laments – Page 4 – A Work in Progress

Thanks for the Memories

The last thing I remember doing with my dad is watching the season ending episode of Three’s Company back in May of 1984. The next day I got off the school bus and my sister was waiting to tell me he had a heart attack and take me to the hospital.

I don’t like that being my last good memory of him–watching some dumb sitcom. Neither of us liked the episode much. So I try to think of other things, like how strong he was. One time I saw him slide a dryer out of the back of his pickup with his bare hands. Heck, the day of his heart attack, he drove himself to the hospital. That probably bought him a day.

He loved to sail, and collect things, and listen to big band music.

I remember bringing him coffee on Saturday mornings, and running down to the little store around the corner to buy him a newspaper.

I remember he had a rifle in his closet that had a white stock, and a .22 revolver in a drawer.

He made me and my friends rubber band guns one time, and took 4 of us to see Jaws at the old Parkway Plaza theater.

I have two favorite memories of my dad that I cherish, and thinking about them now as I hold my 2 year old and watch Dora makes me realize how important it is I create memories for both of my guys

The first memory is this little routine we’d do as he went off to work (he was a cement mason). He’d say “see you later, alligator.” I would follow with “after a while, crocodile.” I loved that–it was something that was just ours.

The second was spending the night on his sailboat. We didn’t do it much, but when we did it was great. I remember the sound of the water slapping the sides of the boat, and the ding-ding of buoys or something out in the harbor. Then we would go to Jack-in-the-Box and get breakfast while it was still dark.

He might not have been Ward Cleaver, but he did what he could. I wish he could have met my kids–he was really good with them.

Anyway, I need to get busy with my guys. It’s Saturday, and we’ve got things to do!

Change the World

If it were just me I needed to think about, I wouldn’t try to change the world. I’ve lived long enough and seen enough of how things always seem to be that I don’t really care what the world “does” to me. I’ve gotten a lot better at taking it.

Yet when I wake up in the morning and when I lay my head down at night I think of these people:

Then I think that what really matters is them, and what I leave behind for them when I’m gone. When I think about them, apathy is no longer an option. I have to care about things because they look to me to learn how to do so much.

How to treat people.

How to treat each other.

How to treat the planet.

Things like that.

I may not want to be an example for anyone, but that almost doesn’t matter. I’ve got two people who need me.

I guess the best place to start is simply changing my own world first…

What We Forget

This morning I read a headline for an article on CNN.com that made me stop and think for a few minutes. What it said was “Dad Claims Sandy Hook Shooter’s Body.”

I read the article, but what it said didn’t really matter. The title alone was sad, and terrible. Perhaps to most people–including myself–not as sad as the parents claiming the bodies of first graders. As a parent of two small boys, what those parents must feel is unfathomable.

Yet the shooter’s dad had to claim the body of a dead son as well, and in some ways it almost seems just as bad. To him it probably is. Not only does he have a dead son, who by most accounts suffered from sort of mental condition (the level or name of which remains unknown), but he also has to wonder where he fell short as a parent, as a father.

The young man who did this terrible thing was once a first grader as well. He was once an infant, and his father cradled him in his arms, as I cradled my son just last night, and you have cradled your children at some point.

So his father grieves the loss of what he remembers, while also wondering what he could’ve done to stop it, or if he, personally is to blame.

What must that be like, to realize your son perpetrated such a monstrous act?

Let me say briefly that I am not addressing gun control or any political agenda here, but we can’t blame the father for what his son did. The blame lies with the killer. The guns he took from his mother aren’t responsible–he is. Saying otherwise is like saying jetliners are responsible for 9/11.

In any case, I pray the father of the killer is able to find some peace with himself and with God. I hope we as a body of people–Americans, fathers, mothers, human beings–can take something away from this terrible lesson.

Love your kids. Teach them to respect life. If your child is ill in some way–especially mentally–educate yourself all you can about what it is that ails them.

And be there for them, no matter what it costs you. We will never know what was in the killer’s troubled mind that brought him to a place where killing people seemed like the thing he should do.

