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!

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

A Man's Man

Where do I look for a man’s man,
To teach me to praise, dance and sing?
I turn back to my Old Testaments’ nub,
To Jesse’s root; David the King.

For God’s honor he fell a Philistine.

He took Bathsheba to Gods’ chagrin,
Still his heart longed for his Shepherd,
God loved the kings’ heart within.

Oh, the depth of my own carnality,

No hope of standing clean before the Son,
David had an innocent’s blood on his hands,
Bright white like snow in Psalm Fifty-one.

I’ve two left feet and it’s all about me,

How will I look in another’s sight?
David cared only for Yahweh’s eyes,
Kicking heels up with all his might.

Where do I look for a man’s man,

When inside there’s a scared little boy?
When David tired of facing life’s fight,
In God’s presence he finds fullness of joy!

Where do I look for a man’s man,
When time comes for leaving all men,
To walk in the Valley of Shadow,
Goodness and mercy will still follow me then.

Photo by Akira Hojo on Unsplash

Refugee Hope

 I eat lunch with a group of refugees every week. I drive home elated, saddened and burdened. These are brave men facing difficult circumstances. Coming alongside, I feel inadequate.

I can’t know this; what it’s like to be alone in a place, not knowing the language or the cultural norms. Falling with no safe-place to land.  To be a professor in Venezuela but a nobody here. He formulates a plan. He knows somebody who sells him an old car for a couple thousand dollars. Been carrying his life with him in a back-pack, through-country. His identification, registrations, originals of his doctorates and degrees, his whole life. Driving back to his apartment he stops inside a gas station. Leaving backpack—and keys—inside the car. Perfect target in a big city.

There are worse things stolen than cars. Dark stories abound, as if you’d want to dwell on these. One of the men, Henry, having flown from the middle east was put into a hospital for some serious surgery. In the process, without consent they removed one of his testicles. Smaller infractions occur in living situations; with management companies randomly trying to raise rent-rates and evict tenants unfamiliar with the law. So much treading of water that it’s a delight when somebody splashes up onto land!

The agencies working with this population generally come alongside to transition the refugee to life in Dallas. They provide them with housing, bed, kitchen, healthcare and a case-worker to help them navigate. Most are efficient as any big government agency like the post office or DMV. So when we found our Rodger hadn’t had a bed for two months it was a thrill to see individuals team together to find a bed (and a microwave), rent a truck and deliver them. Beyond the basics; Rodger has been able to obtain his permits and drivers’ licenses and to obtain numerous jobs; Uber eats, doing clean-up at a local hospital, then leaving that to clean carpets for a local company. The refugees themselves keep looking forward to these successes seemingly not paralyzed by the failures. Resilient human hope keeps them going, helps them move forward.

Some amazing stories are shared over pizza. Heartbreaking losses too. On a macro scale the odds look overwhelming; from fleeing home to flying here. If there’s a secret to their perseverance it is this. Hope lives in each small moment. Woven through each shared meal, the laughter and the bread are life-giving.

Photo by Alan Hardman on Unsplash

Januarys' Promise

 She emits five sighs that once were beeps. The Cuisinart brewer breathes out letting me know the coffee is ready. My wife on the other hand grabs the carafe before the beep. Forcing the cycle, trying to get that thirty-second jump on the day. I’ve never been a fan of mornings, preferring to unfold into the day slowly. Morning feels like the friend in Proverbs shouting, “Rise and shine!” It’s a curse not a blessing.

January feels like morning to me. A slow, cold start to the rest of the year. I choose a favored coffee cup for the morning brew. We have fifteen but I prefer about five. Generally journalling or reading a devotional and a brief Bible passage. Too much lately I reach out for Instagram. Going to try limit that this year. The cold provides an easier excuse for vacuity.

January is the jump-start for the year. The life calendar eases up providing windows to look forward and back. Fortunate enough to be able to envision hopeful dreams for the upcoming year. We’ve seen wrecks in the rear-view but not as bad as some. Set some personal goals. Martin Luther King weekend the wife and I escape town for marriage inventory. I have a list of questions pulled from another author: If the last year could be summed up in one word, what would it be? What new territory needs to be explored spiritually, physically, emotionally? What are some things that MUST be done in order to move my life forward? What could I do to make you feel more understood? It’s still early morning in January though; hard to know what God will allow as the days warm up.

