what is the pinnacle? what is the best that they have to offer? and in my mind the answer is power. and by extension all that comes with power: money, sex, fame, control, adoration. you name it.

the word for “kingdom” that matthew chose here does not refer to an actual literal kingdom. what it refers to the right to ave authority and rule over a kingdom. satan was offering him  power.

maybe it is just me, but i think i gloss over the magnitude of what jesus went through there, of what he refused, of what he gave up. he gave up the right to rule [ironically, just after he had been baptized and announced he was here to set up the kingdom of God].

i get irritated when i have to give up control of the remote or when people don’t do what i want them to do. i give in constantly to the temptation of power and control.

of course the downside of temptation is that you lose something in the transaction: give in to anger and you lose reputation; give in to lust and you lose innocence, maybe more; give in to worry and you lose peace, give in to too much chocolate and you lose that beach body.

the point is this: jesus didn’t give in. he stayed above it, not in the sense that he was distant, just in the sense that he stayed unaffected. heroes cannot be affected by the circumstances; they have to rise above otherwise they become ordinary, stuck, like the reset of us.

the writer of hebrews put it this way: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet was without sin.”

we have a hero, a rescuer, and he is not far from us.

holy: the silent planet

part 2

my dad was a physical education professor for about 30 years and for some of that time he taught at the university of north carolina in chapel hill. that is where me and my brother tad were born [technically we were born in durham at duke university hospital, but i would never tell anyone that].

my dad’s office was in the field house where the tar heels played their basketball games. he told me that he could hear the fans cheering on the team. you probably dont care that much about that, except if you lived in north carolina, then it is a very big deal, because those people are crazy about the tar heels basket ball program. they say crazy things about how they know their team is blessed and anointed by God because why else would he have painted the sky carolina blue. and i dont think those people are joking. they really believe God did that.

so i pretty much grew up a fan of carolina basketball, even though most of my life i spent watching them from about 2000 miles away in wyoming. to be honest we did not get to watch the tarheels all that often. laramie is not exactly in their target market, but we did get to see them a few times a year on national TV, like when they played duke or some other national power program. and we were glued to the set. we loved north carolina basketball.

it wasn’t until the early 80s though that my love for carolina blue went to a whole new level. in 1982 a skinny kid made the winning jump shot as UNC won its first national championship that i was around for. and of course a national love affair with michael jordan began pretty much the moment that ball landed in the net.

jordan went on the become the national player of the year and lead the country in scoring. his legend as one of the best in the game continued to rise. any normal boy scoured the newspapers and magazines for pictures and articles bragging about his exploits on the court the night before.

i had a montage of jordan dunks in my locker at school that i had put together with about as much love as a fifth grade girl has for her first boyfriend. one in particular i remember showed jordan holding on to the edge of the backboard, about two-thirds of the way up, and reaching with his free hand to grab a rebound that we all knew was going to be thrown down with great malice. we had never seen anyone who could jump and move like michael could. and we started to wonder if he was really human, really from earth.

a few years later, because my dad knew dean smith and had roy williams in one of his classes at UNC he was somehow able to get us into the carolina basketball camp the summer before my 9th grade year. maybe he had connections or maybe he just wanted us to think he did, but in either case we got in [with about 800 other kids] and it has to be one of the most exciting things i have ever done.

there we were in our powder blue shorts and jerseys, running up and down dozens of basketball courts, getting shooting lessons and learning the pick and roll from the same guys who coached michael [there had long ceased to be anyone else on that team]. as we walked through campus to the dining hall, little waves of rumor reached our ears, “he’s here.”

“no, he’s not here, he’s in chicago, with the bulls.”

“no, he’s here, taking summer classes.”

“why would he do that?”

the idea that someone would voluntarily go to school was way beyond any 9th grade imagination, but our thoughts soon turned to other, more important issues.

“i hear he has the new air jordans. brand new. no one else has them.”

“well of course he does dummy. he is air jordan.”

“i hear he once dunked in practice from half-court. jumped over the whole team, just because he didnt want to get their sweat on his extra long shorts.” [jordan pretty much single-handedly changed basketball fashion with his extra long shorts. thank goodness.]

“no he didn’t.”

“yeah, tommy told me. his dad is a janitor in the arena. he was at the practice.”

“wow.”

towards the end of the camp, they told us that we were going to get to go to the brand new dean smith center, the dean dome, to watch a scrimmage between the current UNC players and a team made up of former tarheels. of course the whole camp was abuzz. was michael going to play? was he really on campus?

it was incredible exciting and i remember shuffling in to our seats, scanning the players on the court below to see who was warming up. there was only one person we had all come to see, and there he was, big smile as he joked with the other players during warm-ups, he face turned into a stone statue of concentration, tongue emerging as he lept towards the basket, engineering some new dunk we had never seen before, knowing somehow that a thousand little eyes were glued to his every move. even before the game had started.

and of course we noticed that he wore the most beautiful shoes we had ever seen. like flashes of lightning and rolling thunder clouds, it was if he wore the very sky on his feet. [ok maybe i am exaggerating, but they were pretty cool.]

i do not remember a single other person on that court. i am sure there were some great players, future NBA stars who played that day. i only saw michael jordan. he was from another planet: his speed and quickness and agility. there were times you know he was just playing with the opposing team. in fact, the last play of the game, jordan got the ball on the wing. the rest of the team cleared out leaving him one-on-one with some poor college sap who probably dreamed of playing one day against MJ.

we all held our collective breath knowing what was coming next. michael smiled slowly, wide, knowingly. he knew too. and with one quick jab step and spin he was around the defender, jumping it seemed as high as the championship banners in the rafters of the arena and finishing with a thundering reverse dunk.

for a brief moment, in the presence of something totally awesome, it is appropriate to stand in silence. which is what all 800 of us boys did, but then like a dam bursting forth we simultaneously erupted in awe. we were in the presence of greatness. before us was a man, unlike any we had ever seen before and maybe would ever see hence.

as we shuffled back out of the arena, back to our dorms and our smelly practice gear and our old worn sneakers and our poor shooting technique and earth bound vertical leaps a weird tension emerged in us. we marveled at what we had seen, a basketball god and yet there was a sense of loss that came with it. the thought that no matter how hard i try, no matter how much i practice, no matter how much i spend on my next pair of shoes i will never fly through the heavens, or vanquish and embarrass my enemies on the court, or wag my tongue [i tired this and about bit mine off] like michael jordan.

it seemed to us like he was from another planet. like we were in the presence of some sort of basketball deity, someone for whom the laws of this planet did not apply. and we were stuck in our pedestrian, ordinary, mediocre brick-laying, gravity bound selves. and so i think i vasciallated back and forth between admiration and disdain, somewhere between hope and despair. hope, because the way he played was the most beautiful thing i had ever seen and it made believe that beauty truly does exist and despair because i knew that i was nothing like that. i was and am a buck-tooth kid from laramie, wyoming, who can barely touch the rim and misses more shots than i make.

____________________

i wonder some times what it would have been like to be a disciple. to have met Jesus and walked around with him from town to town as he talked to people, healed the sick, cast out a few demons, sparred with the religious leaders. i am guessing it was pretty awesome most of the time. Jesus was like a rock star; massive crowds followed, people tore down buildings to get to him.

and remember the scene where the disciples, hard core fishermen, are on the water and a huge storm comes up. they are terrified, running around the boat, screaming like 5th grade girls at a jonas brothers concert. and there is jesus, asleep in the front.

they are pretty ticked so they wake up and ask him, what’s his deal?