As for me, I will do my best to make sure I’m available for my kids, to be a dad at any and all costs. What I will teach them I have posted about before, so for today just let me say that as horrible as the act was the Sandy Hook killer committed, his father still lost a son, and that’s sad.

Back on the Couch

It has taken me several days to process Friday’s events in Connecticut enough to get to a place in my head and my heart where I could write about it. I was in The Big Swirl frozen yogurt shop with John when I saw something on Twitter about a shooting.

Just then John tried to go behind the counter so we took off and headed over to GameStop to look for some Xbox accessories for David. John decided that would be a great place for a power dump, and it wasn’t until after I changed him that I sat in my car and read the story in full.

The magnitude of the tragedy was simply breathtaking, and I struggled to get my mind around it. What could have happened in this young, young man’s head that he could murder a class full of first graders?

In my mind I saw their faces as he came through the door, probably looking up in curiosity. As a parent my mind immediately went to my own third grade son sitting in his classroom, and two the toddler I’d just buckled into his car seat.

I wanted to be angry at the boy (because that’s really what he was) who had done this evil (because that’s it was), and I even expected to be mad at God for allowing it to happen but all I could feel to this very cold Sunday morning is a sadness so profound it coils in my guts like sickness. I think CS Lewis had it right when he said “no one ever told me grief felt so much like fear…”

I feel a grief of a level I haven’t felt since I was a teenager when I lost my parents and a good friend in my 16th, 17th, and 18th years. I didn’t know how to grieve that loss, and I don’t know how to grieve this one.

Clearly I didn’t know any of those children, but I grieve for them just the same. I grieve for their families. I grieve for what could have been. I grieve for the loss of so much innocence all at once.

I grieve for the teachers and faculty who died trying (some successfully and some not) to protect their students. I grieve for their families.

I grieve for the family of the murderer as well. The love they felt for the killer is no different than what the parents of the murdered children feel. Plus, this young man’s father has to live with what his son did and wonder where he fell short for the rest of his life.

I grieve for the country I love as well, because I feel this tragedy will not pull us together but further apart. It will be gun control vs gun owners and it will not stop.

I grieve because I know something like this will happen again.

I don’t blame the gun, or the killer’s mother for owning the ones used that morning. I don’t blame God or anyone else. God didn’t pull the trigger so many times Friday; a man did. I’m not going to get into the gun control debate today and maybe not at all, but I will say this (and I grieve the loss of my own innocence as well):

I own a gun. I bought it to shoot at targets. I have no plans to shoot any living thing.

But I would put a hundred bullets into the young man who did this thing to protect even a single child and I would be able to live with myself.

I read an excellent post by Morgan Freeman (find it on the Internet) which apportioned blame to media influenced sensationalism and I think that’s true, but not the only truth.

I think we’re failing our kids on a regular basis. So many have lost the idea that life is precious, and what binds us to it is little more than gossamer thread. Violence and violent imagery is ubiquitous. We expose our kids to it and we expose ourselves to it. It makes me despair for people. It makes me think there’s nothing to be done for the world. It makes me think there’s nothing anyone can do, the world is speeding to a sad and inevitable end.

It makes me think there is no hope.

There is hope, and that hope came to earth two millennia ago in a humble and quiet manner.

The hope for humanity is in the form of an obscure Nazarene carpenter who wore humanity for 33 years before dying for it. Our hope is not in a victory that can be achieved by strength of arms, though it is by blood.

We can’t change the hearts of our children, but we can tell them about who can. We can teach them to love like Jesus did. We can teach them every single life means something. We can teach them of the quiet heroism of school teachers and janitors.

I think if we just pour love into our kids then maybe we have a chance against this sort of thing.

Back to this morning. John woke up at 0600, and I brought him out to the couch. I skimmed through Twitter and Facebook, reading news stories about the shooting and people’s status updates about their lives, which carried on. Mine will, too.

