I'm Giving Up Sleep For Lent

 Not all sleep, of course. It’s my first time ‘giving something up’ for Lent. Ideally, it’s an opportunity to identify with and appreciate the significant suffering that Christ went through on my behalf. People give up all kinds of stuff, chocolate, fish, social media and sports. I know of one person that sacrificed sarcasm.

I don’t want to approach Easter with arrogance. Nor do I desire to enter into self-flagellation as Martin Luther did before he understood his justification by faith. Seems the season should hold some sacrifice alongside a reflective posture. Loss and discipline. Remembering and celebrating. Perhaps you’ve come across people where their supposed sacrifice seems ho-hum, “I’m giving up salads!” I felt like I should loosen my hold of something that’s got hold of me. Something my friends recognize as my attachment. My wife’s loud guffaw when I told her I was giving up sleep let me know I was giving up the right thing.

Why sleep? I love my sleep. I have friends that enjoy sunrises. I don’t. Sunrises happen early in the morning when people should be sleeping. If I were on the show Survivor, giving up food would be a tertiary problem. What would ruin me would be giving up sleep. And coffee. The coffee which I need because I’m waking up---from sleep. It comes easy to me; in cars, on airplanes, in chairs and beds. I go to bed late and get up late. But not this season.

I’m not the watchman waiting for the morning, but I’ve been surprised to find a richness in rising earlier. My own voice encourages me to rise up saying, “It’s Lent!”. There’s been no mystical experience, no deep insights into Christ’s suffering. Nothing earth-shaking at all really. There has been this; a settling quiet. A peculiar calm as I sit at my desk drinking my coffee and reading my books. Beneath all that is an expectancy for Easter, the most earth-shaking of events preceding the raising of Christ, the First-fruits of those who are asleep!

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When The Poem Ends

At very first glance, her beauty slays,

She’s there in the flesh, not a vapor,

Pulse revs up and breath gives way,

As you put pen to paper.

Every line a work of art,

Every word has you stirring,

Oh the joy I feel in my heart,

With every rhyme that’s occurring.

 

Happy days of cheese and wine,

Sweet chocolate and red rose,

All things come to the end of their time,

As poet writes their last prose.

 

Rapture gone that once was mine,

Your lips no longer ignite,

Darling we’ve reached the end of our line,

No more words to rhyme or write.

Radical Hospitality

 

 A hotel stay in California during the Pandemic was far worse than staying home. It was more like paying your neighbor hundreds of dollars to sleep in his garage. You had no access to food, kitchen or coffee. Amenities disappeared. Hoteliers, to protect housekeeping staff from germs, only had them enter your room days after your stay. One favorite aspect of vacation was now ruined. Hospitality, a word once associated with the industry, had lost meaning. It was in the midst of this dark time for travel that my wife and I experienced a most memorable inn experience.

Though strangers, The Lancaster hotel greeted us as friends returning from a journey. Our California experience was insipid and antiseptic. Here we were welcomed with champagne in fluted crystal glasses accompanied by macaroons. We were shown through halls of beautiful paintings and sculptures to our room. Tiled, Romanesque and beautiful. The most comfortable bed ever slept in. Fluffy robes and slippers.  After all of it, the next morning, the hotel manager granted us a choice. Though most eating establishments still required outdoor seating, we could have breakfast inside! Not on Styrofoam or paper but porcelain. Hoorah, Houston! That’s how you celebrate hospitality.

Hospitality is a core biblical principal, taking care of orphans, widows and strangers without neglect. Andi Ashworth models this beautifully in her life. “But if you can latch on to the truth that caring for human life is a very powerful work that actually changes the shape of people’s lives and the way they experience the world, you will have a vision that can hold you even in the midst of dismissive cultural attitudes.”

Porches are now built in the backyard and not the front yard because we no longer celebrate community. Hospitality is a radical lifestyle that moves your “porch” back to the front yard and invites neighbors into your life. It’s exciting, cruciform, giving and scary. They could break that mug your daughter gave you! Steal your silverware! I’m set in my ways and rhythms, and inviting people into my day can disrupt my “precious’ plans.

Can I share one more story? My wife and I had invited this single guy over for dinner. During the meal, nearly weeping, he thanked us for the invite. He generally ate alone, and nobody had invited him to share at their table!

This conviviality is an invitation to the great table. The hosts breaking of bread with us during Covid was gracious and risky. In an age of safe spaces and selfies, us and them, pandemics and phobias, hospitality risks it all.

I Am A Romantic

 Fifteen year old boys hardly believe in monsters. That year, in the northwest, Sasquatch stories were on everyone’s lips. The three of us were on a short walk, a familiar trip to the spring. A large wooden cask, brown and covered on the outside with lime-green mildew. You could feel the moisture, smell the wet earth, see the beads of water leaking out, the glint of big yellow slugs feeding even as they produced their own slime. Shadows increased. Panic intensified as the sun slowly disappeared. The obvious trail back to our trailer was hidden to us. Yards from us, something cracked. A breaking. Dry sticks stepped on. A bone broken?