“what’s your deal, jesus? [i'm paraphrasing] don;t you care if we die?”

i imagine jesus woke up, maybe a little groggy like i am when my 6-year old daughter runs into my room at 5 am asking if it is time to get up.

“seriously?”

and so jesus pulls himself up, the waves raging, the boat about to capsize, half flooded with water. if it was me he would have to rub some of the gunk out of the corner of his eye. maybe wait for his contacts to settle a little. and then, turning to face the water,

“quiet! be still!”

we all know the story; the wind dies down, the waves calm, the storms stops. the once violent lake is now calm and placid.

and the disciples asked the question, the only logical one at this point, the question that was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. “who is this?” pharisees, tax-collectors, the sick, the marginalized, the elite. everyone wondered, who is this man? he is like nothing we have ever seen or known.

i think people often got the sense from jesus that he was hiding something. and i think they are right in thinking that. i dont pretend to know why, but jesus kind of let this cloud of mystery follow him. maybe it was that mystery that was attractive and he knew that, but it seemed obvious to everyone that there was more than meets the eye when it comes right down to it.

____________________

one of the more curious stories in the bible is the episode where jesus takes his three closest friends, peter, james and john up onto a mountain. he told them they were going up to pray, which they probably thought was pretty normal. but something really weird happened when they got there.

luke records in his gospel that, “as [jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.” [9:29] and that all of a sudden two guys were there, moses and elijah [how they knew this i dont know since they didnt have cool things like the internet and facebook back then, but somehow they figured it out] and they were talking to jesus about some future stuff jesus was going to do.

of course peter and the gang were asleep while all this was going on [they had trouble praying and staying awake an i ssue i can just sort of relate to], but they started coming to probably wondering, “who in the world is jesus talking to? oh hey it is moses and elijah.” and he’s shorter than i imagined under their breath. but luke goes on to tell that as they woke up they “saw his glory.”

now i dont really know what glory looks like, but the greek word that luke uses there doxa is pretty rich. it means splendor and brightness like the moon and the stars,. it is magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity and grace. the glory they saw in jesus was the kingly majesty which belongs to him as supreme ruler, majesty in the sense of the absolute perfection of the deity.

whatever it was it was awesome. it was the feeling, times a million, of when i saw michael jordan elevate and fly through the air like an angel from another planet. and i think more than anything peter understood this guy is very different than us.

peter’s reaction to all this is very interesting to me. in the middle of this weird transformation where jesus is turning into a lightning bolt and two really old guys that peter knew and recognized and had heard stories about since he was young: how moses lead his people out of slavery and through the red sea, pharaoh hot on their heels and how elijah had defeated the 500 prophets of baal by calling down fire from heaven.

and in the midst of this he says, “master, it is good for us to be here. let us put up three shelters–one for you, one for moses and one for elijah.” i think it is kind of a stange thing to say.

luke, who wrote down this story, must have thought so too, because the very next thing is his little parenthetical side comment, “he did not know what he was saying.” haha. i think i would have like luke. this peter guy is nuts. what is he talking about?

maybe he was crazy, but i think peter experience something on that mountain that few of us ever have, maybe none of us. and he says a couple of interesting things. first he says that it is good for us to be here. i dont think that would been what i would have expected him to say. i would have maybe said [and i m imagining this because i wasnt there] “wow” or “awesome” or “man that is pretty cool.” i dont know what i would have said but probably not “good.”

the word that peter uses is interesting because it means “beautiful by reason of purity” i do not know if this is the same word “good” that God uses to describe the garden of eden, but part of me wonders if that in that moment on that mountain, when peter looks at jesus and sees a wholly new and different side of this friend that it doesn’t awaken in him a memory of a time when things we good and pure and holy and the world was not under the weight of the curse that removed us from the garden in the first place.

i think in that moment that peter saw, very clearly, that jesus was very different from him, from the world. he was some kind of an Other, wrapped in mortal flesh, but unlike any human any of us have ever known.

luke gives him a hard time about wanting to put up some shelters, but i think that idea was simply a reflection of  peter’s experience and him not wanting to leave.

let’s live here, the four of us. i’ll sleep outside. we’ll form a condo board. jesus, you’re the president. i do not want to leave from here.

maybe he felt a little bit like adam and eve. knowing he had to go. that he was stuck in the world. stuck and mired in death and disease and famine. caught in the selfishness and self-centerdness of a human race that had bought into a lie that they did not need God. a planet mute, unable to speak or break free, from the layer upon layer of sin.

i cannot blame peter for wanting to stay. i would have too.

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cs lewis, the great writer and Christian thinker, has a trilogy of science fiction novels, called appropriately enough, The Space Trilogy. The trilogy recounts essentially a great cosmic struggle between good and evil forces, the Oyéresu and the dark eldila. In the course of their battle for control and power, the dark eldila are banished to planet earth. Under the influence of the bent eldila, earth has become distorted and so is separated, isolated from the rest of the cosmos. it becomes known in the universe as the silent planet.

earth is silent, separated from God because of the Fall. but the apostle john tells us that there is a hope, a new hope that has come to this silent, isolated planet. the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. the Word is present and near. and we are no longer alone.

holy: the weight of the divine

part 1

when i was in high school i took a job with one of my father’s best friends; a guy named norm tyser. i dont know if this is ever a good idea, working for someone who knows your dad  because it seemed to give mr. tyser an edge. he knew me. and he knew what he could get away with i think too. he was a little devious that way.

but i really liked him and i think he liked having me around and he gave me a job one summer at his lumber company: lodgepole products, so named because their primary business was to make things out of the massive quantities of lodgepole pine trees that grew in the mountains near my home town.

i am no lumberjack or forester, but lodgepole pines have two main characteristics that i could see: 1. they grow super straight, like telephone pole with a few branches usually near the top, and 2. they are super tall, probably 80-90 feet at times. and so lodgepole products, inc. made things like posts and rails that ranchers would use to make corrals and fences on their property. we cut up some of the bigger logs into 2 by fours and 1 by sixes and the like, but as i remember the main thing we made were posts and huge long rails for corrals.

and my job was to help. i was too young to run a chain saw or the peeler or any of the other stuff that could cut your arm or leg off so my job was to help the guy doing the cutting and peeling. basically my job, the whole summer was to pick up huge logs out of one pile and put them down in another.

all in all it was a miserable job. the logs i had to pick up probably each weighed in the 100 to 150 pound range. and they were really long, fifteen, sometimes twenty feet long so you had the centrifugal force, the swinging momentum to deal with too. try doing that for 40 hours a week. my back hurt, my arms hurt, my legs hurt.

i went through about 10 pairs of jeans that summer. in order to carry a 150 pound, 20 foot lodgepole pine you have to hold it up with the help of your thighs. the rough bark and pine sap made short work of my JCPenney levi’s 701 jeans.

when i would get home i would eat, barely able to lift the fork to my mouth, and then collapse on the couch or in my bed. my friends were out going to parties and playing baseball. all i wanted to do was sleep. it was bad.

i think my dad got a kick out of it, and norm too. i kind of picture the two of them getting together at church or a coffee shop and kind of snickering behind my back, knowing how exhausted i was and how much i was coming to hate wood products. to my face they talked a lot to me about life lessons and how one day i would grow to appreciate the value of a hard day’s work. old people are like this; always talking about the value of things and lessons and character and how kids today are not like they were when they were young. it is one of their most annoying traits.

