A child struggles to find enough to eat in an under-developed African village.

A mother stands over the graves of children lost to disease.

A devout religious person is arrested, beaten and jailed by a hostile government.

A teenager is insulted, assaulted and made to feel like trash as she heads into the clinic.

A man wrestles with whether or not to take his beloved wife off of life support.

The scenarios could go on and on. But the same question reverberates through each: why?

Why evil? Why suffering? Why pain?

Why me?

Last night, hundreds of people gathered at Grayson High School to try and make sense of the deaths of Hope McKenzie and Austin Rogers. Braving crappy weather, the weight of grief, and the crushing presense of confusion, those people banded together to find common strength.

Perhaps it was unspoken, but they gathered together to ask: why?

The philosophically flip (and one might argue, hugely insensitive) amongst us might counter, why not? And indeed, regardless of your particular worldview, there’s some weight to that retort. If the universe is blind and indifferent, then we shouldn’t be suprised to find it indifferent towards us. If there’s a wrathful, demanding god disgusted by our failures, then we shouldn’t be taken aback when that god deigns to punish us for said failures. If this world is merely and illusion of suffering to be overcome through denial of self, then we shouldn’t even ask the question, but instead choose to look beyond it.

The struggle with why only comes into play if there is believed to be a good, benevolent god who is supposed to love humanity and want what’s best for us.

This will probably stir things up, but why is really only an issue for Christians.

We’re the ones who are supposed to have the eternal, perfect, holy, good God. We’re the ones who run around telling people that God loves and wants what’s best for them. We’re the ones telling folks that if they’ll just believe and accept Jesus, God’s one and only Son (whom God sent to die for our sins because He loved us so much) that, in the words of Bob Marley, “everything’s gonna be alright.”

Are we wrong about God?

Or are we wrong with what we believe about Him?

And maybe most damaging of all: are we wrong to believe we can ever really understand why?

My question is: what if the why? is bigger than us? What if there is a good answer, only it doesn’t involve us, involve me, at all?

What if why? is something beyond personal and speaks to a larger, much fuller truth about life than I am capable of understanding?

I know for me, the struggle with why? has been the struggle with the universe not being built around me. Heck, my own life isn’t built around me. This is my personal conviction, and I welcome your comments and perspectives, but the world doesn’t start and end at my nose. It contains more than just what’s inside my personal bubble. And so when events come along that shatter that conceit – when my child dies before she’s born or my neighbor’s child dies in a car accident – why? becomes a question about much more than just the events at hand. It becomes an exploration into our very understanding of life, of the universe, of things that are far beyond ourselves.

Why? takes us into spaces that we usually avoid, because it shows us our own seeming insignificance.

Which is why the question is uniquely problematic for the Christian, who’s spent years believing in his or her significance in the sight of God: after all, He sent His Son to die for me, right?

Maybe not.

This post is going to frustrate a lot of people, some because of the questions I’ve raised and some because I’m not going to pose a neat and tidy answer to the questions I’ve raised. I expect (though I may not get) a flame war in the comments on this post, and that’s okay. I’m a big boy. I can handle it.

But for all of you struggling today, with death, with health, with money or relationships or theology or fear or adoption, for those who are grappling with the why?, take comfort in the knowledge that you do not do so alone.

And maybe that’s the point.

My two munchkins.

When I was in my college years, and really even up until I met my wife, I never actively thought about being a father. I figured it would happen at some point (after all, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?) but I never spent time contemplating what that would mean to my life. I was me-focused, what can I say? The world was only as large as my dreams and aspirations.

But when Ruthanne came along, then Ella, and then Jon, that all changed.

Actually, it all changed when I met Rachel, because she was the only force in the world that could make me think about certain things/realities (like emptying the trash on a regular basis or the financial benefits of washing underwear you already own instead of throwing away used drawers and buying new ones – but I digress). And when she agreed to be with me forever, for better or worse, in June of 2001, I knew then that my mind would have to expand to account for a world of shared dreams.

It was easy with Rachel – we were both adults, we shared things in common, we were both capable of speech and using the toilet on our own as well as being able to feed ourselves – so the transition wasn’t too tough. Plus, I loved her with my entire heart.

