Night-Time Encounter: BTP (Before Trailer Park)

As I mentioned earlier, our family ended up in the trailer park when I was older than 3.  But, before that, we lived in a typical 50's-era residence.  From what little I recall, when you came in the front door you were in the living room, most of it was on the right.  To the left was a dining area and kitchen.  Walking straight ahead would take you down a hall to where there were two or three bedrooms and a bathroom.  Of course, to a pre-schooler, everything looked much larger than it would to my adult eyes.  I have driven by this little house a few times in the years since.  Nondescript, unremarkable, now old and in disrepair.

There is little from the handful of years spent there that I can recall, no doubt due to my very young age.  However, there are two or three vivid events from BTP (Before Trailer Park).  This is one.

Normally a sound sleeper, I woke in the middle of the night and ended up walking down the hallway and sitting on the couch in the living room.  The room was dimly lit by moonlight or street-lighting seeping in through the curtains of the front window.  So there I sat, wide awake in the dark.  The other side of the room seemed far away.  But not far enough away, for suddenly I saw standing there two figures.  Shadowy, dark, ill-defined.  What I saw looked like two men dressed in black robes belted at the waist.  On their heads were cone-shaped, brimmed hats that resembled a classic witches hat, though not nearly so tall.  The gloom and the hat brims hid their faces.  In my young mind, there was a blend of curiosity and dread.  Instinctively I knew that they were not there for my good.  I sat, too frightened to move or call out.  Next, there came a sense that I was safe, not because these beings were no longer dangerous.  And as I watched, it seemed they got smaller or farther away or both -- almost as if they backed away from me by going outside the house and towards the street light.  Then, they were simply gone.  I felt immensely relieved and decided it was safe to go back to bed.  So I padded down the hall, got in bed, and went back to sleep.

Was it a dream?  I remember it very clearly, and told my Mom about it soon afterward.  There are similar accounts by others here, here and here.  My experience happened well before our family became immersed in the local Assemblies of God church; before I had any notion of angels or demons.  That said, one of the realities of the Bible is that it leaves more room for spiritual beings (both good or ill) than our scientific culture can often tolerate.  All I can say with certainty is that this remains a marker in my life, a reminder that the fullness of human experience cannot be measured, quantified, calibrated, data-modeled.  It can only be known as one encounters it.

Valentine for A Homeschool Mom

The following was published anonymously as my contribution to a very small local newsletter at the beginning of the month.  My hope was that it would rekindle a deeper, sacred heart of husbands for wives, wives for husbands.  I am posting it here because it IS, after all, Valentine's Day and there is but one home-educating mother who was and is the inspiration for my romantic ruminations.

Dear One,

Where to begin?  We have traveled some distance from our first Valentine's day.  I loved you then, and I love you now, though neither of us are quite the same.  I have smiled (to myself) as you have struggled bravely with the changes time and child-bearing have brought.  You are still beautiful.

Your daily activities seem endless.  When other women take their education and their talents and their passion to the work world where they can dress nicely and receive glowing annual reviews and actually get paid for their efforts, you toil diligently in near anonymity instilling timeless truths into the fertile ground of a few young minds.  Our children, the fruit of our marriage. These little images of you and I have no understanding of the magnitude of your task and will not until they are grown and someday have children of their own.  Even my understanding of all you do is limited to what I see from the edges of the day.  Yet, your heavenly Father sees fully your hidden labor of love.  I am grateful for you.

But, this is not Mother's Day, it is Valentine's Day.  So, for all that I am thankful to God for the gift you are to our children, what you are to me is an even greater treasure (in my ever-so-slightly-selfish manly heart).  For, in spite of all you invest in our children, you somehow have time for me.  You listen to my mundane complaints about the job, you make sure I am fed and clothed, you allow time for my linear mind to grind away to conclusions your intuition discovered long ago, you appreciate my dreams.  In all my failures and triumphs, your love is constant.  You are the one who inspires me, whose eyes look best and brightest in candlelight, whose smile affirms like none other, whose prayer sustains me even when I am not aware of it.  In the 'for better or for worse' of married life, you have been the better.  You are precious to me.

I am thankful that centuries ago a priest named Valentine had the courage to resist an emperor's edict forbidding marriage and that someone decided he was a saint and needed a special day on the calendar so that you and I can celebrate the mystery of our love today.  My Valentine's Day wish, etched on innumerable tiny heart-shaped candies, is that you will always 'Be Mine'.

Your 'Valentine'

Accepting Whatever God's Hand Offers

I am reading 1000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp and found it astounding that I should be coming into the chapter on grace.  What is it?  How do we see it?  I am thinking about our pastor and the miracle of his wife of 20 years now back from the very edge of death after nine days in a dark coma and speaking and smiling and grateful.  Thinking too of another story told me by a good friend of a husband also wed 20 years and dearly loved gripped by an obscure and deadly malady diagnosed too late.  There were prayers and hope and pleas for his recovery as well.  Instead of a miracle, there was a very nice farewell service in that congregation.  And a widow and two near-grown sons behind to wonder at God's grace.  And a third story.  My own.  Wed over thirty years to a faithful (truly full of faith) wife.  Father to five lovely daughters.  Miles of life's highway full of blessing with scarcely the slightest bump of a pothole.  I wonder, can I indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? Or, to render it more directly to my circumstance, would I, will I accept adversity after wallowing in goodness for so, so long?  Can I trust that all God sends me is His Grace?