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but in spite of all that i did learn two things that summer i worked at lodgepole products: what it is to feel dirty all the time and how crazy you can get when you are alone for too long.

an important part of the process of making fence posts and rails is called peeling. basically peeling is just what it sounds like. there is this giant machine with a long arm with a rotating drum of blades on it. my job was to pick up a post or rail still covered in bark and lay it on these two tires; the long arm with the spinning would come down on the rotating log and peel off the bark. all this was fine and pretty cool when you would see this old barky, nasty log come out the other side neat a clean and white.

the problem with this whole process was the  by-product. as we worked the peeler would spit it out in a huge blizzard of bark chips that more often then not, depending on the wind, would blanket us. but even the bark chips weren’t that bad. what was bad was the sap.

have you ever climbed a pine tree and gotten some of the sap on your hand? that is so nasty, sticky stuff. it is almost impossible to clean off. and if you get dirt in it your hand turns black where it gets caught in the sap.

imagine now a sap shower, a fine mist of sticky gum-like residue, misting your entire body from head to foot. like someone sat with a bottle mister full of liquid glue and doused you for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. and then kick in a little dust a dirt flying around in the hot Wyoming summer winds. not pretty.

my hats and jeans and shirts grew stiff with the sap. my arms and neck and face and hair were in a constant state of filth, and not just filth, sticky. like some sadistic 2 year was rubbing my face with the lollipop all day. horrible, miserable existence.

but worse than that is just the plain fact that i could not get clean at night. it really didn’t matter how many times i showered and scrubbed there was always this feeling of being dirty, sticky. i could not escape it. maybe i would have grown used to it over time, but think thing was that i knew i was supposed to be clean. i knew that it is not normal to be covered in tree sap and to look like i had mange or some weird fungus was growing on me. it was a little humiliating at times and if had had the energy to go out with my friends i think i would have wanted to stay home anyway.

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the other thing i learned was that if you are too alone for too long you can start to really lose. i remember one week we didn’t have many orders for fences so old norm sent me up on top of a hill that overlooked the massive laramie valley that we lived in.wyoming, if you have never been there is pretty wide open. we lived in a valley that was about 30-40 miles wide and pretty empty. scrub brush and dirt, maybe some grass here and there is about all there is holding the wind back. the lumber mill was a few miles outside of town in the middle of nothing. the only thing i could see from that hill was the mill below me, norm’s house about 400 yards to the side on another slight protuberance and the wide open brown prairie. that was it.

my job that week was to take an about 50 foot tall pile of scrap wood and trimmings that had been accumulating from the normal operations of the mill and spend the next 40 hours, by myself, splitting it up for firewood. norm showed me how to use this pneumatic splitter then hopped in his truck and headed off to sip mimosas and, i’m pretty sure, giggle at me through his high-powered binoculars i know he kept on a tripod in his living room to scout antelope at 3 miles.

splitting wood with a pneumatic splitter is not hard work, just repetitive, monotonous and boring. pick up a log from pile number one, place it on a rail, pull a lever, throw split wood into pile number two. repeat one billion times.

every day i would hike up that hill at 7 in the morning, split wood, and then hike back down to my car at 5 or so. there would be days i would not see or talk to anyone. i am not exactly an extrovert, but that is hard on just about anybody. and in such extreme cases you do whatever it takes to keep you sanity.

this was the mid-80s and so there was some pretty awesome music on the radio at the time. one of my favorite bands was journey. steve perry had this amazing voice. they were one of the few bands that i actually bought their album [or cassettes as we called them in those days, kids]. one of the absolute best songs was faithfully, the passionately anthem of a young man pledging his undying love to some super hot chick in leg warmers and a baggy sweater with a huge wide belt. at least this is how i pictured it in my mind.

i have to be honest; i don’t think there was this conscious moment when i said to myself, “hey i think we should sing. you know, to pass the time.”

i think it was something that just kind of evolved over time as i split wood on that hill. i think i was kind of hearing the music and singing in my head at first, and then maybe, perhaps i started to hum a little, kicking in with some lead vocals on the chorus.

i’m foh-ev-vah yoooours. faithful-lee-eee.

like i said, i am not really sure how it happened, but at some point i realized i was really belting it out.

Highway run into the midnight sun

i’d probably thrown in a little barry white bewteen lines. “it’s a hard life on the road with you, baby.”

Wheels go round and round “yeah baby, life is like a merri-go-round”

You’re on my mind

“on my mind, yeah sugah”

Restless hearts sleep alone tonight

“i’m so restless without you, like a caged lion or zebra, baby”

Sending all my love along the wire

“that’s where i’m sending it, on a wire baby, like enrico marconi”

i’d even hit the sweet guitar lick in the middle. awesome power guitar stance, eyes closed, faced contorted and twisted in the sweet, sweet agony only a rock star and over-the-road truck driver can know:

dir dir dir dir bada bah. dir dir dir dir bada bah.

i was a rock god. air guitar holding out that last note, eyes closed. the crowd, crazy with the raw emotion of my faithfulness and awesome guitar licks swooned. i could feel the sweat, the pure adrenaline of my performance trickling down my skin as i slowly opened my eyes, ready to take in the admiration and waves of appreciation from my adoring fans.

and there stood norm, three feet from me, still in my power guitar stance, grinning from ear to ear, stalk of grass hanging out of the side of his mouth. evidently i had struck a chord with him too.

he cleared his throat.

“the missus was wondering if you know any elton john tunes?”

without waiting for an answer, he grinned a little wider, spun around on his logging boots and kind of skipped back to his truck, hopped in and disappeared in a cloud of dust down to the mill.

i looked over my shoulder at norm’s house, just a quarter mile from the wood pile. sounds travels pretty good on the prairie apparently. i’m not positive but i am pretty sure i saw norm’s wife give me a little wave through that big picture window.

the presence of others has a way of bringing us back to reality. [although i must say i also had an awesome cover version of bonnie tyler's total eclipse of the heart. turn around bright eyes.] i was not a rock star. i was standing on a hill, singing, but just to the mesquite and antelope and mrs. tyser apparently. rude awakening.

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i tell you those stories because i have been thinking a lot about adam and eve and how awesome it must have been to live in the garden of eden and to just get to hang out with God and to run around naked and eat all kinds of awesome food and probably have a lion and maybe a cheetah as a pet and not have to worry about it eating your foot while you sleep.

and i have been thinking how incredibly awful it must have been to have messed that all up, to take one stupid bite out of the one piece of fruit off that one tree that God said to leave alone and to all of a sudden realize it is all gone. the pet cheetah. the awesome food. God.

most people think that the punishment for being disobedient was that adam had to get a job and start working and eve was going to start really not like having kids. but the truth is that adam already had a job [naming the animals, looking out for things] and eve already had some pain in childbirth. [her curse was that her pain in childbirth would increase, indicating to me that she already had some level of discomfort]. but i think the two biggest things that changed that day they believed satan and ate from that tree were 1.] they had to start wearing clothes and 2.] they had to leave God.

on first glance it may seem like, no big deal. put on some dockers and hey let’s go relocate. but i think it is much deeper and significant than that. i think that it was in fact a very big deal, that there was a certain weight and gravity to the fact that they had to put something on and leave their home.