Then I saw a picture, and it just wrecked me. It was a painting, really, on a post that was a poem with the rhyme structure and meter of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’

In the painting, Jesus sat in a classroom surrounded by children, and a teacher was reading to her students from a children’s book.

There will be more pictures in the days to come. Many words will be spoken and written, and not all of them will be loving.

I think the thing to remember is that everyone grieves differently, and we should allow them that. Some will cry, some will pray, some will be angry. Some will curse God or call for the weapons of all gun owners.

We need to let people process their grief in their own way, and then we can move on.

We need to talk about a lot of things.

I Know What The Bible Says About Worrying. Get Off My Jock

The guy I voted for didn’t win the Presidency. That’s ok. I survived the previous 4 years, and I’ll survive the next 4 as well. I may not approve of (or like) much of what President Obama proposes for the country in the coming years, but he is still the President, and like it or not will remain so until 2016.

As President, we have to hope that as a collective whole, Obama has our best interests at heart. That may actually be so, but in my opinion only if they line up with his proposed agenda. In January, the LA Times featured an article saying:

The president has been blunt in arguing that the nation’s fiscal problems can’t be solved unless military spending is reduced. To that end, he has imposed a cut of $487 billion in the core defense budget over the next 10 years, and threatened to cut more if needed.

That’s the thing that worries me, a little. I imagine R & D will be one of the deeper cuts to be made, and that’s where I work. Certainly, I would want peace for the world. I think any good person does.

I also want my country to remain strong; the strongest country in the world. Hopefully neither beholden nor indebted to any foreign countries. With that in mind, I fear that we as a country have made the wrong choice in this election.

Those two young men are my priority. Taking care of them is what I care about. The President may not deliberately be trying to undermine that, but it may yet happen. In trying to locate funding for his many promises, cuts do have to be made.

I wonder if the President has considered that the sweeping cuts he proposes will come at a cost? Cutting the defense budget by his proposed amount will mean many, many losses in jobs in defense manufacturing, defense engineering, soldiering, and in my case, defense testing.

It’s unavoidable. It’s a great and unfortunate irony that in finding money to create jobs and balance the budget the President will end many jobs and cause more people to resort to unemployment. It’s a tough and unenviable position.

But so is coming to work every day and hoping you get to keep doing it. Everyone who works out here is constantly wondering and speculating when it will be their heads on the chopping block. Morale is low and I wonder if the President thinks of that?

I guess it’s good I’m finishing my degree. I will probably need to update my resume in the not-so-distant future.

I will have to depend on God more and my country and President less, I suppose. That’s probably a good thing.

What’s Goin’ On

I’ve got a question for you. How important is your political ideology to you? Does it define you? Are you a liberal Democrat or Conservative Republican before all else? Or maybe you’re down with Peace and Freedom. Whichever way you lean, how important is it to you?

How important is your country to you?

Are the best interests of its people as a collective whole more important than whether or not your candidate “wins?”

Is flipping the bird to the other guy or guys more important than giving your nation what it needs to heal, even if what it needs is somewhere between what you want and what they want?

What if what your country needs is not partisanship at all?

Here’s another question. Can we, the people, get past our petty and vindictive natures?

I believe we can, though it will require much of us. We will need to compromise some of our highly prized ideology and possibly even sacrifice something in the way of position or advancement for ourselves or our favorite candidate. Though I also acknowledge some things–like the sanctity of human life–are beyond compromise.

What we’re talking about is a revival of this country, and not just of religious values, but also political and socioeconomic. And musical, for that matter. Someone needs to do something about Katy Perry, and nothing like Call Me Maybe should ever happen again. I won’t even mention the evil of smooth jazz.

Seriously, though. The country is no more beyond saving than the people who live in it.

We just have to do the work.

3%

This morning I read a summary of remarks made by Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards at the DNC, and the gist of them was that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and others want to make it difficult for women to obtain healthcare and other services, which are often obtained through Planned Parenthood.

I wanted to know more about what she said exactly, so I found a transcript of her speech here .