I Cannot Help But Rejoice

Our pastor has been through an incredibly grueling two weeks.  There are faith explanations and psychological explanations for how he has endured from day-to-day.  I am usually quick to find the fallacy, to be the doubting Thomas.  Today, I cannot.  Not because the evidence is so overwhelming, per se, but simply because my heart will not allow me to be less than thankful.  Fourteen days ago, Carol Poston stopped breathing and fell into a coma as the result of an incredibly rapid onslaught of bacterial meningitis.  Thanks to the virtues of our Internet era, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people joined in prayer for the Poston family.  Just a few days ago, the doctors were not hopeful.  The next morning Carol woke up.  You can read the story for yourself.  Powerful and poignant.  I know all the skeptical questions as well as anyone, because, although I am a Christian by profession, I am a skeptic by inclination.  I have seen too much in church to be easily led and in fact am likely to have developed somewhat of a hardened heart.  So, what makes this event so special?  Primarily, the resolve of our pastor to leave his beloved in God's hands, regardless of the outcome.  Some would call that fatalism or stoicism.  Our pastor is no stoic.  He was deeply grieving to the point of near collapse.  But his faith held firm.  Second, the way hundreds of people engaged in supporting prayer, many who knew next to nothing about the Poston family.  I know, you can say it is all coincidence and normal human compassion.  Well, I could, too and would and have at other times.  This time, joy will not let me.

Missing Steve Jobs

I was one of millions deeply affected, saddened by the news on October 5, 2011 that everyone who followed technology saw coming.  It was a valiant, tragic battle and Steve Jobs lost.  I was hoping he would be around to dazzle us for a few more years.  In our home we have three Apple computers of varying ages, three iPhones, two iPods.  I am part of that select subset of computer users my age who started with the original Macintosh and have never owned a PC.  There is some lingering evidence that I am a 'fan boy'.   Enough about the product lineup.

I received the Isaacson biography for my birthday in October, three weeks after Steve Jobs died.  I devoured it.  Most of the major events I knew, the Steve outside the product launches is who I learned about.  He was both more brilliant and more flawed than I realized.

So, who was Steve to me?  I have been wrestling with that question for several months now.  I never met him, never saw him in person, never attended any of the Apple events held a few hundred miles north of where I live.  He seemed a highly successful older brother, a remote alter ego.  I have always been a conforming people-pleaser, having my behavior and objectives almost entirely defined by what others expected.  Steve lived to change people's expectations.  And he did.  In big ways.  Not always positively.  Which means that people who know me have less angst and more good will than many of those who remember Steve.  Still, I miss the magic, the reality distortion field, the intensity with which he chased his vision for simple, incredible technology, the way he guarded both the privacy of Apple R&D and the privacy of his family.

It isn't true that life goes on.  Life ends.  Every day.  Or, perhaps more in line with my faith, life transforms into… what?  Regardless, it certainly ends as we know it.  And while there are lots of fascinating stories of people returning from the other side, these are still just glimpses through darkly tinted windows, not feature-length documentaries recorded in Blue-Ray quality.  That is why belief in the eternal takes more faith than belief in tomorrow's sunrise.  I don't KNOW what happens when the heart stops, the brain-scan flat-lines, and the last breath exhales.  Only God KNOWS.  The rest of us hope and trust.  I was moved by Mona Simpson's eulogy of Steve and his last moments.  Steve crossed the line, and in that moment saw something the rest of us will see some day.

I must resist the urge to critically evaluate Steve's life through the rigid lens of my theology for a couple of reasons:  I don't know enough about Steve, and I don't know enough about God.  Charles Moore provided what seems to me a fair evaluation after Steve's poignant Stanford commencement address in 2005.

When push comes to shove, that is, when the casket is pushed out of the hearse and shoved into the ground, the certainty of the eternal destiny of someone you love becomes far more ambiguous.  For much of my Christian experience, it was very formulaic.  The Christians go to heaven, the rest go to hell.  Somehow, when it is your own flesh-and-blood, and you know they didn't have time for a last minute 'come to Jesus' moment, deep in your gut you hope that God's mercy is more generous than your theology.  I can say that because when my real brother died in a sudden, tragic accident over a decade ago, I knew what my theology would say his destiny was.  I also knew that if I accepted that, I couldn't live with my faith.  And in my experience, that is true of most Christians in that circumstance.  They broaden the tent of God's grace to accept one more sinner.  Does  that mean I believe in 'universalism' - everyone goes to heaven?  No.  I still believe in eternal justice.  I just have no way to know where the boundary is between justice and mercy.

And that best explains what Steve Jobs is to me:  Someone who helped me relinquish dreaded theological certainty and instead trust more in the unfathomable love of God.  My hope is that somewhere in eternity, my brother and Steve Jobs will have a chance to talk about their lives that were cut short and the grace that let them live forever.