Full Disclosure

The death of a father, a missing will, a stepmother of questionable character; my sister and I spent hours on the phone discussing the implications. No information was forthcoming on the will; and the letter that arrived from the stock broker office was less than vague. The implications were these---for a brother and sister schooled in law under Jack McCoy, Lennie Briscoe, and Detective Columbo, it didn’t feel right.

My sister had seen an episode of Columbo in which the family is called together for the reading of the will. We’d had no such reading. During my seasons of studying law I’d learned all about full disclosure, A priori, A fortiori, bequests, caveats and dyspepsia. I recognized that no full disclosure was happening here.

Lawyers seem to have their hands in everything. I had a lawyer handle my divorce, and a different lawyer handle my mothers’ estate and my fathers’ will. Close friends of mine trying to navigate debt and bankruptcy issues are being advised by a lawyer. The pundits I read are lawyers as is my favorite talk-show host. One has to mind ones’ own conscience in this arena. The directive of Christ is to pursue peace and avoid advancing adversarial contests. Warnings to be wise abound in scripture as well. I hire a plumber to fix my pipes. It is reasonable to hire someone knowledgeable (albeit five times as expensive) to handle my legal issues.

So it was we found ourselves on the 22nd floor overlooking San Diego and the Coronado Bridge. We sipped cold water from glasses with the name of the legal firm etched on them and set same glasses down on engraved coasters. We received appropriate counsel and took the initial steps in the process toward discovery. Now we wait.

Waiting for anything worth waiting for is difficult; a love letter, an inheritance, next weeks’ blog post. I know some of you have been in turmoil and have suffered greatly waiting for the next post. As did my sister and I, you found yourselves thinking, “It just doesn’t feel right.” Many of you questioned my commitment to the cause, my character and my word---“Didn’t he promise a blog post every week?” Unsettled you seek full disclosure.

January found my calendar full as a new year began. I promised a blog post every week for the year 2010. These last few weeks found me feeling like the drunk man on a horse in Luthers’ parable; I sway back and forth between legalism and grace trying to just stay in the saddle. I scribble down blogging ideas at work only to find that life overtakes me when I walk through the front door. So I have fallen on the side of grace.

As January slides into February I renew my commitment to blogging and have rearranged my calendar to reflect my priority. I have carved out Mondays to post. Legalism would have me bound to every Monday, but grace allows me to promise myself and you a post sometime between Monday and Wednesday save weeks of vacations and significant calamity such as sickness or the cancellation of Law and Order. There you have it, my posting update; a priori and fully disclosed. All rise.

Note: Law and Order SVU continues to run both in season, reruns, Netflix and Hulu. Yes, Law and Order no longer runs as a series.

The Voice In The Storm

Johnny placed the wooden chair out on the cement patio grabbed his coffee and sat down. Rain pelted the neighborhood; wind bowed the old trees, cold bit all six feet of his narrow torso---even as the storm energized his soul.

There is a power manifest in nature that grants perspective. The rainstorm is awesome to watch with coffee cup in hand as long as your house still stands. Lightning is breathtaking to see unless it sets mount on fire.

Of one famous storm, Krakauer wrote,

"These lower slopes proved to be the most difficult part of the descent. Six inches of powder snow blanketed outcroppings of loose shale. Climbing down them demanded unceasing concentration, an all but impossible feat in my current state. By 5:30, however, I was finally within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four, and only one obstacle stood between me and safety: a steep bulge of rock-hard ice that I'd have to descend without a rope. But the weather had deteriorated into a full-scale blizzard. Snow pellets born on 70-mph winds stung my face; any exposed skin was instantly frozen. The tents, no more than 200 horizontal yards away, were only intermittently visible through the whiteout. There was zero margin for error. Worried about making a critical blunder, I sat down to marshal my energy.”

“It would be many hours before I learned that everyone had in fact not made it back to camp—that one teammate was already dead and that 23 other men and women were caught in a desperate struggle for their lives.”

Speaking of a desperate struggle for their lives, how ‘bout those Egyptians caught in the flood? Boy, talk about a bad wind-chill factor! Point is they thought it would be an easy crossing, like the kids that play in the wash here during a rainstorm---364 days a year it’s safe and dry. Like the Egyptians we lose perspective and forget how powerful nature unleashed can be.

When the next storm hits pour yourself a cup of coffee, put your feet up and enjoy. Just don’t be like the Egyptians and forget who holds the leash. “The voice of the Lord hews out flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve and strips the forests bare; And in His temple everything says, “Glory!”