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my friends mark and lauren have a kid named jack who is two and one of the most energetic little boys i know. he is a bulldog usually banging on something with a stick or a bat or a plastic hammer. or punching his brother in the face. in a loving way, like brothers.

now lauren is a good mother and so jack almost always has clothes on. but the other day i stopped by though and jack had just gotten out of the tub after his bath, and lauren had not gotten around to putting on his diaper, so he was butt-naked. and when kids are naked something snaps in their brain, they go nuts, arms, flapping like a bird, running around squealing, little butt cheeks bouncing like a couple cans of spam on a teeter totter. i mean they act like they can’t believe they have been wearing clothes all these years, or months i guess. jack just seemed so free; it was so natural for him. he loved it that’s for sure.

and it is not like the whole scene is all that weird. we can relate on some level. there is something about clothes that is restricting and cumbersome. we all have had trouble at times finding something that fits or that we like or are comfortable in. clothes can be a real pain. almost a burden at times. a reminder even maybe that things are not like they were when we were 2, innocent and clean, just out of the tub.

clothes were meant to remind us of something. the weight of the animal skins on adam and eve must have been amazing. imagine to have never had anything on and to all of sudden be covered, weighed down, restricted, encapsulated by these odd garments. they were, of course, to cover their shame, to cover the guilt they had incurred in that garden.

it must have felt something like that pine sap, that wretched layer of stubborn dirt and grime that held on to my skin with such malice. i felt, at times, as though i would never get clean. as if there were no hope.

i have to believe that eve and adam replayed that scene a million times in their heads. why did i eat that fruit? why did i listen to that snake? and maybe their hands would reach out and feel the clothes on their legs and arms, remembering.

i think that clothing, and our need to wear it, is symbolic of deeper reality of the human condition. whether we know it or not, feel it or not, we are trapped, covered in shame. time and time again we know the shame of knowing that we have rejected God, that we have willingly and knowingly turned our back on Him, on His way of life. and we carry that weight with us. and unfortunately it is a cycle we seem unable to break free from.

the apostle paul put it this way:

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate to do. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” [Romans 7:15, 18, 24]

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i wonder what it must have been like when adam and eve made their way out of the garden. what was the goodbye like. when my family has to say goodbye we usually gathering in a big circle, arms intertwined like a football huddle. often we will pray, asking for safety and that we will get to see one another soon. then we will each hug every other one, sometimes for several minutes because we know that this may be the last time we will see each other. we have been separated around the world for years at times.

we usually cry, we try to hide it because we are touch guys but we all know we are crying, because of how much we love each other.

and when i drive off or they leave i always feel so lonely, so by myself. on the drive home from ohio is usually in silence. i take a few minutes to pick up around the house, clean the dishes that have stacked up the sink in silence.

how much more adam and eve must have felt alone and sad when they left the garden, when they left their creator and best friend and the one who loved them so much. how piercing and painful. they must have cried and maybe even hugged God one last time, lingering, not wanting that embrace to end.

and this might be the greatest weight they had to bear. the separation. adam and eve probably never looked at each other the same way after that. they had clothes on to cover their bodies, to cover their shame. but they also had to leave the presence of God, and even though they had each other, they must have felt terribly alone walking out into that new world beyond the gates of Eden.

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i think there is a heaviness to being human. there is a weight we all carry, a gravity to the world we live in. the weight of loneliness and separation and the weight of knowing we are trapped. there is no way back. no way out.

knowing: the fear of being known

part 4

this summer my family on my mother’s side had a reunion: it was her and her sister and brother and all their kids and their kids’ kids: about 50 of us all total. i am not real big on family reunions, but these people are all really kind and nice and interested in your life, so as far as reunions go it is not too bad.

while we were there, one of the little kids, silas, my cousin’s son had his birthday. he was 4 i think, or maybe 5 and just a little short for his age. we havent really stayed in touch like we should.

the point is we had a party for him. cakes, balloons, presents, rub-on tattoos, the whole nine yards. but the highlight of the celebration had to be the little pinata my aunt kathie stung up from the rafters of the picnic pavilion.

i have been to a lot of birthday parties and seen my fair share of pinatas, but this one caught my attention. it looked like a normal pinata: a multicolored donkey covered in pink and yellow and blue tissue paper. what was different was that from its underside were attached about 30 ribbons, narrow strings hung down from the donkey’s belly which, upon closer scrutiny, i realized was actually a trap door.

to be honest i was a little bummed that there wasn’t going to be a stick and bunch of blind-folded 5 and 6 year olds, high on sweet tarts and dum-dums, swinging madly like a drunken babe ruth at this toy mule while 15 or so accountant and teacher and businessperson-type cousins and aunts and uncles and cousins dove for cover. this was going to be much more mundane.

the kids lined up very politely and waited for their turn to pull on one of the stomach ribbons, which, if they chose the right one would open the trap door, releasing the sweet guts of the beast, and, hopefully the animal instincts of my little nieces and nephews. i was still secretly hoping for some mayhem and carnage; makes for a better story i think.

one after the other, the dutifully and systematically selected and pulled a ribbon. with each pull you expect something awesome to happen and with each unsuccessful attempt the anticipation grows: this has to be the one! oh man! i thought that was going to be it for sure!

ribbon after ribbon after ribbon: you could see it in the kids’ eyes. they wanted so badly to be the one who would pull the right string, open that bad boy up. [secretly i was hoping it would be grace. you know, just to prove she was smarter than the other kids. clearly this would set our family apart.]

but time and again the ribbon just pulled harmlessly away from the body of the donkey, like we were picking lint off a sweater or brushing cheese doodle residue from some pants.

the whole process was getting just a tad ridiculous. anticlimactic actually. of course the manufacturers of the donkey pinata decided to make the actual string that opened up the trap door to be about 2 inches shorter than the others, thus basically insuring that it would be the last one to be pulled. and to be honest, when there is only one strong left, you pretty much know what is going to happen next.

all the kids jumped and there really was more candy than they could all grab at once so it took some time to get it all picked up. they had a blast. grace was jamming her take into my cargo shorts and then diving back in for more. it was a very proud moment for me.

and one of the parents, grabbed the still hanging donkey carcass by the scruff of the neck and shook out the rest of the innards onto the floor. once empty, the shell of the pinata swung aimlessly from the rafters, a mere shell, empty and now forgotten.

the reason i tell this story is that i think i am afraid i will be like this donkey and that God is somehow like these kids pulling at strings, trying to find out what is inside and what He will ultimately find is that really there is nothing there of substance. i am pretty empty, do not have much to offer and like that donkey am nothing more than a shell, a momentary amusement and activity that before long will be forgotten.

i understand this is a pretty heavy place to go during a birthday celebration for a five year old. i never said i was the life of the party. but i think the whole episode tapped into some deeper fears i have about God and maybe just about life in general.

i think i have this fear of people, God included, knowing me. i am afraid that if i really let them in there, if they pull enough of the right strings that eventually they are going to pull all of them and i am going to open up and empty out on the floor. and what will be left is just this shallow shell, this empty man that really has no substance or value or worth. women and sissies like dr. phil call it fear of intimacy.

i can see my friend, lauren, rolling her eyes.

