Billy Coffey's Blog, page 16

Too much rhubarb

I’ve always been the type of person to show up early for a movie. Fifteen minutes at least, though twenty is preferable. It’s a matter of logistics, really. I need to sit in the back of a movie theater. Not only does it offer the best view, it allows me to see more people than who see me. That’s important. Wild Bill Hickock didn’t take that into account and got shot in the back of the head for his trouble.

The problem is that’s an awful lot of time to sit there in the semi-dark and keep yourself occupied. Conversation is an option of course, though there isn’t much that can be expounded upon in so short a time and in such a hushed environment. And though people watching is a hobby of mine, that’s a bit tricky as well. The dimmed lights offer just enough brightness to not trip over someone but not see exactly who it is you’re not tripping over.

Thankfully, theaters have taken to running advertisements and movie trivia on the screen that are accompanied by a horrible fusion of elevator music and movie scores. I take this as sort of a warm up for the eyes, like stretching before a workout.

I tackle this with the utmost seriousness. Especially the movie trivia. Knowing that the DeLorean in Back to the Future was originally a refrigerator or that the wrestler Peter Parker faces in Spider-Man is real-life wrestler Randy Savage isn’t quite valuable, but it can pass the time before the sneak previews well enough.

Occasionally, though, whomever puts together these little snippets of knowledge manages to sneak something in that really is quite valuable.

Like rhubarb.

Between munches of popcorn and Twizzlers at a matinee the other day, I learned that whenever you watch a scene that includes a large crowd, the extras are often instructed to murmur the word “rhubarb” over and over again, giving the appearance of background conversation.

Why exactly “rhubarb” is used rather than some other word is beyond me and was not explained. Further research has revealed that often other words are used, “peas and carrots” and “watermelons” being among them. I think I understood a little better then. With the image-conscious, diet-crazed environment that is Hollywood, I’m sure there are a lot of hungry people on your average soundstage. Food would always be on your mind, too.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered what all those people in the background were saying. I felt pretty good about myself to finally have the answer to that. It was a tiny burden to lift off my mind, but a burden nonetheless.

But as with many of my unloaded burdens, it was replaced with a new one.

Yesterday I kept track of the people I spoke with and to. I answered over fifty emails, conversed with a dozen people on Twitter, spoke with five people on the phone, and actually had seven conversations with real live people.

That’s seventy-four people. For me, that’s a lot.

I tried to remember exactly what was said and to whom. I should add emphasis on try. Try. The problem was that I couldn’t remember what I had heard or read, nor what I had answered back. I could see the faces of the people I’d spoken to and the gist of what was said, but not exactly.

And that bothered me. It bothered me because I could only conclude that much of my interaction with people yesterday was much more shallow than deep and much less trivial than important. Which led me to ask this one question:

How much rhubarb was in my life?

How many of my words were just chatter, noisy emptiness to fill boredom or an awkward silence?

How many times did I say “How are you?” to someone as a simple greeting and not as an honest question?

How many times did I say I would pray for someone and then let it slip my mind as it disappeared among all the other cares of my day?

Our words carry meaning. They convey more than mere sentiment, but power and intent. Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can break much more. They can lift up or tear down, make right or make wrong.

Or maybe worst of all, they can just fill the air with rhubarb.

Living stories

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As hard as it is for someone like me to believe, there are people who would have you believe they do not like stories. They will say they have no time for books, that they are too boring and require too much effort. They will say they have no need for the imaginary things, characters born of thought rather than flesh or places conjured rather than built. It is reality in which they are most interested. So they would have you believe. In the real world, there is little time for fairy tales. Living is serious business, stories are definitely not. Those who waste their time in tales are the ones who fall behind. They are the ones who lose the game.