Going on five cups of Arabica I still want to crawl back under the covers. Cold world, cold January, cold morning. Goal setting is the little ember lighting my fire. The thing with feathers, as Emily’s prone to say. Caffeine kicking in, undeterred by the draw of the comforter, January holds promise.

Photo by Boshoku on Unsplash

Beauty Saves Me

 I am going to tell you a dark secret. One that’s touched my sister, my daughter and myself. Through us it’s probably touched you too though you may not be aware of it. We have a bent toward depression. By grace we don’t meet the full clinical definition. Often it hovers. Some days it lands. “With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather, a quiver in my lips as if i might cry, by the force of will my lungs are filled and so I breathe.” I dislike mornings. Daytime motivation comes hard sometimes.

My dad was 5150’d. Late in his life, angry seventy-plus years of it. When he was released, I asked him if he’d thought about God. “No,” he said. “I thought about nothing for the whole time. Nothing.” That darkness, that ‘nothing’ wasn’t ever talked about. Seems he would just disappear. I think it would be easy to spiral, spiral, down. Beauty saves me.

It's why Spotify is a constant stream I drink from. I suspect it’s why I’m an extrovert. I seek your companionship. Call it selfish. It’s your beauty I choose to bask in. Your laughter that brightens the dark. Your shared Instagram memes crack me up. Your insights, crafted-ness and God-given perspective that cause me to gasp in wonder and awe. Silly and authentic. My sober guard comes down and darkness flies afar.  

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets,” wrote Buechner. Authors asking questions of the human condition. The Buechners, the Dillards, the Yanceys and Mannings whose anchor chains and mud hooks keep me moored to hope. “Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”

Hope In Cracks and Crevices

 Sitting on our couch in a dim, dingy apartment, surrounded by boxes, my wife cries. We are scared and disappointed. The apartment isn’t the one seen on our video tour. We feel trapped; crushed and defeated.  It looks as though there’s no way out. This is a tale of getting out from a temporary tenement apartment and monetary pressure. This is a personal story not national one. Escape through the cracks and crevices of a man-made system.

Dark wood and bad lighting set the mood as we entered in. Dust and dirt in the pantry, a microwave set in its space at a downward slant. Bathtub knobs black from dirt and rust, bathtub bottom porcelain chipped rendering it unusable. A toilet loosely bolted to the floor so it moves when you sit on it. Dark and dinge creep into hearts. Ceiling ringed with water damage and one or two black spots. Mold? And yes, there were bugs. At night. One is too many; more than one in a new apartment is not acceptable. But backing out of the lease was costly. How much money would we forfeit? The painful but difficult answer is two-and-a-half month’s full rent on top of the initial month and down payment.

From my computer in our delightful, bright new apartment, I type. Finding the management company information online I send them a request to waive all rent based on their bait-and-switch. Upon the third email I found out that the property had been sold to another management company. More research. More emails. No answers. We go back to the previous leasing office.

“Nothing we can do. Talk to the previous management company.” They use completely different systems. We are not in they’re system. While the previous leasing company keeps saying it’s no longer their responsibility! Through this all we have got no bills; no closing statement and the system online shows zero balance. We have fallen through the cracks! What a providence! “We can laugh, and we can cry, and never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows.”

Wind

                                                Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

Taut, alert, sensing before sight,
Howl in canyon,
Hint of power, the outstretched arm,
Deliverance or destruction?
Raising a ragamuffin or
Pulverizing Pharoah?

Barely whispering, fingers on cheek,
Catching unaware,
In Tornado,
Shattering idols, scattering debris,
Internal life thrown out
Into countless cornfields.

Water leaves you wet,

Spoken words leave invisible marks,

Unseen where you’ve been,

Impossible to grasp,

Feeling your slightest movement,

Blowing unabated.

Parched, arid, baking hot,

Cooling breeze,

Street signs screech and sigh,

Rain clouds on the horizon.

Awaiting birth,

Listen for the whisper.

Hard Seasons and A Hidden Hand

                                                    Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

“So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust…”

 Driven from my home I drive round it in circles. Threatened with a TRO (temporary restraining order) I am forced to leave. Numb and confused I call a friend for advice. Checking into a cheap hotel that boasts a pool---a plot of dirt, avoiding the hotel boasting rooms by the hour. “How long will you be with us?” Hotel to hotel, one night grows to three weeks. 