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there is a story in the bible recounting the first time that jesus met peter.it is hard to meet people. you feel like they are sizing you up; trying to figure out who you are, what’s your angle, could they take you out if they had to. it is a lot of pressure.

jesus was teaching next to a lake which he seemed to do quite often. people were enjoying his stories and he was drawing quite a crowd as he usually did. in fact, the people were so excited and interested to hear what he had to say that they were crowding him into the water.

at this time peter and his brother, apparently not that interested in jesus, we off to the side washing their nets. they were fishermen and had just come in from a not very successful night of work. they had a couple of boats there and i guess jesus asked if he could borrow one so he could teach and not drown at the same time. so peter took him out a bit and jesus kept on preaching.

i kind of wonder what peter was doing while jesus was teaching from his boat.i mean he wasn’t really listening it seems before. he was cleaning his nets. the text doesn’t say but my hunch is he was kind of preoccupied with the bad night of fishing and wondering what his wife was going to say when he came home empty handed and where had he been all night and little peter jr. was failing hebrew and was going to end up a loser fisherman like his father and oh by the way, your mother-in-law is coming for a visit.

i am speculating because the bible doesnt say what peter was thinking, but we know he had a bad night at work and that meant he probably felt like a failure [he's a man. that is how it works for us.] and my hunch is he was more worried about that at the time than what this guy sitting in his boat was talking about.

the story goes on to say that when jesus was done talking he turned to peter and suggested they go back out and go fishing. i doubt peter analyzed it that much, but i am amazed by that. jesus had a way of knowing just where people are at and he had this incredible ability to put just the right amount of pressure on that point.

he knew that peter had had a lousy day on the lake; no fish caught. and i think he also knew, that peter was a man and so this whole fishing thing was pretty wrapped up in peter’s understanding of who he was and is as a man. so jesus says, “hey peter, let’s go back out fishing.”

and so i can understand why peter would resist a bit, “uh jesus. yeah, we have been out all night. and we have really, really been trying. we gave it our best shot. so thanks for pointing out that we are losers.”

what comes next amazes me about peter though and for the life of me i dont know what came over him. it has to be one of the most humble things i have heard in my life, because i know he is reeling and i know he doesnt want to get back on that horse and i know he feels like a total schmuck because here is some teacher gonna give him a lesson in fishing. and probably he is worried not that they won’t catch any fish, but that they will.

“but because you say so, I will let down the nets.” [luke 5:5]

i think that peter already knew something about this jesus. maybe he was listening to the sermon there as he worked on his nets. i mean jesus had been doing some pretty amazing miracles in the area and i am sure peter had at least heard about him. in fact, jesus had already been to his house. jesus had just healed peter’s mother-in-law a few days earlier from an intense fever. he knew what this guy was capable of doing.

so he knew who he was talking to. this was a guy who could do some stuff. and i think that is what he was worried about. he could feel the pressure jesus was putting on him, “hey peter, let’s go back out fishing.” to peter it probably sounded more like, “hey peter, let’s go back out fishing so i can show everyone what a loser you are.”

we all worry that we will be found out, that will be discovered to be a fraud, empty, impotent, that we really do not have what it takes. we are no different from peter. and i dont think it is isn’t that peter didnt want to know jesus, i think he just wasnt to sure about jesus knowing him. that was the problem. fear of being known.

and so we know how the story goes; they go out and let down the nets and they catch like a million fish and peter is probably like, great, thanks a lot jesus, make me look like an idiot and in fact he says something very similar. it is revealing:

“Go away from me Lord; I am a sinful man!” [luke 5:8]

i am sure jesus was understanding and he knew probably the deep place of hurt and insecurity those words came from, but i know how it probably tore at his heart too. as jesus stood on the shore, this strong and hulking man reduced to a quivering child at his feet over some fish.

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a few days ago, i brought my 6-year old daughter, grace, breakfast in bed. she likes cinnamon toast crunch and sponge bob in the morning. we have had some trouble not spilling milk lately so i reminded her rather firmly to be careful, especially in bed. milk spoils and you do not want to sleep in that.

maybe 15 minutes later i heard her wail, “oh no! this is terrible!” i ran upstairs knowing what i was going to find. she had spilled the entire bowl smack in the middle of the bed.

to be honest, i lost it. i yelled and said some things that basically called into question who she was as a little girl, her ability to be trusted, etc etc.

not one of my better moments.

but what happened next broke my heart. when i came back in the room with a towel to try to clean up, she was sitting on the bed. she had grabbed the little wooden spoon we use for spankings. she held it out to me and said, “daddy, you can give me a spanking if you want to.”

not always, but sometimes you get a sense of a moment that your child may carry with them for the rest of their life. this felt like on of those moments.

as i pulled her close to me on the edge of the bed, i wanted her to know that i was proud of her and more than that, that i believed in her. i know she is a good kid and that i know she will grow up to be a loving, caring wife, mom and friend.

you see i do not want my daughter to be afraid to fail, to be afraid for me to know who she really is. i want us to walk this road together, for her to know me and for me to help her discover her real self: a strong, beautiful, confident young woman who is not afraid to show her faults or her weaknesses. i want her to know that she is MY child, she belongs to ME and for that to inspire in her confidence and strength and assurance that she can make a difference in the world.

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one of the great things about jesus is that he sees the potential in us, or maybe it is more than potential, maybe he sees who we really are, our true nature beyond all the surface stuff and what he wants more than anything is to reveal that essence to us. he wants to reveal our true nature, our true character and somehow the reality of who we are is tied up in who he is.

what jesus said to peter next changed the course of his life.

“come, follow me and i will make you fishers of men” [matthew 4:19]

rob bell makes the observation that when a rabbi, a teacher, asks someone to follow him, it is an invitation for that person to enter into a relationship with the teacher; a relationship where the students learns who that teacher is, their “yoke” and then becomes like that teacher; is transformed through the relationship into a little version of that rabbi.

when jesus asks peter to follow him, he is, in essence, telling him that if you will go with me, believe me, i will make you into something great. what i think is great about this is that in the midst of his failure as fisherman for fish, in the middle of his own understanding of who he was, jesus speaks a new reality. this i who you are, who you are going to be peter, a fisher of people, not fish, and i am going to show you that, reveal that to you.

come, follow me.

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the weird thing about this relationship, this coming to know God is that in the process you get to learn who you are too. it seems as though the way relationships should work is something more along the line of how they do speed dating. God and i sit down in a room full of a bunch of other singles and tell each other interesting facts about ourselves:

“So, you created the earth and all it contains, interesting. Tell me about that.”

“and i am embrassed to say it, but since we are here… i wet the bed until i was 8, but i guess you already knew that: seeing as how you made me? and why would you do that?!“

and the whole time i think i am getting to know this person, this God, but really it is probably more true that i am getting to know myself better. God is revealing me to myself as we spend time at that speed-dating table.

what really happens, the true dynamic in relationships, any relationship is that as we get to know the other person, that person reveals to us who we are in the process. i see and come to understand who I am in the process of my interaction and proximity to others. this is probably why people who live in isolation for too long become crazy and start thinking they are cats or hitler or can fix the world by sending bombs and anthrax through the mail. they don’t have anyone there telling them who they are and who they are not.

