Where is our Joy?

I don't like to stereotype, and I don't want anything in the following post to sound racist toward any group including the group I would easily be lumped into…

For Memorial Day, we traveled to Port Huron. We found a city park with a large playground for the kids, picnic areas, plenty of shade, and a large beach. I enjoy our Great Lakes. Lake Huron is only an hour’s drive away. Something about the water, the sand, and the soft grass feeds my soul.

The park showcased the melting pot that our country embodies. It was fun to family watch. This is the soil where my form of patriotism grows, in our open arms, in our diversity, and in our families.

A large latino family claimed a large, sunny chunk of the park to play soccer. They were having so much fun. They kept shouting, "Goal!"

I worried a bit about my kids wanting to join in. Then I realized that I might want to join in.

A large arabic family played very interesting music. The young women all joined hands and danced for a short time. My son, Gage thought that was cool. I couldn't help but think about how that embodied freedom and comfort - to dance in public like that in a setting that isn't known for dancing.

As a large Indian family walked in, I noticed that the men were pushing the baby strollers. At first I thought there were no women in the group. They trailed behind a few minutes later. As the day went on, it was obvious that the men were the main caretakers for the kids.

There were other large family groups around us that weren't just speaking English. I couldn't identify them all, but they had one thing in common, they were large families. There were many interracial families too.

In contrast, most of the caucasian-only families were small (4 to 5), a mother, a father, and 2.5 kids. Most of the non-caucasian families numbered 10 to 15+ with people from multiple generations. I'm guessing that they contained great grandchildren all the way through great grandparents.

It had me wondering… and maybe it’s just my family, but why don’t we get together in such large, extended family groups anymore? We did when we were kids.

Maybe I’m generalizing too much. It was only one day at one park, and it was a holiday. But I still wonder, why don’t we value the same things? I mean, here were multiple cultures all with obvious, strong family ties, except for one.

And where is our joy? We don’t dance in the park. We don’t stake out large sections of a park to play games together. We rarely see one another anymore. If it happens once a year, we’re satisfied. Or are we?

Humbling Lessons

It was probably about four or five years ago that I decided I needed to be more actively helping people. That's when I started organizing street clean ups, diaper drives, donating to shelters. I wasn't doing this to impress God. I was doing it to know God better. If you want to see God, you find him in other people (my opinion).

For about a month, I'd get up and pray, "Lord, give me someone to help today." I'd go through my day, and people would literally show up at my desk asking for help. I WOULD TOTALLY MISS IT! They would actually use the word 'help,' and I would let it go over my head. I'd kick myself later on as the irony set in. People would say they needed help with work or with some home repair I was actually good at. Because I was looking for something grand, I'd overlook these little opportunities to be a good friend. It only made me more determined. I was going to help someone.

One morning, I prayed the prayer. I was alert all day. Nothing. It was freezing cold outside and sleeting as I left work.

I worked in downtown Flint at the time. It's a classic "downtown" with a main strip of older buildings, a few really tall ones. There are two busy times for Flint, the 8 a.m. influx and the 5 p.m. mass exodus. Traffic leaving the area is thick and cranky. 95% of people leave that area at 5 p.m. It's a ghost town after that. Most businesses, including restuarants and shops lock up shop at this time.

I was nearly to the freeway and freedom for the day. I passed a car that was stalled in the middle of the afternoon mess. It took me a few seconds, but I realized, here was a person in need. I turned around. Parked. Ran out into the traffic to see if I could help push.

It ended up being a young couple around 18 years old. The male was pushing. The female was steering. They had run out of gas.

At first the kid seemed surprised that I'd help. We had about a block to go before the gas station. Did I mention it was sleeting? Cars were honking at us. We were in the way of wall-to-wall traffic.

He started apologizing. He started degrading his girlfriend. It was all her fault. They had stopped at a friend's house for a quick exchange of some sort. They knew they were low on gas. He had told her to turn the car off and stay put. It took longer than expected, and when he came out, she had been circling the neighborhood. He started referring to her as "the dumb bitch." He continued to elaborate on his opinion of her and women in general. It wasn't pretty.

I tried to remind him that, if they were together, he must have some feelings for her. She must have some value. We all make mistakes. I shared that I have ran out of gas in the past.

