Falling Down

I fell through the ceiling in my hallway tonight. I was carrying a stupidly heavy box of books from my packed up office (a box that was so I heavy I actually thought to myself: I should probably just leave these downstairs), and since my attic doesn’t have decking (but does have a high number of obstacles to easy walking) I missed one of the joists and my left foot came crashing through the ceiling below.

It’s a good thing my butt already has a crack in it – as it is, I almost gave myself a second one. Luckily, nothing sensitive got injured, and all I ended up with was a three foot square hole in my ceiling and a baseball sized contusion on the right side of my butt (which was helpfully treated by my sitting on an ice pack for 20 of the most awkward and least attractive minutes of my life).

For someone who just quit his job and has a limited income right now, this was not a welcome experience. Doubly so since I also have the handy man skills of a six month old.

So now I’m sitting here, staring at the massive hole in my ceiling, and all I can think of is Michael Caine. Specifically, this clip:

I love that clip for a thousand different reasons, not the least of which is Michael Caine’s accent. The man just sounds cool. But I also love it for the truth it contains: we fall down so we can learn to rise. Life has its way of asking us to go backward in order to go forward; we’re not fond of that fact, but it’s true all the same.

I had coffee with a friend tonight (well, now that I think about it, I had coffee; he never drank a thing) and we talked about life and the changes that it holds. For me, the changes with my job and career track; for him, the adjustments to fatherhood and how his writing/creative life has been put on hold for the moment. As we often do, we reminisced about life in high school and college, and we each were able to identify a specific point, or a specific thing, that – if we could do it all again – was the one thing we’d do differently. We talked about that for a second, and then my friend said something like this:

“But you know, by not taking that path, we’ve become the men we are today. So in some ways, not making those choices taught us to make them when they counted.”

We fall down, so we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

I know plenty of people who’ve fallen down lately (and for some, it’s more accurate to say they’ve been shoved down cruelly or kicked to the ground). There are people who are simply looking for enough hope to make it through the end of the week, or the day, or their particular shift at work. They wonder if things will ever be in their favor; if they’ll ever reach that point where life feels like it’s moving forward more often than it feels like it’s going back. The dream is still out there, but they’re tired of it being beyond reach.

All I can say is that falling down isn’t the worst thing in the world. Going backward isn’t always bad. It’s staying there that’s the issue.

If we fall down, we must get up.

That’s the path of reward – that’s the life worth living. Even gaping ceiling holes can be patched and made good as new. But sometimes, we have to live through those moments to believe that.

When Anything Was Possible

This morning, because he was climbing the walls, I put my son in my car and took him for a drive. We ran an errand for work first, then headed down Highway 78, eastbound. We passed through Loganville, Between, Monroe…and as the mile markers swept by, Jon asked me where we were going.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going to take you to where I went to college.”

“You’re gonna take me to your college?” he repeated.

“Yeah. The University of Georgia.”

“The Yoo-be-nursery of…how do you say it?”

I smiled. “The University of Georgia.”

“Oh. You’re gonna take me there?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Can we get ice cream?”

The great thing about my alma mater is that it’s less than an hour’s drive, yet feels like going to another planet. As we turned onto Milledge Avenue, Jon immediately started asking questions. “Why are there so many houses? Why do people have couches in the yard? Why do they have bulldogs on everything?” It was non-stop.

I turned into the Butts-Mehre Building parking lot, thinking that I’d take him to the sports museum inside and show him the glory, glory of old Georgia. We walked in and in quick order took pictures with the 1980 National Championship trophy, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy, and a very nice lady who knew where the restrooms were (that was Jon’s idea). But all of that lasted less than a minute; suddenly, Jon wanted to know where the scientists were.

“I want to see the scientists, like me.” (Special thanks to my brother- and sister-in-law Terrell and Julie White for sending Jon a Big Bag of Science Experiments for his birthday. My kitchen floors will never be the same.)