With kids? I wasn’t too sure.

Even when we began discussing the idea of having kids I was a bit nervous. Gone would be the advantages that Rachel and I shared – age, perspective, language, autonomy – and instead I would have to face an utterly new person experiencing everything for the first time, a person whose life would be inexorably shaped by my choices and perspective and philosophy. The reality of parenting hit me full force: as a parent, you are responsible for shaping a human being who will live in the world, and as you shape them, so you shape the world.

It sounds trite, but it’s true. And it’s a staggering responsibility. Mind-bending, actually, as well as bowel-loosening.

With Ruthanne, the journey ended before it could begin. With Ella, we’re almost into year six of the experiment, and the early returns are positive. She’s bright, energetic, incredibly smart and polite, and despite her myriad minor health issues (which seem, to us, to be monumental), she’s as perfect as any kid can be. Sure, there are days that I don’t enjoy sitting down and having to help her with homework (she occasionally has lapses in her attention span – wonder where she gets that from?), but there’s never a day that I don’t love her with all of my soul. There’s never a day that I regret being her dad.

The same holds true with Jonathan. We’re discovering that the terrible twos were late blooming in him, and as we speed towards his third birthday the boy is making remarkable progress in catching up on his various tirades, tantrums and mood swings. It’s kind of like living with a glue-sniffing drifter.

But through it all, I love my son in a way that I didn’t know existed. While his morning routine is a bit tiresome (wake up, scream, whine, scream some more, make relentless demands about how he would like his milk served) there’s never a day that I don’t relish the inevitable moment when he will walk up to me, his eyes sparkling, and crawl into my lap and rest his head against my chest. Or grab my face and pull my head forward to kiss me ever-so-gently on the lips. Or wrap his arms around my leg in a bear hug and annouce, “I pooped!”

The fact is that I love all of my kids and would give anything, try to be anything, for them. And I look back on the time in my life when I didn’t think about anything other than myself and say, “Idiot.”

Lewis Grizzard once wrote that he had a subconscious fear about kids that probably kept him from having any. Lewis, as he well noted, was a bit challenged in the commitment department, and kids – in his mind – were the ultimate commitment.

Or, to paraphrase one of his columns: “Marriages come and go, but kids are forever.”

He’s right.

My friend Brad and his wife Meredith welcomed their first child, Braden, into the world almost 10 days ago, and Brad summed it up best during my visit with them in the hospital:

“I realize that we’re a family now. We’ll always be. I am forever daddy.”

Forever daddy. Sounds better than anything.

Happy sixteenth birthday, Joseph!

Sometimes, you have to go and find the story. Other times, the story comes to you. This is one of those times.

I work with teenagers as a youth pastor, and one of the young people in my youth group is named Joseph. Joseph is a high-energy, high-charisma kid who is almost always smiling and encouraging the people around him. He loves Georgia football almost as much as he loves Falcons football…or the Braves, Hawks, Thrashers (R.I.P.), or any other sport. He loves younger kids, loves to sing for the church, and is just a darn fine young man.

Joseph is special. In fact, he’s so special that I wanted to share his story, as told by his mother, Shannon, with you today.

Like I said – there are times when you have to look for stuff like this, but last night Shannon posted these words on Facebook and I dang near cried my eyes out because I didn’t know the whole story. And the wonder of it all is that it was right under my nose.

“It has been almost 16 years since I lay in a hospital bed waiting to see my sweet, perfect, new baby boy. I can still remember the shock and pain from hearing the doctors words ” I don’t know what is wrong with your son. I think he will live but he may be blind, deaf, and mentally retarded.” My PERFECT son might not be as perfect as I thought. That day I began a different journey than the one I thought I was starting when I entered the hospital. That day I received more than a perfect baby. I was blessed with my miracle baby and a son who touches lives.

The doctor told me that morning in his office that I didn’t know what I was talking about when I said the baby wasn’t kicking. I was told I was too young and too busy in my life to notice him kicking. I knew my baby wasn’t kicking and I was persistent. I had already been told everything was fine and that I could go home and wait the next three weeks for him to come. Since I was already in the office he decided to humor me and do a stress test. I was young, I was busy, and I had no idea that something was wrong. The doctors eyes began to get bigger and bigger with each test. He finally said “Well, we are going to have a baby today.”

