David Brisbin's Blog, page 26

Christmas Truce

Christmas has become so familiar and ritualized that it may help to look for renewed meaning in the unlikeliest of circumstances, to travel from the traditional imagery of December in year one of the Common Era to a distant Christmas in December, 1914. That Christmas, World War One was only five months old and after a furious German advance into France and Belgium, the lines on the Western front ground to a stalemate. Both sides dug trenches, sometimes only fifty yards apart, and hedged them...

Hot Chocolate

Five AM. Awakened with a thought I can’t put down until I put it down here. The house is dark, quiet. Phones are dark, quiet. Light rain falling outside. Christmas lights still burning on the house across the street, colored streaks across wet pavement. Christmas lights…bright reminders that another year is shuffling offstage with yet another bouncing in the wings. The tree downstairs is dark, but we’ll light it up and gather around in just a few more days. I suppose the word breathless best...

Small Things

A decade ago, my wife and I and our two boys were driving somewhere I forget–the destination as always being much less important than the moving together in a comfortable, dedicated space. Brennan, our then four year old, had brought his then favorite stuffed playmate with him–it changed every week or so–and made a huge fuss about being sure Elmo had his seat belt on. When he finally got Sean, our then twelve year old, to help buckle him up, the car quieted down nicely.

So I turn around to see this...

Beginnings and Endings

If you want to understand something, go to the beginning.
If you want to know something, go to the end.

The difference between understanding and knowing is as vast as that between a PC and an Einstein…between a spreadsheet and the Mona Lisa…the classroom and the concert hall. If understanding is defined as the mental image of a thing, then knowing is the experience of the thing itself. Still, understanding often precedes knowing just as beginnings precede endings, so priorities are nicely est...

Lives and Trees and Stars

Forests and trees. There is a very special relationship between forests and trees.

Sometimes we say we can’t see the forest for the trees, and when we do, we mean that, nose on bark, we’ve gotten so lost in minutia and details, minds so focused on what and when that we’ve forgotten why and how. Forgotten that there are all these other simultaneous trees out there telling a story no single tree could ever tell alone.

And yet without each tree, there is no forest, no story at all.

The forest is...

Preacher Teacher

The purpose of a preacher is to persuade.
The purpose of a teacher is to make students ready to engage.

I’m a teacher.

I’m also a pastor, so many people call what I do on Sunday mornings preaching. But it’s not—not any more than a conversation is a debate. You can feel the moment a conversation crosses that line in the same way a poker game played for plastic chips crosses over to hard cash. It’s not a game or a conversation anymore; it’s a contest. And contests play by different rules.

But i...

What God Wants

I’ve often heard pastors and televangelists talking about what God wants. What God wants us to do or feel or say or [mostly] give. I’ve always thought it fairly presumptuous to claim to know what God wants from our perch on the little blue ball way over there on the edge of that second galaxy to the right… But then I hear myself asking a study group what they thought God’s highest value is and when they don’t come up with exactly what was in my head, telling them exactly what was.

And if my h...

Lenny

I had just hit snooze on the phone alarm a few minutes ago and was still lying there in that early morning half awareness. And I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, but I’d lit a nine-minute fuse that would burn down until that sound went off again. But gathering strength and will to pick up all the threads I’d laid down the night before and pull them into another morning, feeling those tasks and concerns pressing back in, I suddenly found myself talking to an old friend.

 

We were sitting out...

What Change May Come

I don’t envy people my age who find themselves dating again…or still.

Dating is hard enough at any age–like being on permanent audition. But older we get, seems our attitudes and eccentricities, like our skin, become increasingly non-elastic, already stretched over a particular shape and volume. And when the shape our lives have taken sets like a handprint in concrete, chances of finding another life shaped closely enough to fit through the door keep dropping.

But then, looked at another way,...

After the Mugging

There’s an old saying…actually I’m not sure how old it is…but it is a saying, and it goes: A conservative is just a liberal who got mugged. Now I know that half of you reading this are already traveling down the road toward being offended, but before you get there, please know that I’m not trying to make any political points here. Looking past the obvious bias and the merely political to the larger point implied: what happens when our idealistic notions of the way things ought to be slam head...