I am a romantic. I cry during Romcoms (though denying it vehemently). My copy of A Severe Mercy is yellowed and dog-eared. I believe in true love. My wife and I have “As you wish” stamped on the inside of our wedding rings. Deep down I believe Hobbits are real. Elves too. In a world where men are beheaded and burned at the stake for professing a risen Christ, dragons are possible and less horrific. Monsters exist.

This is why I tear up at even a basic Hallmark movie. I want that girls’ berry farm to survive! Her prince must save her! I hate murky, grey endings. Evil must be quashed. That is how the world is supposed to work! And it did, once, before the slithering monster came. And it will again. Every love story should end “happily ever after.” Dragons slayed, evil sorcerers getting their just reward. True kings crowned, friends safely celebrating.

The panic rose and rose. Though a stones’ throw from home, in a secluded forest. Where monsters don’t exist. Did the way home open up (magically), were our friends’ voices suddenly heard in the distance? Did evil just retreat? A short walk and we were home.

“We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.” (Chesterton)

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For Her And Texas... A Love Poem

 I told my wife I’d write her a love poem. This isn’t that. Not quite.

“The Lone Star state?” I asked my wife,

Leave roots, friends, your ocean blue?
The answer same as long ago,
“Wherever you go I’ll go with you.”
Babe, in all the world, you are my nexus,
My one delight, but so is Texas.

When mind and heart are a jumbled mess,
The world going up in smoke,
I rest within your beauty,
Spread below a canopy of Oak.

Arctic blast meets warm Gulf wind,
Tornado warnings cresting,
Hot or cold what will I find?
Most days I’m always guessing.

You are quite the humdinger,
All that and a bag of chips,
Respectfully giving the finger,
With a “Bless you” on your lips.

I delight in that twinkle in your eyes,
The smile upon your lip,
Bluebonnets bursting forth at every rise,
On every curb-side strip.

God Provides In The Dark And The Desert

In the desert all kinds of things are buried and unearthed; dead bodies, gold nuggets, aquifers full of water and whatever one can fit into the back of a pick-up truck. My marriage too, buried, my life unearthed. I was cast out of my house, like Jonah from the whale, escaping with two suitcases of clothes and a credit score that opened the door to an apartment.

Divorce has a way of divesting one of clutter. One is stripped bare. Unadorned like a desert view, snow peaked mountains unobstructed by trees, Milky Way galaxies unobscured by ambient light, air devoid of choking particulates. Except for the dust and sand stirred by the wind, un-tethering everything that isn’t nailed down.

Out prospecting one day (for gold!) my friend Dana saw this behemoth lying in a ravine. I do not know how he hoisted it onto his truck. Real furniture this, cut from some wood that wouldn’t give up its soul. Pulling into my driveway he asks, “Do you need a dresser?”

My friend found a different kind of gold! A practical altar to friendship, God’s faithfulness and a place for my underwear. Straight-forward oak, shiny dark brown shellack, cool and smooth to the touch. Early American, French provincial, I’ve no clue. Stamped with the name of the furniture maker, Angelus in each drawer. Sun and wind only taking their toll on exposed corners.

Little is permanent in the desert. In that first season, the dresser was a beautiful altar to God’s provision. The next season it stayed a strong and secure piece as I moved into my second marriage. One more time on a truck to an expansive home overlooking Joshua Tree.

Howling wind and sand bury most everything in the desert. The stories stay alive. Winter rains and summer monsoons pour water down dry, cracked channels of dirt and sand filling springs and giving life to tree and grass. Gold washes down these channels as well. A prospector hopes to make a find in these dry washes and old streambeds. He may discover other treasures there as well. Like a cast off dresser.  

Cure For A Heavy Heart

Out my window a squirrel reclines like John on Jesus’ breast.  A summer night in Joshua Tree I watched meteor after meteor streak across the sky in a Perseid shower.  There are small delights in nature as well as great grandeur and beauty. On the flip side she can be a horror, a “howling wilderness.” As I write this hurricane Melissa has savaged Jamaica and is bearing down on Cuba and the Caribbean. It is in this tension between its enormity, power and beauty that man continues to find perspective and peace.

“There is but one spot on El Capitan’s upper margin where one can lie down and look into the abyss 3,300 feet beneath him. If a man is a little touched with self-conceit, let him seek this position. Then in his humility and thankfulness would he exclaim with good old Job, “What is man that thou shouldst magnify him.” So writes James Mason Hutchings, the father of Yosemite. I had a similar experience hiking solo down the Narrows in Zion national park. As I stood in the river with towers of red rock rising on either side, I felt immense peace and an assurance that God was in control.

