The Gift We Needed

“But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” – Luke 2:19

Can I be honest with you and tell you what my most distinctive Christmas memory is? It may be a little weird, but this week, as I searched my brain for what was the one thing from my childhood that I simply couldn’t forget about Christmas, this was the thing that came back to mind over and over again.

It wasn’t the year I got the Millenium Falcon and my dad got carpal tunnel from putting on the stickers.

It wasn’t the year I got a television for my room.

It wasn’t even the year I got a computer.

My most indelible Christmas memory is my great-grandmother, for almost 12 years without fail, giving me underwear and socks. Black socks. And white briefs. Just what every gift-obsessed, greed-consumed child wants to find beneath a spool of paper and a mound of tissue.

Socks and drawers.

I remember this gift so distinctly because it was nothing that I wanted. I dreamed of things that required batteries, things that could be played with, things that would make noise or shoot rockets or impress the kids across the street and establish that I was, once and for all, really, really cool. And yet every year, like clockwork, I would rip open the gift marked “To Jason, From Nanny” and my heart would sink as I gazed down upon yet another box full of undies and socks.

Yet, of all the thousands of gifts I’ve received over my lifetime, those annual boxes of practical goodness have remained my most central memory of Christmas. Partly because it makes for a funny story to tell; partly because of the sweetness of my grandmother to make sure that my great-grandmother had something to give us; but mostly because of all the things I got that I wanted, that was usually the one gift I got that I needed.

I read a lot, and so naturally this time of year is filled with blog posts and thoughtful articles from folks who decry the consumerization of Christmas. It’s become a vehicle for greed, they say; it’s become more about getting than giving, they shout; Christmas used to mean something, now it’s just an empty holiday overrun by the never-ending shallowness of the human heart. And I have to say, they have a point.

I realized this when, starting back in November, my son would point to the television every time a commercial came on and scream, “I WANT DAT!” Didn’t matter what the advertised item was: girl toy, boy toy, toy he already owned, toy too advanced for his age, toy too expensive for even Santa’s generous budget – once it appeared on the TV screen, Jon immediately established his desire for it to become his.

After weeks of working with him and reminding him that Christmas isn’t about getting everything insight, but really, it’s about the birth of Jesus and the gift of life to the world, we were finally able to whittle his list down to a few manageable things: lightsabers, a gun, Hot Wheels, a choo-choo train, and a hang glider.

Suffice it to say, Santa will have his hands full on that order.

But I saw in my son my own younger self, when the Christmastime world existed to fulfill my desires, to grant my wishes. Nevermind that I had a thousand needs, what I demanded from Christmas was what I wanted. Forget about socks or shoes or shirts or pants or a college savings account; who needs a CD or a stock certificate that might earn me money that I could only get at some random point in the future? I WANT STUFF NOW. Christmas was when I carefully constructed a master plan to fulfill my every little want – and my great-grandmother’s gift thwarted that plan. It tossed an ugly little monkey wrench into the working of greed in my heart.

The birth of Jesus is the same. It was not the expected gift from God; it wasn’t the anticipated revealing of the Messiah. Christ didn’t come with world-wide fanfare and trumpets blaring, with every king and his nation bending the knee to acknowledge him. Humanity didn’t get what it wanted when it came to its own salvation, but thank God, we got exactly what we needed.

It’s taken me years of thinking about my great-grandmother’s gift to be able to put it in the proper perspective. So let me encourage you tonight, as you leave and head into the rest of your Christmas celebration, to take a moment and consider the greatness of the God who gives us exactly what we need, and so much more than we could imagine.

Dawg Gone: Rest in Peace, Larry Munson

Larry Munson: Voice of the Dawgs, indeed.

The voice sounded like gravel being shoveled out of the bed of a pick-up. The ever-present pessimism made you think even Louisiana-Lafayette could score 45 on us. The emotional calls gave you eyes to see what your ears could only hear. And when it came time to call it a day, it was his voice we would all hear in our sleep.

Larry Munson, 89, passed away in his Athens, Georgia home last night from complications with pneumonia. Poetic really – the same lungs that gave life to Georgia football took life from the man we held so dear.

I loved Larry Munson because my grandfather did. Like so many Georgia fans in the 80s and 90s, my Pop Emmett wouldn’t put up with the TV color guys; he would turn the Bulldogs on TV and turn Munson up on the radio, giving me my first real exposure to the legendary voice. It was almost comical – you could see the Bulldogs dominating on the screen, but Munson’s voice would ring with concern, his words bleak against the bright TV images. Pop would rise and fall with Munson, always Munson, no matter what the TV showed us. If Larry was worried, so was Pop. That’s just the way it worked.