He gave me a look like I was the dumbest person on earth.

There was a few minutes of silence after that.

As we pushed the car into the gas station, he turned away from me acting like I had never even been there. I told him to have a good day. He acknowledged me with a quick sneer, but didn't even say thanks. Apparently I was a fool for helping and a fool for thinking his girlfriend was anyone important.

I went home feeling like crap. On top of that, I got very sick the next day. I even had to miss work.

For weeks I thought about how crappy the experience had been. I had helped someone. It would have taken him much longer to push that car by himself. But it hadn't been a positive experience for either of us.

As time passed, I think I got the lesson. I can want to help people. I can even actually help them, but it doesn't mean they'll appreciate it. Does that mean I quit? I don't think that was the lesson. I think the lesson was to just reign in my expectations. Be realistic. Remember the type of world we live in. A good friend pointed out, perhaps the kid was just embarrassed. Perhaps my words even made him realize that it wasn't cool to bash someone he's supposed to love.

Others have pointed out, maybe I really helped the girl steering.

Or, perhaps it was totally pointless. I have to be willing to accept that because sometimes it might be pointless.

If I'm only helping others to make myself feel good, then my motivations are wrong. If I'm helping just to be a help, it shouldn't matter how I feel afterward or how they respond. I shouldn't be looking for a response.

Violence, Justice, Wrestling…

In the weeks that followed September 11th, 2001, many words escaped my lips that, even then, felt like they were being spoken by some anti-Brian. The words didn't feel like me. Other people told me as much back then.

I had been married for less than a year. Life was good for me. Planes crashing into buildings, that shook my world view, and I didn't like it. It opened my eyes to things I wanted to ignore. It opened up a reality I wanted to deny. I wasn't as safe as I had once thought. Fear, though certainly no stranger in life back then, seemed to grow legs in those days. I was sad too, but that wasn't as transformative.

Hitting that wall of reality made my tongue wag. I wanted justice. I wanted revenge. I wanted violence. I wanted blood. The words that escaped my tongue felt both wrong and right back then. They only feel wrong now. I feel too much shame to share them with you today.

The death of Osama Bin Laden should be something we all contemplate. This is a case where my faith butts heads with my patriotism. It's hard not to see the death of a violent person as a victory when he's caused you sadness and fear, but it's also hard to forget the lessons I've picked up on since then. Death removes the possibility of redemption as we know it.

Using violence to solve problems is easy, but I believe it costs us part of our souls. It's harder to avoid violence if it costs us our lives. So the question may be, what's more important our lives or our souls? Would we rather be a King Jr. or a Bin Laden?

My heart has changed. I feel now that my words were likely very similar to the words of those I sought to harm. I had become no different than my perceived enemy. They were killers, so I wanted them killed, making me a killer.

Justice is a tricky subject. It may sound cliche to say that only God knows the whole story, but I believe it. Even when someone is clearly committing acts of evil, we never know what every motivation might be. We think we do. Maybe there is no justification for evil, but maybe it's not right for us to judge anyway. Over and over again in scripture, God reminds us to be merciful.

I was a fairly new Christian back in 2011. I hadn't chased God much. There's been a lot of pursuit since then. Today, I can't see God being happy with further bloodshed. I can't imagine Jesus approving the outcome or methods. I don't think he wanted us to pray for enemies as we planned to shoot them in the head. It's hard to make a bullet loving.

I also became a father since 2001. My concept of love has grown in ways I can't put into words. If I love my kids so much that nothing they could ever do would take that love away, how much more does God love us? If God loves me, doesn't he love everyone, including terrorists?

If I find fault in a man because he caused so much death, how can I find comfort in even more death? To me, yesterday's death was just one more ugly event in a cycle of ugly events. I doubt the cycle has ended.

This world, this savage garden, it seems it will always leave me shaking my head in disgust, not just for the actions of others, but for the yearnings of my own heart. I thank God my heart is less stony today. I pray it's even less stony tomorrow.