The Saddest Sentence

It was the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard. My dad lay in ICU. Lisa was his nurse. Tubes come out his mouth, blood drips from his nose. Lisa walks to the other side of the bed and faces me, cleaning my dad with white towel. We make light conversation, discourse on dads’ courses—how much he ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner.

“Your mom came by this morning,” she says. I let it pass the first time. The next time she alluded to ‘your mom’ I clarified, “She’s not my mom. Dad’s remarried. Mom died a year-and-a-half ago.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I understand stepmom’s.” There we stood talking casually as if on a bus or in a checkout line while Lisa adjusted pillows and settled my father. She went on to tell me about her new marriage to her second husband, about her first husband meeting someone and moving away. Tying together the catastrophe that was her first marriage and the convenience that was her second she said, “I’ve given up on forever.”

I cry during movies. It’s not really crying per se---I get choked up and my eyes get extra water in them. When the boy gets the girl, when the pitcher gets his second chance at fame, when the bully finds redemption I get choked up. I’m guessing it happens to you too.

The core of our nature is to hope against all hope that good will triumph. We are wired with eternity in our hearts, a seed planted to believe in forever. To kill the seed is to sin against the eternal. Encasing the seed in steel so that it will not grow violates nature. I understand the pain that places the seed in the box. I hope that it doesn’t die in dark but breaks through to new light.

Abraham comes to mind. “In hope against hope he believed,” the scriptures say that he believed that what God promised He was able to perform---in this instance to give him and Sarah a child in their later years. God performs the impossible over and over, hope against hope, cards stacked, death against life and life wins.

Today is sandwiched between Christmas and New Years. The child born of hope, the new year celebrated and anticipated. We clink our glasses at midnight and put hands to the plow on Monday morning. Let us find the courage to stay in the marriage and believe in romance. We shall labor and believe that the work will benefit soul and pocket. May we die to self and love each other. My hope is that at the end of the road we may hear a voice whisper just before they turn out the light, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Eye Candy-Monterey/Santa Cruz

Quote of the Week-G.K. Chesterton

For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and fiercer discontent. 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.

Five Smooth Stones

For Val, my smooth stone...

"He...chose for himself five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in the shepherd's bag which he had, even in his pouch, and his sling was in his hand; and he approached the Philistine."-1 Samuel 17:40

Were they rough and jagged, large as meteorite,
When the fountains of the deep and floodgates of the sky,
Burst forth?
Mountains molded,
Chipped and chiseled,
Clanging, banging, against each other,
Sand on boulders,
Churning five smooth stones.

The God of Heaven,
Who measured the waters of Earth,
In hollowed hand,
Throws these meteors
Into His toy rock tumbler,
He who calculates the dust of the earth,
Waits and watches,
Creating five smooth stones.

The anointed David,
Who tended the family sheep,
With sharp eye and rugged hand,
Throws these stones,
Felling the taunter of God,
He who delivers from paw of lion and bear,
Delivers coming king,
Casting five smooth stones.

Elect and living stones,
Creatures of dust and water,
With fumbling hands,
Dare we doubt, do we fear?
We overwhelmingly conquer through,
Him who holds both rocks and king,
Descendant of David, Messiah God,
Crying out five smooth stones.

Like a Pat Conroy Novel

His works read like this: Man leaves broken marriage to save sister from suicide. Man and sister’s brokenness is due to parental vacuousness and violence. Dark fruit falls from the family tree; line upon line, violence on violence. All set against bridges, bayous, brackish water and French colonial buildings of the South. Such are the novels of Pat Conroy. Talking with my sister made me feel as if I had just stepped into the middle of a Conroy novel (or into the movie, “Walk Hard”).

Pulling me aside at my fathers’ memorial service she whispered, “This may help explain your father...” I already knew the story, no need for her to repeat it. My father was one of three children; Julius, Leo and Rhoda; Julius being the oldest. Julius, the oldest and favorite son was diagnosed with something akin to Rheumatic Fever. The family moved to a drier climate ending in California. While Leo was a teen, Julius succumbed to the disease. Dads’ parents told him that the wrong son had died.

Fast forward a generation---My aunt Rhoda lies on her deathbed and tells my sister another story. My grandfathers’ will left my aunt a small bequest. The will leaves one-dollar to my father. So my aunt, ever the peacemaker, split her inheritance with my father. My father gave it to his 2nd wife to invest in her business.