I met Munson once or twice while attending Georgia, and he was a nice man. We always joked about his student movie groups (they always seemed to have a lot of very attractive girls), but mostly whenever you talked about Munson, you talked about the great calls. And there were plenty: sugar falling from the sky at Auburn in ’82; hunker down defense in that same Auburn game; Kevin Butler’s 61-yard field goal against Clemson in ’84; the unbelievable comeback against Tech in ’97; the hobnail boot in ’01 at Knoxville; Michael Johnson’s famous catch against Auburn in ’02.

And, of course, the call that almost every Georgia fan has memorized:

Florida in a stand-up five, they may or may not blitz, they won’t. Buck back. Third down on the 8. In trouble. Got a block behind him. Going to throw on the run. Complete to the 25, to the 30. Lindsay Scott 35, 40. Lindsay Scott 45, 50, 45, 40. Run Lindsay! Twenty-five, 20, 15, 10, 5. Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! … Well, I can’t believe it. 92 yards and Lindsay really got in a footrace, I broke my chair, I came right through a chair, a metal STEEL chair with about a five inch cushion … Do you know what is gonna happen here tonight? And up at St. Simons and Jekyll Island and all those places where all those Dawg people have got those condominiums for four days? MAN, is there gonna be some property destroyed tonight! 26 to 21, Dawgs on top! We were gone. I gave up, you did too. We were out of it and gone. Miracle!

You just can’t read that paragraph without hearing Munson’s voice in your head. Or getting goosebumps.

We all know that getting older means losing pieces of your childhood one by one, some pieces small and only slightly significant, other pieces as personal as your own heart. I can’t overstate that for many a Georgia fan today, a truly gigantic piece of themselves has gone away. Munson may not have been a Bulldog by birth, but he became one by virtue of being our heart and soul every autumn Saturday for 42 years.

Rest in peace, Larry. I, and the whole of your Bulldawg nation, salute you.

Top Five Albums From My Youth

I’ve been doing some deep thinking over the weekend about things like hope, grace, meaning, love and a host of other topics (such is life when you’re a minister). My intention was to post today about some of the thoughts that traversed through my head this weekend, but that intention got waylaid when I got in the car this morning and “What You Need” by INXS came through the speakers.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that song. And I’d forgotten how good it was.

I loved this album as a kid.

This immediately made me remember the Kick album, specifically it’s black and white and red graphic and picture of a skateboarder in mid-Ollie. Granted, “What You Need” wasn’t on the Kick album, but I’m not responsible for the associations that my brain makes.

I was 12 years old when Kick was released, and my friends and I were in the midst of a skateboarding craze. I remember at least two Christmases in a row that were defined by people getting new decks (I got a Steve Caballero deck complete with Independent Trucks and Bones bearings and wheels; I seem to recall my friend Pete getting a Tony Hawk deck that same year, though he might’ve traded his old Vision deck for it rather than getting it new – Pete, feel free to correct me on this).

For a kid like me, to whom the skateboarding thing was a first taste of pre-teen rebellion (sanctioned and funded by my parents, if that tells you anything about me and rebellious streak), seeing that skateboard on that album cover was a validation. It told me that the culture into which I’d plunged was legit. Nevermind that I couldn’t skate nearly as well as my friends (indeed, I barely mastered the art of the Ollie, let alone anything like this), I was just happy to be along for the ride, to be part of something bigger and different.

Kick was the music we skated to for quite a while. As the child of Baptists, I played “Devil Inside” much quieter than I did the other songs on the album, but to this day I still feel like I did back then whenever I hear songs from the disc. “New Sensation”, “Never Tear Us Apart”, “Need You Tonight” and “Mediate” (the video for those two became an overnight sensation), “Guns In The Sky” and, my personal favorite, “”Mystify” – these were the songs of my preliminary steps into independence.

And again, one song brought all of that to my mind.

It also brought back the horrible incident with a Beastie Boys album, as well as the power of Ten during my high school years. But rather than babble on with inane anecdotes, I’ll just list the top five albums of my youth. Maybe you’ll see one or two of your own (or remember those that were).

1. Kick – INXS: I’ve covered this plenty.

2. Licensed to Ill - Beastie Boys: I don’t remember exactly, but I think my unsuspecting Aunt Melanie gave me this cassette for Christmas one year, unintentionally fueling my subversive little self. I wanted the tape because it had “Fight for Your Right”, the party anthem that everyone – even those of us who had no reason to fight – held as their own personal theme of independence. I made the mistake of blaring the music from this album a little too loud on my Kmart special boombox, and my dad became so offended by the lyrics (though I can’t recall which song or why), he marched into my room, ejected the tape, and literally flung it out the front door. When I went to retrieve it, he said, “Don’t you dare bring that crap back into my house, Jason.”