Answering Machine and Arby's Spirits: Random

• There's one parent that drives by our house to drop his kids off every morning with his radio booming. As I'm waiting for Owen's bus to pull up, I scowl at him. Not only are people trying to sleep at this hour, but his kids and their ears are in the car.
• Let the Right One In (Swedish 2008) versus Let Me In (American 2010). Same basic story. Both well done. Both stark and beautiful in their cinematography. Slightly different angles. Which one would I recommend? I have to go with LROI. It leaves more to mystery, and I always like that in a good horror movie. My imagination… well it's always scarier than anything they reveal. Which is scary on other levels.
• I'm not sure New Mexico was the best setting for a snowy movie in the American version. I get that they have snowfall in the mountains, but when I think of states with snow, I don't think New Mexico.
• Banana peppers are the gateway peppers. I'm now addicted to jalapeños. Where does it end? Habaneros? Eating actual fire?
• We visited Heidi's uncle's house for Easter lunch. He has two new kittens. As we left, Gage told us to put his kitties in the car.
• That kid cries when we leave church, which I suppose is a good thing, but also embarrassing.
• We found a gym that was running a very inexpensive trial. The catch was, you had to participate in their weight loss challenge and weigh in every two weeks. The contest ended last week. I didn't win. They split us into teams based on when we joined. So, we never met our "team mates."
• I was using the exercise bike one night when two of the winners walked up. They started talking about the gaps in weight reporting. People didn't weigh in when they were supposed to. The winners started joking that it was because those particular people obviously hadn't lost enough weight and were likely ashamed. I thought to myself, those people probably came to the gym a lot more than they used to. They should probably be proud of that alone. I think the winners have a right to be happy/proud, but so do all of us that are just getting into better shape and health than we were two months ago.
• Aren't there enough animals that are endangered that we shouldn't have to worry so much about moving them on and off the list? I mean, if we're not eating them and they're not eating us, can't we just agree that we don't need to kill them?
• Some observations on cold calling:
• People aren't as rude as I expected. Most of them will even give you about a minute of their time, which is really all I'm asking for.
• It does sting when someone does hang up on you. I can see not answering the phone. That's what I do because I find it incredibly rude to just hang up on someone that's being polite themselves.
• I usually get a few people laughing each night, in a good way.
• They still don't want an appointment with me.
• I find it incredibly strange when I stumble on a cluster of homes with the same, strange answering machine voice. This happened last week. I found four houses in a row with the same, very unique, stock voice on their answering machines. Like they all owned the exact same machine and lived next to one another. This was not your usual stock voice, it was slightly British, like a butler.
• I noticed a similar thing back when I was a manger at Arby's. We'd have a slow day. There would be nearly an hour between customers. It would be so slow that we'd stare out the windows in the front wondering what was keeping people away. And then… groups of about four cars would pull in together in a line. It was like some spirit had possessed them all at once to put their turning signals on and swing into the lot. That would be followed by another near hour of no one.
• Perhaps some spirit of answering machines possessed these neighbors to seek out the strange British answering machines. Maybe there was a very convincing door-to-door salesman with a butlerish British accent.
• I hate it when kids answer the phone. It throws me off. You just never know, it could just be an adult with a very child-like voice.