I suppose that means I am losing at best. At worst, I am contributing to the delinquency of otherwise good and responsible human beings. Not only do I enjoy reading stories, I enjoy writing them. I enjoy seeking them out. And what I’ve found in my seeking is something those interested in the serious business of living would perhaps find very disconcerting—stories are everywhere. They are buried in every person we meet and every conversation we overhear. They are present in the pictures that adorn our walls and the music that fills our ears. They wait in every rock and puff of wind. In everything there is a beginning, middle, and end, and nestled in the spaces between those three legs of every journey lies all the magic and knowledge any of us care to seek. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” I believe finer words have never been spoken.

There’s more to Rukeyser’s maxim than poetic truth, however. There’s a deeper meaning as well. Whether you call yourself a writer or a reader or an unbeliever in both, the truth is that you a storyteller. That fact cannot be ignored. It cannot be brushed aside. And most of all, it cannot be denied. You are the chronicler of your own tale. Your every day is but one small chapter in the larger story of your life, some part of the beginning or the middle or the end, written upon pages granted by whatever God or random chance you ascribe meaning to. Pages bound together by time itself, filled with your minutes and hours.

Perhaps that sounds a little too metaphysical for the seriously-minded. They may disagree with my notion. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change a thing. Good people can stand on either side of a truth, but that doesn’t alter where that truth lies or what that truth means. We can deny that our lives are a story, but that will make our story one of renunciation. We can choose not to respect our place as authors of our own accounts, but that will make our accounts ones of failure. Do you see? There is no escaping it. You have no choice but to write your story, just as you have no choice but to live your life.

So I say live it for all it’s worth. I say wring every bit of beauty and truth from it. Let is drip down your hands and arms. Let it pour into your mouth and quench your every thirst. Bore down into your every moment and mine the gold you find. Scribble and scrawl on your pages. Write furious and true. Do not waste your days. Time is not a flat circle, it is an arrow that stretches from now into eternity. There is where you should look, on to that final chapter, because God put our eyes in front of us so we can see where we’re going, not where we’ve been. Whether quiet literary or screaming thriller, lustful romance or heartbreaking tragedy, bawdy comedy or uplifting inspirational, when all is finished and the final period is put to the last sentence on the end page, your life in this world will stand for something. Your tale will be set down, and that is what you will be remembered by.

 

Leaving our stories

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I try to schedule field trips into my writing life as often as possible. Sitting at a desk and staring at a sheet of paper can dull the senses. It contracts you. The Out There gets lost in all of the In Here. It’s nice to get out every once in a while and wander about the world.

That’s how I found Archie’s store. Because when you are driving down a lonely country road and you happen across a dilapidated building masquerading as an antiques store and the sign on the marquee says Dead People’s Junk, you have to stop and look. You just do. Very often the places that seem too good to be true are true after all.

The creaky wooden door finally gave way with a hard push, ringing the bell that sat suspended over the archway. The old man behind the counter—“Name’s Archie,” he said, and then added, “You break it, you buy it, even if t’ain’t worth nuthin’”—offered me both a Coke and the general layout of the building. “Furniture’s in the back. Art—and I use that term loosely—is to the right. Guns are over by the far wall.”

I sipped and walked, letting my mind wander. Antiques are such because of their age and their scars. They have endured through the years, survived countless moves and deaths and threats of the landfill. And it is because they have endured that they are all rich in story. Antiques are a form of living history.

That’s what I was after in the land of Dead People’s Junk. The stories.

Like the kitchen table that sat stately and dignified in the corner of the back room. Solid oak, with the worn shine of countless years of meals and gatherings. The price tag made me wince and whistle a long exhale. 1927 was written on the tag beneath the dollar amount, as if to justify the value. I took a step back. This was not something I was interested in breaking.

But still, a part of me felt the price would be more than satisfactory if the story of the table was included along with the chairs and the center leaf. Two years after it was built, the stock market crashed. Then Hitler rose. The Japanese attacked. The bomb was dropped. Kennedy was shot. Interspersed between those were times both hard and soft, the ebbs and flows of the great tide that was life. Who had sat at that table through the years? What family had broken bread there? What joys did they share, and what sorrows? To me, those answers—those possibilities—were worth more than the quality of the construction or the grain of the wood.

