Formula For Success

a+b=c. We view life as formula, if we can manipulate and account for each variable we control life and arrive at the desired outcome. We take our vitamins every morning to assure health and prolong life. A woman I know works hard to put out ‘positive energy’ believing the force of her thoughts will create favorable results. For all her gyrations, her life is chaotic and unfulfilled. Though we exercise and eat the right foods, the old lady next-door inhales a pack a day with coffee or bourbon and she turns 80 next week. The forty-year-old marathoner drops dead or is hit by a bus.

Christians ascribe to the same formulaic approach to life. They exercise, eat the vitamins and use the bible to put god into a box. Some tithe trusting God to fill their storehouses to overflowing. Many of us have lived good lives so that God would like us and grant us pleasurable lives. We work hard at turning out good works thinking God will pay back our sweat equity. We have A and B figured out but C never turns out as expected.

I live in relationship to God the father. I do not serve a wizard who rewards according to mathematical equation. That is both the scary and the stirring reality. In the midst of a broken world we never can be certain of outcomes. Having a Father that moves in relationship with me as I move through my days gives them a positive spin. Still I have no guarantee.

Years ago I went through severe financial difficulty. Pray as I would no relief came. I never landed the miracle job. I went to bed calculating how I could rob Peter to pay Paul always realizing that I owed more than Peter had ever amassed. I had plugged in my formula and God had not provided as expected.

I try to imagine how it is that God raises me up by looking at how I raise my daughter. There are days that I allow her junk food and Mountain Dew, movies and late bed times. I allow it because I know she will not need significant sleep or sufficient sustenance. At other times, state testing for example, sleep, vegetables and protein are important. By the same token our relationship moves according to periods of play and periods of trial in our lives.

In Christ we have a relationship that surprises, delights, upholds and strengthens. God will move as He sees fit; not in response to a bottle rubbed for wishes or a good deed done to bribe the Judge. If there is a formula that works it is that we give up trying to control and manipulate and we rest in the providential care of God.

Green Grass and Sweet Candy

It began with a little experience and a large get-rich dream. We started out mowing one lawn. It grew to two. Soon that doubled and in months we were doing landscaping for many houses in the tract. We worked every Saturday, only Saturday. We had money to burn. We were rich. We were 12 years old.

The Saturdays were full and the work was hard. The work was strenuous, dirty and we often worked until after dinner. Keith would run the gas-powered edger (an investment we made after quickly tiring of the manual version) while I mowed the yard. When he finished he would begin sweeping up the cut grass. We cleaned up leaves and clippings rather than blowing them into the yard of someone else. I have only good memories of those workdays. I’m guessing there are good reasons for that beyond failing memory.

I worked with my best friend. Certainly we got stressed out and had the occasional argument. He usually won---because he could pull the, “It’s my dad’s lawnmower” card. We argued about pricing too; he hated telling homeowners we were raising our rates. Whenever the time came to ask for more money I was the one that had to do the speaking.

We were our own bosses. If we were going on vacation we could just change our workday. We didn’t have to answer to any board or boss. If we wanted to take a ten minute break we could. If we wanted to take a three-hour break and work until nine-we could (at least during the summer months).

We spent our earnings on whatever we wanted. Most weekends we wanted candy. We would walk down the street to J.C. Penney where they had large display cases filled with candy; non-pariels, butter-toffee peanuts, chocolate haystacks; heavenly. Nobody made us put a portion of our earnings away for retirement. We didn’t pay taxes and we didn’t worry about healthcare.

Why does work seem like, well, work now then? Is there anything I can take away from this when I roll out of bed these next days? There seems to be an answer in the Saturdays, the candy, and in the freedom. Being a kid and working Saturdays allowed plenty of time for rest. Rest is difficult now; I fight against it. I burn the candle, I make excuses to keep busy. Physical rest and soul rest come hard.

I need to spend more money. Really I spend plenty---it’s that I need to allow myself to blow a chunk of change on something that is fun even if its fleeting. Relax, enjoy life, don’t worry so much. That’s the real ticket I think. Yeah, I have to show up for work. But it’s my Dads’ lawnmower I’m pushing.

Photo courtesy of Hot Meteor

My Perverse Pleasure

It is a perverse pleasure and I delight doing it in public. I can’t help myself. I found myself doing it again in the Mexican restaurant. As I ate my burrito I eavesdropped on the conversation at the next table. Most of it escaped me except this small sentence. “She really needs to know,” the woman said. She wore plain pants and a shimmery shirt which looked and hung from her shoulders as a shower curtain hangs from the rod. The guy next to her looked like Colonel Sanders with two chins, his attention glued to his ITouch. The man with his back to me was so plain as to be rendered invisible. “This tomato is huge,” the woman said when nobody responded to her earlier statement. “It is the largest I’ve ever seen atop a burrito.”

I almost stood up and walked over to their table. “What does she need to know?” Did she have cancer? Was her husband an alien; all smooth skin on the outside but scaly and oily underneath? Did he have plans to take over the world one woman at a time? Perhaps it was something simple like she’d been watching episodes of 24 on Tivo and nobody dared tell her Jack Bauer wasn’t coming back. Not knowing the rest of the conversation is the danger of my manner faux pas.

Still I can’t help but overhear snippets. Walking down the hall this week I heard, “…and those pictures would make it into porn magazines and be seen everywhere.”

The same day a gal in the back room spoke with a vendor that said, “The blood was tainted.”

“Will you sue,” the gal asked then, her body posture slacking as she said, “Or will you just let it be?” Of course I didn’t hear the outcome. Nor do I know how the blood was tainted. I assume the situation with the tainted blood and the situation alluded to at the Mexican restaurant are one and the same: Aliens are among us.

Now I am faced with a significant moral quandary. Listening in on the conversations is rude and twisted. Yet if aliens are truly amongst us then I have a duty to be the eyes and ears of the good guys. It’s the same problem James Stewart had in Hitchcock’s movie, “Rear Window.” Watching your neighbors through binoculars isn’t right but when one of them commits murder you are bound to make it right.

What is your moral conviction? Do you live in the moment and maintain others privacy? Admit it…there are times when you can’t but help overhear. If you do overhear and there is mention of space ships, mind control or taking over planet Earth…leave me a comment. We will band together and save the world.

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.