The summary seemed fairly accurate, but it did make me want to know a little more about Planned Parenthood.

They are:

the largest U.S. provider of reproductive health services, including cancer screening, HIV screening and counseling, contraception and abortion. Contraception accounts for 35% of PP’s total services and abortions account for 3%. PP conducts roughly 300,000 abortions each year, among 3 million people served.

In a fact sheet published in March of 2011, Planned Parenthood stated in 2009, they performed 332,278 abortions, out of 11,383,900 “services” performed, which would come close to confirming their stated 3% figure (more statistics available here).

Let’s just look at 332,278, the number of abortions performed in 2009. That’s a lot, even if it is a small percentage.

I think the problem Planned Parenthood is having is that they don’t want to separate themselves from that number. I believe if they did, they wouldn’t have as much trouble obtaining funding for their other “services,” which are absolutely worthwhile.

So in my opinion, Mitt Romney and others in the GOP are not necessarily wanting to deny funding to PP as simply a corporate entity, rather as a provider of abortions, small as the percentage performed actually is.

I can’t support any number, and consequently am unable to vote for anyone that does, directly or indirectly. Allow me to express my personal reasons:

Unpopular

It’s interesting how scripture can and will lead you on a journey, if you let it. This morning, for example. I sat down at the kitchen table to read, and my bible was still bookmarked in Acts from church this weekend. A reference to Deuteronomy 30:14 caught my eye:

No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

The word is in my heart.

I struggle to find time for it sometimes. There are so many more important things. Things like breakfast, and Facebook, and fooling around on the computer.

The word is in my heart so I may obey it.

This led me to Deuteronomy 30, so I could get the context of verse 14.

15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I look at verse 17 and 18 and it makes me so aware this is where so many are headed in today’s culture of self-absorption, self-gratification, and moral relativism.

We’ve become “tolerant” of so much as a people–as a country–that things have become permissible and even encouraged that would have landed people in chains not long ago.

It really gives me this sinking feeling when I think about it. Knowing what the world was made to be and could have been and then juxtaposing that with what it’s become is heartbreaking.

So many “religions” are coming to prominence these days that are turning heads and hearts from the only real deliverer.

The names and small g gods don’t really even matter because they are all the same, and lead to the same place.

Which isn’t heaven.

Heaven isn’t simply a state of mind, or a cornfield in Iowa. Nor is Hell.

These places are real, and the truth does not lie in Universalism, or Mormonism, or Hinduism, or any other ism. It’s great to make people feel better about themselves, but they also need to know the truth.

Wide is the path that leads to destruction, and lots of people walk it. More every day.

If you want to know the truth, and you want to avoid the destruction promised in Deuteronomy 30, you need only look to the red letters of John 14:6 (they’re red in my Life Application Study Bible, anyway):

6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

It’s pretty simple, really. It might not be a popular view. It may not be thought of as “tolerant” of other religions. Some people might think it arrogant of Christians to think it, much less say it.

But it’s the truth.

Our job, believers, our only job, is to bring that truth to people and places that don’t know it. To government officials who don’t practice it, but pay lip service to curry favor and win elections, to people that hate us, and hate God.

We aren’t meant for destruction, and we need to put our petty denominational squabbles aside and do the work we were given.

I think of a song by the band Switchfoot;

we were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?

We need to stop trying to make the popular kids like us, and start telling them the truth.

We need to be unpopular. We need to diminish ourselves, that He may increase. So people that don’t know him will Choose life, and their families will live.

Hypocrisy, the RNC, and the Empty Chair

I think it’s interesting how political satire–political mockery–is taken, depending on the target of the mockery, and the deliverer of the material.

In my opinion, one of the great things about this country is we’re free to question, criticize, and even make a considerable amount of sport of whomever we’d like, especially during election season.

Except we are only allowed by the extremely biased media the freedom to do those things if the object of the satire or mockery goes against the far left status quo.

Nothing quite so worthy of mockery, mean-spirited “satire” or even outright name calling as a conservative, Christian, or Republican.