I exercised my mind in that manner for about an hour, moving through the crowded aisles of castoff belongings. There was a rocking horse I imagined once belonged to a small boy who grew up to be deathly afraid of horses after taking a tumble from that wooden substitution on one long ago Sunday afternoon. A desk where a young lady once sat to write a Dear John letter to her boyfriend at war. An opulent set of china—Never Used, said the tag—that was an expensive wedding gift to a couple who chose a simple life over the extravagant lives of their parents.

I roamed and touched nearly every surface of every object, listening. I thought about the sign out by the road and wondered if that had been Archie’s idea. I wanted to ask him. But by the time I made it back around, he was asleep in his chair. His half-finished bottle of Coke sat by the cash register—an antique in itself. Orange crumbs from the pack of crackers he’d snacked on littered the front of his shirt.

I managed to leave without waking him and pointed my truck toward home. I was satisfied. In my opinion, no better field trip could be had.

But I thought about that sign again as I passed it and decided it was all wrong. That was not Dead People’s Junk. Archie’s store may have been filled with remnants of the past, but they also spoke to our shared future.

To a time when perhaps our own dining room tables will be stuck in the corner, and when people will come and touch them and wonder. That brings me a great deal of comfort. Because we leave more than our belongings to this world when we pass on to the next.

We leave our stories, too.

In praise of what’s temporary

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Parenting is all about doing your best to narrow the wide gulf between you and your children, which is much more difficult than it sounds. Often it seems as if your side of the gulf is higher than your children’s, or vice versa. You both speak a different language and have different priorities. Communication, then, can at times be an exercise in frustration and futility. It’s no wonder entire nations can’t get along, what with families struggling to do the same.

Where I get tripped up with my own kids sometimes is the belief that the flow of information can only flow in one direction—me to them. Which makes sense. I’m older and more experienced in the ways of the world. I’ve been where they are. They can’t say the same about me. And as Daddy, it’s my job to pass on to them what little bits of wisdom I can find.

Lately, it’s been the eternal.

As in, keep your minds on what isn’t temporary. Things like good fortune and happiness will sometimes be there and sometimes not, so it’s best to enjoy them while you can but not hang onto them too tightly. It’s a difficult point to get across to my children; their lives are bombarded by the temporary. It’s not just that their worries and fears revolve around things that won’t matter in the end, their attention revolves around them, too.

Better, I’ve told them, to focus on the things that last. That you can depend on being there.

I never bothered to question the wisdom of this, mostly because I didn’t think I had to. It was self-evident. Common sense.

My children seemed to grasp this philosophy well enough, at least in the God sense. It made sense to them that God will always be there, so He’s the one they should count on. Next came family, then came others. Yes! That’s Daddy preachin’.

I thought I was doing a good job until I thought maybe I wasn’t. Because I slowly began to realize that a lot of the things that make my children happiest are the ones that come and go.

Over the past year, I’ve seen their eyes light up as a shooting star fell over their heads.

I’ve seen them giggle and chase fireflies.

Seen them ooh and ahh over fireworks.

I’ve seen them pass precious hours lying in the backyard grass and staring at clouds, trying to decide which is a dog and which is a lollipop. They’ve caught snowflakes on their tongues. Watched deer graze.

None of these things last. A shooting star passes in seconds, and fireflies blink in and out in an instant. Fireworks pop and glow and then die into a black night. Clouds pass. The snow falls and then melts. The deer fill their stomachs and retreat back into the woods.

And yet these are the moments they seem to cherish, just as much as God and family.

I’ve considered asking them why this is so. I haven’t. I think it’s one of those things they would have a hard time explaining to someone like me, who’s still trying to figure some things out.

But I think I know the answer without having to ask. I think this is how they praise God. They appreciate the eternal by embracing the momentary. Those little moments that pass so quickly and may never come our way again aren’t to be shunned, they’re to be held tight.

Maybe this is just another case of my kids being mostly right and me being kind of wrong. The eternal is important, no doubt about it. But maybe the temporary is too, if for no other reason than because it doesn’t last.