I was put right into the hospital and they started to induce labor. They found that every time I had a contraction his heart rate would drop. They knew that if they waited he wouldn’t live. They decided to do an emergency c-section. It was done so quickly that when Joe sat down to say something to me he missed the delivery and didn’t realize the baby was in the corner being worked on.

Being our first child we didn’t know how things worked. We didn’t realize that they should have brought him over to show me or that we would hear him crying or that it is was odd that they wheeled me out before him. It seemed like forever waiting to see him and we still had no idea that something was wrong. I sent Joe to find out when we could see him.

Joe was brought into the ICU where they were working on our baby. There was another mom there who saw him. She grabbed him and said come see my baby. Her baby at that point was the smallest baby born in Georgia at 11 ounces. They were told that there baby probably wouldn’t live an hour but she was about two weeks old. I only saw her through a window and she was so tiny she could have fit into my palm. She did go home around mothers day although I did hear months later that she had passed away at around 5 or 6 months old. So young yet if you asked anyone at the hospital around that time she touched our lives. Her name was Mary. Mary King. Mary and Joseph. Could there have been two more perfect names for these two little miracles?

Joseph is not blind. He not only can see the world with his eyes but he see’s it with his heart. He isn’t deaf. If you ever watch him listen to the choir or his favorite group casting crowns it is like he is already hearing the sound of the trumpet calling and the angels rejoicing. Mentally retarded, I hate that word. Does my son have special needs? Yes, but who doesn’t. The day he rolled over, when he started to walk, when he gets up in front of a crowd at church to sing, these are all miracles and I praise God for each of them. It is so much sweeter to see my child do these things that any other child can do so easily.

Joseph is turning 16 this month. If he has ever touched your life I ask that you join me in celebrating his. He doesn’t want a car or things like a normal child would want. He is special and wants something special. He wants YOU. Please join me in a surprise party for Joseph. It is going to be January 14 from 4-6. If you would like to surprise him please come early. He will show up at 4. It will be at out church Chestnut Grove Baptist Church on Rosebud.”

Here’s hoping Joseph has the best birthday ever.

What does our national reaction to Tim Tebow's faith tell us about ourselves?

Let me start this blog of by admitting that I kind of like Tim Tebow, and that my admiration would perhaps run deeper had he not attended and played for the University of Florida. And let me also say that by his association with that particular penitentiary – uh, university – Tim Tebow proves that he is, indeed, no saint.

But that’s just the Georgia Bulldawg in me talking.

Collegiate allegiances aside, I like Tim Tebow. I think he’s a neat kid who’s trying to do something that very few people have ever managed, A.C. Green excepted: live a pious life as a professional athlete.

In case you don’t remember A.C. Green, that’s okay – he doesn’t remember you either. But he was a professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers, a teammate of Magic Johnson and the Showtime gang, and was more famous for his public declaration of his virginity than his basketball. Green, on a team whose exploits were as prolific off the court as on it, abstained from the many opportunities afforded a pro athlete because of his religious convictions.

Tim Tebow is trying to walk the same tightrope. Only with Tebow, it’s 4,000 feet higher in the air and he’s got people trying to cut the rope out from under him.

You see, Tebow isn’t just public with his faith in Jesus Christ – it’s the defining force in his life. He starts every post-game press conference with a shout out to the Lord, and he brings his faith into every interview. For many, he’s become a folk hero. For others, he’s a proselyte who should just shut up.

And that’s just among us Christians.

Listening to the radio only yesterday, I heard Mike Bell, a local sports talk host on 790 The Zone, say that Tebow needed to keep his religion out of his football. Bell pointed to Tebow’s practice of kneeling at the beginning and end of games – the now ubiquitous Tebowing – as an obnoxious intrusion on the games themselves.

“Like God really gives a crap about a football game,” Bell said.

His partner, David Archer, rebutted Bell by saying that Tebow has made it known that he doesn’t pray for victory or divine intervention in the outcome of games, but instead that the men involved in the competition will play with honor and without injury.

