Growing up, at the time in which I did, I was, maybe, the last of an age of kids who could freely roam the streets of their neighborhood with nary a thought from their parents of their safety or even where they were most of the time and while, as a parent, the idea of Jameson being out somewhere and us not know where he is, is utterly horrifying, my parents lived in a totally different world than me and Lesley occupy. But in my growing up years, in my neighborhood, this took the form of a 3 or 4 house rotation with the kids of the neighborhood congregating a one house to play basketball, another house to play video games, yet another to shoot pool, and finally mine that had a huge trampoline in the back yard that attracted many a young man and many more wrestling matches upon said trampoline. But little of these meetups would have happened if we were left to our own two feet.
From the Start
In my office, sitting on a small table just as you walk in, sits one of most prized possessions—a chessboard. The chess set, given to me by good friends of mine and my wife’s, Eric and Lizzie, on their return from the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan where they had just met and were now bringing home their adopted daughter, Katia, from an orphanage in Bishkek. The board itself is made of a wooden frame with what I can only guess is either sheep or yak leather stretched across and laced into the sides with the alternating squares being tanned to a darker or lighter degree to distinguish the two colors. The pieces, each hand carved from wood local to the country with the dark pieces stained in a deep brown color and the light pieces lacquered and sealed with the grain of the wood visible from just underneath the lacquer. It is a piece of art as much as it is a chess set and I love it presence in my office as much as I love to play with it.
Out of the Water
When I was 15, I took a trip with a group of high schoolers to a Young Life camp in Colorado called Frontier Ranch. For those who don’t know, Young Life is a Christian organization that seeks to reach out to high school age folks and bring them the gospel in a manner more geared to that age and period of life and when I was in high school I was way into Young Life. The summer of that trip, I had spent a month and a half working on the staff of their camp in the mountains of North Carolina only to spend a couple of weeks traveling to Colorado and back on a chartered bus with 50 other high school age folks from Eastern North Carolina. And the trip to Colorado was amazing—a collection of excursions to a great many tourist destinations in between my home on the east coast and Colorado and experiences as diverse as stopping at amusement parks and whitewater rafting and hiking and looking back I cannot imagine how much that trip costed my parents but at 15, I’m not sure I had the best understanding of the value of a dollar, anyways.
Still Seeking...
When I was growing up, for the first few years, I remember traveling a few hours down I-95 to visit my grandparents in the town of Santee, SC. And because this was before the time of DVD players in cars, or iPhones, or any kind of hand-held gaming device, or the ability to choose the music in the car, really much of anything to do, my brothers and I would soon grow restless. To keep us entertained, though in all honesty it was perhaps more to keep themselves from going insane, my parents would play different games with us that required looking outside the car. Early on, my parents would offer a shiny quarter to the person who first saw the “big sombrero” at South of the Border in Dillon, South Carolina.
Traveling with Mary, Pt. 3: My Soul Magnifies God
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly fascinated by the study of the heavenly that are splayed across the night sky. If I had to pinpoint the time that this started for me, it would almost certainly be the first time I looked up into the African night sky from a little village in Malawi and saw the perfectly formed shape of the Southern Cross standing out in a scape in which you could see the entirety of every constellation known to humankind. From that night, I have found myself looking up into the firmament more times than I can count and being amazed by the immenseness of it all. So it was that a couple of weeks ago, I read that there was a comet that had entered the viewable range of the planet and, like I said, being something of a space nerd these days, rushed out to see it. And with space app in hand to map out the luminous darkness above me, I found Christmas Comet 46P.
Traveling with Mary, Pt 2: Finding Our True Home
She could not wait to get away. For she knew the life journey upon which she was now about to embark. A journey that would include all the regular things that a woman experiences on the path to motherhood. Those joyous moments of baby kicking and rolling over, of having dreams about his future, of knitting little outfits for him to first wear. Those less than joyous moments that come with the reality of gestation. The morning sickness that seems to go on all day. The swollen ankles that prevent one from slipping even her loosest sandals on her feet. The fears that come with growing a baby inside of you—will he be able to see? Hear? Speak? Will he have ten fingers and ten toes? But for her, there was an added stress to pregnancy. For her, from the moment she knew that she was with child she also knew that he was bound for regal greatness. That he would be the messiah for which the Jewish faith had been longing seemingly forever.
Traveling with Mary, Pt 1: With Fear and Trembling
The days, weeks, months went by as she waited to be married to her betrothed, he beloved. The time positively crept by as seconds felt like minutes and minutes like hours. There was so much planning that went into these occasions in those days. Hebrew celebrations around marriage were times of great joy and hope for the newly cemented couple. Vows would be made as the man would leave his father, his mother, and hold fast to his new wife, their flesh uniting to form a single, unbreakable bond. There would be a great feast, the first wine of the season would be shared, toasts would be made, everyone would be merry. But when you are the bride, all these things can become a bit overwhelming.
Who's In Charge Around Here?