Movies, Insurance, Sweat, and Bee Rocks…

• No offense Summer, but I need me a strong dose of Spring before you make your sweaty debut. I have jackets to wear, and books to read outside. I don't want to have to install air conditioners yet.
• Owen is terrified enough of bees, and he's already seeing them everywhere. Okay. They're usually rocks. He has an overactive imagination.
• Love and Other Drugs. Ladies, a few questions: So… it's okay for a movie to have gratuitous nudity and sex as long as it's still technically a chick flick? Also… it's okay for the characters to be incredibly shallow as long as there's some romance and someone matures by the end?
• Insurance work has been an adventure so far.
• Cold calling potential clients was a difficult thing to start.
• I've talked to hundreds of answering machines. I should try to come up with something funny to say. Maybe that would get me a few call backs.
• Have you ever noticed that people that are very patriotic don't like anthems that aren't the National Anthem? I would think songs of unity, even if they're not specifically American, would still hold some interest.
• I'm going to miss Michael Scott on The Office. For me, that's an almost perfect weekly dose of comedy. It's so well done now, I'm hoping they can keep the show going without him.
• I saw an article the other day referring to the present musical age as the "Post-Nirvana Era." Do you get the impression that some music writers graduated high school in the early nineties and got stuck in their own musical era? I seem to remember purchasing quite a few albums between 1993-2011 that had no resemblance to grunge or the nineties in any way.
• "New Superman movie villain revealed!" … And it's the same villain that appeared in the first two eighties movies … snore … General Zod again? He's basically evil Superman with a beard.
• DC Comics movies continue to fail with their antagonists. Okay. The Batman franchise has been pretty good lately. They had a lot to make up for though. Let's not forget the Bat-nipples and Jimmy Carrey as the Riddler. Didn't Prince do the soundtrack for one of those movies too?
• If they ever make an Aquaman movie, expect the villains to be a whale and General Zod from the Superman movies.
• Watching Taxi Driver for the first time made me feel unstable. Not because I identified with the main character in any way. More of a, I feel more unstable for having witnessed him, kind of way.
• The ongoing controversy of hell and what it might be like can shine some light on what people believe about other aspects of faith. Those who seem to be having the greatest difficulty with Rob Bell or NT Wright or even C.S. Lewis also seem to have the opinion that Heaven is somewhere else, not accessible now. They seem to neglect the now aspects and focus on whether or not we can "get in" after death.
• I mean no disrespect by pointing this out. If anything, it offers me insight and hopefully understanding into a viewpoint I previously had none.
• As much of a mess as Sucker Punch turned out to be, I loved the quote at the end… "Who Honors those we love for the very life we live? Who sends monsters to kill us... and at the same time sings that we'll never die? Who teaches us what's real... and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live and what we'll die to defend? Who chains us... and who holds the key that can set us free? It's you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight!"
• I think they could have fixed the movie pretty easily. I think I get what the director was going for. He just seems to have left a few pieces out. Maybe those pieces will be replaced in the director's cut.
• I did really dig the sound track.

One of my favorite moments from Poets, Prophets, and Preachers

Reconciliation as a Job

The following is a cathartic exercise (or maybe exorcise is better) of the mind for me. This idea has been intensely in the forefront of my mind this morning, and I need to get it in written form. I have to give it legs or I won't fully function in my normal day to day.

The ideas I'm expressing aren't my own. They've been presented over and over again in books and sermons. I'm just trying to put them in my own words.

My own thoughts might be incomplete by the end of the post, but I need to put them down, here, for now.

There's been a "controversy" lately about what hell might actually be, if it is at all. It seems like a lot of people have faiths that are very static. If you try to move or remove one piece, they act as if the rest falls apart. I think this is understandable, especially if you've grown up from an early age with religion and faith.

As someone that didn't, I try to keep my faith more flexible. There's a core, but the extended pieces aren't all that earth shattering. I like to question and wrestle with things. Even if I've resolved something personally, I like to think that I'm never beyond discussing and possibly questioning it all again.

So the whisperings have involved whether or not there is a literal hell. The suggestion has come up that the traditional view of fire and brimstone might be incorrect.

One of the most common responses in the past few weeks has been to quote John 14:6.

…

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

…

Of course, there is more to the story than this one line. Jesus has just told his apostles that he's leaving, and they want to know how they can get to where he's going. He answers that he's going to be with God the Father. So, basically they're asking, how do we get to Heaven? Some would say that they're asking how they get in on what's coming next.

The assumption, and most common interpretation is that what Jesus says in his answer is that if you don't believe and follow him, you don't go to Heaven. Conversely, you must logically then go to hell(?).

What if that's not what he's saying at all?

What if what he's saying isn't a statement about us, but a statement about himself? Maybe he's saying "You want to get to God, and I'm going to get you there. That's my job!" He doesn't say he's doing this if you believe or do anything first. He's just taking on that role of getting people to God.

Throughout the Bible there are these scriptures about God wanting to reconcile all things to himself. Jesus is always talking about what God the Father has sent him to do. It's widely believed that this reconciliation is one of Jesus' primary responsibilities. If Jesus is a force of reconciliation, you might not need to follow him at all to actually tap into what he's doing.

It's also been suggested that people throughout history live out much of what Jesus taught despite never hearing of him. Perhaps what Jesus is saying in this line of scripture is that, if we're aligned with what he's doing, whether or not we've decided to follow him, we still get in on what's coming next because we're already helping to bring about the same results.

I don't think John 14:6 answers the question of hell. I don't think it even addresses hell at all. It certainly doesn't mention any of the common phrases that would be translated into the word 'hell' in English.