It is like our identity is somehow bound up in His and the better we know Him the better we know ourselves.

i think the apostle paul understood this dynamic, because he was constantly reminding people who they were because they believed and had a relationship with Christ. the letter he wrote to the people in the city of Ephesus pretty much tries to convince those people of who they are because they know Christ. he spends a lot of time telling them they are forgiven and chosen and have access to all kinds of wisdom and power and that  we have a place of great honor reserved for us in heaven sitting next to jesus.

i confess i find it hard for me to believe that this is who i am. i see myself as guilty and abandoned, dumb and impotent and shamed. but the more i know God, the more time i spend with jesus i am starting to see myself more clearly, more accurately and i think i am taking steps in following him to a new understanding of me. and i think that is a good thing.

knowing: the process of mystery

part 3

i don’t claim to be any type of expert on relationships. in fact i would say that in the last 40 years i have thought consciously about the concept of “relationships,” what they mean, who likes them, what makes them good or bad, for maybe a grand total of 25 minutes.

and to be completely honest, if i ever thought about the nature and efficacy of relationships it was usually because some teenage hormone seemed to get loose from my loins and had made its way to my brain. and i am not really sure you can call that thinking.

dr. phil i am not.

but i am around people a lot and i am pretty observant  and it seems to me that one of the key ingredients to relationships is people. hold on, there’s more.

i think that people are fascinating. and even though i probably never consciously think about it, i like to get to know people. in fact, that is the great thing, the “getting to know” part.

i think have an interesting family. i grew up with three younger brothers and a mother and a father and a beagle named samson. and because we all lived together, i was under the impression that we were all pretty normal and to be frank, kind of boring. it took me going away to college to get some perspective on my family. usually this insight would come in the form of some kind of question from a friend or new acquaintance:

“your father did what?”

“he took us to live in a grass hut in New Guinea for a year.”

silence. a lot of times people did not know what to ask at that point. or they were trying to remember 8th grade geography. “new guinea? africa?”

“how old were you?”

“i was twelve. my youngest brother joe was 5.”

more silence. undoubtedly wondering what kind of parents would drag a five year old kid and his three brothers into the jungle to live for a year on grubs, kau kau and grass [probably]. also they were probably trying to recall the number for child protective services in their state.

“what were you doing there?”

“i don’t know exactly, but we helped some kids learn how to shoot a basketball through a hoop one of the old village elders made from some kind of jungle vine and a woven bamboo backboard.”

“oh, and we helped start a school and church.”

i think it was the hanging, gaping mouths and look of utter disbelief and shock that clued me in. we had a pretty interesting family. and usually what followed was a long conversation of them asking questions about new guinea, what we ate, what we did all day, what was it like, etc. etc.

and i dont mean to brag but i could see that they were enjoying this. this getting to know me and my weird family. it was not unlike unwrapping a present at Christmas. you see that little corner of paper that is just sticking out and you want so badly to pull on it, rip it a little extra, see what’s inside.

we love the process of discovery. we love unwrapping things, seeing what is underneath, what is really there.

christo, a German performance artist, once wrapped and entire building, the Reichstag, in berlin, in more than a million square feet of material. the first obvious question is why in the world would anyone wrap a building in more than a million square feet of polypropelene, but perhaps the question is actually the answer.

when things are hidden, something in us comes alive that drives us to discovery, to unwrapping the mystery. we want to know more. and we take great joy when we do. in fact, it is often in the process of unwrapping, of a mystery revealed that we find our greatest joy, we find the most life. it is when there is no mystery, no revealing. just like Christmas and the Reichstag, when the wrapping is all taken off things just go back to normal.

____________________

i have grown up in sunday school. we were one of those families where if the door to the church was open, we were walking through it. i cut my teeth on Abraham, joseph and moses. the stories of david knocking down that giant and daniel surviving the lions have been deeply ingrained in my personal religious lexicon. and as a kid those stories absolutely fascinated me. but to be honest it seemed like every week we just kind of rotated between david and goliath, noah and the ark and daniel and the lions, jesus and the fishes and loaves with maybe a little jonah sprinkled in if there was a fifth sunday of the month.

i loved God, but it was getting a bit repetitive for me. maybe that’s why i tuned out some in high school. i think i figured i had God all unwrapped. there wasnt that much more to know. and frankly i had started to notice other things like girls and sports and the popular crowd. i guess i decided to take my chances there for a while. seemed more interesting.

and i met some interesting people and discovered some interesting things i did not know before. like the time i discovered my prom date had left the prom with a kid from the diving team. i did not know she would do that. interesting.

it took me awhile to get back to God to be honest. like i said before, i kind of figured i had unwrapped all there was to know; no more mystery. in retrospect i should have wondered a little bit though if my sunday school teachers and pastors weren’t holding out on me. after all the story of david and goliath [sunday school version] ends with david talking nicely with king saul in his tent.

“oh yes, good work young man, way to slay the giant. you have saved Israel. here is some candy.”

“sure thing king. my pleasure. well i am off to do my homework and then to read stories to old people at the nursing home.”

“good kid that David, he’ll go far some day. mark my words.”

of course that is not at all how it ends in the Bible version. in that version David lops off the giant’s head with his own sword, a particular appendage that happens to be full of about 30 gallons of blood. at the end of the fight,as the Philistines are running for their lives, David is dragged into the king’s tent, covered i am sure in blood and guts.

[i don't know for a fact, but one time i was in nepal and some guys tried to cut a goat's head off with a machete. it took them about an hour to hack that thing clean from the body. it was not a neat and clean process. a sword is very different from a light saber.]

and so here is this kid, maybe 12 years old, covered in blood, still holding the severed head of the most feared enemy of israel, standing before the king. and do you know what king saul asks him?

“whose son are you, young man?”

who are you?

____________________

i think that when jesus was on earth, for most of his life, people probably just thought he was some ordinary dude. we know that he was not particularly good looking or popular or good at sports. he didnt really stand out in a crowd. i dont think he won class president or was voted “best dressed” senior year. he was just ordinary.

the thing is i don’t think anyone was really able to look beneath the surface, to the see the hidden potential there. maybe at the temple, that one time in jersalem when he got left behind by his parents and he was found three day later debating and discussing jewish law with some of the expert lawyers of his day.

they were a little impressed. the bible says that everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.

and i am sure people were starting to wonder, in their own minds, if not aloud, “who is this kid?”

i think it is kind of exciting when you come across someone like that. someone that makes you ask, who is this person? we are drawn to them, because something in us loves to unravel a good mystery. we love that process.

my younger brother jon has been walking though south america with his faithful companion, a donkey named judas [ironic i know]. they are quite a sight i am sure; blond-haired, blue-eyed kid with a donkey. that is a sight pretty much anywhere in the world, and south america is no exception.

the new york times did a story on him a year ago or so [2.23.08]. this is an excerpt from that article:

JONATHAN DUNHAM is walking the earth. Assisting him in this endeavor is his donkey, named Judas. They have stopped to rest for a few days in Colinas de San Lorenzo, a slum in this dusty town on the cattle-raising plains of northwestern Venezuela.

On a recent Sunday morning, reggaetón blared from a house near the abandoned shack where Mr. Dunham has been sleeping on the floor.

Barefoot children wandered up to his hovel, petting Judas. They giggled and stared at Mr. Dunham, 33, whose disheveled look evokes that of a graduate student for whom surfing, or maybe foosball, is high art.

“Are you an athlete?” one of the children asked him. “Or a missionary?”

“No,” Mr. Dunham replied. “I’m just a guy.”