I’d like to believe that I enjoy the holiday season about as much as anyone can. Just thinking about this next month or so the precipice on which we now rest, conjures up images and memories in my mind of these times in years passed. Time with my grandparents, when all of them were still with us and both sides of the family would gather together. Remembrances of going to aunts’ and uncles’ houses to share holiday meals. Of playing with my cousins outside while the adults talked about adult stuff on the inside. Of going to church for special services. Growing up, one of the ways that my family set its internal calendar around this time of year was with the church service that took place each year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It never felt like the holidays had begun until we, as a church family, gathered in the sanctuary of my home church where we would triumphantly sing, “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Each year the service would conclude with people offering up what they were thankful for and, at some point, without fail the elderly matriarch of the congregation would stand and solemnly say, “salvation,” and we would all know that meant there was nothing else that needed to be said and we could now enter our nation’s day of Thanksgiving.
Breaking Out
Some 14.5 billion years ago, in some far off portion of space, there was a huge explosion of pure, unadulterated energy. From that split second, emerged all the matter that is found in the universe. In an instant, atoms started whirling and connecting to form more complex compounds like the air we breathe, the water we drink, the space that we occupy. Energy began to be thrust in every direction pushing the boundaries of the macrocosm to a shape and area that is unimaginable. Planets and solar systems and galaxies too numerous to count began to populate this immense and ever expanding space, the full extent of which we will never comprehend. In that eruption of uncontainable energy, our planet, one of the only planets that we know of that can sustain life, a relatively small planet in a relatively small solar system, one of thousands in our corner of the galaxy, with a fairly weak sun compared to other stars that power other solar systems, was also flung into place.
There's Always Enough!
Of all the things that dot the landscape of my recountings of growing up, perhaps, no single moment is as foundational to the development of the person that I am than as the time that we spent around the dinner table. Now, it was not because any of the food was particularly memorable, I cannot think of more than a handful of individual meals whose menus I could readily recount, nor was it because of momentous conversations that changed the course of my or my family’s life, those normally happened in other spaces and at other times. No, what remains firmly etched into the deepest recesses of my memory is the way that our house and dinner table were always a space with an open invitation for any and all to come and break bread with us.
Hear, O Israel
We humans are curious creatures. And we are curious because we find ourselves constantly bouncing back and forth like a pinball between our better angels and our darkest demons. For, on the one hand we have imagination and creativity, we have the ability to dream dreams and have visions, to picture a world tomorrow different than it is today and then make it happen, to progress beyond where we believe is possible. But we are also an broken group, forever haunted by the spectre of an innocent past to which we may never return. On the one hand, we have the ability to communicate with one another through the use of words. And we can put those words together in ways that express emotions both good and bad, anger and love, fear and calm. We can write Shakespearian sonnets of beauty and love. But we can also use words to cause harm to one another. We can use words that demean communities of people to which we do not belong, we can use words to deny our common humanity, we can use words that make the other feel as if she does not belong here or anywhere. On the one hand, we have the ability to take fertile ground and use it to grow all manner of fruits and vegetables. From crisp sweet corn to tart peaches. From delicious apples to delectable blackberries. But at the same time, we have the ability to horde what we produce for ourselves and deny sustenance to many within humanity, many that we call our brothers and our sisters in Christ.
The Church of the Misfits
Being of a certain age and casting my vision back into my childhood, I can remember being Presbyterian in a town in which at least the mold of being a Presbyterian was thought to be indicative both about your standing in the community, and about your perceived financial health. Our town, like most little southern towns was neatly divided between Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, with a smattering of other denominations. And while there is a certain amount of ebb and flow that happens in churches, sometimes the Baptists have all the inertia towards growth and life, sometimes the Methodists, when I was growing up while under the leadership of my friend and mentor Sam Shumate, it was my church that possessed that movement and that energy. We were the “it” church in town.
What Do We Lack?
On July 4th, 1854, seeking to leave behind the existence that he had known and in search of life in its purest form, life in its essence, the great philosopher and writer, Henry David Thoreau, began a two year experiment by moving to a piece of property owned by his friend and mentor, the poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The property, located on Walden pond, some three miles from his long-time family homestead, outside of Concord, Massachusetts, represented a chance to break away from the trappings of the civilized life. Inspired by the need to strip away the stuff of life and delve deep into his own practice of transcendentalism and meditation, Thoreau spent two years living on the small piece of property exploring the meaning of life and seeking to know what it was that drove humankind to exist in the manner that it did. At the end of his experiment, he wrote his classic, Walden.
Sisyphean Faith
Ernest Hemingway, in addition to being among the greatest writers to emerge from the United States, struggled with depression and mental instability much of his life. Though a man of great acclaim and ability, he never found any degree of lasting satisfaction with the life that he was given. So it was that Hemingway was constantly searching for what came next trying sport fishing, safaris, covering wars, and writing, to seek to fill in the longing, the void that had seemingly possessed him throughout his time on this earth. So phrenetic was his energy and discontent his spirit that he could not even bring himself to write sitting down but instead used a series of taller tables on which he placed his typewriter and would routinely fire off a tremendous number of typed pages in a single sitting. He was, by all accounts, a monster and it was his family and a string of wives that bore the brunt of his monstrous behaviors. He was mercurial, at times, the life of the Parisian party while other times he was painfully sad and reclusive. He had violent outbursts when he was drinking, which was often, so much so in fact that by the time that he had retired to his hunting camp in Idaho, his liver was nearly completely shut down.