Our life calendars are marked by cataclysmic crisis; pre-Covid, after the divorce, before the baby, during the cancer.  Life is lived segment by segment, season into season; childhood, college, that first job, first love, that fast (impractical for a family) car.

Memory is achromatic. Seeing experience as only black. Perceiving periods as pitch-dark. Not seeing ‘the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows.” That period was less a punch to the gut than it was a hollowness of the gut; feeling numb—which is no feeling at all.

 It was the zenith of the locust plague. Devastation cleared the ground for restoration. The locusts destroy what you’ve built with heart and hand. They overwhelm so you see no way out; only dark, only wing and leg. 

From the detritus of crystalline wings springs new life. A new season. Grasshoppers gnawed the first marriage to the root. A season of singleness and necessary soul work. Separation from the daughter burst into rich relationship that continues into her adulthood. New friendships and enriched older ones. Then the greatest surprise; the friend that is my wife ten years into these healing years.

God’s heart for us is that we are not depressed and distressed by the swarm. Life isn’t always driving circles in the dark. The grasshoppers will move on. The air will clear. Soul and seeds survive. In the light we will see what the strong hand of love was working in the shadows.

Road Tripping Baja

The Mexican Federal Highway 1, was completed in 1973. Google maps claims that’s twenty-one hours of driving to La Paz (click on the ‘family road trip’ icon and that time doubles). Their marriage tenuous, my parents seized on the idea of going south through Baja. I was thirteen, my sister eleven. Was this road trip borne out of an article in Westways magazine? An aching hope that peninsular beaches would wash away present pain? For the kids? Adventure called; Baja beckoned.

A seed of the wild was at work in my folks. Evident in each parent when separately seen. Mom took us to the mountains. Dad played with photography. Somewhere in them, between them, this connection. A seed stifled.

An album in a box contains black and white photos from that trip. Taken with my Brownie camera; mom, dad, sis, a statue celebrating the 28^th Parallel. I have few memories of that trip. Fighting to stay awake---the rocking of the car lulling me to sleep. Watching the scenery in-between fights with my sister. Many bathroom stops—mom was taking a diuretic. Pemex gasoline—that’s funny when you’re thirteen. Roadside shrines, and ribs at Senor Frogs. I can’t say what the trip stirred in my parents. Still a portal opened, a seed planted. 

Is this hankering for road trips my nature? The same DNA driving my parents to drive? That same DNA motivating my grandfather to flee Russia—the most grandiose of road trips. Or was I nurtured by highway? Solid and safe the car takes care of all my needs.  Transporting me to a place where hope is just in the distance. A seed takes hold.

I've seen countless backroads since then. Cresting hills and plummets into washes. Hours in the cab with close friends. Honeymoon with the wife. Weeks in the summer with the daughter checking out ‘America’s best ideas.’ Every October and Summer seeking adventure. Other people’s stories. Vistas and visions of beauty around every turn. Hope just beyond the horizon. A seed blooms. 

Waiting In The Parenthesis

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

“You are silence and song, you are plain as the day, but you have hidden your face--For how long? How long?” ---Andrew Peterson, The Reckoning

It’s been a year of waiting. Waiting for mom’s healthy return from the hospital. The return home in hospice.  Hospice by its definition is a waiting. The final ‘home-free’. Then a parenthesis.

Open-parenthesis; the memorial service. Margaret’s’ waiting is over. Now the children wait. Our son married in March. The wedding is both an end to waiting and the beginning of a process of marriage. Returning home, the waiting continues.

The house is up for sale. We must move. Searching for a rental. We Zillow countless houses, make calls to realtors, open-houses after work. Hoping to find the right one; making an offer, waiting for acceptance. In all the waiting there is tension.

The wife is looking for work. They want her for interviews. Anxiously she pursues the process. Again the waiting. The tension. We want the waiting to end. But what if she doesn’t get the job?  What if we don’t find a house? Pressure is walking through the process. Hope is that the outcome will satisfy.

Easter is a time of waiting. We taste the disciples last week with Jesus. This “walking with’ as we celebrate passion. Holding on while hosannas rattle windows and high-priests. The confusion of that first communion; Roman soldiers, kangaroo court, crucifixion. Taut and heart wrenching the same question asked; the same cry ascends, “How long?” 

