Sucker Fishing- The trip north

I left around 9:00 p.m. Tuesday night, after finishing the last batch of venison jerky, packing 3 times too much gear, and kissing my wife and kids goodbye. I was off for three, maybe five, days of non-stop fun. It was a welcome respite after the day I'd had. Dave and I rushed through a topographic survey on the Maple River, in spite of a bitchy German Shepherd that would lay around for ten minutes then bolt at me and grab my pant leg, survey rod, or the loose glove I was carrying just to give the bitch something to sink its teeth into besides my flesh. Dave and Mike, the owner of the campground we were surveying, had a good laugh every time she rushed me with that deep gutteral growl that raised the hackles from the crack of my butt to my forehead. I know she could smell the fear all over me. I'm not afraid of many dogs but I'm not the dog whisperer either. The beer I drank with Mike, Dave and the two other old river men in Mike's shop redeemed the whole trip. That first beer was great and I wanted to have another but I had to get my stuff together for the trip. I bid them thank you and good bye and hustled out ahead of Dave so he would be between the bitch and I.

Leslie made a great dinner with this pasta, cheese, and sausage dish and sent the rest with me in a container. She helped me pack and questioned me insufferably until I walked out the door. We were staying in a really new camper, close to civilization. It's not like we were not going to survive if I didn't take an extra container of floss.

So I'm on the road at 9:20 and the suburban starts feeling a little loosy-goosy in the back end and then the noise, flump, flump, flump as the rear passenger tire flip-flapped to its completely flattened state. I look all over, through everything, no flashlight. I jumped out and aimed my flip-phone at the tire and sure enough, it's flat but the phone is not enough light to even change it by. I checked the spare. It is inside, on the driver's side, beneath a pile of junk and covered by a gray carpet tire cover with a zipper.
The tab to the zipper was lacking so I had to rip the cloth from the zipper enough to free the spare from its cover. Good news, the white letters on the tire are still covered in blue indicating a brand-new tire! Bad news, it too is flat. How can the brand-new spare be flat?!

I didn't want to but I called home. My wife was out walking with a friend. I called her cell phone. She ended her walk and walked home. She called me back and gave me the road service number to call. I called the 888 number and it put me on automatic hold, for what seemed like an hour but was realistically more like 5 minutes. A young man answered and asked me what I was calling for. I told him I needed roadside assistance and he said "one moment, I'll transfer you to roadside assistance". Now why a roadside assistance number has to be transferred is still a big question for me but he did and I sat for another five minutes listening to elevator music. A voice broke the jazzy beat of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". "The number you are attempting to reach has been disconnected and is no longer in service. Please check the....", the recording stopped as I flipped my phone closed and sat with my forehead on the wheel whispering, "crap...crap...crap..crap" to the rythm of the green blinking triangles on the dashboard display.

I dialed the 888 number again and only listened to the hold message once before being connected to a very nice young lady. I told her that I'd already called and was transferred to an unlisted number so I hoped very much that she could help me. She did. I stayed on hold while road service was called and she smiled through the phone as she came back on an announced that help was on its way and should arrive in 15 minutes or less. Thirty minutes later a little car with a beacon on the top did a u-turn after passing me and swung in behind me. He aired up the spare and changed the tires. I pulled in to my destination, usually an hour and 15 minute drive, at 11:00 p.m.

Mythic Reality

Read the post I've linked the title of this blog. It is a nice perspective.

Blain Butler, if there is one regret that I will have of my life it is that I never stopped and told you I appreciated the deliberate exhuberance that you showed when you waved to me as I passed you on the street. I can't do that now. You fell victim of the destroyer, the self-loathing that many of us develop quietly, undetected, as we go through life with a smile on our face and seemingly without a worry in the world. Aww Blaine, if you'd have seen the crowds of tear-stained faces gathering to honor your life you may have valued it for one breath more. Blaine you were everyone's favorite person, knew no enemies, separated yourself from no one, and somehow the lie crept in and lived within you. I don't know how it happens - it is foreign to creation. I don't think it can be found anywhere but in humans.

Lord help me to seize every opportunity to value people as eternal beings created in your image for all time and help me find little ways and big ways to tell them. A grain of sand remains a grain of sand forever. It may be dashed upon a rock and wear against that rock once and forever more lie motionless trapped in a bed of sand for all eternity but it was that once, that single moment in time that brought significance to its existence. How much more for the very image of the creator God? Blaine will not father a nation, he won't save a person from a burning home, deliver a calf, offer a thirsty person a glass of water, pay taxes, write a love letter, or greet me with a firm handshake and a smile - not again in this present darkness. We mourn you Blaine and 17 years are to few for anyone.

See you later.

Meaning

I listened to Richard Daukins (intentionally misspelled) this afternoon on NPR. Its a weakness to imagine that there is meaning to life. Why then does he bother to write books and go on radio? Its meaningless and a waste of his time. I think there is a little truth inside of every lie. Especially after I listened to him speak about the universe as if it is creating itself.

I don't know if I read this or if I heard it or if it just came to me so I'm not claiming it but if a person, most people, are looking for meaning in life then isn't that evidence that it is out there to find? You'd think that all of science and philosophy, the scientists and philosophers among the brightest and bravest, would just stop if we once found that meaning is not there yet we continue to explore the very idea that we explore.

Thank you dear God for this longing that I have in my heart for everything that is you.