Future Kevin

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He sits by himself at a small table in the back of the lunchroom. Chin in his hand, eyes, down. His fingers flick at discarded bits of the day’s pepperoni pizza that were missed by the lunch lady’s dishrag. The afternoon sun filters through tiny handprints on the windows, making the grass stains on his too-short jeans glow a deep emerald.

He sees me as I walk in—there’s something about a door opening that makes even the meekest of us look up in reflex—and turns aside. Today is Friday, and I told him I would need an answer by the end of the week. But his back is turned away and his body is folded in upon himself to make him as small as possible, and I think no. No, he still doesn’t know.

Waiting for my kids in the school cafeteria gives me a sense of connectedness to a part of their lives I mostly miss. I get to see where they eat, how they interact with others, what kinds of people surround them. And I get to see other kids, too.

Kids like Kevin. The one alone at the small table in the back.

He’s there every day, waiting for someone to pick him up and trying to stay hidden until they do. I said hello to him Monday afternoon. I was a bit early that day, and there was no one else to talk to. I was counting on a one-sided conversation. Kids like Kevin—and there seems to be many of them today, yes?—desire nothing but the next moment, to continue on, regardless of the unnamable weight they bear. I didn’t know what Kevin’s was (and I still don’t), but I knew it was there. I could feel it.

So I said hello. Sat down beside him at the small table and flicked a bit of food away—it was French fries that day—and waited for him to talk. It took prodding, but he did. General stuff. Nothing of home. Kids like Kevin, with their unnamable weights and downcast eyes, don’t talk much of home.

He’d been in trouble that day. Kevin showed me the white slip of paper his mama had to sign. Daydreaming, the note said. I told him I daydreamed a lot and that daydreaming was fun, but school was important.

“No it isn’t,” he said.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked him.

Shrug.

“Come on,” I said. “You have to want to do something.”

Shrug.

“When I was your age, I wanted to be an astronaut. Didn’t work out, but I still look at the stars a lot.”

Kevin said nothing.

“Tell you what, I’ll be back on Friday. You think about it and let me know then. Deal?”

He said he’d try. The kids came and we left. I waved to Kevin as we went out the door. He didn’t wave back.

And now, he’s ignoring me.

“Hey Kevin,” I say.

Shrug.

“Been doing any thinking about what I asked?”

His eyes said yes. I pulled a chair up to the table and sat. My mind tried to think of something little Kevin wanted to be. Maybe an astronaut, like I wanted once upon a time. Or President, though I figured there weren’t many kids nowadays who wanted to grow up to be that. Maybe a scientist.

“I guess I’m going to work at Little Caesar’s like my mom.”

Oh.

“That’s all you want to do?” I ask him. “I mean, that’s great if that’s all you want to do. But…that’s all you want to do?”

He lowers his head to find something to flick on the table. “That’s all I can do,” he says.

“I don’t believe that,” I tell him, and Kevin shrugs.

The kids are on their way. I say goodbye to Kevin and leave him at the table. I don’t know when someone will pick him up, don’t know when I’ll see him again. But I know I’ll worry about him. A boy like that, a boy that young, should see this world as one of possibility and magic. His sights should be set higher than where they are. He should believe in himself more.

But I wonder if we’ve reached that point where we no longer inspire our children to become more than ourselves. If we see them as mere carbon copies, destined to make our own mistakes and suffer through our own failures.

And if we’ve accepted the lie that says greatness in life is reserved for all but shy boys in too-small jeans who sit alone at the lunchroom table.

Check engine

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It began like most problems do—small and sudden. One a drive down an empty two-lane road with windows open, stereo blaring, and me doing my best Kenny Chesney impersonation. Work was done, home was ahead, and I had raw meat, a hot grill, and a ballgame to look forward to. Yes, life was good.

But then a county police car rounded the curve ahead of me and I spotted the tell-tale radar jutting out from the driver’s side window. And whether you’re doing a hundred or twenty-five, your first reaction when you see such a sight is to slow down and check your speedometer. I did and did.