“And from talking to him,” and here it should be noted that Archer is not just a sports talk host, he’s also color analyst for the Atlanta Falcons radio broadcasts and a former NFL quarterback, “he’s sincere with that. He really is praying for every guy to come off that field okay.”

I appreciated the exchange. I could see Bell’s point – he doesn’t want to have someones religion shoved down his throat. Personally, I felt the same way when Mahmoud Abdul Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem because he’s a Muslim. Rauf had every right to practice his faith as he saw fit, and for him, not standing during the anthem was devotion to Allah. I remember, at the time, being disgusted by his logic and turned off to his religion, and a great many people felt the same way – public backlash against Rauf was strong and swift.

And that was just one incident.

Tebow’s faith is out there non-stop, in part because the kid just lives that way, and in part because the national media (cough-ESPN-cough) is in love with him in a way that should almost require a restraining order. We’ve been kind of force-fed Tebow for the last five months because he’s seen as a compelling story, and part of that narrative is his faith. The media doesn’t really home in on it – at least not in a way that makes them as proselyting as Tebow – but by giving him so much air time, Tebow gets countless opportunities to express his beliefs to the viewing public. And for many people that just gets old.

It’s haranguing. It’s pedantic. It’s offensive. It’s another example of the Right Wing-Nuts trying to turn this nation into a theocracy where no one but the faithful get the basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Maybe. If the shoe were on the other foot, if – say – it were a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Moonie athlete getting all the press, I might feel more outrage.

But I doubt it. From every account I’ve read about Tebow, it’s not some cynical masterplan. He would live this way with or without cameras. If he had been really, really gifted at accounting instead of football, he would have prayed over tax returns or statements. If he had been a chef, he would have said the blessing over each meal he served up. He would do this because it’s his sincere belief and it’s an inextricable part of who he is.

Actually, it’s not part of who he is. It is who he is. That’s why it always comes out.

As Christians, that’s the way we’re supposed to be. We shouldn’t have to concoct systems, programs or other subterfuges in an attempt to share the Gospel – it should just be who we are, and come out of us genuinely and naturally. The fact that it doesn’t, that we all too often do come across as forced and manufactured when speaking about our faith, makes Tebow that much more of an intriguing figure because he is the genuine article.

I know a lot of people have adopted the “wait and see” strategy with Tebow – that eventually he’ll do or say something stupid that will validate the cynical among us for not believing in him. Maybe so – he is human after all. But the fact that he has weathered such intense scrutiny – for his faith, his football, and just being himself – without a moral failing coming to light just adds to the mystique.

Tebow will eventually mess up. Not because he’s a phony but because he’s a human being. But even in his mistakes, he’ll continue to be a polarizing figure, but it won’t be because of his faith.

It will be because he forces us to look at our own.

The gift that keeps on giving...

Rachel and I went all in this Christmas for the kids. With the help of my parents we purchased a playset for the backyard. Now, the mere mention of playsets in my family is enough to evoke either laughter or migraines, because once upon a time my parents purchased a playset and assembled it together in the garage on Christmas Eve. My mother’s reasoning was solid: she wanted her boys (my brother and I) to be able to play on the set Christmas morning. And we did – we had a ball swinging and sliding and just enjoying ourselves in general. Once Christmas day had passed, it was time to move the set out of the garage to its permanent home in our backyard.

Uh-oh.

As my parents discovered, playsets are supposed to be erected outdoors for a reason: when my parents tried to pick the set up and move it outside, it simply would not fit out the garage door. No matter how many ways the turned it or tried to shove it, that sucker simply would not budge.

Which meant my father had to take the blasted thing apart and reassemble it. Like I mentioned at the top of the post, the man is gracious.

So yesterday, armed with that family history, a power drill, some borrowed socket wrenches and my pitiful little toolbox, my dad and I set out to give my kids the gift of play. The instructions recommended that the set could be put together by one adult with “an adult helper” in as little as eight hours. “Easy to assemble” the instructions promised. Of course the instructions also said to read them entirely through before attempting to assemble, and to also make sure to have the number of a good contractor handy in case you screwed up royally. Dad and I did neither.