Fifteen years later my fathers’ will leaves five-hundred dollars to my sister; one-dollar, adjusted for inflation. A series of events led to separation between sis and my dad. Snippets I remember, I don’t remember much, am certain the sister remembers more. Bathroom door with holes; altar to a fit of violence; phone cords ripped out of a teen-age girls’ wall, hard words and failures to give grace.

The dark fruit fully ripens. The daughter tires of pursuing relationship with the father, the son vows (early on) to never be angry and out of control. Dark fruit opens to seed…ever to continue the line of violence?

Bitterness and betrayal read well but are crushing and painful spelled out. It has been written that God “will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the grandchildren…” Bad fruit is redeemed by the Wine of redemption spilling into family lines and breaking violence. Conroy novels generally end on a note of redemption. May we say when the last page has turned that the story was worth the telling.

How Fragile We Are

Death hovers like the child underfoot in the kitchen, invisible until you trip over him. Stories of death seem prevalent this week; the thirty-nine year old acquaintance, the seventy-six year old husband, the five motorcycle riders killed on the local highway. The stories seep into conversation, show up in newspapers, are whispered about at work; “Her husband died yesterday. I can’t believe she’s working today.” They remind us that we don’t know when we will get tripped up, when we will fall.

“It’s senseless death that disturbs me,” my coworker said.

“Right,” said I, “as opposed to healthy, normative, fun logical death.” Death still surprises us. It wasn’t part of the plan---was a result of the curse. That is why we fight it so hard, struggle so against it. I understand what my coworker meant. When both my friends, both named Eric (the other with a K) died it was difficult. Prayers for healing not answered for this life; cut down in their prime. Seemingly senseless, the question without easy answer.

“Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Christ, addressing the newspaper accounts, the whispers and whys identifies death as a wake-up call. Repent, he says. Make a decision today. No one is guaranteed tomorrow.

The message echoes through the scriptures as we hear the Preacher say, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting; Because that is the end of every man and the living takes it to heart.”

That is why I delight in the dark red roses blooming outside my front door. Leaving for work and returning home they remind me that life has colour and sweet perfume. Possibilities abound. That too is why I enjoy my forty-five minute commute (most days). A week ago the eastern sky was bright pink, Mt. San Jacinto bathed in crimson. Yesterday two coyotes raced across the highway and into the shadow of the windmills. So I am reminded to embrace life while I have it.

As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow: For soon it is gone and we fly away….So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

Course Correction

Hold on while I finish patting myself on the back. There we go. I have kept my goal of posting every week save vacations. I can see the end of the year from here. Providence has added much to my plate for these last months. To accomodate new committments, Tuesday/Wednesday seem to be more realistic for posting. Look for this weeks' post Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.

Freedom and Bondage

“To the best of our knowledge, the New Hebrides had no Christian influence before John Williams and James Harris…Both of these missionaries were killed and eaten by cannibals…Forty-eight years later, John Paton wrote, “Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of martyrs…”

What cause are you willing to baptize with your blood? What hill are you willing to die on? I’ve landed on a principle which flows from Christ’s dying on a hill for me. It colors my politics; it covers the steps of my days and allows blessed sleep at night. Freedom is the hill I would die on.

A severe sample of bondage is found in Sue Fishkoffs’ book Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority. “Observant Jews do not eat milk and meat together…they will not eat meat from a plate that has ever touched dairy, just in case a nano-sized speck of cheese is clinging to it for dear life.” What a way to live! Apart from freedom in Christ we all live like this. Each of us lives with the fear that some small speck of cheese will keep us from heaven, some small dark secret will open us up to public derision.

The decrees and debts against us have been openly nailed to the cross so that we can walk in openness and freedom. Paul rails against such bondage when he says, “Why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees such as, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” It is for freedom Christ set us free.

Free in God it is consistent that in my politics I fight against the bondage of men. God ordains that government has two responsibilities, to protect and to establish justice. When government begins to encroach on freedoms apart from these then I will fight. If government makes rules on what my pastor can say from the pulpit we will come to blows. When we move toward socialism there will be struggle. As government seeks to limit freedom, I will seek to legitimately oppose. Government that greatly shackles mankind is opposed to the principle of freedom that there is in Christ. Whether then we are bound by spiritual legalism or earthly government we are held captive.

Freedom flowing from the crucifixion of Christ crystallizes for me the energy and motivation that directs my life. What drives you? What eats at you enough that you’d be willing to be eaten by cannibals for it?