At one point, the venezuelan military stopped him an interrogated him for 8 hours, trying to figure out who he was; it took that long for him to convince that the CIA had not gone to some sort of top-secret donkey operatives, trying to overthrow south american dictatorships.

there is a story of jesus. once day he was in a boat with a bunch of his buddies who were fishermen. they were on a pretty big lake and a storm came up. jesus was asleep in the front but everyone else was freaking out, totally scared out of their brains because the storm was so massive and violent. they thought they were going to die.

jesus was sleeping like a baby.

i think they looked at him all curled up, maybe sucking his thumb [not really] and wondered what is wrong with this guy?

they ran over and woke him and basically said, “hey, all the normal people are freaking out here man! what’s your deal?!”

and jesus was like, “whatever dude. relax.”

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. [mark 4:39]

i don’t know how that would strike you, but i think i would ask the same question the disciples asked next, “what kind of a man is this?”

and i am not sure if i would be afraid or intrigued or totally mystified or what, but i think i would want to follow this guy. i think i would want to figure out who in the world this guy was.

i would not want to miss jesus healing a paralytic, dropped down from a hole in the roof, i would want to be there when the murmurs rising from those looking on turned to gasps when the lame man jumped up, able to walk again, finally.

“We have never seen anything like this!” [mark 2:12]

or to hear jesus teach and to mingle in the crowd, hearing the whispers:

“Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?” [matthew 13:54]

or to watch jesus, full or love and compassion for a man who could not talk, possessed by a demon that had a hold of his tongue, drive out those spirits; a voice for the voiceless. and to stand among the crowds, feeling them swell in awe.

“Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.” [matthew 9:33]

there had to be this sense of wonder and anticpation with those who were followers of jesus, those who walked behind him on the dusty streets, through the back roads and villages of israel: what is going to happen today? what do you think he will do? what do you think we are going to see?

this is the beauty of mystery. you don’t get it all at once. it is revealed one step at a time: a piece here, a portion there. it is an unfolding, an unwrapping of a person over time. this is the process of mystery.

knowing: the quantity and quality of God

part 2

there is a tension between quality and quantity. and since i am divorced and have a daughter i know this tension very well. i am pulled between the two: never having enough time, and always wishing, hoping the time we share could be the best, or at least better.

this past july grace and i took a trip to idlewild up in PA. idlewild is one of the oldest amusement parks in the United States. i think it got started somewhere around the beginning of the 1900s. it is the kind of place where you can just imagine men in suits and wide-brimmed hats, the kind barber shop quartets wear today, walking arm in arm with ladies in silk lace dresses carrying parasols; young children run under the arbor trees to the carousel or the Ferris wheel pulled along by the smell of cotton candy, caramel apples, corn dogs. the wooden roller coaster roars in the corner through ancient oaks, families picnic under pavilions and shelters while 4 college students, music majors i’m sure, belt out old show tunes to a half dozen patrons sticky, tired and sunburned, trying to give a minute of relief to their tired feet and legs.

it is a poetic place. a place where memories have been made for literally decades. thousands of families have come to idelwild and now pictures of mom and dad and brother and sister and aunt and uncle and grandmother and grandfather rest on mantelpieces, on bookshelves across the country.

we arrived, just the two of us. i had two things in mind: fun and a lot of it.

normally, trying to be a good dad, i try to keep some sort of regulator on what we do and do not do. in short, i don’t let grace just do whatever she wants to do, but this day was a little different. it was pretty much her call. and i think i caught her by surprise a little bit. i dont normally jst let her do whatever she wants, but this was her day with her dad. it didnt take her long to get in the swing of it:

she wanted to ride the ferris wheel, so we rode the ferris wheel.

she wanted some cotton candy, we got some cotton candy.

she wanted to play in a giant room filled with plastic multi-colored balls for approximately 75% of our time. we played in the plastic ball room.

she wanted a $9 face painting of a tiger that made her look like some kind of weird Vegas show girl. she got a face painting.

the point of the whole day was simple. i wanted to be with my little girl. i wanted her to have the best day. and i wished it would never end.

as we were walking to the car, hand in hand, she said to me, as full of conviction as a little girl can be, “dad, this was the best day of my life! i wish we could do this every day!”

now as prone to hyperbole as she is, i had to agree. that was the best day. and i wished we could do it forever too.

i am pretty sure that i have some distorted views of God. i think we all do probably, which is why He so longs for us to get to know Him. this is what i think most of the time: God is not that interested in spending time with me, and if he was or did, we would probably just talk about theology or how He did all this stuff and isnt He great.

i dont think it would be at all like going to idlewild with my dad.

in the book of john, towards the end, jesus is praying for his disciples. i think that he is really trying, really hoping that they will get it, that they will understand who he is and the significance of what he is about to do on the cross will have for this relationship between his Father and his friends, the disciples.

jesus prays something like this in john chapter 17:

“Father, the time has come for me to do what i came here to do.

You have given me the ability and permission to give eternal life to my friends. And this is eternal life, to know You, intimately and me, the one you have sent for them.”

now that is not an exact translation at all. and i am no biblical scholar, but as i understand that is the basic sense of what jesus wants for these guys. he wants to connect with them, to know them. and that is awesome, but what is more interesting almost is what is wrapped up in that little phrase “eternal life”

now, like i said i am no bible scholar, but i can use the internet which was put together by a lot of people a whole lot smarter than me and this is what i found out about that phrase eternal life by looking at the meaning of those words in the original greek.

that word “eternal” is from the greek word “aionios” which means “eternal.” i mean it really does; it means “without beginning and end, that which always has been and always will be.”

ok, hang on here, i am about to get really deep and theological on you. so when jesus talks about the kind of relationship he wants with you and me and his disciple friends, the kind that happens when we know him; he says that it is eternal, without beginning or end, that which has been and that which always will be.

let that sink in for a moment. that which has been and that which always will be.

i am almost 40. i am a pretty normal guy. not too nerdy. i have had some good friends over the years, guys that i have spent a lot of time with. even friends who moved into my bedroom when their parents kicked them out.

but even in the best case, i have never had a friendship that has always been and always will be. even my relationship with my daughter had a beginning and in some ways ends every time she goes to be with her mother. i never feel like i have enough time with her. never. the time always comes for us to say goodbye, for us to head out to the parking lot and drive home. there is always goodbye. and somehow we know that is not how it is supposed to be. we need more time. we were made for lots and lots of time together.

and jesus says this, this is how it is with me. we get forever, past, present and future. i will always be with you. “i will never leave you or forsake you.” psychologist [probably] call this quantity time. i call it awesome.

but there is another dimension to knowing jesus, to knowing God. some genius [seriously] translated it into “life” in english but i think that is a woefully inadequate word.

the greek word is “zoe.” and it is rich. this kind of life is more than just having a pulse. it is more than getting up at 6am to shave, shower and climb into your 4-door sedan for another day in one of a million cubicles, in one of a million office buildings, in one of a thousand cities among billions of other people doing it just the same way, waiting for those two-weeks at myrtle beach where we get to dig sand out of our crevices, lather on aloe lotion because we fell asleep in the beach chair, fight traffic and a million other people for a seat by the Elvis memorabilia at the Hard Rock cafe. only to strap on the suit and wing tips to do it all over again next year.

that is not zoe life. zoe life speaks to a certain quality. and jesus prayed that his guys and you and me would experience a quality of life unparalleled. zoe life is idlewild on the perfect summer day with your dad.