Evil

I don't know why he did it but Jesse took his own life last night. He was a gang-banger from Lansing, did 6 years for manslaughter starting at 18 yrs. old. He started following Christ while he was inside. Worked on a roofing crew and did youth ministry when he got out. He was one of my best friend's nephews. He called my friend his mentor. I met him a couple years ago. He was a little guy, engaging but humble. His eyes shown brightly with life. He was one person that could describe freedom.

He lived with two of his brothers. In the past month he'd been withdrawn, coming home from work and retreating to his room to study the bible. Just in the past couple of days he started talking again but only surface stuff, nothing too deep. This morning he's gone, in the physical, reach-out-and-hug sense.

He had so much to offer a world of black and white. His life was every shade of gray.

Oh God hear me. Please do not let this tragic event be swept away without your sweet redemption. I pray you move in power among Jesse's brothers and his parents to move them to a new reality in you.

It got me thinking about sin. Yes it is wrong to take your own life but it is no more wrong than materialism, sloth, or unforgiveness. Oh Jesse my heart grieves for you and your family.

Child Theology

I stood in the long wet grass in my bare feet beside my sister. I held the plastic knife in my fat little hand and looked into the deep blue sky. I can still smell the chemical residue of the huge green pipe my dad scrounged from the chemical plant, the dog shit, and the fresh spring breeze that insisted on putting itself on record in spite of the gloom we felt beneath the low but warm May sun. Were it not for that breeze I'm sure the whole memory would be in moldy sepia. Instead, my sister's sleeveless white sundress with the periwinkle flowers, my blue elastic-waste shorts and the dandelion-infested rich green grass lay imprinted on my life. I don't know why she was angry with us. I don't know why she screamed at us to get outside before she brained us but whatever it was seemed so painful at the time. It must have been for me to grab that plastic knife on my way through her kitchen.

"I jus' wanna go see God, I'm tired of being alive" I told my sister. "I'll cut my wrist first and you can do yours next and then we'll go to heaven together!" "No, God don't like us to bleed and I don't like it either so we can't" she scolded me. "It'll be okay, lets go swing" and we did.

New Chapter

When my son left home to go to boarding school never to return to live with us again it was a depth of emotion and pain that I'm not sure I really have felt before. Last night a new chapter was written when my 16 yr. old daughter came into the room I was busily writing in and just stood there grinning. She asked me what I was writing and sat down and read some of it and somehow she turned the conversation to the family down the street that moved in about a year ago. The father of the family is a fiction writer, songwriter, singer, and pastor of a church that meets in a theatre in a nearby city. He has a son a year older than my daughter. I've met him and he seems like a nice kid. BUT, I am not ready to release my little girl's hand into some pimple-faced, hormone-powered, bible-thumping, son of an evangelizard. There, now that I've got that off my chest I want to say that I'm excited for her. She's liked this kid for awhile now, went to his bible studies where he preaches to other teens (and usually draws anywhere between a dozen and two dozen kids - but not the ones you'd think, the ones that seem to be the outcasts and you'd think they'd be too cool to buy this God stuff) about purity and living their lives to God's glory, and she has spent quite a bit of time with his parents as well. She wasn't allowed to date until she turned 16, which was less than a month ago, and remarkably his dad had told him he couldn't until he was 18 but he must have caved in. Anyway, my heart is broken at the thought of my little girl, who suffered through her daddy french-braiding her hair at 5:00 a.m. just to be the "best" daddy I could in others eyes, becoming a woman. We had a tough year together last year but we rode out the storm and we are closer because of it.

You know, we have no money, we have one car working right now and we're two months behind in our mortgage. The Michigan economy is slow and we are having to change our lifestyle drastically because of it. I would love to try and call that suffering but I can't. I have no friends with time to sit around and talk. I can't get the book written that is inside me and no goal that I have set seems even worth looking at right now but there are little things. Little things like last night with my daughter. Little things like the birds that come to the feeder. Little things like wondering at how so many people KNOW so much but really just have heard it from someone else and have these exponentially large number of tiers between really knowing and just believing, yet cannot accept that others DO exactly the same thing and cannot forgive them in their ignorance. I thought it ludicrous one time when a pastor friend told a troubled lady that she had to quit trying so hard and take some time to just "be". I believe he was right. I am thankful for being. I'm thankful for the loss and the gain and little Calvin sitting in the chair drifting off to sleep while I read. I'm thankful for the lit up faces of my little ones as they watch me scan a toy car into the computer. I'm thankful for the snowmen we built and the way that my heart has been ripped out every time I get the idea that I have a direction to head in. Its all worth it.

Shalom.

Persecution Alert

Dr. Peter Jones of "Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet". Listen to him on itunes on the Resurgence Podcast with Gary Shavey.

I know these guys are really trying but they are somehow getting it wrong. Putting a line between created and creator for the sake of mankind is like worshipping a painting of Jesus, no hands or feet. One of the reasons we are created in his image is because he uses us to get things done. If the world is to be saved we need to understand we are the ridiculous way that God will do it because any other way would not be like God. It would be like, put it on velvet with some blacklights.

Talking about 'blurring the lines' between Christian and pagan. Pagan means outsiders. I guess I'm one of them if to be inside means to only understand part of Christianity. The fruit of that remains to be seen. The fruit of name-calling like these guys are doing is called a witch hunt. It is ironic that that is what Peter Jones warns Gary Shavey about as they speak together. Check it out on itunes.