I didn’t.

3. Ten – Pearl Jam: I spent countless hours driving around during my upperclassmen years of high school listening to this album. Part of the reason I remember Ten so fondly is because of the tape deck in my first car, a 1984 Honda Accord 4-door. The tape deck had a music sensor, so you could fast forward or rewind, and when the sensor detected a pause on the tape, it would stop and start playing. To put it in terms you kiddies can understand: my tape deck had a seek button before anyone knew what a seek button was. I could literally skip from song to song, without having to guess when to stop the tape. It was awesome, and it single-handedly assured that the song “Alive” got played about 10,000 times from January 1992 t0 June 1994.

And yes, I realize how old that paragraph makes me sound. And feel.

4. Music – 311: This was a tough call, as I think I actually listened to 311′s self-titled album far more than I ever listened to Music. But through the magical speakers of David Evans came the most amazing drum beats I’d heard at that time in my life (sophomore year of college, 1995), and I was instantly hooked. My two favorite songs were hands down “Freak Out” and “Feels So Good”, and while I never embraced the culture of 311, I certainly enjoyed speeding through the streets of Athens to their Music.

5. Document – R.E.M.: While their Rumor album is much beloved by most fans, for me Document was the best R.E.M. album I ever heard. I know the band recently broke up (and let’s be honest, they were really done when Bill Berry left to go farm), but R.E.M. might be the best band of my generation (feel free to insert screams and hate-filled diatribes here; what do you expect from an unabashed populist?) and Document highlights everything that made them good. You know the standards from this album (“It’s the End of the World As We Know It”, “Finest Work Song” and “The One I Love”) but it’s the quirky little gems that make it so great. I love “Disturbance at the Heron House”, and I think “Oddfellows Local 151″ might be my favorite on the whole record, but you can’t help but enjoy the other songs like “Strange” and “Exhuming McCarthy.”

So those are my top five – what’s yours? I’d love to know what music shaped your life.

The Maze of You

“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There’s no one on earth that is you-er than you!”

- Dr. Seuss

I sometimes wonder if I’m insane. I have a tendency, a nasty, weird tendency, to think of myself as still a child. As a youngster. As someone who isn’t taken seriously as an adult. I see myself, quite often, as the same shy little dork from high school.

It’s debilitating.

Seriously. It is. There’s nothing worse than not seeing yourself as you really are – whether you’re deluded too far to the right of your ego (narcissism) or too far to the left (pathological insecurity). And I think a lot of us suffer from it; even the people you think are immune.

Wouldn’t that explain our self-justifications? Wouldn’t that cover some of the puerile and selfish things we do? Doesn’t that put your neighbor into a clearer perspective?

We’re all adults who act like we’re kids trying to act like we think adults should.

Maybe not all of us. I know most older folks (let’s say 60 and up) seem to have a solid handle on who they are, what they believe, how they’ll live and what they want their life to leave behind. But getting to that point – arriving at full-consciousness of being adult – seems to take longer. Maybe it’s just a generational thing. Or maybe it’s some other sort of factor; maybe it has to do with home life or school districts or Yellow #5 or the strange way some cheese that should be solid and easy to cut steadfastly refuses to be that way. I don’t know.

What I do know is that, as The Head and The Heart sing, sometimes “I get lost in my mind.” Trapped in a maze of me. Maybe you get trapped in a maze of You.

If so, there’s hope.

It’s slight and crazy and almost certainly to scare the fool out of you, but it also creates a warm center in your heart that can’t be extinguished by the fiercest of chills. And it is this: do something that’s not centered around you.

I know – weird, right? I mean, how do you do something that’s not centered around you? You’re you, for Pete’s sakes? You can’t escape yourself! If you do anything, You have to be a central figure in the action!

But being a central figure is not the same as being the central focus. It is entirely possible for you to be intimately involved in something and still be invisible for all intents and purposes. If you simply act and then walk away – do for the sake of doing, without explanation or context or self-aggrandizement – you become nothing more than an actor, nothing more than just a piece in someone else’s story.

And you end up realizing just how grown up you really are. You discover that the maze of You isn’t as confusing as you would think.

It’s been said that the end of you is the beginning of another. Fair enough, but I think you could also add that the center of You is found when you put others at your center.

Seems like I recall a certain Nazarene said something similar about 2,000 years ago. And it still holds.