greek scholars on the internet tell me that zoe life is the “absolute fullness of life” a life that is “active and vigorous” a life that is “fresh and strong.” this is not an ordinary life, this is not the metro-boulot-dodo repetitive monotonous, meaningless life of the postmodern, existential world in which we live. this is something wholly different.

this is a new quality of life. this is the life spent with jesus.

the disciple john talks about this life more than just about anyone. zoe life appears more in his gospel than in any other. in fact, he talks about it more than any other writer in the new testament. he is obsessed with zoe life. probably because he saw it, experienced it, walked with jesus as he brought the dead back to life.

one of my favorite stories about jesus is found in john’s book. jesus is out walking around one day, his disciples jet to get some food so JC sits down by a well. around noon a woman, who is alone, comes to get some water. this is unusual for two reasons.

in first century culture, water collection is a very social activity, this is where you get your info, the scoop on what is going on in the village. the well with the girls, for the first century woman, is like People magazine, the E! channel and Us Weekly all rolled into one. And the best time for the latest gossip was definitely not noon. i don’t know if you have ever been to the middle east at lunch time, but one thing is for sure. it is hot. no one wants to do anything, much less carry a huge, heavy jar of water. no. water collection happens in the morning, when it is cool.

No self-respecting woman was going to miss all that gossip and time with the girls. and no one was going to make life any harder than it had to be.

and that’s the problem, this woman had a story and it was a story that meant she was no longer welcome. she collected her water alone, at noon.

i do not think it is a stretch to say this is probably not the life she dreamed of as a little girl.

enter jesus.

john the disciple goes on to tell us that jesus asks her for a drink. she is surprised. it is not usual for a jewish man to speak to a samaritan woman [yeah, she was half-jew, half-not jew. again, not that great in those days and probably not her dream.]

one of the great things about jesus is that he gets right to the point. it is a little unfair because he is God and all but he knows all these things about her: he knows that the reason she is alone is because she has spent her life chasing men, probably in the hopes that she will be happy and fulfilled and complete and live something like an awesome life, but it just hasn’t worked out and now she is shacked up with the next dude. he knows all this. he knows that her life sucks. and he wants something so much more for her.

she just doesnt know that he knows so i am sure it floors her when he gets right to the point:

“whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst ; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal [zoe].”

she is confused and taken off guard of course beacus she is like “yeah give me this water. i hate coming to this stupid well.” the point isn’t so much that she gets it right away as wha is the heart of jesus.

i want so much better for you. i want for you a life that is deeper and richer and full of vigor and passion and LIFE. i want more for you than coming to this well, filling your jar, turning around and going home, alone again, to your dead and lifeless life.

____________________

i am only starting to scratch the surface of the quantity and quality of life that God wants with me. as a dad i get it. i want nothing more than eternal life, full and meaningful and forever life, with my daughter.

as a man, i am more like the woman at the well: “yeah give me some water, my life sucks.” and i have no idea what is really being offered, but i want it. i really, really do.

i know this is how i am made, to know God. and i know this is the heart of jesus.

knowing: God and the Look

part 1

when my daughter grace was about 3 years old she, like most kids her age, did not like to go to bed. she would often try to come up with a litany of excuses to try to delay having to climb under the covers and turn out the lights.

four staple delays were employed every night without fail:

1. a Bible story. usually she asked for more than one chapter in the little children’s Bible i had bought her when she was two. it had nice pictures. she could tell the good guys from the bad guys depending on if they were smiling or frowning. i am pretty sure she will be very disappointed if Jesus is NOT wearing a white tunic with a light blue sash in heaven.
2. then a song. almost always it was “Jesus Loves Me,” accompanied by a back rub, or  a “rub back” as she called it. she would extend the delay by asking for me to also rub her arms, neck, legs and if she really wanted to push it her fingers and toes, each separately. “but dad, it feels so awesome” and she would let out this little moan. pretty effective delay strategy i must say.
3. next a prayer. this usually was fairly painless. she didn’t really get the whole idea of praying at that point as she couldn’t see or hear or feel God. i can see her point.
4. finally a cold drink. usually this entailed me going back downstairs to get her “sippy” filled with ice water. this is even the case when there was a sippy beside the bed still full. “old” water was unacceptable of course. as i left she would, without fail, sit up and yell down after me, “and remember, new water with ICE!” with special emphasis added to ensure i didn’t put in plastic or cereal or cat food or some other abomination.

once the default delays had been enacted, we moved in the freestyle portion of the program. usually this was some combination of additional hugs and kisses or retrieval of some kind of stuffed animal [invariable downstairs]. occasionally, she would get really creative. this usually didn’t happen until she was desperate and i was at the door, hand on the light switch.

“Dad! Wait!”

“What is it Grace!” i was usually a little on edge at this point, having made 3-4 round trips downstairs, sung all the verses of “Jesus Loves Me” and done a full-scale recon for a stuffed skunk named “Stinky” [of course].

“Umm.” this was a sure sign of a delay strategy.

“OK. Good night.”

“No! Wait!”

“Hurry, it is time for bed.”

“Come here I want to ask you something.”

“OK, Make it quick.” reluctantly i walked back over to her bed, waiting.

“Sit down, please” i sat down.

it was at this point that i realized this kid was a whole lot smarter than me. There was not a lot that she could say at the moment that was not going to annoy or irritate me, but she found it. she figured out the perfect question.

“So Dad, tell me about your day.”

there are a times in the life of being a parent that you look at your kids and just wonder. you wonder at the creativity of a God who put that child together. you wonder at their beauty and their innocence. you wonder how could it be that they came from your loins. you wonder if there is any way you are going to survive the next 15 years until they get married or move out or go to college or whatever.

her obvious ulterior motives aside, the beauty of that question was that within it were hidden two of the foundational longings of the human heart: we all want to be known and we all want to know that we are not alone.

i love it that she is interested in me. and i realize too that i really, really want to know this little girl. who is she? for some reason, in that moment, she looking up ate me from her bed, tucked in, i understand and see the person behind this shell of a body, i see the her behind the her, if that makes sense and i am drawn in.

i think this is what Sartre meant by the Look. that feeling, that moment between two people when we realize that we are not alone in the universe. that pull that draws into wanting to know, in a real metaphysical and epistemological way, an other. it is hard to describe but it happened to me in that moment with my daughter, on the edge of that bed.

j.i. packer in his classic work Knowing God, made a profound distinction. he said that there is a profound difference between knowing about God and knowing God. knowing about something consists perhaps in a list of facts and propositions, but knowing something, or someone is existentially and experientially very different.

and when jesus prayed for his disciples on john chapter 17, when he prayed that they would know God; he meant in the latter form. that we would experience God, that we would know Him in a intimate, personal way. that we would connect the way i connect with my daughter in those moments, sitting on the edge of the bed, lights turned off. that we would share the Look with God Himself.

the greek word that we translate as “know” is actually an idiom for the most intimate act or connection experienced by a husband and wife. it is the connection made when lover’s embrace one another, hold each other in arms of familiarity and love.

i think we have maybe experienced this, this knowing, at times with people in our lives, a son or daughter, wife or husband, a friend or even a foe, but the thought of that kind of intimacy with the eternal, transcendent God is beyond me.

but somewhere i know that this is how i am made. and that i was made for God and that He wants me to know Him as He knows me.