God help anyone who criticizes or mocks President Obama. Apparently, the only president in history whose policies, ideals, and person are beyond reproach or question.

If one is unfortunate enough to make fun of or disagree with any of this president’s policies, or perhaps point out a bit of tarnish on his halo, they will soon find out just how deep the tolerance of the liberal side of the coin actual runs.

They’ll have their intellect questioned. No one with any kind of intelligence can have conservative values.

They’ll have their patriotism and even their faith questioned. Check that last part. If you believe in anything other than a liberal agenda there goes your intellect again.

So far as satire goes, the most vocal and pointed satirists in the entertainment industry (people like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, for instance) have remained nearly silent regarding President Obama.

This is not because he hasn’t said anything worthy of mockery–“you didn’t build that” comes to mind–but likely because to question the President or liberal policies is to be branded intolerant, to be filled with hate, or even be racist.

Last night’s Republican National Convention comes to mind. Clint Eastwood delivered a “speech” that was really more of a pointed commentary at President Obama and his last 4 years of mediocrity, mostly in the form of a one-sided conversation with the President Himself, “seated” in an empty chair next to the podium.

Eastwood’s speech was supposedly completely ad-libbed, which would explain some of the stiltedness and occasional moments of silence. He did have probably the best “line” of the evening, something to the effect of:

We own this country. The government is in our employ. If the President is not doing his job, we’ve got to let him go.

No hidden meaning there.

So today, I’ve seen a lot of stuff in social media that was outright insulting to both Governor Romney, his wife, and Mr Eastwood, who is now apparently suffering from dementia.

This is the same man whose commercial during the Superbowl was widely viewed as being supportive of the Obama administration, which made him more of a media darling than the goat he is today.

Funny how that works.

Plenty more ugly to come in the days, weeks, and months ahead as we progress toward election day.

I can accept that. It’s just becoming increasingly clear that tolerance has become clearly little more than a buzzword without meaning, and free speech clearly is not that free.

Clearest of all to me lately, is that the liberal left (especially the entertainment “lobby”), as my mom would have said, “Can dish it out, but they can’t take it.”

Prone to Wander

Jon Acuff had a great post yesterday on his blog about why people think Christians are fake. Check it out and then come back.

Ok, good. You’re back.

In his piece, Acuff talks about a worship leader changing the words to “Come Thou Fount” when he performs it. I agree with Acuff’s point in the post. The words this leader changes are in my opinion a beautiful description of a sinner that knows where they’ll be given their natural proclivities, and offers what matters most to the God he loves to hopefully mitigate his chance of wandering.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above

Like Mr Acuff, I would love to be able to say that when I became a Christian, I stopped making mistakes. It would be great if I could say that with the advent of Christ in my life came the departure of sin, but that isn’t what happened at all.

Rather, I still mess up. All the time. I get angry, or sometimes lustful. Or maybe I curse, or use the Lord’s name in a way it was never intended. Sometimes I am neither loving nor helpful to the least of these.

And I doubt, and wander.

But I love God, and I acknowledge that only through he can my heart be sealed from it’s natural proclivities.

So when people do things like change lyrics or words because they feel it indicates a more positive message or maybe because they feel they don’t wander anymore, it conveys the message that with God comes an absence of struggle with the things of earth.

That’s not true, and people need to hear that. So that when they still want to do dumb stuff after beginning a relationship with Christ they don’t just think they’re doing something wrong and walk away from the only thing that can deliver them.

I think we need to be real with our worship and our testimony. Heck, sometimes when you’re a leader, the song is your testimony.

Pretty pictures of a life without struggle don’t show Jesus to people. If I wanted that I’d move to Texas and hang out with Joel Osteen.

We need to show people there is hope for deliverance. We do that with honesty about our lives. We share in the struggle. We let people who don’t know Jesus (and also people who do) know they aren’t alone in their tendency to wander. All have sinned and fallen short.

I know I have.

Come thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing thy grace