The good news was that I wasn’t speeding (much).

The bad news was that a red light was glowing on my dashboard.

CHECK ENGINE, it said.

I raised my sunglasses and squinted, hoping that the light was not a light at all. Maybe it was a reflection of the sun or a peculiar shadow. Maybe I was just seeing things.

But I wasn’t.

CHECK ENGINE.

I tapped the glass while keeping an eye on the road, but the light wouldn’t turn off. So I took the next logical step—I put my sunglasses back on, turned Kenny Chesney back up, and kept driving. Not simply so I could watch the road, but because I was trying to convince myself that if I wasn’t looking at the light, it wouldn’t be on.

Not so.

The modern motor vehicle is a technological wonder that can give you detailed information about a myriad of mechanical functions, but it cannot communicate more vaguely than CHECK ENGINE. Those two words of detached brevity can mean anything from a loose gas cap to a blown head gasket to nearly everything in between. So when I got home I paused to unscrew the gas cap, tighten it again, and restart my truck.

CHECK ENGINE.

I opened up a dusty filing cabinet in my head and ran through a list of possible causes: sticky EGR valve, pinched fuel injector, faulty oxygen sensor…

All of which required a trip to the local repair shop, about two hours of my time, and more than a few bucks to diagnose and fix. And even though the guys down at Eavers Tire are great to hang around and talk with, I could think of a few better ways to spend a Saturday morning.

So that’s where things stand as of now. I’m still driving my truck, and it will still clear it’s voice with a low chime and announce CHECK ENGINE every time I turn the ignition. And for the past two days it has even resorted to blinking at me. “Hellloo,” it mimes, “pay attention to me!”

But I don’t. Yesterday I resorted to covering that tiny part of my instrument panel with duct tape so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That didn’t work, either. I couldn’t see the light but I still saw the duct tape, and I knew why it was there.

A part of me still thinks the light will go away if I ignore it long enough. I should know better, yes. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to battle warning lights, and not just with my truck. With my life, too.

Like when I find myself choosing to stand in the rain rather than go looking for some sun. Or when my gaze begins to wander down instead of up. When I go for a bit without smiling or a long time without laughing. That’s when I know something’s wrong with my engine.

CHECK HEART, my brain says.

And I should. Really. But I often don’t. That sort of thing would be much like taking my truck into the shop—it would cost too much and take too much time. So I stumble on ignoring the fact that something somewhere inside me has tripped an alarm.

When paying no heed to that warning turns CHECK HEART into CHECKHEARTCHECKHEART, I’ll use a little duct tape on my soul, too. I’ll start thinking that the cure for my blues could be as simple as a movie night or a pint of Starbucks ice cream. Sometimes both.

That never works, though. Because the duct tape I use to cover what’s wrong inside me is much like the duct tape I use to cover what’s wrong inside my truck.

Both peel off eventually.

Why you’re a writer (even if you don’t think so)

Back when I decided I wanted to become a writer, I added a “someday” to the end. As in, “I’m going to be a writer someday.” That was what I believed I was supposed to do, what was expected of me. Because no one first starting out writing was a writer. You had to do things first.

You had to have a manuscript, for instance. Or at least be working on one. And you had to have a blog and a “social networking presence”. You had to have followers and friends and readers. An agent. And, of course, a publishing contract.

To me, procuring that last one would be my golden ticket into the chocolate factory. To have a book out, to be published, would eliminate the need for that “someday” I kept adding. I wouldn’t need it anymore. I would be a writer. A real one.

Until that time (and if that time ever came, because I understood the odds), I considered myself merely a wannabe. And those thoughts didn’t change after I had a manuscript and a blog and a “social networking presence” because I saw the writing world as a segregated one. The ones who had books on Amazon and did interviews occupied the castles, and the rest of us were left to beg at the gate for any morsel of acceptance tossed our way. I would pass notes through that gate in the form of queries and proposals to any who ventured close enough, hoping against hope that one of them would pity me and bid me to pass. Theirs was the life I wanted, not my own.