So we left the Butts-Mehre, went down by Foley Field (Jon had zero interest in the baseball diamond), turned by Stegeman Coliseum (he wasn’t interested in that either) and zipped over towards the Biology, Chemistry and Food Sciences buildings. He begged me to find a place to park so he could “see the scientists make stuff up”, but I couldn’t find a spot, and wasn’t sure we could get into some of the labs anyway.

“That’s sad,” said Jon. “Don’t people want to see scientists?”

I’ve yet to tell him what Bear Bryant said on that issue: “80,000 people never showed up to watch a chemistry test.”

We turned left on East Campus Avenue and drove behind Sanford Stadium. I turned left again on Baldwin Street and showed him Park Hall. “That’s where daddy spent most of his last two years of college.”

“That looks boring,” he replied.

We turned right onto Milledge once more, and then made a right onto Broad Street. I parked downtown near the Arches and we took a stroll across North Campus. We looked at squirrels, trees, the Chapel Bell, the Law Library Atrium, and the inside of the main library. I walked him back down to Sanford Stadium and made the mistake of telling him that’s where all the dead Ugas are buried. After that, he wanted to talk about nothing else.

It was a nice trip, despite the fact that the campus looks almost nothing like I remember it. Fifteen years after I left, the university has become what former president Charles Knapp had dreamed: a top-flight center of education. I marveled at how young the students are compared to when I was in school; how many of them still think they’re invincible enough to smoke; how many of them seem far more determined than I was when I roamed the same grounds.

As we walked back to the car, I took Jon to Park Hall, where the English and Classics departments are headquartered. I snapped a picture in front of my old haunt, and recalled when a professor stopped me on the front steps and told me that, with a bit of revision, some of my pieces would be press-ready. And then the professor offered to send them to his friend at The New Yorker – and could almost guarantee they’d see print.

I stood there and watched that memory play out one more time: I shook his hand and told him thank you, but no. I wasn’t prepared to face rejection. He asked me to reconsider; told me that of all the students in my “Writing for Publication” class, I was the only one to demonstrate real potential.

I told him no a second time. Then I walked away.

It’s been fifteen years, and I still remember that. In college, so the saying goes, anything is possible. You’re not who you were, not yet who you’ll be. You’re a bundle of potential and passion and purposeless energy. You’re waiting to be aimed somewhere and to see how far you’ll go.

At least, that’s the way some people were. I wasn’t. I’m 37 now, and am just finally reaching my “anything is possible” phase. It took me this long to realize the things about myself that are good and worthy and deserving of people’s attention. Today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take that professor’s hand and say, “Let’s sit down and make those revisions now. Why wait?” I would whole-heartedly accept his offer and be so excited about even the possibility that I might get read, much less published.

But I am that person today because I wasn’t that person then. I am a husband and father and writer today because I couldn’t see myself as any of that then.

Sometimes, we take the path we think we’re supposed to take because we have a hard time imagining ourselves take any other path. We choose what we know because we’re afraid of what we don’t. And sometimes, we discover that we end up where we started; we come back to the path we turned away, prepared to take it and see what happens.

That’s what I felt today, standing on a campus that isn’t the same as it was fifteen years ago. But then again, neither was the man standing there. Today, with my son in tow, I went back in time and realized I hadn’t missed my moment; I’d just been preparing for it.

Carpe diem, right?

Anything is possible. Even today.

The Massacre of Innocence

I honestly wanted to write about the Grinch today. Seriously. I got to thinking about the term “grinch” and what it’s come to mean, so I started looking up the etymology of the word, which lead to a whole bunch of searching and, somehow, me ending up at Matthew 2:13-18, commonly referred to as the Massacre of Innocents.

If you don’t know the passage, it’s pretty straightforward: after Jesus’ birth and the visit of the Magi, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him that King Herod would try and take the life of the Christ-child. The angel told Joseph to take Mary and the baby and escape to Egypt. So they did.

Herod, enraged by the fact that the Magi never told him where the new King of the Jews was, ordered his soldiers to kill every boy child under the age of two in the area of Bethlehem. And his soldiers carried out his order.