Letting Go, Letting God
Growing up my father was bound and determined to teach me the value of the hard-earned dollar. So it was, from the time I was 16 that he found me some of the toughest jobs I can imagine for a highschooler. The summer after I turned 16, I worked full-time for a gas station making minimum wage and my primary task at the gas station was to stock the beer cooler—a task that took hours of being in the cold only to watch the fruits of my labor be wiped out in the 15 minutes or so that followed the shift change at the Black & Decker factory directly across the street from us. The summer following that, I worked in the warehouse of a moving and storage company where it was regularly about 100,000 degrees while we moved furniture, and boxes, and a baby grand piano, once, I think. The summer after I graduated high school, dad had me working at an industrial rental supply company assisting with the maintenance of the equipment. And to this day, I am pretty sure I could take apart and rebuild the engine of a Bobcat T190. So it was that as the summer after my freshman year at Clemson was drawing close and not wanting to see what the next hard job my father could come up with for me, I decided to work towards my own employment, which, I imagine, was his goal all along.
Baptized in Water, Baptized in Spirit
If I’m being completely honest, can I tell you that it is not always easy to be a parent in this world. There are distractions and temptations and issues at school that no one in my generation could have ever even conceived of. Each generation of the young see the world in wildly different ways from that of their elders and can’t begin to understand why we can’t see it way as well. I’m increasingly aware of the perspective my grandmother had, for those in my Wednesday Night Bible study, that’s my “not pure in heart” grandmother, but I am increasingly aware of the perspective that she possessed when she declared one day that she was too old to learn new things and that she was done. And, to a certain extent, she has something of a point. There is almost a mandate for parents to remain at least as technologically advanced as your children so that you can keep up, to know the latest trends that they will want to partake in, eventually, to keep up with which girls or guys they are into because sooner or later, in my case, sooner, you will have to talk to them about girls and guys.
Believing in the Thoroughly Unbelievable
When my older son was younger, maybe a little older than the middle one is now, we tried to introduce CS Lewis’ famed classics, The Chronicles of Narnia, to him and following an extended refusal to listen to them because Mr. Tumnus, the half fawn, half-man, who is the first character one encounters in Narnia, was naughty, he eventually set his keen sense of justice and sharp awareness of right and wrong aside and gave the books another chance. And he loved them. Before long we had finished the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and had moved on to The Horse and His Boy, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and, finally,The Last Battle. Lewis, originally conceived of the stories for his then young Goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, the daughter of a friend of Lewis’s and in the first book, the aforementioned, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis makes the central figure a young girl named Lucy who along with her two older brothers, and one older sister find their way to the mythical land of Narnia.
Planting the Seeds
On top of a mountain in Tennessee called Iron Mountain on about 100 acres of land sits a house that my grandmother purchased about 30 years ago. My grandmother, preparing to retire from the marketing research firm that she had founded, wanted a place to go where she could both entertain guests and also get away from the hustle and bustle of the business world. Though a savvy entrepreneur who comfortable in the boardrooms of Phillip Morris, Pepsi, Burger King, and others, she was, at the end of the day, a small town lady, with limited needs and the desire to, for the most part, disappear for large swaths of time.
Sheer Silence
Elijah has a problem. Elijah, a prophet of God, perhaps on of the greatest prophets of God in the Jewish tradition, literally running for his life from a hostile army. And he is running, we are told, because immediately before this accounting of Elijah running for his life, that Elijah had just, with the help of God, made the king and queen of Israel look like fools. The scripture tells us that Israel had fallen under the rule of a ruler who was hostile to God and the ways of God. This ruler, Ahab, sought instead to worship the Baals, that is the false gods in Israel. At the same time, Israel had been suffering a drought for three years, that is three years in which the sky refused to allow one drop of rain to touch the parched Israelite fields, three years since a crop was able to be grown, three years since food had been produced in Israel and it is not hard to imagine that if you take away water, food, and their ability to take care of themselves that frustration and anger and disillusionment and despair are going to quickly follow, and this situation is no different, tensions in the country were running high.
Be Like Children
When we are born and as we begin to enter into the childhood of our lives the world is a magical place, a place teeming with life, and angels, and magic—a place where each day brings something new to be explored. The woods spoke to us with whispers of persons, cultures, tribes, long since past who roamed in these exact locations. The winds carried the silent musings of creation taking with it rustling leaves and sand off of long dirt roads. To commune with nature simply meant walking outside and into the dew of an early morning, taking time to observe the sunrise as without fail it greeted you each day, or feeling the droplets of a late spring rainstorm replenishing the earth with the necessary ingredients for new growth until whole cycle began again. The silence of snows of winter were something to experience with reverence as Robert Frost poems came to life all around you until your bones were chilled with the air and the clouds and sky and the inability to distinguish where on ended and the next began. And of course all this was a gift from God—God’s magnificence on display for everyone to see.