Why “Toy Story 3″ Makes Me Cry Every Time

My children love movies (as I’ve written before; that post, by the way, still gets over 100 original views a day on average, far and away the most popular post I’ve ever typed!). So it was business as usual when Jon wanted to plop in front of the TV this morning and watch Toy Story 3.

Or, as he says, “I wan’ see Woodee an’ Buss?”

(That the request comes out in the form of a question is his attempt at psychological maneuvering. I honestly think Christopher Nolan got the idea for Inception from dealing with someone’s toddler.)

I sighed. I love Toy Story 3. I think it is one of the most beautifully animated and heartfelt movies ever made, but I hate to watch it because I cry every freaking time I see it. Happened again this morning – we got to the scene where Woody and the gang are slowly slipping to their doom in the garbage furnace, and as they do, the friends all join hands and lean into one another for comfort. Only Woody, in the center of the gang, holding them all together as always, faces their impending deaths alone. The way he closes his eyes and grimly accepts their collective fate just gets me.

The tears just came on their own. Rachel walked by and said, “Are you crying again?”

Yes. Yes I was. Because I can’t help it. The movie is just that good.

There’s a reason why Toy Story 3 makes me cry every time – it’s called parenthood. Having kids of my own, I’m acutely aware that every day that passes brings me that much closer to the end of my time with my kids. They are growing up, as evidenced by Jon’s rapidly expanding vocabulary and Ella’s writing and illustrating her first book.

(Seriously, Ella has written and illustrated a book. Sure, she copied pictures from a Clifford book and simply wrote descriptions of what she drew, but the fact that she cut out pages roughly the same size and tried to follow the same formatting for each page tells me that my little girl is really freaking smart. And talented. And perhaps adopted.)

I have noticed in my own children the sad, forgotten truth that the Toy Story franchise brings achingly to the fore: that the process of time is best observed through children and their toys. Even as Ella transitions away from some of her previously beloved toys, turning instead to crayons and paper and toys for older kids, I see that part of her past fading away like morning mist. And Jon’s the same – while he’s still into some baby toys, he’s asking for Spider-Man, Star Wars and other action figures that move beyond the Little People and their world.

Heck, the only baby toys he really plays with anymore are his Woody and Buzz figures (almost called them dolls).

Why does this franchise have such an impact on the culture (and me in particular)? Because it engages us in that forgotten place from childhood – our imagination. When our sense of pretend gets cranked up by watching Andy construct elaborate worlds with his toys – and then watch as those toys inhabit an elaborate world all their own – we cannot help but be transported back to those times in our own childhood when all we needed was the plastic warmth of a beloved toy and space in which to play.

And perhaps the reason we all go to those places so willingly is that they feel safe. The memory of them, that is. When you think about that favorite toy and how you used to play with it for hours (assuming you were fortunate enough to have such things; I know I was) there is a sense of security and protection that comes over you that belies even the very truth of what was going on around you at the time. Maybe mom and dad were fighting all the time, or maybe dad had walked out. Maybe you only had the one toy because you couldn’t afford any more. Maybe you were abused by someone you thought was nice. The fears and worries of childhood can be many.

But the safety represented by that toy, and your ability to escape via your imagination, could not be undone. It was the one place we could each go to escape whatever else was going on.

It was only after we got older, after we lost those places of safety and solitude, that we put away the toys and tried finding another refuge. Most of us found that there wasn’t really a better one to be had. Adult escapes are generally magnifications of our greatest weaknesses – whether it’s booze, pills, sex, the internet or something else, when we try to get away as adults we usually end up where we started.

So when I watch Toy Story 3 and sense the death of childhood innocence and safety as seen through Woody’s love for Andy, or the toys’ love for one another, I can’t help but shed a few tears for the lostness of my own childhood and the creeping loss of my children’s. Does it make me a pansy? Probably.

But it also forces me to get down on the carpet and play with my son in his world, instead of dragging him into mine. It makes me sit at the table with Ella and marvel at how excited she must feel as she sees her penmanship or artistic skill continually improve.

I cry because Toy Story taps into the truth of human existence: that we all face this world on our own, but we survive it through the company of good friends who inspire us to imagine, who help us discover new worlds, who are simply there when we need them.

And I guess I cry, too, because all too often those good friends are only made out of plastic, instead of flesh and blood.

But I’ll take them all the same. And I’ll love them as much as my kids do while my kids love them, because one day, they’ll represent that portion of my life which was simultaneously the most difficult and most beautiful: the precious few years I had with my daughter and son, just us, together and dreaming.