The major historical works of the time (mainly Josephus) don’t mention the slaughter of babies in Bethlehem, leading some critics to doubt whether the event actually happened. But the reality is that Bethlehem was a small town in Herod’s province, and the likelihood of there being more than 20 babies within the specified age range is very slim.

In other words, history probably doesn’t mention it because it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Herod’s other efforts towards infanticide are well documented, including him having his own son killed. As one person said, “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” So it’s not exactly like the Gospel writer is suggesting something out of Herod’s character or historical resume. The incident in Matthew is quite in keeping with Herod’s particular evil.

It just wasn’t that big of a local story. So no one covered it.

Think about that. Today, that would never happen. We’re so hardwired towards bad news of any sort that things bordering on effluvia take control of our media cycles and Twitter feeds. If someone, somewhere, commits an act of atrocity, we know about it within an hour.

Sometimes within a minute.

And yet, were it not for the meticulous writing of Matthew, these children of Bethlehem, these few, unnamed babies, would have ended up on the floor of history, forgotten. Instead, they become a sad part of our story of redemption. Indeed, one of the most haunting of all Christmas carols is the Coventry Carol, a 16th century song that imagines the words of the mothers in Bethlehem on the night that Herod’s men struck.

That is a haunting refrain, a lullaby to a generation wiped from memory by the greed and paranoia of one man. And it is entirely fitting as a vital part of Christmas: to remind us that the world we inhabit was and is a dark place, filled with dark hearts, and that our hope–our joy–is found in the birth of the Light who dispels Darkness. We rightly turn our eyes towards Bethlehem’s manger, hungering for a look at the Savior, and Matthew makes sure to bring us back to the reality of our own sin.

Matthew shares with us the massacre of innocents to show us the mercy required to save us. God, vulnerable in human flesh, giving himself to us to be beaten and mocked, tortured and destroyed. God, entering into our world on our terms–soft and pink and exposed. We celebrate this, but do we really think about it? Do we really stop and consider that baby in the manger and what his life, his very appearance in our world, really means?

The Massacre, as is it were, of Innocence himself?

I pray that today you’ll take a few minutes to consider all of the Scripture surrounding the birth of Jesus (Matthew and Luke), and look at the story not just through rose-colored lenses, but as it really was: the entrance of Light into a very, very dark place.

Then, may that light shine brighter for your searching.

Their Pain, Our Joy

The Gospel of Matthew begins with some of the most horrific words in all of Scripture: ”A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham…”

Instantly you are thrown into one of those dreaded Bible lists, the kind that – if you’re reading in the King James Version – invariably contain the word “beget” more times than you’d care to know. Matthew, the writer of the Gospel, takes the reader from Abraham’s seed (Isaac) to the birth of King David.

But he continues, listing Solomon as David’s son and plowing on through until you get to little known player Jeconiah, just before Israel was sent packing into exile.

Then, you pick up with Jeconiah’s son, Shealtiel, and follow the generations until you arrive at these words: “and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. Thus there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile in Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

Three groups of fourteen generations, each one detailed in specific, just to connect the fulfillment of the covenant, Christ, with the father of the covenant, Abraham. For Matthew’s readers, this was an impressive display, an imperative bit of evidence that rooted the authenticity of the Messiah’s lineage in the history of the nation of Israel.

For us modern readers, though, it’s reason to yawn. And skip ahead. Let’s get on to the birth of Jesus part, shall we? Isn’t that what really matters? He’s here! Let’s boogie.

But we miss out on so much. Hundreds of years of pain, rooted in the family tree of Israel, etched into the faces of those whom Christ came to seek and save, shouldn’t just be prelude to our getting a fancy new soul. Yet that’s what we make this passage: a delay to our own gratification. Yes, congratulations, Jewish people, you’ve suffered much and now God has sent his son to make everything right. Bully for you. Now let’s get down to sharing the message with the Gentiles so I can watch internet porn and still go to heaven.