It was tough looking through that gate and watching those published writers gorge on their dreams while I starved on my own.

Every so often someone on my side would be granted entrance. Those were always good times, hopeful times, because everyone left would believe their turn may be next. I would watch as those people crossed over and imagine they were me. Often they would each come close to the gate and talk to the rest of us on the other side. We’d hear amazing stories that would both fill us and leave us hungrier.

I had hope that if I hung around long enough—if I kept knocking—my turn would come. I was right about that. Talent can only get you so far in the publishing business. You have to persist. You have to always try once more.

For proof of that, the gate did open. I found on the other side my agent and she helped me find my publisher. Amazon and interviews followed. I thought I would be loosed then. Set free. I suppose in my mind I’d always considered being published akin to shedding my mortal coil in favor of a heavenly body.

That wasn’t true.

There are a lot of writers who change when they go from the land of wanting to be published to the land of author. They think they’ve become someone they’re not because they’re in a place few have been blessed to venture.

I’ve always promised myself that if I were fortunate enough to cross over, I’d stay close to the gate just to see you. Just so you would come close and I could talk to you and say this:

Writing is the most democratic form of expression I know. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you stand in this life, you have a story to tell. One that is just as important, just as needed, as anyone else’s. Being a real writer isn’t a matter of being published, it’s a matter of how you see yourself. It’s a matter of study and work and determination, not a contract.

I found that out.

There is no “someday”. You are a real writer the moment you put pen to page and soak it with your tears and sweat and dare to share yourself with the world. It is that supreme act of courage that gives your life meaning, not a piece of paper to sign and initial at the bottom.

That’s what I will tell you.

And I will tell you this as well—the world on this side of the gate isn’t that different from the world on the other. We strive in each to inspire and transport our reader.

That is our hope and our call.

Googling me

My kids have recently become enamored with their height, believing that their upward rather than inward growth gives the best indication of their march toward adulthood. Every person they meet is gauged in terms of how tall they are. Instead of a hug or a handshake, both of my children will stand in front of them and with hand to head make a straight line across to see how much further they have to grow to get even.

I’d call this a phase, but I know it’s not. I’m forty-two and still do the same thing.

By my count there are 122 listings for “Coffey” in the phone book beside me, and 123 if you count Coffey’s Garage (and you should, because they do great work). That’s quite a number considering the fact that we’re all crammed into a relatively small part of a relatively small Virginia county. And though I don’t know each of them personally, I’d bump into all of them if I climbed high enough into my family tree.

Two of those Coffeys are prefaced by the first name of “Billy.” One of them is me. The other has over the years become me, too. Just improved.

Because in a lot of ways, the other me has always gone first. First to have a girlfriend, first to graduate. First to get married and have kids.

The other Billy Coffey was always cool and still is. He walks the fine line between being redneck enough to go bear hunting with the guys and refined enough to know that “loading the dishwasher” doesn’t mean getting his wife drunk. There are Coffeys around here who have yet to get that one straight.

I ran into him yesterday at the gas station (which is always somewhat awkward—“Hey, Billy,” “Hey, Billy”) and took the time to catch up while our vehicles were filling up. It was the normal sort of conversation between acquaintances, the kind where much is said but not necessarily told.

Weather? Cool. Wives? Good. Kids? Rowdy. Work? Horrible.

We topped off our tanks and said our goodbyes before driving off in opposite directions. But I couldn’t help but think we were actually going the same way now. He was no longer first in most things. No longer improved, either. We were just two guys living their lives who just happened to have the same name.

It was all a bit anti-climactic. Here I had for years considered this man to be a sort of mirror for my life, a crude barometer by which I measured the quality of my own highs and lows. But I didn’t have that anymore, and that was a problem.

So I did what any sane person would do. I went home and Googled myself.