Spurgeon, the great preacher struggled with deep depression. He wrote, “He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood-pigeons in the forest, the song of birds in the woods…needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and his soul grows heavy.” I have sensed God in wind whipping down a canyon and grass growing beside a pond.

Cycling up the west coast years ago a friend and I got stuck in a storm. Hail pelted our helmets as we climbed hills overlooking the ocean. In that beauty with nature fiercely hurling herself at us, I felt very much alive. When soul and heart grow heavy there is no cure like hurling ourselves from our creature comforts into an encounter with creation.

Hidden Riches In Hard Things

 “Officer Thames took me up the driveway, he started kicking me in the back, he kicked me in the kidney and slapped me back of my head and I don’t know if he was hitting me with his hand or hitting me with something…” One of the students testified later that they had a ‘leather blackjack thing’ and that four or five patrol officers would walk by every two or three minutes and kick or hit Reverend Perkins with one of their blackjacks or their feet.

Dr. John Perkins would write later that while in the hospital, “…I began to see with horror how hate could destroy me…Anyone can hate. This whole business of hating and hating back. It’s what keeps the vicious circle of racism going. Jesus’ enemies hated. But Jesus forgave. I couldn’t get away from that.”

We are called to do hard things (apologies to my college professor that insisted, ‘tables are hard, problems are difficult’). My Instagram feed is full of climbers climbing mountain peaks, cyclists speeding and bull riders bracing to reach 8 seconds. The apostle Paul says they do it for a medal that tarnishes. We pursue one that’s eternally gold. But there are overlaps.

Turning the other cheek or climbing K2 forces you into desperate dependence. Living on the edge is never boring. You will experience emotions and perspectives beyond the average Joe. You will have to face yourself. You will face crisis. Labelled an outsider for choosing to swim upstream. For the “tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.”

It is in doing the hard things that Christ flourishes in us. Crucifixion isn’t grandiose. Small acts take courage. Reaching across the bed to your spouse after a fight. Confessing your addiction to another human. Inviting the neighbor over for dinner. Speaking out against that thing no one else is speaking out against. Leaving a note on the car that you scratched. Saying “I love you.”

“They do it for a perishable prize…” The focus is on the prize, not negative consequences. A tale is told by S.D Gordon wherein a man sets out to climb a mountain carrying all his household comforts. As he ascends, he discards them all piece by piece finally arriving at the peak. “And so it is with the Christian life. Many find that when they cannot reach the top with the things they hold in their hands, they let the top go, and they pitch their tent in the plain; and the plain is so very full of tents.”

“There are churchgoers who have little capacity to resist, because they have been taught that the good life is free from suffering. If they have been taught the faith at all, it has been a Christianity without tears.”

The Ear of the King

 

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you. 2 Cor 5:13

She dances on the corner, boom box in her grip,

Grape-Crush carton she wears as a cap,

Folks think we’re like the former, when prayer is on our lips,

As bent-kneed we stand in the gap.

Hard not to feel crazed like that,

To believe that prayer has clout,

Pleading for the church in Nigeria,

Or healing for grandma’s gout.

Don’t try calling Elon or Billy Gates,

They don’t give a damn,

Instead try Him who purchased you,

Who sits at God’s right hand.

You get that call, the tests come back,

It’s cancer rattling your bones,

There is one who calls you friend,

Yet sits on Heaven’s throne.

The failure you face-it’s so bad,

You’d rather amputate a bone,

If a child asks her father for bread,

Why would he give her a stone?

We wonder if He’ll answer, still we persevere,

A beggar’s cardboard sign on a string,

It’s a post-modernist age, “You do you, maybe He’ll hear,”

But we have the ears of the King.

Seasons, Egrets and Death

 

I set out to see the egrets but they were gone. There are things in nature I can watch for hours, lightning storms, meteor showers and egrets on water are some. The wingspan of an egret is roughly two feet less than that of an eagle. In stillness their white regalia makes forest backgrounds fade. Majestic and elegant flying over water, still captivating, though not as dramatic as an eagle stretching out to snatch a fish from the water (go watch a Mark Smith video). The egrets are gone from the rookery. To return in Spring. The cycle of seasons.

The question on the intake form, “Do you think of death?” I answered no (I lied) and handed the form back to the masked lady behind the desk. I think of death often. It seems a natural thought process. I mean, the song that put Marc Scibilia on the charts begins, “I’ve been thinking about dying, and how that’s gonna be…” In Christ it’s the air we breathe; crucified savior, cruciform life. Even Solomon says, “It is better to go into a house of mourning, for that is the end of every man, and it causes the living to take notice.” Maybe I should have answered yes to that question. The question should read, “Do you think about death without hope?”

My hope is to photograph an egret in it’s glide over the water. White wings shimmering in reflection, all creation still and silent. And why head to the rookery? To quote Lewis, “But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.” For nature awakens in us longings for another world. I glimpse that in the egret.

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