The resurrection doesn’t end our longing. It affirms the answer. In the parenthesis we live as aliens aching for a place to settle. We all seek security. Afflicted and needy we want the pain to stop. The resurrection assures us we will be satisfied. There will be a final celebration, final homecoming, final reunion. The waiting will be over.  Close parenthesis.

Kenosis, Christmas and Hope

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself…”

Kenosis is the Greek term.  It means Christ emptied himself of divine attributes in becoming human. Clash of kingdoms. Spirit puts on flesh. The Christmas gospel captures hearts because of this.  Stories of humans making spiritual decisions. In spite of circumstance.  Magi setting personal lives on the shelf in response to the quiet shout of the Heavens and the words of a prophet. Joseph and Mary strike out for Jerusalem as a couple---a pregnant couple putting trust in angel words and First Testament writing over reputation. A desperate despot who thinks the writings may be true…whoa to the two-year olds.  In the midst—grace, peace, forgiveness. Which is why I find such hope in the Christmas story.

We trust in a coming king and a present God. Still normal life looks, well, normal. Water heaters still go out on Christmas.  Governments seem at best to burden the governed.  At worse they persecute them.  In early December Chinese police detained Pastor Wang Yi. “As a pastor, my disobedience is one part of the gospel commission,” Wang wrote. “Christ’s great commission requires of us great disobedience. The goal of disobedience is not to change the world but to testify about another world.”

There is another world.  A risen king. We try live in that way; crucified with Christ living as Christ.  We hold fast to Bible word; “all things work together for good, It is He sits above the circle of the earth, He it is who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth meaningless…” This Christmas, we encounter normal, joyful or dismal.  Still may we find hope.  For the things we see may not be the way they truly are. “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war.”

Nor Is There Any Rock Like Our God

Now there was a certain man…and his name was Elkanah….He had two wives: the name of one was Hannah and the name of the other Peninnah; and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.


Her rival, however, would provoke her bitterly to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. It happened year after year, as often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she would provoke her; so she wept and would not eat.

Hannah’s trial was lengthy and deeply personal. The text says, ‘year after year,’ which to us would mean many Christmases and many New Years Eve’s coming and going with no change in the situation. It also meant that Hannah watched Peninnah’s children growing up while her womb remained closed. Every birthday meant cake for Peninnah’s kids and taunts and barbs for Hannah.


There are those that would have ceased going up to the Lord’s house. They would have caught church on television initially perhaps then slowly any memory of trekking to worship would be forgotten. So too would any deep hope of change in the situation.

One can only respond to, “So, when are you going to have children with Elkanah,” so long. Worst case you will grow bitter but not if you have hope and that hope is built (as Jesus said) on solid ground.

That’s the twist in the story; isn’t it? Peninnah had two children and was caustic and bitter. Hannah was heartbroken and ached but her perspective was fixed on the one who gives hope and changes circumstance. The contrast between the two is drawn in citing Hannah’s heart and God’s focus in the story.

The Lord remembers Hannah and she conceives. God pulls through for Hannah in the end. Not that He’ll do the same thing in the same way for everyone. It’s more about God faithfulness to Hannah and her perseverance and hope. As she sings in her song of thanksgiving, “There is no one holy like the LORD, indeed, there is no one besides You, Nor is there any rock like our God.”

Expecting Change

It’s been a full day. The wife worked. For me it was a day off. I went bike riding. We got news of a friend having surgery and a friend that was laid off. Dropped the kid off at school and picked the girl up after school. Ran errands, ate dinner, and dropped the daughter off at her mom’s house. I feel like I should have been in bed two hours ago. Its feeling late for nine o’clock. Fall has arrived.

There is expectancy in the air. The days are still hot but the nights are trying to cool down. We had the swamp cooler on tonight to cool down. Then we felt cold and unfolded the quilt. It’s that indeterminate period, that purgatory between Fall and Summer. The day can’t make up its mind to be hot or cool so it leans on the wind hoping she will make a determination. The sun is up late but down late enough to still feel the linger of summer evenings.

Going to wrap up blogging for the day and crawl into bed. We’ll run the fan to cool down and, guaranteed, it’ll be to darn cold in the morning. Sunrise was pretty this morning but it was another fake-out. It looked like a fall morning but there was no crispness in the air. So we wait. We wait for the weather to change and hope for enough rain to bring wildflowers in Spring. We wait for life to change and bones to heal and job situations to improve. Fall ushers in the end of a long summer. Our senses tingle and our spirit hopes for cool change.