Turned out there were a lot of me’s out there. The most famous was a Billy Coffey who raced sprint cars. He even had a nickname—The Kid. Billy “The Kid” Coffey. Awesome. I always wanted a nickname, especially one what was cowboy-ish.

There was another Billy Coffey on Facebook. Relaxing in a chair wearing a pair of sunglasses and a ball cap. It was a nice picture and one I could never have taken. I was seldom relaxed.

A Billy Coffey in Florida was appealing a conviction for cocaine distribution. Finally, someone who held a position in life a little lower than mine. But then I found another Billy Coffey who was a preacher in the next county, a fact that rendered the scales a bit uneven again.

And then I found a Billy Coffey who’s sacrifice was enshrined forever on West Panel 2 of the Vietnam Memorial.

That’s when I quit looking. I realized then exactly what I was doing.

It was human nature for us to judge ourselves against others, to stand toe to toe with their talents or looks or status and move a mental hand from the tops of our heads across to them. Regardless of who we are, we all need to see how we measure up. Often, we come up short. Occasionally we can admit we’re not shorter. But it’s rare when we can honestly say we’re taller.

We are all unique. “Wonderfully made,” according to the Bible. Made alike by our capacity to love and dream and hope, yet set apart by our abilities to express them. Which is why comparing ourselves to others will never work.

And also why comparing ourselves to the people we were yesterday always will.

When God hates you

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She stared at me, jaw straight and chin high, and said the three words. I stood there looking back at her, my jaw not so straight and my chin normal, not exactly knowing what to say other than to ask her to say it again. In a slow cadence that enunciated perfectly each of the three syllables, she repeated—“God. Hates. Me.”

“God hates you because your mail isn’t here?” I asked.

“Yes. If He wanted, He could make sure it got here. It’s not here. So God hates me.”

It was the sort of logic I’ve gotten accustomed to here at work, a place full of higher learning and lower thinking. And I had no doubt the student in front of me really didn’t mean what she said. She was angry. Frustrated. Down.

“You know the mail’s backed up,” I told her. “The hurricane and all.”

“Didn’t God make the hurricane?”

“Doesn’t the atmosphere or something make the hurricane? Something about the air off the coast of Africa?”

“Doesn’t God make the air off the coast of Africa?”

I could see where this was going.

“I don’t think God hates you,” I said. “The U.S. Postal Service, maybe. But not God.”

My attempt at levity did little to resolve the situation. She grunted and walked off. I told her to check back again tomorrow. She said she would if God hadn’t killed her by then.

That was yesterday. I didn’t see her today—I’m assuming God hasn’t killed her—which is good, considering her mail still hasn’t arrived. I’m still of the opinion that she was kidding about the whole God-hating-her thing, assuming she knows a little about God. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about the Higher Things to know He doesn’t hate anyone, that God is love.

But still.

There have been times when I’ve caught myself thinking that same sort of thing. Maybe not that God hates me, but certainly that He’s ignoring me. That He’s more concerned with keeping the universe expanding and the world turning than little old me. I suppose that’s not as bad as thinking He hates me. I guess it isn’t much better, either.

Aren’t we all at times like that, though? So much of life is fill-in-the-blank. Things are going badly because _________. Often what we give as our answer is more pessimism than optimism. We hurt and we take sick, we fall on hard times, not because others have done so since time immemorial, but because God hates us.

A few months ago, I got the chance to observe a professional jeweler polish silver. The process charmed me. He walked me through the entire process. The secret, he said, was heat. A good silversmith knows just how hot to get the silver before it is molded. Too hot, and it’s ruined. Too cool, and it spoils. The piece he was polishing? Perfect. Just enough heat.

I think God is like that with us. We’re made for better things—Higher Things—than to simply exist. We must be good for something. We must be molded in a fire neither too hot nor too cool. We are all pieces of silver in the Jeweler’s hand.

It is true this world is cracked and made for suffering. But it is also true that by suffering, we are made to heal what cracks we can.

God does not hate us, He simply loves us too much to fill our lives with ease.