I’m being crass, I know. But be honest with yourself: don’t you skip the lineage stuff at the beginning of Matthew because you either find it boring, or, perhaps more accurately, find it pointless?

It’s not, though.

If you follow it carefully, you’ll see something that should make many of us modern-day Christians sit up and take note. From Abraham to Isaac to Jacob; from Boaz to Obed to Jesse; from David to Solomon to Rehoboam; from Amon to Josiah to Jeconiah; from Matthan to Jacob to Joseph – there is a history of faithful perseverance, a willingness to wait for the timing of the Lord and to see his handiwork fulfilled. Generations of men and women went to the grave not knowing what the true consummation of the covenant would be, and they went to the grave still believing. Still trusting.

Then Jesus. He who was very God made man, the one in whom the fullness of God dwelt so that those who saw him saw the Eternal Father. The Messiah, the one who fulfilled the covenant and revealed its depth and breadth in a way that took the world by storm and seemed to bring pain to the very people it was meant to bless. Jesus, who suffered in his body the penalty for our sins, who stepped out of the eternal into the microscopic measurements of time, living second by second, marching towards a destiny unlike any before or since. He went to the cross, aware of the pain, aware of the separation, aware of the death that awaited him. Still trusting.

So we come to our part in the story, the place to where we rush when we first crack open the Gospel. Thanks to the patient faith of the forefathers, thanks to the sinless faith of our Messiah, we now stand in line with those who came before us and bask in the love and glory of our Father God. Being blessed with a faith that is a gift of God’s very grace, we have become adopted heirs in the Kingdom, brothers and sisters to our Eternal King Jesus. What Abraham and David and others looked toward, we stand in the midst of, enjoying.

And how do we celebrate?

By skipping the parts of the story that don’t contain us. By not learning from our collective faith history. By assuming that instant gratification and immediate results are the hallmarks of sincere faith instead of a patient willingness to suffer for our Lord’s sake.

Shame on us.

Christmas is a time for reflection, a time to think deeply on the birth of Christ our Lord, and to consider what that really means to our lives. Let us not skip a word of the narrative, even if we’re so excited to get to the better known parts that inspire celebration. Because without centuries of faithful, patient suffering, with the fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to Jeconiah, and fourteen from Jeconiah to Jesus, there would be no celebration. It is through their pain that our greatest joy became known.

Take some time today and think about that.

Stump the Chump: How Can the Bible Still Be Relevant?

Is the Bible outdated?

Got this in my inbox today from someone who unfairly labeled themselves “goofus”:

Question: I’m not sure that this is quite a “stump the chump”, but it is something that I have been musing lately myself:

People commonly think that the bible can’t possible be relevant in it’s current form because it is so old and things are so different now.  While it is true that the bible is old and things are very different now, I believe that the comparison between the bible and things is what is irrelevant.

Generally the bible only deals with things with regard to the roles they play in the relationships between people and God, as well as between people and other people.  Gods Word actually speaks to people (not things) and people don’t change.  Think about it: “Dear, do you think this dress makes me look fat?”…2000 years ago: “Do you think this toga makes me look fat?”…iPhone 4G or iPad2 vs chariot or guilded shield?

Things have changed a lot, but I think people remain the same from age to age.  God doesn’t change.  People don’t change.  Maybe the bible doesn’t need to change either.  What do ya think?

Well, goofus, I think you’ve made some pretty salient points. The only thing that I would even add is the following:

• The Bible is a revelation of God, and as such is about God. Much as you said people don’t change, it is even more true that God doesn’t change. He is, after all, eternal. Therefore a book about Him would by definition be relevant in any age.
• People who dismiss the Bible because it’s “out of date” should also dismiss everything written prior to the modern era. After all, what is history if not outdated?
• And finally, I don’t think there was a good answer to the toga question, even then.

Thanks for writing – and for the great thoughts. If you have a question you’d like to Stump the Chump with, then click on the link above and submit your form. I’ll happily address it as soon as I can.