My father opened the book up and said, “Okay – here’s what we do first. We’ve got to build the walls.”

And so we did. It took a long time because the walls were held together by 4-inch bolts on lock washers that had to be tightened by hand because we didn’t have a drill bit that would fit the WH head. Then the base of the wall had to have holes drilled for its screws, and by the time we finished both we were two hours into the eight hour process. Of course, it didn’t help that we built one wall completely bass-ackwards; conveniently, the easy-assemble instructions didn’t point out that the walls had to mirror each other. So we had to take one wall apart and reassemble it all over again.

“This feels familiar,” my dad muttered.

Once we got the outer walls framed, we began to build the rest of the structure. We attached the header boards, some platform supports, and other things that I can’t remember the words for. Then we had to screw in the flooring for one of the platforms. Dad grabbed the wood (with Ella and Jon’s help) and brought it to me, and I just started knockin’ ‘em out. Soon enough we had the lower platform completed floored, and the top one was coming along when my dad said, “That’s the last piece of wood for that one.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking at the gaping 4-inch board sized hole in the platform. “There has to be another piece.”

“Well, there’s only supposed to be fifteen. How many you got up there?”

I did a quick count: 15.

“What the heck, man?” I turned to dad. “Did we screw up?”

Dad re-read the instructions and realized that there was a missing board that was labeled differently. He handed it up and I plopped it down in the hole. A good two inches short.

“It doesn’t fill the hole,” I said.

“That’s all the wood that’s supposed to be up there. The instructions just say to ‘space evenly’.”

I looked at the platform. Each of the fifteen planks was screwed into place by five one and a half inch wood screws. That meant I was going to have to unscrew at least half of them in order to space the boards out so that there would be no dangerous holes. I took a deep breath and began to unscrew. Dad suggested using a small washer as a spacer, and soon enough the work was done. No problem.

Then dad looked at the lower platform and said, “Wait, that one is supposed to have a little piece of wood like that one.”

I stood there, staring. Sure enough, I had used one too many pieces of a certain type of wood on the lower platform. And wouldn’t you know it, the correct piece of wood was a tiny little one that required me to unscrew almost all of the lower platform and “space evenly”?

Four hours down. Three near total reassembles. And we were still only on step 5. Out of, like, 205.

Easy to assemble my butt.

Fortunately, the rest of the day went well. We were able to get the third story on the structure, got both pitched roofs assembled, installed all of the braces and anchors, and even got the crossbar mount ready for the swing beam. Of course, we did almost all of this in a persistent, nagging drizzle that never really got you wet but left you awfully damp.

And yet, despite all of these things, I never really lost my temper. Never got short with my father or transferred any anger to the kids or Rachel. Amazingly, it was kind of fun. Dad and I laughed a lot, and I enjoyed the feeling of building something lasting for my kids. Jon was in and out of the construction zone all day, and he was so pumped up about seeing the playset going up that he would just scream at random and then jump up and down. Ella came out and helped us sort wood, and she didn’t need that much help; her reading skills have grown nearly astronomically since school started, and she was able easily identify the letters and numbers stamped on the wood, and then stack the pieces by the stamps. And Rachel was able to use the time to get stuff done inside, like cleaning and wrapping Christmas presents.

Perhaps, though, what I enjoyed the most was just being with my dad. We’ve not had much time together lately, and we’re not exactly the kind that have long heart to hearts even when we do get together. But to be able to work with him, side by side, for almost eight hours was a wonderful thing. There were times that I wanted to ask him about what kind of things he used to do with his dad, but never did. Pop’s death in August was a tough time for our family, and we made it through Thanksgiving okay, but understandably sad. I think Christmas will be the same, as it is for any first occasion where Pop isn’t there.

And with that absence looming, it was a gift to be able to be present with my father. To laugh with him, to be able to work with him as both a son and an equal. Perhaps most precious of all, to be able to add one more story to my memory banks.

With the rain falling steadily today, we’ve decided that we’ll finish the project on Friday. And while we have a bit more to assemble (included a rock wall with 12,000 rocks that have to be screwed into place), I look forward to being with him again, working side by side, not saying much and yet so much being said between us.

A son can’t ask for much more for Christmas.