One final thing about that jeweler. He told me he’d been sitting there for hours shining that piece of silver. That fact seemed a bit pointless to me. I couldn’t imagine it shining any brighter. I asked him how he would know when it had been polished enough.

“The silver faces the fire,” he said, “but it isn’t done. Then it is molded and polished, but it still isn’t done. The silver is only done when it casts the Jeweler’s reflection.”

Yes.

Showing us what we can’t see

image courtesy of photobucket.com

I had no idea how far we’d walked—when you’re tromping through the woods with two kids, time drags on until it becomes irrelevant—but it was far enough that we were ready to turn around and go home. After all, it wasn’t as if we had a map to go by. All we had were stories.

“Maybe we should just pray,” my son said. My son, who announced last week that he wanted to be a preacher when he grew up. To him, praying is the answer to everything.

“I think God would rather we walk than pray,” I told him.

“Why, did you ask him?”

I didn’t answer. We pushed on through the brambles and found the river—at least that part of the story had been proven right—then decided to sit and watch the water. My daughter tried to spot fish, my wife tried to spot spiders, and I tried to figure out where we should look next.

My son, the future Preacher Man, looked into the blue sky peeking through green trees and said, “Our Father, whose art ain’t in heaven, Halloween be your name.”

“This way,” I told them. “I think it’s over here.”

Which wasn’t true at all. I had no idea where it was or even if it was, but you know about men and directions. Besides, it wasn’t like we could pull over at the next gas station.

My daughter said, “Maybe we should just go home before we get eaten,” which brought more prayers from the little boy in the back.

I reminded them of the value of a story, of how the whole world was made of them and sometimes they’re true and sometimes they’re not, and how sometimes the ones that are not have more truth. And when you come across a story about an old home forgotten somewhere in the mountains, you have to go look. You just have to.

So we trudged on—me, my wife, my daughter, and the Preacher, who was now calling down the Spirit to keep Bigfoot away.

Truth be known, I didn’t think we’d find a thing. Though the mountains here are littered with the remnants of pioneer homesteads, their locations are masked by either wilderness or the foggy memories of the old folk. But the directions I’d received turned out to be pretty darn close. It wasn’t long until the woods opened up a bit into an ancient bit of clearing, and wouldn’t you know it, there was something up ahead.

Of course that something was hidden by a couple hundred years of changing seasons. Trees and bushes and plants had reclaimed the area that was once taken from them. All that remained to be seen was a bit of foundation. The rest was enclosed by an impenetrable wall of overgrowth.

“Let’s try to break through,” my daughter said, to which she received a chorus of no ways.

“I don’t want to go in there,” my wife said.

“I’m too tired to try to go in there,” I said.

“We should really pray first before we go in there,” my son said.

Simply going back was no longer an option. We’d found it now, and to leave without at least a look around simply wouldn’t do. So we looked. All of us. We poked and prodded for weak spots, we tried to peek into what had likely gone unseen for centuries. We stood on tiptoes and jumped and, once, even tried to make a human pyramid. But it was no use. The mountains would not give up their secrets that day.

“Hey,” my son said, “I see something.”

He was knee-bent, face almost in the dirt, peering through the undersides of thorns and thickets.

“Hey, wow.”

The rest of us followed. Knees bent, faces in the dirt, peering through the thorns, we found holes just big enough to peer through. What lay on the other side was nothing more than the remnants of a stone foundation, but to us it was Machu Picchu and Stonehenge and Easter Island rolled into one.

It was then that I realized what my son had done. The little Preacher Man, too little to jump too high or tiptoe too up, had decided to use his smallness to his advantage.

He’d gone to his knees.

“You can see more if you get on your knees, Daddy,” he’d often said. “If you stand up, you just see what you can. But if you bow down, God will show you what you can’t.”

Those words, profound as they were, had always gotten him a rub on the head or a squeeze on the shoulder. Nothing more. But then I knew just how right he was, and I wondered just how much I’d missed in my life because I’d been standing instead of kneeling.